Course Description:

Human sexuality has become a contested site of political and social conflicts. Since the 1980's research has challenged popular conceptions of sex as a natural and biological force. The course explores the socio-political construction of sexualities through the fields of psychoanalysis, law, sexology, and popular culture.

Focusing on Canada, the United States and Britain from the nineteenth century to the present, the course investigates a range of subjects: gender identity, heterosexuality, homosexuality, transsexuality, bisexuality, ‘femininity,' ‘masculinity,' transgender, sexual representation, pornography, and disease.

Goals of the Course
The aim of the course is to encourage both analytic and critical thinking through the examination of sexuality as a theoretical and political discourse; the course will problematize and historicize sexuality as a complex human expression mediated by socio-political differences of gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and ableness.

Course Format
Two weekly 60 minute lectures followed by a 20 minute discussion period.

Texts

• Bauman, Liquid Love
• Foucault, The History of Sexuality , Vol. 1
• hooks, Black Looks
• Lacombe, Blue Politics
• MacKinnon, Only Words
• Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories

Kit Readings - A kit is available at the York bookstore.

• Katz,The Invention of Heterosexuality
• Vance, Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of Sexuality
• Rubin, Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality
• Paglia, Rape and Modern Sex War
• MacKinnon, Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide
• Kaufman, The Construction of Masculinity and the Triad of Men's Violence
• Horowitz & Kaufman, Male Sexuality: Toward A Theory of Liberation
• Horowitz, The Renunciation of Bisexuality
• Evans, Dual Citizenship? Bisexuality
• Evans, Trans-Citizenship Transvestism and Transsexualism
• Kaveney, Talking Transgender Politics
• Stryker, Transexuality The postmodern body and/as technology
• Halberstam, Drag Kings: Masculinity and Performance
• Bell, Finding the Male Within and Taking Him Cruising
• Bell, Kate Bornstein: A Transgender Transsexual Postmodern Tiresias
• Segal, Sweet Sorrows, Painful Pleasures
• Mercer, Just Looking for Trouble
• McClintock, Gonad the Barbarian and the Venus Flytrap
• Gotell, Inverting Image and Reality: R.v. Sharpe and the Moral Panic Around Child Pornography
• Bell, Sharpe's Perverse Aesthetic
• Weeks, AIDS: The Intellectual Agenda

Grade Assignment

Handing in assignments
Papers are to be handed in class; the exam is to be put in the Political Science departmental course drop box for S. Bell, 6 th floor S Ross.

Late Penalty
2% will be deducted per class in which the paper is not handed in.
2% will be deducted per day in which the take-home is not handed in.

Seminar & Reading Schedule