Contextualized within the fluid culture of identity politics, this seminar engages the contemporary relevance/problems of queerly embodied methodologies. Both in service to and in spite of our sexual desires, how do we orient, embody, and/or materialize queer objects? How do we reconcile these often contingent orientations with a larger need to create community? At a time when individual signs are without signifiers, how can we navigate our ambivalence between preserving historic codes of sexual difference and the urgency to abandon them in favor of new, often diaphanous modes of speaking? Through various visual and theoretical examples, we will examine historic and contemporary sensibilities by which objects, images and spaces are queered. Archetypal structures surrounding performativity, confession, nostalgia, criminality, ornamentation, abstraction, and the death drive, will be examined as we complicate our quest to locate and reconstruct critical new forms of desire. History and Theory courses are designed to hone students' critical skills through intensive reading and writing assignments. Recent course topics have included gender, ethics, disease, aesthetics, and discourse on global art movements of the past 50 years.

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