FEMINIST AND QUEER THEORY

Fall 2024, WEDNESDAYS, 6:00-9:00PM; MEETS AT MIT

Partly historical and partly topical, this course will introduce you to foundational texts and central questions in each of the respective fields of feminist theory, queer theory, and trans* theory, as well as the difficulties of drawing bright lines between and among these fields. We will explore everything from the Big Questions of field definition down to specific and concrete political phenomena these areas of (sometimes overlapping) feminist, queer, and trans* theory have taken as worthy of attention and interrogation. Assigned readings will privilege the theory part of the course title and pay particular attention to politics.

FACULTY

C. Heike Schotten (she/her) is Professor of Political Science and affiliated faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches courses in political theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Her research interests lie at the various and unlikely intersections of queer theory and Nietzsche Studies, which ground a wide array of publications focusing, most recently, on the theoretical presuppositions animating Right-wing ideologies, including but not limited to settler colonialism, anti-queerness, neoconservatism, “terrorism” policy and the “War on Terror”, anti-Muslim racism, Zionism, and trans-exclusionary feminism. She is a member of the organizing collective of the US Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and the author of Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (Columbia UP, 2018), Nietzsche’s Revolution:  Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality(Palgrave, 2009), and multiple articles and book chapters in Nietzsche studies, critical political theory, feminist theory, and queer theory.