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Semester 1

Introduction to The Modern History of Sexuality (HIST10492)

Subject

History

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students must have completed 3 History courses at grade B or above, and please note that we will only consider courses with a specific focus on History (not including History of Art) towards these pre-requisites. We will only consider University/College level courses. **Please see Additional Restrictions below**

Course Summary

Today, sex is at the tip of society's tongue. What really is this thing called 'sexuality' and how did it become such a ubiquitous social and political issue? This course offers an introduction to the sexual past that seeks to answer this question with a primary focus on Europe, but which also explores the intersections of sex, race and colonialism.

Course Description

Human sexuality is commonly understood in biological terms, explained as driven by natural instincts and as part of a slow evolutionary process. Sexuality, in this view, is a timeless constant and hardly has a history. But this course will serve to demonstrate that much of what is taken for granted when it comes to sex shrouds an often-counterintuitive complexity of historical developments. The very notion of sexuality, for example, has only become thinkable in the past 150 years. In many ways, modern Europe and its colonial empires were where the intense preoccupation with problems of sex and reproduction produced an immense apparatus of knowledge that Michel Foucault described as a veritable scientia sexualis. The intersections of gender, sexuality and race have historically served to shape social power structures between men and women, straights and queers, colonizers and the colonized, and combinations of the above. Students will learn various ways in which historians have approached laying bare these power mechanisms in the past. In so doing, they will explore the extensive ways in which 'sex' has been and continues to be intensely political. Ultimately, rather than reproduce a Whiggish history of sexuality that informed the sexual revolution and its earliest historiography, this course will serve to upset such readings by examining the continuous ambivalence that surrounds sexuality in European society and by taking issue with the tenacious Eurocentrism that lies at the heart of even the most sophisticated analyses of sexual modernity.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Restrictions

Unless you are nominated on a History or HCA exchange agreement, visiting students are only permitted to enrol in two 3rd year History courses each, per semester, before the start of the relevant semester’s welcome period – and spaces on each course are limited so cannot be guaranteed for any student. This includes courses in Economic History and Scottish History. Enrolment in a third course from this group will depend on whether there are still spaces available in the September Welcome Period, and cannot be guaranteed. It is NOT appropriate for students to contact staff within this subject area to ask for an exception to be made; all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. This is due to the limited number of spaces available in this very popular subject area.

view the timetable and further details for this course