Henderson, Introduction to Queer Studies: Beyond Binaries Instructor’s Manual with Student Resources, by Bruce Henderson © 2019, Harrington Park Press. All rights reserved. Note: A separate test bank is available upon request by writing to [email protected] Contents Organizing Your Course and Using This Book Chapter 1. Queering Language: Words and Worlds Chapter 2. Queering Desire: Knowing “Feeling” Chapter 3. Queering Identities: From “I” to “We” Chapter 4. Queering Bodies: Transgender and Intersex Lives Chapter 5. Queering Privilege: Whiteness and Class Chapter 6. Queering Intersectionality: Race and Ethnicity Chapter 7. Queering School Chapter 8. Queering Sociality: Friends, Family, and Kinship Chapter 9. Queering Health: Well‐Being, Medicalization, and Recreation Chapter 10. Queering Spirituality: Religion, Belief, and Beyond Chapter 11. Queering Citizenship: Politics, Power, and Justice Chapter 12. Queering Imagination: Arts, Aesthetics, and Expression Conclusion: Imagining Utopias in Queer Studies Henderson, Introduction to Queer Studies: Beyond Binaries Instructor’s Manual with Student Resources, by Bruce Henderson © 2019, Harrington Park Press. All rights reserved. Organizing Your Course and Using This Book Queer Studies: Beyond Binaries was conceived of as a result of my experiences teaching a 200‐ level survey course over the course of several semesters at Ithaca College. The course is offered in the Program on Women’s and Gender Studies, an interdisciplinary unit with a coordinator and faculty generally drawn from established departments. Its only prerequisite is sophomore standing (though I often waived this requirement for students with particular initiative and commitment to the material), assuming no background in gender theory, sexuality studies, or any particular disciplinary approach to the study of queerness. In my experience, it is a highly sought‐after course, regardless of the instructor, as an increasing number of students have both personal and social interest in the material covered. Students from majors as varied as physical therapy, art history, biology, sociology, and TV‐radio production have enrolled, as well as those ranging from first‐semester students to those at the end of their undergraduate education. One of the central challenges has been providing a broad enough range of perspectives and topics to engage students from all backgrounds, while also including enough specificity to go beyond generalized theories or concepts. In early semesters, I used an anchor textbook and supplemented it with a number of primary texts, usually drawn from literature, memoir, history, and the social sciences, as well as mediated texts, such as films, videos, and so forth. As time went on, I found the anchor texts available often covered some topics very well but, because they were often written by people whose primary background was in one discipline or another, gave what felt to me like short shrift to other areas of interest to students. This is understandable, as no single author can hope to be expert in all areas such a course might cover. I moved for a while to using only primary texts, which, in order to provide sufficient coverage of a number of different fields, became somewhat cumbersome and top‐heavy for an introductory course. So, when I was invited to consider writing this book, I took the following as goals. 1. Frame as much content as I could in interdisciplinary ways. While there is ongoing debate about the meaning and value of interdisciplinarity, it is certainly the case that more and more developments in scholarship and pedagogy attempt to bring different methods and perspectives into dialogue with each other. In a sense, I let the composition of the students in my classes provide a kind of inspiration—as they bring different perspectives (the scientific method of experimentation, critical and cultural analysis, application to practical, everyday endeavors, for example), so I aim to bring multiple perspectives to common themes and areas, without making claims that are too large in terms of disciplinary completeness. 2. While acknowledging the usefulness of categories in organizing experience and phenomena, always to challenge myself and my students to think “beyond binaries.” Thinking beyond binaries leads naturally to explorations of intersectionality, the “both/and” rather than “either/or,” in which identities and processes are always at places where no single label or category will suffice to describe the richness and complexity of any individual, group, event, or movement. 3. To include enough detailed examples to give students concrete sources of knowledge, while also allowing individual instructors to find spaces for their favorite supplementary texts or cases. In this sense, the book can function in multiple ways, depending on your goals and desires, the perceived needs of students, and the role of the course in any given curriculum. It can be the anchor text for the course: there is sufficient material in it for you and your class to use it as the sole text for a survey of the field of queer studies. It can be the anchor text that you supplement with a handful of exemplary other texts (such as novels, political studies, various artworks) to allow for deeper and more extended study. In this case, it is likely that you will find yourself needing to make some strategic decisions about which chapters to include as required reading for the entire class, which to omit, and which to offer for individual projects and study. Yet a third way might be to use the text as an important source for students to gain useful contexts for various perspectives on queer identity and queer lives, but to focus the course on a narrower topic or perspective, such as queer identity itself or queerness in society. In this case, you might devote considerably more time than in a broad survey to a handful of the chapters, adding other relevant texts to extend the study of the focused theme or topic. The first half of the book, which discusses, in extended fashion, foundational aspects of queerness common to any approach (language, identity, desire), could be used to establish a shared set of issues or questions, and then the course might move to a specific topic that is your specialty, of interest to the students enrolled, or particularly relevant to the setting in which the course is offered (e.g., a sociology department, a religiously affiliated institution, a class of humanists and artists). What I recommend, above all else, is that you find a way to use Queer Studies: Beyond Binaries in ways that best suit your own goals and the needs of your students. The book is, I hope, a useful tool, one that can provide a roadmap for you and your students alike, and this instructor’s manual provides materials to help both new and experienced teachers think about how to use the book. It can be taught in the course of a semester (with approximately one chapter per week in the usual schedule, leaving some room for introductions, conclusions, exams, and other presentations), but it need not be taught from first word to last to be of use. (And if your institution is on a quarter system, with ten weeks or so to the term, I strongly advise against trying to cram the whole thing in just to finish the book.) You will discover how best to integrate it into your pedagogy; what follows are a few samples of syllabi for which it might be used. Anchor Book: Survey Course Description: This course is designed as an introductory survey of the interdisciplinary field coming to be known as Queer Studies. It is intended to provide students with entries into a range of topics in queerness, as well as myriad perspectives through which scholars, researchers, activists, and artists approach such study. Schedule Unit I: Introductions and the Language of Queer Studies (1 week) Readings: Introduction and Chapter 1 Activities: The ranking of terms from the Issues for Investigation is particularly helpful. Unit II: Queering Identity (6–8 weeks) Readings: Chapter 2: 1 week Chapter 3: 1–2 weeks Chapter 4: 1–2 weeks Chapter 5: 1 week Chapter 6: 2 weeks Activities: The range of Issues for Investigation will allow you to vary class pedagogy, so that, unless the class size prohibits it, students are not always locked into lecture‐discussion formats for learning. Midterm Exam or Paper Using the Materials in Units I and II. If you do not plan on having a midterm exam and prefer to structure the class around papers, I recommend doing some quizzing of the material in each chapter, through either announced quizzes or occasional pop quizzes. You can guide students regarding how much informational recall you expect, while at the same time encouraging them and rewarding them for staying on top of reading assignments. At this point in the semester, a paper that asks students to bring their own growing knowledge of queer studies, based on readings and other materials, to their own perceptions, experiences, and observations is probably more useful than a research paper, which might be better positioned near the end of the semester. Unit III: Queering Contexts (3–4 weeks) Readings: drawn from Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 If you wish to give students the broadest of surveys, you can cover each chapter in about a week, probably highlighting specific sections of each chapter on which students might focus. You might find it equally useful to identify three or so of the chapters, providing enough range within your choices to introduce students either to more intimate or foundational contexts (such as school, family, friendship) or to larger organizations or units (such as faith traditions, political movements, health issues). You might also strike a middle ground, identifying two that the class will study as a whole, and then one or two that might be studied and reported on by groups or individuals.