About

"Map of Human Sexuality"
www.humansexmap.com (1-23-2010)

Sexuality and American Culture

Spring Term 2011

Tuesdays, 3-5:30pm

Professor: Lee Quinby, leequinby@aol.com
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 2:30-4pm, at Macaulay Honors College

Instructional Technology Fellow: Lauren Klein, lklein@gc.cuny.edu
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2-5pm, in the Macaulay Reading Room

Course Description: How does sexuality intersect with history?  “What’s love got to do with it”?  How have cultural productions commented on the power of sexuality and the relations of power that govern it?  This course will focus on such questions to investigate issues of sexuality, regulation, surveillance, and resistance in the context of American culture.  We will draw on the work of Michel Foucault to provide an analytical framework regarding links between sexuality and what he calls “power/knowledge.”  We will explore historical documents and analyses that show how sexuality has been shaped and reshaped as shifts occur within family, economic, and medical structures. By examining the history of changing attitudes toward and practices of sexuality from the colonial era to the present day, we will consider ways in which discourses of law, love, religion, medicine, literature, and the media produce what Foucault called a “deployment of sexuality.”  And we will reflect on the myriad cultural forces that have challenged that deployment.