Fall 2022 Course Guide : Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies : UMass Amherst

WGSS

yellow count towards the theory requirement for majors. Courses in green are UWW/Online.

WGSS 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Monday, Wednesday 11:15-12:05 p.m.
Friday discussions 9:05, 10:10, 11:15 and 12:20
Kiran Asher

This course offers an introduction to some of the basic concepts and theoretical perspectives in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Drawing on disciplinary, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies, students will engage critically with issues such as gender inequities, sexuality, families, work, media images, queer issues, masculinity, reproductive rights, and history. Throughout the course, students will explore how experiences of gender and sexuality intersect with other social constructs of difference, including race/ethnicity, class, and age. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which interlocking systems of oppression have shaped and influenced the historical, cultural, social, political, and economical contexts of our lives, and the social movements at the local, national and transnational levels which have led to key transformations. (Gen. Ed. I, DU)

WGSS 201 – Gender and Difference: Critical Analyses
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Jennifer Cannon

An introduction to the vibrant field of women, gender, and sexuality studies, this course familiarizes students with the basic concepts in the field and draws connections to the world in which we live. An interdisciplinary field grounded in commitment to both intellectual rigor and individual and social transformation, WGSS asks fundamental questions about the conceptual and material conditions of our lives. What are “gender,” “sexuality,” “race,” and “class”? How are gender categories, in particular, constructed differently across social groups, nations, and historical periods? What are the connections between gender and socio-political categories such as race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, (dis)ability and others? How do power structures such as sexism, racism, heterosexism, and classism and others intersect? How can an understanding of gender and power enable us to act as agents of individual and social change? Emphasizing inquiry in transnational feminisms, critical race feminisms, and sexuality studies, this course examines gender within a broad nexus of identity categories, social positions, and power structures. Areas of focus may include queer and trans studies; feminist literatures and cultures; feminist science studies; reproductive politics; gender, labor and feminist economics, environmental and climate justice; the politics of desire, and others. Readings include a range of queer, feminist and women thinkers from around the world, reflecting diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives in the field.

WGSS 230 – Politics of Reproduction
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Derek Siegel

From the Black Panther Party and Young Lords in the 1970s to SisterSong and Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice in the 1990s to Ferguson and Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement in the present, communities of color and socialist feminists have fought for a comprehensive reproductive freedom platform--birth control and abortion to be sure, but also the right to raise wanted children that are safe, cherished, and educated. The names of these issues have included freedom from sterilization, high quality affordable day care, IVF, immigrant justice, social reproduction and wages for housework, welfare and neoliberalism, foreclosure and affordable housing.

WGSS 250 – Introduction to Sexuality and Trans Studies: Movement for Justice in a Contemporary World
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Nicole le Roux

This course was previously WGSS 290B. This interdisciplinary course will help students to understand what the term "sexuality studies" means by providing a foundation in the key concepts, historical and social contexts, topics, and politics that inform the fields of sexuality studies; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies; and queer studies. Course instruction will be carried out through readings, lectures, films, and discussions, as well as individual and group assignments. Over the course of the semester, students will develop and use critical thinking skills to discern how "sexuality" becomes consolidated as a distinct category of analysis in the late nineteenth century, and what it means to speak about sexuality and transgender politics and categories today. Topics will include queer theories and politics, trans theories and politics, LGBTQ social movements within and outside of the US, relationships with feminist reproductive justice movements, heterosexuality, homophobia, and HIV/AIDS and health discourses. The range of materials covered will prioritize developing analyses that examine the interplay between sexuality and class, gender, race, ethnicity, and neoliberalism. (Gen. Ed. SB, DG)

WGSS 286 – History of Sexuality and Race in the U.S.
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m. – Tiarra Cooper
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m. - Signe Predmore
UWW Section – Kirsten Leng

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary feminist study of sexuality. Its primary goal is to provide a forum for students to consider the history of sexuality and race in the U.S. both in terms of theoretical frameworks within women's and gender studies, and in terms of a range of sites where those theoretical approaches become material, are negotiated, or are shifted. The course is a fully interdisciplinary innovation. It will emphasize the links rather than differences between theory and practice and between cultural, material, and historical approaches to the body, gender, and sexuality. Throughout the course we will consider contemporary sexual politics "from the science of sex and sexuality to marriage debates" in light of histories of racial and sexual formations. (Gen. Ed. HS, DU)

WGSS 310 – Writing for Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Majors
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Miliann Kang

Fulfills Junior Year Writing requirement for majors. Modes of writing and argumentation useful for research, creative, and professional work in a variety of fields. Analysis of texts, organization of knowledge, and uses of evidence to articulate ideas to diverse audiences. Includes materials appropriate for popular and scholarly journal writing. Popular culture reviews, responses to public arguments, monographs, first-person narratives and grant proposals, and a section on archival and bibliographic resources in Women's Studies. May include writing for the Internet. Nonmajors admitted if space available.

WGSS 391V – The Problem of Sexual Violence: A Research and Resistance Workshop
Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Angie Willey

This class will serve as a collaborative workshop on the problem of sexual violence, informed by transformative justice. We will start with a recap of how the problem of sexual violence on campus has been understood and framed by various constituents here at UMass. We will then explore the problem from a variety of academic and activist angles, gathering insight through individual and collective research. Questions we will explore include: What are we talking about when we talk about "sexual violence"? Who is impacted by sexual violence and how? How are racism, classism, transphobia, ablism, xenophobia, and other factors that contribute to vulnerability thematized (or ignored) in conversations about the problem of sexual violence? Why doesn't the carceral model for understanding and ending sexual violence work? What sorts of strategies have activists on and off college campuses used to raise awareness, challenge dominant carceral models, and create community safety? Final projects can take a variety of forms and may be collaborative. Students who enroll should be invested in deepening their understanding of sexual violence, have respect for its individual and collective impacts, and possess a desire to work collectively towards transformation.

WGSS 395J – Imagining Justice
Tuesday 1:30-4:30 p.m.
Laura Ciolkowski

This course will be conducted inside the Western Massachusetts Regional Women's Correctional Center (WCC) in Chicopee (TRANSPORTATION PROVIDED) and enrolls an equal number of students from UMass/Five Colleges and students who are incarcerated in the WCC. As a member of this course, you will be joining an international community of educators and students who are committed to dialogue and scholarly learning inside prisons and jails. Enrollment in this course is by application only. Permission by Instructor is required. Application for admission to the course is available here: https://forms.gle/HnUXPTubR4zRreUZ9 . Please Note: Depending upon the status of COVID-19 in fall 2022, the format of this class may be adjusted to accommodate the needs of students both inside and outside the jail. Students should be prepared for some blended sessions with the jail to be taught remotely, via Zoom.

This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the critical, aspirational, artistic, and creative forms that Justice takes in literature and the humanities more broadly. This course will explore the following questions: What sorts of ethical, social, and political issues are animated by writers and thinkers who seek to imagine and build a different world? What are the tangled roots of inequality and the legacies of sexual, racial, and economic (in)justice? How do writers, poets, artists, and “freedom dreamers,” as Robin D.G. Kelley so memorably called them, labor to re-invent our universe and to imagine justice? Course topics will include: utopian and dystopian fiction; bioethics and literature; Afrofuturism; art and social justice; prison writing, poetry, and the literature of restorative and transformative justice. Authors may include: Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudia Rankine, Mia Mingus, Leslie Marmon Silko, Nicole Fleetwood, Ursula Le Guin, James Baldwin, adrienne maree brown, Natasha Trethewey.

WGSS 392AA – Asian American Feminisms
Thursday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Miliann Kang

How have the figures of the Chinese bachelor, the geisha, the war bride, the hermaphrodite, the orphan, the tiger mother, the Asian nerd, the rice king, the rice queen, and the trafficked woman shaped understandings of Asian Americans, and how have these representations been critiqued by Asian American feminist scholars and writers? Is there a body of work that constitutes "Asian American feminism(s)" and what are its distinctive contributions to the field of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies? How does this body of work illuminate historical and contemporary configurations of gender, sexuality, race, class, nation, citizenship, migration, empire, war, neoliberalism and globalization? In exploring these questions, this course examines Asian American histories, bodies, identities, diasporic communities, representations, and politics through multi- and interdisciplinary approaches, including social science research, literature, popular representations, film, poetry and art.

WGSS 393P – Gender, Race, and Media Icons
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Alexandrina Deschamps

This course will be an exploration, analysis, and discussion of what meaning we attach to the images of racial political, social, and cultural figures. We will focus on how black womanhood has been historically and continues to be reconstructed through representations, images, as well as in our imagination. Nicole Fleetwood examines the currency of these images and asks, how do racial icons “signify”. We will read Tony Morrison’s Playing in the Dark; Nicole Fleetwoods, On Racial Icons, Blackness and the Public Imagination; thoroughly analyze Beyonce’s Lemonade; discuss other icons in sports, politics, pop culture, and social media (inter alia, the Venus Sisters, Laverne Cox, Janet Mock), and look closely at the Hottentot Venus and black female desire. Students will have the opportunity to tailor their assignments and projects with lots of flexibility keeping in the mind that this course is about intersectional analysis and must include at least race, gender, and sexuality.

WGSS 393V - Rewilding Feminisms
Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Karen Cardozo

2020 was unprecedented for four simultaneous "super-disruptors" - economic recession, mass protests, election instability, and a pandemic. In other words, "civilization" isn't all it's cracked up to be. This course will examine the rising discourse of "rewilding" in ecological, social and feminist contexts, exploring attempts to reduce the damaging effects of global capitalism as we strive for environmental justice in a more sustainable world. Through an intersectional and interdisciplinary lens, we will explore how concepts of gender, genre and genera shape the naturecultural configuration of our lives and habitats and explore alternate ways of knowing and living. How might we reclaim our inherent author-ity to write more "untamed" stories, imagining freer, wilder lives in a more humane and thriving ecosystem?

