3 semester credits. This course will explore sex, love, romance, desire, and intimate relationships in the modern world from both global and historical perspectives. Topics include multicultural awareness and exploration of how identity formation, cultural norms, gender, xenophobia, class, and sexual orientation influence various ethnic and cultural stereotypes. Students will analyze how ethnicity, class, gender, nationality, ability, and sexuality intersect, along with the changing definitions of sexual respectability, prostitution and sex-based work in different contexts, sexual behavior and sexual ideals, trans-sexuality and trans-gender identities, the meaning of marriage, the cult of romance, sexual revolutions and gender conflict, state regulation of sexuality, global sexual epidemics, and love and sex in popular culture.
