Syllabus

Sex, Gender, and Print

Sunday, June 8 - Friday, June 13, 2025

All required and suggested readings available to participants via Dropbox.

Required viewing: Searching the American Antiquarian Society Catalog (time: circa 35 minutes)

• Five Things to Know about the AAS Catalog
• Anatomy of a Catalog Record
• Finding Digital Surrogates
• MARC View
• Wildcard Searches

Sunday, June 8: Introduction and Orientation

4:00-6:00 pm: Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury St.

Welcome, introductions, and a tour of the library with Scott Casper (President, American Antiquarian Society), John Garcia (AAS Director of Scholarly Programs and Partnerships), Greta LaFleur (Associate Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University), and Jordan Alexander Stein (Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Fordham University).

6:00-7:30 pm: Goddard-Daniels House (GDH), 190 Salisbury Street Post-tour reception and dinner.

Monday June 9: Definitions / Terminology: The Historicity of Analytic Frameworks

9:00-10:00 am: Learning Lab (LL) in Antiquarian Hall. Participants complete library registration (bring 2 forms of ID).

10:00-10:30 am: (GDH): Coffee/tea break

10:30am-12:30 pm (LL): Sex & Gender and How and Whether to Parse Them
Overview of syllabus and first discussion of readings.
Required Primary Reading:

• Melissa Adler, Cruising the Library: Perversities and the Organization of Knowledge (Fordham, 2017), ix–xvii.
• Jen Manion, “Introduction: Extraordinary Lives,” Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge, 2020), 1–14.
• Maria Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice, ed. Wendy Harcourt (Macmillan, 2016).
• Kai Pyle, “Naming and Claiming: Recovering Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit Language,” TSQ 5.4 (2018): 574–588.

Suggested Readings:

• Greta LaFleur, “‘What’s in a Name?’ They/Them,” Journal of the Early Republic 43.1, (2023): 109–119.
• Scott Larson, “‘Indescribable Being’: Theological Performances of Genderlessness in the Society of the Publick Universal Friend, 1776–1819,” Early American Studies 12.4 (2014): 576–600.
• Jordan Alexander Stein, “Sexuality and Print Culture,” Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition vol 2: 1820–1860, ed. Justine S. Murison (Cambridge, 2022), 235–252.

Optional Background Readings:

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Axiomatic,” Epistemology of the Closet (California, 1990).
• Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah, eds. “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First Century Transgender Studies,” special issue of TSQ 1.1-2 (2014): 9–272.
• *C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minnesota, 2017).
• Marquis Bey, “The Transness of Blackness, the Blackness of Transness,” TSQ 4.2 (2017): 275–295.

12:30-1:30 pm (GDH): Lunch

1:30-3:00 pm (LL):
Required Primary Reading:

• Anonymous, “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly Magazine 50.6 (Dec. 1857): 599-609.
• Anonymous, “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” American Periodicals from the Center for Research Libraries (Collection II).
• Anonymous, “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” in Christopher Looby, ed. “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman” and Other Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories (Penn, 2017), 94–108.
• Elizabeth Reis, “Transgender Identity at a Crossroads: A Close Reading of a ‘Queer’ Story from 1857,” Early American Studies 12.3 (2014): 652–665.
• Christopher Looby, “Sexuality, History, Difficulty, Pleasure,” J19 1.2 (2013): 253–258.
• Rafael Walker, “The Nineteenth Century Just Got Queerer,” GLQ 25.2 (2019): 363–365.

3:00-3:15 pm: Break

3:15-4:30 pm (LL): Primary Source Perusal

Evening: Dinner on your own 
Homework: identify 3-4 items in the AAS catalog for independent study.

Tuesday June 10: Reading Absences / Silences in the Archive
Students must submit requests for 3-4 AAS collections items by 1:30 pm.

9:00-10:30 am (LL)
Required Primary Reading:

• Anjali Arondekar, “Introduction: Without a Trace,” For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke, 2009), 1–25.
• Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12.2 (2008), 1–14.
• Brian Connolly and Marisa Fuentes, “Introduction: From Archives of Slavery to Liberated Futures?” History of the Present 6.2 (2016): 105–116.
• Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale, 2018), 1–16.

