syllabus

Week 1: Normativity and queer failure
Based Judith Butler’s foundational work on gender theories and Jack Halberstam’s theory of queer failure, we will start our conversation on how the body and our identities are policed by social norms. We will specifically look at the distinction between performing gender to reach normativity versus the radical potential of failing to uphold that norm through a queer lens. We will discuss how the unruly body, the one failing to meet the standards or expectations surrounding their gender, can be used as a starting point for performance.  
 
Week 2: Performance of gender in history and contemporary practices
In our second session, we move from the glitch to transformation. We will look at historical examples of performing gender, both in performance art and in society. We will trace a lineage through S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), and Claude Cahun, towards contemporary drag performances. In this process we will start the conversations on different styles of drag, focusing on three strands: Impersonation, Exaggeration, and Adaptation and the social commentaries they create. 
We will also consider how drag as a tool is not simply a costume, but a method of "Queering" the self as proposed by Meredith Heller and Shaka McGlotten.
     
Week 3: The politics of gender and resistance
In week 3 we will broaden the conversation to acknowledge that the regulatory fiction of gender is enforced by real-world stakes. This includes inequality, erasure and violence. We will look at performances on gender as the combination of sites of play, and sites of protest, engaging once more with the revolutionary foundations of S.T.A.R.,  the confrontational performance work of Adrian Piper and the visceral endurance of Cassils. We will discuss how artists have used performative gestures to expose systemic injustice, how performing can be a way of opposing the system, and how we use our art to make the audience feel the weight of the norms and expectations placed on our gender.  

Week 4: Dissonance and texture
In our final session we will inhabit the in-between. We explore gender not as a binary, but as texture. If we think of gender as a fabric we can weave, tear, layer and dye, we can explore the nuances of performing gender, and all the in-between options that arise while critically assessing what gender is. We will engage with the question: if gender is a performance, what happens when we perform the impossible? We will respond to the writings of Paul B. Preciado and José Esteban Muñoz and envision what utopian gender performances might look like. Actions that don’t just react to the world as it is, but summon the world as it could be.