In response to requests from faculty and candidates alike for more recent and inclusive perspectives on gender and sexuality, the Committee on Gender and Sexuality would like to share with the psychoanalytic community the following course syllabi from APsaA institutes across the country. These syllabi were developed by faculty with extensive teaching experience and familiarity with current literature on gender and sexuality. As you will discover, these syllabi represent a wide range of approaches to this vast topic, with varying degrees of weight attributed to historical versus postmodern concepts of sexuality and gender, to socially constructed versus biological conceptions of gender identity and sexual desire, and to the political and philosophical realms of gender and sex. We believe what they all share is a rigorous, thoughtful approach, yet a willingness to question long-held psychoanalytic ideas, while maintaining a dialectical tension between the old and the new, the socially constructed and the biological, the real and the fantastical. We don’t really know how gender and sexuality are constructed, and the Committee on Gender and Sexuality offers access to these syllabi in hopes of stimulating the psychoanalytic curiosity we all share.

Gender & Sexuality Syllabi: