Spring 2020 Course Guide : Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies : UMass Amherst

WGSS

WGSS 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Derek Siegel

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 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Online CPE/UWW Course
Adina Giannelli

See description above.

WGSS 201 – Gender and Difference: Critical Analyses
Section 1: Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m. Adina Giannelli
Section 2: Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m. Ryan Ambuter

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
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Svati Shah
Distribution Requirement: Critical Race Feminisms/Sexuality Studies/Transnational Feminisms

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 285 – Biology of Difference
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Banu Subramaniam/Angie Willey
Distribution Requirement: Sexuality Studies

The course centrally examines our understanding of the "body". While humans have many similarities and differences, we are organized around certain axes of "difference" that have profound consequences - sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, nationality etc. These differences can shape not only group affiliation and identity, but also claims about intellectual and behavioral capacities. This course will explore popular claims, critiques and understandings of "difference" as well as academic research, its claims, debates and critiques. This is an interdisciplinary course that will draw from the biological and social sciences and the humanities. We will explore principles of human biology - anatomy, physiology, sex/gender/sexuality, reproductive biology, genetics, as well as the scientific method(s) and experimental designs. The course will give students the tools to analyze scientific studies, to understand the relationship of nature and culture, science and society, biology and politics. (Gen Ed SI, DU)

WGSS 290C – History of Sexuality and Race in the U.S.
Monday, Wednesday 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Discussions Friday 9:05, 10:10, 11:15 and 12:20
Laura Briggs
Distribution Requirement: Critical Race Feminisms/Sexuality Studies

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 291J/COMM 291J – Villains in Film: Issues in Representation
Monday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Online activities due each Wednesday
Rachel Briggs
Distribution Requirement: Critical Race Feminisms/Sexuality Studies

This course will interrogate representations of villains in cinema. We will screen a wide variety of films, including Basic Instinct, Disney's Aladdin, and Jennifer's Body. We will use intersectional feminist theory, film theory, and queer theory to examine how race, gender, sexuality, and disability are used to construct images of danger, badness, and villainy. Course content will explore and critique harmful tropes of bisexuality as dangerous and trans identity depicted as inherently deceptive, as well as examining how villains were historically queer-coded in Hollywood film. We will view and analyze films that construct whiteness as goodness and use representations of people of color as a stand-in for villainous character traits. We will look at the stigmatizing of mental illness and representations of people who look "different" as ways that ableism emerges in cinematic representation. Films that resist stereotypes and tropes will be viewed to offer a counterpoint to theses representations and to explore ways in which film can be used to present and change narratives around representations. This class meets in person on Monday and convenes online on Wednesday. The online session doesn't have a meeting time; film viewing and online activities should be done by Wed. at 11:59 p.m. EST. For further questions, contact instructor.

WGSS 291L – Love-Politics, Self-Care and Feminist Discourse
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Fumi Okiji
Distribution Requirement: Critical Race Feminisms

In this course we will explore the potential that love has for transforming relations with others, and with ourselves. Drawing from feminist scholars and culturemakers, we will focus on both politics and imaginaries in order to come to an appreciation of the critical and utopian potentials that love and radical self-care hold. Our inquiries will be historically broad, taking in early black feminist educator and activist Anna Julia Cooper, jazz vocalists Billie Holiday and Abbey Lincoln, the Combahee River Collective, the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind school, contemporary scholars such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Jennifer Nash, and their creative counterparts, including Solange and Meshell Ndegeocello.

WGSS 292M – Sex, Race and Medicine
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Seda Saluk
Distribution Requirement: Critical Race Feminisms/Sexuality Studies/Transnational Feminisms

This course explores the fields of health, medicine, and ethics through the lenses of race, gender, and sexuality. Throughout the semester, we will focus on the role of biomedicine in the production and embodiment of the body, health, and illness from a historical, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural perspective. In the first section of the course, "Theorizing the Body, Health, and Medicine," we will build a shared set of theoretical tools and language for thinking, talking, and writing about bodies, biology, and difference. In the second section, "(Global) Inequalities and Health," we will examine how power and inequality shape our experiences and understandings of the transnational body. In the final section of the class, "Remaking Bodies, Lives, and Markets," we will explore some of the cutting-edge developments in biomedical technologies as well as ethical concerns around them. We will touch on topics including new medical technologies (organ donation/transplantation, assisted reproduction, and genetic testing) and commodification of the body and biotechnologies.

WGSS 295C – Career and Life Choices
Monday 2:30-4:00
Karen Lederer

Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies teaches critical thinking skills. How can students use these skills to make informed career choices? How is it possible to engage in planning one’s career while conscious of the realities of race, gender, sexuality, and class in today’s economy? What are career options for students whose values include working for a better society? Is it possible to put together a balanced life and pay the bills besides? How can pressured college seniors, particularly activists, get all the career tasks they need to do done (resume writing, budgeting, researching career opportunities, networking, informational interviews) while finishing out their college degree? Students will formulate their own career questions and choices. The first part of the semester is self awareness, articulating interests, skills and values. The second part of the semester focuses on workforce information, practical job search skills, and research on a possible field. Assignments include: self awareness exercises, informational interviews, budget, resume, cover letter, career research and more.

WGSS 295S – Sex and Liberation: The 1970s
Wednesday 2:30-5:00
Kirsten Leng
Distribution Requirement: Sexuality Studies

As a result of changing understandings of and attitudes towards women’s sexuality, homosexuality, and premarital sexuality, as well as the rise of new social movements such as the women’s and gay liberation movement, new technologies such as the birth control pill, and legal triumphs like Roe v. Wade, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a "sexual revolution" in the United States and indeed in much of the world. Among other things, the sexual revolution was marked by new forms of sexual expression and practices and new visions for sexual relations, ethics, and sexual-social organization. Central to the sexual revolution was the concept of sexual liberation, the idea that repressed sexual subjects, desires, and practices were now freed of their previous constraints. This claim was seen as particularly true for women and for gay men and lesbians. But what did sexual liberation really mean for these actors? Did it mean the same thing to all? How did women differ in their understanding and experience of sexual liberation? Was liberation synonymous with pleasure? With emotional fulfillment? With independence? Was sexual liberation even financially tenable for women? And what did a politics of sexual liberation look like for different actors? This course will explore the complexity of sexual liberation by examining the history of the sexual revolution in the US from the 1960s and the 1980s, focusing on feminist and gay liberation thought and cultural products from the period. Moreover, we will consider the legacy of diverse visions and experiences of "sexual liberation" between 1960-1980 for the present day.

WGSS 297TC – Introduction to Transgender Studies
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Cameron Awkward-Rich
Distribution Requirement: Sexuality Studies

While mainstream discourse tends to frame "transgender" as a perpetually new phenomenon, this survey of transgender studies will contextualize present-day conversations in a longer intellectual history. We will be guided by questions like: What does trans mean and how has its meaning been shaped by regimes of gender, racism, colonization, ableism, and medical and legal regulation? What have emerged as the main concerns of transgender studies/activism and how has trans studies interacted with more established academic fields? How have trans artists, activists, and scholars helped us to imagine other, more just worlds? By engaging with scholarship from multiple fields, as well as a range of creative work, we will map the emergence of "transgender" as both an object of knowledge and a way of knowing.

WGSS 393G – Global Mommy Wars: Reproductive Politics in Asia and Asian American
Monday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Miliann Kang
Distribution Requirement: Critical Race Feminisms/Transnational Feminisms

How has motherhood become a highly contested site for racial politics? How are mothers pitted against each other in ways that undermine and detract from struggles for reproductive justice? The “mommy wars” were once shorthand for a mostly media-fueled catfight between middle class stay-at-home versus working mothers. The obsession of these old mommy wars –tough love or attachment parenting, helicopter or free-range mothering – have not gone away. But they have been sutured to newly virulent, highly racialized debates focused on “anchor babies,” birthright citizenship and family separations at the border. Given the rise of China and the ongoing conflation of Asian Americans with Asia, regardless of ethnicity or national origin, Asian American mothers have emerged at the fulcrum in this global iteration of the mommy wars. This course will examine how the stereotypical figure of the “tiger mother” has emerged as the default representation of Asian American mothers, and how this stereotype obscures the important complexities of debates around affirmative action, college admissions, and families, caregiving and reproduction broadly. This course will draw on a wide range of materials, including feminist and ethnic studies scholarship, public debates, policy initiatives, media representation, and creative writing to delve into current constructions of motherhood as they are shaped by race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, nation and migration. There are no prerequisites but if you have concerns feel free to email the professor, Miliann Kang @email.

WGSS 393J – Critical Prison Studies
Wednesday 4:00-6:30
Laura Ciolkowski
Distribution Requirement: Critical Race Feminisms

There are currently over 2 million people living in prisons and jails across the United States - more incarcerated people per capita than any other country in the world. What is the carceral state and how do particular gendered and racialized bodies get caught up in its logics? How do gender, race, sexuality, and class shape systems of discipline, punishment, surveillance, and control? What is "anti-carceral feminism" and what are some of the abolitionist critiques of the prison industrial complex? This course approaches the issue of mass incarceration through the lens of feminist social justice theory, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race theory. An intersectional and deeply interdisciplinary exploration of the carceral, the course draws on literature, memoir, film, history, social science, psychology, art and popular media to interrogate and explore the many dimensions of mass incarceration in the US.

WGSS 395P/COMM 395P – Performance and Peformativity
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Fumi Okiji
Distribution Requirement: Critical Race Feminisms

The course will consider two distinct genealogies of performativity - that of J. L. Austin and that of Judith Butler. This will be followed by an exploration of the importance of performance to an understanding of contemporary theories of blackness. Our enquires will proceed through a range of expressive sites, including sound, music video, film, TV, literature, photography, and everyday behavior. We will pay close attention to the distinction between the two ideas, and consider how each deals with common concerns such as gender formation, subjection, spectatorship, utterance and subversion.

WGSS 493M/693M – Conversations with the Ghost of Marx
Thursday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Kiran Asher

In "Europe and the People without History," Eric Wolf, the late anthropologist notes that, "The social sciences constitute one long dialogue with the ghost of Marx." Feminists and anti-colonialists are among the many advocates of social justice who have engaged with Karl Marx's writing and fierce criticism of capitalism. This advanced seminar focuses on an exegesis of some of Marx's oeuvre and the historical and current scholarship that draws on, critiques, and pushes its boundaries. In addition to selections from Marx's key works, we will read the writings of his important interlocutors such as Silvia Federici, Donna Haraway, Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, CLR James, Rosa Luxemburg, Gayatri Spivak, Raymond Williams, and others. Our discussions will emphasize the need to understand the parameters and debates about uneven capitalist development and its raced and gendered dimensions.

WGSS 494TI – Unthinking the Transnational
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Svati Shah

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 primary WGSS majors OR the transnational feminisms requirement for the WGSS major or minor.

WGSS 691B – Issues in Feminist Research
Tuesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Laura Ciolkowski

This is a graduate seminar in feminist research, and constitutes a core course for students enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies. Feminism has long been interested in a foundational way in questions of epistemology (how we know what we know) and research methodology (how we go about developing original research), because in its most recent incarnations, post-1968, it emerged as an academic formation that asked basic questions about disciplines: how did they invent a world without women? How was systemic bias built into its knowledge systems such that they made women, people of color, working class people, people outside the US and Europe (“the West,” as it came to be called, through an Orientalist bit of geographic folly), peasants, slaves, indigenous people, colonized people, (most) queers, trans folk and a great many others invisible? Obviously, in this endeavor feminists had help from many other fields and activist movements, which worked together across disciplines and movements to transform knowledge. In many ways, they won. No discipline or field of study is unchanged or untouched by these inquiries, although some are obviously more resistant than others. As this is a required course for graduate students enrolled in the Advanced Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies, those students have priority for enrollment. Please contact Linda at lindah@umass.edu to be added to the list for the class.

