UMass Boston

Course Overview

Description

How do race, gender, and sexuality inform, enable or prevent people's relationship to different forms of mobility (migration, embodiment, detention) in urban spaces? This course explores concepts, theories, and histories of race, gender, and sexuality through the lens of mobility. Some of the core questions of this class include: How do constructions of race, gender, and sexuality inform, enable, or prevent people's freedom of movement and mobility in the modern world? While mobility between or within nations (immigration, travel, global trade) is romanticized as positive and liberating, what borders, bans, and walls impact the human rights of marginalized communities (ie refugees, migrant workers, queer and trans communities of color) to move freely? While this course investigates forms of structural oppression that limit mobility (including disability access, gender discrimination, and incarceration), we will also witness how self-narratives created by and for LGBTQ, immigrant, Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities work to transform individual and collective mobilities. Course texts include literature, films, and scholarship from interdisciplinary fields including gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, geography, and ethnic studies. This course pays special attention to how formations of gender and sexuality intersect with the social categories of race, ability, and national belonging; it also considers how the universal human right to mobility is experienced differently based on one's intersectional identities of race, sexuality, gender, and class.

Prerequisites

Sophomore status