BA Art History and English Literature / Course details

This course explores three analytical concepts central to our understanding of what makes us 'modern': gender, sexuality and the body. We begin by looking at the women's and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as some early twentieth-century writings by sexologists, such as Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld. Then we move on to explore some key theorists of sexuality, including Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault, paying close attention to the significant differences between their approaches. Alongside these historical and theoretical texts, we analyse specific examples of more recent fiction and non-fiction writing, independent feminist and queer filmmaking and photography to consider topics such as: desire, identity, trans, sexual classification, repression and liberation, racialised bodies, transgression, and normality and deviance. Throughout the course key feminist and queer theorists are introduced in relation to debates about changing understandings of the three categories in the course title.

• To introduce students to a range of theoretical work on gender, sexuality and the body informed by, or critical of, sexology and psychoanalysis;


• To encourage students to assess such material critically;


• To introduce students to a number of 20th century cultural texts which - self-consciously or otherwise - foreground issues of sexuality, gender and the body;


• To encourage students to develop strategies of reading cultural texts informed by theories of sexuality, gender and the body.

By the end of the course, the successful student will have demonstrated:

• An understanding of some of the main issues raised by theoretical accounts of sexuality and gender;


• A grasp of the distinctions between different schools of thought in this area;


• An ability to analyse cultural texts in ways informed by theoretical work of sexuality, gender and the body;


• An appreciation of the implications for cultural criticism of the distinctions between the different schools of thought in this area.

Written and face-to-face (upon arrangement)

Theories:

Michel Foucault History of Sexuality, vol. 1.  London: Penguin, 1998

Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite.  New York: Vintage Books, 2010

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.  Trans. by David McLintock.  London: Penguin, 2002

Novels:

Alan Hollinghurst, Swimming Pool Library.  London: Vintage, 2015

Audre Lorde Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2018.

Films:

Orlando  (1993, dir. Sally Potter)

Looking for Langston (1989, dir. Isaac Julien)