Gender, Sexuality, and History (321-0-21)
Topic
Histories of the Trans Present
Instructors
Zavier Nunn
Meeting Info
Harris Hall L28: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
taught by new professor, Dr. Zavier Nunn
Are trans people new? Is sex binary? Can sex change? These questions and their precedents have monopolized gendered politics and have taken on global significance in recent years. Amidst the tidal wave of contemporary attacks on trans existence within the US and across transnational borders, answers to these questions are pressing and of great consequence—not only for trans people themselves, but the stability of the systems of gender and sex which organize bodies and persons along a cis/trans and male/female divide.
But the importance of sex and gender to everyday and political life has a much longer history.
This course is a history of the trans present in that it charts the ways in which sex and gender have been ontologized across borders and contexts, often in ways which regulate and police bodies within borders. It historicizes the divisive discourses that animate present day politics, showing that sexual dimorphism's legitimacy has been continually contested in different ways and from different standpoints for centuries, and that arguing for or against the universality of sex/gender is a move that people across left/right and liberal/illiberal political lines have historically made. The path towards trans' contemporary inception is not only uneven, including many discontinuities as well as continuities. It is also global and disturbing, requiring the violence of empire, eugenics, and slavery to cleave sexual dimorphism into two, whose "binary logic" trans then seeks to muddy and muddle—in ways which sometimes yield to ideas of what sex and gender "really are". Trans people do have a history. And it is longer than transphobes would like us to believe. But it is not a pleasant or necessarily radical history. It is also not solely the history of people who are trans. Rather, this history is plural and fractious, and is a history of everyone who has ever existed in a world where gender and sex are operating concepts.
Class Attributes
Historical Studies Foundational Discipline
Historical Studies Distro Area