Race, Sex, Capital

Modern sexual fantasies, desires, and subjectivities are indelibly shaped by both the commodity form and the racial legacies of colonialism and chattel slavery. In this interdisciplinary graduate seminar, we will attempt to give greater specificity to this reciprocal “shaping.” How do we think about sexual desires, fantasies, and pleasures? How do they work? Does political economy change their fundamental forms, or merely their symbolic contents? How does erotic life sustain capital flows and racial hierarchies? How can we hope to answer these questions when race, colonialism, and capital have shaped the very conceptual tools that we use to analyze erotic life? We will read widely across history, literary criticism, Black studies, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Topics include BDSM, interracial sex, sex tourism, and sex work. This is an analogue (i.e., electronic-device free) course.