Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender 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.

Within the last two decades, there has been an exponential increase in mainstream discussions of LGBTQ issues. For many within the LGBTQ community, however, these mainstream images bring with them the sense that to be gay is to be white. Although a few exceptions exist, minorities are still left asking: Where are all the black, brown, and yellow faces? This course addresses this question, alongside another equally important one: How do black, brown, and yellow gays and lesbians experience their sexualities in and apart from these mainstream images? Focusing on 21st-century texts (read broadly to include, but not limited to, literature, poetry, nonfiction, and film), we will work toward a deeper understanding of what it means to be queer and a racial minority. In so doing, we will work toward a better understanding of what it means to belong to this (queer) nation.

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.

Queer Americans certainly, James, Stein, Cather, and Baldwin each fled “America.” James (1843-1916) and Stein (1874-1946) spent their adult lives in Europe. Cather (1873-1947) left Nebraska for Greenwich Village after a decade in Pittsburgh, with a judge’s daughter along the way. Baldwin (1924-1987) left Harlem for Greenwich Village, then left the Village for Paris. As sexual subjects and as writers, these four could hardly appear more different; yet, Stein described James as “the first person in literature to find the way to the literary methods of the 20th century,” Cather rewrote James to develop her own subjects and methods, and Baldwin found in James’s writings frameworks for his own. In the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, James, Stein, and Cather witnessed the emergence of modern understandings of homosexuality and made modern literature, each pushing boundaries, always in subtle or dramatic ways. (Stein, for example, managed to parlay the story of her Paris life with Alice B. Toklas into an American bestseller in 1933.) In the second half of the 20th century, Baldwin began to dismantle modern understandings of sexuality and of literature. Examining the development of their works side by side will allow us to push the boundaries of lesbian/gay/queer cultural analyses by pursuing different meanings of “queer” and “American” through an extraordinary range of subjects and forms. Beginning with James on gender, vulnerability, and ruthlessness, this course will range from Cather’s pioneers and plantations to Stein on art and atom bombs and Baldwin on sex and civil rights. We will read novels, novellas, stories, essays, and memoirs by James, Cather, and Baldwin, plus Stein’s portraits, geographical histories, lectures, plays, operas, and autobiographies. Literary and social forms were both inextricable and inseparable from the gender and cross-gender affiliations and the class, race, and ethnic differences that were all urgent matters for these four. James’s, Stein’s, Cather’s, and Baldwin’s lives and works challenge most conventional assumptions about what it meant—and what it might mean—to be a queer American. Conference projects may include historical and political, as well as literary, studies, focusing on any period from the mid-19th century to the present.

Queer theory emerged in the United States, in tandem with Queer Nation, at the beginning of the 1990s as the intellectual framework for a new round in ongoing contests over understandings of sexuality and gender in Western culture. “Queer” was presented as a radical break with homosexual, as well as heterosexual, pasts. Queer theorists and activists hoped to reconstruct lesbian and gay politics, intellectual life, and culture; renegotiate differences of gender, race, and class among lesbians and gay men; and establish new ways of thinking about sexuality, new understandings of sexual dissidence, and new relations among sexual dissidents. Nevertheless, queer theory had complex sources in the intellectual and political work that had gone before. And it has had, predictably, unpredictable effects on subsequent intellectual and political projects. This class will make the history of queer theory the basis for an intensive study of contemporary intellectual and political work on sexuality and gender. We will also be addressing the fundamental questions raised by the career of queer theory about the relations between political movements and intellectual movements, the politics of intellectual life, and the politics of the academy—in the United States, in particular—over the past half-century.

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.

How does a chronic illness affect a person’s orientation to the everyday? What are the social and political forces that underpin life in a homeless shelter? What is the experiential world of a blind person, a musician, a refugee, or a child at play? In an effort to answer these and like-minded questions, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in developing phenomenological accounts of particular lived realities in order to understand—and convey to others—the nuances and underpinnings of such realities in terms that more general social or symbolic analyses cannot achieve. In this context, phenomenology offers an analytic method that works to understand and describe in words phenomena as they appear to the consciousnesses of certain peoples. The phenomena most often in question for anthropologists include the workings of time, perception, selfhood, language, bodies, suffering, and morality as they take form in particular lives within the context of any number of social, linguistic, and political forces. In this course, we will explore phenomenological approaches in anthropology by reading and discussing some of the most significant efforts along these lines. Each student will also try their hand at developing a phenomenological account of a specific social or subjective reality through a combination of ethnographic research, participant observation, and ethnographic writing.

