R. Hexter Seminar TR 10:30 AM - 11:50 AM Hutchison 102
Course Description:
The purpose of this class is to offer students the opportunity to produce a substantial research paper about the classical world that will involve study of ancient Greek and/or Roman material as well as engagement with relevant modern scholarship. Our topic this quarter is sexuality.
As a topic, sexuality is one which is highly vexed but for that very reason unusually instructive in terms of methodology. To begin with, “sexuality” is a term, and a concept, with a history. The concept itself has been the subject of debate, especially intense over the last fifty years, not least because the behaviors it attempts to describe, analyze and categorize themselves have been subject to interdiction, in some cases severe penalties, for centuries. In some places, they still are. Indeed, the very mention of the matter has been suppressed and discussion of it is to this day subject to restriction.
As a field of inquiry, the study of sexuality overlaps with the study of gender: indeed, it cannot be investigated without awareness of the evolution of that adjacent field, including both gender identity and gender expression. Further adjacencies would include the fields of anthropology, philosophy, the history of religion, even biology, although given the fact that sexuality involves sex and much reproduction is sexual, perhaps that is no surprise. While there is no field of inquiry that doesn’t have a potentially infinite set of adjacencies, in the case of the study of sexuality, perhaps because the issues are not only complex but controversial in the minds of many, those adjacencies are variously visible and obscured, and often contentious.
One might well quail at a task at once so ambitious and potentially fraught, but students of ancient Greece and Rome who understand the discipline of Classics to be a serious one, worthy of modern attention, and approach the topic with an open mind will be richly rewarded.
Course Content Note:
When exploring such potentially triggering material, it will be imperative to maintain a classroom space in which each of us respects the right of everyone to hold personal views and values.
If you suspect that specific material is likely to be challenging for you for any reason, I’d be happy to discuss any concerns you may have before the subject comes up in class.