Feminist Histories of Gender and Sexuali

This undergraduate seminar offers students an introduction to the histories of gender and sexuality in Modern Britain since the early-nineteenth century. The advent of new nation states, industries, empires, and political ideologies transformed the place of gender and sexuality in British society. Yet the attempt to document those historical transformations changed the ways that feminist historians wrote that history too. This class thus introduces students to the major topics in the history of gender and sexuality in modern Britain: the relationship between industrialization and family labor, conceptions and categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality, the impact of imperialism on gender roles, queer histories of urbanization and the metropolis, and the place of gender, race, and sexuality in the development of the modern state. But it will also ask students to consider how historians like Sally Alexander, Catherine Hall, Judith Walkowitz, Durba Mitra, Samuel Rutherford, and Kennetta Hammond Perry have applied and engaged the major theorists of gender and sexuality, including Frederick Engels, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Carole Pateman, Henri Lefebvre, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Stuart Hall, and Hazel Carby. In doing so, students will learn both the histories and the theories that comprise the feminist historical tradition of Modern Britain.