WGSS 6010 - Medicine, Science & Sexuality

• Students will be able to describe the historical role of science and medicine in shaping cultural understandings of sexuality.
• Students will be able to recognize the history of medical approaches to intersex, trans, gendered and sexed bodies, and how this history developed a new vocabulary for conceptualizing human sexuality.
• Students will be able to identify the influence of medicine and science in the context of Western colonialism in shaping contemporary global views of sexuality.
• Students will be able to recognize the competing and sometimes contradictory relationship between medical knowledge and feminist and queer activism.
• Students will be able to identify key historical episodes in the scientific and medical approaches to human sexuality.
• Students will be able to compare debates over assisted reproductive technologies and contraceptives within the context of arguments regarding overpopulation and poverty in so-called developing countries to parallel debates in industrialized nations.
• Students will be able to describe the role that birth control science has played in colonial and postcolonial governance and nation formation.
• Students will be able to recognize that narratives of biological essentialism are alternatively used to support, but also to demonize, diverse gender and sexual identities.
• Students will be able to examine the political and ethical context of narratives within LGBTQ communities, and discuss the relationship these narratives have to genetic and evolutionary investigation into human sexuality.