WGSS 692T – Thinking with Feeling
Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Cameron Awkward-Rich

Traditionally, feeling has been regarded as private, internal, and subjective, a barrier to the production of knowledge. By contrast, in this seminar we will foreground feminist/queer/critical race approaches in order to ask: what does thinking with feeling allow us to know? Together, we will chart the multiple genealogies of affect theory; consider the role of feeling and affectivity in the production of race, gender, dis/ability, nation, and discipline; and attend to the structures of feeling that undergird existing scholarship. While the primary aim of this class is to track the emergence of feeling as both a method and an object of minoritized thought, we will also devote substantial attention to thinking with feeling as a means of generating our own critical and creative work.

WGSS 693E - Historicizing Sexuality
Monday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Kirsten Leng

Sex and sexuality are not static entities; they vary and change across cultures and time. In this graduate seminar, we will engage the historicity of sexuality and analyze key works from this burgeoning subfield. We will reflect on how narratives about sexuality are constructed, what kind of sexualities are prioritized analytically, and how (and whether) sexualities of the past connect with sexualities of the present. Additionally, we will gain first hand experience writing histories of sexuality by visiting local archival repositories.

WGSS 693M/493M – Conversations with the Ghost of Marx
Thursday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Kiran Asher

UMASS

UMass Courses Outside of WGSS (Departmental)

AFROAM 326 – Black Women in U.S. History
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Yelana Sims

The history of African American women from the experience of slavery to the present. Emphasis on the effect of racist institutions and practices on women. The ways in which women organized themselves to address the needs of African Americans in general and their own in particular. The achievements of such leaders as Mary Church Terrell, Harriet Tubman, Ella Baker, and Mary McLeod Bethune as well as lesser known women. (Gen.Ed. HS, DU)

ANTHRO 205 – Power and Inequality in the U.S.
Tuesday, Thursday 8:30-9:45 a.m.
Jennifer Sandler

The roots of racism and sexism and the issues they raise. The cultural, biological, and social contexts of race and gender and examination of biological variation, genetic determinism, human adaptation, and the bases of human behavior. (Gen Ed SB, DU)

ANTHRO 297SR – Sex, Reproduction & Culture
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Elizabeth Krause

This course explores and analyzes topics pertaining to sex, reproduction, and culture within and beyond the United States from a critical medical anthropological perspective. We center our thinking on experiences of sex and reproduction, with particular attention to reproductive justice, reproductive politics, and stratified reproduction. We learn and practice skills related to ethnographic research. Articles, films, books, and news reports will be used to discuss weekly case studies corresponding to each thematic topic. Students will develop projects and form solidarity groups of mutual interest. The course fulfills requirements for two certificates: Five College Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice (RHRJ foundational course) and the Five College Program in Culture, Health, and Science (CHS biocultural approaches category). With a 1-credit add-on, the course may also be applied toward the UMass Certificate in Civic Engagement & Public Service (CEPS).

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

Architecture, sculpture and painting from 1600-1750, especially in Rome; painting of the Bolognese school; spread of the Baroque style. Emphasis on Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Bernini, Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona.

ART-HIST 391P – Identity Politics and Art
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Karen Kurczynski

This course historicizes identity politics in art from the 1960s to today, examining what social identity means and why it has been a contentious topic in contemporary art history. Students will consider the problem of discussing intersectional identities when they are shifting, open-ended, and complex constructions. We will study artists whose work raises personal and political questions about social experience and authenticity in ways that break down stereotypes. The role of performative works, video and installation will be considered in relation to more traditional artistic media such as drawing and painting. We will study the history of the Black Art and Feminist movements and key texts from queer studies, feminist, and critical race theory in order to examine their intersections and divergences. The relationship of art to political protest movements, the AIDS crisis, Black Lives Matter and other recent developments will be addressed along with art world controversies such as The Decade Show (1991), the Culture Wars (1989-91), and the Whitney Biennials of 1993 and 2017. The course also incorporates trips to current exhibitions on view that relate to these topics.

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) This course is open to Commonwealth Honors College students only.
This course was formally numbered COMM 290H. If you received credit for taking COMM 290H, you cannot receive credit for taking this class.

COMM 397GC – Gender and Interpersonal Communication
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Devon Greyson

What is gender and how does it affect the way we communicate with each other? This course provides an overview of the ways gendered identities, expressions, discourses, norms and roles affect our information interactions on an individual basis and in groups, online and off. Students will explore topics ranging from communication in family relationships to classroom and workplace communication dynamics to online self representation, applying an intersectional lens to the role of gendered power dynamics in shaping interpersonal communication. Open to Senior and Junior Communication majors only. All other majors by permission of the instructor, @email.

COMP-LIT 592A – Medieval Women Writers
Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Jessica Barr

Selected medieval women writers from the point of view of current theoretical perspectives. Writers include Heloise, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, Margery Kempe, and others. Themes to be discussed include love and desire in women's writing; representations of women in medieval literature and philosophy; gendered representations of sanctity; and critical approaches derived from Marxist and feminist theory.

ECON 397WM – Economics of Women, Minorities, and Work
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Fidan Kurtulus

See department for description. Prerequisite: ECON 103 or RES-ECON 102
The prerequisite for the course is Introduction to Microeconomics (Economics 103 or Resource Economics 102). Prior knowledge of statistics and/or econometrics is helpful for the course as a large portion of the relevant literature we will be discussing is empirical in nature.

EDUC 595G – LGBTQ Issues in Education
Thursday 4:00-6:30 pm.
Warren Blumenfeld

See department for description.

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture
#1 Tuesday, Thursday 10:00 - 11:15 a.m. – Catherine Tisdale

Women make up half of the world's population and compose the largest designated minority group. Woman can be powerful, tenacious, fierce and inspiring, but more often than not their voices have been silenced in history and in literature. This class aims to focus specifically on female voices in literature throughout history and examines issues of gender and sexuality in texts from ancient Rome through to the modern-day. We will explore how literature both reflects and challenges dominant understandings of gender and sexuality, and how women's silences—as well as their exclamations—communicate meaning in their respective time periods and resist varying society's patriarchal, male-dominant power structures. Ultimately, we will explore an array of representations of women in literature, and a cacophony of different women's voices as they move through imaginative and/or realistic landscapes. The goal of this class is for you to question how literature can illuminate concepts of gender and sexuality, and to think, read, and write critically about those categories in literature, moving away from the notion that they are natural and fixed and toward the idea that they are historically specific and shifting social constructions that require analysis and close study. Furthermore, you should emerge asking and exploring questions such as: how do expectations of gender and sexuality differ across cultural, historical, racial, and sexual identities? How do these identities inform how we consider gender and sexuality today?

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture
#2 Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:10-11:00 a.m. – Benjamin Latini

This course will engage with masculinities in a contemporary global context. Students will read literary texts that represent a range of different masculinities that coexist or conflict with one another, and consider those masculinities in context with other gender identities and with sexualities. As we read and study these texts, we will ask questions about how gender dynamics and experiences of sexuality in different parts of the world are linked by economic, social, and political connections. We will also consider the various aesthetic techniques used by writers who seek to represent masculinities and will explore many different ways in which the experience of gender can be thought of and communicated. Close attention will be paid to the ways in which literature can illuminate the intersections of gender with other aspects of identity. The syllabus will not be limited to authors who identify as men; the literary perspectives on masculinities that are taken up in the course will come from writers of various gender identities and sexual identities.

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture
#3 Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:15-12:05 a.m. – Dina Al Qassar

Queering the Self: Identity and Representation from Sappho to Rapinoe What do we mean when we speak of gender and sexuality? How are these essential parts of the self? What is the role of literature and popular culture play in constructing our understanding of gender, sexuality and selfhood, especially in relation to queer identities and selves? This course will question and challenge our ideas of gender and sexuality by looking at various representations of queerness and queer bodies in literature and popular culture. We will be looking at how gender and sexuality are constructed, negotiated, and subverted both culturally and as a lived experience by examining coming of age stories and expressions of desire; desire in this context is not limited to the erotic but expanded to include the desire for belonging, community, and history. Some of the questions that will guide our thinking are: what does it mean to come of age? How is that experience shaped by queerness? Why is it important to have diverse experiences and bodies represented? What does it mean to realize one's gender and sexuality? What does embodiment mean and how does it relate to sexuality? How do gender and sexuality intersect and how are they shaped by the language and images we are given? We will be looking at a variety of texts and genres including but not limited to: poetry, memoirs, graphic novels, and films.

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture
#4 Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m. – John Yargo

Are cannibals just another body desiring bodies? When is eating human flesh erotic? When does it disgust? Cannibalism has provoked every possible response in the written record, from admiration to contempt to boredom. We will track cannibalism from the present moment all the way back to early modern Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and across the different forms assumed by the cannibal: the anthropophagi, the zombie, the man-eating femme fatale. The rich archive of the cannibal will be central to how we think and discuss in this class about sexuality, culture, gender, class, and race. We will investigate how “cannibal talk” was mobilized to justify colonialism in the Americas, as well as the significance of more recent heavily-publicized incidents like Jeffrey Dahmer and the “man-eater of Rotenberg,” Armin Meiwes in the cultural imagination.

ENGLISH 378 – American Women Writers
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Gloria Biamonte

“What Moves at the Margin”: Reading Contemporary American Women Writers. ’The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist,” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1925, “everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.” The contemporary writers we will be reading in this course – a rather open-ended exploration of American women writers from the 1980s to the present – would agree with Woolf. In exploring a range of richly diverse, original, and, at times, radically experimental narratives, we will consider the writers’ attempts to respond to the social, economic and political events that shaped their lives. Though our focus will be on the novel, we will also be reading poetry, drama, and nonfiction. Close textual readings will help us to examine the subtleties of character interactions, the weaving together of multiple storylines, and the inventive narrative devices that each writer uses in creating their stories. Authors may include: Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, Jennifer Egan, Jesmyn Ward, Linda Hogan, Adrienne Rich, Ming Holden, Anna Deavers Smith, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Books will be available at Amherst Books.

HPP 582 – Reproductive Justice
Monday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Aline Gubrium

Reproductive Justice course is designed to explore social scientific, feminist, and critical approaches to reproductive health issues. It looks at reproduction in the broader structural (socioeconomic and political) contexts in which it is situated. In particular, in the course we explore the gendered, racialized, cultural, sexual, and classed dimensions that underlie women’s reproduction, with special attention to the long-term health effects of racism, poverty, and sexism.

HISTORY 265 – U.S. LGBT and Queer History
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Shay Olmstead

This course explores how queer individuals and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities have influenced the social, cultural, economic, and political landscape in United States history. With a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the course covers topics such as the criminalization of same-sex acts, cross-dressing, industrialization and urbanization, feminism, the construction of the homo/heterosexual binary, transsexuality and the "lavender scare" during the Cold War, the homophile, gay liberation, and gay rights movements, HIV/AIDS, and (im)migration. We will often look to examples from the present to better explore change over time and the modes and influences that shape both current and past understandings of gender and sexual difference. (Gen. Ed. HS, DU)

HISTORY 397RR – History of Reproductive Rights Law
Tuesday, Thursay 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Jennifer Nye

This course will explore the history of reproductive rights law in the United States, centering the reading of statutes, court decisions, amicus briefs, and law review articles. We will look at the progression of cases and legal reasoning involving a wide variety of reproductive rights issues, including forced sterilization, contraception, abortion, forced pregnancy/c-sections, policing pregnancy (through welfare law, employment policies and criminal law), and reproductive technologies. We will pay particular attention to how differently situated women were/are treated differently by the law, particularly on the basis of age, class, race, sexual orientation, and ability. We will also examine the role lawyers have historically played in advancing (or constraining) the goals of the reproductive rights movement(s) and explore the effectiveness of litigation as a strategy to secure these rights. Finally, we will consider the question of reproductive rights versus reproductive justice and whether reproductive justice can be obtained through advocating for reproductive rights.

HISTORY 397SC/LEGAL 397SC – Sex and the Supreme Court
Tuesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Jennifer Nye

This course focuses on the U.S. Supreme Court and its rulings regarding sex and sexuality. What has the Court said about what type of sexual activity or sexual relationships are constitutionally protected and how and why has this changed over time? What is or should be the Court’s role in weighing in on these most intimate issues? We will examine several hot button issues such as reproduction (sterilization/contraception/abortion); marriage (polygamous/interracial/same sex); pornography/obscenity; sodomy; sexual assault on college campuses; and sex education in public schools. We will consider how the Court and advocates framed these issues, used or misused historical evidence, and how the argument and/or evidence changed depending on the audience (i.e. the Court or the general public). Students will write several short argumentative essays, learn how to read and brief Supreme Court cases, and present an oral argument based on one of their argumentative essays. Prior law-related coursework is helpful, but not required.