WGSS 395A – Poetry and/as Black Feminist Thought
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 p.m.
Cameron Awkward-Rich

From Pauli Murray to Audre Lorde to the contemporary practice of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, many of our most visionary black feminist theorists have also been poets. Taking seriously Lorde?s insistence on poetry's thought- and world-building function, this course traces a history of black feminist theorizing that puts poetry at the center in order to ask after how and what poetry allows us to know. Possible reading includes: poetry/theory by Pauli Murray, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Dionne Brand, fahima ife, the Trans Day of Resilience project, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs and criticism by Hortense Spillers, Kevin Quashie, Theri Alice Pickens, and Christina Sharpe. This is a theory class but will ask you to exercise your creative capacities.

WGSS 701 – Genealogies of Feminist Thought
Tuesday 2:30-5:00
Cameron Awkward-Rich

This graduate seminar in feminist theory constitutes a core course for students enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies. The seminar will be organized around questions that emerge for feminisms from the rubrics of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, transnationalism, human rights, economics and postcolonialism. Feminist theory is inherently interdisciplinary and we will draw on classic and contemporary writings from the many fields that contribute to the "field" of feminist theory.

WGSS 891 – Critical Feminist Pedagogies
Wednesday 10:00-12:30 p.m.
Laura Ciolkowski

Feminist pedagogy is a radical philosophy of teaching and learning. It is an approach, rather than a toolbox of assorted tips and strategies, that is rooted in feminist, anti-racist critiques of power and knowledge, and is deeply informed by the values of social justice feminism and feminist practice. This graduate-level course in critical feminist pedagogy will explore the epistemological, methodological, and theoretical foundations of feminist pedagogical approaches, from Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed to bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress; from readings in the Black radical tradition to the Latin American experiments with literacy and empowering the poor; and from Bettina Love's abolitionist pedagogies and Audre Lorde's pedagogies of social justice and collective dissent to the growing scholarship on participatory methods, mindfulness and presence, and feminist experiments with alternative epistemological frameworks. The course will also explore, from a feminist pedagogical perspective, the obstacles that students face in learning: why some believe we have a "push out" problem more than a "drop out" problem; how pedagogical practices can be painful and harmful to students; the debates over classroom "safe space"; and the critiques of the "corporate university" and its metrics. A combination practicum and graduate theory seminar, the course also centers the practice of feminist pedagogy in the classroom. Feminist Pedagogy will create a fully collaborative space for students to interrogate, explore, test out and reshape the methods, methodologies, theories, and critical pedagogies that support our feminist teaching practices. Over the course of the semester, students will develop and workshop a course syllabus; they will design, critique, and practice learning plans; and they will build a community of feminist teachers and learners with whom they may continue to think about, reflect on, and reimagine critical feminist pedagogy.

UMASS

UMass Courses Outside of WGSS (Departmental)

All courses listed here count towards the minor. Courses on this list 200-level and above automatically count towards the WGSS major. If you're taking a class that is not listed here, you can petition for it to count towards WGSS with this Google Form.

ANTHRO 497DK/697DK – Doing, Knowing, Being
Tuesday, 10:00-12:45 p.m.
Felicity Aulino/Lynnette Arnold

What counts as care? For whom? In what contexts? To what effects? In this course, we will draw on a range of ethnographic work, including cultural and linguistic anthropology, as well as feminist and indigenous theory, film, media, and activist literature to explore contemporary issues of care. In the three units of the class - doing, knowing, being - we examine care as a concrete everyday practice, one that is rooted in and shapes ways of understanding the world, and which has far-reaching implications that both reproduce and resist multiple intersecting inequalities. We will explore methodology. We will ask political questions. We will encourage a deeper consideration of care, not only research and scholarship, but also in the interdependent ways in which we live our lives.

ART-HIST 314/614 – Sexuality, Drama and Invention: The Baroque Artist in Italy
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Monka Schmitter

This course focuses the lives, careers, and works of five famous Italian Baroque artists and architects: Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Guido Reni, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and Francesco Borromini. Intermittently, we also examine works by some of their important, but perhaps less well known, contemporaries, such as Domenichino, Guercino, and Pietro da Cortona. Special attention is given to the role of sexuality in the artists? lives and works as well as in Baroque culture more broadly, and to the concepts of drama and invention in the theory and practice of Baroque art and architecture.

ART-HIS 397R/697R – Women in Architecture
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Margaret Vickery

This course begins with an examination of gendered, architectural spaces and how and why they were structured for women in the 19th century in both Britain and America. Looking at primary and secondary sources, students will gain insight into societal norms and how they conditioned architecture generally associated with women, such as houses, asylums, and early women's colleges. This study will serve as a platform from which to understand the pressures upon women and the pioneers who rejected such norms and pursued architecture as a profession. The latter half of the course will look at the work of early women architects, the hurdles they faced and the examples they set. The course will conclude with a critical examination of women architects practicing today and how they navigate the profession.

COMM 288 – Gender, Sex and Representation
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Sut Jhally

This course will examine the relationship between commercialized systems of representation and the way that gender and sexuality are thought of and organized in the culture. In particular, we will look at how commercial imagery impacts upon gender identity and the process of gender socialization. Central to this discussion will be the related issues of sexuality and sexual representation (and the key role played by advertising).

COMM 394EI – Performance and the Politics of Race
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45
Kimberlee Perez

This course looks at the ways race, racial identities, and interracial relations are formed through and by communication practices in present-day U.S. America. Though focusing on U.S. America in the current historical moment, the course takes into account the ways history as well as the transnational flows of people and capital inform and define conversations about race and racial identities. Race will be discussed as intersectional, taking into account the ways race is understood and performed in relation to gender, sexuality, class, and nation. The course will focus on the performance and communications of race, ranging from everyday interactions, personal narratives and storytelling, intra- and inter-racial dialogue, and staged performances.

HISTORY 297WL/LEGAL 297WL – Women and the Law: History of Sex and Gender Discrimination
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Jennifer Nye

This course examines the legal status of women in the United States, focusing specifically on the 20th and 21st centuries. How has the law used gender, sex, sexuality, and race to legally enforce inequality between women and men (and among women)? We will examine the legal arguments feminists have used to advocate for legal change and how these arguments have changed over time, paying specific attention to debates about whether to make legal arguments based on formal equality, substantive equality, liberty, or privacy. We will also consider the pros and cons of using the law to advocate for social justice. Specific issues that may be covered include the civil and political participation of women (voting, jury service), employment discrimination, intimate relationships, reproduction, contraception and abortion, violence against women, women as criminal defendants, and women as law students, lawyers, and judges.

HISTORY 397RL – Rape Law: Gender, Race, (In)justice
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Jennifer Nye

The history of the legal response to rape has often resulted in injustice for both the victim/survivor and the alleged perpetrator. This course will examine the evolution of the U.S. legal system's treatment of rape, paying particular attention to the movement against lynching in the post-civil war era, the rise of the feminist anti-rape movement in the 1970s and the student movement against campus sexual assault. Through an analysis of court cases, legislation, and other texts we will consider the role sexual violence has played in maintaining gender and racialized power relationships. We will examine how and why such violence came to be seen as a crime, including who is worthy of the law's "protection" and who is subject to the law's ? punishment." We will explore issues such as: rape as a form of racialized and imperial violence, especially against black and Native American women; the criminal legal treatment of rape and the evolution of the legal concepts of force, resistance, and consent; and the civil responses to rape under the Violence Against Women Act and Title IX. We'll also look at the international law responses to rape as a weapon of war. Finally, we'll think about how the legal responses, or non-responses, to rape have differed over time depending on factors such as the race/ethnicity, income level, immigration status, sexual orientation/gender identity, age, and marital status of the victim/survivor and the perpetrator. Finally, we?ll consider how the legal system can or should respond to rape, particularly in this age of mass criminalization and mass incarceration, and whether restorative justice responses might be preferable. Prior law-related coursework is helpful, but not required.

HISTORY 364 – Gender and Race in U.S. Social Policy History
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Libby Sharrow

What are the problems associated with developing equitable and just policy? Why does social policy in the United States continue to be marked by tensions between the principle of equality and the reality of inequalities in social, political, and economic realms? How might policy subvert or reinforce these differences and inequalities? This class examines the history of social policy in the United States, particularly those policies affecting concerns of gender, race, and class. We will examine a wide range of social policies, focusing on those affecting groups such as: women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBT people, and low-income people. We will study primarily empirical work, while asking questions about how political culture, interest groups, social movements, government institutions and other factor influence U.S. social policy.

JAPANESE 391S/591S – Japanese Women Writers
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Amanda Seaman

This course explores literature written by women in Japan from the Meiji Period 1868 to the present, focusing on women's roles, motherhood and authorship. We question the category of women's literature in general.

POLSCI 392AP – Activism, Participation and Protest
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Sonia Alvarez

This course examines contemporary forms of political activism, participation, and protest. Drawing on select case studies, principally from Latin America, the U.S, and Europe, we will pay particular attention to the dynamic development of feminisms, anti-racist/Black mobilizations, anti-austerity and pro-democracy protests, and LGBTQ organizing.

SUSTCOMM 225 – Race, Gender, Sexuality and Equity
Monday, Wednesday 11:15-1:10 p.m.
Darrel Ramsey-Musolf

In capitalist societies, inequity creates winners and losers, profits and losses, and the privileged and the marginalized. Inequity is defined as a “lack of fairness or justice” and refers to a system of privilege that is created and maintained by interlocking societal structures (i.e., family, marriage, education, housing, government, law, economics, employment, etc.). Alternatively, equity is defined as “the state, quality or ideal of being just, impartial and fair.” To achieve and sustain equity, equity needs to be thought of as a structural and systemic concept and requires action. In this seminar, we will question society’s values and deepen one’s understanding of “self.” and agency as we examine how people create and implement equity when such persons are defined by their race, gender, or sexuality. (Gen. Ed. SB, DU)

UMass Courses Outside of WGSS (Component)

For component courses, majors and minors must focus their work on WGSS topics in order for these courses to count. 100-level courses only count towards the minor and 200 level and above count towards the major. All courses listed here count towards the minor. Courses on this list 200-level and above automatically count towards the WGSS major. If you're taking a class that is not listed here, you can petition for it to count towards WGSS with this Google Form.

