RACE, SEX, AND TEXTS (HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WRITING)

Uses writing in many forms and genres to help students explore how race, gender, and sexuality intersect with language and inform textual experiences. From marriage licenses, passports, and don't ask, don't tell policies to literacy requirements and gag rules, written texts have played major roles in enforcing expectations about race and sex in the United States. At the same time, anti-slavery petitions, letters to the editor, wheat-pasted posters, and hashtag activism all also harness the power of writing to challenge and revise those expectations. In light of that active textual production and negotiation, this class traces public debates and daily experiences where people write or talk about race and sex in order to make a difference. Ultimately, the class takes on the power of words to break bones and heal wounds. Through reading and writing informed by scholarship in writing studies and rhetoric, students in this class will examine historical and contemporary interconnections among race, sexuality, gender, and texts in the United States, developing analytical tools for understanding how language works on and in their world.