Kirin Wachter-Grene

We live in a world we didn’t create. But we innovate how to exist within it. This Scholar’s blended academic/studio symposium course explores what it might mean to “queer” space through installation strategies. Installation art is the desire to transform the perception of space to produce new experiences. What could it look like and feel like to take up space while simultaneously making room with others and for others? Together, we will explore these questions through the lens of feminist and queer historical texts that archive radical experiments, aspirations, and failures in kinship, collectivity, and utopian world building efforts. Additional readings will look at affect theory, disorientation, desire, accessibility, and community-building. Students are expected to keep up with the reading weekly and to come to class ready to write about it and discuss it in depth. Studio work, solo and group, will explore and transform space through different techniques such as the arrangement of found/rescued objects, soundscape, light manipulation, video projection, smell, activation via performance, haptic textures, and other modes of site-specific strategies. Artists in focus will include Allyson Mitchell, Nayland Blake, Tiona Nekkia Mcclodden, Jacolby Satterwhite, Chris E. Vargas, Ernesto Pujol, Kang Seung Lee, AK Burns/Katherine Hubbard, and more.

We live in a world we didn’t create. But we innovate how to exist within it. This Scholar’s blended academic/studio symposium course explores what it might mean to “queer” space through installation strategies. Installation art is the desire to transform the perception of space to produce new experiences. What could it look like and feel like to take up space while simultaneously making room with others and for others? Together, we will explore these questions through the lens of feminist and queer historical texts that archive radical experiments, aspirations, and failures in kinship, collectivity, and utopian world building efforts. Additional readings will look at affect theory, disorientation, desire, accessibility, and community-building. Students are expected to keep up with the reading weekly and to come to class ready to write about it and discuss it in depth. Studio work, solo and group, will explore and transform space through different techniques such as the arrangement of found/rescued objects, soundscape, light manipulation, video projection, smell, activation via performance, haptic textures, and other modes of site-specific strategies. Artists in focus will include Allyson Mitchell, Nayland Blake, Tiona Nekkia Mcclodden, Jacolby Satterwhite, Chris E. Vargas, Ernesto Pujol, Kang Seung Lee, AK Burns/Katherine Hubbard, and more.

This course guides students from the nineteenth-century to the present to consider how Black feminisms, plural, have complicated, critiqued, and re-imagined feminist and anti-racist theories of race, sexuality, gender, class, power, and pleasure and continue to innovate. Major historical interventions covered include Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s history of respectability politics and Brittney Cooper’s nuancing of it; The Combahee River Collective’s and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theories of interlocking oppressions and “intersectionality”; Jennifer C. Nash’s critique of the institutionalizing of intersectionality; Alice Walker’s alternative construct of “womanism”; Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of “controlling images”; and bell hooks’ “oppositional gaze.” We will then explore new theories in contemporary Black feminism that move away from what critic Jennifer C. Nash calls “protectionist” frameworks to articulate a politics of pleasure. Here, readings include selections from adrienne maree brown, Mireille Miller-Young, LaMonda Horton Stallings, Joan Morgan, and more. Students should expect to read on average 50 pages of critical scholarship per week and to write about it and discuss it in depth. Students should also expect to take turns as discussion leaders. For their final project, students will write a critical/creative Biomythography inspired by Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, one of the core texts of the class.

BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers have used SF—which stands for speculative fiction (science fiction, horror, and fantasy)—to imagine alternative worlds for centuries. In this class we will closely consider such texts’ visions of race and ethnicity, sexuality, gender, power, and worldbuilding by situating them within the social, political, and historical contexts of their time. How do these texts—some written by writers from marginalized groups who have already survived or are daily surviving apocalypse—represent self-determined visions of resistance, decolonization, abolition, environmental justice, and interspecies solidarity? Fictional texts will include work by Larissa Lai, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, Rebecca Roanhorse, Neon Yang, N.K. Jemisin, and more. Students should expect to read, on average, 75 pages per week and to write about and discuss texts in depth. Students should also expect to take turns as discussion leaders. For their final project, students will write an argumentative essay or develop a creative project with a written reflective component inspired by concepts central to the texts but pertaining to a topic of their choosing.

Do you believe that people should have sovereignty over their imaginations? Do you believe that people should have private reading lives and the right to read under the First Amendment? Do you believe that people should have free access to information? These are the questions at the heart of one of the most pressing culture wars of our time: the sweeping increase in book banning in U.S. school districts and libraries. Reading and intellectual freedom are under siege and books that tell the stories of certain people in this country, particularly Black, queer, and trans people, are increasingly under attack. Why? In this class we will contextualize the banned books we read within these urgent political stakes to try to understand what is deemed, by some, to be so threatening as to be banished, and why that should concern every single one of us. Texts include some of the most banned and challenged books of recent years (including some that have been contested since their publication decades ago): the graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale; Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel Maus; Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir Gender Queer; Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; Toni Morrison’s Beloved; and George M. Johnson’s memoir-manifesto All Boys Aren’t Blue. We will also push ourselves to consider recent forms of public censure, such as cancel culture, in relation to historical and contemporary literary censorship. In so doing, we will ask: what is the line between critique, moralism, and censorship? Students should expect to keep up with the reading and to write about and discuss texts and ideas in close and critical depth every week. Students should also expect to take turns as discussion leaders.