Comparative investigation of a topic related to the study of gender and/or sexuality in literature and culture.

What's queer about Jewish culture? Or, what's Jewish about queer theory and history? Recent TV shows, film, and writing all seem to suggest that the two are intimately connected, beyond a broad analogy of “otherness.” In this seminar we will explore this hypothesis, investigating key conceptual problems central to both Jewish studies and queer theory. Is it possible to write a queer-oriented history of modern Jewish life and culture? We will begin answering this question by looking at the ways by which the racialization of the Jewish body collided in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries with perceptions of Jewish gender and sexuality as perverse and degenerate. Probing nationalist and diasporic Jewish discourses, we will see how Jews made sense of these characterizations, and how they rejected them or adapted them for their own literary and ideological purposes. We will then move on to address early expressions of queer desires, while asking how to approach under-documented and understudied moments of queer Jewish culture, such as lesbian desires and trans experiences. Finally, we will consider the act of cultural reclaiming of Jewish as queer and queer as Jewish from the 1980s onwards in major works of literature, film, and television that tie Jewish culture and history together with queer narratives. Throughout the semester we will tend to conceptual concerns, considering the methodological constraints of historiography in the study of repressed histories and exploring the theoretical potential of queer temporalities as an alternative organizing framework.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.