The recent popular and awarding-winning television drama Pose brought Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ ballroom culture to new audiences—at the same time introducing viewers to the histories of HIV/AIDS activism in the 1980s and 90s and the structural conditions of poverty, homelessness, and police violence that gay, transgender, and gender non-conforming people faced then and continue to face now. A show such as Pose is more than entertainment, it participates in queer archival practices and forms of community knowledge production. In this course, students consider how the queer past shapes ideas of the queer present and future. We begin by examining the historical links between slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow segregation and regulations of gender, sexuality, and desire today. Students learn to put popular culture representations like those in Pose in conversation with primary historical source materials using a variety of queer and trans archives to think about what counts as queer knowledge. By the end of the quarter students use their archival research to produce and share primary source materials in the form of a zine (a small self-made small publication) that introduces audiences to key concepts of queer knowledge production
About the instructor:
Jeanne Scheper is an Associate Professor and former Chair (2020-2023) of the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at University of California, Irvine. Before coming to UCI, Scheper was a Research Director for the Palm Center, a public policy think tank focusing on sexual minorities in the military that was critical to ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell policy.” Scheper is completing a monograph related to this work, “Policytainment: ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ Transgender Military Service, and Popular Culture,” and is the author of Moving Performances: Diva Iconicity and Remembering the Modern Stage (Rutgers University Press, 2016) and the recently published edited volume The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora, with Mae G. Henderson and Gene Melton II (Rutgers University Press). Her scholarship appears in Feminist Media Studies, Radical Teacher, African American Review, Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy, Feminist Studies, as well as in The Josephine Baker Critical Reader: Selected Writings on the Entertainer and Activist (eds. Mae G. Henderson and Charlene B. Regester) and Sasinda Futhi Siselapha: Black Feminist Approaches to Cultural Studies in South Africa’s Twenty-Five Years Since 1994 (eds. Derlene Dee Marco et al.). Scheper has been teaching with zines in collaboration with librarians, museums, and community zine festivals for over ten years.
Requirement for ALL semester students:
The four weeks from August 28 to September 18 will be spent in a special topics module taught by Dr. Jimmy Ellis on Wednesdays from 6:30 to 9:30p.m. This module will account for 15% of the core seminar final course grade.
Your selected seminar will begin the week of September 23 and your seminar instructor will officially be your instructor of record for the term, responsible for computing and submitting final course grades at the end of the term.
**NO additional registration required.