New Fully Online Class

GWS 310 will be offered fully online Spring 2022. See the course description below for more information.

Working with the assertion that "the personal is political" that emerged from Feminist of Color scholarship, this course will introduce students to transgender identity and politics through memoir, autobiography, and self-narrative. Students will learn how transgender people require a story that authenticates their identification in order to receive medical, legal, and social care. From questions about pronoun use to "When did you know" or "How do you know," transgender identity has a unique relationship with self-narrative and the biographical. How has this biographical imperative of transgender subjectivity shaped theoretical, political, and aesthetic debates in Transgender Studies? Attentive to questions of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and ability, this course will study how "the story of self" reveals the bond between embodiment and subjectivity, the experiential and the social, inside and outside, and semiotics and materiality.