Courses

Queer & Trans Migration places a special emphasis on queer, transgender, and gender nonbinary global migrant experiences and how these expand conceptions such as citizenship and diaspora alongside sexuality, gender, race, indigeneity and class. This course will ask: how do queer, transgender and feminist studies offer critical insights on - and inform politics regarding - issues of forced displacement, migration, citizenship, national belonging and global rights? 

Students will engage with ethnography, history, fiction, and digital media to explore the multi-dimensional phenomenon of (internal and transnational) queer, transgender and gender nonbinary migration. The course gives special attention to viewpoints from the global South and to New York City as a queer migrant nexus. Students will develop their expertise on course themes through their own digital ethnographic research projects, that can include observation of social media and other virtual spaces for queer, transgender, and non-binary communities in diaspora. Throughout the course, they will put their research in conversation with queer and feminist theory from interdisciplinary perspectives that draw attention to the ways migration and citizenship is entwined with sexuality, gender, race, settler colonialism, indigeneity, Blackness, and political economy. In class dialogue and readings will allow students to consider the implications of such analysis for political and cultural movements related to migration, and how these politics play out in everyday life, from language to love and desire.