Sexuality and the City

This reading-intensive seminar explores the interrelated histories of sexuality and the city in twentieth-century New York and Paris. The city has classically been represented as the site of sexual freedom and experimentation, but also of sexual disorder, immorality, and danger. We will consider how urban conditions and processes (from immigration, racial segregation, and the development of new forms of housing and mass culture to urban blight and urban renewal) shaped sexual practices, identities, communities, ethics, and people’s understanding of the boundaries between public and private. We will also survey how sexual matters (from the spread and reorganization of sexual commerce and the development of new sexual moralities to the formation of identity-based sexual communities and cultural movements and the campaigns of anti-vice activists) shaped urban processes and politics. We will pay particular attention to the critical role played by sexuality in constituting racial, class, and national hierarchies and to how questions of racial and class difference and inequality shaped discourses of sexuality. Methodologically, we will consider what we can learn from social and cultural histories, novels, and films, and how we can read them with and against one another. We will think about how the novels and films are historically shaped and situated and how they served as critical interventions in historical processes and debates. The course is grounded in New York, especially Harlem, Greenwich Village, and Times Square, and in Paris, especially Montmartre, Montparnasse, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and it explores multiple crossings and influences between the two.
The final paper will allow you to pursue your interest in a particular aspect of the history of sexuality and the city by reading (or viewing) and critically assessing additional texts on a subject of your choosing.