This course takes the shifting nature of sexual and gender concepts as an opportunity to reflect on the history of sexuality. Focusing on the period that forged many of the sexual concepts we have with us today (1870-1930), we will reflect on the historically determined nature of the sexual concept and the philosophical problem of whether the experiences they describe are equally changeful. We will pay special attention to literary form throughout, asking how the confessional mode, naturalist description, poetic address, and the character sketch, among other literary modes and genres, not only describe, but determine knowledge of gender and sexuality.

This introduction to literary study examines a compelling literary theme related to questions of gender and sexuality. The theme's function within specific historical contexts, within literary history generally, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

This course will serve as an introduction to frameworks for studying gender and sexuality through the lens of early modern South Asian history, literature, and art, covering what are today the countries of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Taking the fundamental questions of “what is gender?” and “what is sexuality?” as our starting point, we will examine the diversity of social practices and beliefs related to these concepts expressed in early modern South Asian writings and visual art, as well as how this past relates to contemporary debates, in contexts including Hindu mystical traditions, Islamic courtly culture, and early colonial society. The course will emphasize direct engagement with primary sources ranging from memoirs, legal documents and advice manuals to mystical tales, satirical poetry, and paintings. Topics covered include formulations of masculinity and femininity, notions of the home and the family, representations of queer sex and desire, and conceptualizations of the categories of intersex and transgender. Students will complete the course with an understanding of comparative lenses for thinking about gender and sexuality in addition to proficiency in applying and interpreting those lenses in relation to a variety of sources, from literature to technical prose to visual culture. No prior knowledge of South Asian history, languages or literature is required.

This course will introduce students to the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, organize families and work like, delimit opportunities for individuals and groups of people, as well as impact the terms of local and transnational economic exchange. We will explore the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality work with other markers of difference and social status such as race, age, nationality, and ability to further demarcate possibilities, freedoms, choices, and opportunities available to people.

When you think of the term “scandal,” what comes to mind? Is there something about a society’s national identity that makes particular scandals resonate and shake the culture more than others? By exploring several Italian scandals that have helped define the cultural fabric of generations of Italians, we will learn to understand the social and political roots behind the what and why of these phenomena. Through cross-mediatic and transnational archival research, we will look at the ways that different media and different nations use these phenomena to represent national belonging, social fear, and cultural expectation. Each crime has its own story, but how do they help us understand how Italy makes sense of itself through tragedy, corruption, murder, and mayhem? How bello is this bel paese after all? Did you ever wonder what’s behind Italy’s ever-revolving government? Or why do Italians prefer to use the English word “serial killer”?
This course will be taught in English

The establishment of postmodern art as a chronological development is built into the very term postmodern, but unfortunately chronology gets everything about postmodernism wrong. It is not born after modernism but is rather coterminous with it and a product of the same forces. Nor does it succeed modern art, but rather in some fundamental ways instead critiques it, for the postmodern is more concerned with what infects art from outside its frame-including history, society, gender, racial and sexual politics, etc.-- than anything that develops within it. This course is thus concerned with the heyday of postmodern art from roughly the 1950 through the 1980s, although we begin in the early 20th century with the work of Marcel Duchamp. We will look at artists as different as Cindy Sherman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John Cage, Andy Warhol, and Kara Walker, and pay particular attention to art about AIDS. Roughly evenly divided between art and theory, the course presumes no prior knowledge of either. Still, as Jacques Derrida explained, binaries such as modernism and postmodernism remain extremely useful to power, because they uphold the status quo, circumscribing the field of contestation to either one pole or the other, and thus eliminating other possibilities. This course is concerned with these other possibilities.

The establishment of postmodern art as a chronological development is built into the very term postmodern, but unfortunately chronology gets everything about postmodernism wrong. It is not born after modernism but is rather coterminous with it and a product of the same forces. Nor does it succeed modern art, but rather in some fundamental ways instead critiques it, for the postmodern is more concerned with what infects art from outside its frame-including history, society, gender, racial and sexual politics, etc.-- than anything that develops within it. This course is thus concerned with the heyday of postmodern art from roughly the 1950 through the 1980s, although we begin in the early 20th century with the work of Marcel Duchamp. We will look at artists as different as Cindy Sherman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John Cage, Andy Warhol, and Kara Walker, and pay particular attention to art about AIDS. Roughly evenly divided between art and theory, the course presumes no prior knowledge of either. Still, as Jacques Derrida explained, binaries such as modernism and postmodernism remain extremely useful to power, because they uphold the status quo, circumscribing the field of contestation to either one pole or the other, and thus eliminating other possibilities. This course is concerned with these other possibilities.

How have women’s and queer communities’ desires for rights and representation and access to basic resources and social services transformed urban space? What makes a space feminist, and how has feminism understood the city? This course offers an introduction to key concepts in gender and sexuality studies and how the field has understood urban space. Throughout the semester, we will examine how feminist, queer, and transgender theory has interpreted the city. We will analyze historical case studies on design and urban planning as they relate to issues like sex work, sexual health, birth control and abortion services, pregnancy, and family and community making. Each week, we will explore these topics through hands-on archival research in Penn’s rare book and manuscript collections. Working with the archives, we will trace how feminist/queer/trans movements have been shaped and been shaped by the city. We will also interrogate the role of archives, repositories, and museums for queer/feminist/trans memory. We will experiment with poetry, creative non-fiction, critical essays, visual essays, sound and film, and more throughout the semester. Students will design creative projects rooted in their theoretical, historical, and archival practice.

This course will introduce students to the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, organize families and work like, delimit opportunities for individuals and groups of people, as well as impact the terms of local and transnational economic exchange. We will explore the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality work with other markers of difference and social status such as race, age, nationality, and ability to further demarcate possibilities, freedoms, choices, and opportunities available to people.

"Jewish woman, who knows your life? In darkness you have come, in darkness do you go." J. L. Gordon (1890). This course will bring into the light the long tradition of women as readers, writers, and subjects in Jewish literature. All texts will be in translation from Yiddish and Hebrew, or in English. Through a variety of genres -- devotional literature, memoir, fiction, and poetry -- we will study women's roles and selves, the relations of women and men, and the interaction between Jewish texts and women's lives. The legacy of women in Yiddish devotional literature will serve as background for our reading of modern Jewish fiction and poetry from the past century. The course is divided into five segments. The first presents a case study of the Matriarchs Rachel and Leah, as they are portrayed in the Hebrew Bible, in rabbinic commentary, in pre-modern prayers, and in modern poems. We then examine a modern novel that recasts the story of Dinah, Leah's daughter. Next we turn to the seventeenth century Glikl of Hamel, the first Jewish woman memoirist. The third segment focuses on devotional literature for and by women. In the fourth segment, we read modern women poets in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. The course concludes with a fifth segment on fiction written by women in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English.