Academic

This course examines the many ways technology has shaped women's lives and how women have shaped technology. Students consider how Western definitions of technology typically include only high technology, automatically position it as something done by men, and include women as users or beneficiaries of technology rather than its producers or co-creators. Other topics include feminist and queer technologies, and particular attention is paid to the ways that race, sexual orientation, gender, disability, and socioeconomic status affect and are affected by people's interactions with technology. 

Students explore the evolution of LGBTQ identities and examine how LGBTQ or same sex desiring people were participants in and affected by such events as the Holocaust, the Stonewall Riots, gay liberation, and the AIDS crisis. "Queering" is used as a theoretical framework for examining institutions like marriage, government, and education and potentially re-envisioning those institutions. Unique to this class is its exploration of Hampton Roads history. Trained in archival research, students create a queer walking tour of Norfolk that ensures an understanding of national and local queer history.

In this class students read short stories, novels, poetry, graphic novels, comics, and creative nonfiction by and about LGBTQ people. Students are encouraged to consider the question "what makes a piece of literature queer?" and to examine the traditional literary canon for the ways it obscures or leaves out LGBTQ voices and experiences. The class then expands the queer canon as each student introduces an LGBTQ literary work as a candidate for canonization, arguing its importance in literary history in general and queer literary history in particular.