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Looking at various histories of queer nightlife, this course centers the different ways that queer people have built solidarities, community, and friendship in bars, raves, and other places to gather. The course will consider what kinds of intimacies with strangers are possible outside the home, what broader relationships nightlife can elaborate and sustain, and what kind of publics queer people have produced across the long twentieth century. We will think through questions of surveillance, gentrification, activism, and access as we look across these different spaces. Readings will include: Stone Butch Blues, raving, The Bars Are Ours, Time Square Red, Times Square Blue, Zami, The Terminal Bar, and Mother Camp.
Instructors
Matt Brim is Executive Director of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, Professor of Queer Studies in the English department at the College of Staten Island, and on the faculty of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He teaches courses in queer studies, LGBTQ literature, women’s studies, and queer feminist research methods. He is currently writing a material history of queer/trans studies that envisions ways of redistributing resources around the queer academy.
Dr. Musser has published widely on race and critical theory, queer femininities and race, race and sexuality, and queer of color critique. She has an MSt in Women’s Studies from Oxford University and received her PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. She has held fellowships at New York University’s Draper Program in Gender Studies and Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Her research has been supported by grants from the Ruth Landes Memorial Fellowship and the Arts Writers’ Grant from the Warhol Foundation. She previously taught at New York University Washington University in St. Louis, and George Washington University.
