Omie Hsu

This course welcomes students interested in the field broadly called “queer theory”--even if they don’t have a background in women’s, gender, or sexuality studies. It requires neither expertise nor past experience precisely because the primary question the class experiments with is: “What could queer theory look like if we begin from the premise that its model subject is not white?” The syllabus is organized around how “queer theory” is differently distributed and taken up by various fields of inquiry/analysis, methodological approaches, and traditions of activism and cultural production. We’ll use many genres and forms of queer of color theorizing as points of entry into concepts central to queer/critical thought (like intimacy, power, subjectivity, labor, sex). We’ll read legal scholars (like Kenji Yoshino, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ian López) alongside theorists of performance/performativity (like E. Patrick Johnson, José Muñoz); we’ll put historical manifestos (like those by Radicalesbians, the Combahee River Collective) in conversation with contemporary literary manifestos (like Joshua Chambers-Letson’s); we’ll treat graphic novels (like Jaime Cortez’s Sexile) as works of philosophy and works of political philosophizing (like writing by Cathy Cohen, C. Riley Snorton, Jeff Nunokawa) as poetic/aesthetic; we’ll watch web series (like Brown Girls) and we’ll write a lot. We’ll use short, though frequent, critical reflections to frame class discussions and you’ll use longer paper and/or creative projects to consolidate/present your learning.

This is a class where we will think about games with respect to social and political life; it is not a game design course. It puts Game Studies and Critical Theory in conversation with each other in order to invite questions and thought about what the formal, aesthetic, historical, sociopolitical, and affective dimensions of games could teach us about the formal, aesthetic, historical, social, and affective dimensions of politics. We will read games across genre and type - from First-Person Shooter video games to collaborative board games to Role-Playing mobile games to drinking card games (without the drinking). We will also read theory across disciplines and fields - from theories of embodiment (like queer theory or race and ethnicity studies) to debates in game studies (like ludology v. narratology) to concepts behind design elements (like game mechanics or player interaction) to questions of contemporary sociopolitical life (like critiques of capitalism or Science and Technology Studies). Also expect to play some games and to write short, though regular, critical analyses.

This course is 'not quite introductory' because it is more specific, more experimental, and far less thorough than a survey class on major textual and conceptual touchstones of the field of Asian-American Studies. It has twin goals: the first, to organize encounters with a variety of textures and styles of representation, political action, and cultural production loosely defined as, or associated with, 'Asian-American.' This means that in addition to theoretical texts intended to anchor and stage each unit, we will also be reading across genres of analytic objects, like the blog, memoir, novel, documentary, and play. The second, to treat these studies of Asian American life/living as extended cases, immanently constitutive, of the study of politics. Units will be thematically organized around conceptual concerns that include: economies of labor, circulations of stereotype (from terrorist to model minority), articulations of the nation and citizenship in the context of diaspora, and food.