This course focuses on the analysis of gender, sexuality, migration, and borders in Latin American and Latinx cultures. It serves as a survey course that introduces key issues and themes surrounding gender identities, sexuality, and borders, drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's borderland theory. Her theory recognizes the experiences of immigrants, exiles, mixed-race individuals, queer communities, and those who cross traditional binary boundaries. In this context, gender and sexual diversity in borderland popular culture challenge heteronormativity and the rigid dualistic notions of sex and gender. The borderland itself symbolizes the restrictions and wounds caused by binary thinking, while also providing a space for recuperation, healing, learning, and transformation. The course will be taught in English, and readings will be provided in English and Spanish.
Our interdisciplinary study will examine how gender and sexuality have been historically structured and experienced along the U.S.-Mexico border and how these factors influence national and political identities, social movements, migration, and diasporas through literature, film, and popular culture. We will also explore the implications of cultural formations within diasporas emerging from Latin America and within established Latinx communities in the U.S. This includes cross-border perspectives, comparative frameworks on sex and gender systems, and a focus on transnational processes.
T/TH 5:00 pm – 6:20 pm; G30 Literatures, Cultures & Linguistic Bldg.
CRN: 72128
Instructor: Alejandro Ramírez Méndez
Course image: Ashley Peña’s “Border Chronicles"