History of Sexuality

Catalog description

WMNST/ HIST 166 History of Sexuality (3) (GH;US)This is a 100-level course on the history of sexuality, spanning several centuries and a wide range of contexts. The study of sexuality offers a particularly good lens for developing students' analytical ability to think historically about something that is often considered both natural and exclusively modern. Topics will include the role of religion, medicine, law, and politics in controlling and shaping sexuality; change and controversy over birth control, abortion, and gender roles; the connections between prescriptive literature and lived experience; the origins and meanings and racial violence in the context of ideas about sexuality; the concept of respectability; and the experiences and conflicts that have shaped the emergence of modern lesbian, gay, and trans identities. Students evaluate large questions about sources, methods, and analysis that historians face, including: How do we recover stories of private life, from societies and eras different from our own? How does our own understanding of what sexuality "is" complicate our historical exploration? What can we learn about gender and sexuality, repression and resistance, deviance and acceptance, identity and community from studying persons of nonconforming gender from the past? How has racism been employed to justify particular reproductive and sexual practices, as well as to limit claims to sexual respectability? To what extent is the study of sexuality inherently a study of gender, sex roles, and feminism? While focused primarily on the United States, the course will offer students opportunities to examine these questions in other, transnational contexts.