Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0157 - Sexuality and Capitalism

How has human sexuality been impacted by the network of socio-economic forces called "capitalism"? Have lifestyles and modes of consumption under capital benefited both heterosexual and queer cultures? Or does capitalism collude with structures of power to police sexual practices and orientations? Should we see sex industries as capitalist exploitation? Or should we see them as labors and pleasures that need to be recognized and decriminalized? These are the key questions that this course will address through a combination of queer, feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial scholarship and contemporary media texts. We will pay attention to technologies made available by late capital-such as psychotherapy, hormonal treatments, and surgery-and their effects on gender identity and expression. We will investigate neoliberal formulations of "debility" and "capacity" through the lens of queer disability studies, and assess the impact of uneven globalization on representations of the hetero- and homonormative.

Culture, Humanities, and Languages Power, Community and Social Justice Independent Work Writing and Research Multiple Cultural Perspectives Instructor: Ani Maitra A background in gender and sexuality studies will be useful but not mandatory.