| Kommentar |
Death and entropy are perhaps the only certainties in an ever-changing, tumultuous world. Amid growing economic and ecological catastrophe across the globe, our confrontation with death – our own, and that of other people and things – is becoming more urgent than ever before. This QTutorial will welcome students from a variety of disciplines (across the social sciences, life sciences and humanities) to undertake independent research projects, which will be united under the larger theme of “Queer Death Studies.”
Queer Death Studies concerns itself with how death is weaponized within systems of racist, sexist, ableist and classist oppression, while seeking to destabilize – or to “queer” – the normative productions of knowledge around death and mourning. Students who research (neo)colonialism and genocide; legal or religious judgment (for instance, the death penalty); philosophical questions about death or dying; religious or nonreligious mourning rituals; biomedical and technological encounters with or scientific definitions of death; ecological perspectives on the death of animals or nature; queer theory and phenomena of mass death such as the AIDS crisis; what human or non-human material we consider to be “alive” or “dead;” or literary engagements with death will be encouraged to critically intervene in classical binaries of life and death and human and nonhuman subjects, and to confront death from an anti-discriminatory, “queer” perspective.
Participating students will design and carry out research projects over the course of the semester. The main question that we will seek to explore in the Q-Tutorial is: how might the themes of unknowability, indefinability, and indeterminacy – words that also inhere in the discourse surrounding death – that are paramount in queer theory influence our construction of Death Studies and our scholarly confrontation with death? What role does interdisciplinary thinking play in queer theory, in Death Studies and at the intersections of these two fields of study? Both BA and MA students are welcome in the Q-Tutorial; the only prerequisite for participation is an interest in questions of queer interdisciplinarity, the death of human or non-human individuals or populations, and an openness to modes of inquiry outside their main field of study. Students should be comfortable reading and discussing theoretical texts. |
| Literatur |
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York:
Verso, 2004.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
(Selections; in particular, Chapter 4, “No Future”)
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, Volume 15, no. 1, Winter
2003, p 11-40, Duke University Press
Squier, Susan Merrill. Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004. (Selections; in particular, the Introduction, “Networking
Liminality”)
Queering The Non/Human, ed. Myra J. Hird and Noreen Giffney. London: Routledge, 2008.
(Selections; in particular, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human” and
“Necrosexuality”) |
