The Making of Crucial Differences:'Race', Sexuality, Gender and Class in Historical Perspective

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This course offers a historical inquiry into the evolution of intersecting categories of difference: gender, sexuality, class, ‘race’, from the eighteenth century until World War II. It will reconstruct the paradoxes of a ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’, that means the dark side behind its claim for reason, equality, brotherhood and freedom. It aims, firstly, to trace and illustrate the ways in which the Enlightenment has provided a rationale to mark gendered, classed and racialized boundaries in science which, more often than not, resulted in inequalities. These inequalities became embedded in European society in such a way that the active, dominant subject came to be seen as ‘white, male, and middle class.’ Moreover, this dominance grew beyond ‘Europe’ and helped to carry out the imperial project. The centrality of empire discursively and materially forged a ‘European-ness’ that was distinctively gendered, classed and racialized. This will introduce you to how middle class was defined in relation to the working class. Secondly, the course will problematize social divisions such as ‘race’, class, and gender as well as norms like heterosexuality, middle-class-ness etc. by looking at shifting boundaries of these divisions and norms. Thus, it will examine the dynamic processes of their formation and contradictions, which emerged out of these processes. We will heed our attention to some of the salient ways in which women and men of the different classes and ‘races’ became embedded in social relationships, thereby often transgressing taken-for-granted lines of differences. We will primarily draw on examples from ‘European’ history. We will ask how the European colonial adventure and its constructions of ‘Otherness’ was connected to Anti-Semitism and how the Jews became the “inner Other”. Finally, the course aims to introduce a wide range of debates that offer the possibility to analyze the ways in which differences have intersected with one another in different periods and how they have manifested themselves in power relations.
Disciplinary perspectives
History, Philosophy, Gender and Diversity Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology.