01- Thinking Sexuality: Queer Theories and Histories

 This course is an introduction to the study of sexuality that covers some of the key texts that have formed the academic basis of this field and asks questions about its relationship to activist LGBTQ movements. We’ll be looking both at the history of what we now call sexuality (with emphasis on classical antiquity and the late nineteenth century) and at several of the most contentious issues in the study of sexuality (focusing on the often troubled relation of queer studies to feminist inquiry, on the ways race, nation and globalization inflect sexuality, on AIDS and the making of queer “generations,” on the expanding fields of transgender and disability studies, and on how queer thought might revise our ideas of intimacy, public space, the family, and marriage). The course will approach the study of sexuality from several different disciplinary angles, challenging students to ask what questions we can pose and what kinds of answers we can expect when we think sexuality from the perspective of literary study, of psychoanalysis, of history, of anthropology, of autobiography, and of activism.  We’ll also be watching films and reading fiction that explores these topics.