Integrated Freshman Seminar Series on Bias, Prejudice, and Bigotry

Topic: Homophobia

Instructor: Professor Valerie Jenness

Course Overview:

This course is the first of three courses in the series. In weekly moderated conversations, students will discuss the causes and consequences of implicit bias, the interaction between personal preferences and political discourses of difference, and the use of ideologies of hate to construct communities organized around fear of the other. Our focus will be on anti-LGBT bias, prejudice, bigotry, and violence.

Bias, prejudice, bigotry, and violence aimed at individuals who identify, or are perceived as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) or otherwise gender variant has been a part of the fabric of most societies historically and in the present era. This course situates bias, prejudice, bigotry, and violence against sexual and gender minorities in an historical context; presents an overview of empirical data that reveals the contours of this type of violence in the modern era; and presents psychological, interactional, cultural, and structural perspectives on violence against LGBTQ people. We discuss empirical and theoretical literature that indicates that the patterned nature of bias, prejudice, bigotry and violence against sexual and gender minorities is an outgrowth of structures and processes intimately connected to a binary sex/gender system in which heterosexuality and heterosexism are defined as normative. The course concludes by examining how, late in the twentieth century, violence against LGBTQ people garnered the attention of activists and interest groups, educators, politicians, journalists, and other stakeholders in unprecedented ways, which in turn engendered significant legislative and other mitigatory responses at the local, state, and national levels in the U.S. and other countries.