CSIS 500: Critical Studies in Sexuality: Multi-disciplinary Approaches

CSIS 500C (3): Queer and Trans of Colour Creativity and World Making 

24W Term 2 – Mon 12:00-3:00pm

Instructor: Dr. JP Catungal

What kinds of worlds do queer and trans people of colour imagine and create, and how – through what ways of knowing and being – can be we sense them? What can practices of queer and trans of colour creativity tell us about the present moment and how we have arrived here? How do they orient us towards more socially just, more abundant and more capacious futures?

This course concerns queer and trans of colour ways of being, knowing and doing, and the political and intellectual resources they offer for understanding the world as we know it. Our focus will be on “queer and trans of colour” in multiple registers: (1) as a set of subject positions, (2) as ways of sensing and navigating the world, and (3) as practices of making place and making home.

Our interlocutors in this course – guest speakers, readings, case studies –engage variously artistic, academic and activist forms of practice. Along with attending to the aesthetic and formal dimensions of their work, we will also think with queer and trans of colour creative practices as cultural and political analyses of the ‘sexual’ in its entanglements with racism, coloniality, empire and capitalism. Along the way, we will linger on the sensual, bodily and felt ways that queer and trans of colour thinkers and creators make sense of the world, and imagine and enact other ways of being and becoming anew.