#3: Nightlife
Instructed by Dr. Karen Jaime at Cornell University
PREVIOUS: #4: Let it Rock: The Rolling Stones, Writing and Creativity
Nightlife: it’s a siren call for the under-21 crowd, an essential element of New York City’s culture, and a source of inspiration for innumerable pop and rap musicians.
For certain marginalized communities, nightlife is also a safe haven. It’s this relationship that Dr. Karen Jaime explores in Nightlife, a performance-driven course currently offered to students at Cornell University.
#3: Nightlife
School: Cornell University
Course: Nightlife
Instructor: Dr. Karen Jaime
Course Description:
This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9–5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as “after hours” in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.
Ask the Instructor: Dr. Karen Jaime
Why did you elect to offer Nightlife at Cornell this year?
I first developed and offered this course in spring 2017 and have offered it every spring semester since. As someone who worked in Nightlife during graduate school as a way to supplement and then earn a living working at various queer nightlife venues in NYC, I was looking for a way to critically engage with Nightlife as a site of analysis.
What do the parties and events that we attend offer queer communities, and queer communities of color specifically? How do these events and happenings enable the emergence of alternative kinship networks or “chosen families?” Disrupt the capitalist model of production where 9–5 employment is the the only form of labor that is validated and celebrated? Ultimately, how can I help students acquire the critical skills necessary to unpack the world around them? Especially the things that they enjoy?
Is Nightlife offered within the department in which you usually teach?
Yes, in the Department of Performing and Media Arts, although it is cross-listed with the programs in American Studies, Feminist Gender, and Sexuality Studies, LGBT Studies, and Latina/o/x Studies.
What do you ultimately hope that your students take away from participating in Nightlife?
Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, I hope that students acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as “after hours” in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.
If you could teach a course on any topic at all, what would it be?
I am lucky that I em employed by an institution where I am able to teach the courses that I am interested in teaching. Upon my arrival, I began offering a course on Spoken Word, Hip-Hop Theater, and the Politics of Performance, then developed this Nightlife class, and am gearing up to teach a class on Minoritarian Aesthetics In/As Performance: a seminar that will introduce graduate students to theories and critiques that attend to the aesthetic dimensions of visual culture, scripted staged performances, performance art, and contemporary media created by Black, queer, Asian, Caribbean, and Latinx/Latin people.
NEXT: #2: Mass Incarceration and the Literature of Confinement
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