Course Overview

Queer Women’s Lives is a literature course focused on queer women’s memoirs. We read and discussed multiethnic U.S. and British literature within the contexts of history, literary criticism, and intersectional feminist and queer theories lenses. In analyzing the literature, we considered how the act of categorizing exerts real power—the ontological power to set boundaries between “beings” and the epistemological power to bring into focus certain histories and narratives and to occlude others. What makes a text or story lesbian or queer? What expectations do we have when reading a queer memoir? These were some of the questions we considered throughout the course. The course foregrounded how social identities (such as gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sex, and sexuality) are intersectional, operate within institutionalized systems of power and privilege, and affect the experiences and material realities of peoples’ lives as well as what and how we read.

Curated by Janet Winston