Masculinities, Femininities & Sexualities on Campus & Beyond

Catalog description

This course will introduce students to social science academic studies and critically engaged scholarship that explore how men's and women's shifting social roles around sex, gender, and sexuality binaries intimately shape young people's sense of self in emerging adulthood. College, particularly a residential college experience, can be very destabilizing as gendered constructions of young adulthood, typically rooted in the media and popular culture, shape how young men and women explore their identities and sexualities within the context of campus cultures. These cultures are not inevitable or natural,but their impacts are very real and reverberate through young people's lives. Some examples include:the pressure to fit into normative binary identities and organizations, strict gendered appearance standards, hooking up, drinking, partying, and having fun, picking a college major and a career path, starting and ending friendships and romantic relationships, and learning what it means to belong the social category "man" or "woman" in our contemporary world. By exposing the often-invisible web of culture, hegemony, and power that shape our feelings, our identities, our opportunities, and our constraints,we can better locate ourselves within their impacts and to forge more conscientious and engaged relationships with ourselves, with our environment,and with others.