Subversive Literacies: Analyzing QueerThings and Contexts

ENGL

B6410

Subversive Literacies: Analyzing QueerThings and Contexts

Have you ever considered how the abilities to read, write, listen, speak, research, and critique the word shape the world in which you live? In Subversive Literacies, we will focus upon how literacy has continually played a role in the dynamic power play between normative literacy sponsors and the marginalized voices that both yielded to them but also resisted them. Many marginalized people’s reading and writing have been systemically restricted by institutionally imposed (and often unspoken) regulations: Jim Crow laws, English-only statutes, bathroom legislation, immigration policies, and educational gag orders have all over-determined how people read, write, think, research, and critically identify and express themselves. As a means to conserve and reproduce their own ideologies, potent literacy sponsors have often disenfranchised people’s literacy capabilities rendering their reading, writing, and researching capabilities less powerful. Yet there is another subversive side of that literate narrative and discourse: marginalized groups use their literacies to resist. Colonial subjects have used literacy aptitudes to resist occupation. African-Americans have used it to countervail racist oppression. Queers have used it to confront and upend homophobia and heteronormativity. Students have used it to challenge inequitable educational positions and policies. Literacy can be weaponized, but it can also be disarmed. This course will challenge you to identify and analyze literate primary objects and within them locate your own literate marginalization (or privileges or both); your memories, family lore, and life-long collected memorabilia will provide the inspiration and evidence for your investigations. Alongside your literacy introspections, we will also learn about the histories, theories, and ideologies concerning literacy and that knowledge will help you position your own story in the larger litanies of literacy.

Graduate

Yes