• Coordinators:
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Spring 2024 Schedule Forthcoming! schedule and announcements:  (forthcoming)

The Queer Studies Research Group is a graduate reading group that meets several times a semester to read and discuss works of canonical, important, or emerging queer theory, as well as gender, sexuality, and intersectional theory broadly conceived. We also are strongly interested in trans* and queer literature, poetry, and media, including film. We emphasize and support work that recognizes the critical contributions to queer theory of feminism, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, trans studies, disability studies, class studies, and other fields of identity politics and theory. While the Queer Studies Research Group emerges from the English department, we hope to encourage interdisciplinary research and political work, and we are committed to fostering work by our members and within the Rutgers community.

We have drawn on texts across disciplines and discussed various issues including homonormativity; homonationalism; privilege; biopolitcs; the erasure of gender-variant people; compulsory heterosexuality; the systems of race, gender, class, and sexuality; non-Western knowledges; gay marriage; queer of color critiques; the American prison industrial complex; the closet; the white, Euro-centric foundations of queer theory; queer affect theory; the connections between critical race theory and queer theory; the academic appropriation of queer and trans activists; the moral codification of sexual acts; queer utopias; and other topics.

In past semesters, we have read fiction, poetry, and political and theoretical works by Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde, Judith Halberstam, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Patricia Holland, Leo Bersani, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, Achille Mbembe, Michel Foucault, Dena Spade, Jefferey Eugenides, Michael Hames-Garcia, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Eve Sedgwick, Jasbir Puar, David Halperin, and others. We are open, as always, to the suggestions and interests of our members, however, so come and propose something!