Art and Media 2234 - Cyberpunk: Queering the Text, Queering the Body

This course is for students interested in both analyzing and writing science fiction. We'll explore the genre of cyberpunk through a lens of queer theory, unpacking what this realm of science fiction has to tell us about the body and its relationship to queerness, race, gender, capital, disability, and more. One half of our class sessions will be devoted to theory and media analysis, learning how the works we're looking at slot within the historical framework of the genre and how they offer responses to the real world concerns of their authors. The other half of our class sessions will focus on writing craft and aesthetic analysis of the works in question, with the goal of allowing students to carry this knowledge forward into their own creative practice, developing science fiction characters and stories with something to say about the world we live in. Possible readings / screenings include Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, William Gibson's Neuromancer, Samuel Delany's Babel-17, James Tiptree Jr's The Girl Who Was Plugged In, selections from the anthology Cyberpunk and Indigenous Futurisms, and more. Please note that while we will explore a mix of different media, this class will require reading at least a few full-length novels. Please also note that while bolstering creative practice is one major goal of this course, it is not a workshop class. Keywords:Creative writing, Queer, Scifi, Science fiction, Cyberpunk