CLAS4203 · Classical Studies

Everyday Aphrodite: Classics and the History of Sexuality

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

This course investigates how the language and culture of ancient Greece and Rome has shaped many of our contemporary ideas on sexuality in the US. Students explore the role of Greco-Roman material in discourses of sexual identity, freedom, and oppression from the first scientific studies of sexual behavior in the late nineteenth-century to notions of sex, gender, and sexuality in the modern day. Throughout the course students analyze both ancient and modern texts to see how classical culture has acted as an explanatory force in the fields of medicine, psychology, law, and politics. Students also explore how marginalized groups, especially LGBTQI peoples, have used Greco-Roman antiquity as a means both for forming community and for arguing equal rights.