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CS92PROD
Transnational Sexualities
ANTH 228
Fall 2013 not offered
Crosslisting: FGSS 241, AMST 263

This course is an introduction to the anthropology of sexuality. Our focus will be on practices and relationships understood as nonnormative--and thus on the relationships between gender, sexuality, and power. For anthropologists, this might mean same-sex marriage or mail-order brides, butch/femme relationships or ritualized homosexuality, two-spirit people or transgender sex workers, gay immigration or Caribbean sex tourism, female genital surgeries or plastic surgery.

We will explore bodies, genders, desires, sexual practices, sexual identities, sexual labor, and socio-sexual relationships in a variety of locations: the United States, Brazil, Suriname, India, the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, Indonesia, China, Thailand, and Japan, among other places. Our readings will range from the classic to the contemporary: Margaret Mead's (1928) COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA to Esther Newton's (1972) MOTHER CAMP to several ethnographies published in the last year or two. Throughout, we will ask, How do sexuality, sex, desire, and gender vary across cultures? How are our concepts--queer, gay and lesbian, transgender, sex worker, or heterosexual--challenged by these similarities and differences? What happens when our concepts travel across temporal, national, and cultural boundaries? And, finally, how does thinking both locally and globally help us understand, analyze, and reformulate the content of basic social categories like gender, sex, and sexuality?

Our course will take an intersectional and transnational approach, paying careful attention to the ways sexuality intersects with class, nation, and race, as well as the effects of globalization, transnational mass media, and cross-border economies and activisms on local or "traditional" genders and sexualities. Our aim is to use ethnography to illuminate important cultural and national differences between people and thus unsettle U.S.-centric approaches to gender, sexuality, and queer studies.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS ANTH
Course Format: Lecture / DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (AMST)(FGSS)(STS)

Last Updated on MAR-29-2024
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