124344 PS Literary Studies / Proseminar Literature and Cultural Studies (2017W)

This class explores gender and sexual difference in colonial British North America and the early United States (ca. 1600-1830). We will critically discuss basic conceptualizations of gender and sexuality in early America, and trace the cultural struggles over their meaning (e.g. the two-sex model, questions of gendered legislation and sexual ethics, or early forms of feminism). Moreover, we will examine the intersections of gender politics with a number of other cultural issues central to early America and the early modern Atlantic world: settler colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, various forms of racism, nationalism and nation building processes, militarism, as well as the questions of the political public sphere and an emerging aesthetic discourse. In the process, we will also discuss methodological/political questions concerning the archive, canon formation, and the feminist revision of early American culture that took place in the 1980s and 1990s.
In order to better understand how early Americans negotiated questions of gender and sexual difference, we will look at various exemplary historical texts, including court records, travel narratives, pamphlets, and perhaps most significantly, the early American novel.