Central European University, Department of Gender Studies
Anthropology and the Erotic Other
GENS 5014
MA Level Class
Fall 2012-13
Hadley Z. Renkin renkinh@ceu.hu
Class Time: T 3:30-5:10pm/Th 11-12:40pm
Place: T Z412/Th Z411A
Course Description
Office: Zrínyi 512
Office Hours: TBA
The purpose of this course is to explore how our understanding of the meanings of sexuality and the erotic have been and continue to be produced through the concrete conjunctions of sexual desires and practices with a range of gendered, raced, classed, and geopolitical differences, and how this has shaped the definition and disciplining of a wide variety of internal and external erotic Others, with critical consequences for people’s lives, and senses of identity, community, and politics. From the United States to New Guinea to Eastern Europe, and from Foucault to
Fascism to (post)Fordism, the class will draw upon material from anthropology, history, and cultural studies, to investigate and compare these understandings of erotic difference and their consequences across time and space, focusing on how different understandings of sexual identities, communities, and politics constitute, intersect with, and support or contest, broader systems of power and meaning, inclusion and exclusion. The course is meant both to destabilize our often unquestioned assumptions about sexuality and the erotic, and render more visible their mutual constitution with other critical vectors of social, cultural economic, and political difference. Discussion topics will include: colonial sex and exotic others; erotic outlaws and social control; national sexualities; erotic spatialities past and present; class erotics; HIV/AIDS; global sexual frictions; and transgender Others.
Learning outcomes: This course will acquaint students with a wide range of analytical approaches to the study of sexuality as a cultural phenomenon, and will provide them with the intellectual knowledge necessary to perceive and articulate more effectively its varied, complex, and subtle connections to relations of power, inclusion, and exclusion. Through its emphasis on the close reading of texts, as well as the continual linking of scholarly analysis to current, concrete manifestations of sexual practices and politics, the course will strengthen students’ skills in critical scholarship. Participation in discussion and writing for the course will train students to hone their effective expression of thoughts and reactions in analytical and scholarly terms.
Student Responsibilities and Requirements
This is a discussion-based course, not a lecture course. It will, therefore, require a great deal of responsibility on the part of all of you. For each class, I will first introduce and contextualize the week’s topic. We will then, as a class, map out the central theoretical and analytical moves presented by the day’s readings, their specific arguments, and the relationships between them.
The remainder of the class will be an open discussion of these arguments and their implications –
1

Central European University, Department of Gender Studies in which I will occasionally mediate or intervene. Thus, all of you will be expected to analyze, express your opinions about, and debate the assigned materials in depth.
Requirements:
Short article summary presentation
After the first week of class, each of you will be required to present a SHORT (5 minute
MAXIMUM) presentation summarizing the main argument of one of the readings for the course, and come up with a couple of questions for discussion. This will be considered
10% of your class participation grade.
Final research paper (12-15 pages, typed, double-spaced)
A final research paper is required for the class:
This must be a critical research paper, exploring in depth one or more of the key issues examined in this course. Around the middle of the semester, each of you will meet with me in order to choose an appropriate topic and discuss possible readings for and approaches to the paper.
N.B.: The paper will be due on the last day of class; late papers will not be accepted.
Grading:
General participation in class discussions will count for 50% of your grade (including 10% for your summary presentation). The Final Research Paper is worth 50% of the total course grade.
Class Schedule:
Part One: Setting Things Up
I. Introduction: Sex and why, where, and when it matters
1
Foucault, Michel. 1978. Part I, “We Other Victorians”, and Part II, “The Repressive
Hypothesis”, in The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, An Introduction. New York: Pantheon, p1-14, 15-50.
1
2 Stoler, Ann. 1995. “Chapter One: Colonial Studies and the History of Sexuality”, Race and the Education of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, p1-18.
Rubin, Gayle. 2009. “A Little Humility” in Gay Shame. Halperin, David, and Valerie
Traub, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p369-74.
II. Colonizing the Erotic
Bleys, Rudi. 1995. “Chapter One: The Pre-Enlightenment Legacy” in The Geography of
Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic
Imagination, 1750-1918. New York: New York University Press, p17-44.
2