ANTHRO 212 – Science, Technology and Society
Monday, Wednesday
Nick Caverly

This course explores scientific and technical systems that permeate our lives. By way of facial recognition, IQ tests, vaccine protocols, hydroelectric dams, and other systems, we will focus on the all-too-human questions embedded in processes of scientific innovation and technological development. Together, we will address the following: What makes something a scientific fact? Who benefits and who is harmed by emerging platforms? How do social, political, and economic inequities shape technology and vice-versa? Can we engineer alternate futures? There are no prerequisites. Introductory experience in anthropology (e.g. 100, 104, 105) or an allied discipline (e.g. History, Sociology, Geography, WGSS) is an asset, but not required to do well. (Gen. Ed. SB, DG)

COMM 287 – Storied Encounters
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Kimberlee Perez

This course approaches stories and storytelling through critical communication and performance studies. Stories and storytelling are sites of encounter: between speaker and listener, social/structural and personal, language and place. To consider "what stories do" means simultaneously engaging in practices of listening, analysis, and response. The stories we will look at include contemporary non-fiction authors who lend their perspectives to pressing cultural issues and social in/justice. From the study of stories, participants will generate stories grounded in their own experiences with opportunities to share them.

ENGLISH 355 – Creative Writing Fiction
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Jordy Rosenberg

Prerequisites: ENGLISH 354 with a grade of 'B' or better. This class has been approved to have online components. Please contact the instructor for details.
Students should email one complete story and a brief personal statement (list and briefly discuss your reading preferences, your favorite writers and books), along with your contact information, to Professor Rosenberg: jrosenberg@english.umass.edu. Application deadline is April15th. Students will be notified by May15th of their status. Registration after this date is possible, but priority will be given to students who meet the April 15th deadline. Please let us know 1) if you are seeking the specialization in Creative Writing and 2) when you plan to graduate. Registration by department permission only.

Graduate

WGSS 701 – Genealogies of Feminist Thought
Tuesday 2:30-5:00
Cameron Awkward-Rich

WGSS 891 – Critical Feminist Pedagogies
Thursday 10:00-12:30
Laura Ciolkowski

ART-HIST 614/414 – Sexuality, Drama and Invention: The Baroque Artist in Italy
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Monka Schmitter

ART-HIS 697R/397R – Women in Architecture
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Margaret Vickery

ECON 797GS – Gender, Sexuality, Work and Pay: Empirical Perspectives
Tuesday 10:10 12:45 p.m.
Lee Badgett

See department for description. Open to graduate students only.

POLSCI 392AP – Activism, Participation and Protest
Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Sonia Alvarez

This course examines the multiple, often competing, ways in which scholars have theorized how diverse kinds of collective actors both shape and are (re)shaped by politics. Drawing on select case studies, principally from Latin America, Europe, and the U.S., and varied theoretical approaches from a range of disciplines - including not only several subfields in Political Science, but also Sociology, Anthropology, Feminist Studies, Geography, African Diaspora Studies, History, Cultural Studies, and more- we will explore the following questions, centered on Activism, Participation, and Protest (APP, for our purposes): What does political activism look like? How do we know it when we see it? What does activism entail? (e.g. demonstrating, protesting, signing petitions, canvassing, doing graffiti, engaging in civil disobedience, drafting policy briefs, living alternatively, running for office, crashing windows). How/when/why does one form/modality of APP shift to another? (e.g. protest to participation). Where does APP happen? In the streets, in civil society, in participatory institutions, on the internet, elsewhere, all of the above? What forms of collective action/activism constitute what 20th century social science called "social movements"? Are other concepts available to characterize today's activism? What frameworks might we need to develop to better apprehend contemporary forms of APP? What modalities of APP are most effective, why, and to what ends? When and how does collective action shift scales, from local, to national, to global and (sometimes) back again? How and why do contemporary protests/mobilizations emerge? What is the role of the larger political, organizational, discursive environment in that emergence? How and why do they decline, "fail," or end? Do they have "afterlives"? If so, what are their effects? How do we assess APP success? APP failure? How does the policing/militarization and criminalization of protest affect mobilizational outcomes? How do shifting concepts and discourses regarding diverse forms of collective action reflect changing theoretical and political agendas in different disciplinary arenas and on national, regional and transnational scales?

SOC 792 – Gender and Society (Not in Spire, but submitted)
Joya Misra

Gender is one of the most central axes of inequality, along with class, race, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, and sexuality. Gendered analyses of almost every social phenomenon exist, because gender always matters when we are thinking about the social world. This survey course highlights only a few key areas: feminist theory; culture; bodies; migration; education; work; sex work; families; violence; crime, law, and punishment; and politics. In addition, these readings are meant to highlight intersectional and global/transnational approaches to gender, including thinking about race, masculinity, and transgender.

UWW Winter / Spring

UWW WINTER/SPRING

WGSS majors and minors much focus their work on WGSS topics for any courses designated as component in any course guide. As a reminder, majors can only count courses 200-level and above. Contact department with questions! All courses listed here count towards the minor. Courses on this list 200-level and above automatically count towards the WGSS major. If you're taking a class that is not listed here, you can petition for it to count towards WGSS with this Google Form.

WGSS 275 - Literature and Social Justice: Gender, Race and the Radical Imagination (DU, AL)
Jude Hayward-Jansen
Summer Session #2

This is an interdisciplinary and intersectional exploration of the critical, aspirational, and creative forms that Justice takes in literature and the humanities more broadly. Approaching justice through the lens of social justice feminism, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race theory, this course will ask: What are the tangled roots of inequality and the legacies of sexual, racial, and economic (in)justice and how does the study of literature provide us with strategies, artistic models, and creative blueprints for imagining more just worlds? How does literature engage with, interrogate, and reimagine the ethical, social, and political questions at the heart of gender, race, and social justice and, finally, what is the role of the literary and artistic imagination in the world-making labor of social and political change?

WGSS 286 – History of Sexuality and Race in the U.S. (DU, HS)
Tiarra Cooper
Summer Session #1

COMM 288 – Gender, Sex and Representation
Sut Jhally
Summer Session

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture (AL, DG)
Nancy K.A. Prempeh
Summer Session #2

“I raise up my voice – not so I can shout but so that those without a voice can be heard. We cannot succeed when half of us are held back.” – Malala Yousafzai.
This course is designed to be a meaningful first dip into ideas on gender, sexuality, culture, and race, and those questions and concerns shaping their evolution and stakes. To that end, we will be engaging with a select number of texts cutting across gendered, racial, transcultural, and transhistorical boundaries to negotiate the shared need to “raise our voices,” to explore whether or not indeed there is such a thing as a people “without a voice,” and the multiple ways in which gender, sexuality, and race intersect to demonstrate how “half of us are held back” and the implications of such a reality for life as we know and have known it.

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture (AL, DG)
Jarrel De Matas
Summer Session

We will study texts by writers belonging to underrepresented, marginalized, and diverse groups. Such groups will include perspectives by queer, Black, Caribbean writers, and persons with disabilities. We will read these texts alongside broader cultural interventions on rethinking mainstream literature, writers, and gender and sexual representations.

FRENCHST 280 – Love and Sex in French Culture (AL)
Patrick Mensah
Summer Session #1
Component

Is love a French invention? How do we explore, through literature, the substance behind the stereotypical association of love, romance, and sexual pleasure with French culture? Do sex, passion and love always unite in the pursuit of emotional fulfillment in human relations, according to this literature? What affiliations does this literature interweave between such relations of love, requited or unrequited, and pleasure, enjoyment, freedom, self-empowerment, on the one hand, and on the other hand, suffering, jealousy, crime, violence, negativity, notions of perversion, morbidity, and even death? How are problems of gender roles and human sexuality—i.e. Hetero-, bi-, and homosexuality--approached in this literature? What connections or conflicts are revealed in this literature between human love relationships and the social norms and conventions within which they occur, as well as the forms of political governance that have been practiced in France over the centuries? Those are some of the issues that are investigated in this course, which offers a broad historical overview of selective ways in which love, passion, desire and erotic behavior in French culture have been represented and understood in Literature and, more recently, in film, from the middle ages to the twentieth century. Readings from major French authors drawn from various centuries such as Marie de France, Beroul, Moliere, de Sade, Flaubert, Gide, and Duras will be supplemented with screenings of optional films that are based on those texts or inspired by them. The course is entirely conducted in English.

