DIS ST / LSJ / CHID 430, GWSS 490, 5 credits, instructor Kai Kohlsdorf

Queering Disability Studies DIS ST / LSJ / CHID 430, GWSS 490 Spring 2015

5 credits

Instructor: Kai Kohlsdorf

Time: Tues & Thurs, 11:30-1:20

Course description: This course aims to think through what it means to queer an interdisciplinary field of study, specifically disability studies. Despite a substantial lack of engagement with topics of queerness or sexuality within the field of DS, disability is intricately bound to and co-created alongside sex, gender, and sexuality as a socially constructed norm. What might be at work in the erasure of the confluence of these categories? We will use queer theory to highlight and focus on the interconnectedness of systems of domination and how they are implicated and informed by discourses of disability. We will engage with histories of creation of race, class, gender, and sexuality norms to think about how constructions of a normal body have marked abnormal bodies deviant through discourses of lack and excess. We will question how we come to know whose bodies matter and how queer theory and disability studies can learn from each other. We will utilize material from transgender studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, feminist studies, cultural studies, critical race theory, poverty studies, feminist care ethics, and more.

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