Department of Gender Studies

This seminar examines the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender peoples in the United States during the post-bellum era.  Although the history of the emergence of dissident sexual and gender identity categories during the modern period will be emphasized to a considerable degree, we will also consider historical instances of same-sex sexual behavior and gender non-conformity that predate the coalescence of such categories, or that transpired alongside them, often in accordance with logics of social and cultural difference that are unlike the logics of social and cultural difference that tend to organize our understanding of such phenomena today.