"Race," "gender," and "sexuality" are complex concepts freighted by histories of sex, marriage,science, colonialism, slavery, the law, the state, and their parallel systems of meaning-making. What are "race" "gender," and "sexuality?" How have they evolved as ideas? How do they get mapped onto bodies? This course considers race, gender, and sexuality as systems of representation and thinks through these systems using performance and visuality. Together, we will consider how performance always interacts with these representational systems, and how theories of visuality and performance can help us understand how these systems operate and interact with the social, cultural, national, economic, and corporeal. We will consider performance broadly to include: installation, film, poetry, theater, television, storytelling, music, and other representational forms as long as they engage with race, gender, and sexuality. The specificity of these representational systems will be a central component of our discussions, and students will be encouraged to hone their close-reading skills of culture, events, images, objects, media, as well as written texts.

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