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 4:00-5:15 p.m.
- 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
- Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m. – Debadatta Chakraborty
- Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m. – Reyna Orellana
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 205 – Feminist Health Politics
- Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
- B Aultman
What is health? What makes health a matter of feminism? And what might a feminist health politics look like? These questions lay at the heart of this course. In Feminist Health Politics, we will examine how health becomes defined, and will question whether health and disease are objectively measured conditions or subjective states. We will also consider why and how definitions and standards of health have changed over time; why and how standards and adjudications of health vary according to gender, race, sexuality, class, and nationality; and how definitions of health affect the way we value certain bodies and ways of living. Additionally, we will explore how knowledge about health is created; how environmental conditions, social location, politics, and economic conditions affect health; how various groups have fought for changes to health care practices and delivery; and how experiences of health and illness have been reported and represented.
WGSS 240 – Introduction to Transgender Studies
- Monday, Wednesday 2:30 3:45 p.m.
- Cameron Awkward-Rich
This survey of transgender studies will introduce students to the major concepts and current debates within the field. Drawing on a range of theoretical texts, historical case studies, and creative work, we will track the emergence of “transgender” as both an object of study and a way of knowing. In particular, we will ask: what does it mean to “study” “transgender?” This guiding question will lead us to consider the varied meanings of “trans” and how these meanings have been shaped by regimes of gender, racism, colonization, ableism, and medical and legal regulation; the tensions and intimacies between trans, disability, anti-racist, queer, and feminist theory/politics; and how “trans” might help us to imagine other, more just worlds.
WGSS 250 – Introduction to Sexuality Studies
Univ+ (online)
Nicole Leroux
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.
Monday, Wednesday 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Friday discussions
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 291N – Critical Relationship Studies: Belonging Beyond the Family
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Angie Willey
Grounded in queer, feminist, and decolonial concerns with social belonging, this class begins from the critical insight that “the family” is neither an inevitable nor ideal way to organize our social worlds. The nuclear family has a history. The first half of the course considers "monogamy" from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. From histories of marriage to sciences of mating systems to politics of polyamory, we will explore monogamy's meanings and how its logics shape our worlds. In the second half of the class we will explore a broader world of relationality. Drawing on indigenous, multispecies, crip, and queer feminist insights, we will explore relating and belonging beyond the settler family. Over the course of the semester students will become familiar with debates about human nature and belonging and a variety of critical and creative approaches to reading and engaging them.
WGSS 392FT – Feminist, Theory, Technoscience
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Angie Willey
Feminist science studies is a rich and diverse radically interdisciplinary field with genealogies in science practice, history, social sciences, and philosophy. Science studies has been a vital resource to feminist, queer, critical race, postcolonial, and disability theory and has also been profoundly shaped and extended by work in these fields. We will explore the contemporary preoccupations and concerns of this exciting field by conducting a careful reading of a new open-source journal (2015-present) devoted to it. Catalyst: Feminism Theory Technoscience (https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/archive) has for almost a decade now dedicated itself to radical re-imaginings of both science studies and science itself. As we read and explore these new directions, we will consider such questions as: What do we know? How do we know it? What counts as science? What knowledge systems have been excluded from the category? What and how do we know when we decenter the human? What might it look like to “queer” or “crip” science and feminist approaches to reading and making it? Students will build critical lenses and a robust vocabulary for understanding sciences, their critics, and the ways of knowing and worlding these critical engagements enable.
WGSS 393A – Feminism and Social Justice Activism
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Laura Briggs
What are the problems that activists are try to solve? How do feminist, queer, and trans activists come to have such an outsized role in so many movements—from Black Lives Matter to prison abolition to climate justice, immigration, and indigenous land and water struggles? Why is this the case from Idle No More in Canada to Fees Must Fall in South Africa to the movement to overthrow the governor in Puerto Rico? This course will explore the issues in contemporary movements through histories, writings, and conversations with contemporary activists.
WGSS 492D/692D – 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 492E/692E – 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 494TI – Unthinking the Transnational
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Kiran Asher
This course is about the framework of transnational women's and gendered activisms and scholarship. We will survey the field of transnational feminist research and praxis, locating structures of power, practices of resistance, and the geographies of development at work in a range of theories and social movements. The course will not only examine the implementation of feminist politics and projects that have sought to ensure some measurable social, cultural, and economic changes, but also explore the ways conceptions of the `global' and `transnational' have informed these efforts. Students will have the opportunity to assess which of these practices can be applicable, transferable, and/or travel on a global scale. We will focus not only on the agency of individuals, but also on the impact on people's lives and their communities as they adopt strategies to improve material, social, cultural, and political conditions of their lives. Satisfies the Integrative Experience for BA-WoSt majors.
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.
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.
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
WGSS majors and minors much focus their work on WGSS topics for any courses designated as component in any of our course guides. 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.