Teaching 2023-2024

Theorising Gender, MA/MSc, Brikbeck University of London

Theorising Gender focuses on gender and sexuality theory and introduces some key concepts, thinkers and histories. It looks at some of the practical ways in which we might apply these ideas and considers the relationship between theory and methodology in gender and sexuality research.  

Queer Histories/ Queer Cultures. 

This course introduces students to queer history in Britain from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. In most weeks we will consider both a specific period/issue in queer history alongside a distinct methodological approach to studying the queer past. We will also use the course to investigate, week by week, the ways in which particular historical and historiographical approaches interact with and inform queer history (and vice versa). The course focuses on Britain, but students are welcome and encouraged to read into broader national and cultural queer histories.

Across the course, we consider queer lives broadly conceived. We will think about how people have understood their own sexual and gender identities, how social, cultural, political and medical actors have labelled queer subjects and how these concepts have changed over time. These foci will undulate throughout the course and we won’t consider particular ‘identities’ in isolation: there is, for example, no single week on trans. Rather, trans and gender non-conforming historical actors appear at multiple points throughout the course. Students are invited to think about the changing understandings of particular queer constituencies across the course.

Self-designed courses 

Feminism and/or Queer Theory, MA Option, the University of Oxford (2018-2022)

This option will give students the opportunity to critically examine the relationship between feminism and queer theory as academic disciplines. If feminism cannot be reduced to a theory of gender, just as queer theory cannot be reduced to a theory of sexuality, then how are students to understand the interplay of each? Do we follow scholars like Janet Halley and embrace feminism’s displacement by queer theory? Or return to Judith Butler’s ambition in 1994, to establish the ‘constitutive interrelationship’ of two these fields. Students will be invited to consider the historical developments of the two fields and the affordances and limits of each for a politics of sexuality in the present. 

The course will begin by considering alternative genealogies of queer theory including: AIDS activism, the feminist sex wars and Chicana feminism. It will then revisit the sexual politics of second-wave lesbian feminism. Questions pertaining to sexuality and temporality will be examined by contrasting the assumptions and implications of Lee Edelman’s polemical No Future with those of Jose Munoz’s Cruising Utopia. Finally, the second wave slogan: ‘the personal is political’ will be revisited in light of contributions in affect theory- by Eve Sedgwick, Heather Love and Sara Ahmed.

The dual questions of how to articulate a politics of sexuality in the 21st century, and what, if any, are the proper objects of feminism and queer theory, are at stake and students will be encouraged to develop their own original reflections on the matter. 

Undergraduate Teaching

LSE100, London School of Economics (2021-2023)

LSE’s flagship interdisciplinary undergradate course. Innovative pedagogical approaches are employed to create a dynamic learning environment in which student’s engage with and tackle big social questions. I designed a new class on Intergenerational Fairness, using the case of reparations in different historical and geographical contexts to consider: What do we owe to the past and the future?

Sex, Gender and Politics, Oxford Brookes (2018, 2021)

This undergraduate course introduced students to key questions around gender theory and feminist politics. It explores the influence of debates about sex and gender on political representation, the family and society. It introduces students to key concepts such as patriarchy, intersectionality, and philosophical ideas of sex and gender. Considering key interventions from queer theory, postcolonial scholarship and critical race studies as well as the impact of globalisation and neoliberalism, it takes up questions around multiculturalism, imperialism and LGBTQ+ rights. 

Feminist Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire (2017- 2018)

In the last half-century, feminist criticism has raised questions about the central topics of philosophy  that go far beyond its original concern with gender equality and power relations. For example, feminist philosophers brought an emphasis on embodiment and social role that challenged the relevance of the ideal types (ideal reasoner, ideal observer, etc.) of traditional epistemology. These ideas are now debated in mainstream epistemology and philosophy of mind. At the same time, feminism has undergone internal differentiation into (for example) liberal and radical feminisms. Students on this module examine the contribution of feminism to philosophy and critically consider the challenges that feminism poses to the theory and practice of philosophy.