Faculty of Arts & Sciences

The study of selected topics in studies of women, gender, and sexuality.

We are bombarded by sound bites from all over the globe, moving at disorienting speeds, reorganizing our relationship to time and space with increasingly dystopic results. This course will focus on selected televisual and digital events in "real time" from February-May 2014. We will analyze the embedded bits of gender and sexuality always at work in the representations of those events. Topics include: politics, the environment, military adventures, and popular revolt in dialogue with important texts in WGS Studies.

What is "queer"? What relationship does queer have to "homosexuality," "LGBT," or any conventional understanding of gender, sexuality, culture, history or politics? This course surveys the interdisciplinary field of queer theory, from its emergence two decades ago to its present day articulations. We will examine queerness as a conceptual category, as identity (or anti-identity), and its relation to race, ethnicity, nationality, class, as well as to artistic production and activism. We will likewise interrogate "theory" itself, what it is, what it does, and what interventions it can perform. Other topics include recent work on futurity, utopia, place, risk and intimacy.

This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the Chicana identities through feminist histories and scholarship. Beginning with a brief historical overview of Mexican American women in the U.S., we'll consider the emergence of Chicana feminism and examine the genesis of the term, "Chicana" as it was developed and deployed during El Movimiento in the early 1970's. Then move into contemporary explorations of identity including race, regional difference, art, literature, and community organizing. Course participants will gain the ability to recognize the interplay of social processes on the development of identity, especially within U.S. cultural institutions.

Making the case for what Deepika Bahri identifies as the "prominent and constitutive" role of gender-and sexuality-in colonial formations, this course will examine how gendered and sexed ideas and practices were critical to signifying racial difference, naturalizing exploitation, symbolizing the colonial mission, and managing colonial economies. We will ask, with Ann Laura Stoler, was sexual domination a metaphor for colonial power, or the very "substance" of imperial policy?

This course examines a range of works from the British and American LGBT canon. Our starting premise will be that LGBT themes have been central, rather than peripheral, to the Western literary tradition. We'll pay close attention to how sexual identity and desire are understood and represented in different social and historical circumstances, as well as the aesthetic traditions and personal experiences shaping these individual works. Authors include James Baldwin, E.M. Forster, Nella Larsen, Virginia Woolf.

This course will examine how women, through popular music, have articulated clear political analysis to their oppression that has reached large audiences and become foundational to American culture. We will begin with African-American blues in the early 20th century and moving through jazz, torch singing, folk, girl groups, disco, and contemporary song. Along their music readings we will include biographical, historical, and critical texts that will place these women in their artistic and political contexts. Performers studied will include, among others, Bessie Smith, the Boswell Sisters, Billie Holiday, Marian Anderson, Peggy Lee, Joan Baez, Gloria Gaynor, and Amy Winehouse.

This intermediate-level seminar investigates the connections between sexuality, reproduction, public health, and social justice. We will examine how inequities related to gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic position, and sexual orientation influence the sexual and reproductive health and rights of socially and economically marginalized groups of women in the contemporary United States, especially women of color and poor and low-income women but also lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women. Using public health and social justice lenses, we will focus on the following topics: pregnancy, birth, abortion, contraception, forced sterilization, sexual violence, cervical cancer, and HIV/AIDS.

Is romantic love a life-altering "event" in Alain Badiou's sense? Or is it a biopolitical tool of neoliberal control in Michel Foucault's sense? This course examines love from a philosophical, psychoanalytic, critical theoretical, and cultural studies perspective. Special attention is given to the foundational role of love in how Western subjects negotiate the complexities of gender, sexuality, and identity.

This course examines how poverty, development and global health policies, legacies of colonialism, and public infrastructure influence sexual and reproductive health outcomes (pregnancy, maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, cervical cancer) and access to sexual and reproductive health services (family planning, abortion, HIV testing and counseling, cervical cancer screening) among women in developing countries. We will also address how inequities based on socioeconomic position, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, and sexuality shape sexual and reproductive health inequities within countries in the Global South and how women have responded to these challenges through individual and collective agency.

This course examines how Western medical knowledge, practices, and institutions define female health and normality and manage diseased and gender-variant female bodies. How, for instance, does medicine conceive of the female body as a medical problem or mystery and how do race, class, and sexuality inflect these conceptions? Topics include: "female maladies," medicalization of childbirth and the pregnant body, medical management of transgender and intersexed bodies, ideals of fitness, cosmetic surgery, disability, and pharmaceutical marketing.

The term "mommy wars" emerged in 1990 to suggest that relations between "working mothers" and "stay at home mothers" were characterized by mutual animosity and petty status battles between women defined through their roles as mothers. Yet the political, cultural, and economic struggles over motherhood have deep roots and high stakes. This seminar will look critically at the history and literature of the "mommy wars," from The Feminine Mystique to contemporary advice literature, paying special attention to voices often excluded from mainstream media representations. Topics include mothers in the workplace, race and reproduction, caring labor, and class in discourses of "good" and "bad" mothering.

This course will examine categories of race, gender, sex, and sexuality through the lens of the visual. Using contemporary literature, photography, performance art, film, and theories of the visual, our task is to investigate the import and utility of embodiment. How do race, gender, and sexuality function in artistic imaginary? What can we glean from cultural productions that engage the viewer/reader in ways that challenge ideas about conformity, fluidity, belonging, and self-reflection? More than a linear literary or theoretical trajectory, this course will provide a template for all the mechanisms of the visual-psychological and ocular, interpretive, rhetorical and performative.

This seminar will draft and then evaluate alternate plans on ethical reasoning about sexual acts, desires, and identities. In an astonishingly short time, sex has been pushed from the center of American morality to somewhere beyond the edge of it. A hundred years ago, "immorality" without qualification usually meant sexual misconduct, especially by women. Today many Americans are unclear whether there is any morality to sex beyond counsels of hygiene or responsible reproduction. This rapid historical change makes sex a very good place to think not only about how ethical reasoning changes, but what it does and doesn't add to human lives. The seminar will consider the full range of topics pertinent to a course on sexual ethics, but also and perhaps more importantly the array of possible pedagogies.