Fall 2021, CairoShort Course
Ab/Uses of the Erotic

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Course details
- Cycle
- Fall 2021, Cairo
- Starts
- Monday, Oct 18
- Meets
- Monday, 18:00–20:00
- Length
- 8 weeks
- Format
- In person
- Taught in
- English
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About the course
How has the erotic been deployed as a colonial and racializing technology? How might the erotic scramble, however fleetingly and flimsily, the coherence of racialized and colonial relations? Lingering with this dialectic of ab/use, we consider how the erotic has been aesthetically and theoretically taken up—not despite but precisely because of the violence that haunts it.
Who teaches it
Course flow
October 2021
We will listen together to a recording of Lorde reading the essay, which inspired this course and its title.
- Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as PowerAudre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
- Audre Lorde reading “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”
In class
- ActivityWe will listen together to a recording of Lorde reading the essay.
- Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black DiasporaKeguro Macharia
- Does anyone have the right to sex?Amia Srinivasan
November 2021
- Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer HistoriesElizabeth Freeman
- Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer DiasporaGayatri Gopinath
- Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the HumanAlexander Weheliye
- The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading PornographyJennifer Nash
- Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary ImaginationDarieck Scott
- View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual RepresentationTan Hoang Nguyen
- Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and MasochismAmber Musser
- Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer HistoryKadji Amin
- The White ElephantShuruq Harb (film)
- Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict ZoneGil Hochberg
- Loving Unbecoming: The Queer Politics of the Transitive NativeJodi Byrd
- Out in the DarkMichael Mayer (film)
December 2021
- The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-DeterminationMark Rifkin
- Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina LongingsJuana María Rodríguez
- BonbonéRakan Mayasi (film)