FILM-ST/FRENCHST 284 – The Undead Souths: Southern Gothic and Francophone Mythologies in Film and Television (AT, DU)
Patrick Mensah
Summer Session # 1
Component

The Southern Gothic names a field of literary and filmic representation in which imagery of dark swamps, dismal landscapes, decaying architecture, fanatical and occult religious practices, and other grotesque figures and cultural tropes associated with an imaginary medieval past, are often deployed to invoke a sense of horror and dread, moral corruption, and psychological abjection. These regimes of negative gothic tropology and stereotyping are arguably linked with practices of identitarian exclusions and inclusions in American culture, that are only compounded by the added dimension of the histories of slavery and colonialism. In this way, these tropes do not only incorporate within the gothic imaginary, the geography of the American South, but they also extend that geography to include the Caribbean, associating both in one shared history of colonial dominations and slavery. As instances of popular entertainment that overlap with genres of horror in cinema and television, the gothic traffics in demonized, monstrous, or socially marginalized figures and tropes that are staged as threats to conventions of normality and mainstream ideals, such as those upon which the stereotype of the American dream is founded. Such norms and ideals are typically represented by the relatively privileged bourgeois heterosexual monogamous couple, the nuclear family, and the various state apparatus, such as the Church, the school, the party, the police, the armed forces, and other mainstream institutions that are responsible for safeguarding them. Yet these gothic representations also foreground exclusionary protocols, and practices of libidinal, sexist, and creative repression, class exploitation, and various forms of “othering” as necessary conditions that make the upholding of the invoked normative ideals possible. Such practices of demonization, repression, othering and marginalization are what make aspects of Southern gothic cinema and television entertainment particularly suitable for reflections and discussions of cultural diversity and imperatives of inclusion. Paying due attention to their affiliations with Francophone and French Creole cultures and mythologies of the Caribbean and the American South, this course will explore representations of the undead, such as zombies, vampires, and related paranormal creatures of the Southern Gothic tradition on film and television. We shall examine popular entertainment media narratives of such paranormal phenomena and related critical scholarship, treating them as figures and tropes of displaced social anxieties and commentaries, as well as projected fantasies through which evolving personal, cultural, historical and sociopolitical themes are articulated and negotiated. Themes to be examined would include, the history of slavery, colonial and postcolonial relations, creolization, religion, cultural difference, gender difference, globalization, minority relations, civil rights, issues of marginalized or repressed sexualities, money, class relations, alienated labor, terror, ecological degradation, as well as questions of dystopian, utopian, apocalyptic, and post-apocalyptic narrative interest. The Course will be conducted in English.

UWW 375 – Sexual Violence
Lisa Fontes
Summer Session #2

This interdisciplinary course explores sexual violence in the United States from psychological, sociological, public health, feminist, legal, historical, and criminal justice perspectives. It addresses the sexual victimization of teenagers and adults of all genders in a variety of social contexts, using an anti-oppression framework. The course also focuses on ways to make sexual violence prevention and intervention services better suited to culturally diverse people.

Five Colleges

Amherst

SWAG 209 – Feminist Perspectives on Science and Medicine
Tuesday/Thursday 10:00-11:20 AM
Katrina Karkazis

This seminar uses feminist theory and methods to consider scientific practice and the production of scientific knowledge. We will explore how science reflects and reinforces social relations, positions, and hierarchies as well as whether and how scientific practice and knowledge might be made more accurate and socially beneficial. Central to this course is how assumptions about sex, gender and race have shaped what we have come to know as “true,” “natural,” and “fact.” We will explore interdisciplinary works on three main themes: feminist critiques of objectivity; the structure and meanings of natural variations, especially human differences; and challenges to familiar binaries (nature/culture, human/animal, female/male, etc). Students who completed SWAG 108/ANTH 211 Feminist Science Studies in Fall 2019/20 will need to consult with Professor Karkazis prior to enrolling.

SWAG 235/BLST 236 – Black Sexualities
Tuesday/Thursday 2:30-3:50 PM
Khary Polk

From the modern era to the contemporary moment, the intersection of race, gender, and class has been especially salient for people of African descent—for men as well as for women. How might the category of sexuality act as an additional optic through which to view and reframe contemporary and historical debates concerning the construction of black identity? In what ways have traditional understandings of masculinity and femininity contributed to an understanding of African American life and culture as invariably heterosexual? How have black lesbian, gay, and transgendered persons effected political change through their theoretical articulations of identity, difference, and power? In this interdisciplinary course, we will address these questions through an examination of the complex roles gender and sexuality play in the lives of people of African descent. Remaining attentive to the ways black people have claimed social and sexual agency in spite of systemic modes of inequality, we will engage with critical race theory, black feminist thought, queer-of-color critique, literature, art, film, “new media” and erotica, as well as scholarship from anthropology, sociology, and history.

SWAG 243/AMST 240/EDST 240 – Rethinking Pocahontas: An Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies
Tuesday/Thursday 10:00-11:20 AM
Kiara Vigil

From Longfellow’s Hiawatha and D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature to Disney’s Pocahontas and more recently Moana to James Cameron’s Avatar, representations of the Indigenous as “Other” have greatly shaped cultural production in America as vehicles for defining the nation and the self. This interdisciplinary course introduces students to the broad field of Native American and Indigenous Studies, by engaging a range of texts from law to policy to history and literature as well as music and aesthetics. Film will also provide grounding for our inquiries. By keeping popular culture, representation, and the nature of historical narratives in mind, we will consider the often mutually constitutive relationship between American identity and Indian identity as we pose the following questions: How have imaginings of a national space and national culture by Americans been shaped by a history marked by conquest and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples? And, how have the myths of conquest become a part of education and popular representations to mask settler colonial policies and practices that seek to “erase in order to replace” the Native? This course also considers how categories like race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion have defined identities and changed over time with particular regards to specific Native American individuals and tribal nations. Students will be able to design their own final research project. It may focus on either a historically contingent or contemporary issue related to Native American people in the United States that is driven by a researchable question based on working with an Indigenous author’s writings from the Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg (or KWE for short) collection of Native American Literature books in the archives of Amherst College.

SWAG 259/SOCI 259/POSC 259 – (En) Gendering Development: Historical Genealogies/Contemporary Convergences
Wednesday/Friday 12:30-1:50 PM
STINT Fellow Thapar-Björkert

We will explore the centrality of gender in the processes, problematics and politics of development through feminist postcolonial and decolonial conceptualizations, with a particular focus on gendered livelihoods and gendered vulnerabilities. Focusing primarily on the global south, the course will draw on empirical examples from Africa, the Middle East, South and South East Asia and Latin America. We will cover the following development areas: a) orientalism and the global "war on terror"; how gendered/sexualized orientalist discourses are deployed to heal wounded national identities and justify military interventions and territorial encroachments; b) anti-colonial nationalism and the rise of femonationalism; how discourses of gender, nation and sexuality are (re)framed for contemporary political agendas; c) structural adjustment programs and femicides; how trade liberalization and feminization of labor generates economies of sexualized violence in border industries; d) politics of population control and reproductive tourism; how bodies of underprivileged women, formerly seen as "waste," and whose reproduction should be "controlled," are transformed into sites of profit generation for the reproductive industry in the global north. The course will draw on the relevant academic literature as well as a range of other sources including news media, documentaries, feature films, and policy reports.

SWAG 265 – Manhood and Masculinity in the U.S.
Tuesday/Thursday 1:00-2:20 PM
Katrina Karkazis

What does it mean to be a “real man” in the contemporary United States? What impact does masculinity have on sports, pop culture, and health, for example? How do race and sexuality impact masculinity? These are just a few of the questions that we will begin considering in this course. Masculinity, like "whiteness," has long been an opaque social category, receiving scant attention as a focus of study in its own right. But within the past few decades social scientific scholarship on the cultural construction of masculinity and on men and masculinities as complex and changing symbolic categories are the subject of intense theorization. This was born in part from the recognition that early feminist and gender theory focused almost exclusively (and for obvious political reasons) on the position and experience of women. Men, except where they were situated as part of the problem (the abuser, the oppressor, the patriarch), were neither the object nor the subject of study. This course critically analyzes manhood and masculinity as socially constructed and ever-changing concepts deeply entangled with race, class, disability, and sexuality. We will interrogate how masculinities influence actions and self-perceptions as well as analyze how masculinity promotes hierarchies of power and privilege in groups, organizations, and institutions, such as education, work, religion, sports, family, media, and the military. We will investigate the origins and development of masculinity, its expressions, and its problematic manifestations (including hegemonic masculinity, violence, sexual assault, health outcomes, etc.). By the end of the course, students should have an understanding of the ways that masculinity has shaped the lives and choices of men and women, boys and girls and should also be able to identify and question the taken-for-granted aspects of masculinity.

SWAG 310/ARHA 385/EUST 385 – Witches, Vampires and Other Monsters
Tuesday/Thursday 1:00-2:20 PM
Natasha Staller

Our course will explore how evil was imagined, over cultures, centuries and disciplines. With the greatest possible historical and cultural specificity, we will investigate an array of monstrous creatures and plagues -- their terrifying powers, the explanations for why they came to be, and the strategies for how they could be purged -- as we attempt to articulate the kindred qualities they shared. We will study centuries-old witch burning manuals, and note the striking degree to which dangerous tropes -- about women, about pestilence, about dangerous sexuality, and about differences of all kinds -- have continued to our day. Among the artists to be considered are Velázquez, Goya, Picasso, Dalí, Buñuel, Dreyer, Wilder, Almodóvar, and the community who made the AIDS Quilt. This course fulfills a requirement for the Five College Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice (RHRJ) certificate. Not open to first-year students.

SWAG 316/ENGL 316 – Immersive Accompaniment: Reading the Bildungsroman
Tuesday/Thursday 8:30-9:50 AM
Karen Sánchez-Eppler

“From whence comes my help?” “From where does your strength come?” The psalmist and Adrienne Rich ask these questions, which we will face while we read coming-of-age narratives that fit in a genre known by its German name, the Bildungsroman. These novels go beyond the pilgrimage out of adolescence, and into explicit representation of intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual growth experienced in unison with sexual development, awakenings, thrills, mishaps, and marriage. We will pay attention to how we immerse ourselves into the condition of those who grow on the page; not to “identify” with the characters, but to accompany them. From our immersive accompaniment we will re-emerge–intentionally–to write about how we progress, digress, regress, and grow some more. As we read we will explore many terms and theoretical concerns: Erik Erickson on life stages; Donald Winnicott on holding environment and object relation; Jacques Lacan on mirrors and interminability of desire; Silvan Tomkins on affects and nuclear scripts; Shoshana Feldman on re-reading, un-learning, en-gendering, and–again–desire. Readings will likely include: Plato, Phaedrus; Susan Choi, Trust Exercise; Lazarillo de Tormes; Teresa de Avila, Interior Castle; John Woolman, The Journal; Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse; Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot; Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook; Richard Powers, The Overstory.

SWAG 343/SPAN 342/LLAS 343 – Comparative Borderlands: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Transnational Perspective
Monday/Wednesday 2:00-3:20 PM
Sony Coráñez Bolton

“Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out,” Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in the hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera. She was referring to, what she called, the linguistic imperialism of English in the US Southwest. And yet she also carved out a third space for those subjects at the crossroads of multiple ways of being – the queer and the abject. In this course, we will examine cultural and literary texts that speak to the ways that race, gender, and sexual identity are conditioned by the historical development of geopolitical borders. We will pay particular attention to the US-Mexico Borderlands but we will also examine other places in which “borderlands” of identity exist. Course conducted in Spanish. Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor.

SWAG 349 – Law and Love
Wednesday 2:00-4:30 PM
Martha Umphrey

At first glance, law and love seem to tend in opposing directions: where law is constituted in rules and regularity, love emerges in contingent, surprising, and ungovernable ways; where law speaks in the language of reason, love’s language is of sentiment and affect; where law regulates society through threats of violence, love binds with a magical magnetism. In this seminar, placing materials in law and legal theory alongside theoretical and imaginative work on the subject of love, we invert that premise of opposition in order to look for love’s place in law and law’s in love. First we will inquire into the ways in which laws regulate love, asking how is love constituted and arranged by those regulations, and on what grounds it escapes them. In that regard we will explore, among other areas, the problematics of passion in criminal law and laws regulating sexuality, marriage, and family. Second we will ask, how does love in its various guises (as philia, eros, or agape) manifest itself in law and legal theory, and indeed partly constitute law itself? Here we will explore, for example, sovereign exercises of mercy, the role of equity in legal adjudication, and the means that bind legal subjects together in social contract theory. Finally, we will explore an analogy drawn by W. H. Auden, asking how law is like love, and by extension love like law. How does attending to love’s role in law, and law’s in love, shift our imaginings of both?

SWAG 372/AMST 370 – Indigenous Feminisms
Tuesday/Thursday 2:30-3:50 PM
Jennifer Hamilton

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Indigenous feminisms, and explores how questions of sex, gender, and sexuality have been articulated in relation to concerns such as sovereignty, colonization, and imperialism. We will explore how Indigenous feminists engage with or challenge other modes of feminist thought and activism. We will focus on how Indigenous ways of knowing and being can challenge how we conduct research and produce knowledge. While we will concentrate on work produced within the context of Native North America, we will also be attentive to transnational dimensions of Indigenous feminist histories, political movements, and world-building. Specific topics include movements to recognize missing and murdered Indigenous women; Indigenous feminist science and technology studies; and, Indigenous futurisms. This course fulfills a requirement for the Five College Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice (RHRJ) certificate.

SWAG 400/POSC 407 – Contemporary Debates: Gendering Populism
Tuesday 2:30-5:15 PM
Amrita Basu

The topic will vary from year to year. The past decade has witnessed the dramatic rise of populist parties, movements, and leaders. One of the populists' defining attributes, and a key reason for their success, is their affective character. Rather than laying out policy proposals for rational deliberation and critical consent, they touch and excite people in an intimate way through their oratory and bodily comportment. Gender and sexuality play a key role in these visceral appeals. We will explore the ways populists enact hegemonic forms of masculinity and femininity and employ binary constructions of gender to differentiate allies from enemies. Although we sometimes mistakenly assume that populist leaders draw on a common script, populist performances are most effective when they mine national memories, anxieties, and aspirations. We will analyze significant differences in the gendered styles of male and female populist leaders within and across nations. We will also examine how progressive movements among LGBTQ groups, feminists, and racial/religious minorities have employed gender and sexuality to challenge right-wing populists. Our approach will be comparative, cross-national, and interdisciplinary. The seminar will culminate in a final research paper. Not open to first-year students.

SWAG 411/POSC 411 – Indigenous Women and World Politics
Wednesday 2:00-5:00 PM
Manuela Picq

Indigenous women are rarely considered actors in world politics. Yet from their positions of marginality, they are shaping politics in significant ways. This course inter-weaves feminist and Indigenous approaches to suggest the importance of Indigenous women’s political contributions. It is an invitation not merely to recognize their achievements but also to understand why they matter to international relations. This course tackles varied Indigenous contexts, ranging from pre-conquest gender relations to the 1994 Zapatista uprising. We will learn how Indigenous women played diplomatic roles and led armies into battle during colonial times. We will analyze the progressive erosion of their political and economic power, notably through the introduction of property rights, to understand the intersectional forms of racial, class, and gender violence. Course materials explore the linkages between sexuality and colonization, revealing how sexual violence was a tool of conquest, how gender norms were enforced and sexualities disciplined. In doing so, we will analyze indigenous women’s relationship to feminism as well as their specific struggles for self-determination. We will illustrate the sophistication of their current activism in such cases as the Maya defense of collective intellectual property rights. As we follow their struggles from the Arctic to the Andes, we will understand how indigenous women articulate local, national, and international politics to challenge state sovereignty. This course fulfills a requirement for the Five College Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice (RHRJ) certificate. Requisite: At least one POSC course (200 level or above)

SWAG 416/ECON 416/BLST 416 – Economics of Race and Gender
Tuesday/Thursday 2:30-3:50 PM
Jessica Wolpaw Reyes

Economics is fundamentally about both efficiency and equity. It is about allocation, welfare, and well-being. How, then, can we use this disciplinary perspective to understand hierarchy, power, inequity, discrimination, and injustice? What does economics have to offer? Applied microeconomics is a fundamentally outward-looking and interdisciplinary field that endeavors to answer this question by being both firmly grounded in economics and also deeply connected to sociology, psychology, political science, and law. In this class, we will employ this augmented economic perspective to try to understand the hierarchies and operation of race and gender in society. We will read theoretical and empirical work that engages with questions of personal well-being, economic achievement, and social interaction. Students will have opportunities throughout the semester to do empirical and policy-relevant work. Each student will build a solid foundation for the completion of an independent term paper project that engages with a specific economic question about racial or gender inequity. Requisite: ECON 300/301 (Microeconomics) and ECON 360/361 (Econometrics) or Consent of Instructor.

SWAG 430/EUST 430 – Renaissance Bodies
Tuesday/Thursday 2:30-3:50 PM
Jutta Sperling

This course investigates the ways in which early modern sciences and the figurative arts of the Renaissance converged to represent body-centered visual knowledges ranging from the "secrets of women" to scientific "monstrosities." We will also examine the ways in which Catholicism enhanced body-centered, sensual and visual forms of devotion. Discussions will center on the eroticization of male, female, and queer bodies in a variety of discourses and visual rhetorics. A particular focus is on the representation of black bodies before the onset of modern racism. Case studies will include Eckhout’s "ethnographic" portrayals of African slaves and the native inhabitants of Brazil; Casta paintings in New Spain; Chiara di Montefalco’s miraculous relics; Elena Duglioli’s career as a spontaneously lactating, virginal saint; the cultural history of the dildo; Elena/o de Cespedes’s life as a transman; Sarah Bartmann as fetishized object of desire; male prostitution; and anatomical wax figures. This seminar will be based on class discussions and student presentations. The aim is to produce one substantial research paper based on the investigation of primary (written and visual) materials.

Hampshire

CSI 213 – Abolition Now!: Feminism Against the Prison
Monday/Wednesday 1:00–2:20 PM
Stephen Dillon

This course examines the relationship between feminist activism, theory, and politics and the prison. The course takes a two pronged approach that is historical and theoretical. We will examine the history of the prison in the United States as well as how feminist theorists and activists have understood the relationship beteen incarceration and race, gender, sexuality, ability, immigration, war, economics, as well as resistance.

CSI 273 - Cuba: Nation, Race and Revolution
Tuesday 1:00-3:50 p.m.
Roosbelinda Cardenas/Amy Jordan
Component

This interdisciplinary course critically engages a range of frameworks (geopolitical, historical, literary) for a study of the complex and contested reality of Cuba. We will critique and decenter the stereotypical images of Cuba that circulate in US popular and official culture, and we will examine the constructions of race, gender, and sexuality that have defined the Cuban nation. We will also explore how Cuba should be understood in relation to the U.S., to its diaspora in Miami, and elsewhere. This course is open to all, though it is best suited to students beyond their first semester of study. The class will be conducted in English, with many readings available in Spanish and English. Papers may be submitted in either language. This interdisciplinary course critically engages a range of frameworks (geopolitical, historical, literary) for a study of the complex and contested reality of Cuba. We will critique and decenter the stereotypical images of Cuba that circulate in US popular and official culture, and we will examine the constructions of race, gender, and sexuality that have defined the Cuban nation. We will also explore how Cuba should be understood in relation to the U.S., to its diaspora in Miami, and elsewhere. This course is open to all, though it is best suited to students beyond their first semester of study. The class will be conducted in English, with many readings available in Spanish and English. Papers may be submitted in either language. For students wishing to apply for the Hampshire in Havana January term program, this required course will offer critical foundational knowledge. For students wishing to apply for the Hampshire in Havana January term program, this required course will offer critical foundational knowledge.

Mt. Holyoke

GNDST 204CP/CST 249CP – Trap Doors and Glittering Closets: Queer/Trans* of Color Visual Cultures of Resistance
Tuesday/Thursday 9:00-10:15 a.m.
Ren-yo Hwang

In 2014, Time magazine declared the "Transgender Tipping Point" as a popular moment of transgender people's arrival into the mainstream. Using a queer and trans* of color critique, this course will unpack the political discourses and seeming binaries surrounding visibility/invisibility, recognition/misrecognition, legibility/illegibility, belonging/unbelonging and aesthetics/utility. How might we grapple with the contradictions of the trapdoors, pitfalls, dark corners and glittering closets that structure and normalize violence for some while safeguarding violence for others? This course will center the 2017 anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility.

