Queer Studies & LGBTQ+ Life in London and the Global World Creative & Performing Arts Program Spring 2025 Semester - London

This course analyses the relationship between sexuality and London's history since the late nineteenth century to the present day. As a Queer Studies course, a central theme reveals how understandings of sexuality have changed over the last one hundred years. This includes specific consideration of how western identity terms, such as bisexual, gay, lesbian, straight and trans are relatively recent inventions and are largely the creation of colonial trajectories and the late nineteenth-century western medical gaze. Class lectures and activities highlight how the terms LGBTQ+ have been reclaimed in the twentieth century as a result of the American civil rights movements, LGBTQ+ movements, Women's movements as well as anti-colonial struggles. Furthermore the course questions what is distinctive about Queer Studies in the London context and unveils contemporary Queer life and culture in London via an interdisciplinary approach to sexuality, the latter being a characteristic of Queer Studies.