Government 366 - SEM:POLITICAL THEORY

Topics course. This course explores the social and political construction of heterosexuality; it's interaction with race, class and gender; and the queer resistances to heteronormativity that have formed to oppose it. Examining heterosexuality as a form of social and political privilege, we explore the ways in which it acts as a coercive yet successful cultural norm, often disappearing as a category of investigation altogether. Attention is paid to rendering visible the historical, political, economic and social forces that have contributed to the construction and maintenance of a coerced and coercive heterosexuality, while simultaneously exploring the uniqueness produced through the intersections of heterosexuality with race, class and gender. These intersections reveal the many ways that heteronormativity has been deployed as a form of political organization of the body politic, even as it produces multiple locations of resistance for politicized bodies.

Topic: The Politics of Heterosexuality. Instructor permission. Not open to first-years, sophomores