Optional Background Readings:

• David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (1986).
• Lamont Aidoo, Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History (Duke UP, 2018).

10:30-11:00 am (GDH): Coffee/tea break and meet the curators

11:00 am-12:30 pm (LL) Sex/Slavery/Consent/Law
Required Primary Reading:

• Emily Owens, “Eliza’s Last Child,” Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (UNC, 2023), 9–27.
• Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe 22.1 (2018): 1–17.
• Sharon P. Holland, “The ‘Beached Whale’,” GLQ 17.1 (2011): 89–95.
• Aliyyah Adbur Rahman, “‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives,” African American Review 40.2 (2006): 223–237.

Suggested Readings:

• Sarah Deer, “What She Say, It Be Law: Tribal Rape Law and Indigenous Feminisms,” The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minnesota, 2015), 16–30.

Optional Background Readings:

• Lauren Berlant, “Sex in the Event of Happiness,” On the Inconvenience of Other People (Duke, 2022), 31–74.

12:30-1:30 pm (GDH): Lunch

1:30- 3:00 pm (LL): Guest instructor Katie Walkiewicz (UC San Diego)
Required Primary Reading:

• Deborah A. Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ 16.1-2 (2010): 253–284.
• Sara E. Johnson, “Illustrative Storytelling,” Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World (UNC, 2023), 215–234.
• Deborah A. Miranda, “Bridges: Post-Secularization, 1836–1900,” Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Heyday, 2013), 1–21.

Suggested Readings:

• Sara E. Johnson, “Introduction,” Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World (UNC, 2023), 1–21.
• Jean O’Brien, “Historical Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies: Touching on the Past, Looking to the Future,” Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, ed. Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien (Routledge, 2017), 15–22.

Optional Background Readings:

• Greg Younging, Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and about Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edition (Birchbark, 2025).
• Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, Angie Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy,” Feminist Formations 25.1 (2013): 8–34.
• Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, “The Ea of Pilina and ’Aina,” Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo'olelo, Aloha 'Aina, and Ea (Minnesota, 2021).
• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “The Sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples’ Bodies” and “Indigenous Queer Normativity,” As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minnesota, 2020).
• Aisha Finch, “The Anatomy of a Rural Movement,” Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841–1844 (UNC, 2015), 168–198.
• Jennifer L. Morgan, “Accounting for ‘The Most Excruciating Torment’: Gender, Slavery, and Trans-Atlantic Passages,” History of the Present 6.2 (2016): 184–207.

• Kai Pyle, “Naming and Claiming: Recovering Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit Language,” TSQ 5.4 (2018): 574–588.

   

3:00-3:15 pm - Break

3:15-4:30pm (LL): Primary Source Perusal

Evening: Dinner on your own

Wednesday June 11: Circulation / Impact / Audience

9:00-10:30 am (LL):
Required Primary Reading:

• Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49–90.
• Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (Knopf, 2002), 3–15.
• Joanna Brooks, “The Unfortunates: What the Life Spans of Early Black Books Tell Us About Book History,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Cohen and Stein (Penn, 2012), 40–52.

Background Readings:

• Michael Warner, “New English Sodom,” American Literature 64.1 (1992): 19–47.
• Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 547–566.
• Patricia Cline Cohen, “Public and Print Cultures of Sex in the Long Nineteenth Century,” The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History, ed. Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Lisa G. Materson (Oxford, 2018), 195–216.
• Joseph Rezek, “The Racialization of Print,” American Literary History 32.3 (Fall 2020): 417–445.

