Instructor: J. Peters
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar).
This course offers a cultural and literary history of sex. We will look at a series of texts from various moments in the history of sex: the Bible, Greek drama, Renaissance erotic literature, Victorian pornography, popular film, YouTube autobiography. And we will look at the variety of spaces, genres, and media in which sex is produced, performed, and represented (visual art, literature, theatre, film, popular culture, and the performance of everyday life). The course will examine, transhistorically, such concepts as desire, pleasure, eroticism, obscenity, taboo, fetish, prostitution, pornography, the body. Reading the history of sex, sexual identity, and sexual performance (in the various senses of the word) will permit us to ask questions of contemporary relevance through a historical lens. Is sexual identity a function of sexual practice? Is it subject to change? What constitutes pornography? Should all forms of sexual expression be permitted? Students who take this class must be comfortable not only discussing the range of historical sexualities, but also looking at (sometimes difficult) images. Texts include Euripides’ Bacchae, Aretino’s Dialogues, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (etc.), and numerous legal, religious, scientific, and visual texts.
