FS 013 PZ -Global Intimacies

Institution: Pitzer

Description: In Western culture, we locate intimacy in ‘natural’ and ‘enduring’ spaces and relationships: love, family, marriage, desire, sexuality, the body, reproduction, etc. From this perspective, intimacy remains outside of broad-scale social processes. Yet, intimate and reproductive labor-such as domestic service, sex work, surrogacy, medical tourism, cross-border marriages, transnational adoption, organ trafficking, etc.-tie the intimate to the large-scale, the individual to the social, the local to the global. Some of the questions we will ask are: How do past and present global transformations change practices of love and intimacy? What do “love” or “marriage” or “parenthood” mean in different locations, and how are they changed by transnational exchanges? How do inequalities (of class, race, gender, sexuality, or geography) produce and shape intimate relations across national borders? Pairing ethnographic (anthropological) texts with fiction and non-fiction films, this course will investigate several case studies of global intimacies.

Prerequisite(s): First-Year Seminars are required for all incoming freshman and do not have prerequisites.

First-Year seminars are not listed on the course schedule. Incoming students will be assigned to a first-year seminar and registered automatically.