GNDST 204CW/FMT 230/GNDST 204CW – Androgyny and Gender Negotiation in Contemporary Chinese Women’s Theater
Wednesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Ying Wang

Yue Opera, an all-female art that flourished in Shanghai in 1923, resulted from China's social changes and the women's movement. Combining traditional with modern forms and Chinese with Western cultures, Yue Opera today attracts loyal and enthusiastic audiences despite pop arts crazes. We will focus on how audiences, particularly women, are fascinated by gender renegotiations as well as by the all-female cast. The class will read and watch classics of this theater, including Romance of the Western Bower, Peony Pavilion, and Butterfly Lovers. Students will also learn the basics of traditional Chinese opera.

GNDST 204NB/ENGL 233 – Nonbinary Romanticism: Genders, Sexes, and Beings in the Age of Revolution
Monday/Wednesday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Kate Singer

With the onslaught of American, French, Haitian, and South American revolts and revolutions, the Atlantic world, much of Europe, and its colonial/industrial empire were thrown into a period of refiguring the concept of the raced, national, and gendered subject. This course considers what new forms of gender, sex, sexuality, and being were created, practiced, or thought, however momentarily, in this tumultuous age. Specific attention is given to conceptions of nonbinary being (of all varieties). Authors may include E. Darwin, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Lister, M. Shelley, Byron, Jacobs.

GNDST 206MA/HIST 259 – Mary Lyon’s World and the History of Mount Holyoke
Wednesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Mary Renda

What world gave rise to Mary Lyon's vision for Mount Holyoke and enabled her to carry her plans to success? Has her vision persisted or been overturned? We will examine the conditions, assumptions, and exclusions that formed Mount Holyoke and the arrangements of power and struggles for justice that shaped it during and after Lyon's lifetime. Topics include settler colonialism and missionary projects; northern racism and abolitionism; industrial capitalism and the evolution of social classes; debates over women's education, gender, and body politics; religious diversity; and efforts to achieve a just and inclusive campus. Includes research based on primary sources.

GNDST 210JD/JWST 234/RELIG 234 – Women and Gender in Judaism
Tuesday/Thursday 9:00-10:15 a.m.
Mara Benjamin

his course examines gender as a key category in Jewish thought and practice. We will examine different theoretical models of gender, concepts of gender in a range of Jewish sources, and feminist Jewish responses to those sources.

GNDST 210YD/JWST 213/GRMST 213 – The Gender of Yiddish
Monday/Wednesday 3:15-4:30 p.m.
TBA

Yiddish and questions of gender have a long history. The language was called "mame-loshn" (mother tongue); it was associated with home and family. Jewish women were the primary intended readers of Yiddish, beginning with religious literature for those who could not read Hebrew and developing into a modern, secular, often moralizing literature. Despite the strong connections between Yiddish and women, women writers have been marginalized and underestimated. This course will explore the gendered history of Yiddish, including through the lens of queer theory. We will also read English translations of literature by modern Yiddish women writers who are being rediscovered today through new translations and scholarly attention.

GNDST 221QF – Feminist and Queer Theory
Tuesday/Thursday 1:45-3:00 p.m.
Christian Gundermann

We will read a number of key feminist texts that theorize sexual difference, and challenge the oppression of women. We will then address queer theory, an offshoot and expansion of feminist theory, and study how it is both embedded in, and redefines, the feminist paradigms. This redefinition occurs roughly at the same time (1980s/90s) when race emerges as one of feminism's prominent blind spots. The postcolonial critique of feminism is a fourth vector we will examine, as well as anti-racist and postcolonial intersections with queerness. We will also study trans-theory and its challenge to the queer paradigm.

GNDST 241HR/ANTHR 216HM – Feminist Engagements with Hormones
Tuesday/Thursday 9:00-10:15 a.m.
Jacquelyne Luce

This course takes a transdisciplinary and multi-sited approach to explore the social, political, biocultural, and legal complexities of hormones. Hormones "appear" in many discussions about reproductive and environmental justice, identity, health and chronicity. But what are hormones? What are their social, political and cultural histories? Where are they located? How do they act? The course will foster active learning, centering feminist pedagogies of collaborative inquiry. Examples of topics to be explored are: transnational/transcultural knowledge production about hormones; hormonal relations to sexgender, natureculture, bodymind; and hormone-centered actions and activism.

GNDST 333AD/CST 349AD – Abolitionist Dreams and Everyday Resistance: Freedom Memoirs, Struggles, and Decolonizing Justice
Thursday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Ren-yo Hwang

This seminar will offer close theoretical readings of a variety of anti-colonial, abolitionist, anti-imperialist, insurgent and feminist-of-color memoir, autobiographical and social justice texts. We will read works from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Assata Shakur, Patrisse Cullors, Grace Lee Boggs, Audre Lorde, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinna, Leila Khaled, Fannie Lou Hamer, Sarah Ahmed, Lee Maracle, Kai Cheng Thom, Angela Davis, Sojourner Truth, adrienne maree brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mary Brave Bird, Jamaica Kincaid, Gabby Rivera and Haunani-Kay Trask. We will center the interlinking and capacious concepts of liberation, revolution, freedom, justice and decolonization.

GNDST 333AE/AFCNA 341AE/CST 349AE/ARTST 380AE – Race, Gender and Sexual Aesthetics in the Global Era
Wednesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Sarah Stefana Smith

Reading across a spectrum of disciplinary focuses (e.g. philosophies of aesthetics, post-structural feminisms, Black cultural studies, and queer of color critique) this course asks the question what is the nature of aesthetics when it negotiates modes of difference? This course explores the history and debates on aesthetics as it relates to race, gender, and sexuality with particular emphasis on Black diaspora theory and cultural production. Drawing on sensation, exhibitions, active discussion, observation, and experimentation, emphasis will be placed on developing a fine-tuned approach to aesthetic inquiry and appreciation.

GNDST 333BW/SPAN 330BW – De Brujas y Lesbiana and Other Bad Women in the Spanish Empire
Tuesday/Thursday 10:30-11:45 a.m.
Nieves Romero-Diaz

During the Spanish Empire (16th-18th centuries), witches, prostitutes, transvestite warriors, lesbians, daring noblewomen and nuns violated the social order by failing to uphold the expected sexual morality of the "ideal woman." They were silenced, criticized, punished, and even burned at the stake. Students will study contradictory discourses of good and evil and beauty and ugliness in relation to gender in the Spanish Empire. We will analyze historical and literary texts as well as film versions of so-called "bad" women -- such as the Celestina, Elena/o de Céspedes, Catalina de Erauso and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Taught in Spanish.

GNDST 333ER/CST 349ER – Theorizing Eros
Thursday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Angie Willey

The erotic is a rich site of queer feminist thinking about the costs of the imposition of sexuality as an interpretive grid. The course begins with the study of sexuality as a knowledge system, with a focus on racial and colonial histories of sexuality, then moves on to considerations of the erotic. In both Lordean and Foucauldian genealogies, eros operates as a set of possibilities, or capacities -- for pleasure, joy, fulfilment, satisfaction -- that exceed "sexuality" and can inspire ways of rethinking nature, need, and relationality. Lynne Huffer, L.H. Stallings, Adrienne Marie Brown, Sharon Holland, and Ela Przybylo, among others, help us think capaciously about what the erotic can do.

GNDST 333PC/BIOL 321PR – Pregnancy and the Placenta
Monday/Wednesday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Sarah Bacon

Pregnancy is a stunning feat of physiology. It is a conversation between two bodies -- parental and fetal -- whose collective action blurs the very boundaries of the individual. In this course we will explore such questions as: what is pregnancy, and how does the ephemeral, essential organ known as the placenta call pregnancy into being? How is pregnancy sustained? How does it end? We will consider the anatomy of reproductive systems and the hormonal language of reproduction. We will investigate the nature of "sex" hormones, consider racial disparities in pregnancy outcome, and weigh the evidence that the intrauterine environment influences disease susceptibility long after birth.

GNDST 333WE/SPAN 330WE – Weird Feelings: Unsettling Latin American Short Fiction
Tuesday/Thursday 1:45-3:00 p.m.
Adriana Pitetta

In this course we will read and discuss a group of short stories written by contemporary female, queer and trans Latin American authors. These stories deal with (among other weird feelings and states) the uncanny, the unsettling and the horror of daily life as well as processes of becoming, embodiment and disidentification. This course considers the intersections of identity and imagination, race, gender, and class. Special attention is given to the way in which these writings depict oppression and resilience and how they reinvent the Latin American short story writing tradition. Authors may include Ivan Monalisa, Guadalupe Nettel, Mariana Enriquez, Camila Sosa, and Claudia Salazar. Taught in Spanish.

Smith

SWG 222 – Gender, Law and Policy
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Carrie Baker

This course explores the impact of gender on law and policy in the United States historically and today, focusing in the areas of constitutional equality, employment, education, reproduction, the family, violence against women, and immigration. We study constitutional and statutory law as well as public policy. Some of the topics we will cover are sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination, pregnancy/caregiver discrimination, pay equity, sexual harassment, school athletics, marriage, sterilization, contraception and abortion, reproductive technologies, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and gender-based asylum. We will study feminist efforts to reform the law and examine how inequalities based on gender, race, class and sexuality shape the law. We also discuss and debate contemporary policy and future directions.

SWG 227 – Feminist and Queer Disability Studies
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Jina Kim

In the essay "A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer," writer-activist Audre Lorde forges pioneering connections between the work of social justice and the environmental, gendered, and healthcare inequities that circumscribe black and brown lives. Following Lorde’s intervention, this course examines contemporary feminist/queer expressive culture, writing, and theory that centrally engages the category of dis/ability. It will familiarize students with feminist and queer scholarship that resists the medical pathologization of embodied difference; foreground dis/ability’s intersections with questions of race, class, and nation; and ask what political and social liberation might look like when able-bodiedness is no longer privileged. Prerequisite: SWG 150.

