This course brings together two areas of inquiry: queer studies and affect/emotion/public feeling. What is the relationship between feeling(s) and queer subjectivities? How does engagement in public culture structure and shape individual and collective counter-publics? What role does a commercialized mass culture play in producing queer feelings? The interdisciplinary course will use an intersectional analytic approach to investigate the relationship between emotion/affect/feeling and the production of queer selves. Students will engage with both primary texts (e.g. autobiographies, visual culture, built environment) and secondary literature (both empirical and theoretical) to explore these questions.

This page will evolve as we continue through our class.  You'll find links to required readings and related content below.  As we progress with our oral history projects, resources will be added here as well.  If you have questions about the page or are unable to download a reading or resource, please contact Daniel.Guadagnolo[@]utoronto.ca with HIS400 in the subject title.

To view a copy of the syllabus, click here. 

To view the templates for your oral history recruitment protocols, due Oct. 18, click here. 

Readings

WK 2: Tuesday, Sept. 20: Archiving the Ephemeral
Nan Boyd, “Who is the Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality vol 17, no. 2 (2008): 177-189.

Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106:3, Summer 2007, 459-468.

Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. (Duke, 2003), 1-33. Focus on the end of this section, where Taylor discusses the different ways we utilize a repertoire. 

Esther Newton, “My Best Informant’s Dress: The Erotic Equation in Fieldwork,” from Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas (Duke, 2000), 243-258.

Recommended:

Robert S. Weiss, ch. 4, “Interviewing,” in Learning From Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies (Free Press, 1995), 61-121. 

WK 3: Tues. Sept. 27 Affect/Feeling
Primary text key words: a) Affect b) Feeling
Stephen Frosh, Chs. 1-3 in Feelings (Routledge, 2011), 1-28.

Ann Cvetkovich, “Introduction,” and “The Everyday Life of Queer Trauma” in An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003), 1-48. 

Sara Ahmed, "Queer Feelings,” in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), 144-167. 

Irene Matthis, “Sketch for a Metapsychology of Affect,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis vol. 81 (2000), 215-227.

Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 79, vol. 22, Summer 2004 (117-139).

WK 4: Tues, Oct.  4: Feeling Manly
Max Valerio, The Testosterone Diaries The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation From Female to Male [Paperback] Seal Press, 2006. 

WK 5: Tues, Oct.  11: Ordinary Affects. Primary text keyword: "ordinary affects”

Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press, 2007)

WK 6: Tues, Oct.  18 Queer Publics and Counterpublics Primary text key words: a) counterpublic and b) ‘utopian performative’

Alice Echols, “More, More, More: One and Oneness in Gay Disco,” in Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (Norton, 2010), 39-70.

Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” in Publics and Counterpublics (Zone, 2002), 65-124. 

Jill Dolan, “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative,” Theatre Journal vol. 53, no. 3 (2001), 455-479

WK 7: Tues, Oct.  25: Affect and Political Mobilization
Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS (Chicago, 2009). (e-book)

WK 8: Tues. Nov. 1: Affective Excess Primary text key word: camp
Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’" in Against Interpretation (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961), 275-292.

Fabio Cleto, “Introduction: Queering the Camp,” in Cleto, ed., Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader (1999), 1-43.

Jose Esteban Munoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STD's),” Theater Journal 52 (2000): 67–79.

WK 9: Tues. Nov. 15: Mourning and Visuality 
Primary text key words: a) punctum and b) studium
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980).

WK 10: Tues. Nov. 22: Feeling National
Primary text key words: a) homo-nationalism
Lauren Berlant, “Queer Nationality (written with Elizabeth Freeman),” in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke UP, 1997), 145-173.

David L. Eng, “Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy” in The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (2010), 1-22.

Jasbir K. Puar, “Mapping U.S. Homonormativities,” Gender, Place and Culture vol. 13, no. 1 pp. 67-88 (February 2006).