Tutor: Howard Chiang

3:30-5:30pm January 20, 2015

This seminar extends our investigation into the relationship between medicine, identity, and being human by exploring scientific and medical approaches to the understanding of sex, gender, sexuality, and the body. We will go over some classic studies in the field, but we will also look at some of the more recent findings. Because there is already a very healthy body of scholarship supporting the study of science, medicine, and sexuality, our seminar can only be introductory in nature and, as such, focus on historical developments in the modern West. Students are encouraged to contact the seminar tutor for a list of further readings, especially for comparative and global perspectives.

Readings:
Arnold I. Davidson, 'Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality', Critical Inquiry 14, no. 1 (1987): 16-48.

Nelly Oudshoorn, 'Endocrinologists and the Conceptualization of Sex, 1920-1940', Journal of the History of Biology 23, no. 2 (1990): 163-186.

Henry Minton, 'Community Empowerment and the Medicalization of Homosexuality: Constructing Sexual Identities in the 1930s', Journal of the History of Sexuality 6, no. 3 (1996): 435-458.

Harry Oosterhuis, 'Sexual Modernity in the Works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll', Medical History 56, no. 2 (2012): 133-155.

Sarah S. Richardson, 'Sexing the X: How the X Became the "Female Chromosome"', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37, no. 4 (2012): 909-933.