This course will engage in reading two kinds of narratives about sexuality: 1) modern historical narratives about the nature of human sexuality and its relationship to gender identity and sexual orientation, and 2) eighteenth-century British narratives that relate a gendered, personal identity to a story of sexual misconduct or transgression. We will begin by looking at how the histories of Michel Foucault, Thomas Laqueur and Nancy Armstrong, for example, narrativize the development of modern sexual identities. We will ask questions about how gender is organized in these historical narratives--does it follow developmental patterns? Is it thought of in oppositional terms (masculine and feminine as opposites)? What range of possibilities do these histories allow in thinking about gender as an organizing principal of sexual desire? In sum, we'll be looking at modern historical narratives of sexuality and gender, particularly as they figure the eighteenth century, and at eighteenth-century British narratives about sex and identity drawn from popular culture. The goal of our study will be both to learn more about how sexuality and gender are imagined in eighteenth-century British popular texts and to learn more about how our own histories construct the field of sexual possibility.
