SEX, LOVE AND GLOBALIZATION
ANTH515
Tuesdays 3 to 5:50
Martin Manalanson
“What’s love got to do with it (I mean globalization)?”
Escalating global flows of people, ideas and technology unravel banal notions such as sex and love as these movements defy the paradoxical juxtaposition of the “intimate and the proximate.” To think sex and love in the 21 st century demands an understanding of globalization.
In this course, we will examine how discourses on love and sex travel. That is, how they encounter, confront and negotiate the logics of the capitalist market, the discrepant narratives of modernity, and the gripping reality of desire. We will be concerned with the various ways the cultural artifacts of intimacy are rendered, fetishized and reified in various geographical and virtual sites. Utilizing multiple genres – including theoretical works from Plato to Kipnis and recent ethnographies, we will navigate the treacherous relationship between sex and emotions –specifically love, and their articulations in global realities such as emerging internet cultures, sex work, development programs, migration, political/social movements, pornography, and debates around marriage.
Course requirements: weekly reading notes, 15-20 page research paper, seminar participation and presentation.
Tentative reading list: