This course will explore the history of sexual expression, desire, and regulation, together with the social and political conditions that facilitated their emergence from the early modern period to now. Lectures will provide background information in order to help students evaluate the different ways in which people have defined and understood what constituted normative, normal, healthy, aberrant, transgressive, and deviant sexuality in different social, geographical and temporal contexts. We will take a global approach, looking at how persons and ideas have moved through and across borders, sometimes buttressing power, other times challenging it. Upon completion of the course, students will come to see that here have been many different ways of thinking about what counts as normal and perverse, denigrated and desired.