This MA in English analyses the function of sexuality and gender in fiction, theatre, and film. Our courses use a variety of approaches, including psychoanalysis, cultural materialism, and deconstruction; cross-disciplinary work is encouraged. The university library has a strong gender and sexuality collection, and we run an open seminar series on queer theory, gender studies, and lesbian and gay studies at which visiting academics present their research. (Recent speakers have included Patricia Duncker, Terry Castle, David Halperin, and Judith Halberstam.) Individual courses reflect the research of the programme's tutors, whose specialisms include the history of sexuality, feminism, popular culture, theatre and homosexuality, lesbian identity, and contemporary gay writing. We believe 'Sexual Dissidence' to be the only humanities-based MA of its kind in the UK. This makes it a high-profile programme which attracts well-qualified graduates from all over the world, and its diverse student body is itself a resource: recent intakes have included students from the US, the EU, Mexico, China, and Taiwan. The web site of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence is currently under construction.
Programme structure
Full-time students take two courses in the Autumn Term and two in the Spring Term. During the Summer Term students work under individual supervision towards a dissertation.
Part-time students take the MA over two years, taking one course per term in the Autumn and Spring Terms and working towards their dissertation over their two Summer Terms.
Teaching
Each course is taught by weekly small-group seminars. In addition we offer an open seminar series on queer theory and lesbian and gay studies in which visiting speakers present their research. The English Department also offers a programme of workshops on how to write a term paper, how to approach your dissertation, and so on.
Courses
Critical Issues in Queer Theory (tutor: William Spurlin)
This course provides a forum for addressing some of the most compelling issues facing queer studies today through examining queer theory both as an academic discipline and as a possible political praxis for radical social change. Queer theory mediates in culture between normative ideologies and material practices, between intellectual enquiry and social activism, between text and context. Unlike its lesbian/gay studies counterpart, often concerned with the politics of sexual difference alone, queer theory operates as a critical lens for (re-)reading the complexity of the cultural worlds we inhabit and as a potential site for social transformation, exposing and critiquing (hetero)normativity as it is imbricated within a range of social norms, categories, and institutions, including, but not limited to, sexuality, the body, the family, gender, censorship, racial and national fantasy, reproductive politics, health care, and the mobility of 'queer,' as a materiality and as a discourse, across the globe. Initial questions with which to begin the seminar enquiry will address how queer theory, with its investment in the endless proliferation of social differences, might enable new understandings of subjectivity, child development and maturation, gender, race, history, imperialism, and postcolonial nationalism. More broadly, the seminar shall consider the ways in which queer theory functions as a mode of analysis and as a strategy of opposition for reading the signifying practices that constitute culture by challenging the heteronormative social order embedded in most standardised accounts of the world. This implies attention not only to sexuality as an axis of theoretical investigation, but to the persistent pressures of other normalising regimes pertaining to race, gender, social class, nationalism and geopolitical spatialisation, citizenship, and the effects of globalisation without losing sight of specific cultural, historical, and local contexts in any particular instance. Primary theoretical texts will be read alongside cultural texts, where appropriate, including literature, film, music, visual art, clinical texts, and legal documents, in order to demonstrate the approaches and contingencies of queer theoretical work.
Sexuality, Fiction and Subculture (tutor: Alan Sinfield)
This course explores the circulation of same-sex identities, especially through fictive representations. It is plain that 'gay' and 'lesbian' do not describe the scope of same-sex activity in metropolitan societies today. Contests over these constructs will be illuminated by considering recent writing alongside texts deriving from other times and places. Topics are likely to include masculinity and femininity; race and ethnicity; HIV and AIDS; queer theory; bisexuality; subculture and politics.
Sexualities in Early Modern England (tutor: Alan Sinfield)
This course explores the scope for same-sex relations as they appear in diverse sources, and particularly in imaginative writing. If, as Michel Foucault says, the homosexual as such was hardly a conceivable social category, a range of dissident positions was nonetheless available. They derived partly from Greek and Roman culture, and partly from the actual living spaces and patterns of authority in courts, households, schools and theatres. Plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Lyly, Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher will be studied, together with poetry and prose by Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Barnfield and Katherine Philips.
Sexuality and Identities in Twentieth-Century Postcolonial Cultures (tutor: William Spurlin)
Historically, postcolonial studies has not sufficiently interrogated non-heteronormative desires in its analyses of the effects of imperial power, both past and ongoing. Queer studies, on the other hand, still needs to more fully develop contextualised and historicised understandings of dissident sexualities and interrogate more deeply its metropolitan and western biases. This course is a critical examination of some of the productive theoretical intersections possible at the innovative conjunction of postcolonial and queer studies. The course broadens the study of sexuality and centre-periphery relations, thereby addressing a much wider range of social differences. Topics are likely to include and encompass an analysis of empire, nationalism, diasporic and transnational migration, and the effects of globalisation with particular, but not exclusive, attention to how these might refigure our understandings of the politics of sexual difference. How are geographical and disciplinary borders, as well as those demarcating self and other, further destabilised through postcolonial queer analysis? We will examine the relations between hegemonic cultural transmissions as they intersect with indigenous sexualities marked by a history of colonialism (e.g. South Africa, India, the Caribbean) as well in those transnational spaces where the remnants of imperialism and the possibilities of queer resistance reside (e.g. global health policies on HIV/AIDS, human rights discourses, and the impact of electronic communication and technology on the circulation of sexuality across the globe).
