Faculty of Arts & Sciences

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

An introduction to foundational concepts and skills in the study of gender and sexuality. Readings include Gloria Anzaldua, Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberle Crenshaw, Monique Wittig, Alison Bechdel, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Michel Foucault.

This course supports the writing of the junior paper through seminar discussions and one-on-one tutoring. In the seminar portion of the course, students discuss feminist methodologies across the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences through engagement with diverse readings from these fields. In the practicum, students work with an individual tutor on a semester-long research project in his or her area of interest.

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.

The classics of American postwar, mainstream feminist thought are sometimes assumed, sometimes reviled, but rarely re-read. In this seminar, we will read critically across four decades of widely-read, influential feminist books, keeping constantly in view the philosophical and political, psychological and historical, legal and ethical questions at the heart of women, gender, and sexuality studies today.

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.

Is there a particularly "queer" way to live? Does a queer perspective mitigate for certain forms of social, interpersonal or political action? Are there sets of vocations, engagements or relationship formations that are, in and of themselves, distinctly queer? Or is queerness something that can infuse or transform pre-existing modes of personal or relational action? Is a university education or academic queer theory necessary, or even useful, for these endeavors? Students will examine the connections and disconnects between academic work in gender and sexuality studies and the ways feminist and LGBTQ politics are imagined and lived within contemporary activist communities.

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.

What is a crime and who is a criminal? How are social understandings of punishment and control informed by hegemonic racial ideologies? How do the answers to these questions change the ways we imagine and respond to news? to violence? or social inequity? This seminar will examine the complex intersections between race, gender, poverty, and crime within U.S. cultural, political and social contexts. To do this, we will explore historical and contemporary studies that provide arguments about the connections between race, gender, poverty and the criminal justice system. Topics include: mass incarceration, policing, violence, reproductive control and media representations of crime.

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?

Students write and analyze short stories, paying close attention to key writing concepts such as characterization, voice, point-of-view, dialogue, and setting, while also investigating thematic issues related to women, gender, and sexuality studies. Frequent writing assignments, including written evaluations of peers' stories.

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 survey course examines the changing images of masculinity in Hollywood films from 1950 to the present. We will use the films, critical readings, feminist theory, film theory and primary source materials to chart the enormous changes in how postwar culture conceptualized "manhood" and "masculinity." Beginning with post-World War II films such as "The Men," and then covering Vietnam films and sports films such as "Rocky" and "Raging Bull" we will end with popular comedies celebrating male immaturity of Judd Apatow. We will be analyzing the films in the economic, political, sociological, and psychological context in which they were made and to which they were responding.

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 seminar surveys the changing politics of gender across African history, in conversation with global histories of gender and sexuality. We investigate three questions: How can we understand the history of gender in Africa before colonialism? What role did gender play in the making and unmaking of colonialism? How have nationalist and postcolonial politics been defined by gendered categories? Readings include case studies from west, east, and southern Africa, treating themes from the history of sexuality to the history of political culture. Each student will present an original research project related to course themes.

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.

How many people would you count as your friends? Facebook friends? Facebook Close Friends? Google+ friends? Other network friends? Friends with Benefits? Does sex get in the way of friendship? Are your friends mostly of the same sex/gender/sexuality? Is it harder to make friends with persons of different sex/gender/sexuality? How have friendships changed as people have become more embedded in online communities? The course will begin with a consideration of current conversations about friendship, including popular TV serials -- such as "Friends," "Sex and the City," "New Girl," and "The Inbetweeners" -- in which friendships are lived and variously configured through sexual relationships. What could we make about meanings of friendship and sex, and their inter-relationship, in contemporary American culture? We will read various texts that form historical threads that inform our contemporary concepts and practices of friendship and romance. Readings will include Winthrop, Plato, Cicero, Biblical sources, St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Montaigne, Bray, Marcus, Sedgwick, and Foucault. Finally, we will return to contemporary America, asking what gay marriage, Facebook, and changing conceptions of masculinity/femininity are doing to/for friendship.

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 scholarship on gender, sexuality, and race within a multitude of feminist disciplines in order to suggest productive interventions in analyses of women and warfare. Refuting essentialized notions of womanhood as passive, peaceful, and submissive, this class encourages students to move beyond thinking about what men and women do in war, and instead consider how gendered constructs are necessary for war. Memoirs, documentaries, military policy, and legal cases will serve as case studies to analyze contemporary and historical issues of gender and militarism.

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.

How did social forces in the 18th and 19th centuries shape (and contest) new theories of womanhood, sexuality, and political equality? Readings from a variety of literary and political sources, including "Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," "Moll Flanders," "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," "A Vindication of the Rights of Women." Areas of inquiry: prostitution, the suffrage movement, motherhood, property rights, psychology, manliness, sexology, Victorian pornography.

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.

How are notions of human difference, including ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality, used to sell products in an increasingly global market? We will start in the nineteenth century with the rise of consumer culture, examining how cultures and people considered "primitive" achieved value as objects for exchange and entertainment, and then investigate how this idea takes shape in our contemporary moment. Topics include: sex tourism; commodification of "queer" and multiracial aesthetics; "compassionate" consumption.

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 examines the construction of desire, pleasure, and fantasy in Hollywood film. Drawing on current debates in feminist film theory - as well as on related fields such as queer theory, critical race theory, and psychoanalysis - the course focuses on theories of the gaze, fetishization, racialization, heteronormativity, and the subversive potential of mainstream film.

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 course offers an introduction to theoretical themes in the study of women, gender, and sexuality. Special attention is given to recent critical debates that have (re)energized the field and that cross disciplinary boundaries. The course also addresses matters of professional development.

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.