This module focusses on the psychoanalytic case study as a distinct genre of writing in the Humanities and as a Social-Scientific method through which knowledge claims about gender and sexuality are constructed, contested, and reconfigured. Across the module, we will consider topics such as the history of hysteria as a female complaint; the gendered politics of the Oedipal schema; the relationship between gender identity and identification; the “queering” of desire; sexuality and the so-called “perversions”; and the binary organization of sex. Students will become familiar with psychoanalytic concepts and frameworks, and learn how to situate them historically and critically with reference to other discourses of sex, gender and sexuality (e.g. sexology, feminism, queer theory).
- Module Supervisor: Chenyang Wang