GQS 335 | Gender and Genre

This course takes as its jumping-off point Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: a Biography. This novel’s long afterlife in adaption for the stage and the screen indicates that the enduring thematic heart of the text is its fantastical encounter with gender. Woolf’s novel is, notably, humorously, and impossibly mis-genred as a biography. The question for this class, then, is as follows: how do genre and form inform, circumscribe, explode, and/or ramify what can be thought and said about gender? What constitutes reality, fidelity, or truthfulness in fiction, film, memoir, or theory? The primary way students will engage with the texts that serve as the backbone of this course is creative. Students will read two novels, inflected by Woolf’s Orlando, and then write their own gender-bending fiction, analyze two genre-bending memoirs and write their own creative nonfiction, and apply a work of queer theory that refuses the dichotomy between scholarship and personal writing to other course texts.