HSOC-201: The Gender Project

This course will find students (alongside their instructor) grappling with human desire and creativity in the individual quest for friendship, sex, power, and love. Through reading, writing, discussion, and artmaking, we'll tackle important, if potentially uncomfortable issues surrounding childhood sexuality, intersexuality, perversion, pornography, prostitution, casual sex, acquaintance rape, dating, and marriage-and the ethical concerns to which these issues inevitably give rise. As an undergraduate philosophy seminar, we'll generally raise difficult questions rather than accept stock answers. Throughout, we'll try to maintain our composure even when a little vulnerability is called for and the facts are in dispute. The only prerequisites are an open mind and an interest in self-exploration.