FGSS 379 – Gendered Belonging and the Politics of Inclusion

If inclusion and belonging are tied to recognition, how do marginalized subjects establish their legibility and “right to appear”? This course addresses social exclusions around gender nonconformity and examines legal, activist, and artistic practices that contest them. Using several contemporary case studies, including fights over the sex segregation of bathrooms, controversies over the diagnosis and treatment of trans* youth, and the movements defending the lives of trans* women of color and advocating for trans* people in immigrant detention, the course will address how U.S.-based social contests over sex/gender are implicated in hierarchies of race, citizenship, and dis/ability, and situated in (neo)colonialism, racial capitalism, and geopolitics in complex ways.