The Making of Crucial Differences:'Race', Sexuality, Gender and Class in Historical Perspective

Academic year 2011-12

Date last modified

23-4-2012 1:29

Period

Period 1

Startdate:

05-Sep-11

Enddate:

28-Oct-11

Code

HUM2003

ECTS credits

5.0

Organisational unit

University College Maastricht

Coordinator

Description

This course offers a historical inquiry into the evolution of intersecting categories of difference: gender, sexuality, class, ‘race’, from the eighteenth century until World War II. It aims, firstly, to trace and illustrate the ways in which the Enlightenment has provided a rationale to mark gendered, classed and racialized boundaries in science which, more often than not, resulted in inequalities. These inequalities became embedded in European society in such a way that the active, dominant subject came to be seen as ‘white, male, and middle class.’ Moreover, this dominance grew beyond ‘Europe’ and helped to carry out the imperial project. The centrality of empire discursively and materially forged a ‘European-ness’ that was distinctively gendered, classed and racialized. This will introduce you to how middle class was defined in relation to the working class. Secondly, the course will problematize social divisions such as ‘race’, class, and gender as well as norms like heterosexuality, middle-class- ness etc. by looking at shifting boundaries of these divisions and norms. Thus, it will examine the dynamic processes of their formation and contradictions, which emerged out of these processes. We will heed our attention to some of the salient ways in which women and men of the different classes and ‘races’ became embedded in social relationships, thereby often transgressing taken-for-granted lines of differences. We will primarily draw on examples from ‘European’ history. This indeed urges us to look at the world of empire, through which ‘European-ness’ has come to the fore. Finally, the course aims to introduce a wide range of debates that offer the possibility to analyze the ways in which differences have intersected with one another in different periods and how they have manifested themselves in power relations.

Goals

• To acquaint students with historical configurations and intersections of ‘race’, class, gender and sexuality, and the way in which they were conceptualised and sometimes newly invented in science, philosophy and social theory; • To acquaint students with the way in which these configurations have structured cultural texts and images, individual identities and organisations; • To acquaint students with the way in which such intersecting categories of difference have constituted (and still constitute) inequalities and differences of power, resulting in invisibility, restricted access to sources etc.

Instruction language

Prerequisites

Recommended literature

• Students can obtain the reader at the University Library. • Each problem is accompanied by a list of obligatory reading. References with a R are found in the reader and those with an L can be found in the University Library.

Teaching methods

PBL
LECTURE(S)

Assessment methods

FINAL PAPER
ATTENDANCE
PARTICIPATION
WRITTEN EXAM
TAKE HOME EXAM

Key words