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Spring 2007

HIST 502 A: PROB IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY    
 The History of the Body and Sexuality: a Comparative Perspective, 18th Century
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Tamara Matheson
325 Gregory Hall 
W 1-2:50pm
CRN: 32431

This course will investigate how scholars (from the 18thC to the present) have approached the body and sexuality as objects of historical inquiry. What are the theoretical, epistemological, social and political stakes of such analyses? How do we grasp corporeality within an historical frame? What is sexuality? How is it practiced, produced, policed, constructed, represented, liberated, controlled? We shall begin by reading foundational texts (Foucault, Laqueur, Butler, Halperin, etc), in order to establish familiarity with the methodological and theoretical questions circumscribing work in these fields. Subsequent investigations shall be structured thematically around such topics as sexual orientation, colonial/postcolonial sexual economies, prostitution, sexology and sexual norms, reproductive technologies, disabilities, surgical interventions, pornography and the erotic, eugenics, eating disorders and bodily control, sexual education, and bodily adornment and mutilation. The geographic focus in this class is eclectic; Europe and America will constitute our primary areas of study but texts will range globally to Africa, Asia, Latin America, etc. Our work will include the analyses of the body and sexuality in art, literature, advertising, and film.