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CS92PROD
Queer Opera

MUSC 294
Fall 2017 not offered
Crosslisting: FGSS 295
Course Cluster: Queer Studies

Opera is a total art: It weds elaborate fashions with scene design and lighting to create incredible dramas set to music. For this reason, opera forces us to think interdisciplinarily about the narratives it portrays. Every action, every emotion, every decision and recognition in the drama is conveyed to the audience in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways. Operas are also fantastic living experiments in the performative representation of human sexuality. In addition to all of the love and sex that occurs explicitly on the opera stage--and there is plenty of that--operatic narratives also bear witness to changing structures of normativity; regimes of social control are thematized, sometimes lampooned, and often transgressed within the drama, and operas allow us to see how this unfolds within an interconnected ensemble of media. This course serves to introduce students to the world of the opera stage and, through that world, the foundational texts of queer theory. Together we will explore operas from the 17th century to the present day, opera theory of the past century, and queer theory of the past three decades to ask what these bodies of knowledge have to teach each other.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA MUSC
Course Format: Lecture / DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (MUSC)

Last Updated on MAR-29-2024
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