Of the many literature courses that the University of Iowa English Department offers its undergraduate students, one continues to be in high demand and retaught every few semesters. The class, “Gender, Sexuality, and Literature: Searching for Queer Stories,” asks students to read and analyze five LGBTQ+ novels that examine the legacy or absence of queer history in literary studies. In this class, students are asked to discuss queer identity, conduct archival research, and engage in a creative project of queer story making.
As a student in the course, I’m a huge fan of the novels that we studied. This semester’s picks included Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Jewel Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, Samuel Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Justin Torres’ Blackouts, and Joss Lake’s Future Feeling. Students were asked to read sections of each novel in preparation for class and during the class the instructor led discussion with small groupwork tasks, prepared questions, and open dialogue about modern day politics that can be related back to the course material.
While students were mainly asked to engage with the reading, there were also fun and playful moments sprinkled into the course to keep things from being repetitive. One instance was a class dedicated to watching a short film about Orlando which gave students a break from literary analysis. Another example was an exercise in fanfiction where students were asked to do a five-to-ten-minute fanfiction writing exercise about the current novel. For many students, these fun and sporadic exercises ended up influencing the topics for their essays and helped them find a topic that mattered to them.
When asked about the importance of the course, the professor, Dr. Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, said the following: “Queer stories offer us the chance to think about how storytelling works, especially within communities and voices that have been historically silenced or marginalized. We honor the kind of thinking that can happen when we let discussion flow and move us to unexpected places.”
Of the literature courses that I’ve been able to take, this is one of my favorites! It was recommended to me by a handful of other students who also recognized its importance among our course offerings. Whether students are interested in maintaining/learning about queer rights or want to find a queer safe space on campus to express their identities, this class continues to educate and inspire undergraduates to ask questions about the past (and the future) of queer communities.