2006 Handbooks

This unit explores ideas and practices that highlight the social and cultural construction of sexuality. We take the perspective that sexual acts vary in social significance and subjective meaning depending on how they are culturally and historically defined and understood. Over the semester we will consider how sexualities assume different meanings and significance in different historical periods and in different social contexts. We will do this by looking cross-culturally at how local understandings of sexuality intersect with other key structuring forces such as religion, politics, capitalism, ideas of masculinity and femininity and so forth. We look at notions of orientalism and the 'sexual primitive', gender ambiguity and the ontology of 'the third sex', constructions of desire within carnival and ritual performances, homosociality and male bonding, love and marriage, virtual sex, AIDS and the regulation of sexuality, as further means to investigate how sexuality is experienced as culturally specific.