The 1990s was a moment of aesthetic and critical foment for queer and trans life and politics. In New York, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities, planned gentrification and rezoning -- and resistance to them -- had a lasting impact on a generation of artists and theorists, as well as the city’s sexual, racial, and economic landscape. This course asks after the ongoing aesthetic and cultural inheritance of this period. We will study artists’ interests in questions of social life, sexual and racial politics, space, and governance in the 1990s, as well as key concepts in critical race studies, black studies, queer and gender theory, and the economic left that emerged under the pressures of this period. Through artwork, critical writing, and archival material, we will trace how the notion of “public sex” came into focus among queer and trans organizers, artists, and academics during a period of heightened response to HIV/AIDS, broken windows policing and the “clean-up” of areas of sexual commerce and recreation. How did entwined art and political practices yield legacies of performance art, printmaking, dance, and photography, as well as video, tv broadcast, and the beginnings of internet-based work? We will explore the material and infrastructural histories that shaped queer and trans artistic production, such as mass movements against policing, the dot-com boom and the expansion of the internet, the destruction of welfare, and the attack on state arts funding.