JAPANESE 591M – Queer Japan in Literature & Culture
Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Stephen Miller

See department for description.

LABOR 201 – Issues of Women and Work
Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Clare Hammonds

The role of women at a variety of workplaces from historical, economic, sociological, and political points of view. Among areas considered: discrimination, health care, women in the labor movement and in management, and civil rights legislation. (Gen. Ed. SB)

MIDEAST 190B – Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle East
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Malissa Taylor

This course will examine general attitudes about sex and gender roles among people of the Middle East by studying primary sources and scholarly literature relating to sexuality and its place within Middle Eastern societies. The course investigates the cultural landscape of the Middle East before the rise of Islam and inquires how the mix of the new religion together with the prevailing customs of Late Antiquity created a new framework for gendered relations. The course considers debates pertaining to gender roles and sexuality in the medieval and early modern periods, and will probe the changing contours of women’s lives during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

PSYCH 391ZZ – 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. Open to Senior and Junior Psychology majors only. Prerequisite: PSYCH 241

POLISCI 291U – UMass Women in Leadership
Tuesday 5:30-8:00 p.m.
Michelle Goncalves

UMass Women into Leadership (UWiL) is a series of hands-on workshops designed to educate participants on the existence and causes of gender disparities in public service, to provide leadership training to prepare participants to enter public service careers, and to offer mentoring and networking programs to help launch public service careers.

POLISCI 297W – Introduction to Women and Politics in the USA
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m
Maryann Barakso

This course examines women's political incorporation in the United States primarily, but not exclusively, with respect to electoral politics. We explore women's pre-suffrage political activities before delving into the campaign for women's suffrage. We study the effects of achieving suffrage on women's political behavior during the period immediately following their achievement of the right to vote and beyond. The relationship between women and party politics will be probed before discussing the challenges women still face as candidates in state and federal legislatures in the U.S. The extent to which women's participation in campaigns and elections makes a substantive difference in policy making is considered. Subsequent discussions examine the role women's organizations currently play in expanding women's political representation in the U.S. Open to Seniors & Juniors only. An Intro Political Science class is recommended but not required. Open to Non-major Seniors/Juniors after initial pre-registration period.

POLISCI 397FP – Feminist Politics
Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Sonia Alvarez

This course will analyze the changing dynamics of feminist activism Latin America, Europe, the U.S., and other world regions from the mid-20 th century to the present day. Particular attention will be given to the articulation of diverse expressions of feminisms with contemporary anti-racist, pro-democracy, and anti-austerity movements around the world.

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 340 – LGBTQ Health
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Kelsey Jordan

This course is about the unique health needs and health disparities within the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) communities, and among the individuals who make up each of these communities. We will learn about gender identity and sexual orientation development in kids and young adults, sexual health, global perspectives, strategies for improving the healthcare experience of LGBT people (e.g., patient-centered and compassionate care), barriers to accessing health care, and many other relevant topics. This is an important course for public health students, because it teaches more than just the facts, but also skills for creating a compassionate and inclusive environment for vulnerable populations. (Gen. Ed. SB, DU)

PUBHLTH 372 – Maternal and Child Health in the Developing World
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Bridget Thompson

In this seminar, students will discuss a variety of issues affecting women's health around the world. Topics include maternal mortality, family planning, infectious disease, sex trafficking, and gender-based violence.

STPEC 491H – The Political Economy of Race and Gender
Monday 1:15-3:55 p.m.
Katherine Moos

This course will investigate hierarchal identity-based power structures in capitalist societies from an intersectional Feminist-Marxian Perspective. We will focus on the roles of households, markets, and states in social provisioning and the social reproduction of labor-power.

SOCIOL 106 – Race, Gender, Class & Ethnicity
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 12:20-1:10 p.m.
TBA

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
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Janice Irvine

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) This course will be meeting with the following sections: University and Online Education (formerly CPE) The university section will meet face to face and asynchronous and online will be fully asynchronous. Please contact your Advisor for more info.

SOCIOL 395K – Domestic Violence
Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Whitney Russell

Prior to the 1970s, domestic violence in America was widely viewed as a private matter in which public intervention was inappropriate except under the most extreme circumstances. Over the past several decades, however, domestic violence has been increasingly perceived and responded to by the public as a criminal matter. Take a detailed look at patterns and trends in domestic violence in contemporary America, explore theoretical perspectives about its causes, and examine the domestic violence reform movement, paying special attention to research that tries to assess the actual effectiveness of criminal justice reforms in reducing domestic violence.

UMass Courses Outside of WGSS (Component)

AFROAM 245 – The Slave Narrative
Thursday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
A. Yemisi Jimoh

An examination of the African American genre of slave narratives, from the shortest paragraph-long examinations to book-length manifestations that captured the imaginations of 19th century America and the world. The course will encompass issues of race, gender, sexuality, and historical and literacy contexts of important narratives, which may include those of Olaudah Equiano, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as modern and contemporary narratives influenced by the genre.

AFROAM 345 – Southern Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Keyona Jones

Southern literature by African Americans, including slave narratives, autobiography, fiction and poetry. Concepts and issues of time, oppression and violence, culture and tradition, family and community, roots of social change as they impact factors of identity, race, class, and gender. (Gen. Ed. AL, DU)

ANTHRO 597CR – Critical Race Theory
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-12:15 p.m.
Amanda Johnson

See department for description.

CHINESE 241 – Contemporary Chinese Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
Enhua Zhang

The development of modern China as seen through its literature covering the period 1915-1989. Exploration of the relationship between writing and political change, the role of dissident writers, and the politics of gender in texts from mainland China and Taiwan. All readings are in English translation.

CHINESE 597M – The Ming-Qing Novel
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Elena Chiu

This course introduces the major works of traditional Chinese fiction, including Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber. We will engage in close readings of these great novels, while paying attention to issues such as the representation of history, gender relations, changes in conceptions of desire, religious and philosophical beliefs, and the characterization of heroes and anti-heroes, among others.

COMM 271 – Humor in Society
Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Stephen Olbrys Gencarella

This course examines humor as a significant form of creative expression in social and political life. In recent decades, scholars of all persuasions from the humanities, social sciences, and even hard sciences have examined this subject through a critical lens, leading to the development of an interdisciplinary field known as humor studies. This course provides an introduction to that burgeoning field. Topics will include different theories of humor, the relationship between humor and play, the differences between humor and comedy, the use of humor in the redress of political and social tensions, the importance of the body in humor, and the role of humor in maintaining identity, especially in the negotiation of race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. (Gen Ed SB) This course was formerly numbered COMM 297C. If you have taken COMM 297C you cannot take this course.

COMM 297FA – Spirit and Stories: The Folklore of Alcohol
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Stephen Olbrys Gencarella

This course examines the vast store of folklore inspired by and directed at alcohol and its cultural reach. Folklore means traditional expressive practices ranging from the verbal arts (such as stories and songs) to material culture (such as crafts and medicine) to customary activities (such as rituals and beliefs). The range of folklore herein is both global and ancient; that is, it concerns the entire history of alcohol, which in effect necessitates attention to the entire history of humanity in a global perspective. Specific lectures will address cultural differences concerning alcohol in the negotiation of race, ethnicity, class, nationhood, religion, gender, and political identity.

COMM 297SF – Possible Futures: Science Fiction Cinema
Friday 10:00 a.m. to 1:10 p.m.
Kevin Anderson

There are multiple growing concerns regarding issues of climate, class, race, gender identity, and the nature of democracy in our contemporary world. Science fiction has proven to be a thought-provoking genre to help raise awareness to many of these social and environmental issues. This course takes a global perspective on such pressing issues by examining science fiction films from around the world. As such, the course uses science fiction films as primary texts, accompanied by weekly readings. Students will engage in a critical analysis of the assigned films and readings in order to better appreciate what we can begin to anticipate regarding our future. Open to Junior, Sophomore and Freshman COMM majors only.

COMM 495A – Performance Ethnography
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Claudio Moreira

What is Ethnography? What is Performance (auto) Ethnography? How can we think about Performing Ethnography? Drawing heavily on the works of Dwight Conquergood, Norman Denzin, and D. Soyini Madison, we give a rest to traditional forms of qualitative inquiry as we disrupt the notion of "business as usual" in the academic space. We will examine the interpenetrating relationships among performance, ethnography, and culture. The readings and assignments forefront localized critical pedagogy, critical personal narratives, decolonizing and interpretive inquiry as moral, political discourse. From the everyday space where gender, race, class, and performances intersect, we will examine how the practices of critical inquiry can be used to imagine, write and perform a free democratic society.

COMM 497P – On Citizenships and Belongings
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Kimberlee Perez

Citizenships and belongings are unstable, dynamic, ongoing sites of struggle that animate one another. This course looks at citizenships and belongings as communication practices that include and produce multiple and competing discourses, relations, and lived experiences. Using critical women of color, feminist, queer and performance theories, the course begins and centers questions on citizenships and belongings from and through their systemic exclusions, namely those whose subjectivities, bodies, identities and relations place them outside the bounds of the norm. This decolonial approach includes the makings and doings of intersectionality, reflexivity, resistance, counterpublics, and worldmakings through narratives, creativity, aesthetics, and embodiments of POC, queer, trans, working class, migrant, and others who forge alternate intimacies, citizenships and belongings. Course work will include, but will not be limited to, opportunities for non-normative knowledge production and research such as such as performance, creative and experimental writing, digital and visual practice.

COMP-LIT 231 – Comedy
#1 – Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m. – Kathryn Lachman
#2 – Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m. – Juan Carlos Cabrera Pons

Our course begins with the premise that contemporary American comedy is informed by the histories of ethnic American groups -- African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and U.S. Latinos/Latinas -- along with issues of race, class, sexuality and citizenship. American comedians, independent filmmakers, feminists and transgendered comics deploy the language of comedy to invoke serious social matters in contemporary American life: racism, heterosexism, homophobia, class biases against the poor and the undocumented, misogyny, war and other burning issues of the day. We will thus consider that the ends of comedy are more than laughter. Comedy confronts political issues that are constitutive of and threatening to the U.S. body politic. (Gen Ed AL)

COMP-LIT 350 – International Film
Thursday 4:00-7:00 p.m.
Friday Discussions
Barry Spence

We will screen films from across the globe studying examples of a range of lesser-known subgenres of the Horror film, such as Giallo (Italian genre mixing slasher horror with detective mysteries), Fantastique (French genre mixing gothic horror with fantasy erotica), and Jiangshi (Hong Kong genre mixing slasher horror with Kung Fu). And we will consider in equal measure the so-called dystopian film. We will look at the interrelationship connecting these two modes, which can be seen at work in films like Battle Royale. This course will include a primary focus on gender issues, will examine the representation of women, and will screen (transgressive) examples of these modes by women filmmakers. The intention of this course is to expose students to a cultural diversity of these vital contemporary film genres beyond the conventional Hollywood fare. Weekly film screenings and discussion. (Gen. Ed. AT)

COMP-LIT 391SF/591SF/FILM-ST 391SF – International Science Fiction Cinema
Tuesday 7:00-10:00 p.m.
Discussions Thursday
N. Couch

This course provides an introduction to science fiction cinema from the end of the nineteenth century to today. Beginning with the experiments of the Melies Brothers and the importance of German Expressionist films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the course considers technological prognostication from Destination Moon to 2001: A Space Odyssey, adventure and science fiction in films like Forbidden Planet and Star Wars, and the dystopian imagination from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to District 9. The course will also highlight the roles of women writers and directors from Thea von Harbou to Kathryn Bigelow, and technological cinematic advances from matte painting and process shots to CGI.

EDUC 590Z – Critical Pedagogy for Media Literacy
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Kysa Nygreen

This course brings the rigorous study of educational inequality together with the tools of critical media analysis to explore representations and realities of inequality in schools with a focus on race, class, ability, gender, and sexuality. Students will also develop skills to teach for critical media literacy using critical pedagogical methods. Instructor Consent required. Prerequisite: EDUC 167

ENGLISH 141 – Reading Poetry
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:15-12:05 p.m.
Juliana Ward

What does Contemporary Poetry look like in the year 2020? Who writes it? Why are they writing it? Who are they writing for? What is it ‘about’? This semester we will approach these questions and more by reading and discussing a diverse selection of contemporary living poets. Yes, actual living poets who are writing today! All the books we will read were published between 2016- 2020. These current literary voices will offer us meaningful ways to engage with important questions about identity, citizenship, history, origin, family, gender, sexuality, the body, love, loss, grief, joy, and all the other essential factors that affect our relationship to larger world around us. We will look at a variety of poetic forms ranging from the lyric to the long poem, from erasures to sonnets, in order to have a broader appreciation of poetic form and possibility. Our conversations will focus on close reading and responding critically to the poetic texts we read. As a class, we will work toward building a vocabulary for engaging with literary texts. We will work together to take a deeper look at the complexity of poetry, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as an exciting venue to expand our capacity for language and ideas.

ENGLISH 369 – Modern Fiction
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Stephen Clingman

This course will survey major trends in twentieth century fiction by taking as its theme the idea of `writing at the frontiers'. We'll understand this in various ways, ranging from the frontiers of form in the work of some of the century's foremost writers, to the literal frontiers that many of them have faced: of geography, culture, race, gender, politics, and (in the broadest sense) history. We will begin with the cultural phenomenon of modernism; that complex of literary, artistic and philosophical developments which defined a specific shift in modern intellectual consciousness between about 1880 and 1930. (Gen.Ed. AL)

ENGLISH 374 – 20th Century American Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Caroline Yang

W. E. B. Du Bois famously declared that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line. In this class, we will investigate how some American writers imagined and grappled with this "problem" through their fictional writings. Instead of presenting a simple solution to the problem of race, these writers complicated it by highlighting other markers of identity and difference such as class, gender, sexuality, religion, and ability. Through a historical approach to the writers’ fictional imaginings of the twentieth century, we will expand our knowledge of a recent "past" in order to enrich our understanding of our present moment.

GERMAN 372 – Creating Modern Culture: Vienna around 1900
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Sara Jackson

Examines art, literature, and music in turn-of-the-century Vienna in a social-historical cultural context with a focus on gender. Multimedia presentations. Conducted in English. (Gen.Ed. AL)

ENGLISH 360 – Studies in Modern Fiction
Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Stephen Clingman

HISTORY 154 – Social Change in the 1960s
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:15-12:05 p.m. – Michael Jirik
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m. – Joie-Lynn Campbell

Few periods in United States history experienced as much change and turmoil as the "Long Sixties" (1954-1975), when powerful social movements overhauled American gender norms, restructured the Democratic and Republican parties, and abolished the South's racist "Jim Crow" regime. This course examines the movements that defined this era. We will explore the civil rights and Black Power movements; the student New Left and the antiwar movement; the women's and gay liberation movements; struggles for Asian American, Chicano/a, Native American, and Puerto Rican freedom; as well as the rise of conservatism. Throughout the semester, we will assess Sixties social movements' ideals, strategies, and achievements, and their ongoing influence upon U.S. politics, society, and culture. (Gen.Ed. HS, DU)

HISTORY 397JL – Social Justice Lawyering
Thursday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Jennifer Nye

From fighting Jim Crow segregation to challenging the recent Muslim travel ban, judicial review has historically been used as a strategy to reign-in executive and legislative over-reach and protect Constitutional rights. This course will examine how lawyers, social movements, and everyday people have used litigation to advocate for social justice in the United States. Through reading in-depth studies of important civil and criminal cases, we will explore such questions as: What is the history of social justice lawyering in the United States and how, why and when have social movements turned to litigation to advance their causes? What are the pros and cons of using litigation to achieve social justice, versus other tools like direct action, lobbying for political change, and community organizing? How effective is litigation in achieving the goals originally envisioned by lawyers, activists, and litigants? How have lawyers constrained or expanded the vision of social justice movements? What dilemmas do lawyers who are ethically bound to zealously advocate for the interests of individual clients’ face when they are additionally interested in advancing "a cause"? Cases explored may include issues such as civil rights, women's rights, free speech, LGBT/Queer rights, disability rights, environmental justice, criminal justice, poverty and people's lawyering, immigration rights, and the rise of conservative social movement lawyering. Prior law-related coursework helpful, but not required.

HONORS 321H – Violence in American Culture
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Ventura Perez

This course will explore the complex social and cultural interactions that can lead to violence. We will begin by examining various theories of human violence from a number of disciplines: anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Students will then survey different cultural attitudes towards violence beginning with several prehistoric sites from the American Southwest and northern Mexico. Next, the course will consider the historical roots of American violence starting with the European invasion of North America. Specific instances of violence in American history will also be considered, including the attempted genocide of American Indians, the enslavement of African Americans, and the American Civil War. The second half of the course will focus on a number of contemporary issues of American violence including race violence, hate crimes, violence against women, family violence, gang violence, and the violence in contemporary art and film. (Gen.Ed. SB, DU) This course is open to Senior, Junior, and Sophmore Commonwealth Honors College students only.

HPP 590B – The Social and Political Economy of Health Inequalities
Thursday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Airin Martinez

The focus of this course is to learn how economic, political and social policies produce health inequities. We analyze domestic and international policies through theories of political economy and how they have produced inequities among racial/ethnic, class, gender, and sexual minorities. More importantly, as future public health practitioners, healthcare providers, and community organizers, having some familiarity with the health implications of social and economic policy will allow students to create primary prevention strategies and structural interventions.

JAPANESE 144 – Modern Japanese Literature
Monday, Wednesday 12:20-1:10 p.m.
Discussions Friday 10:10 and 12:10
Stephen Forrest

Introduction to Japanese literature from around 1600 to present. Alternating between reading poetry and prose and viewing classics of Japanese film. Discussion of the construction of love and death during centuries of national seclusion and in the era of Western influence. Focus on changing gender relations and on the status of discriminated against minorities. Conducted in English. No prerequisites. (Gen.Ed. AL)

JUDAIC 354 – Adaptation: The Jewish Experience from Text to Film
Wednesday 4:00-6:45 p.m.
Olga Gershenson

This course approaches adaptation in two different senses: media to media and culture to culture. In both cases, we will ask questions about the nature of transformation. What is gained and what is lost in the transition? As a case study, we will focus on cinematic adaptations of Jewish literature and the ways these films reflect and shape modern Jewish experience, including issues of identity, gender, religion, persecution, immigration, and culture. The texts and films are in original English or translated from Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and other languages.

LEGAL 394AI – Law and Social Activism
Tuesday, Thursday 8:30-9:45 a.m.
James Ben-Aaron

The relationship between law and social activism. The use of court decisions to effect change and mobilize support for causes. A critical look at such strategies to determine if and when they are effective in achieving activists' goals. How sociolegal scholars should define social change and understand the role legal professionals play in structuring movement practices. Activism may include the Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, environmentalism, and so-called "green backlash." Readings, drawn from various disciplines, on such topics as cause lawyering and the legal profession, civil rights and the language of rights, and the structure of social movements and how to understand their impact on society. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-Legal major.

POLISCI 361 – Civil Liberties
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Sheldon Goldman

Development of constitutional law in the civil liberties sphere. First Amendment freedoms of speech, press, and religion, and certain rights of the accused; the rights of African-Americans and other minorites and the rights of women and gays under the equal protection of the laws clause. Prerequisite: basic American politics course or equivalent. Open to Seniors, Juniors & Sophomores only. Pre Requisite: POLISCI 101 or POLISCI 162 or LEGAL 250. Course will open up to non-majors after initial registration ramping.

POLISCI 394SPH – Sports, Policy, and Politics
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Elizabeth Sharrow

Where are politics in the spaces we go for leisure and play? Sports and politics have become increasingly intertwined over the past 40 years. Local, state, and federal governments, as well as non-governmental bodies like the NCAA, regulate who can participate in sports, and what standards players must meet to do so. But sports have also become the battleground for major political discussions around sex equity, racial inclusion, sexuality, physical ability, and drug testing. Why and how has this happened, and how can studying sports teach us about the politics of inclusion, political identity, and public policy? We will focus on the linkages between policy, politics, and sports in historical and contemporary contexts, primarily in the U.S. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-PolSci majors.

PSYCH 391SD – Stigma, Discrimination, Health
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Allecia Reed

This course will examine the effects of stigma and discrimination on physical health outcomes and will consider the biological, psychological, and behavioral pathways through which these effects occur. Course readings will cover a range of stigmatized identities (e.g., ethnicity, LGBTQ) and will highlight the commonalities and differences in outcomes among individuals who belong to these groups. The course will also cover interventions to both reduce the existence of stigma and to help those who experience stigma to better cope with the experience.

STPEC 101 – Introduction to STPEC
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Shemon Salam

This course will familiarize new students with the program and its vision. STPEC is a rigorous, democratically run, interdisciplinary academic program. STPEC is also a community of students, staff, instructors, alumni, and friends that will help you navigate your time at UMass. Ideally this course will also familiarize us with each other. The content of this course is organized around concepts students will encounter in their other STPEC requirements, as well as in the STPEC community and the greater world. It will provide an introduction to social theory, political economy, race and ethnicity, gender, masculinities and femininities, globalization and inequality in the Global North and the Global South. Assignments facilitate exploration of these and related topics. Students will have the opportunity to learn the value of social theory and how to make an argument; communicate for effective dialogue, and how to begin to identify social justice issues. STPEC 101, like STPEC's core classes, is seminar-style. This means small groups with an emphasis on discussion and reflection. This class is open to STPEC majors only.

STPEC 189 – Introduction to Radical Social Theory
Wednesday 4:00-6:30
Graciela Monteagudo

This is an introductory course to radical social theory (formerly STPEC 190A). Our focus is the history of social thought in the West, and the post-colonial critiques of some of these ideas. In this course, students will learn that "radical" means "at the root," and radical social theory is theory that explains the roots of social inequalities and proposes ways of transforming society to achieve justice. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG) Seats in this course are reserved for freshmen and sophomores of any major. STPEC students may enroll.

STPEC 320 – Writing for Critical Consciousness
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
TBD

The STPEC Junior Writing Seminar focuses on individual development of voice. We will weave this theme through standard essay assignments, weekly response papers, cover letters and resumes, and a student-driven class project of your choosing. Since you and your classmates with be struggling together to find your voices, we’ll focus on peer-editing and tutoring techniques at the beginning of the semester. As we discuss peer-editing, we may consider issues of language and dialect, Black English, Standard Written English and feminism. The second half of the semester will focus on political, environmental, educational, cultural, and philosophical texts. Throughout all assignments I expect to see cultivation of your voice and communication of your own creative ideas. We encourage integration of ideas from your other courses and experiences. Be prepared to think critically and examine texts carefully. We will be sharing our writing with each other – be ready to give and receive constructive feedback. This course meets only once a week; do not plan to miss any classes. STPEC majors only. Prerequisite: College Writing or equivalent.

STPEC 391H – Core Seminar I
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Shemon Salam

This course looks at the Black Radical Tradition and racial capitalism from the 15th century to World II. Through these two frameworks and methods we will analyze gender, inequality, nationalism, and struggles of the oppressed. This is a student driven course where classroom discussions, presentations, self-reflections, and group work are central to the daily functioning of the class. STPEC majors only. PREREQUISITES: One Intro to Social Theory course and one Intro to Political Economy Course chosen from the STPEC Recommended Course List.

STPEC 392H – Core Seminar II
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Graciela Monteagudo

This course focuses on a series of interrelated political, social and theoretical movements of the 20th and 21st Century with an emphasis on how political practices and philosophies relate to the successes and catastrophic failures of modernism in complex and contradictory ways. Some of the topics addressed include anti/post-colonialism, the role of identity in political theory/practice and poststructuralism. We will research the connection between race, class, gender, sexuality, able-bodiness and other axes of oppression resistance under neoliberalism, including violence against women. A major research paper of the student's choosing will be produced over the course of the semester allowing them to more deeply engage with a topic, and to practice applying the critical methodological and theoretical tools developed in the STPEC curriculum. STPEC majors only. PREREQUISITES: One Intro to Social Theory course and one Intro to Political Economy Course chosen from the STPEC Recommended Course List.