Queering Popular Culture (tutor: Andy Medhurst)
The focus of this course is on lesbian, gay and queer contributions to, and perspectives on, the key fields of popular culture - film, television, music and fashion. The course considers the issues of representation, consumption and interpretation; examines debates over stereotyping, subcultures and sensibilities; and asks whether a specifically queer critique is feasible and/or politically desirable.
Romantic and Nineteenth-Century Sexualities (tutor: Vincent Quinn)
This course will examine sexual identity from the Romantic period to the end of the nineteenth-century. As well as analyzing the importance of medical, scientific, and legal discourses in the formation of modern sexual identities, the course will explore how Romantic notions of the self inform Victorian and early-twentieth-century constructions of sexuality and gender. Likely topics include sensibility, orientalism, Romantic friendship, decadence, the 'new woman' debates, sexology, 'man-boy love', and the Wilde trials. Authors to be covered might include Wollstonecraft, Austen, Byron, Stoker, Wilde. No previous knowledge of nineteenth-century culture or the history of sexuality is required.
Sexuality and Creative Writing (tutor: Vincent Quinn)
Course content to be advised
Querying the Unconcious (tutor: Amber Jacobs)
The course will examine how the contemporary intellectual climate of post-structuralism has witnessed psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious undergo numerous re-workings and re- readings. We will study how the Freudian, Kleinian and Lacanian theories of the unconscious and the construction of sexuality have been critically read (differently) by feminist theorists and queer theorists as narratives belonging to a set of hegemonic social and cultural formations. Our detailed critiques of these theories will be followed by an attempt to think through the following questions: Can the concept of the unconscious be re-theorised as part of a iable 'post-structuralist politics' that seeks to intervene into the current patriarchal and heterosexist socio-symbolic organisation? Can we go beyond the critical readings of psychoanalytic models of the unconscious that pronounce it as a normative static theory of sexuality and culture and instead explore its multiple political possibilities? Key theorists will include: Freud, Ferenczi, Klein, Lacan, Foucault, Laplanche, Irigaray, Bersani, Butler, De Lauretis.
Alternative optional courses
As alternatives to the above, with the consent of the Programme Convenor, students may take one or two courses from any of our other English MA programmes.
Summer term
During the summer term students work under supervision on a dissertation of up to 20,000 words on a topic they choose and agree with their supervisor. Part-time students are expected to begin background reading for the dissertation in their first summer term.
Assessment
The MA is assessed by a 5000 word term paper for each of the four courses, which is written in the vacation following the end of the course, together with the 20,000 word dissertation, which is submitted towards the end of the summer vacation.
Admission requirements
Students should have at least an upper second honours degree in a related discipline.
MPhil and DPhil study
The University offers individual supervision leading to an MPhil or DPhil in English.
Associated faculty and research interests
The following faculty are particularly associated with the programme:
Amber Jacobs (Psychoanalytical theory, feminist philosophy, with particular reference to the work of Luce Irigaray, classical drama)
Vicky Lebeau (Psychoanalysis and modern culture, theories of childhood/democracy, literary and visual culture, feminism and theories of social identity, contemporary films and literature)
Andy Medhurst (Lesbian and gay studies, British popular culture, theories of comedy and identity, contemporary TV)
Sally Munt (Lesbian studies, popular culture, class, space)
Vincent Quinn (Lesbian and gay studies, queer theory, the history of sexuality, sexuality and nationhood, Irish studies)
Alan Sinfield (Lesbian and gay studies, Early Modern culture, Shakespeare and sexualities, post-1945 politics and culture, modern theatre)
William Spurlin (Trained in critical theory and comparative literature, William's interdisciplinary work in queer studies, postcolonial studies, and critical/cultural theory encompasses the analysis of a broad range of literary, cultural, and critical texts of the twentieth/twenty-first centuries. The texts with which he works cross national, geographic, and linguistic boundaries and include not only British and American texts, but those located in francophone and Germanic cultures, southern Africa, and the wider African diaspora)
For links to individual faculty member's profiles, see the University's staff directory.
Further information
For further information on the MA, please contact the Programme Convenor, William Spurlin, email w.j.spurlin@sussex.ac.uk. Prospective MPhil or DPhil students with specific questions about postgraduate research in sexual dissidence should also contact William Spurlin. Alternatively, contact the English Department Research Convenor Vincent Quinn, email v.r.quinn@sussex.ac.uk.
Please note that it may not be possible to run an advertised course in a given year if there is insufficient demand from students. For more general information on possible variation of programmes and courses, see the 'Terms and conditions' page in the 'Applications' section of the Postgraduate Prospectus.