SWG 235 – Black Feminist and Queer Theory
Monday 3:05-4:20 p.m.; Wednesday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Jennifer DeClue

This course brings together two robust fields of study, Black feminism and queer theory, to study the conversations, debates, ruptures, and connections produced by this engagement. Black feminist theory and queer theory are scholarly interventions themselves, and by reading significant foundational and emergent work in these fields, students will learn the history of those scholarly interventions and examine the dominant ways of knowing that are being disrupted through Black feminist scholarship and queer theory. Students in this course will develop an understanding of the queer theoretical foundation that Black feminism has made while deepening their facility with queer theoretical concepts.

SWG 241 – White Supremacy in the Age of Trump
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Loretta Ross

This course will analyze the history, prevalence, and current manifestations of the white supremacist movement by examining ideological components, tactics and strategies, and its relationship to mainstream politics. We will also research and discuss the relationship between white supremacy and white privilege, and explore how to build a human rights movement to counter the white supremacist movement in the U.S. Students will develop analytical writing and research skills, while engaging in multiple cultural perspectives. The overall goal is to develop the capacity to understand the range of possible responses to white supremacy, both its legal and extralegal forms.

SWG 245 – Collective Organizing
Wednesday/Friday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
TBA
Component

This course is designed to introduce students to key concepts, debates and provocations that animate the world of community, labor, and electoral organizing for social change. To better understand these movements’ visions, we will develop an analysis of global and national inequalities, exploitation and oppression. The course explores a range of organizing skills to build an awareness of power dynamics and learn activists’ tools to bring people together towards common goals. A central aspect of this course is practicing community-based learning and research methods in dialogue with community-based activist partners. Prerequisite: CCX 120 or SWG 150.

SWG 321 – Marxist Feminism
Wednesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Elisabeth Armstrong

Marxist feminism as a theory and a politics imagines alternate, liberatory futures and critiques present social orders. Beginning with a simple insight: capitalism relies on the class politics of unpaid, reproductive "women’s work," Marxist feminists in the 19th century sought to imagine new social connections, sexualities, and desire to overthrow patriarchy, slavery, feudalism and colonialism. Today, queer of color &decolonial feminist theory, alongside abolition, environmental, and reproduction justice movements rejuvenate this tradition of Marxist feminism. This seminar will focus on theoretical writings from around the world to better understand radical social movements from the past and the present. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

SWG 377 – Feminist Public Writing
Thursday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Carrie Baker

This interdisciplinary course will teach students how to translate feminist scholarship for a popular audience. Students will practice how to use knowledge and concepts they have learned in their women and gender studies classes to write publicly in a range of formats, including book and film reviews, interviews, opinion editorials, and feature articles. We will explore the history and practice of feminist public writing, with particular attention to how gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, disability, and citizenship in women’s experiences of public writing. We will also some of the political and ethical questions relating to women’s public writing. Prerequisite: SWG 150 and one other SWG course. Cannot be taken S/U. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

AFR 201 – Methods of Inquiry in Africana Studies
Wednesday/Friday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Daphne Lamothe
Component

Designed to introduce students to the methods of inquiry used for research in Africana Studies. Through intensive study of a single topic (past examples: Toni Morrison's Beloved, the American South, The Black Seventies) students will consider the formation of the field, engage canonical texts, attend lectures and learn from scholars whose work is based in a variety of disciplines. Focus will be on the challenges and opportunities made possible by doing multi- and interdisciplinary research: how and why scholars ask and approach research questions and have conversations with each other. Students may explore and develop their own research project.

AFR 202 – Black Queer Diaspora
Monday/Wednesday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Paul Joseph Lopez Oro

This interdisciplinary course explores over two decades of work produced by and about Black Queer Diasporic communities throughout the circum-Atlantic world. While providing an introduction to various artists and intellectuals of the Black Queer Diaspora, this course examines the viability of Black Queer Diaspora world-making praxis as a form of theorizing. We will interrogate the transnational and transcultural mobility of specific Black Queer Diasporic forms of peacemaking, erotic knowledge productions, as well as the concept of “aesthetics” more broadly. Our aim is to use the prism of Blackness/Queerness/Diaspora to highlight the dynamic relationship between Black Diaspora Studies and Queer Studies.

EAL 235 – Class, Gender and Material Culture in Late Imperial China
Monday 3:05-4:20 p.m.; Wednesday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Jessica Moyer

This class examines the continuum between subject and object in Chinese fiction, drama, and poetry from the 16th through the 18th centuries, discussing how individuals participate as agents and objects of circulation; how objects structure identity and articulate relationships; the body as object; and the materiality of writing, illustration, and the stage. We analyze historical constructions of class and gender and reflect on how individuals constructed social identities vis-à-vis objects and consumption. All readings in English translation.

EAL 242 – Modern Japanese Literature
Tuesday/Thursday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Kimberly Kono
Component

A survey of Japanese literature from the late 19th century to the present. Over the last century and a half, Japan has undergone tremendous change: rapid industrialization, imperial and colonial expansion, occupation following its defeat in the Pacific War, and emergence as a global economic power. The literature of modern Japan reflects the complex aesthetic, cultural and political effects of such changes. Through our discussions of these texts, we also address theoretical questions about such concepts as identity, gender, race, sexuality, nation, class, colonialism, modernism and translation. All readings are in English translation.

EAL 273 – Women and Narration in Modern Korea
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m. (Lab Thursday 7:00-9:30 p.m.)
Irhe Sohn

This class explores modern Korean history from women's perspectives. It charts the historical and cultural transformation in modern Korea since the 1920s by coupling key terms of modern history with specific female figures: (1) Colonial modernity with modern girls in the 1920s and 30s; (2) colonization and cold-war regime with "comfort women" and "western princesses" from the 1940s to the 1960s; (3) industrial development under the authoritarian regime in the 1970s with factory girls; and (4) democratization and multiculturalism with rising feminists in the new millennium.

ENG 218 – Monstrous Mothers
Tuesday/Thursday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Jina Kim/Lily Gurton-Wachter

This course will explore the monstrosity of motherhood - the fear, disgust, alienation, and confusion of both being a mother and having one. We will discuss literary and cinematic representations of mothers as absent, distant, cruel, ambivalent, irresponsible, and deviant, and consider the ways we have been taught to think of motherhood both as a self-sacrifice and as necessary. But we will also seek new models of care, love, and attachment that are dependent neither on the sacrifice of one’s self nor on biological reproduction and that recast mothering as potentially revolutionary.

ENG 275 – Witches, Witchcraft and Witch Hunts
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Andrea Stephanie Stone

This course has two central ambitions. First, it introduces themes of magic and witchcraft in (mostly) American literature and film. We work together to figure out how the figure of the witch functions in stories, novels and movies, what witches and witchcraft mean or how they participate in the texts’ ways of making meaning. At the same time, we try to figure out how witches and witchcraft function as loci or displacements of social anxiety--about power, science, gender, class, race and politics. Since the identification of witches and the fear of witchcraft often lead to witch panics, we finally examine the historical and cultural phenomenon of the witch hunt, including both the persecution of persons literally marked as witches and the analogous persecution of persons (Communists, sexual outsiders, etc.) figuratively "hunted" as witches have been. Open to students at all levels, regardless of major.

ENG 353 – Shakespeare and Sexuality
Wednesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
TBD

Sexuality as a term for personal identity dates from the mid-nineteenth century, but Shakespeare’s plays and poems are replete with erotic desires of all sorts, allusions to sexual acts, character-types defined by their desires and acts, rebellion against authority, attempts at legal control, happy endings, and tragic endings. After honing our skills at visualizing and hearing Shakespeare’s texts, we will take up eight that are particularly concerned with what we would call sexuality. Covering the full range of Shakespeare’s career and the full range of genres in which he wrote, we will read some sonnets, Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

FMS 261 – Video Games and the Politics of Play
Monday/Wednesday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Jennifer Malkowski
Component

An estimated 63% of U.S. households have members who play video games regularly, and game sales routinely exceed film box office figures. As this medium grows in cultural power, it is increasingly important to think about how games make meaning. This course serves as an introduction to Game Studies, equipping students with the vocabulary to analyze video games, surveying the medium’s genres, and sampling this scholarly discipline’s most influential theoretical writing. The particular focus, though, is on the ideology operating beneath the surface of these popular entertainment objects and on the ways in which video games enter political discourse.

FRN 230 – Banlieue Lit
Monday 3:05-4:20 p.m.; Wednesday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Mehammed A. Mack
Component

In this course, students study fiction, memoir, slam poetry and hip-hop authored by residents of France’s multi-ethnic suburbs and housing projects, also known as the "banlieues" and "cités". We examine the question of whether "banlieue" authors can escape various pressures: to become native informants; to write realistic rather than fantastical novels; to leave the “ghetto”; to denounce the sometimes difficult traditions, religions, neighborhoods and family members that have challenged but also molded them. Often seen as spaces of regression and decay, the "banlieues" nevertheless produce vibrant cultural expressions that beg the question: Is the "banlieue" a mere suburb of French cultural life, or more like one of its centers? Students may receive credit for only one section of FRN 230. Basis for the major. Prerequisite: 220 or permission of the instructor.

FRN 239 – Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Dawn Fulton

An introduction to works by contemporary women writers from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. Topics studied include colonialism, exile, motherhood and intersections between class and gender. Our study of these works and of the French language is informed by attention to the historical, political and cultural circumstances of writing as a woman in a former French colony. Texts include works by Mariama Bâ, Maryse Condé, Yamina Benguigui and Marie-Célie Agnant. Students may receive credit for only one section of FRN 230. Basis for the major. Prerequisite: 220 or permission of the instructor.

FRN 380 – Immigration and Sexuality
Monday/Wednesday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Mehammed A. Mack

This course explains how gender and sexuality have been politicized in immigration debates in France, from the 1920s to the present. Students examine both cultural productions and social science texts: memoirs, psychoanalytical literature, activist statements, sociological studies, feature films, fashion, performance art, blogs and news reports. France has historically been the leading European host country for immigrants, a multiplicity of origins reflected in its current demographic make-up. Topics include: the hyper-sexualization of black and brown bodies, France as a Mediterranean culture, immigrant loneliness in Europe, intermarriage and demographic change, the veil and niqab, as well as sexual nationalism and homo-nationalism.