STPEC 492H – Focus Seminar II: Decolonizing Performances (of Resistance)
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Claudio Moirera

What is Decolonizing Inquiry? What is Performance (auto) Ethnography? How can we think about Performing Ethnography? This performance-based seminar will focus on the implications of decolonizing emancipatory epistemologies for critical, interpretive inquiry. Drawing heavily in the works of Dwight Conquergood, Norman Denzin, and D. Soyini Madison, we give a rest to traditional forms of qualitative inquiry as we disrupt the notion of "business as usual" in the academic space. We will examine the interpenetrating relationships among performance, ethnography, and culture. More, we will focus on the relationship between everyday life and decolonizing performances. We will explore how communication in everyday life may be understood using performance as a metaphor and method of study. We will also look at how decolonizing performances are informed by everyday experiences. We will discuss culture as a continuous performance, from the “ordinary” speech of an individual to the elaborate rituals/practices of groups and organizations. We will look at how these everyday performances construct and maintain culture. The readings and assignments forefront localized critical pedagogy, critical personal narratives, decolonizing and interpretive inquiry as moral, political discourse. From the everyday space where gender, race, class, and performances intersect, we will examine how the practices of critical inquiry can be used to imagine, write and perform a free democratic society. PREREQUISITE: STPEC 391H Senior and Junior STPEC majors only.

STPEC 494PI – Praxis
Wednesday 11:15-1:45 p.m.
Shemon Salam

This course tackles the latest developments in racial capitalism by analyzing social struggles and organizations since the economic crisis of 2007. Using the latest research on gender, class, race, empire, and sexuality this course looks at how crisis and struggle are simultaneously shaping the world. For the final project students build their own organizational website. Students will construct their own organization based on the readings from this semester, STPEC courses, and other courses they have taken. As an integrative experience (IE) course students are encouraged to draw on knowledge from prior courses, life experiences, and readings from outside the class. Praxis will be driven by applying theory to the real world. This course is highly student driven: composed of presentations, small group discussions, debates, and self-reflection. This course satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-STPEC majors.

SOCIOL 461 – Race and Racism
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Moon-Kie Jung

Though biologically untenable, race continues to structure virtually every aspect of social life, from life expectancies at birth to death penalty executions. Topics to be covered in this course include the historical origins and evolution of race and racism, gender and class dynamics of race, antiracist movements, poverty, higher education, migration, incarceration, and nationalism. Considering and critiquing various theoretical approaches, this course reaches beyond the Black-white binary and, though focusing on the United States, also examines race and racism in other contexts. Prequisite: 100-level SOCIOL courses.

SPANISH 324 – Introduction to Latino/a Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Luis Marentes

In this course students will think critically about the various "wild tongues" that have defined U.S. Latinx literature and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Our analysis will center on issues of power as they are experienced by diverse U.S. Latinx populations. Specifically, we will focus on Latinx writers, performers, and scholars that push the boundaries of acceptable gender, sexuality, and racialization within U.S. Latinx cultures, focusing specifically on Caribbean and Chicanx populations in the United States. Students will be required to engage critically with primary texts, as well as reflect on the ways in which these issues exist in the world around us. Because Latinx thinkers often blur the boundaries of traditional literary and scholarly genres, we will consider pinnacle works of Latinx studies - such as those of Pedro Pietri, Gloria Anzaldua, and Junot Diaz - alongside other forms of cultural production, such as performance art and film. We will also try our hands at these art forms in an effort to find new, embodied ways to interact with expressions of Latinx culture. Course texts are written in both English and Spanish. Class discussion will take place in Spanish. All assignments must be completed in Spanish. (Gen. Ed. AL, DU)

Graduate

WGSS 691B – Issues in Feminist Research
Tuesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Laura Ciolkowski

WGSS 692T – Thinking with Feeling
Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Cameron Awkward-Rich

WGSS 693E - Historicizing Sexuality
Monday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Kirsten Leng

WGSS 693M/493M – Conversations with the Ghost of Marx
Thursday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Kiran Asher

ANTHRO 697 – Economic Anthropology: Crisis, Value, Possibility
Thursday 2:30-5:15 p.m.
Elizabeth Krause

In an era when the economy dominates cultural and institutional practices as well as political discourse, this graduate seminar turns to the subfield of economic anthropology to address problems related to value, inequality, reciprocity, and solidarity. A critical feminist approach to knowledge production informs this seminar. In that spirit, our point of departure is Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) to address a key question: What manages to thrive in the ruins we have made? This multispecies ethnography invites thinking about possible worlds and provides contemporary mooring for considering the legacies of Marx, Malinowski, and Mauss. How have these legacies shaped research agendas? What inspirations exist for conducting careful ethnographic analysis to address questions related to urgent problems? We consider key legacies in terms of understanding economic diversity, limitations, and possibilities. We collectively grapple with political economy approaches as well as newer agendas related to the anthropology of crisis, neo-Marxism, feminism, ecological anthropology, development anthropology, post-peasants, neoliberalism, and globalization. The seminar aims to provide a nurturing space to incubate student research projects, statements of field, prospectus documents, and grant proposals.

COMP-LIT 592A – Medieval Women Writers
Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Jessica Barr

HISTORY 697I – Topics in U.S. Women’s and Gender History
Thursday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Jennifer Fronc

This course will focus on selected topics in U.S. women's and gender history from the colonial era to the present. Our focus will be on how interpretations of women's experience have been influenced by changing conceptions of race ethnicity, sexuality, family, class, religion, region, immigration, economics, and politics. We will consider and compare the lives of Native American women, African American, Asian American women, Latina women, and European American women from the colonial period through industrialization and into the twentieth century. We may also give special consideration to different forms of women's political participation, to the influences of different conceptions of masculinity and femininity on political and cultural discourse, and to changing scientific constructions of body norms, ability and disability, reproduction, race and eugenics, womanhood and motherhood, heterosexuality and homosexuality.

POLISCI 791G/HISTORY 791PG – History of U.S. Social Policy, Politics of Gender
Monday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Elizabeth Sharrow

This interdisciplinary course, designed for students in both Political Science and History, will concentrate on approaches to the study of the history of U.S. public policy aimed at addressing social and political inequalities. We will explore the methods, findings, and controversies in research about public policy in American politics, history, and political science from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and approaches. Readings will focus our attention on policies aimed at the overlapping axes of marginalization on the basis of gender, race, class, and sexuality, in particular. Throughout the course, we will analyze the ways in which policy, over time, has come to address issues and discrimination in intersectional ways, defining politically-relevant categories, identities, and forms of marginalization, such as gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and ideological and partisan identification. Students will write a short reaction paper every other week, make two short presentations, and write a research paper that they will present to the class.

POLISCI 795F – Feminist Politics: Topographies, Transnationalisms, Translations
Tuesday 5:30-8:00 p.m.
Sonia Alvarez

Drawing on case studies from Latin America, Europe, North America, and other world regions, this course will analyze the uneven topographies of space, place, and power in and across which feminist politics travel and are enacted. Themes explored include comparative and transnational epistemologies; the horizontal and vertical flows of feminist politics into parallel social movements and national and international institutions ("sidestreaming" and "mainstreaming," respectively); navigating and resisting development; and, negotiating, confronting, or colluding with neoliberalism. Particular attention will be focused on the transnational dynamics of each of these themes and to the complex cultural and political translations they require of feminist activists and scholars alike.

Winter

WINTER

Winter 2020

Departmental Courses
Courses from other UMass departments at 200-level and above automatically count towards the major. 100-level courses only count towards the WGSS minor.

WGSS 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Ryan Ambuter
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)

COMM 288 – Gender, Sex and Representation
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).

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture
Jae Young Ahn
Literature treating the relationship between man and woman. Topics may include: the nature of love, the image of the hero and heroine, and definitions, past and present, of the masculine and feminine. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)

SOCIOL 287 – Sexuality and Society
Skylar Davidson
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)

COMPONENT
WGSS Majors and Minors must focus their papers or projects on WGSS topics to count component courses. 100-level courses only count toward the minor.

ANTHRO 106 – Culture Through Film
Ana Del Conde
Exploration of different societies and cultures, and of the field of cultural anthropology through the medium of film. Ethnographic and documentary films; focus on gender roles, ethnicity, race, class, religion, politics, and social change. (Gen.Ed. SB, DG)

COMM 287 – Advertising as Social Communication
Sut Jhally
This course looks at advertising from the viewpoint of social theory (that is, of how we can understand advertising's broad political, economic, social, and cultural role in modern society). The course will broadly examine the social role of advertising in consumer societies with a central focus its relationship to: the construction of individual identity, the quest for happiness; the evolving environmental crisis based on depleting resources and climate change; the process of globalization; the commercialization of childhood; the definition of health and wellness; and the crisis of financial debt.

COMP-LIT 231 – Comedy
Marco Lobascio
Our course begins with the premise that contemporary American comedy is informed by the histories of ethnic American groups -- African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and U.S. Latinos/Latinas -- along with issues of race, class, sexuality and citizenship. American comedians, independent filmmakers, feminists and transgendered comics deploy the language of comedy to invoke serious social matters in contemporary American life: racism, heterosexism, homophobia, class biases against the poor and the undocumented, misogyny, war and other burning issues of the day. We will thus consider that the ends of comedy are more than laughter. Comedy confronts political issues that are constitutive of and threatening to the U.S. body politic. (Gen Ed AL)

EDUC 210 – Social Diversity in Education
Aurora Santiago-Ortiz
Focus on issues of social identity, social and cultural diversity, and societal manifestations of oppression. Draws on interdisciplinary perspectives of social identity development, social learning theory, and sociological analyses of power and privilege within broad social contexts. (Gen.Ed. I, DU)

HISTORY 154 – Social Change in the 1960s
Julia Sandy-Bailey
This course focuses on the "Long Sixties," period stretching from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. We will look in new ways at topics you are probably already familiar with: the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, counterculture, sexual experimentation, and never trusting anyone over 30. We will also explore aspects of the Sixties you may not know about or associate with a different era, such as the Great Society, a thriving conservative movement, environmentalism, and gay rights. Students will view online lectures, participate in online discussions, and complete assignments which include reviewing music, movies, and books from the sixties. For more information or to request a syllabus, contact Professor Sandy: @email. (4 credits, HSU)

HISTORY 264 – Health Care and Medicine in the U.S.
Emily Redman
This course explores the history and social meaning of medicine, medical practice, health care, and disease in the United States from 1600 to the present. Using a variety of sources aimed at diverse audiences students will investigate topics such as: the evolution of beliefs about the body; medical and social responses to infectious and chronic disease; the rise of medical science and medical organizations; the development of medical technologies; mental health diagnosis and treatment; changing conceptions of the body; the training, role, and image of medical practitioners and the role of public and government institutions in promoting health practices and disease treatments. We will pay particular attention to the human experience of medicine, with readings on the experience of being ill, the delivery of compassionate care, and the nature of the relationship between practitioners and patients. Course themes will include race, gender, cultural diversity, women and gender, social movements, science, technology, politics, industry, and ethics. (Gen. Ed. HS, DU)

Spring 2020

WGSS 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Rachel Briggs
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)

Departmental Courses
Courses from other Umass departments at 200-level and above automatically count towards the major. 100-level courses only count towards the WGSS minor.

ENGLISH 132- Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture
Anna Klebanowska Piecuch
Literature treating the relationship between man and woman. Topics may include: the nature of love, the image of the hero and heroine, and definitions, past and present, of the masculine and feminine. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)

PSYCH 391WM – Women’s Mental Health
Hilary Halpern
See department for description. Prerequisite: PSYCH 100

PUBHLTH 340 – LGBTQ Health
Kelsey Jordan
This course is about the unique health needs and health disparities within the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) communities, and among the individuals who make up each of these communities. We will learn about gender identity and sexual orientation development in kids and young adults, sexual health, global perspectives, strategies for improving the healthcare experience of LGBT people (e.g., patient-centered and compassionate care), barriers to accessing health care, and many other relevant topics. This is an important course for public health students, because it teaches more than just the facts, but also skills for creating a compassionate and inclusive environment for vulnerable populations. (Gen. Ed. SB, DU)

SOCIOL 287 – Sexuality and Society
Janice Irvine
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) This is a multimodal course, and meets with the following sections: University and OE. The University section will be held at the Amherst campus face to face and asynchronous and online will be fully asynchronous. Please contact your Advisor for more info.

