Course Description:

The cultural and biological categories of sex, gender, and sexuality shape our lives in profound and intimate ways, defining how we know and inhabit our bodies, how we relate to and interact with other people in our societies, even how we understand what it means to be human. Yet although all cultures studied by anthropologists distinguish between male and female and organize social relationships and symbolic systems in terms of gender and sexuality, no two societies make these distinctions in quite the same way. Furthermore, gendered and sexual norms and practices within a single culture or society are not static conceptions but rather exist in a constant state of flux, often related to or reflecting larger processes of cultural and social change and transformation.

This course will introduce students to different ways of experiencing, practicing, imagining, and organizing gender and sexuality in a variety of social and cultural contexts, including Melanesia, Africa, the Middle East, and North America. Evaluating how social scientific theories and understandings of gender and sexuality have changed during the twentieth century, we will view gender and sexuality not merely as “natural” or inherent traits but instead as complex and contested fields of expression and representation that are bound up in broader relations of power including notions of race, ethnicity, religion, and class. Throughout the course we will be exploring “other” cultures and societies as a way of better understanding and critiquing “our” own.

Course Goals:

• To acquaint students with a wide range of classical and contemporary topics, themes, and theoretical frameworks used in the anthropological study of gender and sexuality; 


• To encourage students to challenge and complicate their own taken-for-granted understandings and assumptions about gender and sexuality;

• To explore how gender and sexuality are experienced, practiced, and organized in different ways across different cultural and social contexts and across time;

• To empower students to think critically about how gender and sexuality shape and are shaped by intersectional workings of broader power relationships and social structures including race, ethnicity, religion, and class; and

• To give students the opportunity to further explore the topical and theoretical concepts learned in class by developing and carrying out an independent archival or ethnographic research project.