Sexuality, Youth, Education

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary course utilizes insights from a variety of areas - such as literature, sociology, popular culture, law, and medicine - to analyze how contemporary discourses of sexuality are viewed from multiple perspectives. The course investigates how discourses of sexuality co-mingle with discourses of youth with special attention to the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, nationality and ability. Working from a Critical Youth Studies (CYS) framework and similar theoretical positions, the course privileges scholarship and community-based educational models which foreground issues of equity, social justice, and youth participatory activism. Central questions addressed throughout the course include: What is sexuality, and what does race have to do with it? How are notions of innocence, purity, risk and danger tied to particular bodies, identities and desires? How do the logics, structures and processes of late capitalism and globalization shape the cultural politics of sexuality?.