Queer Race: a Decolonial Approach to the Study of Gender and Media (original) (raw)

Abstract

This course aims to develop a decolonial approach to the study of gender and media, one which explores the reiterative representation of non-normative subjects as less human ‘other’ by means of concomitantly employing sexuality and race as epistemic categories which connote ‘deviance’. Understood as signifying everything other than the ‘norm’ in any given society, the term ‘queer’ is thus employed to sheds light on the multiple ways of being and belonging in the world which are otherwise denied intelligibility. By examining selected case studies from the USA, China and Australia, this course chiefly illustrates how condensed modes of scientific and aesthetic knowledge production have denied positive significance to queer ways of being and belonging by means of representing them as either backward or irrational, pathological or bestial. Conversely, cases of ‘moral panics’ from these same geopolitical realities will be studied to show how alleged transgressions of the norms yielded by the gendered patriarchal imperative to be ‘straight’ uphold forms of social division and domination along the line of race, ethnicity and national identity. As this course will demonstrate, public debates on minority groups’ sexuality bespeak of dominant groups’ investment into the hetero-patriarchal paradigm (i.e. the monogamous couple and nuclear family) not just because this stands as a measure of normality but also, and more importantly, because it works as the mark itself of civilisation.