WGSS 231
Sexuality and Imperialism Fall 2016
Division II Exploring Diversity Initiative
Cross-listed COMP 234
This is not the current course catalog

This course takes as its central premise that the definition and experience of modern sexuality are intimately bound to nineteenth-century imperialism and its legacies. How did imperial power relations help to constitute racial and sexual categories and classifications? To what extent did sexual norms in both the colonies and European metropole contribute to the “management of empire”? In what ways can this historical and intellectual framework help us understand contemporary phenomena such as homonationalism and pink-washing? We will explore these questions through the study of novels, films, and a variety of other cultural and historical texts, ranging from Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Foucault’s History of Sexuality to André Gide’s accounts of sexual tourism in colonial Algeria and Fanon’s analysis of the devastating psychological effects of colonialism. As part of the Exploring Diversity Initiative, this class will foster an awareness of how the economic and political structures of imperialism affected sexual diversity (and vice versa), and how colonial social hierarchies created differing and unequal sexual expectations, restrictions, and freedoms in individual lives.