Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Uses lectures, music, film and images to explore the beliefs and social practices through which sexual identities are created and transformed over time. Introduces some of the main theories and concepts used in the field. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

This HIST 115 is a broad survey course, which provides students with an overview of the history of sexuality in Europe. From classical antiquity to the ‘sexual consumerism’ of today’s Western world we will chart the turning points and changing attitudes toward sexuality from the injunctions of Augustine, to Humanism and Renaissance’s worlds of licit as well as illicit sex, through the ‘radicals’ of the Enlightenment, to Freud’s introduction of ‘sexuality’ into the cultural discourse and to Foucault’s theorizing of its history in more recent memory.

The lecture part of the class is constructed around Clark’s text, which focuses on the dichotomous portrayal and experience of eponymous “desire” as both socially disruptive as well potentially transcendent and even revolutionary. In the tutorials the accompanying reader, which provides “a dynamic introduction to the latest debates in the history of Sexuality in Europe,” will be employed as a springboard for group discussion. Both will be integrated with additional resources including primary and secondary works, both textual and from other media.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Course objectives:

• familiarize students with the fundamentals of the field of the history of sexuality
• facilitate students’ critical engagement with a variety of historical sources 
• set up a gateway into upper-division offerings in the department

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: