One elite private university is offering a course called, “In a Queer Time and Place.”
The University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality is currently offering the winter quarter class in an attempt to challenge the “heteronormative” understanding of time, or “straight time and its governing logic.”
“Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and its governing logics,” the description on the center’s winter course list reads. “[T]hey question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering.”
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The description also notes that “the so-called ‘temporal turn’ in queer and trans studies” has led to “some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years.”
“We investigate queer theory’s boldest interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present,” it continues.
Assistant Instructional Professor Agnes Malinowska is teaching the course at both the graduate and undergraduate level this quarter. Her listed research interests include “gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, animal / nonhuman studies and the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and the history of the social and biological sciences.”
In the spring quarter, Malinowska will also be teaching a course called “Reproductive citizens: gender, work, and the body,” which will feature “Black and Native feminists,” “Marxist social reproduction theorists,” “family abolitionists” as well as “sex worker’s rights activists.”
Established in 1996, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality serves as a “major center for faculty and graduate research and pedagogical training and has developed an extensive undergraduate program in gender and sexuality studies,” according to its website.
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Other courses currently being offered through the center include “Treating Trans-: Practices of Medicine, Practices of Theory,” “Indigenous Feminisms of Latin America,” “Consent in American Life,” “Midwives, Healers, and ‘Abortionists,’ “Queer Theories/Queer Practices” and “The Queer Enemy and the Politics of Homophobia.”
Campus Reform has contacted the University of Chicago, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and Agnes Malinowska for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
