Benjamin Zender

This is an introductory queer and feminist studies course that centers the intellectual work of theorists within the traditions known as Black Feminism and Queer of Color Critique with the US academy. Each week, we will take up a key debate or concern within the interdisciplinary field of women, gender, and sexuality studies, pairing influential works from the past alongside contemporary scholarship. We’ll visit work by scholars including, but not limited to, Sara Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Barbara Christian, Cathy Cohen, the Combahee Collective, Roderick Ferguson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiya Hartman, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Vivian Huang, E. Johnson Patrick, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, José Muñoz Esteban, Jennifer Nash, C. Snorton Riley, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams. Some topics will include survival, loss, care, “the academy,” archives, identity politics, respectability, and language. Conference projects will be based on archival research at the Sarah Lawrence College Archives. Students will meet every two weeks at the SLC library in one of four conference groups organized around overarching topics of concern and debate from the class, including “identity and intersectionality,” “institutionality and the academy,” “violence, resistance, and care,” and “emotion.” Alongside individual seminar projects, these four research groups will each produce a co-authored archival “finding aid,” a guide for future scholars who visit the SLC Archives.

In this practicum-style class—meeting weekly at the Yonkers Public Library (YPL) Riverfront Branch—we will pursue projects that will directly support efforts at the library to build and publicize an LGBTQ+ archival collection. Class readings will discuss the risks, challenges, and rewards of building queer history through archival collections, especially in the context of a public institution like YPL. For conference work, students will participate in one of three group projects at YPL. The Oral History Project group will run public dialogue circles on LGBTQ+ issues in Yonkers and conduct oral histories to be housed in YPL’s public digital archives. The archives acquisition project will build physical and digital collections at the library and develop archival finding aids to assist patrons with archival research. The exhibition group will develop a small exhibition at YPL, sharing Yonkers and Westchester-area history and showcasing existing materials in YPL’s archival collection, including materials developed by the first two project groups. Students will ideally have have some level of experience with queer studies as an academic discipline, archival research, or applied work at nonprofits or other archives, libraries, and/or museums.

This introductory queer and feminist studies course will center the intellectual work of theorists within the traditions known as Black feminist theory and queer of color critique. The course will read scholarship by Gloria Anzaldúa, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Barbara Christian, Cathy J. Cohen, the Combahee River Collective, Roderick Ferguson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiya Hartman, E. Johnson Patrick, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, José Esteban Muñoz, Jennifer C. Nash, C. Riley Snorton, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams. The course will also explore documentary films by Marlon Riggs, fiction by Toni Morrison, creative nonfiction and poetry by Claudia Rankine, and the films Moonlight (directed by Barry Jenkins) and The Watermelon Woman (directed by Cheryl Dunye). Conference projects will emerge from archival research at the Sarah Lawrence College Archives. Students will meet every two weeks at the Sarah Lawrence College Library in one of four conference groups organized around overarching topics of concern and debate from the class, including: 1) critical fabulation, 2) institutionality and the academy, 3) violence, resistance, and care, and 4) emotion. Major writing assignments will include four brief “archival dispatches,” where students will report on their research findings to describe their intellectual, political, and emotional investments in the archives. For the course's final assignment, students will develop an individual project proposal that envisions a future intellectual, activist, or artistic response to the archives.

In Waves, we’ll move backward through feminist and queer time, as we revisit “classic” pieces within their original historical contexts. We will locate theory in place and time, naming how they respond to specific political, intellectual, and social exigencies. Our goal is to read these texts with close attention and care, asking how they reflect the urgent desires and needs of multiple overlapping communities. The texts represent a large breadth of topics, disciplines, and values of feminist and queer thought and are far from exhaustive history of any of these conversations. Likewise, our authors—folks such as Joshua Chambers-Letson, Saidiya Hartman, Martin Manalansan, Jennifer Nash, Claudia Rankine, Gayle Rubin, Eve Sedgwick, and Barbara Smith—each write from the specifics of their own experience, offering frequently contradictory arguments about the way the world does—and should—work. Together, we’ll build narratives about queer and feminist theoretical history that honor these complexities. We’ll build a co-authored public website that will house a timeline, theory cloud, and a digital exhibit of images from your archival research. You’ll be responsible for curating discussion for one class period. For your final conference work, you’ll conduct an independent project at either the Yonkers Public Library or the Sarah Lawrence College Archives, with an optional opportunity to help curate a final community event in spring 2024. As an interdisciplinary theory course, expect to draw on theory from gender and sexuality studies; LGBT studies; and Africana studies.

The television show Hoarders: Buried Alive. Artist Andy Warhol’s junk collection, consisting of receipts, junk mail, and takeout menus. Professional organizer Marie Kondo and her minimalist ideals. Big-screen televisions, fast fashion, and floating islands of plastic trash contrasted with the promises of decluttering, downsizing, and shrinking homes. From fantastic depictions of people overwhelmed with their accumulation of things to popular self-help books that promise freedom and joy in the form of a clean home, this course will be concerned with the judgments we make about people and their relationship to their stuff. This course will begin to unpack "abject object orientations" by investigating figures like the archivist, the hoarder, the minimalist, and the collector. The course will ask how race, gender, sexuality, and class shape our judgments of people and their relationship to things. By looking to depictions of whom Scott Herring calls "material deviants" across performance art, film, and memoir, students will describe the cultural logics through which speaking of a person's orientation toward objects becomes a way of making ethical claims about them. For major assignments, students will develop three total live performances, including two archival “show and tells,” and a final autoethnographic performance unpacking students' own relationship to things. Archival “show and tells” will center an object from trips to the Sarah Lawrence Archives and can be either solo or group performances. Potential field-trip sites may include the Hudson River Museum, local thrift and resale stores, and the Yonkers Public Library Local History Room. No previous performance experience is required.

In this small workshop meeting at the Yonkers Public Library (YPL), we’ll plan a series of writing workshops for Yonkers-area community members and a final event celebrating SLC’s yearlong collaboration with the YPL. We’ll work directly with Yonkers-area community members and YPL staff to develop workshops themed around topics like oral history, autobiographic performance, family heirlooms, and grassroots archives. The final live event will share work from these writing workshops and the fall 2023 class, Feminist and Queer Waves. You’ll develop a theme, co-author a curatorial statement, develop a small exhibit of archival materials from YPL and SLC, and invite members of our overlapping communities. This small class welcomes former students from Feminist and Queer Waves, as well as those who are invested in publicly- engaged pedagogy, community organizing, and museum and archival curation.