D. Theories of Sexuality
Prof. Brad Epps
This seminar aims to stimulate open-ended, interactive, and interdisciplinary reflections on some of the thorniest and most persistent debates on human sexuality as they relate both to questions of gender, class, race, nationality, and other marks of identity and to critiques of identity. Students are encouraged to bring the debates to bear on literary, artistic, cinematic, and other modes of cultural production and to engage in the ongoing querying of the sex-gender binary (male-female, hetero-homo) by way of a consideration of such issues as intersexuality, transgenderism, performativity, intersectionality, postcolonialism, and globalized economics. Accordingly, students are also encouraged to attend to the institutional frame in which we work, the ramifications, contradictions, and complicities of pursuing critical inquiry from within an elite, privileged university in which presentism and Occidentalism loom large.
Session 1: Love, Pedagogy, Embodiment
Plato: The Symposium
Sappho: selected fragments
John Boswell: “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories
David M. Halperin: “Sex Before Sexuality”
Anne Fausto-Sterling: “Dueling Dualisms” & “Should There Be Only Two Sexes”
Session 2: Psychoanalysis and History
Sigmund Freud: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Jacques Lacan: “The Meaning of the Phallus”
Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex (selections)
Michel Foucault: The History of Sexuality
Session 3: Kinship, Family, Marriage, and Other Domestic Compulsions
Claude Lévi-Strauss: Elementary Structures of Kinship (selections)
Luce Irigaray: “Women on the Market” & “Commodities Among Themselves”
Gayle Rubin: “The Traffic in Women”
Monique Wittig “The Straight Mind” & “One is Not Born a Woman
Adrienne Rich: “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
Session 4: Nation, Race, Class, and Empire
Frederick Engels: Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (selections)
George Mosse: Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (selections)
Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands/La frontera (selections)
John D’Emilio: “Capitalism and Gay Identity”
Anne McClintock: “Imperial Leather: Race, Cross-Dressing and the Cult of Domesticity”
Additional Readings: OPTIONAL
Session 1:
Martha Nussbaum: “The Softness of Reason” (optional)
Carolyn Dinshaw: “Got Medieval?” (optional)
Session 2:
Teresa de Lauretis: “Freud, Sexuality, and Perversion.” (optional)
George Chauncey: “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality” (optional)
Rudi C. Bleys: “‘Mapping’ Homosexual Vice (1860-1918)” (optional)
Mitchell, Juliet: “Introduction” to Feminine Sexuality (optional)
Thomas Laqueur: “Destiny is Anatomy” (optional)
Judith Butler: “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex” (optional)
David Halperin: How to Do the History of Homosexuality (optional)
Lynn Hunt: “Foucault’s Subject in The History of Sexuality” (optional)
Abdul R. JanMohamed: “Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright, and the Articulation of ‘Racialized Sexuality’” (optional)
Session 3:
Judith Butler: Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (optional)
Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real (selections, optional)
Lee Edelman: “The Future is Kid’s Stuff” (optional)
José Esteban Muñoz: “Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity” (optional)
Donna Haraway: “The Cyborg Manifesto” (optional)
Session 4:
Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman: “Queer Nationality” (optional)
Michael Warner: “Normal and Normaller” (optional)
Óscar Montero. “The Signifying Queen: Critical Notes from a Latino Queer” (optional)
Walter L. Williams: “The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Aspects of the Berdache Tradition” (optional)
E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson: “Introduction: Queering Black Studies/’Quaring’ Queer Studies” (optional)
Evelynn Hammonds: “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality” (optional)
Martin F. Manalansan: “In the Shadows of Stonewall” Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma” (optional)
M. Jacqui Alexander: “Imperial Desire/Sexual Utopias: White Gay Capital and Transnational Tourism” (optional)
José Quiroga: “Latino Cultures, Imperial Sexualities” (optional)
Angela Davis: “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation” (optional)
