Welcome to the History of Sexuality Toolkit, a free, online Pressbook that fourteen students and one instructor created during the fall semester of 2023, at the Claremont Colleges.
We were inspired to create this Toolkit because of the massive wave of censorship and outright bans on topics of gender and sexuality, as well as race, directed specifically at youth, throughout the United States this year. Even as participants in the seminar were learning about the topics ourselves, we simultaneously worked to create a Toolkit that others could use to join our inquiry.
HISTORY OF SEXUALITY: COURSE DESCRIPTION
Is sexuality a modern construct that didn’t exist in the premodern past? Why does ancient Greece occupy center stage in so many artistic, literary, philosophical, and scientific explorations of sexuality? How might the study of sexuality in the ancient Greek world enable us to better understand our own experiences? In this course, we will trace the intellectual history of sexuality studies and draw on intersectional feminist, Critical Race, Black Trans*, and queer theory to imagine new directions for the field. Participants in this course will become a community of scholars committed to critical inquiry, creative practice, and generating our own histories. We came together in a seminar titled the History of Sexuality, organized by Jody Valentine, a faculty in the Classics program at Pomona College. Students joined from Pitzer, Pomona, and Scripps colleges, which are all part of the Claremont Colleges Consortium. (At the Claremont Colleges, students apply to, attend, and graduate from one of the colleges, but may participate in courses at the other schools.)
This Pressbook is an invitation. Please feel free to duplicate and recreate what we have made. If you have questions, or want to connect, please contact us at our collective email: hostoolkit@gmail.com.
A NOTE FROM THE INSTRUCTOR:
Our work in this seminar, and on this Pressbook, has been collaborative. As we have moved through our work together, I have further developed my own idea about “history” – what it is, and what purpose it serves – especially the “history of sexuality.” As we have noticed in our work, there is no one thing that is THE history of sexuality. Rather, the concept of “sexuality” has multiple histories, all of which are impossible to fully comprehend. In our seminar, we have followed some of the best-known threads in the theorization of sexuality as an historical subject, beginning with Michel Foucault. We have come to understand that sexuality cannot be understood without considering gender. Race, class, economics, and religion are also essential aspects of how sexuality forms individual and social identities. We have noticed that academic discourses are limited in their capacity to help us understand lived experience of sexuality. We have considered how complex the study of sexuality in ancient Greece: our sources are limited and biased; the practices are at once more liberated than at other times in other places, and fraught with ethical problems, including misogyny and pederasty. We have contemplated whether contemporary theories, like Black Trans Feminism, are useful for the study of sexuality historically.
Throughout our work in this History of Sexuality seminar, I have come to a deep understanding of an idea that I have encountered through the scholarship and creative practice of afro-futurism, indigenous futurity, emergent strategy, and queer futures. The study of history understood as an activity aimed toward the creation of liberated futures is an inclusive and empowering practice that we are all invited to join. You may have heard the old cliché that we must study history in order to avoid repeating our mistakes. That aphorism never landed with me; for one thing, it didn’t seem to work. From what I could tell, people in power had been studying history all the while, using it as justification for their choices, as they reanimated the oppressive paradigms and actions of the past. By studying history with humility and the deliberate aim of creating more liberated futures, our seminar has experimented with doing history as a practice that is self-reflective, open-minded, critical, and, above all, empowering.
As the semester concludes, and we prepare our Toolkit for publication, I am grateful for the learning community that we have built. This Toolkit is the culmination of our seminar, but it is not intended to be read as a finished product or authoritative text. Perhaps more than cementing who we are as historians, this course has taught us that we are becoming historians, committed to and capable of continued growth, always developing awareness of our own biases, and understanding the inevitable fact that we all make mistakes. Even as we commit to our continued growth, we recognize that we have the power to create knowledge — and to have fun and build relationships as integral parts of the process.
Our Toolkit includes a glossary of terms, summaries of significant theories, our own poetry, art, and reflective writing. Creating this Toolkit has inspired us to interrogate ourselves and to integrate our own learning so that we could produce something valuable for others. As a teacher, my primary aim in suggesting we create this book was to encourage students in the seminar to take an active role in our co-learning. The students showed up with enthusiasm and integrity and I believe that we have all learned a lot in the process.
–Jody Valentine