Critical Sexualities Courses (888)

Historical, cross-cultural, and multidisciplinary approaches to sexuality research. Social, moral, and political meanings of sexuality in U.S. and transnational contexts. Current issues and debates around sexual norms. Prerequisite: 01:988:280.

Considers how globalization alters conceptualizations of sexuality and its relationship to gender. Issues include global, diasporic, and postcolonial gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activism, tourism and travel, HIV/AIDS organizing, "sexual rights" discourses, sex work, and asylum based on gender and sexual orientation.
Prerequisite: 01:988:101 or 190 or 235 or 201 or 202.

Cultural construction and representation of same-sex desire in Western societies. Debates about identity, subjectivity, and the uses of experience included.

Explores cultural representations of non-conforming sexualities in France from the late-19th century to the present. Approach combines writing exercises with close reading and analytical discussion of literature, theory, and film within evolving historical context. Taught in English.

Introduction to various disciplines' contributions to understanding the relationship of homosexuality, particularly lesbianism, to society. Includes a section on the political organization and recent theory coming out of the gay movement.

Introduction to the study of sexuality as well as sexual and gendered identity from multidisciplinary and historical perspectives. Includes U.S. and European approaches to sexology, legal regulation of sexual practices, and family formation.

Survey of key themes in transgender studies. Explores the category across medicine, history, anthropology, and women's and gender studies; transgender practices as embedded in race, class, sexuality, nationality, and ability.

• Instructor: Louisa Schein

This synchronous online course introduces students to the study of sexuality from historical, cross-cultural, contemporary and global perspectives. We will look at the different meanings given to sexuality and how sexual practices manifest in diverse contexts and consider how they are shaped by culture and media, economy, race and ethnicity, social structure, policy, stigma etc. We ask: what is defined as sex and what is prescribed and prohibited in diverse communities? What is considered normal and what perverse? How is sexuality related to gender, to homoerotics, to trans? What defines a sexual minority? We will look at questions of persecution, discrimination and activism, and at transnational flows and interactions between societies and peoples. In Fall 2020 we will zoom in (literally!) on topics related to our times. We will analyze COVID-19 through the lens of the earlier HIV/AIDS crisis. We will delve into movements for racial justice in relation to sexuality and racial representation as well as sexuality, policing and incarceration. Dynamics of sexuality in China will be considered. Readings, guest lectures and lots of films cover historical, ethnographic, theoretical, sexological, literary and creative approaches to both the U.S. and many other parts of the world.