2016 - 2017

0621-9040-01
  Queer and Transgender History in the Modern Era                                                      
FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
Prof. Iris RachamimovGilman-humanities319àTue1600-2000 Sem  2
 
 
University credit hours:  4.0

Course description
Queer History has developed in the past two decades into one of the most innovative and dynamic fields of historical research. On the most basic level, the field deals with the historical experience of sexual and gender minorities (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender = LGBT), and their attempts to fight discrimination, to express themselves and to gain rights and respect. In the first part of the seminar we will focus on the emergence of a new of thinking about gender and sexuality in modern Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, and on the centrality of doctors, psychiatrists and jurists in developing this new conceptual framework. The second section of the seminar will discuss the oppressive and potentially liberating elements embedded in this new way of thought, and the emergence in Germany in 1897 of the first "Gay Liberation" organization (the Scientific Humanitarian Committee - headed by Magnus Hirschfeld). The third section of the course will discuss developments in North America in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and will examine the creation of powerful new mechanisms of oppression and exclusion (some sponsored and initiated by the psychiatric establishment). At the same time we will look at the emergence of a powerful new liberation movement riddled with inner conflicts and conflicting agendas. The final part of the seminar will be devoted to local LGBT history. One of the goals of the seminar is to serve as an incubator for the development of original research in the history of LGBT (local and non local)

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