UNC spring course catalog features 'Queer LatinX Environmentalisms'
UNC Chapel Hill will offer a three-credit course called 'Queer LatinX Environmentalisms.'
'This course examines queer LatinX literature from the late 1980s to the present as it intersects with ecological and environmentalist concerns,' a descriptions reads.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Women’s and Gender Studies Department is offering a course this upcoming semester that examines environmentalism from the dual perspectives of LGBT and “LatinX” identities.
The three-credit course is named “Queer LatinX Environmentalisms.”
“This course examines queer LatinX literature from the late 1980s to the present as it intersects with ecological and environmentalist concerns,” the course description on the university’s website reads. The course also appears on a list of Sexuality Studies class options for the spring semester.
“We explore how these cultural productions question normative assumptions about the ‘order of things,’ the ‘naturalness’ of nature, and the ‘inevitability’ of the historical exploitations of coloniality and the ongoing predations of neocolonialism,” the description says. “We pay close attention to LatinX cultural productions that approach cosmology, ecology, and environmental justice from queer perspectives and that queer ecological concerns from minoritized perspectives.”
“’Queer’ and ‘LatinX,’ combined with one another and modifying ‘Environmentalisms,’ signal other ways of thinking, doing, being, and becoming,” the description continues.
Students will seek to learn new conceptions of natural law, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism. This process demands “thinking beyond the blinders of heteronormative and species-hierarchical traditional humanism.”
Professor Maria DeGuzman of the English and Comparative Literature Department, who is also the founding director of the UNC Latina/o Studies Program, is the listed course instructor. Her research interests include “Critical Race Studies,” “Critical Theory and Cultural Studies,” “Ecocriticism” and “Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies.”
Other UNC Women’s and Gender Studies Department courses offered this upcoming semester include “LGTBQ Film and Fiction from 1950 to the Present,” “Introducing Intersectionality: Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality,” “Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice” and “Love, Sex, and Marriage in Soviet Culture.”
Campus Reform has contacted the University of North Carolina, the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, and Maria DeGuzman for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
