Women,Gender,Sexuality Studies 292L - S- Losing Gender

Have you ever felt that gender is a bit odd? Ever feel a little perplexed about "gender reveal parties" and the obsession around an unborn child's genitals? Binaries are strange, knowing the range of thought, expression and creativity humanity* is capable of. Why are we told there are two main genders? What happens when you take all of this into account alongside histories of slavery and conquest? This course will take seriously the claim that gender is anti-Black, that slavery marked an epochal rupture and that slavery is a technology for producing a kind of human. Following the work of Hortense Spillers' Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book, this course is interested in thinking through how the politics gender differentiation was and still is central to black subject making in the New World. One of the objectives for this course, is to develop a way to advocate for a politics vested in the abolition of gender in the long run and in the short-run, doing the work in thinking about how race, gender, and sexuality has been vital to subject making.