Trans History in North America

Undergraduate

This course provides an introductory-level survey of the histories of gender, gender nonconformity, and trans experience in North America from the 17th century through the present. Records of individuals' decisions to live as a gender that differs from the one that they were assigned or understood to bear at birth appear in archives all over the world and across time. Yet the cultural understandings that shaped that decision-making-- to live and/or identify as someone of a different sex-- are distinctly local, specific to particular regions, cultures, religions, racial demographics, ethnic communities, and worldviews. This course focuses on North America from the colonial period through the present, and combines primary texts-- for example, that of Thomas/ine Hall, whose gender was investigated by a colonial Virginia court and their performance ordered by legal authorities-- with secondary scholarship in history (colonial through modern American history, including histories of science and medicine), women and gender studies, American studies, ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, Black studies, legal studies, and more to track how cultural understandings of "sex" and "gender" emerged and changed over time. HU M 1:30pm-3:25pm