Sex is probably not what you expect to learn about at university. Hidden amid the various genetics, calculus, and history classes, U of T’s course listings boast a small but bold amalgam of courses focused on concepts familiar to all of us: love and sex. The theme is the only unifying aspect of these courses, which can be found across departments and campuses.

CLA222 — Sex, Death, and Poetry explores the theme of sex in ancient Greek and Roman texts across genres, from epics to tragedies, while FCS292 — Love, Sex, and Desire in French Literature and Cinema does so in French literature and cinema from the 18th to the 20th centuries. 

UNI104 — Sex in the City, specifically designed and restricted to first-year students, examines “what ‘sex’ means to Toronto’s varied, multicultural communities,” while JPS378 — Sex and the State covers topics such as “neoliberalism and BDSM.” 

UTSC students can take ANTC09 — Sex, Love, and Intimacy: Anthropological Approaches to Kinship and Marriage or PHLB12H3 — Philosophy of Sexuality, while science lovers can find what they’re looking for in PSY354 — The Biopsychology of Sex at UTM.

More than quirky electives

One course that covers everything from “Sexual Utopias” to the “Hardcore Pornographic Feature” is CIN213 — Cinema & Sensation II: Sex. The class is currently taught by Roshaya Rodness, a sessional lecturer at the Cinema Studies Institute. 

“Not every film department has a course like this for undergraduates,” Rodness — whose syllabus lists over 45 films spanning 11 topics — wrote in an email to The Varsity, “I think our students appreciate what a special opportunity it is to watch films so guarded by censorship and that aren’t always available for public viewing.” 

Exploring these niche films with students is part of the excitement of teaching the course for Rodness. 

“I [really] enjoy teaching short experimental cinema… It’s been a source of really radical sexual expression that you’re not going to see [at] Cineplex.” While acknowledging this, Rodness still noted that there are many new releases. “With Babygirl in theatres right now, I am also excited to teach the psychosexual thriller after reading week.” 

Beyond the screen, there are many courses discussing love and sex for book lovers at U of T. In an email to The Varsity, Xianwei Wu — an assistant professor with the book & media studies program — said her goal is to “help students understand that BL [Boys’ Love] can be a serious field of academic study” through her course, BMS434 — Boys’ Love and the Culture of Desire.

“Boys Love is basically a genre of gay romance written primarily for women by women [that] originated in Japan,” Wu explained. The course covers the cultural and social implications of BL as well as, “the actual tropes of the genre and specific BL works, including eccentric tropes like male pregnancies and the omegaverse, but also serious topics like dubious consent and domestic violence.”

These courses aren’t just quirky electives to take to fulfill breadth requirements. Rodness discussed the importance of her courses in “being able to examine the cinema as a conversation we have about sexuality encourages us to consider how it has shaped economic and political spheres.” 

“Politicians have found an effective scapegoat in trans people to assuage the consequences of global economic disparity,” Rodness expressed, stating that her course “provides a useful vocabulary for making sense of the complexity of today’s identity politics.”

Wu wrote that her students were particularly focused on the ways “BL (also queer culture in general) has been censored or even criminalized in many parts around the world.” She shared that there were “some cases of Chinese BL authors being sentenced to prison as I was teaching the course last semester.”

But both Wu and Rodness ended on a hopeful note.

Wu hopes their class will help “bring attention to those who are facing danger or harm, so they can receive the help they need or at least know that they are being seen and heard.”

“This course is about developing your relationship to the cinema as a source of meaning,” Rodness wrote. “Sex is also an important source of meaning for all of us.”

Plus, Rodness added cheekily, “You get to see naked people screwing.”