Education

Princeton To Offer Fall Class Teaching Students How To ‘Read Queerly’

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Grace Carr Reporter
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Princeton University will offer a fall course that teaches students how to read queerly and engage with materials from a sexually liberated perspective.

“In this course, we will both read from various trajectories of queer literature and engage what it means to read queerly,” the Queer Literatures: Theory, Narrative, and Aesthetics course description reads. “We will consider the historical etymology of the term queer and think through its affiliate terms and acronyms: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans.”

The course will examine how gender, desire and sexuality interact and overlap from a queer perspective and will address the historical situation of queer politics. The course will also “investigate how discourses of power and institutions of normativity have come up against queer bodies [and] narratives.” (RELATED: Princeton Discussion Group Teaches Men That Being The Breadwinner Is Bad)

Readings include Willa Cather’s “The Professor’s House” about a middle-aged man losing control of his life and Michel Foucault’s “The History of Sexuality,” which seeks to expose history’s allegedly “repressive” discourse on sexuality. Also on the reading list is Eli Claire’s “Exile and Pride,” which recounts Claire’s experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist. The work explores the “landscape of disability politics and queer liberation.”

Princeton also has a discussion group, “Men’s Allied Voices for a Respectful & Inclusive Community”(MAVRIC), which hosts lunch conversations twice a week in order to “unpack our own internalized ideas about what it is to be a man,” according to the group’s website. It also “look[s] for the tender spots where some emotion comes to the surface.”

Campus Reform also wrote a Wednesday piece on the upcoming class.

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