Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: SENSORIAL QUEERNESS : QUEERING THE SENSORIAL

Department: Art History

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course introduces students to key concepts in the interrelated fields of queer studies, visual culture and art history. We will consider the slippages and contours of non-visual sensory registers (senses other than sight) and queer aesthetic practices and theories in contemporary art. What does it mean to queer the visual realm? What does it mean to center an expanded sensorial queerness? In this class, we will look at how artists engage the sensory modalities of sound, touch, proprioception, and interoception as both method and material within their work. We will consider the use of spit, bodily fluids, blood, sweat, vibrations, visceral inclinations, indigestion, balance, and other sensory things to ask: How do senses evoke dissident feelings? As Kyle Wazanna Tompkins writes in the 2015 winter issue of A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, “To aim for the visceral, we have found, is to come at feeling, at sex, at sensation, at theory itself, from a queer place.” It is my priority to make this course on contemporary art joyous, safe, and accessible to students of all genders, sexualities, and disabilities. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for HART 363 if student has credit for FOTO 263/HART 263.