Sexualities/Textualities
SSP 100/Stokes
Course Description
An exploration of the centrality of writing to the creation, promulgation, and
enforcement of human sexualities. We will focus on the written word as
a place where an otherwise amorphous network of desires gets clarified
and organized, deployed and policed. From Plain Talks on Avoided Subjects,
a popular nineteenth-century guidebook for the young, to The Flame
and the Flower, a Harlequin romance from the early 1970s, we will
explore the ways in which sex becomes text. We will position these sometimes-bizarre
popular texts in the context of medical, scientific, and philosophic discourses,
including the work of Freud, Foucault, and Kinsey, in an attempt to understand
the relation between the written word and the ways in which we live and
imagine human sexual identity.
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