Spring 2017 Course Preview: Gay & Lesbian Lit & Culture with Laura Wallace
UT English: Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re teaching next semester.
Laura Wallace: I'm a postdoctoral lecturer in the English department. I finished my PhD here in Summer 2016. This spring, I'm teaching Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture. It'll be my fourth time teaching this course at UT. Our syllabus includes authors and characters who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, and/or all or none of the above. And it's a Writing Flag, so there are lots of different kinds of writing assignments.
UT: What will you be reading?
LW: We'll read some classic gay and lesbian texts, like Gertrude Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene," Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues and some more recent books, including Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (which is a graphic novel), Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (which is a young adult novel set in El Paso!) and--new to the syllabus this semester!--a collection of short stories, Misadventure by Nicholas Grider.
UT: What is your favorite of everything you’ll be reading next semester?
LW: While I love pretty much everything on this syllabus, I am especially partial to the novel Nevada by Imogen Binnie, which is usually the last book we read in the course, and the anonymous pamphlet "Queers Read This." I love the narrative voice in Nevada and I love the rage in "Queers Read This"--which, unfortunately, is as relevant 25 years later as it was in the early 1990s.
I am also really attached to the movie I'll be showing, which is called Appropriate Behavior. It follows the misadventures of a 20-something bisexual Iranian American woman in Brooklyn. Not only is the protagonist (played by writer-director Desiree Akhavan) hysterically funny and awkward, but she's one of the only main characters in a feature film who I've ever heard self-identify as bisexual.
UT: What will final projects look like?
LW: One of my main goals for the entire course is to encourage students to claim ownership of their ideas and their interpretations, and the final projects are where they really get to put this into practice. Among the options are: a traditional comparative essay, a polemic or manifesto, fanfiction, or a poetry collection. A few of my favorite examples from this year: one student wrote a beautiful song inspired by Aristotle and Dante; another made a really funny video inspired by a scene in Nevada where the main character narrates her morning routine; and a third student wrote a piece of fanfiction from the perspective of one of the more homophobic characters in Stone Butch Blues that demonstrated intense empathy for a really unlikable character.
UT: What’s one of the most important things you want your students to take away from this class? Or, what do you hope they’ll get out of it?
LW: In all of the classes I teach, I ask students to begin with their own responses: why do certain texts make us feel certain ways? Why do we like some texts and reject others? Examining our own aesthetic and emotional responses in a collaborative setting leads us all to ask how we know what we know, how the literature and media we encounter shapes our understanding of the world, and how our own words and creations might affect others.
Particularly in the case of LGBTQ literature and media, I want students to think about how the texts we read help us situate ourselves within history, but also lead us to question our preconceptions about history and identity. For example, Zami and Stone Butch Blues both depict lesbian subcultures of the 1950s and '60s, but Zami mostly takes place in New York City, among educated bohemians, while Stone Butch Blues focuses on working class butches and femmes in Buffalo. Although there are certainly similarities between the two texts, reading both of them demonstrates that history looks different depending on your location and on your intersectional identities.