GOV 233 – Problems in Political Development
Monday/Wednesday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Anna Kapambwe Mwaba

This course explores the practical meaning of the term "development" and its impact on a range of global topics from the problems of poverty and income inequality to the spread of democracy, environmental degradation, urbanization and gender empowerment. We examine existing theories of economic development and consider how state governments, international donors and NGOs interact to craft development policy.

HST 223 – Ancient Times to the 19th Century
Monday/Wednesday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Marnie Anderson

The dramatic transformation in gender relations is a key feature of Japan’s premodern history. How Japanese women and men have constructed norms of behavior in different historical periods, how gender differences were institutionalized in social structures and practices, and how these norms and institutions changed over time. The gendered experiences of women and men from different classes from approximately the seventh through the 19th centuries. Consonant with current developments in gender history, exploration of variables such as class, religion and political context that have affected women’s and men’s lives.

HST 252 – Women and Gender in Modern Europe, 1789-1918
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Darcy Buerkle

A survey of European women’s experiences and constructions of gender from the French Revolution through World War I, focusing on Western Europe. Gendered relationships to work, family, politics, society, religion and the body, as well as shifting conceptions of femininity and masculinity, as revealed in novels, films, treatises, letters, paintings, plays and various secondary sources.

HST 278 – Decolonizing U.S. Women’s History
Wednesday/Friday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Jennifer Guglielmo

Survey of women's and gender history with women of color, working-class women and immigrant women at the center and with a focus on race, class and sexuality. This course is guided by the cultural and theoretical work of women of color feminists to decolonize knowledge, history, and the world. Topics include colonialism, emancipation from slavery, racial segregation and exclusion, industrial and neoliberal capitalism, imperialism, mass migration, feminism, civil rights, and a range of freedom movements in the 19th and 20th centuries.

HST 280 – Im/migration and Transnational Culture
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Jennifer Guglielmo

Explores significance of im/migrant workers and their transnational social movements to U.S. history in the late 19th and 20th centuries. How have im/migrants responded to displacement, marginalization and exclusion, by redefining the meanings of home, citizenship, community and freedom? What are the connections between mass migration and U.S. imperialism? What are the histories of such cross-border social movements as labor radicalism, borderlands feminism, Black and Brown Liberation, and anti-colonialism? Topics also include racial formation; criminalization, incarceration and deportation; reproductive justice; and the politics of gender, sexuality, race, class and nation.

HST 355 – Gender and the Aftermath of War in the Twentieth Century
Tuesday 7:00-9:30 p.m.
Darcy Buerkle

In this course, we focus on the work of reconstruction, recovery and memorialization in the aftermath of war and consider how that work interacted with gendered experience. Primary questions will include: Was the aftermath of war as gender-specific as war experience itself? What role did women take in postwar recoveries? How was the aftermath of war reflected in cultural production through fiction, film and visual art in the twentieth century? Primary focus will be on Europe, but students can expect to actively engage with the transnational effects and sources. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

HST 371 – Remembering Slavery: A Gendered Reading of the WPA Interviews
Tuesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
TBD

Despite the particular degradation, violence and despair of enslavement in the United States, African American men and women built families, traditions and a legacy of resistance. Using the WPA interviews—part of the New Deal Federal Writers Project of the 1930s—this course looks at the historical memory of former slaves by reading and listening to their own words. How did 70- through 90-year-old former slaves remember their childhoods and young adulthoods during slavery? And how do scholars make sense of these interviews given they were conducted when Jim Crow segregation was at its pinnacle? The course examines the WPA interviews as historical sources by studying scholarship that relies heavily on them. Most importantly, students explore debates that swirl around the interviews and challenge their validity on multiple fronts,even as they remain the richest sources of African American oral history regarding slavery. Students write an original research paper using the WPA interviews as their central source. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

JUD 271 – Motherhood in Early Judaism
Tuesday/Thursday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Sari Fein

How did early Jewish communities imagine mothers, and what does this reveal about communal ideas of gender, family, and identity in early Judaism? This course considers various manifestations of mothers in early Judaism through exploration of such literary sources as the Bible, rabbinic literature, and the pseudepigrapha, as well as artifacts from material culture such as Aramaic incantation bowls, synagogue wall paintings, and other archeological evidence. No prior knowledge of Judaism is expected.

MES 213 – Sex and Power in the The Middle East
Tuesday/Thursday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
TBD

This course invites students to explore how sexuality has been central to power and resistance in the Middle East. When and how have empires, colonial powers, and nation states tried to regulate intimacy, sex, love, and reproduction? How have sexual practices shaped social life, and how have perceptions of these practices changed over time? The course introduces theoretical tools for the history of sexuality and explores how contests over sexuality, reproduction, and the body shaped empires, colonial states, and nationalist projects. Finally, we examine contemporary debates about sexuality as a basis for political mobilization in the Middle East today.

PSY 266 – Psychology of Women and Gender
Tuesday/Thursday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Lauren Duncan

An in-depth examination of controversial issues of concern to the study of the psychology of women and gender. Students are introduced to current psychological theory and empirical research relating to the existence, origins and implications of behavioral similarities and differences associated with gender. We examine the development of gender roles and stereotypes, power within the family, workplace and politics, and women’s mental health and sexuality, paying attention to social context, and intersectional identities. Prerequisites: PSY 100 & PSY 202.

PSY 375 – Political Psychology
Tuesday/Thursday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Lauren Duncan
Component

An introduction to research methods in political psychology. Includes discussion of current research as well as design and execution of original research in selected areas such as right wing authoritarianism, group consciousness, and political activism. Prerequisite: PSY 202 or GOV 190 and PSY 266. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

SOC 216 – Social Movements
Monday 3:05-4:20 p.m.; Wednesday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Nancy Whittier
Component

This course provides an in-depth examination of major sociological theories of collective action and social movements. Emphasis is placed on the analysis of social movement dynamics including recruitment and mobilization, strategies and tactic, and movement outcomes. The empirical emphasis is on modern American social movements including student protest, feminist, civil rights and sexual identity movements. Prerequisite: SOC 101.

SOC 229 – Sex and Gender in American Society
Monday/Wednesday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Nancy Whittier

An examination of the ways in which the social system creates, maintains and reproduces gender dichotomies with specific attention to the significance of gender in interaction, culture and a number of institutional contexts, including work, politics, families and sexuality. Prerequisite: SOC 101.

SOC 327 – Global Migration in the 21st Century
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Payal Banerjee
Component

This 300-level seminar provides an in-depth engagement with global migration. It covers such areas as theories of migration, the significance of global political economy and state policies across the world in shaping migration patterns and immigrant identities. Questions about imperialism, post-colonial conditions, nation-building/national borders, citizenship, and the gendered racialization of immigration intersect as critical contexts for our discussions. Prerequisite: SOC 101. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

SPN 230 – Domestica
Tuesday/Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Michelle Joffroy

This course explores the realities and representation of women’s domestic labor from the thematic perspectives of precariousness (a condition and expression of subjectivity under globalization) and intimacy (understood as both an experience of affect and a condition of labor). This course uses short fiction, documentary and film from the Spanish-speaking world (the Americas and Spain) and the Portuguese-speaking world where appropriate, to explore the ways in which women’s transnational domestic labor has shaped new cultural subjects and political identities in the public as well as the private sphere. Students work on the theme of women’s domestic labor from the perspective of their choosing (for example, human rights, migration policies, racial and gendered labor regimes, neoliberal reforms and resistance). Prerequisite: SPN 220 or equivalent.

THE 319 – Shamans, Shapeshifters and the Magic If
Tuesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Wednesday 7:00-10:00 p.m.
Andrea Hairston

his course investigates the counterfactual, speculative, subjunctive impulse in overtly speculative drama and film with a particular focus on race and gender. We examine an international range of plays by such authors as Caryl Churchill, Tess Onwueme, Dael Orlandersmith, Derek Walcott, Bertolt Brecht, Lorraine Hansberry, Craig Lucas and Doug Wright, as well as films such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Pan’s Labyrinth; Children of Men; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; X-Men; Contact and Brother From Another Planet.

WLT 205 – Contemporary African Literature and Film
Monday/Wednesday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Katwiwa Mule
Component

A study of the major writers and diverse literary traditions of Africa with emphasis on the historical, political, social and cultural contexts of the emergence of writing, reception and consumption. We pay particular attention to several questions: in what contexts did modern African literature emerge? Is the term "African literature" a useful category? How do African writers challenge Western representations of Africa? How do they articulate the crisis of postcoloniality? How do women writers reshape our understanding of gender and the politics of resistance? Writers include Achebe, Ngugi, Dangarembga, Bâ, Ndebele, and Aidoo. Films: Tsotsi , Softie, and Blood Diamond.

PHI 240 – Philosophy and Gender
Tuesday/Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Melissa Yates

This course examines philosophical conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality in the context of contemporary ethical questions. In what ways are our conceptions of gender created and reinforced through cultural and social norms? How do assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality shape and potentially limit research in natural and social sciences? In what ways are feminist and multiculturalist goals potentially at odds? Is sex and sexuality the public’s business? How do gender identities intersect with other identities? We will consider applications of these questions to a variety of contemporary debates concerning parenting, pornography, sex education, marriage, sexual harassment laws, and sexual or gender assignment or reassignment.

PSY 345 – Feminist Perspectives on Psychological Science
Tuesday/Thursday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Benita Sibia Jackson

Research Seminar. In this advanced methods course, we study feminist empirical approaches to psychological research. The first part considers several key feminist empiricist philosophies of science, including positivist, experiential and discursive approaches. The second part focuses on conceptualizations of gender beyond difference-based approaches and their operationalization in recent empirical articles. The capstone will be an application of feminist perspectives on psychological science to two group projects-quantitative and qualitative, respectively-in the domain of health and well-being. Prerequisites: PSY 202 and (PSY 140 or 266). Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.