This course departs from hegemonic accounts of modernism to tell the story of modernism through the work of underrepresented artists—artists of the Black Atlantic, queer and trans artists, artists of color, women artists, and artists seen as “outside” the canon. Looking geographically to Europe, North America, South America, and East Asia, we will investigate how artists responded to fascism, colonization and anti-colonial protest, war and mass migration, the legacies of enslavement, and rationalized forms of labor. We will look to discourses of leftist politics and collectivity, feminist struggle, abolitionism and antiracist discourse. What representational strategies did artists use to respond to modernity, to remake the world anew? The emphasis of this course is on the global plurality of modernism, shifting our understanding of where modernism was produced, when, and by whom. This course serves as an introduction to art history in the sense that it will equip students with the basic tools of close, slow looking and of descriptive writing about art, art historical research, and practices of curatorial display while also introducing students to broad and diverse histories of modern art. The course will also include field trips to New York City museums. This course is a lecture-seminar hybrid: One lecture a week will introduce you to the broader movements; weekly group conferences will look at specific case studies and scholarly approaches to writing about contemporary art.

This course follows the transition from late modernist art after World War II to the heterogeneous practices of contemporary art in the 21st century. Attention will be paid to formative artistic movements—such as Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Performance, and Institutional Critique—as well as to how marginalized artists continually challenged the hegemony of the mainstream artworld with political activism along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class. The final section of the course will examine current trends, including postcolonial art, digital technologies, Indigenous art, and ecological art in an era of climate change. The course will include a field trip to a New York City museum, where students will select artworks for their own research papers. Other assignments will include visual analysis, a comparative research paper, and a group presentation. Alternative proposals for final projects, such as exhibition designs, are also welcome. One weekly lecture on the history and theory of each topic will prepare students for weekly group conferences involving close reading of primary and secondary sources, visual analysis of artworks, and guided discussion.

Feminist economics arose as a critique of the androcentric and Eurocentric assumptions underlying mainstream (neoclassical) economics. But over the past 30 years, feminist economics has developed into a coherent perspective in its own right. Feminist economics acknowledges and investigates power differentials in both the home and the market on the basis of race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, nation, and disability status. It takes seriously the crucial economic impact of caring labor (both paid and unpaid) in both the home and the broader community. And it proposes alternate measures of economic success that emphasize bodily integrity, human agency, sustainability, and human rights. We will begin this course with a brief exploration of the historical context for the development of feminist economics; i.e., the rise of feminist movements in both the developed world and the Global South. We’ll then examine the differences between feminist and mainstream neoclassical economics by examining questions such as: What do we mean by "the economy”? Do transactions and activities have to be monetized to be "economic”? How is caring labor (both paid and unpaid) conceptualized in economics, and how does the performance of this labor impact one's status in both the labor market and the household? The answers to these and similar questions will help us to reconceptualize economics to take account of all of the labor necessary to reproduce individuals and social/economic structures. Finally, we’ll apply this reconceptualized, feminist economics to questions of economic policy. We’ll examine a number of case studies, including:

• the persistence of occupational segregation and wage differentials by gender and race and policies to mitigate these inequalities;
• the impact of domestic violence and other forms of nonmarket coercion on economic outcomes;
• the impact of reproductive control (or the lack thereof) on the economic trajectories of both individuals and societies; and
• the (re)conceptualization and measurement of economic development and growth.

In addition to class participation, requirements for the course will include frequent short papers on the readings, leading class discussions (in pairs), and participation in group presentations. In lieu of a traditional conference paper, students may elect to participate in an on- or off-campus service-learning project.

