Summer 2025
FRIT 37.30-Elhariry @ 12:FQZ Feminist Queer Zones provides in-depth study of the exceptional richness of feminist and queer traditions in global francophone cultures. From nineteenth-century revolutionaries to the mid-twentieth century's first-wave feminists; from reproductive rights and women's suffrage to the explosive intersectionality of race, capitalism, post/colonialism, and feminism; the books read in this class help us understand sexuality, gender, and identity as they evolve over time and across historical, political, and sociocultural formations. The texts open up POROUS ZONES—open fields and fluid sites of change, exchange, and interchange—that allow for various other forms of alternative thinking. All readings and discussions are conducted in English. No prior knowledge or pre-requisites necessary. Readings, written assignments, and x-hours are offered in French for students seeking credit for the major or minor in French. Cross Listed Courses WGSS 50.01. Degree Requirement Attributes: Dist:INT or TMV; WCult:CI. NRO eligible.
French 19-Elhariry @ 11: Baaaaaaad French! A Creative Writing Workshop-As the speaker of a foreign language in the United States, you are in a unique position to innovate, improve, and corrupt French. Baaaaaaad French! enables you in this endeavor. It introduces you to historical precedents of bad French, and provides you with the opportunity to conceive, theorize, historicize, and execute projects in bad French. You will think and you will write with the awareness that you are in the presence of all the bad Frenches that have ever preceded you. You will read and you will write your own logics of emancipation, liberation, and disorientation out of the prison house of language. Baaaaaaad French! ultimately resists all forms of standardization. It empowers you to harness your innate capacities to sound different, to write wrong and ungoodly, and to take pride in the innovative impulse to resist the standardizing imprint of globalizations on your accent and pronunciation. Baaaaaaad French! lies at the intersection of cultural history and the creative writing workshop. It is an invitation to read and write creatively, historically, and across genres and media. The course adopts a long historical view of the dynamic history of French as it plays out in a wide array of media. You will learn this history nonchronologically, which places different strains and genealogies of bad French into stronger relief. The material provides us with the opportunity to slowly develop together a broad collective definition of badness over the course of the term, with a particular emphasis on the distinctly sonic dimensions of our linguistic identities. You will engage in a series of class discussions, creative writing assignments, and workshops, and you will have the freedom to pursue and create a final project in any medium, produced in a bad French language of your own invention. A contest and awards ceremony for the baddest project caps the course. The course stars readings by Monique Wittig, Rupi Kaur, Amandine André, Rim Battal, Claire Star Finch, Alpheratz, Stéphane Bouquet, Katalin Molnár (aka Kité Moi), Luc Bénazet, Loïc Demey, Ghérasim Luca, Isidore Isou, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lamartine; music by Rahim Redcar, Aya Nakamura, PNL, Dita Von Tease and Sébastien Tellier, Jeanne Added, Camille, Françoise Hardy, Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, Claude François; films by Catherine Breillat, Mathieu Kassovitz, Stephen Spielberg, Melvin Van Peebles, François Truffaut; media by Joyce Mansour, Les Coquettes, clips from French radio and television (Apostrophes, Les Marseillais). Prerequisites: French 10 or instructor permission. Distributives: World Culture and Western Cultures, LIT.