History 370: Histories of US Genders and Sexualities

This class explores the uses and meanings of gender categories and understandings of sexualities in the history of the United States. It explores how gender categories have been deployed in a multicultural nation, and in what ways people of the past understood what we would call sexuality. It also asks in what ways other kinds of social and geographic boundaries –for example race, class, region, ethnicity, citizenship –have shaped gendered and sexual experience, and when. In the past half-century, constructing and rewriting histories of binary categories and silenced experiences has led to an interrogation of gender categories and boundaries and layers of rethinking sexuality. More recent histories add intersections with other ways of delineating difference and power. We will explore histories of ideologies and experience in a range of contexts from the 18th through the 20th centuries. May be taken for credit toward the Gender Studies major or minor or the Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies major or minor.