Fall 2023 Course Guide : Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies : UMass Amherst

WGSS

Attention Majors and Minors! For those of you that declared the major or minor before Fall 2020, you must follow the old requirements. Please contact the department advisor about these requirements. Courses in yellow count towards the theory requirement for majors. Courses in green are UWW/Online. All additions and changes are in red!

WGSS 187 - Gender, Sexuality and Culture

Monday, Wednesday 11:15-12:05 p.m.
Discussions sections Friday 9:05, 10:10, 11:15 and 12:20
B Aultman

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 & Difference: Critical Analyses

Section 1 11:30-12:45 p.m. Deb Chakraborty
Section 2 1:00-2:15 p.m. Laura Briggs

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 220 – Sustainability, Gender and the Global Environment

M,W,F 9:05 – 9:55 a.m.
Friday class will be discussion/review

Gender, the environment and sustainability are key terms in debates about economic globalization and social justice. While not new, they are reemerging in the as part of the post-2015 sustainable development agenda. This course will introduce students to the perceived and existing links between women, gender, and the global environment as they appear in 21st century discussions about sustainable development. We will explore these debates by focusing on questions such as:
- When did the environment and sustainability emerge as key issues on global agendas?
- What are their connections to economic globalization? To colonialism and capitalism?
- How did women and gender become part of these discussions?
- How did governments, multilateral institutions (e.g. the United Nations, the World Bank), and development policies target third world women? Was it to meet their needs and address gender equality? Or was it for more efficient and effective environmental and sustainability outcomes?
- What were the results and implications of these interventions?
- In what guise are these interventions reemerging in the context of the ?green? economy, food security, and population and reproductive rights?
- How have women across the world organized to address concerns about the environment and sustainability?
- How have feminists engaged with issues of gender, the global environment and sustainability?

The primary goal of this class is to familiarize students with these debates in a way that will enable them to participate in 21st century discussions in informed, critical and self-reflexive ways. (Gen. Ed. SB, DG)

WGSS 250 – Intro to Sexuality and Trans Studies: Movements for Justice in the Contemporary World

Wednesday 2:30-4:30 p.m. B Aultman

This interdisciplinary course will help students to understand what the terms "sexuality studies" and "trans studies" mean, 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" and "gender" become consolidated as distinct categories of analysis in the late nineteenth century, and what it means to speak about sexuality and transgender politics and categories today. Topics include queer theories and politics, trans theories and politics, LGBTQ social movements within and outside of the U.S., relationships with feminist reproductive justice movements, heterosexuality, gender norms, 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.

Section 1 Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m. Tiarra Cooper
Section 2 Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m. Derek Siegel
UWW Section - Tiarra Cooper

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 230 – Politics of Reproduction

Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
~~B Aultman~~ Laura Briggs

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 310 – Writing for WGSS 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 392AA – Asian American Feminisms

Tuesday 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 393M – What to Expect When You’re Expecting

Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Kirsten Leng

Pregnancy losses are generally resigned to silence. They are not publicly discussed and do not constitute a standard part of pregnancy education. Moreover, different kinds of pregnancy loss are siloed from each other. Within public discourse and political activism, "induced" pregnancy loss (abortion) is treated separately from "involuntary" loss (miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, and stillbirth). Within this course, we will hold all forms of pregnancy loss within a common frame. We will think collectively about how we might reimagine and treat reproductive losses - and indeed, reproduction itself - as existing on a spectrum of experiences, and will approach reproduction as a simultaneously biological, social, cultural, political, economic, and subjective phenomenon. Grounded in an approach informed by reproductive justice, and specifically birth justice, this course will draw upon interdisciplinary scholarship and guest talks by academics, activists, care providers, and support group leaders. Learning objectives include (among others): historicizing experiences and conceptualizations of pregnancy losses; interrogating the relationship between pregnancy and childbearing; identifying how (and why) federal and state laws criminalize pregnancy losses; analyzing how pregnancy loss experiences vary based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and nature of loss; and examining how both the women's health movement and medical science have addressed forms of loss.

