UMass Amherst To Offer Transgender Marxism Course This Spring

By Tom Joyce | December 10, 2024, 10:41 EST

What types of courses do public universities in Massachusetts offer?

One such university offers a course called about transgender Marxism.

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass Amherst) plans to offer a course titled “Transgender Marxism:  Theories, Debates, Cultural Productions” during the spring 2025 semester. It is a graduate-level English course, according to the school’s web site.

Here is a course description from the school’s web site:

 

This class is an opportunity for intensive study in one of the most promising areas of development in Trans Studies, a field of thought aptly described by Elle O’Rourke and Jules Gleeson as “Transgender Marxism.” The course will explore the intersection of Marxist thought and struggles around gender and sexuality. We will address classic areas in Marxist thought — such as production/reproduction, capital accumulation, extractivism, the commodity-form, and fetishism — as well as more vanguard areas of the field — such as metabolic rift theory and eco-socialism — alongside major LGBTQIA movements, movements for racial justice, sex workers’ rights, industrial labor and workplace struggles, health activism, land struggles, mutual aid, and immigrant rights.

 

Jordy Rosenberg, who plans to teach the course, identifies as a transgender man, according to The Guardian.

Campus Reform was first to report on UMass Amherst offering this course.

A couple of other graduate-level English courses the school plans to offer in the spring 2025 semester deal with American Indian feminist poetry and so-called environmental racism.

The American Indian feminist poetry course is titled “591N Topics in Indigenous Literature:  Shapes of Resistance in Indigenous Literature.”

Here is a course description from the university’s web site:

 

Contemporary Native Women Poets. What attributes mark Indigenous women’s poetry today? How do contemporary Indigenous women poets engage in trends shared across feminist poetics as well as topics of specific concern to an Indigenous experience, both historical and contemporary? How do these concerns differ and shape the work at the level of subject and craft? As the population statistically most likely to experience violence, how do contemporary Indigenous women poets write under and against such violence. This seminar will focus on contemporary female poets from shared and various Indigenous nations, such for example Joan Naviyuk Kane, dg nanouk okpik, m.s. redcherries, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Selina Boan, No’u Revilla, and Layli Long Soldier, in the context of these and other questions posed together throughout the semester.

 

Meanwhile, the course that deals with what it calls environmental racism is titled “Climate, Coloniality and Sustainable Futures.”

Here is a course description from the university’s web site:

 

Radical in its conception and led by a humanist and a climate scientist, this course offers an opportunity to engage in an interdisciplinary understanding of climate breakdown and the Anthropocene. Seminars will foster robust discussions on texts (literary, scientific, critical, and visual) that speak to the intersections of empire, climate, and capital; we will learn about the birth of climate and the environmental sciences, discuss their relationship to ecological imperialism and environmental racism, and also think through why the humanities and the sciences need to work in tandem to address the most pressing problems of climate chaos. We will gain a better understanding of how imperial processes continue to dominate climate politics, what the racial and gendered implications of the crisis are, and what a politics that sustains life might entail. Focusing on wicked problems and emancipatory narratives, we aim to arrive at a politics of hope, equity, and sustainability for a kinder future.

 

Rosenberg and a press spokesman for UMass Amherst could not be reached for comment on Monday.

 

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