This lecture talks about the putative three waves of feminism and puts forward the under-represented idea that the so-called "Third Wave" has not yet taken place, that much of what we call the Third Wave is actually part of the backlash against the second.

This episode of the course will likely be one of the more controversial. While its larger thesis is that transgender people have always existed and deserve social accommodation and legal equality, it challenges many of the ideas common in the transgender rights movement by historicizing gender and suggesting that a society's order with respect to gender non-conformity arises from specific historical and social conditions and is consequently highly variable and contingent. The lecture is also choppy in early parts because two personal anecdotes required anonymization for a larger audience.

There is a long digression about the rise of the US Republican Party and its institutional importance in modern politics of identity in a a fairly Eurocentric narration of the history of homosexual identities. 

In this class, we discuss the Marxian fundamentals of oppression: gender, class and race. The lecture proceeds from the understanding that forms of oppression linked to systems of labour structure human experience in ways mere bigotry does not.

In this episode we apply commodity fetishism and other Marxist ideas to major cultural, economic and political developments of the long twentieth century, including the rise of sexual orientation as an identity category, the formation of white settler states and the commodification of culture. We also reveal the strange origins of the IGA grocery chain.

The lecture discusses the film Being John Malkovich and then engages with major Western Canon thinkers, Thomas Hobbes, Plato, Sigmund Freud and Julian Jaynes, as well as Sufi mystic Idries Shah.

Our first real lecture follows the rise of modern identity categories and practices, tracing their beginnings to the rise of conspiracy theory during the Black Death, plantation race slavery on Crete and Cyprus by the Genovese and Venetians, the Spanish conquests of the Granadans, Mexica and Inca and the rise of the Inquisition.

Identitarianism is a new way of doing identity politics taking the world by storm. To understand and define it, we must look at the history of politics of identity since the 1300s. This episode sets up the course and its objectives. 

Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.