Subjects of Sexuality: Bodies, Cultures, Psyches

Cultural anthropology and psychoanalytic theory reframe sex and gender as cultural and psychic problems and open up ways of rethinking relationships between bodies, power, and culture. This seminar explores key currents in the anthropology of sex and gender, focusing on authors that draw on, elaborate, or contest psychoanalytic theory. How do sociocultural contexts shape sexual identities, desires, and practices? How are sexual normalization and subversion shaped by vectors of difference, like race, ethnicity, class, and religion? How do these debates relate to concepts such as violence, agency, capitalism, liberalism, sovereignty, and secularism? We’ll consider historical and ethnographic materials across a range of contexts, including hormone science, sports scandals, ancestral rituals, factory work, beauty pageants, state-sanctioned violence, and psychotherapy. Case studies will be drawn from settler and indigenous North America, the Black diaspora, India, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Greece, and Venezuela.