ANTH 165: Sexuality and Culture

This course examines sexuality with an emphasis on understanding the historical, cultural, economic, and political factors that contribute to the construction of sexual identities, relationships, and institutions. Topics to be addressed include differentiating biological sex, gender and sexuality; understanding gender diversity cross-culturally; sexuality, class, and racial stratification; cultural constructions of sexuality; the emergence of sexual identities and movements in the United States; tourism, sex, and the sex industry; the global HIV/AIDS crises. Ethnographic and national cases in the course include Native North Americans, Thailand, the Philippines, urban Brazil, urban Mexico, and contemporary U.S. urban culture and its class, racial and ethnic variation. Underlying the course's focus on specific topics and case studies will be an examination of essentialist and constructivist notions of sexuality. The course relies particularly on cases and examples that defy assumptions of 'norms' in gender and sexuality. The course encourages students to move beyond their own experience and engage in open discussion and exploration of the wide range of variation found in the expression of genders and sexualities in human cultures around the world and through time.