PSCI 332
Sex and Politics Fall 2016
Division II
This is not the current course catalog

“War is politics by other means,” German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously declared. Is politics sex by other means? Classical Greeks seemed to think so. Lysistrata, the comedian Aristophanes’ famous play (recently reimagined by Spike Lee), depicts war-weary women strategizing to deny all sex to all men until the men elect to stop fighting. Sex and politics are also closely linked in the tragedian Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and in Plato’s Symposium. After these classical texts, we move to Sigmund Freud, probably the most important theorist of sex in modernity, and political reactions on both the radical Left and the radical Right. On the Left, we look at Marxist thinkers popular with sexual liberationists in the 1960s and the groundbreaking theories—indeed, bold calls for new forms of sexuality and desire—by Michel Foucault and his contemporaries. On the Right, we look at highly controversial thinkers of sex and politics in fascism, Nazism and the New Right today.