Gender & Sexuality Studies

ENG 375:  Literature and Sexuality

Section D1, MWF 11:30-12:30

This course examines the role of sexuality in recent fiction, memoir, poetry, and plays.  We’ll look at a diverse range of texts written by and about LGBTQ people, looking at the way sexuality intersects with gender, race, class, religion, nationality, and ethnicity.  This course counts toward the English major/minor and the Gender and Sexuality Studies minor and certificate.

Additional texts may include:

• Excerpts from Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
• Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
• Short stories from Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch
• Excerpts from Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
• Excerpts from Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other
• Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera
• “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror

Image text:

Fall 2024 HIS 319 Gender and Sexuality in American History

Dr. Erica Ryan T/Th 9:45-11:15am

Course description: What makes a man, exactly, and what makes a woman? What
kinds of sex are normal, and what kinds are abnormal? Who decides? The answers to
these questions are not fixed. Throughout American history, popular understandings
of gender and sexual norms evolved in close relationship with the political, economic,
racial, and social dictates of the time. This course will trace the evolution of ideas on
sex and gender from the 18th cent. to the present using historical sources, including
fiction and film. Particular attention will be given to analyzing dominant models of
proper behavior and the complex relationships of power enmeshed within them. A
sample of topics include gender and the frontier, the invention of heterosexuality and
homosexuality, debating reproductive rights, the Harlem Renaissance, sexual
revolutions, the politics of family life, and the AIDS epidemic. Note: the course is
cross listed with GSS 319 and counts for the GSS minor/certificate.