Studies in Sexual Regulation
Sexual regulation is found in socio-legal relations, truth regimes, and normalizing discourses. It is pervasive throughout social processes, including those that, on the surface, appear quite removed from sexuality. This course examines how sexual regulation is constituted through state activity, the production of ‘expert’ knowledges, the activities of social movements, and transnational politics. We will de-centre state activity in the interest of undertaking a broadly oriented governmentality approach; one that investigates the normative ordering and reordering of social life.
Our analysis of sexuality is grounded in the premise that, while sexuality is an autonomous field of study in its own right, its history and constitution cannot be separated from gender organization, racialization, economics and class, state formation, and increasingly, transnational forces and knowledge flows. Our analysis explores how dimensions of sexuality, gender, race, class and citizenship are mutually constitutive and ongoing social processes, rather than fixed and pre-given aspects of identity and experience.
