User:Mstanfill/course wizard/Course description

What is "queer"? What does it mean to be political? What might a queer politics look like? How might we think about "queer" as a practice, an identity, a community, a kind of activism, and an academic concern? Queer Lives, Queer Politics asks these questions, thinking about non-normative sexualities as they intersect with race, class, gender, ability, the law, space, and media and popular culture. Through our readings and discussions, we will explore the basic problems and questions in queer studies. Through the class, you’ll learn to analyze the role of race, class, and gender in producing social ideas of sexuality, recognize the difference between sexual “deviance” in general and the disruptive and productive potential of “queer” in particular, and identify the operations of normalization in various political contexts from the law to popular culture.

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