California students will learn about 'brown racialized sexualities and genders' in new 'Jotería' course
'We’ll consider jotería studies genealogies and future configurations in relation to Chicana/o/x-Latina/o/x Studies, ethnic studies, and queer and trans studies.'
The CSULB Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department 'encourage[s] an interrogation of systems of power and contradictory social realities.'
This fall, California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) will offer a brand new Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) elective titled, “Jotería Studies: Queer Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Américas.”
“This course explores the emergent and dynamic interdisciplinary field of jotería studies in which ‘brown’ racialized sexualities and genders serve as both the primary subjects of analysis and main methods of reading,” a class description states.
“We’ll consider jotería studies genealogies and future configurations in relation to Chicana/o/x-Latina/o/x Studies, ethnic studies, and queer and trans studies,” it continues. “Through an intersectional lens, we’ll examine jotería studies as a critical cultural, political, and intellectual formation in visual art, literature, photography, performance, testimonial, essay, film, and ephemera.”
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According to the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS), “Jotería“ refers to “queer Latina/o, Chicana/o, and Indigenous people.” AJAAS also defines the term as an adjective used to describe “a decolonial queer/feminist sensibility and politics, a mode of seeing, thinking, and feeling geared towards empowerment and social transformation.”
Since its inception in the 1960s and ‘70s, the WGSS department at CSULB “encourage[s] an interrogation of systems of power and contradictory social realities by analyzing historical, systemic, and institutionalized patterns of injustice.” Additionally, WGSS faculty members “invite provocative questions about gender and sexuality.”
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The course will count toward elective credits for the WGSS major and minor, as well as for the Queer Studies minor. Assistant WGSS Professor Dr. Stacy I. Macias will serve as the class instructor.
Campus Reform previously reported on how CSULB hosted zero conservative campus speakers during the 2016-2017 school year. Campus Reform also covered how the school was collecting data on the sexual orientations of students to share with state lawmakers in 2017.
Campus Reform reached out to Dr. Macias and CSULB for comment and will update this article accordingly.