WGSS 395A/ENGLISH 395A – Poetry as Black Feminist Thought

Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 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 395J - Imagining Justice

Tuesday 1:10-5:00 p.m.
Laura Ciolkowski

This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the critical, aspirational, artistic, and creative forms that Justice takes in literature and the humanities more broadly. What sorts of ethical, social, and political questions 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, economic, and ecological injustice? How do writers, poets, artists, and "freedom dreamers," as Robin D.G. Kelley so memorably called them, labor to expose injustice and re-invent our universe? Ursula Le Guin has written, "We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable." Taking Le Guin's focus on the radical imagination as a starting point, this course explores the relationship between literature, the arts, and a wide range of social justice projects. Topics will include: Afrofuturism; utopian and dystopian fiction; art, politics and social justice; bioethics and literature; antebellum slave narratives and fictions of restorative and transformative justice; mass incarceration and prison literature; diaspora studies and literary and artistic representations of movement, forced migration and displacement.

This course will be conducted inside the Hampshire County Jail in Northampton and will enroll students from UMass/Five Colleges and students who are incarcerated in the facility.

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/vUbzCbXJx87gWwYj7 . Transportation will be provided from UMass. Students should also note that the seminar schedule includes travel time, to and from the jail.

Depending upon the status of COVID-19 in fall 2023, 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.

WGSS 398/698 – Teaching and Learning in Carceral Spaces

Mandatory Zoom meetings on Mondays at 5:00 p.m.
Laura Ciolkowski

This course is centered on teaching and learning in carceral spaces. It gives students the opportunity to facilitate weekly tutoring sessions in the Hampshire County Jail and the Franklin County Jail; to read and explore critical prison studies; and to discuss broad questions around equity and access to education in prison and jail. Students will complete a multi-part Tutor Training; offer individualized tutoring sessions that support the academic goals of students in the jail; participate in seminar meetings to deepen reading and research in educational theory, critical prison studies, and carceral pedagogy; and complete a 3-part Reflection Journal Project. As a member of this course, you will move beyond the traditional classroom to become active participants in your learning. You will develop the knowledge, experience, and practical skills to support justice in education and to work with others to imagine, advocate for, and build a more just society in which all people, regardless of their circumstance, have access to quality higher education. Instructor's permission required. Application for admission is available at this link https://forms.gle/79RmUWbwyfdK1JY39

WGSS 695E – Theorizing Eros

Tuesday 10:00-12:30 p.m.
Angie Willey

This graduate seminar centers around the project of theorizing eros. The erotic has been a rich site of queer feminist thinking about the epistemic and material costs of the imposition of sexuality as an interpretive grid for making sense of human nature. The course will begin with the study of sexuality as a knowledge system, with a focus on racial and colonial histories of sexuality, while most of the rest of the semester will be devoted to queer feminist considerations of the erotic as a site of ethics and politics. Michele Foucault famously distinguished between ?scientia sexualis? and "ars erotica" and Audre Lorde, coterminously, between the pornographic and the erotic. In The History of Sexuality and "Uses of the Erotic," eros operates as a set of possibilities, or capacities, - for pleasure, joy, fulfilment, satisfaction - that exceed and provincialize sexuality and which might inspire ways of rethinking nature, need, and relationality. In addition to Lorde and Foucault, we will read Lynne Huffer, L.H. Stallings, Ladelle McWhorter, Adrienne Marie Brown, Sharon Holland, Ela Przybylo, Jennifer Nash, and Amber Jamilla Musser, among others, to help us think capaciously about what queer feminist erotics can do.

WGSS 698/398 – Teaching and Learning in Carceral Spaces

Mandatory Zoom meetings on Mondays at 5:00 p.m.
Laura Ciolkowski

WGSS 701 – Genealogies of Feminist Thought

Tuesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
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. This is a required course for students enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies and was previously numbered 791B (Feminist Theory). If you've taken 791B, you should not sign up for this course. This course is only offered in the FALL semester. Contact @email if you are enrolled as a certificate student and need to be added to the course.

WGSS 891P – Critical Feminist Pedagogy

Thursday 10:00-12:20 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.

CHINESE 394WI – Women in Chinese Cultures

Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Elena Chiu

This course focuses on the representation of women and the constitution of gender in Chinese culture as seen through literature and mass media. It focuses on literary and visual representations of women to examine important issues such as the relationship between gender and power, self and society, and tradition and modernity. This course has a dual goal: to explore how women's social role has evolved from pre-modern China to the present and to examine important issues such as women's agency, "inner-outer" division, and the yin-yang dichotomy in Chinese literature and culture. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-Chinse majors.

