PHIL 330 - Seminar in Ethics & Theory of Value

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

A seminar offering an in-depth exploration of a chosen topic in Ethics and Theory of Value.

Topic for 2023/24b: Queer Temporalities: Formations and Contestations of Race, Gender, and Sexuality. (Same as WFQS 330) In his 1979 study of the advent of the modern Western penal system, Michel Foucault examined the ways that the ordering of time — into minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, life-stages, generations, epochs, etc. — established the predictable and normative rhythms of human life. Such an ordering of bodies in time, he argued, served as a means of disciplining political subjects into social conformity and economic productivity. In this course, students engage a diverse array of philosophical perspectives and texts that track how the temporalization of bodies is entangled with the formations of race, gender, sexuality, and disability and is therefore crucial to ethical and political projects that contest the social meanings that are bound up with these identities. We ask: How has the ordering of bodies in time been used to establish norms of the “good life,” the “good citizen,” or the “good neighbor” which perpetuate the dominance and normalization of systems of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, and abelism? If what José Esteban Muñoz has called “straight time” is, at the same time, the time of white supremacist patriarchy, what would it mean to “queer” time in such a way that we might contest these power relations and instead generate different identities, values, and social relations? Readings may include the works by figures such as Michel Foucault, Elizabeth Freeman, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, José Esteban Muñoz, Judith Butler, Lisa Baratser, Julia Kristeva, Lee Edelman, Dana Luciano, Adriana Cavarero, Ellen Samuels, Mark Rifkin. Rachel Silverbloom.

Prerequisite(s): Two intermediate or advanced Philosophy courses, or permission of the instructor.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS