FEMINIST AND QUEER THEORy

Fall 2025, monDAYS, 6:00-9:00PM; MEETS AT MIT

This course introduces graduate students to the foundations of feminist and queer theory, and ways in which such theory intersects or occurs at the confluence of various disciplines, including sociology, anthropology and other social theory, the humanities, the sciences, and pedagogy. The course focuses on reading and understanding theoretical texts. We will examine theory from a wide variety of disciplines and consider: how do we read a theoretical text? How do we use it? Critique it? How do theoretical texts “speak” to one another across disciplines with different styles of writing and academic approaches?

Although this is largely a reading (and writing) course, theory does not occur in a vacuum. Over the course of the semester, we will also consider the ways in which theory and practice overlap and intersect, question and explore the ethics of working in the community, and consider how social policy is framed in academic theory and by those affected by it. We will also examine the identities and experiences of those we work with, their relationship to our own identities, and consider what this means in terms of theory.

FACULTY

Keridwen Luis is currently a lecturer at Brandeis University, where she took her Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2010. Her most recent book, Herland: Exploring The Women's Land Movement in the United States, came out from the University of Minnesota Press in 2018. Her current research, "Fan Bodies and Fan Performance: Community, Identity, and Intersecting Selves," is a fieldwork and interview project examining gender, sexuality, race, and disability in science fiction and media fandom, and a book on this research is under contract with Palgrave-MacMillan.