Amalle Dublon

The 1990s was a period of aesthetic and critical foment for queer and trans life and politics in the United States. In New York, Los Angeles, and other cities, planned gentrification and rezoning—and resistance to them—had a lasting impact on the city's racial, sexual, and economic landscapes and on a generation of media makers, activists, artists, and writers. This course asks after the ongoing cultural inheritance of the 1990s. We will study questions of social life, sexual and racial politics, space, and governance, as well as key concepts in performance studies, critical race studies, Black studies, queer and gender theory, and the economic left that emerged under the pressures of this period. Through cultural objects, critical writing, and archival material, we will trace how the notion of “public sex” came into focus among queer and trans organizers, cultural workers, and academics during heightened responses to HIV/AIDS, intensified policing, and state attacks on areas of sexual commerce and recreation. How did shifting frameworks of “public space” emerge alongside new techniques of protest, media-making, and broadcast? How did entwined aesthetic and social practices yield legacies of interdisciplinary performance, poetry, printmaking, and photography? We will explore the material and infrastructural histories that shaped queer and trans cultural production, such as mass demonstrations against policing, the nascent Internet, and the dismantling of welfare and state arts funding. Over the course of the term, students will develop and share with the class response papers of three-to-four pages each, as well as a self-driven research project.

This course will address the medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic histories of trans, queer, and intersex experience in their convergence with the politics of madness and disability. Beginning with psychoanalytic and sexological accounts of homosexuality and sexual inversion in Western Europe in the 19th century, the course will go on to study the medicalization of trans and intersex childhood in the United States and Europe, alongside psychiatric and criminological approaches to queer and trans desire. We will consider how psychiatry and medicine—and resistance to them—informed the shifting tactics of queer and trans politics in the 20th century, from 1950s gay organizing to 1980s AIDS activism and 1990s pickets of the American Psychological Association by the transgender-rights activist group, the Transsexual Menace. The course will also look at intersections of queer, trans, and disabled-led organizing and discourses. The 1970s, for example, were marked by lesbian feminist antipsychiatry activism, as well as a decisive coalition among gay liberation, Black Power, and the nascent disability power movement that yielded the historic 504 sit-ins and which eventually contributed to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The course will situate these alliances within histories of deinstitutionalization and mass incarceration in the United States, as well as attempt to develop radical psychoanalytic and psychiatric alternatives to hospitalization in Latin America, Europe, and North America.