10:30-11:00 am (GDH): Coffee/tea break

11:00 am-12:30 pm (LL): Science, Medicine and Popular Print
Required Primary Reading:

• Thomas H. Johnson, “Jonathan Edwards and the ‘Young Folks’ Bible,” NEQ V (1932): 37–54.
• Vern L. Bullough, “An Early American Sex Manual, or, Aristotle Who?” Early American Literature 7.3 (1973): 236–246.
• Ava Chamberlain, “The Immaculate Ovum: Jonathan Edwards and the Construction of the Female Body,” The William and Mary Quarterly 57.2 (2000): 289–322.
• Mary E. Fissell, “Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle’s Masterpiece,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60.1 (2003): 43–74.
• Sarah Schuetze, “Bodies,” Early American Studies 16.4 (2018): 607–613.

Background Readings:

• Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Georgia, 2017).

12:30-1:30 pm (GDH): Lunch

1:30- 3:00 pm (LL): Primary Source Perusal

3:00-3:15 pm - Break

3:15- 4:45 pm (AH): Individual Research in the Reading Room

Time for viewing materials of interest to you – and also consultation with seminar leaders.

5:00-7:00 pm: Dinner on your own

7:00-8:00 pm (Antiquarian Hall): James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture. Christopher Looby, “Revisiting Jonathan Edwards and the ‘Bad Books’ Controversy” (A reception in the Goddard-Daniels House will take place after the lecture.)

Thursday June 12: Capital / Labor / Economic Life

9:00- 10:30 am (LL):
Required Primary Reading:

• John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (Monthly Review, 1983), 100–113.
• Emma Heaney, “Introduction: Sexual Difference without Cis-ness,” Feminism Against Cis-ness, ed. Heaney (Duke, 2024), 1–33.
• Tera Hunter, “The Marriage Certificate,” Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard, 2019), 1–22.

Optional Background Readings:

• Kathi Weeks, “Introduction,” The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke, 2011).
• Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory (Pluto, 2017).
• Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1989).
• Essays on the Story of Eleanor Rykener:
  • David Lorenzo Boyd and Ruth Mazo Karras, “The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London,” GLQ 1.4 (1995): 459–465.
  • Carolyn Dinshaw, “Afterlives,” GLQ 25.1 (2019): 5–6.
  • M. W. Bychowski, “The Transgender Turn: Eleanor Rykener Speaks Back,” Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern, ed. Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov and Anna Klosowska (Cornell, 2021), 95–113.

10:30-11:00 am (GDH): Coffee/tea break

11:00 am-12:30 pm (LL): Guest instructor Emily Owens (Brown University)
Dr. Owens will speak to the group about her book, Consent in the Presence of Force.

Recommended further reading:

• Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (University of Chicago Press, 2007)
• Marisa J. Fuentes, “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen's Troubled Archive” Gender & History (2010)
• Alexandra J. Finley, An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)
• Heather Berg, “Free Sex” South Atlantic Quarterly (2023)
• Samantha Pinto, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (Duke University Press, 2020)
• Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, 1999).
• Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Columbia University Press, 1996)

12:30-1:30 (GDH): Lunch and overview of the AAS fellowships with Nan Wolverton (AAS Vice President for Academic and Public Programs)

1:30-3:00 pm: Sex Work
Required Primary Reading:

• Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in History: From Parables of Pornography to Metaphors of Modernity,” The American Historical Review, 104.1 (1999): 117–141.
• Marcia Carlisle, “Disorderly City, Disorderly Women: Prostitution in Ante-Bellum Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 60.4 (1986): 549–568.
• Jules Gill-Peterson, “Sex and the Antebellum City,” A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Verso, 2024), 61–95.

Optional Background Readings: 

• Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Harvard, 2009), 1–42.
• Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-century New York (Knopf, 1998).

3:00-3:15 pm: Break

3:30-4:45 (AH): Individual Research in the Reading Room
Time for viewing materials of interest to you – and also consultation with seminar leaders.

6:00-7:30 pm (GDH grounds): Evening Picnic

Friday June 13: Presentations & Closing Thoughts

9:00- 10:30 am (LL): Presenting the Research Questions

10:30-10:45 am: brief comfort break

10:45 am--12:30 pm (LL): Presenting the Research Questions and Closing Thoughts

12:30-1:30 pm (GDH): Lunch

1:30- 5 pm: More research time on your own in the library or departures