ANTH 280 - Genders, Sexes, Sexualities: Anthropological Perspectives

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

(Same as WMST 280) Gender is one of the major forms of social difference worldwide, and cultural ideas about gender difference have powerful implications for what it means to be a person, what roles a person is expected to perform, what status a person has, and what access a person has to material, cultural, spiritual, political resources. The course examines gender, sex, and sexuality as a set of culturally constructed meanings that are used to define and police difference. Among the topics covered are: how anthropologists approach the study of gender and sexuality; how gender and sexuality are understood and experienced in different cultural contexts; how gender and sexuality intersect with other categories of identity and difference such as race, class, ethnicity, nation, and how anthropology engages challenges to structures that support beliefs about gender, sexuality, bodies, desire and identity and that constrain people’s lives, often in violent ways. The course reviews ethnographic studies that attend, for example, to meaning as well as materiality, including the way that everyday spaces become gendered and sexualized; to the body as it is represented in art and popular culture, and the way adornment and alteration of the body are used as mediums of communication, conformity and resistance; to the gendered representation of illness and disability; to the ways that sexualities are constructed by scientific and medical discourses. The course provides students with frameworks and methodologies to identify and think critically about taken-for-granted notions about gender and sexuality, including those of their own culture. Course materials include theoretical essays, films, case studies, popular media and culture, art and literature and students conduct a short ethnographic research project focused on a specific aspect of gender/sex/sexuality. Colleen Cohen.