Queer Opera
MUSC 294
Fall 2020 not offered
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| Crosslisting:
FGSS 295 |
| Course Cluster and Certificates: Queer Studies |
Opera is a total art: It weds elaborate fashions with scene design and lighting to create incredible dramas set to music. For this reason, opera forces us to think interdisciplinarily about the narratives it portrays. Every action, every emotion, every decision and recognition in the drama is conveyed to the audience in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways. Operas are also fantastic living experiments in the performative representation of human sexuality. In addition to all of the love and sex that occurs explicitly on the opera stage--and there is plenty of that--operatic narratives also bear witness to changing structures of normativity; regimes of social control are thematized, sometimes lampooned, and often transgressed within the drama, and operas allow us to see how this unfolds within an interconnected ensemble of media. This course serves to introduce students to the world of the opera stage and, through that world, the foundational texts of queer theory. Together we will explore operas from the 17th century to the present day, opera theory of the past century, and queer theory of the past three decades to ask what these bodies of knowledge have to teach each other. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA MUSC |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (MUSC) |
Major Readings:
Carolyn Abbate, IN SEARCH OF OPERA
Carolyn Abbate, UNSUNG VOICES
Gary Tomlinson, METAPHYSICAL SONG: AN ESSAY ON OPERA
Roger Parker (ed), THE OXFORD ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF OPERA
Michel Foucault, HISTORY OF SEXUALITY VOL. 1
Eve Sedgwick, EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOSET
Eve Sedwick, BETWEEN MEN
David Halperin, SAINT-FOUCAULT
David Halperin, HOW TO BE GAY
Leo Bersani, IS THE RECTUM A GRAVE?
José Muñoz, CRUISING UTOPIA
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Examinations and Assignments:
One midterm paper and one final paper. |
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