Growing Up Queer: Coming of Age in Contemporary Literature

Mentor Areas

Coming-of-Age Literature 
History of Sexuality
LGBTQ+ Studies
Film and Television

Description:

We typically describe youth, puberty, or adolescence as the period of transformation from childhood to adulthood. This process doesn’t come without its challenges. Young people famously argue with their parents and have been in constant generational conflict with their elders. More importantly, youth is the period when we develop our own sense of identity and personality, feel deeply misunderstood, make our first friends, wonder about the meaning of life for the first time, and when we discover love and sex. 

Youth has not always been the same, of course. In fact, adolescence as such did not exist until the early nineteenth century. Since then, authors have been trying to describe the intense emotions as well as the intellectual and moral growth experienced by people during this period of life. Needless to say, the Bildungsroman, as this literary genre came to be known, focused on the experiences of young, white male protagonists and was deeply normative. In the end, the main character in these stories is supposed to find comfort in fitting in and accepting the world around them as it is. 

What does it mean to grow up queer, then? In this course, we’ll consider how contemporary queer authors have turned this genre upside down to include the lived experiences of people who don’t “fit in.” We’ll focus on coming out as the moment of self-recognition, self-acceptance, and disclosure of one’s sexuality or gender identity, but also as a deeply political act that promotes new ways of being in the world beyond binaries and norms. All along, we’ll consider how class, race, ethnicity, and religion shape these experiences. 

Novels, graphic novels, as well as examples from films and television series will help us generate ideas about this topic and consider how authors are developing original narrative and aesthetic strategies to describe what growing up queer is like.

Preferred Qualifications

good reading and writing skills in English and/or German and/or Spanish; research skills needed to create bibliographies and summarize sources; retrieval, download, and/or scanning of articles, book chapters, images, and video from libraries, special collections and online resources; willingness to scavenge for original sources (new literature, films, etc.); interest in learning more about literature, film and television, queer studies, youth studies, and research on race, gender, and sexuality.