(re) Assessing Sexualities in the Past

This post borrows from the title of the third week of our course. During this week, we discussed the work of Jeffrey Weeks, Voss and Schmidt, Peter Stearns, and Joan Roughgarden. All of these readings brought up important questions about how we define sexuality in a historical sense. For our first assignment in class, we were asked to define sexuality in our own terms. I will include my definition from that first week below:

“Sexuality” describes both the public and private sexual interests, preferences, behaviors, and actions of individuals and groups that are informed by social constructions and economic, political, and social power and oppression. 

Ultimately, I concluded that sexuality is constantly in a state of flux, not to be confused with constant evolution, and is fundamentally undefinable. The content and discussions from this third week of class certainly solidified that idea. One stand-out piece of content from this course, which I would like to highlight here, Joan Roughgarden's TEDx talk titled "Sexual Diversity in Nature".