WGSS 66.30 Trans Feelings, Feeling Trans
In her germinal essay in trans studies, Susan Stryker writes that “transgender rage is a queer fury, an emotional response to conditions in which it becomes imperative to take up, for the sake of one’s own continued survival as a subject, a set of practices that precipitates one’s exclusion from a naturalized order of existence that to maintain itself as the only possible basis for being a subject.” In this class, we will explore the affective elements of trans experience and theory—including but not limited to rage, joy, loss, and love—through a survey of trans scholarship and trans stories from an intersectional, transnational, and multidisciplinary lens. Students will learn to apply this
mode of critical affective analysis to media produced by trans people, and to anti-trans actors who use affective rhetoric to promote violence and oppression through appeals to emotions.