tangled community, entangled communities: lesbians and always moreTuesdays 4:00pm - 6:30pm at KEY 0125WMST 494 / LGBT 494, Spring 2015 UMD Lesbian Communities and Difference

>>>SECTION ONE: EVERYTHING CHANGES AND THE TIMES ARE MULTIPLE!

Tuesday 26 January – Welcome to Our Course!Tuesday 3 February – The material culture/s of gendered timelines Tuesday 10 February – Gay Propaganda Tuesday 17 February – Times and Places: what they say to each other

>>>SECTION TWO: ACCELERATING QUEERNESS

Tuesday 24 February – Sisterhood’s Table of Parts <ENSZER VISITS> Tuesday 3 March – Using one book to look at others: making meanings

• WORKSHOP #1: A Queer MethodWe explore context, method, and queering as a practice for understanding newly. You will identify a theme from one of two books, a theme that captures your imagination, and then interconnect it with methods from the other book. You will then share in either poster or written analysis why these concerns you raise matter for lesbians in various communities. These mind-bending questions are ones to explore at any developing moment in your understanding of lesbian and queer worlds. Good faith work to challenge your thinking and to share with and learn from others is the point here. Chose EITHER • to analyze Gessen’s book through the analysis (eyes, lens, perspective, tools) of Paoletti’s Pink & Blue with its multi-linear histories and causes; OR • to analyze Paoletti’s book through the analysis (eyes, lens, perspective, tools) of Gessen’s Gay Propaganda’s interviews of people trying to figure out how to deal with changing legal and social systems. NOTICE that you will need to do some additional research. Always make a point of connecting projects to class readings and activities.

Tuesday 10 March In the first part of class we will share our work poster session style: divide in two groups, and all move around talking to each other about work during the class time. After our break we will have a conversation about what we learned, noticed, thought about, and draw from class presentations. Make notes during the first part so you can run the discussion yourselves during the second part.

Everything must be in final finished state on Tuesday to display, but you are allowed to revise one more time before turning things in electronically by Friday.

Send to katiekin@gmail.com , use filename yrlastname 494 paper1 or poster1. Please number pics if more than one. Use this subject header too: yrlastname 494 workshop1

TAVIA NYONG’O, "Deep Time, Dark Time: Kara Walker’s Anarchaeology"> Thursday, March 12, 2015; 5pm at Francis Scott Key Hall 0106 > Friday, March 13, 2015 Colloquium with Tavia Nyong’o; 12:30pm-2pm at Taliaferro Hall 2110 

Tuesday 17 March – SPRING BREAK

>>>SECTION THREE: QUEER KINSHIPS

Tuesday 24 March – Exiles and Globalizations Tuesday 31 March – Afterglows? <ENSZER VISITS AGAIN>

MIRANDA JOSEPH, "Investing in the Cruel Entrepreneurial University" > Wednesday, April 1, 2015; 5pm at Marie Mount Hall 1400

Tuesday 7 April – Knowing Otherwise

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• WORKSHOP #2: Queer Speculations & Lesbian Kin This year’s LGBT lecture series invites you to join discussions about the speculation about queer bodies, objects, feelings, pasts, futures, utopias, dystopias, and transformations. You will explore class readings and LGBT lecture series presentations together carefully, chose which text to analyze with the tools from particular lectures and discussion, and •share in either poster or written analysis why it matters for lesbians in various communities. Our mind-bending questions are ones to explore at any developing moment in your understanding of lesbian and queer worlds. Good faith work to challenge your thinking and to share with and learn from others is the point here. Choose EITHER • a chapter of Rodríguez’ book, OR • an article you choose from either Transgender Studies Quarterly OR Sinister Wisdom at any point in their publication history. Whichever text you choose, you will explicitly discuss HOW YOU USE the tools, perspective, methods, lens, ideas you glean from the presentation or lecture of one of the two people presenting as part of the LGBT Series in March, before our workshop convenes. You will attend at least one of these events in order to note the concerns, themes, understandings, and approaches of EITHER Tavia Nyong’o (two possible events to go to) OR Miranda Joseph. (If for any reason you cannot attend one of these events, you will need to talk to Katie about the extra work required to substitute one of the author visits to our class.)

Tuesday 14 April In the first part of class we will share our work poster session style: divide in two groups, and all move around talking to each other about work during the class time. After our break we will have a conversation about what we learned, noticed, thought about, and draw from class presentations. Make notes during the first part so you can run the discussion yourselves during the second part.

