Prerequisite: None

Exam: Last Class Take-Home

This course will examine the ways in which contemporary liberal legal orders – the United States, other countries around the world, and international entities – construct sex, sexuality, gender and the family to enable political and economic structures and practices that may seem “gender-free.” The course will focus equally on theories of political economy and actual institutional practices.

Classic problems will include gender and unpaid labor in the home; gendered patterns in formal and informal labor; provision of care work; state provision of social security/welfare; the regulation of sexual acts and identities; sex crimes; the anti-trafficking system; the commodification of sexuality and sexual services; the family as an economic unit; and the ideological and institutional roles of gender and the family in nationalist, colonial, and post-colonial legal orders.