To paraphrase the late, great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of queer theory, an understanding of virtually any aspect of history must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of queer sexuality. Such is the wager of this seminar. Put differently, but still in Sedgwickian terms, queer approaches may have a deeply resonant, minoritarian appeal to historians working on the queer past, but they also have more universal applications, which is to say, queer history has something to offer everyone across the spectrum of genders and sexualities studying any aspect of the past.
Adopting this universalizing, non-identitarian approach, our aim will be to explore how the methods of queer/trans history and theory developed over the past four decades challenge and enrich historical practice in such areas as epistemology (is sex good to think with?), temporality (straight, linear time vs. queer anachronism and backwardness), materiality (queer historical materialism, transnational homocapitalism), colonialism (Indigiqueerness, queer settler colonialism), affect (loss, pain, anger), and archives (state/community/colonial, with/against the grain, absence/abundance). We will investigate identity/community formation and unbecoming, attachment to/desire for the past (‘touching the past’/‘rubbing up against the past’), and interpretive strategies (from the reparative to the fabulated and the fractal).
Because some of the best work on queer temporality comes from medieval studies, queer epistemology from the early modern period, queer archives and colonialism from South Asia and Latin America, queer affect from twentieth-century North America, queer knowledge production from the Sinosphere, and queer interpretive strategies from Africa and the West Indies, our focus on queering history will necessarily take us across a broad range of geopolitical regions and time periods. Written work will focus on exploring the possibilities and problems in pursuing queer historical methods in relation to students’ own research interests, queer and otherwise.
