| This course will use interdisciplinary methods to analyze the construction of sexualities in the Americas, with a particular focus on the ways that sexualities have been created in a transnational frame from the late fifteenth century through the present. I will argue in the course that transcultural and transnational interactions have driven the creation and re-creation of sexual ideologies, behaviors, and imaginations throughout the entire time span covered. The course will take an explicitly transnational approach, emphasizing the ways that sexualities have radiated outward from centers (Europe and the United States) to peripheries, only to have the center/periphery distinctions problematized through the cultural effects of the periphery on the center. Thus students will find that the radical changes that took place in the construction of European sexualities in the period beginning in the late eighteenth century related closely to European contact with indigenous peoples in the Americas. The creation of the United States set into motion a hegemonic discourse in which a U.S. dominated approach to sexuality would become, in the twentieth century, a globalized moralistic framework. But here too sexualities radiated in different and unexpected directions as hegemonic discourses and tropes such as the hyper-sexualized African American man and the Brazilian sexual utopia (or den of sexual decadence, depending on one’s vantage point) show the transnational construction of sexual imaginations in the United States as well as the influence of colonialism, imperialism, globalization, and slavery on the construction of sexualities. |
