Thinking Sex

How do we come to experience ourselves as having a gender and a sexual orientation? How do social constructions of gender relate to understandings of sexuality? How have categories like masculinity and femininity; heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality transformed over time? This subject approaches gender and sexuality as historically and culturally contingent rather than as natural expressions of a private self. It provides the historical and theoretical frameworks for understanding the rise of specific genders and sexualities in relation to available medical, psychoanalytic, philosophical, political and popular discourses. Drawing from recent formations in both feminism and queer studies, this subject engages with a diverse range of cultural texts from the proceedings of court cases to personal advertisements, from celebrity gossip columns to popular film. On completion of this subject students should be able to explicate the complex imbrications of gender and sexuality and to analyse the representation of gendered and sexual identities and desires in selected cultural texts, which may include television, film, Internet and print media.

• 1Identify and critically analyse the imbrications of gender and sexuality within the complex changing contexts of contemporary cultural life in mostly Western, and some non-Western contexts
• 2Critique how contemporary gendered and sexual identities developed in the West as an aspect of cultural modernity
• 3Explain key concepts and approaches to gender and sexuality in contemporary humanities scholarship (including post-structuralist feminism and queer theory), and contextualise this learning in relation to the discipline
• 4Formulate a high-level analysis that shows conceptual sophistication and critical thinking on gender and sexuality, including on how these relate to other facets of social identity such as race, generation and nationality
• 5Assess the representation of gendered and sexual identities and desires in selected local and specific cultural texts across a range of forms and genres
• 6Discuss national and international debates on specific contemporary issues and complex problems connected with sexuality, with an awareness of the wider community.