CLASSICS 335 – Women in Antiquity

Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Lauren Caldwell

Lives, roles, contributions, and status of women in Greek and Roman societies, as reflected in classical literature and the archaeological record. (Gen.Ed. HS)

COMM 209H – LGBT Politics and the Media

Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Seth Goldman

This course aims to further understanding about 1) historical trends in media portrayals and public opinion about LGBT issues; 2) the effects of mass media on attitudes toward sexual and gender minorities; 3) the interplay of LGBT issues and electoral politics; and 4) the evolving role of sexuality and gender identity/expression in U.S. politics and society. (Gen. Ed. SB, DU)

COMM 394EI – Performance and the Politics of Race

Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
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.

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature, and Culture

Section 1 – Monday, Wednesday, Friday Jarrel De Matas
Section 2 – Monday, Wednesday, Friday Olivia Barry
Section 3 – Monday, Wednesday, Friday Sam Davis

ENGLISH 378 - American Women Writers

Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 a.m.
Sarah Patterson

Fiction by women exploring the social and sexual arrangements of American culture.

GERMAN 363 – Witches: Myth and Reality

Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:25 – 2:15 p.m.
Kerstin Mueller Dembling

This course focuses on various aspects of witches/witchcraft in order to examine the historical construction of the witch in the context of the social realities of women (and men) labeled as witches. The main areas covered are: European pagan religions and the spread of Christianity; the "Burning Times" in early modern Europe, with an emphasis on the German situation; 17th-century New England and the Salem witch trials; the images of witches in folk lore and fairy tales in the context of the historical persecutions; and contemporary Wiccan/witch practices in their historical context. The goal of the course is to deconstruct the stereotypes that many of us have about witches/witchcraft, especially concerning sexuality, gender, age, physical appearance, occult powers, and Satanism. Readings are drawn from documentary records of the witch persecutions and witch trials, literary representations, scholarly analyses of witch-related phenomena, and essays examining witches, witchcraft, and the witch persecutions from a contemporary feminist or neo-pagan perspective. The lectures will be supplemented by related material taken from current events in addition to visual material (videos, slides) drawn from art history, early modern witch literature, popular culture, and documentary sources. Conducted in English. (Gen Ed. I, DG)

HISTORY 290STA/LEGAL 290STB – 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. Prior law-law related coursework helpful, but not required.

HISTORY 364/SPP 364/POLISCI 364 – Gender and Race in US Social Policy

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.

HISTORY 390STC – 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 gendered 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 390STE - Gender and Sexuality in African History

Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Elizabeth Jacob

This course explores gender and sexuality in African history, from the era of the slave trade to the present. Together, we will examine a range of themes, including politics and power, marriage and motherhood, fashion and the body, and love and intimacies.

PSYCH 391LB – Psychology of the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Experience

Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
John Bickford

Students in this course will explore psychological theory and research pertaining to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Topics include sexual orientation, sexual identity development, stigma management, heterosexism & homonegativity, gender roles, same-sex relationships, LGB families, LGB diversity, and LGB mental health

PUBHLTH 328 – Fundamentals of Women’s Health

Thursday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Sara Sabelawski

This course will provide a comprehensive overview of issues related to health in women, addressing areas including but not limited to biology, psychology, geography, economics, health policy, and social issues.

PUBHLTH 372 – Maternal and Child Health

Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
TBD

This course is designed to give students a broad overview to pertinent topics in the field of global maternal and child health. Topics covered include causes of maternal and infant mortality, treatment of malaria in pregnancy, HIV and pregnancy, infant nutrition, maternal and child nutrition, gender roles, and cultural and religious concepts in relation to working in a global setting. This course will explore approaches to public health programming that acknowledge and incorporate cultural differences.

SOCIOL 106 – Race, Gender, Class & Ethnicity

Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-23:45 p.m. – Joshua Kaiser
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m. – Kathryn Reynolds

Introduction to Sociology. Analysis of the consequences of membership in racial, gender, class and ethnic groups on social, economic and political life. (Gen.Ed. SB, DU)

SOCIOL 287 – Sexuality and Society

Monday, Wednesday, Friday 9:05-9:55 a.m.
TBD

The many ways in which social factors shape sexuality. Focus on cultural diversity, including such factors as race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity in organizing sexuality in both individuals and social groups. Prerequisite: 100-level Sociology course. (Gen.Ed. SB, DU)

SOCIOL 344 – Gender and Crime

Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Gender and Crime
TBD

The extent and causes of gender differences in crime, from the "streets" to the "suites." Topics include problems in the general measurement of crime, historical and cross-cultural differences in the gender gap, the utility of general theories of the causes of crime in explaining the continuing gender gap, and a detailed look at the question and magnitude of gender discrimination in the American criminal justice system.

