The Making of Crucial Differences

Full course description

The Making of Crucial Differences offers a historical inquiry into the development of important social differences marked through categories like gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and social class from the Enlightenment until the mid-twentieth century. The course introduces students to seminal approaches within gender studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory as critical lenses for analysing different historical case studies, philosophical texts, and literary works. Specifically, the course looks into the ways in which dominant Western discourses of identity have formed divisions between self and other; black and white; the Orient and the West; male and female; hetero- and homosexual; upper, middle, and lower classes; and how these differences were used to maintain cultural hierarchies and social inequalities. Special attention is directed to the co-construction of gender, sexuality, race, and class as categories that shaped—and were shaped by—the entangled histories of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and modern science.

The course combines an intersectional theoretical perspective with a historical and discursive approach to the analysis of power and knowledge, and asks how gender, sexuality, race, class, and other crucial differences were conceptualized and “invented” both within and against the dominant discourses of Western modernity. The purported aim of the modern age was to achieve progress through rational, critical thinking and to liberate human beings from dogma, myth, and superstition. But while the Enlightenment promised liberty, democracy, and equality, at the same time it also has created dynamic patterns of inclusion and exclusion that continue to structure and divide society today. This ambivalent legacy of the Enlightenment is at the centre of this course. We will highlight the paradoxes of major modern progress narratives, and their entanglement with structures of power and inequality, while at the same time we will affirm the capacity of minoritarian knowledge production to negotiate, resist, and survive the violent realities of systemic racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and other intersecting forms of oppression.