To form is to configure or shape. Form, as an object of literary and visual studies, denotes the styles or conventions of a representation. This bivalence leads us to wonder about the inextricability of the verb from noun: how do aesthetic modes draw us nearer and concretize our positions? As feminists, how do we put things together, how do we gather, how do we cohere, represent, visualise, and transmit our calls for justice? In other words, what forms can feminism take, particularly alongside and entangled with anti-racism, queer and trans liberation, decolonization, and class and climate justice? This reading group is an invitation to explore how aesthetics relate with systems of oppression and resistance; or, the ways in which perception and judgment are solicited, training and habituating our faculties of attention and feeling along or against the grooves of power. Across theory, as well as extracts from film, literature, and art, we will collectively engage questions of how we form knowledge, futures, practices, bodies, habits, movements, and visions of a feminist world.

Sample readings:

• Denise Ferreira DaSilva & Rizvanna Bradley, “Four Theses on Aesthetics”

• Amber Jamilla Musser, “Deep Listening, Belonging, and the Pleasures of Brown Jouissance”

• Lauren Berlant, “Starved”

• Lizzie Borden, Born in Flames

• Dana Seitler, “Suicidal Tendencies: Notes toward a Queer Narratology”

• Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter

• Jose Esteban Muñoz, “Utopia’s Seating Chart”

• Annemarie Jacir, Like Twenty Impossibles

• Grace Paley, “The Seneca Stories: Tales from the Women’s Peace Encampment”

Join us for weekly virtual meetings to discuss exciting theoretical texts that deal with questions of perception, epistemology, embodiment, politics, method, futurity, affect, identity, and more from an intersectional feminist perspective. These texts will (hopefully!) help us all to think through the complex orientations of our work as scholars, writers, artists, activists, and people—toward what kinds of objectives, worlds, fields, or subjects are we directed and how can we continuously broaden and engage critically with these horizons? What brings us to and how do we ‘do’ (or re-do) feminism? The title of the syllabus is drawn from provocations in Sara Ahmed's 2006 Queer Phenomenology (a familiarity with which is not necessary, though awesome). We are excited to meet for informal and engaged conversation, to make new friends/connections, and to deepen and expand our understandings of feminist theories!

Sample readings:

• Sara Ahmed, “Feminist Attachments”

• Saidiya Hartman, “The Burdened Individuality of Freedom” and “Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible”

• Bonnie Honig, A Feminist Theory of Refusal

• Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

• Clare Hemmings, “Unnatural Feelings: The Affective Life of ‘Anti-Gender’  Mobilisations”

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now”