Democracy, Dictators, Rights and Wrongs: An Introduction to Political Anthropology

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course examines how gender and sexuality are understood, constructed, and implicated in relations of social power in various regions of the world. It will integrate scholarship from anthropology and women and gender studies to explore how ideas of maleness, femaleness, trans, queer, and heterosexual are reproduced, contested, and transgressed within different social contexts and the everydayness of these categories. We will learn about cultural changes in conceptions of gender and sexuality in North and South America, SWANA (South West Asia/North Africa), Southeast and East Asia, Central and Southern Africa, and Europe. In the first half of this course, we will consider traditional themes in cultural anthropology, including kinship, morality, ritual, emotion, politics, and the circulation of goods and labor, to examine how different communities produce cultural knowledge about gender and sexuality. The second half of this course will address contemporary themes such as activism, violence, and gender and sexual oppression. Using our knowledge of anthropological theories developed in the first half of the course, we will take up topics of concern such as masculinity and violence, LGBTQ rights and pinkwashing, and gender and nationalism to understand how gender and sexuality are relevant to post-colonial contexts and settler-colonial resistance movements.