Gender: A History

Catalog description

This course traces concepts of gender in the West from Classical understandings of sexual difference that foreground gender hierarchy, to the multiple gender imaginaries formulated in the premodern period (one sex model, Galenic humors, Christian and Jewish interpretations), to Enlightenment period reconfigurations reliant on the conceptual frameworks of degeneracy, atavism, and race science, up to modern articulations of sex/gender/sexuality indebted to nineteenth and twentieth-century sexology and psychoanalysis. Contemporary articulations of sex and gender by feminist and trans studies writers will be woven into the course throughout the semester.