ENGL 050M. Queering the History of Emotions


How do we find and tell stories about the LGBTQ past? In periods before queer communities organized under the banner of civil rights, what did queer experience look or feel like? This course provides an introduction to queer and transgender history by combining primary texts with major works in queer theory. To explore issues of experience and identification simultaneously, we'll also discuss two fields known as the "history of emotions" and "affect theory." Primary texts will revolve around figures who have become important to our understanding of the LGBTQ past, including Deborah Sampson/Robert Shirtliff, who lived and fought as a man during the American Revolution; the Ojibwe warrior Ozaawindib, who identified as ayekwe, meaning "one who becomes a woman"; poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson; the African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis; novelists Oscar Wilde and Willa Cather; and the early gay activists John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter, among others. We'll also read major scholars in the history of gender and sexuality, including Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, E. Patrick Johnson, Leela Gandhi, and Susan Stryker.
For majors and minors, this course can count either as an 18th/19th or as a 20th/21st century course, depending on the topic of the final research paper.
GATEWAY English Literature.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Catalog chapter: English Literature  
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature


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