Critical Social Inquiry 0203 - Queer University Studies

What is the idea of the university and how did we find ourselves here, in one? What, or who, is the university for? The university, as we now know it, is a place of immense contradiction: supposedly sites of nationalist or cultural cohesion, but also, as Bill Readings has shown, empty signifiers for "excellence." They are places where we might theorize queer horizons, but, at the same time, institutions that have financial investments in anti-queer, racist industries like weapons, prisons, and dispossessive technologies. In this class we'll trace a history of the university and its interfacing with queerness, from the far right's attempt to co-opt universities, to encampments for Palestine, backwards to the mid-century and GI Bill. We'll seek to understand how it was that queerness became absorbed into the university, and to what ends. Throughout, we'll think queerness alongside other topics in critical university studies: labor, precarization, globalization, debt, and neoliberalism's phagocytic relation to "difference." Keywords:queer studies, pedagogy, neoliberalism, fascism

In/Justice Students should expect to spend 6-8 hours weekly on work and preparation outside of class time