This is an open course designed to enlighten our creative consciousness, using music and nonfiction filmmaking as tools for liberation. Music and other sonic experiences are intrinsically connected to how we witness, experience, and tell nonfiction stories. In this course, we will examine work where the score itself plays a character while also creating films of our own inspired by the soundtrack as a living piece of our form. Broken into groups, students collectively will create a five-minute film that invites the viewer into subjects that are engaging and new, while also challenging the binary and often Western notion of what storytelling can be. The role that music and sound can play as a form of protest, meditation, and transformation are at the heart of our visual experience. In the spirit of global movements toward a more just and sustainable world, this course infuses a cinematic quest for truth in storytelling with the undeniable power that music brings to our understanding of a moment in time, a scene, a relationship, and ourselves. From American Utopia to Amazing Grace and Gimme Shelter, students will screen, discuss, and be inspired to create work that challenges all of the senses.

“But if you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply—any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will,” Margaret Fuller wrote in Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845. Not 10 years later, Fanny Fern’s autobiographical protagonist tells her daughter, when asked if she would write books when a woman, “God forbid,” because “no happy woman ever writes.” In this seminar, we will discuss what US women writers imagined they could be and why they wrote (happy or not). We will read both major and forgotten works of literary activism from women writers of the 19th and early-20th centuries, focusing around issues of gender and gender convention, race, racial prejudice and enslavement, immigration, migration and national identity, class and elitism, sex and sexuality. Course readings will mainly be primary sources, coupled with historical essays to help contextualize them. Emphasis will be placed on choosing women writers outside of the mainstream, who actively worked with their writing to change the status quo—to “reconstruct” womanhood.

Within the last two decades, there has been an exponential increase in mainstream discussions of LGBTQ issues. For many within the LGBTQ community, however, these mainstream images bring with them the sense that to be gay is to be white. Although a few exceptions exist, minorities are still left asking: Where are all the black, brown, and yellow faces? This course addresses this question, alongside another equally important one: How do black, brown, and yellow gays and lesbians experience their sexualities in and apart from these mainstream images? Focusing on 21st-century texts (read broadly to include, but not limited to, literature, poetry, nonfiction, and film), we will work toward a deeper understanding of what it means to be queer and a racial minority. In so doing, we will work toward a better understanding of what it means to belong to this (queer) nation.

James Baldwin is one of the most incisive and astute writers that the world has ever known. Black, queer, and fundamentally American, Baldwin wrote about the intersections and pressures of his various identities, his role as a writer, and his relationship to the nation with the force and energy of a man disappointed with the realities of what he saw but hopeful of the potential that he felt remained. This course explores Baldwin’s own impressive body of work (fictional and otherwise) alongside the lasting impact that he has had on the literary, social, and political world in his wake.

There was a reason why Edmund Burke famously called the press “The Fourth Estate” of government during a debate in Parliament in 1787 and why it remains true. For all its self-proclaimed and often real independence, the press is as much a part of the power systems that run society, politics, and the economy as the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary; political and social organizations; the police; churches; and corporations. With that in mind, this course will examine the role of the press (now newspapers, radio, TV, and an endless array of digital outlets) in the creation and perpetuation of anti-Black racism in the United States. Even with the most well-meaning attempts to stay above the fray, the media is not merely a passive pipeline for events and data. They construct the news and, in doing so, are as much as part of the institutions of racism as any other group with power and privilege in a racist society. How do the media reflect the social, economic, and political currents of the day; and how, in turn, do the media influence them? This is not a practicum class in journalism, but we will study and ask questions about journalistic practices, institutions, and language structure to see how the language and agenda of racism were reflected in journalism. Do journalists, in turn, perpetuate that language and, in fact, foster it either wittingly or passively? Do the media help sustain overt and systemic racism, even as many cover, with obvious approval, things like the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter movement of today? Readings for this class will include large parts of two books: The History of White People, by Nell Irwin Painter, and White by Law, by Ian Haney Lopez—but will primarily be original news and opinion content from the late 19th century until today. Students should be prepared to consume media coverage every day—mainstream and otherwise and from left, center, and right—and bring examples to class on a weekly basis to discuss with the group. Class participation is vital in this class, along with an eagerness to read widely and to do research. There will be two short essays and, of course, the mandatory conference project.

