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CS92PROD
Queer/Anthropology: Ethnographic Approaches to Queer Studies

ANTH 398
Fall 2013
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: FGSS 398, AMST 398
Certificates: Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory

This advanced seminar brings together queer theory with cultural anthropology to ask: Can there be a queer anthropology? Cultural anthropology and queer theory are sometimes opposed--some anthropologists find queer studies excessively theoretical, narrowly interested in Western forms of knowledge and power, and given to abstracted critique rather than social explication. Yet even as anthropologists problematize queer theory's assumptions, methods, and boundaries, queer theoretical insights and frameworks have generated new questions and approaches in the anthropology of sexuality--just as anthropology's interest in the global, the comparative, and the ethnographic have enriched new work in transnational queer studies.

This course explores the possibilities of productively juxtaposing, combining, and even opposing anthropology and queer theory. This semester, we will have a special focus on activism. We will read several recent ethnographies of queer (and LGBT) activist organizations alongside theoretical critiques and political calls-to-arms to ask: What counts as queer activism or radical politics? How are political visions produced by social landscapes, and how do they transform them? What are the ethics of queer ethnography, or queer critique?
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS ANTH
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (AMST)(ANTH)(CSCT)(FGSS)
Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
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