コース情報

Despite renewed sociopolitical repressions against queer people globally, queerness and queer culture continue to play an important role in popular discourses, particularly on social media. From the influences of shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race on (online) vernacular language, language that is itself mostly originally derived from Black and Latino Ballroom cultures, to reoccurring accusations of “queerbaiting” in fandom spaces, to the circulation of the “lesbian masterdoc”, to the more recent example of the impact of a show like Heated Rivalry, queerness, queer people, and queer culture are deeply embedded in popular culture, and social media practices in particular. This seminar examines pop cultural representations of queerness through the lens of queer theory. Through the application to current discourses in popular culture (particularly on social media), this course will introduce some of the central works and concepts from the field of queer theory. Queer studies as a field is largely concerned with deconstructing societal conceptualizations of “normal,” aiming to go beyond essentialist, and oftentimes binary, conceptions of gender and sexuality. By engaging with concepts such as heteronormativity & homonormativity, performativity & identity, intersectionality, or homonationalism & pinkwashing, we will think critically about how queerness appears in current pop cultural discourses. We will work together to define, understand, and apply “queer” in its multiplicity of meanings, histories, and uses – as a (self-)identifier, as a theoretical concept, as a methodology, and as an activist approach.