3.00 Credits
How do race, gender, and sexuality define/inform our identities, influence discourses, practices, institutions and policies? Where do gender, race, and sexuality come from? What is the currency of these categories and are they still useful or necessary to our present day thinking and practices? This seminar approaches these questions by tracing how gender, race, and sexuality have been defined and mobilized historically and the legacies of this history. This tracing not only provides formative information on the legal, cultural, ideological, and biological intricacies of identity categories but also provides direction on how methodologically and theoretically to approach the study of gender, race, and sexuality. How does one see gender, race, and sexuality? And where? Readings in feminist, cultural, and queer studies for the working foundation for analyses and examples and the seminar will conclude with contemporary and applied examples of gender, race and sexuality studies. By seminar's end students will have a working model for their own areas of interest and research and will be able to design complex analyses of gender, race, and sexuality, whether historical or contemporary; evidence based or ethnographic; discursive, policy based, or media studies.