ANTH 538 - Kinship, Gender & Sexuality

Credits: 4

Examines theories of power and difference through a focus on kinship, gender and sexuality. Organizing questions include: how kinship works to bind people to social structures, how the powerful bonds of kinship, with their signifying ties to gender and sexuality, are made available for larger social projects (community-building, nationalism, social policy, etc.), and produce exclusions as meanings grounded in everyday practices are redeployed to larger arenas; how kinship mediates relationships between nature and culture, and through that works to “naturalize” social differences (gender, race, sexuality, class) and systems of inequality. We ground our studies of kinship, gender and sexuality in readings on their places and uses in, for example, colonialism, decolonization, prostitution, queer subcultures, nation-building, “race” and racism, and new reproductive technologies.