COMPONENT
WGSS Majors and Minors must focus their papers or projects on WGSS topics to count component courses. 100-level courses only count toward the minor.

AFROAM 151 – Literature and Culture
Candace King
Relevant forms of Black cultural expressions contributing to the shape and character of contemporary Black culture; the application of these in traditional Black writers. Includes: West African cultural patterns and the Black past; the transition-slavery, the culture of survival; the cultural patterns through literature; and Black perceptions versus white perceptions. (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)

ENGLISH 354 - Contemporary Voices: A Writer’s Workshop
Juliana Ward

What does creative writing look like in the year 2020? Who writes it? Why are they writing it? Who are they writing for? What is it ‘about’? How can we as writers be inspired to create through the practice of reading? What will our contemporary creative writing look like? This semester we will approach these questions and more by reading and reflecting on a diverse selection of contemporary living poets and writers. Yes, actual living authors who are writing today! All the books we will read were published between 2016- 2020. These current literary voices will guide us into meaningful ways to engage and write with important questions about identity, citizenship, history, origin, family, gender, sexuality, the body, love, loss, grief, joy, and all the other essential factors that affect our relationship to larger world around us. We will look at a variety of writing styles in order to have a broader appreciation of form and possibility. Ideas sparked from these readings will venture us into our own creative writing, as we explore and play with syntax, tone, context, address, and style. We will build a portfolio of our own contemporary creative writing, which will include poetry, fiction, as well as hybrid forms.

HISTORY 264 – History of Health Care and Medicine in the U.S.
Emily Hamilton
This course explores the history and social meaning of medicine, medical practice, health care, and disease in the United States from 1600 to the present. Using a variety of sources aimed at diverse audiences students will investigate topics such as: the evolution of beliefs about the body; medical and social responses to infectious and chronic disease; the rise of medical science and medical organizations; the development of medical technologies; mental health diagnosis and treatment; changing conceptions of the body; the training, role, and image of medical practitioners and the role of public and government institutions in promoting health practices and disease treatments. We will pay particular attention to the human experience of medicine, with readings on the experience of being ill, the delivery of compassionate care, and the nature of the relationship between practitioners and patients. Course themes will include race, gender, cultural diversity, women and gender, social movements, science, technology, politics, industry, and ethics. (Gen. Ed. HS, DU)

Five Colleges

Amherst

SWAG 200 – Feminist Theory
Monday, Wednesday 8:30-9:50 a.m.
Jennifer A. Hamilton

In this course we will investigate contemporary feminist thought from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. We will focus on key issues in feminist theory, such as the sex/gender debate, sexual desire and the body, the political economy of gender, the creation of the "queer" as subject, and the construction of masculinity, among others. This course aims also to think through the ways in which these concerns intersect with issues of race, class, the environment and the nation.

SWAG 203/BLST 203/ENGL 216 – Women Writers of Africa and the African Diaspora
Monday 2:00-4:45 p.m.
Carol Y. Bailey

The term “Women Writers” suggests, and perhaps assumes, a particular category. How useful is this term in describing the writers we tend to include under the frame? And further, how useful are the designations "African" and "African Diaspora"? We will begin by critically examining these central questions, and revisit them frequently as we read specific texts and the body of works included in this course. Our readings comprise a range of literary and scholarly works by canonical and more recent female writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and continental America. Framed primarily by Postcolonial Criticism, our explorations will center on how writers treat historical and contemporary issues specifically connected to women’s experiences, as well as other issues, such as globalization, modernity, and sexuality. We will consider the continuities and points of departure between writers, periods, and regions, and explore the significance of the writers’ stylistic choices. Here our emphasis will be on how writers appropriate vernacular and conventional modes of writing.

SWAG 208/BLST 345/ENGL276/FAMS 379 – Black Feminist Literary Traditions
Monday, Wednesday 12:30-1:50 p.m.
Anneka A. Henderson

Through a close reading of texts by African American authors, we will critically examine the characterization of female protagonists, with a specific focus on how writers negotiate literary forms alongside race, gender, sexuality, and class in their work. Coupled with our explication of poems, short stories, novels, and literary criticism, we will explore the stakes of adaptation in visual culture. Students will analyze the film and television adaptations of The Color Purple (1985), The Women of Brewster Place (1989), and Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005). Authors will include Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Gloria Naylor. Expectations include three writing projects, a group presentation, and various in-class assignments.

SWAG 234/THDA 236 – Dissecting the Music Video: Dance, Image, and Representation
Monday, Wednesday 12:30-1:50 p.m.
Dante R. Brown

This dance history course locates the intersections between dance, music, film, and identity politics by analyzing the cultural phenomenon of the American “music video” from the early 1980s to now. By considering American dance history from 1900 to the present, alongside film analysis work, students will gain an introductory understanding of how the moving body on screen intersects with identity politics related to race, class, sex, sexuality, and gender. Students will explore the course topic through readings on dance, music, film, and critical theory; in-class film viewings of music videos, dance for camera, and other visual media; in-class discussions dissecting critical theory for analysis purposes; and written analysis of film and video.

SWAG 239/RELI 261 - Jewish Identity and MeToo: A Study of Women in Judaism
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:20 a.m.
Susan Niditch

From ancient texts to contemporary documentaries, we explore the portrayals and roles of women in Jewish tradition. Sources include biblical and apocryphal texts; Rabbinic literature; selections from medieval commentaries; letters, diaries, and autobiographies written by Jewish women of various periods and settings; works of fiction; and visual media. An important thread in the course examines contemporary responses to and interpretations of classical sources, as writers and film-makers examine or refashion the tradition in the light of current challenges facing women in Judaism. This discussion course requires participants to prepare a series of closely argued essays related to assigned readings and films.

SWAG 275/THDA 275 – Her Story Is: Feminist Approaches to Theater and Performance
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:20 a.m.
Ana Candida Carneiro

Western text-based theatre has historically hushed the voices of women and those from marginalized communities. This course will focus on examples of such voices, paying special attention to artists, writers, and thinkers who challenge and deconstruct aesthetics that privilege the male gaze. In dialogue with feminist theories of gender and identity, we will read plays and study works by women and gender non-conforming artists, such as Hildegard von Bingen, Juana Ines de la Cruz, Susan Glaspell, Adrienne Kennedy, Marina Abramovich, and Taylor Mac. Finally, we will also inquire into new forms of gender-inspired “artivism,” such as The Kilroy’s, the Guerilla girls, Pussy Riot, and the #MeToo movement in theatres around the world. During this course, students are expected to pursue an individual writing or performance project that will further explore the concepts discussed. For this purpose, we will study the Theater of the Oppressed methodology as applied by contemporary Latinx feminist theater-makers.

SWAG 279/BLST 302/ENGL 279 – Global Women’s Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 8:30-9:50 a.m.
Krupa Shandilya

What do we mean by “women’s fiction”? How do we understand women’s genres in different national contexts? This course examines topics in feminist thought such as marriage, sexuality, desire and the home in novels written by women writers from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. We will draw on postcolonial literary theory, essays on transnational feminism and historical studies to situate our analyses of these novels. Texts include South African writer Nadine Gordimer’s July's People, Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India, and Caribbean author Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea.

SWAG 296/AMST 296/BLST 296 – Black Women and Reproductive Justice in the African Diaspora
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Jallicia A. Jolly

This course explores the transnational politics of race, gender, sexuality, and health from interdisciplinary perspectives. It engages a range of texts and methodologies that locate the historical and contemporary experiences of Afro-disaporic women and girls in the struggle for embodied freedom, autonomy, and reproductive justice. We will draw on examples from Africa and the African diaspora (U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin America) as we engage the main debates in reproductive justice around key issues: sexual and reproductive health and rights; HIV/AIDS; sexual autonomy and choice; sterilization; police brutality; the right to bear children; abortion. The course will also introduce students to theories about health and illness, embodiment and subjectivity, critical race theory, ethnography, black feminist theory, and postcolonial health science studies. Class field trips to reproductive justice organizations will also provide an experiential component that grounds our inquiries.

SWAG 301 – Queer Theory and Practice
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:20 a.m.
Khary O. Polk

This course is an interdisciplinary methods course designed to complement the existing SWAG core sequence. Using theories and approaches from the discipline of performance studies, the explicit mission of the seminar is to acquaint students with the study of LGBT history, politics, and culture while also strengthening student research skills in four overlapping areas: archival research, close-reading, performance analysis, and community engagement-as-activism. Course activities include working in the Amherst College Frost Archives, the production of a performance piece, and structured engagement with contemporary LGBT activism in the Pioneer Valley and the larger world.

SWAG 329/BLST 377/ENGL 368 – Bad Black Women
Monday, Wednesday 2:00-3:20 p.m.
Anneka A. Henderson

History has long valorized passive, obedient, and long-suffering African American women alongside assertive male protagonists and savants. This course provides an alternative narrative to this representation by exploring the ways in which African American female characters, writers, and artists have challenged ideals of stoicism and submission. Using an interdisciplinary focus, we will critically examine transgression across time and space in diverse twentieth- and early twenty-first century literary, sonic, and visual texts. Expectations include three writing projects, a group presentation, and various in-class assignments.

SWAG 331/ENGL 319 – The Postcolonial Novel: Gender, Race and Empire
Tuesday 1:00-3:45 p.m.
Krupa Shandilya

What is the novel? How do we know when a work of literature qualifies as a novel? In this course we will study the postcolonial novel which explodes the certainties of the European novel. Written in the aftermath of empire, these novels question race, class, gender and empire in their subject matter and narrative form. We will consider fiction from South Asia, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa. Novels include Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome, Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and North African author Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North.

SWAG 336/ANTH 336 – Feminist Ethnography
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:50
Jennifer A. Hamilton

This course introduces students to ethnographic research methods by exploring how interdisciplinary feminist scholars have engaged and challenged traditional anthropology. We will consider the dynamics of fieldwork, the ethics of research, and the production of anthropological knowledge through an engagement with the history of feminism in the discipline as well as with contemporary feminist debates. Students will design their own projects and conduct mini-ethnographies throughout the semester. Course topics include the cultures of biomedicine; the anthropology of reproduction; race, gender, and embodiment; and multispecies ethnography.

SWAG 343/POSC 407 – Comparative Borderlands: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Transnational Perspective
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:50 p.m.
Sony Coranez 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.

SWAG 400/POSC 407 – Contemporary Debates: Gender and Right-Wing Populism
Wednesday 2:00-4:45 p.m.
Amrita Basu

This seminar will explore the consequences of neoliberalism, cultural conservatism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiments for women of different social and economic strata as well as women’s divergent political responses. Why have some women become prominent right wing leaders and activists while others have allied with leftist, anti-racist, and other progressive forces to fight for the rights of women and other marginalized groups? How have transnational forces influenced both forms of women’s activism? To what extent are there cross-national similarities in the impact of the far right surge on women, gender and sexuality? The seminar will draw on examples from many different regions of the world, with particular attention to India and the U.S. There will be a final research paper for this course.

SWAG 425/POSC 425 – Contemporary Feminist Political Philosophy
Tuesday 2:30-5:15 p.m.
Monique Roelofs

Feminist theories are shifting and are reframing our current political landscape. Starting with historical work on intersectionality (by writers such as Lorde and Lugones), this course will go on to explore new critical trajectories in feminist political philosophy in engagement with twenty-first century writings by scholars such as Cynthia Willett, Bonnie Honig, Sara Ahmed, Anne Cheng, Siane Ngai, and Mariana Ortega, and artifacts by feminist artists. Each student will design a research project that will be presented to the group in the final weeks.

