Tesla Cariani (they/she)
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Lecturer
Tesla Cariani is a new faculty member in the WGS Program whose scholarship focuses on LGBTQIA+ visual media and contemporary literature. Cariani’s research encompasses questions of visibility, belonging, affect, and modes of resistance/refusal to examine how artists and authors grapple with visuality and violence in their creative work.
In their spare time, Cariani enjoys being outside, crafting, visiting strange museums, supporting queer art, and spotting the local turkey population around Boston.
This fall, Cariani looks forward to getting involved in campus life and building community among students. To that end, Cariani will be hosting a Queer Book Club that will meet for the first time on Monday September 30th at 5:30pm to discuss Ryka Aoki’s Light From Uncommon Stars (2021). If an inter-galactic love story about chosen family, donuts, and cursed violins sparks your interest, then this is the book club for you. Stay tuned for more information.
Cariani is also developing two new classes for Spring 2025:
*CAS WS 305 - Topic for Spring 2025: Trans Studies
Trans Studies This course focuses on the complex and still evolving field of trans studies through a diverse range of texts and media—both foundational and new. We will chart how the field of trans studies has grown exponentially alongside the increasing precarity and hypervisibility of trans bodies in public life. Drawing on legacies of activism and interdisciplinary scholarship, this course will explore the contested meanings of “trans” or “transgender” alongside related terms of gender variance. Our primary geographic focus will be North America, but we will situate discussions within broader global conversations and transnational political movements. This course will familiarize students with related issues such as trans healthcare, cissexism, bathroom legislation, trans media, book bans, and more – paying particular attention to frameworks of disability, decoloniality, and trans of color critique. Throughout the semester, we will question how knowledge is created, taken up, and disseminated, examining identities as both critical orientations as well as lived experiences.
*CAS WS 505 - Topic for Spring 2025: Feminist Killjoys & Cynical Queers: Intersectional Theories of Affect
This class is designed to provide an upper-level examination of the “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences, which has been marked by a shift in attention towards bodily sensation, structures of feeling, and modes of relationality. In this course, we will meet feminist killjoys, grapple with queer negativity, engage with Afro-pessimism, and encounter crip feelings. We will survey intersectional theories of affect and emotion with particular focus on cultural constructions of happiness, pessimism, joy, shame, anger, optimism, disgust, sadness, and compassion. Through our readings and discussions, we will work together to develop a critical framework to address vital questions such as how do hierarchies of sensation impact notions of ability, whose emotions are socially regulated, how do affects circulate in the media, and why do certain affects become associated with particular marginalized subject positions? We will also consider how affect and emotionality play key roles in strengthening social bonds, creating collective identities, and motivating action. Readings will include work by theorists like Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Ann Cvetovich, Saidiya Hartman, Brian Massumi, José Esteban Muñoz, Sianne Ngai, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Elizabeth Wilson.
Get to Know Tesla Cariani
If could only recommend one piece of media to us, what would it be?
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
What’s the best meal you’ve ever had?
I make pasta from scratch with my whole family a couple times a year, and it is the best.
What’s one item you can’t live without?
A good pen.
Tell us about your pet!
I don’t currently have any pets, but I do have a mimosa bonsai tree that I move around multiple times a day to find the best light.
If you were to wake up tomorrow with one new skill, what would you want it to be?
Flying, always.
Want to meet Tesla? Stop by the WGS office during their office hours, or join the Queer Book Club!
