By posing seemingly simple questions such as what is love and who has the right to love, this introductory-level lecture course surveys how love has been experienced and expressed from the pre-modern period to the present. Through case studies of familial and conjugal love in Africa, Asia, the US, Europe, and South and Latin America, the course will examine the debates about and enactment's of what constitutes the appropriate way to show love and affection in different cultures and historical contexts. Among the themes we will explore are questions of sexuality, marriage, kinship, and gender rights. A final unit will examine these themes through modern technologies such as the Internet, scientific advances in medicine, and a growing awareness that who and how we love is anything but simple or universal.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for LGBT 1940 - A Global History of Love

This course offers an introduction to central issues, debates, and theories that characterize the field of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Studies. Starting from the assumption that neither "sex" nor "sexuality" is a private experience or category, we will explore some of the ways that these powerfully public and political terms have circulated in social, legal, economic, and cultural spheres. We will also examine how these categories are situated in relation to other formative categories including race, ethnicity, religion, family, marriage, reproduction, the economy, and the state. Using a comparative and intersectional approach, we will read from various disciplines to assess the tools that LGBT studies offers for understanding power and culture in our contemporary world.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for LGBT 2290 - Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies

How does literary language depict the experience of physical suffering? Can a poem or a novel palliate pain, illness, even the possibility of death? From darkly comic narratives of black plague to the rise and fall of hysteria to depictions of the AIDS crisis, this course examines literature centered on medical practices from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Why have medical practices changed, and how do writers address their political, social, and ideological implications? Readings will include a broad range of genres, including poetry (Dickinson, Whitman, Keats), fiction (McEwan, Chekhov, Gilman, Kafka, Camus), theater (Kushner), nonfiction prose (Woolf, Freud), and critical theory (Foucault, Scarry, Canguilhem, Sontag).

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for LGBT 2350 - Literature and Medicine

Why are boys more likely than girls to be diagnosed with autism, and why are women more likely than men to be diagnosed with depression? Are there different "gay" and "straight" brains? And how does brain science interact with gender and sexuality in popular debate? Reading and discussing the original scientific papers and related critical texts, we will delve into the neuroscience of gender. In this course, we will delve into the neuroscience of gender difference. Reading the original scientific papers and related critical texts, we will ask whether we can find measurable physical differences in male and female brains, and what these differences might be. Do men and women solve spatial puzzles differently, as measured physiologically? Do nonhuman animals display sex-specific behaviors mediated by brain structure, and can we extrapolate these findings to human behavior? Why are boys three times more likely than girls to be diagnosed as autistic, and is there any connection between the predominantly male phenomenon of autism and other stereotypically male mental traits? Are there physical representations of sexual orientation in the brain, and how are these related to gender identity? And how are scientific studies represented and misrepresented in popular debate?

Catalog Distribution: (BIO-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, OPHLS-AG)

Full details for LGBT 3210 - Gender and the Brain

During her time in Germany, the U.S. poet Audre Lorde (who described herself as "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet") sought out community and encouraged Black Germans to speak up and make themselves visible as Afro-Germans in a country that often ignored or invalidated their existences. This is one of many crucial moments in Black German history and Black German Studies. In this course will explore the histories, activism, literature, and scholarship that arise from Afro-German communities and have shaped the field of Black German Studies. We will engage with films, novels, poetry, short stories, graphic narratives, music videos, and scholarly essays. Considering the great variety of media and genres, we will spend class time not only developing a shared vocabulary to talk about each text, but we will also learn to apply differing methods of analysis in our class discussions and individual assignments.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for LGBT 3575 - Introduction to Black German Studies

Individual study program intended for juniors and seniors working on special topics with selected reading or research projects not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with an LGBT Studies faculty member who has agreed to supervise independent study.

Full details for LGBT 3990 - Undergraduate Independent Study

Drawing on feminist and queer theory and ethnographic studies of ritual and devotional practices around the world this course will consider the relationships among the social organization of sexuality, embodiment of gender, nationalisms and everyday forms of worship. In addition to investigating the norms of family, gender, sex and the nation embedded in dominant institutionalized forms of religion we will study such phenomena as ritual transgenderism, neo tantrism, theogamy (marriage to a deity), priestly celibacy and temple prostitution. The disciplinary and normalizing effects of religion as well as the possibilities of religiosity as a mode of social dissent will be explored through different ethnographic and fictional accounts of ritual and faithful practices in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS, GLC-AS)

Full details for LGBT 4290 - The Sexual Politics of Religion

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for LGBT 4701 - Nightlife

Drawing on feminist and queer theory and ethnographic studies of ritual and devotional practices around the world this course will consider the relationships among the social organization of sexuality, embodiment of gender, nationalisms and everyday forms of worship. In addition to investigating the norms of family, gender, sex and the nation embedded in dominant institutionalized forms of religion we will study such phenomena as ritual transgenderism, neo tantrism, theogamy (marriage to a deity), priestly celibacy and temple prostitution. The disciplinary and normalizing effects of religion as well as the possibilities of religiosity as a mode of social dissent will be explored through different ethnographic and fictional accounts of ritual and faithful practices in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Full details for LGBT 6290 - The Sexual Politics of Religion

Are queer theory and Marxism truly irreconcilable? While queer studies emerged in part as a rejection of Marxism's totalizing approach and Marxists have criticized the queer emphasis on individuals, this seminar explores the potential of bringing the two fields together. We will consider how queer critiques of reproductive futurism, racial capitalism, and homonationalism can transform the legacy of Marxist theory and practice. At the same time, we will examine Marxist notions of totality, reification, and value to reenvision the scope of queer politics. After covering these key Marxist and queer theoretical concepts, the seminar will turn to transnational Marxist debates on gender and sexuality in Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union. We will conclude the seminar with a discussion of new scholarship in the emergent field of queer Marxism and a symposium with presentations by seminar participants.

Full details for LGBT 6363 - Queer Marxism