SWAG 430/HIST 430 – Renaissance Bodies
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:50 p.m.
Jutta G. Sperling

This course will investigate the ways in which early modern sciences and the figurative arts of the Renaissance collaborated to represent body-centered visual knowledges ranging from the "secrets of women" to scientific "monstrosities." The course also examines the ways in which Catholicism enhanced body-centered, sensual and visual forms of devotion. Discussions 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; Chiara di Montefalco’s miraculous relics; Elena Duglioli’s career as a spontaneously lactating 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.

Hampshire

CSI 173 – Sex, Science, and the Victorian Body
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Pamela Stone, Lisa Sanders

How did Victorians conceive of the body? In a culture associated in the popular imagination with modesty and propriety, even prudishness, discussions of sexuality and physicality flourished. This course explores both fictional and non-fictional texts from nineteenth-century Britain in conjunction with modern scientific and critical perspectives. We will discuss debates over corsetry and tight-lacing, dress reform, prostitution, and the Contagious Diseases Acts, sexology, hysteria, and other topics relating to science and the body, alongside novels, poetry, and prose by major Victorian writers. The writings of Freud, Foucault, and other theorists, as well as writings in the natural and biological sciences, will assist us in contextualizing nineteenth-century discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and embodiment. Several shorter papers and a longer research project will be required.

CSI 229 – Social Movements and Social Change: the Zapatistas on Mexico
Wednesday 2:30-5:20 p.m.
Margaret Cerulllo
component

In 1994, to everyone's astonishment, the Zapatistas rose in revolt in Chiapas, Mexico, the same day that NAFTA went into effect-January 1, 1994. How to make sense of the coincidence? Why have so many, in Latin America and in the world, found the Zapatista messages exciting? What challenges face the Zapatistas today, including the election of a "progressive" government in Mexico in 2018? The Zapatistas' actions and writings constitute a case study in which the economic, the political, indigenous rights, women's rights, civil society, cultural memory, and writing that is poetic and political--all converge. Focusing on the Zapatistas, we consider an example of "local" resistance to "global" designs. "Resistance" names the struggle in Latin America against the precariousness of life under neoliberal economics, and against dominant paradigms that relegate other forms of knowledge and doing to the realm of "the primitive" or the invisible. Together, the two constitute renewed efforts to decolonize Latin America, economically and culturally.

CSI 246 – Black Boyhood Studies: Race, Youth, and Masculinity
Monday, Wednesday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Tammy Owens

From the success of the Oscar-winning film Moonlight to the global popularity of hip-hop stars Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar, America indulges in the cultural work that young black men and boys create to express their unique experiences at the intersections of race, youth, and masculinity in film and music. Yet, when black boys and young men are not on stage or the screen performing to entertain spectators, they are oftentimes perceived as threats and violently policed, incarcerated, and killed. This course explores how the interconnections of race, gender, youth, and geography influence performances and cultural perceptions of black masculinities in America since the twentieth century. Students will use Queer of Color and Feminist theories to analyze representations of black masculinity in literature (e.g., Kiese Laymon, Richard Wright), film, art, music, and social media. Students will also study current social science research on black masculinities in Boyhood Studies.

CSI 254 – The Black Feminist Archive
Monday 4:00-7:00 p.m.
Tammy Owens

The hashtags #sayhername #blackgirlmagic #blackjoy #blacklivesmatter #intersectionalfeminist and others are rooted in a long history of Black Feminist consciousness in the U.S. While these hashtags have made feminism more accessible to people across multiple lines of difference, they have also silenced a rich genealogy of black women and black queer intellectuals, educators, and activists who created the original theories long before the hashtag was created. Thus, the creators are not cited for their work and originality, but rather relegated to the dark corners of history. In this course, students will follow the hashtag offline to recover its intellectual roots. Analyzing films, archives, texts, and social media, students will examine key issues and scholarly interventions in Black Feminist Thought from the nineteenth century to present. Throughout the course, students will create a web-based hashtag archive that links some of the most popular hashtags to Black Feminist thinkers.

CSI 272 – From Choice to Justice: The Politics of the Abortion Debate
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Marlene Fried

Abortion rights continue to be contested in the U.S. and throughout the world. Since the legalization of abortion in the U.S. in 1973, there have been significant erosions in abortion rights and access to abortion. Harassment of abortion clinics, providers, and clinic personnel by opponents of abortion is routine, and there have been several instances of deadly violence. This course examines the abortion debate in the U.S., looking historically at the period before legalization up to the present. We explore the ethical, political and legal dimensions of the issue and investigate the anti-abortion and abortion rights movements. We view the abortion battle in the U.S. in the wider framework of reproductive justice. Specific topics of inquiry include: abortion worldwide, coercive contraception and sterilization abuse, welfare rights, population control, and the criminalization of pregnancy.

CSI 275 – Hopes and Fears: Religion, Gender, and Possessions from the Middle Ages to the Pilgrims
Wednesday, Friday 10:30-11:50 a.m.
James Wald
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What can the hopes and fears of a given society tell us about it and ourselves? Did the gravest "sins" in old Europe and the North American colonies involve food, money, or sex? Among the hallmarks of modernity were the rise of new social formations (classes) and the commercialization of daily activities and relations. Did traditional institutions and belief systems hamper or facilitate the changes? What roles did religious and national contexts play? Did the increase in the sheer number of "things" change the way people thought? What changes did the family and private life undergo? At the heart of the course is the concept of culture as a process through which individuals and groups struggle to shape and make sense of their social institutions and daily lives. A core course in history, the social sciences, and cultural studies.

HACU 199 – Hashtags, Memes, and Trolls: Politics in the Age of Social Media
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Professor Loza

Although early internet theorists imagined the World Wide Web as a wild frontier where only minds mattered, social media testifies to the lasting force of bodily inscriptions like race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and class. In this course, we will consider how identity shapes how we communicate, debate, collaborate, and mobilize online. We will investigate how different populations engage with digital technologies and social media in particular; how such environments expedite stereotypes and construct difference; and how online platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are tools of social justice as well as replicators of reactionary ideologies. Our critical arsenal will draw upon Media Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Cultural Studies, and Ethnic Studies. We will apply these theories to current events online. Throughout our examination of the politics of hashtags, memes, and trolls, we will foreground the ways that power relations continue to inform how bodies travel through the digital realm.

HACU 232 – Topics in Film Studies: Race, Gender, and Sexuality on Screen
Section 1: Monday, Wednesday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Section 2: Thursday 7:00-10:00 p.m.
Lisa Sanders

This course is designed to introduce students to key issues in film studies, focusing on cinema in the United States from the silent era to the present. We will pay particular attention to discourses of racial identity, gender difference, and sexuality on screen, reading early, classical, and recent films in the context of contemporary conversations about politics, equity, and social justice. The course will highlight the history of filmmaking by women and people of color (including Dorothy Arzner, Julie Dash, Maya Deren, Sessue Hayakawa, Oscar Micheaux, Jordan Peele, and Lois Weber, among others) in an effort to critique and expand the film studies canon. Several short papers and in-class discussions will address how to interpret film on the formal/stylistic level (sequence analysis, close reading, visual language) as well as in the context of major trends and figures in film history.

HACU 247 – Deviant Bodies: The Regulation of Race, Sex, and Disability in the US
Thursday 10:30-11:50 a.m.
Susana Loza

Since its founding, the US has closely regulated the bodies of Others and punished those that rebel against these socially-constructed designations. Utilizing an interdisciplinary amalgam of Critical Race Theory, Sexuality Studies, Queer Theory, Media Studies, Sociology, American Studies, Performance Studies, and Feminist Theory, this course will explore how the state, the media, and civilian institutions police the boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality by pathologizing, criminalizing, and stigmatizing difference. We will also examine how the subjects burdened with these dangerous inscriptions evade and contest them through passing, performativity, and other forms of identity-based resistance. Special attention will be paid to the criminalization of cross-racial and same sex desire; the re-biologization of racial and sexual difference; the dehumanization of immigrants; the racialization of crime; the gendering of mental disorder; the rise of homonormativity; genetic surveillance; the biopolitics of reproduction; and the role of The Law in constructing and controlling deviant bodies.

Mt. Holyoke

ASIAN 247 – Chinese Women Writers in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Ying Wang

In the last hundred years, China witnessed the emergence of many talented Chinese women writers. Not only did they take part in every stage of important socio-political changes in modern and contemporary China, they were and still are the avant-garde of literary reform and innovation. Many of their works, in particular, take gender and gender ideology/politics at issue, while deviating from the traditional discourse that marginalized or trivialized women, exploring creative and effective ways of literary dialogue and imagination. This course will cover women writers from both modern (1911-1949) and contemporary (1949-present) times. Some of the representative women writers include: Ding Ling, Xiao Hong, Zhang Ailing, Zong Pu, Yang Jiang, Wang Anyi, Tie Ning, etc.

GNDST 201 – Methods and Practices in Feminist Scholarship
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Jacquelyne Luce

This is a class about doing research as a feminist. 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? Are there feminist ways of doing research? Why and how do the stories we tell in our research matter? Some of the key issues and 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, and research as storytelling. The class will be writing intensive and will culminate in each student producing a research portfolio.

GNDST 204NB/ENGL 233 – Nonbinary Romanticism: Genders, Sexes and Beings in the Age of Revolution
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Katherine 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 204QT/ENGL 219QT – Queer and Trans Writing
Wednesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Andrea Lawlor

What do we mean when we say "queer writing" or "trans writing"? Are we talking about writing by queer and/or trans authors? Writing about queer or trans practices, identities, experience? Writing that subverts conventional forms? All of the above? In this course, we will engage these questions not theoretically but through praxis. We will read fiction, poetry, comics, creative nonfiction, and hybrid forms. Expect to encounter work that challenges you in terms of form and content. Some writers we may read include Ryka Aoki, James Baldwin, Tom Cho, Samuel R. Delany, kari edwards, Elisha Lim, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Eileen Myles, and David Wojnarowicz.

GNDST 204RP/CST 249RP/LATST 250RP – Race, Racism, and Power
Monday, Wednesday 9:30-10:45 p.m.
Vanessa Rosa

This course analyzes the concepts of race and racism from an interdisciplinary perspective, with focus on Latinas/os/x in the United States. It explores the sociocultural, political, economic, and historical forces that interact with each other in the production of racial categories and racial "difference." In particular, we focus on racial ideologies, racial formation theory, and processes of racialization, as well as the relationship between race and ethnicity. The course examines racial inequality from a historical perspective and investigates how racial categories evolve and form across contexts. The analysis that develops will ultimately allow us to think rigorously about social inequality, resistance and liberation.

GNDST 206MC/HIST 296MC – Women and Gender in Modern China
Monday, Wednesday 2:55-4:10 p.m.
Xiaofei Gao

This course introduces the changes in Chinese women's lives-and the changes in shared social ideas about what women should do and be-from the late 19th century to the present, a time of profound change on the Chinese mainland. The central question animating the course is this: when we foreground gender as a category of analysis, how does history look different? The course is organized chronologically. Course materials include a textbook to introduce broad themes, scholarly monographs and articles, primary sources from the 19th and 20th centuries, visual and material artifacts, and films.

GNDST 206US/HIST 276 – U.S. Women’s History since 1890
Monday, Wednesday 1:30-2:45 p.m.
Mary Renda

This course considers the historical evolution of women's private lives, public presence, and political engagement within and beyond the borders of the United States, from the 1890s to the present. How have U.S. racism, consumer capitalism, immigration, and changing forms of state power shaped women's experiences and possibilities? How have regimes of gender, sexuality, bodily comportment, and reproduction evolved in relation to national and global changes? Emphasis will be placed on the experiences and perspectives of working-class women, women of color, and colonized women.

GNDST 209 – Sex and Gender in the Black Diaspora
Tuesday, Thursday 1:30-2:45 p.m.
Riche Barnes

This course explores, in global perspective, concepts of blackness and its relationship to feminist, women-led, queer and gender-based political movements that have shaped complex discourses on the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality. We begin with an introductory examination of the ways in which "race" has been historically theorized in U.S. sociological and anthropological discourse. The course integrates a survey of ethnographies and ethnographically informed studies of the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality and concludes with a student-led ethnographic project. Students should leave the course having simultaneously explored sociological and anthropological conceptualizations of the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality, their political implications, and how these issues resonate within broader fields of identity formation, globalization, public discourse and political movements.

