(Offered as HIST 381 [TC/TR/TS] and SWAG 381). This seminar will explore the histories of transgender identities, activism, and communities around the world. Some questions to be engaged include: What concepts have been used to understand gender variant, expansive, and nonconforming people throughout history? How have war, violence, and legacies of colonialism, enslavement, and exploitation shaped the terms and conditions by which people of transgender experience and expression understood themselves and were perceived by others? How have transgender people advocated for self-determination, legal rights, and medical care? How has the transgender rights movement intersected with the civil, disability, women’s, and the LGBTQ rights movements? Students will work with primary sources such as newspaper accounts, legal codes, medical journals, religious texts, memoirs, and manifestos as well as pathbreaking historic studies of transgender people in China, England, Germany, Iran, Thailand, and the United States.
One class meeting per week. Limited to 18 students. Spring Semester. Professor Manion.
If Overenrolled: SWAGS and History majors will have priority.