What is “queer literature?” How have mechanisms of social control, silence, shame, and invisibility shaped modern literatures by and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual people? What is the relationship of LGBTQIA+ literature and culture to queer resistance and movements for social justice? Is there a specifically queer aesthetic? This course explores these and related questions through twentieth-century literary and aesthetic engagements with same-sex eroticism and gender nonconformity.  Paying particular attention to intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, embodiment, and illness, we will explore how representations of difference and marginalization complicate monolithic notions of queerness. Writers may include Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Rita Mae Brown, John Rechy, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Tony Kushner, and Alison Bechdel. Fiction, drama, poetry, graphic memoir, and film will be examined alongside critical, historical, and theoretical texts drawn from feminist and queer studies. This course will take place entirely online; there will be both “synchronous” (live) and “asynchronous” (on your own time) components of the course. Requirements are likely to include weekly module assignments, short papers, and a take-home final exam. Cross-listed with WGST 3480.