Elective

CLIT7006 Fabrications of Identity

This course explores the formations of identity in film, literature, cultural history, theoretical discourse, and in daily life. It examines the ethics, power, and politics of representing identity and difference, especially cultural and sexual differences in various local, national, and global settings. Drawing upon perspectives from critical theory, cultural studies, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, race and ethnicity studies, and postmodernism, the course engages with visual and literary texts as creative and dialogic acts manifesting interconnected identities that demand close reading, intertextual analysis, and cross-disciplinary referencing. Topics include: identity, agency, and representations of differences; femininities, masculinities, and queer identities; self and other, racial, and post/colonial identity; formation, negotiation, and fabrication of Chinese identity in the context of Greater China (diaspora as well as post/national identities); and postmodern identities (e.g. in cyberspace, and post-9/11 America). A wide range of selected texts will be studied for their imaginative, innovative, and progressive staging of alternatives that speak to and counteract the given identities of monocultures and taken-for-granted-ness from various essentialisms.