La Fabrique de la Différence

Debates around race, gender, and sexuality dominate today’s media and political discourse. Where did these notions of identity originate? What meanings did these concepts carry in the early modern period? How did “science,” before it was even called science, shape ideas about race, gender, and sexuality in France and the French Atlantic Colonies from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries? As Europe rapidly globalized and encountered new people and cultures, what frameworks emerged to explain and categorize human and cultural diversity?

This course explores how doctors, healers, midwives, surgeons, naturalists, travelers, philosophers, and artists contributed to shaping ideas about human difference in the early modern era. Through close readings of primary texts and images, alongside key scholarship in pre-modern critical race studies and gender and sexuality studies, we will explore intersectional conceptions of gender, sexuality and race in the fast-expanding francophone world and their relationship to science. We will uncover how early scientific thinking helped establish paradigms whose influence endured for centuries, and how competing early modern definitions and manifestations of race, gender, and sexuality challenged dominant discourses of difference. We will also engage with nearby archival and museum collections and have opportunities to learn directly from scholars through in-person or virtual class sessions.

Throughout our investigations, we will look for traces and even eruptions of the voices of Native American, Afro-descendant, and gender-nonconforming individuals whose lived practices, perspectives, and acts of resistance often appear only between the lines of scientific or colonial accounts and archives—but whose interventions created powerful disruptions that could not be silenced, creating alternative norms and narratives.

The centuries we will study mark a crucial turning point in the formation of ideas about human difference—ideas whose legacies continue to make their devastating effects felt today. The course encourages students to draw connections between early modern beliefs, prejudices, and systems and those of our own time. By tracing these continuities and ruptures around race, gender, and sexuality, we will consider how the past remains deeply entangled with the present—and how understanding it can help us interrogate the deployment of normative concepts today.