SUSTCOMM 255 – 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.

Graduate

WGSS 692D/492D - Capitalism, Debt, Gender, and Empire
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 p.m.
Laura Briggs

Feminists have an under-acknowledged tradition of talking about debt. While analysis of the political, social, and economic force of debt, largely articulated in the global south, has entered feminist scholarship in English at many points, there has been little effort to hold up a specifically feminist understanding of debt that has been ping ponging through scholarship in English since at least the 1970s. Beginning in that period, and with intensifying force when Reagan/Thatcher came into power, global financial institutions moved aggressively to restructure the international economy around loans and debt. Development programs were reimagined in terms of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and more loans. The withdrawal of state subsidies for food, health care, and education intensified poverty and household debt, even as international institutions based mostly in wealthier nations reimagined the "gender and development" enterprise as microcredit loans to women. Sovereign debt and household debt became the economy of impoverished people and nations. Debt has become a primary driver of international migration - including debt incurred as a result of previous migration attempts - and India in particular has documented epidemics of debt suicides. This course will explore analysis by feminists of debt across many fields, including both activists and scholars.

WGSS 692E/492E – Trans and Queer of Color Thought
Tuesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Cameron Awkward-Rich

Since its coining at the turn of the twenty-first century, queer of color critique (and later trans of color critique) has come to name the vital project of queer/trans theorizing attentive to the racial and colonial histories that undergird the categories of "gender" and "sexuality." In this mixed grad/undergrad seminar, we will first trace the development of trans/queer of color critique in the United States as simultaneously a continuation of black and woman of color feminism as they were articulated in the 1970s/80s; a site of disidentification with queer and trans theory; and a practice emerging from trans/queer of color expressive culture and world-making. In the second half of the class, we will ask after how trans/queer of color thought helps us to know about disability, migration, settler colonialism, sex, erotics, and aesthetics, among other key terms.

WGSS 705 – Feminist Epistemologies and Interdisciplinary Methodologies
Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Laura Ciolkowski

This course will begin from the question, "what is feminist research?" Through classic and current readings on feminist knowledge production, we will explore questions such as: What makes feminist research feminist? What makes it research? What are the proper objects of feminist research? Who can do feminist research? What can feminist research do? Why do we do feminist research? How do feminists research? Are there feminist ways of doing research? Why and how do the stories we tell in our research matter, and to whom? Some of the key issues/themes we will address include: accountability, location, citational practices and politics, identifying stakes and stakeholders, intersectionality, inter/disciplinarity, choosing and describing our topics and methods, research as storytelling, and the relationship between power and knowledge.

WGSS 795D/COMP-LIT 795D – Critical Decolonial Gender and Sexuality Studies
Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Svati Shah
Corinne Tachtiris

As Talal Asad and Gayatri Spivak have argued, to translate another culture’s practices into the language of the scholar involves not only a linguistic shift, but an epistemological one as well. This course asks students to think critically about how those practices become subjects of scholarly knowledge production, particularly with respect to questions of gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality have often been central to producing comparative perspectives on civilization that place the West ahead of the rest of the world. This course unpacks hierarchies that arrive in the form of ‘the woman question’ and ‘homonationalism’ in Western academic discourses, with a view to expanding how we may critique and undermine the uneven developmentalist ethos embedded within them. ‘Decolonialism’ is presented here as the term through which counternarratives to this ethos are being made legible in Euro-American academic contexts. We present a key set of these counternarratives by introducing students to how categories, subjects, and debates are both produced in postcolonial worlds, and how they are translated into particular conceptualizations and objects of study. We take gender, racialization, and sexuality as the key sites of inquiry in an interdisciplinary exploration of robust postcolonial and decolonial critique from Asia, Africa and the Americas. In building the critical language to address these developments, students develop their ability to think through how ideas move, via language, across, out, and through postcolonial worlds. In this light, the course will pay particular attention to the way language shapes discourse about racialized, sexual, and gender identities as well as shapes those identities themselves.

UWW Winter / Spring

Five Colleges

Fall 2023 Course Guide