Before We Were Queer: Premodern Gender and Sexuality in Europe and the Mediterranean

Catalog description

This course offers an initiation into queer and trans history across premodern Europe and the Mediterranean (1000 BCE to 1850 CE). How do historians think about and bring to light the rich diversity of sex, gender, and sexuality in the past? How can historical methods help unearth the pluralities of sex, gender and sexuality before modern sciences and laws imposed the uniform categories that we know today? How do we study queerness and transness before they were "invented" by the medical and institutional discourses of psychoanalysis and sexology rising from the 1850s on? This course focuses on examples and concepts from Antiquity and the Middle Ages and the ways in which they became key references in the early modern era for various forms of gender and sexuality non-conformity. Throughout the quarter, students will work with primary sources - literary works, legislative and judicial documents, theological and medical treatises, maps, images, and material artifacts - and mobilize different methods to do and bring to light queer and trans history.