This community partnership course will focus on the health of humans living within physical, social, and psychological urban spaces. We will use a constructivist, multidisciplinary, multilevel lens to examine the interrelationship between humans and the natural and built environment, to explore the impact of social group (ethnic, racial, sexuality/gender) membership on person/environment interactions, and to explore an overview of theoretical and research issues in the psychological study of health and illness across the lifespan. We will examine theoretical perspectives in the psychology of health, health cognition, illness prevention, stress, and coping with illness; and we will highlight research, methods, and applied issues. This class is appropriate for those interested in a variety of health careers or anyone interested in city life. The community-partnership/service-learning component is an important part of this class. We will work with local agencies to promote health-adaptive, person-environment interactions within our community.

We have time, energy, questions, and few responsibilities. We want to push the envelope, resist compromise, lead revolutions, and turn the world upside down. Because we do not yet know quite how to be, we have not settled and will not let the dust settle around us. —Karlin & Borofsky, 2003

Many traditional psychological theories of development posit a brief transition from adolescence to adulthood; however, many people moving into their 20s experience anything but a brief transition to “feeling like an adult,” pondering questions such as: How many SLC alums can live in a Brooklyn sublet? What will I do when I finish the Peace Corps next year? In this course, we will explore the psychological literature concerning emerging adulthood, the period from the late teens through the 20s. We will examine this period of life from a unified biopsychosocial and intersectional perspective.

In recent years, scholarship in Jewish studies has recognized that much of recorded Jewish history and writing has centered the male, heterosexual, cisgender Jew as the normative Jewish figure and has failed to reckon sufficiently with the perspectives of Jewish women, queer Jews, trans Jews, and other Jews holding marginalized gender and sexual identities. At the same time, scholars have noted that Jewish literature and rabbinic sources contain fascinating resources to interrogate gender norms and, in particular, to explore how the ambiguity of gender roles contained within rabbinic sources does or does not map onto contemporary gender binaries. Building from this perspective, this class aims to explore the evolution of debates about gender and sexuality in Judaism, focusing both on textual sources and on the lived experiences of Jewish people. Topics to be covered include: the status of women under halakhah (Jewish law); gender in the Talmud and Jewish religious texts; constructions of masculinity and femininity; debates over the proper role of the body and the gendered nature of religious practice and religious authority; the role of women in Jewish emancipation and the changing nature of Jewish gender norms in the modern era; the relationship of women and queer Jews to nationalisms and citizenship; Zionist discourses on the relationship between land, rootedness, and gender; and the gendered politics of Jewish identity in both Europe and the Middle East. Throughout the course, we will read both primary and secondary sources; the primary sources will include Jewish religious texts, as well as fiction and autobiography produced by Jewish women and queer Jews. We will ask the questions: Who claims the right to speak for a tradition, and what does it mean to say that certain Jewish bodies are and are not normative? In so doing, we will also review some of the key debates surrounding gender studies and queer studies in the field of religious studies more broadly, and students will gain a basic understanding of some of the key methodological and theoretical debates in contemporary queer theory.

In this lecture, students will be introduced to key areas of study in the sociology of “deviance,” detention, and illegality. We will be taking a global and transnational perspective on examining the ways in which social groups define, categorize, and reinforce deviance and illegality, from the treatment of minority and persecuted groups to the detention and expulsion of populations such as undocumented migrants and refugees. Students will learn about foundational theories and concepts in the field, starting with a reading of Émile Durkheim’s classical study of suicide and the idea of anomie, followed by Robert Merton’s strain theory and then contemporary ones such as conflict theory, labeling theory, and the infamous “broken-windows” theory. The class will take a critical approach to reflecting and challenging ideas about deviance and illegality by examining global and transnational forms of population governance, such as ongoing mutations to human rights and the technocratic management of displaced populations through humanitarianism around the world. We will be reading about major sectors of transnational deviance and crime, including industrial fishing and trafficking on the high seas (Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean), exploitation and profiteering through international logistics (Carolyn Nordstrom’s Global Outlaws), and transnational sex work and trafficking (Christine Chin and Kimberly Hoang). This critical lens is intended to help us understand how different groups and populations are rendered “deviant” or “illegal” for the purposes of management and control (or political leverage) and to what extent groups themselves are able to resist or challenge those categorizations. Finally, we will be looking at how social movements and acts of resistance can produce widescale changes in societies toward the treatment and categorization of people seen as “deviants,” “criminals,” or “illegals”—including struggles against apartheid, hunger strikes in prisons, and protest movements for undocumented groups. Additionally, we will be discussing how social transformations wrought by three years of living under a global pandemic has led to the emergence of new forms of deviance related to biopolitical and biotechnological notions of population health and well-being. For conference work in this lecture, students will work in groups to produce portfolios of research on an area of study related to deviance, detention, and illegality. Each portfolio will include presentations and discussions of the chosen area of study, as well as critical essays written by each student that bring in conceptual and theoretical discussions drawn from the class.

