Time Schedule:
Bruce Burgett
BIS 431
Bothell Campus
Examines the ways that sexual beliefs, practices, identities, and behaviors are connected to various cultural, economic, political, and historical forces. Ideally builds on students' previous critical study of sex and sexuality, either at the UW or elsewhere. Specific focus and topic varies with instructor.
Class description
Thinking Sex (Spring 2004)
This course takes its title and inspiration from a groundbreaking 1984 essay by the feminist anthropologist and social activist Gayle Rubin. In "Thinking Sex," Rubin posed a series of wide-ranging questions: What does it mean to think, research, and talk about the politics and cultures of sex and sexuality? What gets included in and excluded from those discussions? How do the choices we make when we think about sex and sexuality influence the ways in which we live and imagine sexual practices and identities today?
Following a reading and discussion of Rubin's essay, this course will reapproach these large questions in three stages. The first will focus on a series of video and oral ethnographies intended to complicate the broad ways in which we think today about the relations among sex, power, politics, culture, equality, and freedom. The second will turn our attention to the literary, legal, and medical dossier of a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite (Herculine Barbin) in order to highlight the ways in which the relations we explored through ethnographic methods in the first section of the course can be reapproached historically. The third will return us to the here and now by considering how recent battles over sexual cultures in the Seattle area provide opportunities for social and political transformation and activism.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
This course will be team-taught by Professors Kari Lerum and Bruce Burgett, and has an enrollment cap of 70 students. It will combine some (minimal amount of) traditional lecture with several films and videos, as well as large amounts of structured small-group discussion. Though it is a large class (at least by UWB standards), we intend for it to revolve around your active and engaged preparation and participation.
Recommended preparation
There are no official prerequisites for this course, but you will have a much easier time in it (and enjoy it more) if you have some background (academic or otherwise) in the critical study of sex and sexuality.
Please also note that this course is rated R. It's not a real hard R, but it's not a very soft one either. Most everyone will be "offended" at some point and there will be various representations intended for (what the motion picture review board calls) "adult" audiences. If you are uncomfortable reading, viewing, and discussing these sorts of representations in the public forum of the classroom, this is probably not the course for you.
Class assignments and grading
Assignments will include electronic response papers and several longer, written "research" tasks.
