Course Reading Halberstam: Doing queer/trans feminist cultural analysis

Course description

Ahead of queer-/trans-researcher Jack Halberstam’s public lecture and master-class at Aarhus University the 6th and 7th of March 2025, this three-week PhD-course will explore Halberstam’s writings, the way they do queer/trans feminist cultural analysis and critique, and what a Halberstam-inspired perspective could do for the participants’ ongoing work/research projects.

The course offers a chronological introduction to Halberstam’s writings, an exploration of their analytical and methodological strategies and opportunities, and a discussion of them in relation to queer/trans/feminist concerns more broadly. Each week will address a specific topic from Halberstam’s work, the analytical and methodological issues pertaining to this part of Halberstam’s work, and look at how it has been taken up by others within queer/trans/feminist research.

The three topics will be “female masculinity”, “queer times”, and “children and animals”. Topics that entail a range of overriding questions for the course such as: What is female masculinity? How can it help develop new understandings of both masculinity and femininity? How is queer a temporal phenomenon – and time a queer phenomenon? What kinds of temporality and historiography are at work when it comes to transgender and queer sexuality? How is time an issue in childhood? How can children be said to be or become queer and/or trans? And in relation to the cultural analytical work: How can genders or gendered cultural phenomena that move across and/or beyond conventional understandings of masculinity and femininity best be analysed? How is time at work in cultural artefacts – not just as a linear flow, but in multiple and strange ways? What roles can cultural products play – and how – in people’s becoming sexual and/or gendered, queer and/or trans? And how might animals (as living creatures and signs) participate in such becomings?

This PhD course will serve as preparation for Jack Halberstam’s masterclass “Unworlding: Atopia, Dystopia, Queertopia” on the 7th of March. Participation in the masterclass is however not mandatory for taking part in this course. 

Aim
The learning objectives of this course include for students to gain:

• General knowledge of the research of Jack Halberstam and its developments.
• Understanding of central concerns of Halberstam’s writings and their analytical and methodological strategies and opportunities.
• Ability to contextualize Halberstam’s work in relation queer/trans/feminist research more broadly.
• Development of a queer/trans feminist perspective in relation to the participants’ own work.

Literature

Course date 1: Female masculinity

• Jack Halberstam, “An Introduction to Female Masculinity: Masculinity without Men”, in Female Masculinity, Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 1-43.
• Judith Keegan Gardner, “Female Masculinity and Phallic Women: Unruly Concepts”, Feminist Studies, vol. 38, nr. 3, 2012, pp. 597-624.

Course date 2: Queer times

• Jack Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies”, in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York University Press, 2005, pp. 1-21.
• Elizabeth Freeman, “Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography”, Social Text, vol. 23, nr. 3-4, 2005, pp. 57-68.

Course date 3: Children and animals

• Kathryn Bond Stockton, “Growing Sideways, or Versions of the Queer Child: The Ghost, The Homosexual, the Freudian, the Innocent, and the Interval of Animal”, in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Steven Bruhm og Natasha Hurley (red.), University of Minnesota Press, 2004, pp. 277-315.
• Jack Halberstam, “Where the Wild Things Are: Humans, Animals, and Children”, in Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 125-146.

Target group/Participants
The course is aimed at PhD-students at all stages.

Language    
English or Scandinavian languages, depending on the participants.

Form
A mixture of mini lectures, short PhD-student presentations, and group discussions of texts and presentations.

ECTS-credits
1,5

Lecturers

Jakob Rosendal

If you have any questions regardring the course please contact Jakob: jr@cc.au.dk

Venue
Campus Aarhus

18/02/2025: 10.00-13.00 - Langelandsgade 139, 8000 Aarhus C. Building 1586, room 114. 

25/02/2025: 10.00-13.00 - Langelandsgade 139, 8000 Aarhus C. Building 1586, room 114. 

28/02/2025: 10.00-13.00 - Langelandsgade 139, 8000 Aarhus C. Building 1586, room 114. 

Course dates:

• 18 February 2025 10:00 - 13:00
• 25 February 2025 10:00 - 13:00
• 28 February 2025 10:00 - 13:00