Undergraduate Module Descriptor

POC3134: Queer Theory in the Global Context

This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.

Please note that this module is only delivered on the Penryn Campus.

Module Aims

The module aims to showcase the centrality of sexuality to global and local processes of governance. It prioritizes intersectional analysis and complicates, rather than simplify, our understanding of the complex relationship of the body to larger socio-political and economic structures. Whilst being situated primarily at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies, the module embraces an overall decolonial methodology that prioritizes historicizing and contextualizing. The module places queer debates across and within distinct borders and times, and pushes for a multi-faceted understanding of what we loosely term politics, history or culture.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

This module's assessment will evaluate your achievement of the ILOs listed here – you will see reference to these ILO numbers in the details of the assessment for this module.
On successfully completing the programme you will be able to:
Module-Specific Skills1. Understand the specificity and materiality of sexuality by anchoring it in diverse contexts
2. Become highly familiar with the theoretical reach and scope of queer theory
Discipline-Specific Skills3. Develop a critical vocabulary and working knowledge of sexuality debates beyond identity politics
4. discuss and analyse complex overlapping and intersection power structures
Personal and Key Skills5. Work independently and communicate clearly in writing and speaking
6. Confidently approach and engage in complex queer theoretical conversations

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

This list is indicative:

Monographs and Journal Articles (Selected):

Ahmed, Sara. 2013. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality.Routledge: London and New York.

a khanna. 2007. Us “Sexuality Types”: A Critical Engagement with the Postcoloniality of Sexuality, in B. Bose & S. Bhattacharyya, eds. The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India, pp.159- 167.

Amer, Sahar. 2012. Naming to Empower: Lesbianism in the Arab Islamicate World Today, Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 1, no.4, pp. 381-397.

Boone, Joseph. 2014. The Homoerotics of Orientalism, Columbia University Press.

Chávez, Karma. 2013. Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

D’Emilio, John. 1983. “Capitalism and Gay Identity”, in A. Snitow, C. Stansell & S Thompson, eds. Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, Monthly Review Press.

Duggan Lisa. 2002. “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism.” In: Castronovo R. and Nelson D.D. (eds) Materializing Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 173–194.

El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2012. “Gays who cannot properly be gay’: Queer Muslims in the Neoliberal European City,” European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 79-95.

Engebretsen, Elizabeth. 2013. Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography. Routledge: London and New York.

Fejes, Fred. 2000. Market niche at last, market niche at last, thank god almighty, we're a market niche at last: The political economy of Lesbian/Gay identity. [online]

Grewal, Inderpal. 1996. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel. Durham: Duke University Press.

Habib, Samar, 2010. Islam and Homosexuality, ABC-CLIO.

Haritaworn, Jin. 2015. QueerLovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places, Pluto Press.

Hopwood, Denis. 1999. Sexual Encounters in the Middle East: The British, the French, and the Arabs, Reading: Ithaca.

Jad, Islah. 2014. Between Religion and Secularism: Islamist Women of Hamas’, in Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone (ed.) On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, New York: Feminist Press.

Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1991. Women, Islam, and the State, Temple University Press.

____________. 1988. Bargaining with Patriarchy, Gender and Society, 2(3), pp. 274 – 290.

Karayanni Stavros, S. 2004. Dancing Fear and Desire: Race, Sexuality, and Imperial Politics in the Middle Eastern Dance, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Massad, Joseph. 2007. Desiring Arabs, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

McCormick, Jared. 2011. Hairy Chest, Will Travel: Tourism, Identity, and Sexuality in the Levant. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, vol 7, no. 3.pp. 71-97.

Mourad, Sara. 2013. Queering the Mother Tongue. International Journal of Communication, vol. 7, no. 14, pp. 2533-2546.

Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 2005. Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, University of California Press.

Perez, Hiram. 2005. You can have my brown body and eat it, too! Social Text 2005, vol. 23, pp.171-191.

Puar, Jasbir. 2013. Rethinking Homonationalism, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 45, pp. 336-339.

___________. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham: Duke University Press.

Rao, Rahul. 2014. The Location of Homophpbia, London Review of International Law, Volume 2, Issue 2, 1 September 2014, Pages 169–199.

___________. 2015. Global Homocapitalism. Radical Philosophy, vol. 194, pp. 38-49.

Richter-Montpetit, Melanie. 2017.  Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (in IR) But were Afraid to Ask: The ‘Queer Turn’ in International Relations, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol 46. No.2, pp. 220-240.

Traub, Valerie. 2008. The Past is a Foreign Country? The Times and Spaces of Islamicate Sexualities, in Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire, edited by Kathryn Babayan, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Cambridge : Harvard University.

Weber, Cynthia. 2016. Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the Will to Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yegenoglu, Meyda. 1998. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge University Press.

Zeʼevi, Devi.2006. Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900, University of California Press.