Everything must be in final finished state on Tuesday to display, but you are allowed to revise one more time before turning things in electronically by Friday.

Send to katiekin@gmail.com , use filename yrlastname 494 paper1 or poster1. Please number pics if more than one. Use this subject header too: yrlastname 494 workshop1

>>>SECTION FOUR: POLITICS OF ATTACHMENT

 DC Queer Studies SymposiumFriday, April 17, 2015 – ALL DAYTawes Hall, University of Maryland RAMZI FAWAZ, “Stepford Wives and Female Men: The Radical Differences of Female Replicants"SHANTÉ PARADIGM SMALLS, “Superheroes, Queerness, and Anti-Blackness: Storm, Django, and Michael Brown”Plenary: Friday, April 17, 2015; 3-4:30pm at Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall JUANA MARÍA RODRÍGUEZ, "Feeling Queerly, Knowing Otherwise" Keynote: Friday, April 17, 2015: 5pm at Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall Masha Gessen's Maya Brin Residency will take place from April 16-25 at UMD, with public events and a conference. The Maya Brin Residency brings leading Russian scholars, artists, or cultural figures to UMD.

>Monday 4/20: 4:00 pm McKeldin Library: book talk>Wednesday, 4/22: Public Lecture (ULRICH RECITAL HALL)>Friday, 4/24: Conference on Freedom of Speech in Russia.

Tuesday 21 April– Not today, not tomorrow Tuesday 28 April– Multiplicitous Self Tuesday 5 May– Sexuality on the Move

Tuesday 12 May– GATHERING: THE LAST DAY

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DUE: LEARNING ANALYSIS AND LOGBOOK 3

On our last day we will share with each other our thoughts on how what we know has changed during our time together.

tangled community, entangled communities: lesbians and always moreTuesdays 4:00pm - 6:30pm at KEY 0125WMST 494 / LGBT 494, Spring 2015 UMD Lesbian Communities and Difference Credit only granted for: LGBT494 or WMST494Prerequisite: 1 course in WMST. Recommended: WMST200 or WMST250 Class Website at: http://lezcom15.blogspot.com

===course description for this term’s version of the class

The term “lesbian community” might well mean something different in each decade since the 1970s when gay women began to use the term to describe themselves and feminism had to stop dyke baiting practices. Recently at UMD the LGBT Studies program became folded into our WMST department and there is talk about changing both names, but to what? And this last year a new scholarly journal began its first volume, named TSQ or Transgender Studies Quarterly. Transnational politics, legalities, travel, and scholarship under various names and umbrella terms have their own histories and timelines, something very unevenly obvious in and to the US. So in 2015 there are many questions to explore about lesbian communities. How do they/we name them/ourselves? What communities do we discover to be entangled here, how does naming matter, what intersectionalities should we center or network, what national and transnational ranges are our proper contexts for investigation? Are communities something to work for or against and why? Do communities protect or police or include or exclude those who might want to work together with in solidarity today?

===Weekly outline of class assignments & activities

Reading is very tricky in this class! You must read ahead constantly in order to begin work on the assignments at the right time. We have portions assigned on particular days to discuss, but often this is properly a REREADING, as you sometimes you should have read that a first time already. Notice that some days you have a choice of several readings to focus upon, say, 3 chapters out of 5 in a section of one book. This is to give us all the chance to hear about readings we may not have time to do ourselves by that point. That means you need to be able to tell others about the readings, making note taking and preparation even more important. However, by the end of class you should have read the entirety of each of our books. So you can see that keeping up with the reading, discussed on the day on which it is named, is essential, as is attendance on both days! And that doing all this carefully will make your graded assignments so very much easier!

Notice that you are assigned web research as well as readings. Put as much time into this as you do for reading and take it quite as seriously. Web reading and analysis is as important today as book reading is and should be done as carefully and with as much thought, not as a easy substitute for harder work: it IS the harder work! Similarly, everyone should spend time in McKeldin library, finding on the bookshelves stuff not available on computer databases. Schedule time on campus to do research in the library in person and to meet, face to face, with your partner or with other class buddies. In this class we think carefully about how to do all this as well as doing it! Learn to cite your sources, web and print, carefully and conscientiously. This means keeping good records of them all.

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