Sex and Bioethics

Catalog description

While the topics of sex and sexuality have a long and storied history in medical culture, they have been especially complex and problematic in the past century. With the creation of distinct sexually-minded medical fields since the late 19th-century including sexology, psychiatry, and hormonal studies, medicine has also occasioned the very categories and labels of the homosexual, the hermaphrodite, the invert, and the nymphomaniac, to name a few. While medical historians and queer theorists have paid almost obsessive attention to these subjects, bioethicists have intervened to a lesser degree and on only a handful of relevant subjects. In this course, we will address the range of historical and theoretical matters that speak to this intersection of bioethics and sex, paying special attention to the health concerns of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) persons. Who has sex with whom? What does it mean to pathologize or diagnose such desires? How do we raise the stakes when considering persons who question their sex or who are in sexual transition? And how do such questions reveal the dilemmas of bioethicists at large, not just those related to matters of sex and sexuality? Accordingly, this course will consider a range of historical and contemporary topics which speak to the bioethical dilemmas of the intersection of medicine, sex, and sexuality, including: the gay adolescent, the intersex person, gay-conversion therapies, the prospect of gay gene studies, sex addiction, and blood/organ donation policies in wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Specifically, we will focus on literary sources (poetry, memoirs, diaries, and films) as well as on non-literary accounts (medical texts, bioethical scholarship, legal cases, and historical records) that explore the emotional and somatic aspects of matters related to sex and bioethics.