Central European University, Department of Gender Studies
1
Agnani, Sunil. 2007. “Doux Commerce, Douce Colonisation: Diderot and the Two Indies of the French Enlightenment” in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment. Wolff, Larry and Marco Cipolloni, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p65-84.
2
Stoler, Ann. 2002. Chapter 3, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender and
Morality in the Making of Race” in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: UC Press, p41-78.
III. “Sexuality”: what’s in a name?
Herdt, Gil. 1999. “Introduction: Sexual Cultures, Strange and Familiar”, Chapter One,
“Songs in the Key of Life”, and Chapter Two, “Sambia Sexual Culture” in Sambia
Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p1-88.
2 Elliston, Deborah. 1995. “Erotic Anthropology: ‘Ritualized Homosexuality’ in Melanesia and beyond” American Ethnologist 22 (4):848-67.
Wardlow, Holly. 2004. "Anger, Economy, and Female Agency: Problematizing
"Prostitution" and 'Sex Work' among the Huli of Papua New Guinea." Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 29(4):1018-1040.
Part Two: Other Sites and Situations
IV. Panicking, Sexualizing, Bordering
1 Rubin, Gayle. 1984. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Carol Vance, ed.
London: Routledge, p267-318.
Lancaster, Roger. 2011. Ch 1 “Panic: A Guide to the Uses of Fear” in Sex Panic and the
Punitive State. Berkeley: UC Press, p23-38.
2 Walkowitz, Judith R. 1980. “Introduction: The revolt of the women”, and Chapter 10,
“The Making of an Outcast Group”, in Prostitution and Victorian society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p1-9 and 192-213.
Kulick Don. 2003. “Sex in the New Europe : The Criminalization of Clients and Swedish
Fear of Penetration” Anthropological Theory 3(2):199-218.
2
V. National Erotics
1
Mosse, George. 1985. “Introduction” and “Manliness and Homosexuality”, in
Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, p1-22 and 23-47.
Herzog, Dagmar. 2002. “Hubris and Hypocrisy, Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and
German Fascism.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11(1/2): 3-21.
3

Central European University, Department of Gender Studies
Bérubé, Allan. 2011. “Coming Out Under Fire” in My Desire for History: Essays in Gay,
Community, & Labor History. D’Emilio, John and Estelle Freedman, eds. Chapel Hill,
NC: UNC Press, p100-12.
VI. Identifying Spaces, Pt. 1
1 October 23rd - NATIONAL HOLIDAY - No Class!
2 Healey, Dan. 2002. “Homosexual Existence and Existing Socialism: New Light on the
Repression of Male Homosexuality in Stalinist Russia”, GLQ 8(3):349-78.
VII. Identifying Spaces, Pt. 2
1 Essig, L. 1999. Ch 3 “Identity Politics and the Politics of Identity” and Ch 4 “Queer
Subjects and Subjectivities” in Queer in Russia: A Story of Self, Sex, and the Other.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p55-82, 83-101.
2 November 1st - NATIONAL HOLIDAY - No Class!
VIII. Out-classed
1 D’Emilio, John. 1993. “Capitalism and Gay Identity”, in The Lesbian and Gay Studies
Reader, Abelove, Henry, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds. New York:
Routledge, p467-76.
Maskovsky, Jeff. 1999. “Do We All ‘Reek of the Commodity’?: Consumption and the
Erasure of Poverty in Lesbian and Gay Studies” in Out in Theory: The Emergence of
2
Lesbian and Gay Anthropology. Lewin, Ellen, and William Leap, eds. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, p264-86.
Bérubé, Allan. 2011. “Class Dismissed” in My Desire for History: Essays in Gay,
Community, & Labor History. D’Emilio, John and Estelle Freedman, eds. Chapel Hill,
NC: UNC Press, p233-58.
IX.
[American Anthropological Association Meetings in San Francisco - No Classes!]
Makeup class (TBA): Acting and Being, Selves and Others
Wekker, Gloria. 2007. Chapter One, “No Tide, No Tamara” and Chapter Five, “The Mati
Work” in The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese
Diaspora. New York: Columbia University Press, p1-54 and 171-222.
X. Residues of Fear and Love: HIV/AIDS
1 Gilman, Sander, 1987. "AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease", in AIDS:
Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Crimp, Douglas ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, p87-
107.
2
Carrillo, Héctor. 2002. Ch 11 “Trust, Love, Passion: The Relational Context of HIV
Risk” in The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, p255-88.
4

Central European University, Department of Gender Studies
Takacs, Judit, et al. “Condoms Are Reliable but I Am Not”: A Qualitative Analysis of
2
AIDS-Related Beliefs and Attitudes of Young Heterosexual Adults in Budapest,
Hungary and St. Petersburg, Russia”
Central European Journal of Public Health 14(1):
59–66.
XI. Globalocal Others
1 Altman, Dennis. 1997. “Global Gaze/Global Gays”, GLQ 3:417-36.
Manalansan, Martin F. 1997. “In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay
Transnational Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma”, in The Politics of Culture in the
Shadow of Capital, Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, p485-505.
Rofel, Lisa. 1999. “Qualities of Desire: Imagining Gay Identities in China”, GLQ: A
Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 5 (4):451-74.
Gaudio, R. 2009. “Man Marries Man in Nigeria?” in Out in Public: Reinventing
Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World. Lewin, Ellen and William Leap, eds.
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, p273-91.
XII. Transidentities
1 Valentine, David. 2007. “Introduction”, Ch 2 “Making Community” and Ch 3 “‘I know
What I Am’: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity” in Imagining transgender: an ethnography of a category. Durham: Duke University Press, p3-28, 68-104, 105-37.
2 film: A Boy Named Sue (2000)
5