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This module explores how contemporary social movements and digital activism critically engage with theories of gender and sexuality. Cultivating a decolonial perspective, it addresses the limitations of Western theories of gender and sexuality through practices taking place worldwide. Students will learn how movements have apprehended, challenged, and sabotaged seemingly common models of comprehending the role of gender and sexuality in action through key interdisciplinary concepts, such as vulnerability, representation, diversity, collectivity, normativity, and the humane. Each week focuses on a unique form of organising and protesting, in-person or digitally, and highlights their theoretical tensions with contributions to one particular concern related to studies of gender and sexuality. By the end of the course, students will also be able to critically question the limits of and possibilities in new and familiar forms of activism. Topics include #NiUnaMenos, protests demanding justice for Marielle Franco, digital and in-person Black Lives Matter organising during the COVID-19 pandemic, multi-media counter-mapping, and creative approaches to decolonising technology. Topics may change according to new tensions across the globe. Issues such as coloniality, racialisation, disability, economic precarity, migratory movements, reproductive justice, and the environment are interwoven throughout the module rather than compartmentalised in specific themes.

Readings for the module include:

1. Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life.
2. Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’.
3. Arvin M., Tuck E., and Morrill A. (2013). ‘Decolonizing feminism: Challenging connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy’.Ìý
4. Butler, J. (2015) Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.
5. Duggan, L. (2002) ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’.
6. Eng, D. (2010) The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy.
7. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble.
8. Puar, J. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.
9. Stanley, E. (2011) ‘Fugitive Flesh’.
10. Tuck, E., and Yang, W. K. (2012) ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’