English

While queer narratives, like Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and HBO’s The White Lotus, have achieved mainstream popularity and critical acclaim in recent years, the history of queer storytelling in Western literature can be traced all the way back to Petronius’s Satyricon, a first century Latin text. Although this recent spike in popularity has brought much-needed visibility and increased acceptance to the LGBTQ+ community, it has also revealed previously unexamined inequalities and disparities in terms of race, class, and gender presentation. This course aims to examine questions surrounding these realities by putting a variety of texts, including films and TV shows, into conversation with the more traditional fodder of the English classroom, i.e. short stories, poems, and novels. Alongside looking for answers to these questions, students in the course will learn to use the tools of literary queer theory and film studies as tools for closereading and argument-making while exploring the roles storytelling has played in the history of gender and sexuality and while reflecting the queerness of society.