With a new school year comes new classes for many students, but this semester the Women’s and Gender Studies department has a new class on its docket: WGS 205 Intro to Queer Studies.

Intro to Queer Studies is a three credit course with English 150 as a prerequisite, and the course meets the U.S. diversity requirement.

Ann Oberhauser, director of Women’s and Gender Studies and professor of sociology, said this course has been offered in the past but has not been offered for the last two to three semesters due to a lack of faculty available to teach the course.

“This class was brought back due to demand from students and faculty who wanted to increase our course offering into the areas of queer studies,” Oberhauser said.

Intro to Queer Studies is taught by a new hire for the Women’s and Gender Studies department named Rita Mookerjee, a recent graduate of the English department at Florida State University.

“This is an introductory course into late 20th and early 21st century queer theory,” Mookerjee said. “It will be mostly 21st-century theory with subjecthood in a political, historical and psychological context.”

Mookerjee said that as the 2020 election comes ever-closer and creates a political climate, the course will start to relate more to current events, political discourse and pop culture as it relates to queer culture.

Some of the large topics that will be discussed in the class include queer categories, how capitalism feeds into heteronormativity, public ideas of queerness, queer art, queerness in communities such as family units, anatomy and nonbinary topics.

Oberhauser said that students should be aware of these topics and that the topics mix well with other courses in the Women’s and Gender Studies department.

“I am most excited to move into the last chunk of my syllabus because I have some critiques of queer topics and queer pop culture that I think might be a little close to home for some folks,” Mookerjee said. “I really want to call into question ‘pop queerness’ like RuPaul’s Drag Race and the revival of Queer Eye and sort of look to representation and ask big questions like ‘are we perpetuating queerness.’”

Both Oberhauser and Mookerjee agreed this class is important because it shows there is a place for queer recognition and queer scholarship on the Iowa State campus.

“It is frankly irresponsible for any university that has this type of liberal arts programming to not have queer theory,” Mookerjee said. “What you’re doing is not giving the students the tools to talk about issues that revolve around gender, orientation, and sex, and politics and class. It’s really about making sure everyone has a seat around the table.”