Women,Gender,Sexuality Studies 695E - S- Theorizing Eros

This graduate seminar centers around the project of theorizing eros. The erotic has been a rich site of queer feminist thinking about the epistemic and material costs of the imposition of sexuality as an interpretive grid for making sense of human nature. The course will begin with the study of sexuality as a knowledge system, with a focus on racial and colonial histories of sexuality, while most of the rest of the semester will be devoted to queer feminist considerations of the erotic as a site of ethics and politics. Michele Foucault famously distinguished between ?scientia sexualis? and "ars erotica" and Audre Lorde, coterminously, between the pornographic and the erotic. In The History of Sexuality and "Uses of the Erotic," eros operates as a set of possibilities, or capacities, - for pleasure, joy, fulfilment, satisfaction - that exceed and provincialize sexuality and which might inspire ways of rethinking nature, need, and relationality. In addition to Lorde and Foucault, we will read Lynne Huffer, L.H. Stallings, Ladelle McWhorter, Adrienne Marie Brown, Sharon Holland, Ela Przybylo, Jennifer Nash, and Amber Jamilla Musser, among others, to help us think capaciously about what queer feminist erotics can do.