English 281AD - Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory: 'Queer and Disability Mindbodies, Affects, and Times'

This course will read queer and disability theory both as separate histories and as interlaced projects that resist normative life chronologies, genders, sexualities, productivities, and bodily shapes. Particular attention will be given to questions of embodiment, race, political activism, and relationality. This last category-how we relate to ourselves and to others-will be explored through queer and disability theory's understanding of neurodivergent mindbodies and their nonconforming sorts of feelings and times. How might we think about, for example, "feeling backwards" or "flexible time" as both scholarly ideas and experiences that might help us change our lives and the structures we live within? We will also discuss how theory might be written, and might ask us to read, in queer and neurodivergent ways.

Course limited to sophomores, juniors and seniors