Screwing Up: Error, Apology, and Gender Theory

Cross-Listed with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Department of English Language and Literature

“I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name”
- June Jordan, “Poem about My Rights”


What does it feel like to mess up, to get something wrong, to be the wrong way in the wrong place or time? How do you know? What does the “normative” in heteronormative mean? In this class, we will use the question of normativity—senses of wrongness and rightness and how those judgments are articulated, navigated, and enforced—to explore foundational concepts in and across theories of gender and sexuality. This course will cover philosophical, sociological, psychoanalytic, and literary theoretical approaches to accounting for the emotions, social norms, and interactions that constitute the experience of “being wrong.” We will examine ways in which gender and bodily regimes of normativity occur in and around scenes of discomfort, uncertainty, and insecurity as well as through infrastructures of legality and policing. We will also examine the performances of apology, guilt, regret, and remorse that occur when individuals learn that they have erred or transgressed, and how those forms of interaction relate to projects of repair and reconciliation.