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Gender and Sexuality

This course will introduce students to a variety of critical thinking about gender and sexuality by focusing on theoretical descriptions of the body. Beginning with theories of matter from Ancient Western Philosophy and moving to sexual hypotheses of the Victorian period, one aim of the course will be to historicize the human body, examining how it was constructed in different historical periods to get a better idea of how contemporary thinking on the body reflects not a true state of affairs, but is another example of how the body, gender, and sexuality are continually made and remade. A second aim of the course will be to look more closely at how this process of bodily vision and revision occurs. To do so, we will study psychoanalytic descriptions of sexuality, medical accounts of sex and gender, and queer theory’s recent theorizing of the performance of gender. Readings to include: Aristotle, Plato, Michel Foucault, Thomas Laqueur, Freud, Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Donna Haraway, and Rosi Braidotti. Expect a challenging course with lots of theoretical reading, weekly writing assignments, and a final research paper.