PRINCETON COURSE CATALOG LISTING

“Queer Boyhoods” examines depictions and enactments of the boy who is somehow just “not normal.” As we chart the cultural construction of “boy” behaviors from the later nineteenth through the early twenty-first century, we will investigate the myriad ways that popular performance has crafted a particular role for the queer boy (the sissy, the tomboy, the boi, the punk, the queer) within a host of popular culture genres. We will explore how popular performance provides an archive of hidden histories of gender, sexuality and childhood even as it also rehearses and enacts processes of gender formation in the United States and beyond. Surveying popular drama, film, and literature from the long twentieth century, this seminar explores how and why boyhood has emerged as a particularly fraught category of experience in the United States.