Acrylic painting on canvas by Cree artist, Kent Monkman, entitled, I Come From pâkwan kîsik, the Hole in the Sky (2022, 108 inches x 81 inches).
HIST 3907A: Queer History in the U.S. & Canada
Winter 2024
Instructor: Emma N. Awe
For more info & to get an idea of the creative queer/trans worlds we’ll be inhabiting, you can check out the course website (still under construction) or email me at emmaawe@cunet.carleton.ca
Moving across time and space, this course will explore themes in queer/trans history through the creative lenses of media, storytelling, and art. We’ll question constructions of ‘queer,’ ‘trans,’ and ‘history,’ moving beyond and between historic settler state formations to trans the very idea of nation. Fracturing ‘transnationalism,’ the course will then re-evaluate labels, borders, taxonomies, and other colonial interferences across Turtle Island and engage with Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer storytelling. We’ll consider the lingering effects of colonialism such as criminalization, pathologization, and eugenics and how these impacted queer/trans communities during the 18th and into early 19th centuries. This course will surface historic media to explore sex, rural-urban divides, punk/DIY cultures, emotion, and futurity as related to queer/transness from the pre-colonial up to the contemporary period.
We’ll discuss the emblematic moments often shaping popular understandings of queer/trans pasts in Canada and the United States, such as the history of pride, Lavender Scare, and HIV/AIDS crisis. Throughout the course we’ll also read and reflect on sources like Kent Monkman’s The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives that interweave archival materials with narrativity to fill silences in the historical record. In conversation with these sources, we’ll question how/why the experiences of queer/trans Black, Indigenous, and people of colour have long been erased. Despite these silences and violence, diverse queer/trans people have built communities founded on radical joy and love.
In addition to the course contents, the class itself will be a collective creation. Each class we’ll engage with week’s theme and readings during in-class creative workshops, such as letter-writing, zine-making, postering, and more. By the end of the course, we’ll have accumulated a ‘portfolio’ reflecting the ways we learned how to visit queer/trans pasts, and actively queering our approach to historical scholarship. No artistic/creative experience required (you won’t be judged on your artistic skills), only a willingness to experiment!
Course Format: This course will be offered in-person, on campus, Fridays 8:30-11:25am. Course time will be divided into lectures and in-class creative workshops.
Readings/assigned sources: We’ll be reading and engaging with diverse types of sources (digital exhibits, documentaries, artwork etc.) each week. There is no set text for this course and no purchase will be required. All assigned sources will be made available via Brightspace, ARES Library Reserves, and/or the Ottawa Public Library.