The Science and Fiction of Sexuality

Catalog description

From Sigmund Freud to Magnus Hirschfeld, Michel Foucault to Judith Butler, the 20th century witnessed the development of radically new understandings of gender and sexuality. At the turn of the century, sexual identities were established and contested in the emergent sciences of sexology, psychoanalysis, and ethnography, as well as in literary and visual representations. With the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s, the very notion of identity categories was thrown into question. The seminar considers how boundaries between normativity and nonnormativity were continually redrawn in the course of the 20th century through scientific case studies, theoretical texts, literary works, and political speeches. Students will gain an understanding of the historical arc of foundational debates in feminist and queer theory by considering canonical sources as well as the marginalized perspectives of women, working-class, and trans authors. We will examine the relationship between sexual taxonomization and pathologization, as well as the entanglement of Western sexual identities in eugenics discourses and colonial projects.