The present course is meant as an introduction to the study of human sexualities as a method that can be used for exploring, reconstructing, and deconstructing the past. The course aims to provide both an overview of the basic conceptual framework and hermeneutic strategies with which modern historians of sexualities (past and present) operate, and practical illustrations of how such strategies work in terms of interpreting a wide range of relevant sources (both textual and visual) produced and circulated from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern times. The following main topics will be addressed (not to the exclusion of others): pre-modern conceptualizations and problematizations of sexual difference and sexual acts, gendered sexualities, the various ideological inscriptions of human bodies (religious, scientific, rhetoric), the relationship between norm and practice, constructions of the sexual self, the rhetorical constructions of sex, sexual conformity vs. divergence.
- Instructor: Cristian-Nicolae Gaspar