GBL 261 SEX, GENDER, AND CULTURE IN THE NETHERLANDS

Students will gain a cross-cultural knowledge of different approaches to understanding and regulating, sex, gender, and sexuality. Students will learn about the differences between American and Dutch approaches to sex & sexuality education, sex work, gender identities, and sexualities and will examine how these differences impact outcomes and policies related to public health, mental health, education, economy, and labor. In the pre-departure course, students will become familiar with foundational concepts in the interdisciplinary field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Through readings, lectures, and class discussion, students will practice applying those models to provided examples of lived experience within a U.S. context. During our time in the Netherlands, we will apply these foundational texts to our interpretation and understanding of how the Dutch approach gender identity, sexuality, sex education, sex work, and sex tourism. Readings, lectures, and site visits while abroad will provide students with information necessary for a comparative analysis of policies, systems, and social and cultural constructions across the U.S. and the Netherlands.

Credits

4

Prerequisite

GBL 161

Course Types

Society

Offered

• Winter

Notes

As a course within the WGSS interdisciplinary field, this course clearly examines the human experience, including the individual, social, and cultural contexts of that experience, as their primary content area.

1. Students will be able to identify gender, sexuality, and sexual practices as complicated, socially-constructed aspects of identity and desire in their own culture to enable them to compare and contrast with manifestations of that construction in the host culture.
2. Students will gain a cross-cultural knowledge of different approaches to understanding and regulating, sex, gender, and sexuality.
3. Students will learn about the differences between American and Dutch approaches to sex & sexuality education, sex work, gender identities, and sexualities and will examine how these differences impact outcomes and policies related to public health, mental health, education, economy, and labor.
4. Students will be able to understand and describe one’s or a group’s social position through an intersectional lens.
5. Students will be able to connect course work to their lived experience, the lived experiences of others, and larger social constructs, structures, and systems. Students will be able to describe the social structures and systems that contribute to differences in access to sex and sexuality education, approaches to sex work, and degrees of sexual health from the U.S. to the Netherlands.