课程信息

This course serves as an introduction to the history of gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Europe and its empires. The class is organized roughly chronologically, but its approach is primarily thematic. We will begin by examining Enlightenment and revolutionary debates about women’s relationship to politics and civil society. From there, we will turn to consider gendered understandings of work and the effects of those understandings on labor practices and labor organizing. We will also examine how ideas about gender, sexuality, and race structured European colonialism, and we will reflect on how European and indigenous peoples engaged with, made use of, and challenged the gendered and racial discourses of the colonial project. Finally, we will look at strategies deployed by a range of individuals to argue for women’s political rights and their inclusion in national institutions. We will end by considering fin-de-siècle concerns about decadence, effeminacy, and the nation-state. Throughout the class, we will consider how gender norms were constructed by philosophical, political, racial, and scientific thinking over the nineteenth century, and we will reflect on how individuals both conformed to and defied those norms in their individual lives. We will also examine nineteenth-century beliefs about sex and sexuality and look at how those beliefs structured relationships within and across gendered lines.