MLA Proseminar: Comparative Histories of Sexuality

This seminar will explore the cultural history of sexuality from a critical and historical lens. It starts with the idea that sexuality has a history, and aims to trace this history through medical, theological, legal, and literary contexts from Antiquity to the present. How did we end up with sexual subjectivities, identities, orientations, and subcultures we have in modern West? How do premodern conceptualizations and representations of sexuality challenge our modern understanding of sex and sexuality? By posing such questions, this seminar aims to show that study of the past adds significantly to our understandings of sexualities and sexual discourses in the present, and to involve students with the use and evaluation of theoretical frameworks and concepts to critically analyze larger issues in the past and present.