Amalle Dublon

This course takes up questions of gender, sexuality, and sound, drawing connections between popular audiovisual culture—such as disco, vocal fry, and ASMR videos—and experimental media since 1945. Sexual politics have been understood almost exclusively in terms of visual and textual markers, yet their entanglement with the sensory and philosophical register of sound is extensive. Gender and sexuality cut through discourses on sound and sonic aesthetics, asking us to rethink both the history of experimental sonic media and the status of sound in the arts more broadly. Likewise, attention to sonic aesthetics and performance might compel us to reframe sexual difference and sexual dissidence. We will study how media makers and writers have deployed sound—as part of videos, films, performances, literature, and audio-based work—in ways that offer material for thinking through sexuality, gender, and queer and trans history. The role of musical, vocal, and auditory practices within political movements will also be considered. Course material will span experimental and popular media, music, literature, and film, as well as disability studies, Marxist feminism, trans and queer studies, and psychoanalytic approaches to voice and listening. We will explore how close attention to sound and sound studies might reshape central knots in queer studies.

The 1990s was a period of aesthetic and critical foment for queer and trans life and politics in the United States. In New York, Los Angeles, and other cities, planned gentrification and rezoning—and resistance to them—had a lasting impact on the city's racial, sexual, and economic landscapes and on a generation of media makers, activists, artists, and writers. This course asks after the ongoing cultural inheritance of the 1990s. We will study questions of social life, sexual and racial politics, space, and governance, as well as key concepts in performance studies, critical race studies, Black studies, queer and gender theory, and the economic left that emerged under the pressures of this period. Through cultural objects, critical writing, and archival material, we will trace how the notion of “public sex” came into focus among queer and trans organizers, cultural workers, and academics during heightened responses to HIV/AIDS, intensified policing, and state attacks on areas of sexual commerce and recreation. How did shifting frameworks of “public space” emerge alongside new techniques of protest, media-making, and broadcast? How did entwined aesthetic and social practices yield legacies of interdisciplinary performance, poetry, printmaking, and photography? We will explore the material and infrastructural histories that shaped queer and trans cultural production, such as mass demonstrations against policing, the nascent Internet, and the dismantling of welfare and state arts funding. Over the course of the term, students will develop and share with the class response papers of three-to-four pages each, as well as a self-driven research project.