rl Goldberg
Assistant Professor of Queer Studies
rl Goldberg's research and teaching focus on trans and queer studies, phenomenology, pedagogy, and 19th and 20th century U.S. literature. They received their A.B. from Harvard College and their Ph.D. from Princeton.
Goldberg's first monograph, I Changed My Sex! Pedagogy and Trans Narrative is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. They are also co-editing a volume, Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical, under advance contract with Fordham UP, with Kenyon College professor Alex Brostoff. They have published articles about trans epistemology, pedagogy, autotheory, pornography, and trans sleaze books, and regularly write public-facing scholarship.
Before coming to Hampshire, Goldberg was a longtime teacher with Princeton's Prison Teaching Initiative, teaching courses in writing, gender studies, and English literature in carceral facilities across New Jersey.
Recent and Upcoming Courses
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When Joe Biden was asked in 2019, at a campaign stop in Iowa, how many genders there are, he stumbled on a compelling response: "There are at least three." Beginning from this premise-from the indeterminacy of the "at least" and its refusal of a certain taxonomy-we will read from various trajectories of trans literature and theory and engage whalct it means to read "difference" in literary accounts of trans. Investigating how discourses of power and institutions of normativity have come up against trans embodiment, narratives, and politics, we will consider how such encounters are historically situated in relation to national formations, carceral states, and racial capitalism. As we work through texts that range across both region and time, we will pay close attention to the ways in which desire, gender, and sexuality are queerly narrativized and mediated by and through trans geographies. Keywords:Transgender, transsexual, literature, fiction, stone butch blues
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What is the idea of the University and how did we materially find ourselves here? What, or who, is the University for? The University, as we now know it, is a place of immense contradiction: supposedly sites of nationalist or cultural cohesion, but also, as Bill Readings has shown, empty signifiers for "excellence." Places where we might theorize queer horizons, but, at the same time, institutions that have financial investments in anti-queer industries like weapons, prisons, and dispossessive technologies. In this class we'll trace a history of the University and its interfacing with queerness, from the GI Bill to today's encampments for Palestine. We'll seek to understand how it was that queerness became absorbed into the University, and to what ends. Throughout, we'll think queerness alongside other topics in critical university studies: labor, precarization, globalization, debt, and neoliberalism's phagocytic relation to "difference." Keywords:University, theory, educational justice
