Global LGBT Fiction

This course will introduce students to the increasingly global genre of contemporary LGBT literature. A central focus of the course will be how LGBT subjectivities, needs, and desires differ across regional and national contexts and how LGBT culture and personhood are being rethought and restructured in the wake of HIV/AIDS becoming a more manageable illness and of important though uneven gains in civil rights and recognitions. Of particular concern will be the fate of LGBT subcultures and resistance movements in an age of assimilation, the intersection of sexuality with other axes of identity and identification, the persistence of homophobia and transphobia, the lingering resonance of negative feelings and anti-social orientations, and the cooptation of LGBT lives by neoliberal narratives of success and individualism. Literary form will also be a primary consideration, specifically the use of non-chronological narration to question and disrupt the teleological trajectories of reproductive futurism. Key texts in queer theory will supplement the readings when appropriate.   Credit Level: 10 Year taken: Year 4 Undergraduate