What does it mean to be “beautiful”? Whose bodies qualify as beautiful? This seminar will explore the social construction of beauty as a process imbued with power and violence. Our investigation begins by overviewing Michel Foucault’s concepts of “biopower” and “biolegitimacy” to understand how the state manifests social hierarchies and control through the construction of the idealized, beautiful body. We will subsequently explore in what ways beauty standards are deployed to create gendered and raced distinctions that uphold colonial powers and white supremacy. Moreover, students will study the transformation of beauty standards across time with the goal of understanding how these changes reflect broader sociohistorical transformations and political interpretations of gender and race. Our seminar will subsequently study the impact of beauty standards on a microsocial level, including to what degree individuals come to internalize or resist notions of biolegitimacy and beauty. Within this conversation, we will study various forms of body modification and plastic surgery, as both an ontological tool for self-construction and as a means for pathologizing deviance from beauty standards. For conference, students may choose to trace the historical roots and evolution of a specific beauty standard. Alternatively, conference work might focus on how individuals collectively resist a given beauty standard, potentially within the context of subcultures that substitute alternative notions of biolegitimacy.

The concept of space will serve as the point of departure for this course. Space can be viewed in relation to the (human) body, social relations and social structures, and the physical environment. In this seminar, we will examine the material (social, political, and economic) and metaphorical (symbolic and representational) dimensions of spatial configurations in urban settings. In our analysis, we will address the historical and shifting connotations of urban space and urban life and their material dimensions. In our examination of spatial relations within urban settings, we will also examine practices and processes whereby social “space” is created, gendered, revisioned. “Space,” in this latter sense, will no longer be seen solely as physical space but also be (re)viewed through the construction of meanings that impact our use of and relations in both physical and social settings. While economic factors will continue to be of significance to our analysis, we will emphasize extra-economic relations and constructs—including power, gender, and sexuality. The focus will encompass both macroanalyses and interrogation of everyday life, including the significance of public-private distinctions. In the latter part of the seminar, particular attention will be paid to attempts by scholars and activists to open up space both theoretically and concretely. Although the analytical questions at the core of this seminar lend themselves to an analysis of any city, our focus in class will be largely, although not exclusively, on New York City. Students are encouraged, however, to examine the relevance of our readings to other spaces, including places in which they have lived. In their conference work, students can elect to study space- and place-making in different contexts and/or with respect to themes that are of particular interest to them.

This is a course about sports as practice, which is used here in a multiple sense. As an embodied activity, sporting practice is felt and experienced in and through the body, which is its primary but not sole “habitus”—a term the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized when elaborating on his notion of “cultural capital.” In this course, taking the sporting body and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (taste, habits, skills, dispositions) as our point of departure, we will examine sports and its habitation of worlds that reach far beyond the individual (body) in both time and space. We will examine sports along multiple axes: as a collective and/or individuated activity; as a source of leisure and recreation; as a source of profitable employment; as a site of identity and nation-building projects; and as a space that engenders transnational mobilities and interconnections, as well as ruptures. In its commoditized contemporary form, sports is more often than not controlled by big money and/or the state and is part and parcel of what Debord refers to as the “society of the spectacle,” a site of production, consumption, and entertainment. The complex relationship between sports as experienced through the body and as a set of disciplinary practices will allow us to think through the relation of the individual, the collective, and institutionalized power, linking these to questions of body politics. Taking seriously the internal dynamics and meaning of sports, we will engage sports as a contradictory field, as both a productive space and a space of consumption. Our readings will include scholarly works, sports journalism, films, documentaries, and other primary sources. Possible conference topics include sports and politics; analysis of particular sports events (e.g., Olympics, women’s basketball, World Cup); (auto)biographies and/or oral histories of athletes; sports and protest; “fitness,” health, and the body; gender, race, sexuality, (dis)ability and sports; nationalism(s), national “styles” and sports; and the phenomenology of sports.

