2020-2022 Undergraduate and Graduate Bulletin (without addenda) 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2020-2022 Undergraduate and Graduate Bulletin (without addenda) [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

STS-UY 2224W Science and Sexuality

4 Credits
This course explores and analyzes the constructions of sexuality in the biological, social, and medical sciences, focusing on issues in evolutionary biology, endocrinology, neuroscience, psychiatry, comparative anatomy, and genetics. Throughout the semester, we shall compare the various meanings given to sexuality across disciplinary frameworks, paying attention to the increasingly unstable relationships between the categories of fiction and science, reproduction and sexuality, nature and culture, male and female, animal and human, and hetero- and homosexuality. We shall also assess how expert scientific discourses influence popular understandings of sexuality and vice versa. Specifically, we will examine how they contribute to the normalization and official regulation of certain kinds of behavior, how they satisfy a desire for stories about human origins, and how they fashion terms of attraction, repulsion, affection, antagonism, dominance, and submission according to which sexuality is putatively expressed.

Prerequisite(s): Completion of EXPOS-UA 1  or EXPOS-UA 4 
Note: Satisfies a Humanities and Social Sciences Elective.