ANTH 2054 - The Sexual Body

North Terrace Campus - Semester 1 - 2015

This course explores how sexuality is understood and experienced cross-culturally. Utilising a variety of historical and cross-cultural frameworks and examples, it will investigate some central theories of sexuality in order to locate particular ideological, political, economic, religious, global and other influences on conceptualisations of human sexuality. In particular, it will examine ethnographic research that questions the 'natural' or given qualities of sexual bodies, identities, ideas and practices. In order to do this, the course will also examine what are often characterised as sexual abnormalities or aberrations in our own and other cultures, such as third genders and homosexual practices. The course will focus on taken for granted aspects of sexuality, especially those assumptions about gendered roles in sexual practices and ideas, the ways in which these may become naturalised, and how anthropology may provide useful ways to critically explore the corporeal and cultural bases of ideas and practices of sexuality. Finally, the course will explore the various ethical and practical problems that anthropologists of sexuality have encountered in specific ethnographic research, and the ways in which they have been able to shed light on more general problems in ethnographic research pertaining to power, reflexivity, and anthropological methodologies and theories.

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