In the 1970s, ideas of the commons focused on the separation of the public and private spaces through the notion of property—a capitalist tool leading to the continued commodification of land, site, and ground and furthering inequality and accessibility to resources. In the early 1980s, new positions began to envisage the city as “the commons.” This perspective conceived the city as a collection of shared resources within public spaces, where the public assembled for social interactions and decision-making guided by aspirations for a more equitable society. The architectural discourse focused less on the relational and architectural co-produced transformations promoted by “commoning” practices as a reaction to crisis and necessity. Therefore, a notion of trans-property is central to understanding how sharing in a capitalist regime can occur critically through modes of living. While the prevailing production structures are in motion and inadequate, their transformation is essential for the genuine advancement of the commons. A crucial aspect of this transformation involves identifying and situating the individual experience of “being in common” with others and redirecting society’s individualistic tendencies toward a more collective orientation. Without this initial point, the promotion of sharing structures transcends the existing ones; but this task proves to be a formidable and intricate challenge, which could result in increased division and disassociation and ultimately leading to fractured commoning practices. This course aims to reexamine the notion of housing through the lens of common practices and collective action. The current housing crisis echoes those of the past. Many solutions have been proposed to build more housing, which has led to homogenized designs in the name of efficiency, political tension, technology, and less focus on the people as a collective. Through reading, research, and designing this course, students will analyze architectural styles and movements; develop arguments; and propose new housing model understanding, buildability, aesthetics, affordability, sustainability, circularity, and collective action.

Traditionally, we refer to the house as the structure to protect the intimacy of the family. It provides shelter and separates us from work but also supports it. The house is the space that protects the biological life of the occupants and encompasses an envelope with subdivisions into smaller spaces—what we call rooms. Such rooms present a defined hierarchy—what we call privacy, set forth by the homeowner, allowing individuals to separate from the rest of the occupants—a value directly connected to the notion of the “traditional family.” The division of rooms and their functions reiterates the nuclear-family structure. It allows for the separation of the family from the outside world and of each individual within the house. This course explicates the house, home, and housing as a space we all inhabit and sometimes take for granted. We live in times of housing scarcity, climate adjustments, new family structures, and real-estate development that hinder architects, planners, and designers from proposing spaces for non-homogenized living based on the traditional family and the work-life paradigm that fuels our current housing. This course aims to question the house, its form, sustainability, temporality, production, and reproduction, as well as how to answer, propose, and study its elements for better living not only for “one family” but for all.

Experiment and explore contemporary performance art. Through surveying a range of important artworks and movements, we will review the histories, concepts, and practices of performance art. Born from anti-art, performance art challenges the boundaries of artistic expression through implementing, as material, the concepts of space, time, and the body. Examples of artists that we will review are John Cage, Joan Jonas, Adrian Piper, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Simone Forti, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Pope.L, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Janine Antoni, Suzanne Lacy, Aki Sasamoto, and Anna Halprin, to name a few. We will review dialogues and movements introducing performance art, such as art interventions, sculpture, installation art, institutional critique, protest art, social media, video art, happenings, dada, comedy, sound art, graphic notation, scores, collaboration, and dance/movement. Students will be able to relate the form and function of performance art through research, workshopping ideas, experimentation, and improvisation—thereby developing the ability to confidently implement any method of the performance art genre.

Since the early 20th century, artists have explored performance art as a radical means of expression. In both form and function, performance pushes the boundaries of contemporary art. Artists use the medium for institutional critique, for social activism, and to address the personal politics of gender, sexuality, and race. This course approaches performance art as a porous, transdisciplinary medium open to students from all disciplines, including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, video, filmmaking, theatre, dance, music, creative writing, and digital art. Students learn about the legacy of performance art from the 1970s to the present and explore some of the concepts and aesthetic strategies used to create works of performance. Through texts, artists’ writings, video screenings, and slide lectures, students are introduced to a range of performance-based artists and art movements.