Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality

Catalog description

In this course we will engage scholarship in the social sciences focused on gender, sexuality, and culture. While primarily focused on ethnography, our class will also engage other writing in the humanities and social sciences including history and sociology, given the multiple and interdisciplinary underpinnings of queer and trans anthropological inquiry. Through our readings, we will examine how gender and sexuality relate to an array of pressing topics including—but not limited to— race, ethnicity, religion, kinship, labor, sexual exchange, activism, coloniality, medicine, migration, and neoliberalism. We will extensively focus on transnational contexts beyond the United States and North America, with readings centering the politics of gender and sexuality in locations like Palestine, Taiwan, Canada, Pakistan, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Armenia and elsewhere. Those without a background or research focus on queer and trans anthropology are welcome to take this course.