Subjects of Desire (TCPS 5504h)

James Penney

Term: Fall

Time: TBA

This course sets out to explore the foundations of what has come to be known as queer theory. Though we will investigate the seminal 1990s queer texts of Sedgwick, Butler, Dollimore et. al. in the latter segments of the course, the focus will rather be on those other, antecedent texts which queer theory has enlisted as formative influences. Alongside considerations of Freud and Foucault, we will investigate how Marx and Marxism helped shape the dissident tradition of materialist queer theory. The main theme throughout will be the powers and limits of sexuality’s politicization. If, as some now argue, this emphasis has run its course, how might a return to the foundational traditions suggest a renewal of the queer project, or even the development of a more desirable and manifestly political alternative?

Books

Leo Bersani, Homos.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender.
Teresa Ebert, Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Labor and Desire in Late Capitalism.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.
Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. An Introduction.
Peter Gay, ed., The Freud Reader.
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization.
Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne.
James Penney, The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire.

Robert C. Tucker, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader