CTSJ 337 Queer Los Angeles: Cruising the Archive

The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the last decade's increasing attention to Los Angeles as a historical origin point of United States' LGBT history. Students are encouraged to "queer" the very concept of the archive by considering how minority voices and experiences register themselves across time, through both traditional archives and less formal communities of readership and historiography, wrought through alternative archives like pulp novels, comics, films, and even gossip. Students will be training in physical archival work, oral history, digital story telling, and mapping, all while considering the impact of the "Digital Revolution" and how LA's particularly intersectional queer communities have mapped themselves across the so-called "digital divide." In addition to individual papers and presentations, the class will produce a "mixed media archive" as a student group final project that will both yield an exhibit at the end of the semester and serve as a template for an ongoing "queer LA archive" housed at Oxy.