WGST
294.01
BEYOND BINARY SEX: TRANS AND INTERSEX STUDIES
Professor Scott Morgensen
M/W/F 9:40 – 10:40 am
Old Main 010
Syllabus
THE COURSE:
Trans and intersex
people are creating new knowledge, culture, and organizing that challenge
oppression and official regulation of sex and gender. This course
examines the politics and culture that have defined intersex and trans
people’s
lives in the United States historically, and to which current scholars, artists,
and organizers respond. We read that history’s conditions of
possibility in order to remind that it is only one way gender and sex
may be constructed,
and we compare it to knowledge of diverse forms of sex and gender in
the world and across time, even as we critique uses of such knowledge
by Northern activists
in a colonial and globalizing world.
The course centrally
examines scholarship and testimony that highlight intersex and trans
people’s stakes in creating knowledge and movement,
including in conflicts over race, class, nationality, ability, sexuality,
gender, and sex. As a comparative study, the course foregrounds the many
links as well as great differences and ongoing tensions between intersex
and trans movements. The course thus returns continually to the implications
of people who are and are not trans or intersex doing ally-work for social
change. In that context, course conversations offer a means through which
all people may study the effects of binary sex/gender systems in their
lives, and imagine new identity and action.
Books
Lessons from the Intersexed, Suzanne Kessler (1998)
How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the U.S., Joanne Meyerowitz
(2002)
Intersex and Identity: The Contested Self, Sharon Preves (2003)
The Transgender Reader, Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., (2004)
Intersex in the Age of Ethics, Alice Dreger ed. (1999)
From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond, M.
Diamond, ed. (2004)
Films
Venus Boyz, Intersex: Redefining Sex, Woubi Cheri, Toilet Training, Hermaphrodites
Speak!, Southern Comfort, Ke Kulana He Mahu (The Rank of the Transgender)
