Cultures Sexualities

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course combines anthropological concepts with recent developments in gender and queer theory to understand cultural diversity in concepts of gender, sexuality, and sex across continents. The class focuses on cultural norms, institutions, and historical processes that have influenced possibilities for gender and sexuality in different places and times.Readings approach gender and sexuality from a number of theoretical standpoints including identity, desire, practice, scientific and medical subjectivity, institutional categories, and political stance.We will consider gender and sexuality in conjunction with concepts including social construction, performativity, intersectionality, governmentality, globalization, and hegemony.Readings incorporate ethnographic examples from several continents related to masculinity, femininity, marriage, reproduction, hetro-and homo-normativities, non-binary gender categories, and queerness.These case studies will provide students a basis for understanding how theory relates to lived experience.