Introductory description

This optional module is intended to give a critical overview of one of the fastest growing and most dynamic areas of modern historical enquiry - the history of gender and sexuality. It aims to provide students with an understanding of how feminist and queer history has emerged from earlier approaches to the study of history, what makes it distinctive and what its principal strengths and weaknesses might be. As an option taken by students across different MA streams, this module not only examines the range of historical methods and interpretations that constitute feminist and queer histoircal inquiry (from the early modern period to the present), but also looks at the usefulness of 'gender' and 'sexuality' as categories of analysis that can be investigated alongside other social grids and indexes of identity and in relation to different source-driven approaches to history.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

1. Class
2. Colonialism
3. Race
4. Law
5. Science
6. Reading week
7. Violence
8. Health
9. Religion
10. Sex and History

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate an understanding of a longer chronological and broader geographic understanding of gender and sexuality as a thematic field of historical expertise.
• Demonstrate a conceptual and practical understanding of the skills of an historian of gender and sexuality.
• Demonstrate the ability to formulate and achieve a piece of critical and reflective historiographical writing.
• Demonstrate the ability to undertake critical analysis.
• Demonstrate the ability to formulate and test concepts and hypotheses.

Indicative reading list

• Judith Butler and Joan Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (1992)
• Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonising Theory, Practicing
  Solidarity (2003)
• Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population
  Control (1987)
• Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial
  Options, Duke University Press (Durham, 2011)
• Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial
  Rule (Berkeley, 2010)
• Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empires and the Early
  Scientific Revolution, University of Texas Press (Austin, 2006)
• Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (U of
  California, 2003)
• Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Harvard, 2010)
• Judith Tucker, Women, Family and Gender in Islamic Law (Cambridge, 2008)
• Alison Bashford, Purity and pollution : gender, embodiment, and Victorian medicine
  (1998)
• Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the body : beauty, health, and fitness in Britain,
  1880-1939 (2010)
• Marcia C. Inhorn and Soraya Tremayne (eds), Islam and Assisted Reproductive
  Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives (2015)
• Susan Martha Kahn, Reproducing Jews : a cultural account of assisted conception in Israel
  (2000)
• Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the
  Congo (Duke University Press, 1999)
• Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
  (Harvard University Press, 2002)
• Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in
  Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2013)
• Robert M. Buffington, Eithne Luibhéid, and Donna J. Guy, eds., A Global History of
  Sexuality: The Modern Era (Wiley Blackwell, 2014)
• Merry E. Weisner-Hanks, Gender in History: Global Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell,

• Raquel A. G. Reyes and William G. Clarence-Smith, eds., Sexual Diversity in Asia, c. 600-
  1950 (Routledge, 2012)
• Carroll, Stuart, ed., Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective
  (Basingstoke, 2007)
• Spierenburg, Pieter, ed., Men and Violence: Gender, Honor and Rituals in Modern Europe
  and America (Columbus OH, 1998)

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.