Course Information

[This is a certified Communication-intensive (CI) Course which meets all of the requirements endorsed by HKU’s Senate, including (i) the teaching assessment of visual and digital communication ‘literacies’; and (ii) at least 40% of the course grade assigned to communication-rich assessment tasks.]

Evolving out of the highly successful Sexual & Gender Diversity Broadening Course, Sexuality and Gender: Diversity and Society promises to be one of the most distinctive and challenging courses you will ever take…

The SGDS will strike a match to light up your intellectual and lived experience as possibly no other course can! With this understanding of other people’s experiences of maleness, femaleness, sexuality, gender expressions and other very interesting and stimulating concepts, you will better understand yourself and important issues we all face in contemporary society.

Built on mutual commitment, this is a special course with potential to be life-changing, because you can expect to:

Engage in open and honest conversations on issues that would normally considered ‘taboo’ or ‘sin’ in our daily lives.
Meet and have a dialogue with people whose gender or sexuality places them on the fringes of mainstream society (in some cases beyond it).
Join contemporary debates on topics that so often stir deep emotions and challenge fundamental beliefs.
Take an experiential journey with innovative assessments that require an open mind, informed judgement, and critical thinking ability.

Most importantly, it is you, our students who have made and will continue making this course exciting and important….

Course Aims are

To critically evaluate concepts central to the study of sexuality (e.g. sex itself, as well as attraction, preference, behaviour and identity), gender (e.g. roles, stereotypes and identity), and diversity (e.g. normality, difference, deviance, disorder, health and sickness).
To appraise the role that society and culture play in the construction of these concepts and the links and distinctions that are drawn between them, as well as in framing actual development of genderedness and sexuality in individuals growing up in any society. To reflect on historical changes (and cultural differences) in the ways in which sexuality, gender and diversity have been (and are) viewed.
To critically appraise the ways that ideas about sexuality and gender are created and transmitted (and adherence to norms is regulated) within any culture or society, for example through the arts (visual, textual and dramatic) and religion, and (in modern societies), through the media (e.g. televisual and cinematic), the sciences (e.g. biology), education, medicine and other helping professions (including psychiatry), and the law and correctional systems.
To reflect upon how these ideas (including norms) frame our responses (individual and collective) to sexuality and gender, as well as to forms of sexual and gender diversity and to the behaviour of persons belonging to sexual and gender minority groups.
To analyse critically the impact of increasing global interconnectedness in framing ideas about sexuality and gender, norms for sexual and gendered behaviour, and individual and collective responses to sexual and gender diversity.
To reflect on ways in which, globally, humanity can reconcile (on one hand) a heightened awareness of cultural differences with (on the other hand) a respect for individual differences and preferences, and a commitment to upholding human rights, justice and equality, and to improving the well-being of humankind.
To reflect and debate on issues of human sexual and gender development and diversity in an informed and rational way, incorporating an awareness of others’ experiences and perspectives (including perspectives unfamiliar to the student’s own culture), but also an appreciation of fundamental democratic values such as freedom of speech (including expression of ideas), human rights, justice and equality.

Issues that will be addressed

How and why might we distinguish between sex, gender and sexuality, and how does each help to define and distinguish us as people?
What do we know about sexual and gender development, and to what extent is such development biologically hard-wired, and/or influenced by experience?
What, if anything, is ‘normal’ human sexuality and genderedness?
How, when we look at the broad range of human sexuality, do we distinguish between normal and abnormal, different and deviant, acceptable and unacceptable, healthy and sick?
How do we respond (individually and collectively) to those whose sexual and gendered identities and patterns of behaviour are different to our own?
How are their lived experiences different from our own?
How do we balance individual rights (e.g. to equal opportunity) and community responsibilities (e.g. ‘to protect family values’)?
What roles do society and culture play in forming our ideas about ‘normality’ in sex, gender and sexuality?
How are such ideas transmitted, for example through language and the arts?
How are sexuality and genderedness regulated through religion, education, media, medicine and the law?
How has science and medicine impacted on the lives of individuals from sexual and gender minorities?
How, in an increasingly interconnected world, are our ideas about sex, gender and sexuality changing and converging?

Why a course like this in the Common Core Curriculum?

Sex, gender and sexuality play central roles in our lives, indeed in our experience of being human. They help define who we are. Yet our sexual and gendered lives, and our responses to those whose sexual and gendered lives are different to our own, occur in the context of a complex web of attitudes and beliefs that themselves play into a broader cultural discourse about the nature of humanity as it is and as it should be, as well as notions of good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable, difference and deviance, and health and sickness.
Such notions invite debate, promoting historical change and cultural variance. Contemporary debates in sex, gender and sexuality draw on disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, law, biology, medicine and history. They also draw on the work of writers such as Michel Foucault and Anne Fausto-Sterling and others who have contributed to the development of a perspective called ‘Queer theory’, but also upon writers such as Simon LeVay, Anne Moir and others who have argued that aspects of sexuality and gender are hard-wired into the brain. The course provides students with some of the tools they need for joining these debates, promoting an informed, open and critical understanding of issues that stir deep emotions and challenge fundamental beliefs.