Yale class focuses on ‘lesbian pop culture,’ ‘Sapphism’
The course will focus on teaching ‘genealogical and historiographic approaches to sexuality studies.’
The course instructor has previously authored several books, including ‘Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV that Soothes Us.’
Yale University is offering a “Pop Sapphism” course this fall semester, focusing on “lesbian popular culture.”
“Lesbian popular culture, despite rare waves of visibility, is construed as generically niche and embalmed in past eras like the 1970s and 1990s,” the description reads. “As we enter deeper into the millennium, the lesbian presence in pop—from music and literature, to film, TV, and other media—is revivified through the more expansive sexual and aesthetic imaginary of ‘sapphism,’ a term that signals the explicitly gay, as well as the more implicitly ‘queer coded.’”
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The description emphasizes the course’s particular focus on recent developments in “lesbian pop culture,” including several lesbian celebrities’ rise to fame.
“This seminar revisits the key historical and aesthetic touchstones of ‘sapphism,’ while engaging contemporary iterations of sapphic pop culture, from figures like K-Stew (Kristen Stewart), Janelle Monae, and a slew of ‘converted’ reality contestants, to the controversies surrounding ‘Gaylorism’ itself,” the description states.
“Gaylorism,” according to one definition, is the belief that pop singer Taylor Swift is “queer,” and involves examining her songs “through a queer lens.”
“The seminar teaches genealogical and historiographic approaches to sexuality studies, along with techniques of close reading and analysis in Queer Studies—especially recent books on lesbian aesthetics, as well as earlier iterations queer of color critique,” the course description continues.
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The course’s instructor, Dr. Karen Tongson, is a visiting professor at Yale in American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Tongson previously authored a number of books on gender and sexuality, including “Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV that Soothes Us,” which is an “irreverent look at the love-hate relationship between queer viewers and mainstream family TV shows like Gilmore Girls and This Is Us.”
“Normporn asks, what are queers to do--what is anyone to do, really--when we are forced to confront the fact of our own normalcy, and our own privilege, inherited or attained? The fantasies, the utopian impulses, and (paradoxically) the unreality of sentimental realist TV drama creates a productive tension that queer spectators in particular take pleasure in, even as--or precisely because--it lulls us into a sense of boredom and stability that we never thought we could want or have,” the book description advertises.
Campus Reform has reached out to Yale University and Dr. Tongson for comment. This story will be updated accordingly.