Gender, Sexuality, and Culture

Catalog description

This course invites students to think about some of the most carefully controlled but also fervently sought-after questions since the time of Plato: what is the difference between gender and sex? What is the relationship between our gendered bodies, behaviors, and identities? How does sex, something we do, translate to the discourse of sexuality, something we talk about? What is the measurement of normality? If art indeed imitates and even changes life, in what ways do images of gender performance in literary and visual culture also reproduce and perhaps reshape our own experiences as gendered and sexed beings in a society? What can gender and sexuality tell us about the construction of culture, its boundaries, and its “outlaws”? Through the reading of philosophical, literary, historical, medical, and visual texts, and through discussions of case studies in mass media, we learn to see gender and sexuality as an evolving historical phenomenon rather than essentialist notions. We ask how the development of human interest in sexuality coincides with the burgeoning of governing techniques in modern times to police and promote sex simultaneously—as desirable and useful on the one hand, but also forbidden and harmful on the other. Lastly, as humanists, we ask how the boundary of our body (that is, our inside and outside in the most literal sense) is marked less by our blood cells, skin pores, or molecules than by our use of lan­­guage. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Interdisciplinary/Advanced Courses (18-19 Critical Concepts/Topic Courses).