Harvard University is offering students a course that teaches modern-day conceptions of sexuality and gender identity in the context of colonialism.
The course, titled “The Sexual Life of Colonialism,” will consider “the role of colonialism and neocolonialism in racial imaginations of gender and sexuality and how these histories shape contemporary understandings of LGBTQ politics, reproductive and sexual rights, and anti-colonial resistance around the world.”
Students will also examine “queer” and “trans sexualities” that supposedly exist in “colonial and postcolonial spaces.”
The class will also “cover many forms of sexuality, including interracial relationships between colonizer and colonized peoples, questions of sexual violence, queer desires, sexual outcasts like ‘prostitutes,’ transgender rights, and the politics of gender difference and LGBTQ rights in the postcolonial world.”
Durba Mitra, an Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, will be teaching the course. Her research interests combine “feminist studies, sexuality studies, and global intellectual history.”
Mitra’s first book was “Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought,” which “demonstrates how ideas of deviant female sexuality became foundational to modern social thought.”
She has taught other courses as part of Harvard University’s gender studies program, such as “Who Run the World? Feminism in the Age of Empire,” “Feminist and Queer Theories of Difference,” “Solidarity: Transnational Women’s Rights from Suffrage to NGOs,” and “Feminist Theory: The Body as Archive.”
Mitra is also teaching a junior tutorial this semester called “Research and Methods.”
Campus Reform contacted Harvard University and Durba Mitra for comment. This story will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
