The Fragmented Self: Philosophy of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Disability was a philosophy course I designed and taught at the University of Notre Dame, emerging directly from my research on self-fragmentation in the solitude of queer subjects in the global south who lack access to queer communities. Starting from basic philosophical terms such as “biopolitics” in Foucault’s genealogy and “orientation” in Sara Ahmed’s queer and critical phenomenology, this course interrogates the notion of the “self” as a unified, coherent entity by examining how it is instead fractured through intersecting systems of power and difference. I pair theoretical readings with films and novels, which give these concepts concrete form. For example, I put Hortense Spillers’s theory of the flesh, Black motherhood, and femininity in dialogue with the performance of queer masculinity in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied. I also pair Butler’s theory of gender melancholia with the queering of the Oedipus complex in Toshio Matsumoto’s Japanese underground film Funeral Parade of Roses (1969).
Categories: Queer Studies, Black Studies, Continental Philosophy