There are many stories we tell ourselves about sex. We locate our identities in sexuality, we consider our sex lives to be the secret core of our personhood, we take for granted that sexual desire is where we’re free from social influence, and we assume that culturally we’re moving toward greater freedom from sexual repression as well as greater tolerance toward sexual expression. It’s hard to read a book, watch a film, or listen to the news without encountering these “fictions” or discourses about sex. French historian Michel Foucault launched one of the most persuasive theories about the curious status of sex in modern society by first asking how sex came to be simultaneously what we should never talk about and what we can’t stop talking about. Through his analysis of historic transformations in modernity, he offers a trenchant critique of the political work that happens in and through ideologies about sex, desire, freedom, and constraint.

For Spring Quarter 2008, we will read selections from Foucault’s History of Sexuality alongside texts that coincide with touchstones in his periodization of “sex.” As we acquaint ourselves with Foucault’s critical framing, we’ll read and discuss short selections from the sixteenth to early-eighteenth century. We’ll then read a series of novels that proceed from the late-eighteenth century to the present. The majority of our texts will counter and critique commonly-held notions about sex, and we’ll use them as the occasion to discuss how deeply-entrenched ideologies about sex, freedom, and constraint have managed to sustain themselves despite historic evidence to the contrary. This course will thus trace Foucault’s claim: that against the belief that we are moving toward greater freedom, we are instead more subjected to power and relations of force through discourses about “sex.”

This course is highly recommended for students interested in women’s studies, queer studies, or critical study into the intersections of race, class, nation, and gender. Students who enroll for this course should be prepared to read and discuss roughly a novel a week.

To qualify for W-writing credit, students will complete one- to two-page writing assignments for each novel. These assignments will instruct students in how to write about fiction. Students will be required to: analyze narrative form, analyze characters, gloss a text, trace a thematic, close-read, locate historic context, articulate a line of inquiry, dialogue with critical sources, and finally generate a claim. At the end of the quarter, students will translate these skills into a 6- to 8-page final paper.

Required Texts: The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, The Coquette (1797), The Scarlet Letter (1850), The Awakening (1899), Passing (1929), Another Country (1962), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), Bastard Out of Carolina (1993), Middlesex (2002)

Book List:
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. ISBN 0-679-72469-9
Foster, Hannah. The Coquette. ISBN 0-195-04239-5
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. ISBN 0-679-78338-5
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. ISBN 0-380-00245-0
Larson, Nella. Passing. ISBN 0-142-43727-1
Baldwin, James. Another Country. ISBN 0-679-74471-1
Cliff, Michelle. No Telephone to Heaven. ISBN 0-452-27569-5
Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. ISBN 0-452-28705-7
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. ISBN 0-312-42773-5