HIST 3106A: Social History of Sexuality

HIST 3106A: Social History of Sexuality
Fall 2023

Instructor: Professor Jennifer Evans

Course Description  

Contrary to its typical treatment as a private and marginal component of history, love, lust, desire, bodily expression, and sexuality are central to how we mark and understand change over time. Attempts to define, repudiate, and regulate “healthy” and “appropriate” gender and sexual comportment have held broad implications for how states govern, who is awarded citizenship, what behaviour and institutions best suits economic growth, and what activities justify state, moral and medical intervention. Gender and sexuality are at once intensely personal matters and subjects of public concern, especially around hot button issues like what young people think, act out, and do.

This course will explore the history of sexual expression, desire, and regulation, together with the social and political conditions that facilitated their emergence from the early modern period to now. Lectures will provide background information in order to help students evaluate the different ways in which people have defined and understood what constituted normative, normal, healthy, aberrant, transgressive, and deviant sexuality in different social, geographical and temporal contexts. We will take a global approach, looking at how persons and ideas have moved through and across borders, sometimes buttressing power, other times challenging it. Upon completion of the course, students will come to see that here have been many different ways of thinking about what counts as normal and perverse, denigrated and desired.

Themes I’m particularly interested in this year which might make their way onto the syllabus: conversion therapy in the Cold War, transgender childhood, sex tourism, moral panics around intergenerational desire and pleasure, intimacy and disability.

Structure 

Our course meets for 3 hours each week and will take place synchronously, on campus, unless public health policy dictates a transition to asynchronous learning. Class will consist of lectures, discussion, and films but we will also do a series of in-class activities, some with digital humanities tools, that will prepare students to research and write the various assignments. There will be a take home final exam.

Aims 

Part of what this course is about is teaching how to historicize events when evaluating the change in ideas over time. In other words, this course is not a compendium of facts about the history of sexual expression; instead, it emphasizes conceptual trends currently shaping the discipline. Students will be asked to grapple with the varied ways in which historical actors and researchers themselves have made sense of past sexual identities, practices, and relationships.

Required Readings  

All the articles and book chapters assigned will be available via ARES in the Library and online, and will form the basis of evaluation for the assignments, participation, and for the final take-home exam.

Happy to answer any questions: Jennifer_evans@carleton.ca