American Cultural Studies - Queer Theories and Methods

Theme: Refusing Disposability: Global Queer Futures Against Mass Death. Refusing Disposability: Global Queer Futures Against Mass Death

Since 2017, we have borne witness to an accelerated attack upon trans youth in the law, media, and public policy that has picked up alarming speed in recent months. As Jules Gill-Peterson reports, there have been approximately 100 anti-transgender bills that have been introduced in more than 25 state legislatures in 2021 alone. This attack converges with a war being waged upon the lives and bodies of myriad communities that is coming to the fore—and which can be seen everywhere from colonial climate violence, to the crisis of incarceration, to the continuation of police brutality, to the ongoing attack upon migrants, to the mass abandonment of disabled communities, the young, and elders in a pandemic, and more.

This course begins with these wars being waged upon those defined to be “non-normative” to ask questions about the dangerous politics of disposability that is coalescing in our contemporary moment. We ask: How did we get here? And, what is the role of queer movements and frameworks in the face this wide-scale normalization of death?

To these aims, we will trace the historical framing of normative and non-normative bodies in medical, legal, and cultural discourse, with particular attention to the broader practices of imperialism, colonization, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy circumscribing this framing. We will also center the ways that anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, disability justice, and queer movements have consistently pushed back upon the discourses and practices that deem certain lives to be expendable. In so doing, we will highlight the broader stakes of contemporary LGBTQ movements and politics over time.

Our ultimate goal is to contribute to a radical queer anti-racist feminist politics that challenges transmisogyny, heteropatriarchy and their underlying systems of imperialism, colonization, white supremacy on all fronts. In so doing, we foreground a global queer future premised on the radical recentering of sacred life.