"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer that we can suppose," (evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane.) "In Anger they are all separate, but they come together in Love and yearn for one another. From these come all things that were and are and will be in the future." (Empedocles 450 BCE.) Even earlier the Hindu spoke of Brahma Days and Nights, the Chinese I Ching of the Dao of Yin and Yang transitions. Today the non-liner dynamics of Chaos Theory metaphorically talks of "Strange Attractors," an inspiration for the name of this course. In 2001 the ekpyrotic model of quantum cosmology controversially theorized giant parallel universes, "mem-branes," ever attracting and distancing themselves in a dance of Big-Bangs and cosmic Breaths. While Cultural historian Theodore Roszak suggested that science down to the atom was "suffused with sexual politics." Is this psycho-politics of exuberance and complexity, this political economy of desire, revealing us something about our "culture wars"? Might not physics, biology and ecology, history, economics, and anthropology, modern aesthetics and popular culture, queer theory and psychoanalysis shed some light about gender and sexuality, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and other, long-standing social, economic, and cultural issues of power, geography, and difference? Drawing from a range of accessible documents and films we will explore in a novel way some of these questions in a related three-part inquiry on Cosmology, Biology, and Cultural History.

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