Marxism, Materialism, and Queer Theory
Fall Semester 2014
Jordana RosenbergOffice Hours Thurs 12-2
Required Texts (Available at Amherst Books, or – except for the Lukacs and the Delany – as ebooks through the library system)
Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia, NYU Press
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds, Duke University Press
Samuel Delany Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, NYU Press
Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, MIT Press
JasbirPuar, Terrorist Assemblages, Duke University Press
Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire, University of Minnesota Press
(recommended) Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, University of Minnesota Press
Tuesday, Sept 2
Introductions, overview of syllabus
9/9
* Jose Munoz, “Feeling Utopia”
* Judith Butler, “Preface 1999” and “Preface 1990” in Gender Trouble
Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 1-35
* Eve Sedgwick, “Axiomatic”
Karl Marx, from The German Ideology, “Idealism and Materialism”
Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”
9/16
*Monique Wittig, “One is not Born a Woman” Feminist Issues, vol 1, no. 2, Winter 1981.
*LuceIrigaray, The Sex Which is Not One, 23-34.
* Butler, “Language, Power, and the Strategies of Displacement,” in GT, 34-45.
* Rubin, “The Traffic in Women”
* Foucault, Parts One and Two, The History of Sexuality
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
9/23
*Munoz, “Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism”
* Bloch, from Principle of Hope
* Floyd, “On Capital, Sexuality, and the Situations of Knowledge”
* Jameson; from Valences (xi-9); from Political Unconscious (on Lukacs)
* Marx (commodity chapter)
* Lukacs, from History and Class Consciousness
*Stuart Hall, “Rethinking the Base-Superstructure Metaphor”
9/30
* Munoz, “The Future is in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia”
* Floyd, “Disciplined Bodies, Lukacs, Foucault and the Reification of Desire”; Floyd, “Performative Masculinity: Judith Butler and Hemingway’s Labor Without Capital”
* Bloch and Adorno, “Something’s Missing”
10/7
*Munoz, “Cruising the Toilet: Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions and Queer Futurity”
* Kara Keeling, “Looking for M”
* Roderick Ferguson, “Queer of Color Critique, Historical Materialism, and Canonical Sociology” (handout)
10/14 (No Class; Monday Schedule)
10/21 (class cancelled; professor out of town to give a talk)
10/28
*Elizabeth Freeman, “Queer and Not Now”; “Time Binds; or, Erotohistoriography”
*JasbirPuar, “Homonationalism and Biopolitics”; “The Sexuality of Terrorism”; “Queer Times, Terrorist Assemblages”
* C. Riley Snorton, Nobody is Supposed to Know, “Introduction,” and Chapter Two
11/4
* E. Patrick Johnson’s Black Queer Studies, “Introduction: Queering Black Studies”
*Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”;
* Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line, “Introduction”; Chapter One, “Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body”
*Chandan Reddy, Freedom With Violence, “Introduction”
11/11 (No class; Veterans Day)
11/18
*Munoz, “Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories”
*Samuel Delany, from Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
*Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space pp. 92-132
*David Harvey, “A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development”
*Christina Hanhardt, “Introduction” and Chapter 5, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence
*Lefebvre, from Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment
11/25 Make-up class; if we have missed more classes than the ones scheduled for cancellation, we will use this class to catch up on missed readings.
11/27 (Class Cancelled; Thanksgiving)
12/2 (all handouts/uploads)
*Beatriz Preciado, “The Pharmaco-Pornographic Regime”
*Gayle Salamon, “An Ethics of Transsexual Difference”
*Mel Chen, “Animals Without Genitals: Race and Transubstantiation”
Grades Due Dec 22 (Papers Due; Final Exams Due Dec 18)