GSWS3120 - Grammars of Pop: Cross-Racial and Cross-Gender Performance across the Americas

Long before the internet discourse of transfluencers (a la Nikita Dragun) and celebrities (a la Ariana Grande), popular genres of expressive culture and mass entertainment have long been sites of raced and sexed performance. This course explores the persistence of appropriation as convention and charge of popular performance. Taking one genre of vernacular/lowbrow performance as its focus—drag performance—this course will engage an array of disciplines to approach a racial history of cross-gender performance, from Harvard’s Hasty Puddings Club to contemporary Halloween parties and the early 2000s camp classic, White Chicks.
Grounded in Hortense Spillers’s concept of grammar as the symbolic organization of social institutions, this course will track cross-racial and cross-gender performance across two centuries of popular/lowbrow performance and mass entertainment, to blackface minstrelsy and what Danielle Roper calls “hemispheric blackface” across Latin America. What grammars underlie performances of racial and sexual impersonation, historically? And how does that relate to contemporary performances of (dis)identity? Coursework will consist of several short writing opportunities and a creative piece.