Regulating Sex: Historical & Cultural Encounters Seminar

3 units

Enrollment limit: approx. 10 law students + 10 social work students. Drop deadline: 9:00 pm the day after the first class meeting. Emphasizing culture, society, and the ways both change over time, this seminar will examine sexuality, social work, and law as discourses and as regulatory instruments. In particular, the seminar will consider how law and social work do and do not regulate sexual practice, norms, and values, inequalities, and hierarchies and how, in turn, these sexual forces shape law and social work. This explicitly interdisciplinary course uses materials from law, social work, literature, and popular culture and contrasts conventional legal analysis with feminist and other frameworks, including queer theory, social constructionism, intersectionality theory, and symbolic interactionism. Possible topics covered include the impact of the history of Americaâ?Ts slave economy on sexual values and practices, sexual violence and efforts to reduce it (on campus, in the military, in the home, and elsewhere), different understandings of sexual pleasure, the medicalization of sex, traditional marriage and various alternatives, pregnancy, sexual initiation and education, sex research, and sexual citizenship. Professor Susan Appleton from the School of Law and Professor Susan Stiritz from the George Warren Brown School of Social Work will co-teach the seminar. Enrollment will include a mix of law students and social work students, with joint JD-MSW students especially welcome. Law students will become acquainted with sources, methodologies, and frameworks that highlight the dynamic relationship between culture and law, privacy and legal regulation, and power and sexual citizenship. Social work students will become acquainted with the language of law, assumptions underlying legal regulation, and law's aspirations and shortcomings. All students will have opportunities to converse across disciplines, to perform multidisciplinary research, and to use both personal experiences and imagination to enrich understanding. The seminar will meet weekly for two hours, and class discussion of assigned readings will form a significant component of the course. Students will write a research paper, in which they will rethink and rewrite parts during the semester, after feedback from the instructors. Law students will receive writing credit for the seminar. This course is cross-listed with the Brown School 3 units.