GNDST 210BD/RELIG 241 – Women and Gender in Buddhism
Tuesday, Thursday 2:55-4:10 p.m.
Susanne Mrozik

Can women become Buddhas? Why is the Buddha called a "mother"? Who gets to ordain? Why would anyone choose celibacy? Who engages in religious sexual practices and why? This course examines the centrality of gender to Buddhist texts, practices, and institutions. We pay particular attention to the challenges and opportunities Buddhist traditions have offered women in different historical and cultural contexts. Throughout the course we consider various strategies of empowerment, including feminist, postcolonial, queer, trans*, and womanist.

GNDST 210NR/CST 249/RELIG 225 – Reimaging American Religious History: Race, Gender and Alterity
Tuesday, Thursday 1:30-2:45 p.m.
Meredith Coleman-Tobias

This course invites its participants to place critical race and gender studies perspectives in dialogue with the emergence of new religious movements in the United States. Course participants rely on the presupposition that only through a thorough examination of religious traditions on the 'margin' can we fully understand the textured meaning of American religious history as a sub-discipline. Privileging the founding stories and institutionalization of minoritized American religious groups, the course considers how subaltern voices have shaped and transformed American religious life.

GNDST 210WR/AFCNA 246/RELIG 246 – Womanist Religious Thought
Tuesday, Thursday 2:55-4:20 p.m.
Meredith Coleman-Tobias

As a conceptual framework which reconsiders the rituals, scriptures, and allegiances of religious black women, womanist thought has expanded the interdisciplinary canon of black and feminist religious studies. This course is a survey of womanist religious scholars from multiple religious traditions: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Yoruba-Ifa -- as well as theorists who understand womanism as a "spiritual but not religious" orientation. Course participants will use the interpretive touchstones of cross-culturalism, erotics, earthcare, and health -- among others -- to examine contemporary womanist religious thought.

GNDST 241HR/ANTHR 216HM – Feminist Engagements with Hormones
Tuesday, Thursday 1:30-2:45 p.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 & Everyday Resistance: Freedom Memoirs, Struggles and Decolonizing Justice
Wednesday 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 333AR/ANTHR 306AR – Anthropology of Reproduction
Tuesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Lynn Morgan

This course covers major issues in the anthropology of reproduction, including the relationship between production and reproduction, the gendered division of labor, the state and reproductive policy, embodied metaphors of procreation and parenthood, fertility control and abortion, crosscultural reproductive ethics, and the social implications of new reproductive technologies. We examine the social construction of reproduction in a variety of cultural contexts.

GNDST 333HH/ASIAN 340 – Love, Gender-Crossing and Women’s Supremacy: A Reading of The Story of the Stone
Wednesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Ying Wang

A seminar on the eighteenth-century Chinese masterpiece The Story of the Stone and selected literary criticism in response to this work. Discussions will focus on love, gender-crossing, and women's supremacy and the paradoxical treatments of these themes in the novel. We will explore multiple aspects of these themes, including the sociopolitical, philosophical, and literary milieus of eighteenth-century China. We will also examine this novel in its relation to Chinese literary tradition in general and the generic conventions of premodern Chinese vernacular fiction in particular.

GNDST 333MC/LATST 350MC/CST 349MC – Latinas/ox/x and Housing: Mi Casa is Not Su Casa
Wednesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Vanessa Rosa

Housing is closely tied to quality of life and the health of neighborhoods and communities. As a main goal of the "American Dream," homeownership has important significance on an individual and societal level. For immigrants, this goal is often out of reach as a result of racism and discriminatory housing policies. This interdisciplinary seminar explores Latinas/os/x relationship to housing and homeownership by examining: 1. the history of housing policy in the United States; 2. national identity, assimilation, and housing; and 3. discriminatory housing policies/programs and housing inequality. We explore topics including immigration, housing policy, public housing, segregation, gentrification, the suburbs, homelessness, eviction, affordability, and community building. Exploring this range of topics will help us develop a clearer understanding of why housing is one of the most pressing issues for Latinas/os/x today. Students will engage in community-based research on affordable housing in communities in the Pioneer Valley.

GNDST 333MS/CST 349MS – Multi-Species Justice? Entangled Lives and Human Power
Monday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Christian Gundermann

How can we change animal exploitation and re-situate the human more equitably with other species? Through animal rights? Justice? Abolition? Dismantle human exceptionalism? Animal emancipation? Companionship? Co-existence? Stewardship? What are the uses and limits of the discourses from which critical animal studies borrows conceptually, for example: antiracism, feminism, disability studies, nationalism, transformative justice, and so on. We will explore different scenarios of human-nonhuman entanglements, such as training, rescue, the animal industrial complex, the politics of extinction, hunting, infection, predation, breeding/reproduction and others.

GNDST 333PA/SPAN 340PA/CST 349PA/FLMST 380PA – Natural’s Not in It: Pedro Almodovar
Monday, Wednesday 1:30-2:45 p.m.
Justin Crumbaugh

This course studies the films of Pedro Almodóvar, European cinema's favorite bad boy turned acclaimed auteur. On the one hand, students learn to situate films within the context of contemporary Spanish history (the transition to democracy, the advent of globalization, etc.) in order to consider the local contours of postmodern aesthetics. On the other hand, the films provide a springboard to reflect on larger theoretical and ethical debates related to gender, sexuality, consumer culture, authenticity, and authorship.

GNDST 333PA/– Poetry and Image: Form of Identity
Tuesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
S. Ace

Description TBD.

GNDST 333RT/RELIG 352/CST 349RE – Body and Gender in Religious Traditions
Wednesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Susanne Mozrik

Do bodies matter in religious traditions? Whose bodies matter? How do they matter? By studying religious body ideals and practices, we examine the possibilities and problems different kinds of bodies have posed in religious traditions. Topics include religious diet, exercise, and dress; monasticism, celibacy, and sexuality; healing rituals, and slavery and violence. We pay special attention to contemporary challenges to problematic body ideals and practices coming from feminist, disability, postcolonial, queer, and trans theorists and activists.

GNDST 333UU/LATST 360/CST 348UU – Latina/o Immigration
Tuesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Raquel A. Madrigal

The course provides an historical and topical overview of Latina/o migration to the United States. We will examine the economic, political, and social antecedents to Latin American migration, and the historical impact of the migration process in the U.S. Considering migration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, we will discuss the social construction of race, the gendered nature of migration, migrant labor struggles, Latin American-U.S. Latino relations, immigration policy, and border life and enforcement. Notions of citizenship, race, class, gender, and sexuality will be central to our understanding of the complexity at work in the migration process.

GNDST 333VV/FLMST 340EX – Women Experimental Filmmakers
Thursday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Robin Blaetz

This seminar examines experimental cinema made by women from the early 1950s, during the earliest years of the movement known as the American Avant-Garde, through the 1990s. While the class will read feminist film theory and see the work of such well-known filmmakers as Yvonne Rainer, Sally Potter, and Chantal Akerman, we will also examine the less familiar but highly influential films of women working in the home movie or diary mode, with particular emphasis on the work of Marie Menken.

GNDST 333WT – Witches in the Modern Imagination
Wednesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Erika Rundle

From the middle ages to the present day, witches have evoked both fear and fascination. Their fellowships (real or fantastic) challenged the prevailing power structures of church and state patriarchies and upset the ordered precepts of the modern world. This seminar offers an overview of the history of witchcraft in Atlantic cultures, with special attention to the early modern British and American colonial eras. We will examine figures of the witch in European art; religious and legal texts that document the persecution of sorcerers; and dramatic, literary, and cinematic representations of witches that have helped to shape our understanding of gender, nature, theatricality, and power.

POLIT 233 – Introduction to Feminist Theory
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Elizabeth Markovits

This course explores the overlapping dualities of the feminine and the masculine, the private and the public, the home and the world. We examine different forms of power over the body; the ways gender and sexual identities reinforce or challenge the established order; and the cultural determinants of 'women's emancipation.' We emphasize the politics of feminism, dealing with themes that include culture, democracy, and the particularly political role of theory and on theoretical attempts to grasp the complex ties and tensions between sex, gender, and power.

Smith

SWG 238 – Women, Money and Transnational Social Movements
Monday, Wednesday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Elisabeth Brownell Armstrong

Flickers of global finance capital across computer screens cannot compare to the travel preparations of women migrating from rural homes to work at computer chip factories. Yet both movements, of capital and people, constitute vital facets of globalization in our current era. This course centers on the political linkages and economic theories that address the politics of women, gender relations and capitalism. We will research social movements that challenge the raced, classed and gendered inequities, and the costs of maintaining order. We will assess the alternatives proposed by social movements like the landless workers movement (MST) in Brazil, and economic shifts like the workers cooperative movement. Assignments include community-based research on local and global political movements, short papers, class-led discussions &written reflections.

SWG 241 – White Supremacy in the Age of Trump
Tuesday, Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Loretta June 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. Enrollment limited to 50.

SWG 271 – Reproductive Justice
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Carrie N. Baker

This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of reproductive health, rights and justice in the United States, examining history, activism, law, policy, and public discourses related to reproduction. A central framework for analysis is how gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, disability and nationality intersect to shape people’s experiences of reproductive oppression and their resistance strategies. Topics include eugenics and the birth control movement; the reproductive rights and justice movements; U.S. population control policies; criminalization of pregnant people; fetal personhood and birth parents’ citizenship; the medicalization of reproduction; reproductive technologies; the influence of disability, incarceration and poverty on pregnancy and parenting; the anti-abortion movement; and reproductive coercion and violence. Prerequisite SWG 150 or permission of the instructor.

SWG 300 – Queer Visual Studies
Monday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Instructor TBD

As representations of queer subjectivities has left the largely coded citations of the closet, they have come to rely on discursively complex and intersectional forms of representation that at once exceed, and rely on, queer cultures, communities, and even subjects. Queer visual culture has long offered a way for queer subjects to both represent, and come to understand, who they are and how meaning is inscribed onto and through [their] bodies. We will leverage history and theory to explore a range of media from fine art to popular culture, and develop a queer lens with which to interrogate visual culture. This class will map the trajectory from the early twentieth century to our present moment, and ultimately seek to describe what queer visual representation is—and perhaps is not—today.

SWG 321 – Marxist Feminism
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Elisabeth Brownell 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 and permission of the instructor.

SWG 360 – Memoir Writing
Tuesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Cornelia D.J. Pearsall

How does one write a life, especially if it’s one’s own? This writing workshop addresses the profound complexities, challenges, and pleasures of the genre of the memoir, through intensive reading, discussion, and both analytical and creative writing. Our readings will be drawn from a range of mostly contemporary memoirists with intersectional identity locations—and dislocations—drawing from a range of voices, experiences, and representations, pursuing what the class comes to identify as our own most urgent aesthetic and ethical questions. Our attention will be to craft, both in the memoirs we read and those we write. Writing sample and permission of the instructor required.

AMS 201 – Introduction to American Studies
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Evangeline M. Heiliger, Kevin L. Rozario
component

An introduction to the methods and concerns of American studies. We draw on literature, painting, architecture, landscape design, social and cultural criticism, and popular culture to explore such topics as responses to economic change, ideas of nature and culture, America’s relationship to Europe, the question of race, the roles of women, family structure, social class and urban experience.

AMS 245 – Feminist and Indigenous Science Studies
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 p.m.
Evangeline M. Heiliger, Christen Mucher

In this course, we will consider such questions as: What do we know and how do we know it? What knowledges count as “science”? How is knowledge culturally situated? How has “science” been central to colonialism and capitalism and what would it mean to decolonize science(s)? Is feminist science possible? We will look at key sites and situations—in media and popular culture, in science writing, in sociological accounts of science, in creation stories and traditional knowledges—in which knowledge around the categories of race, gender, sex, sexuality, sovereignty, and dis/ability are produced, contested and made meaningful.

ARH 278 – Race and Gender in the History of Photography
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Emma R. Silverman

This course examines histories of photography from the medium’s invention around 1839 to its use by artists and non-artists today. In particular, we will focus on race, gender and representation, exploring how photography has been deployed both as a tool of oppression and of resistance. Throughout, students will be introduced to the rich theoretical literature on the medium as well as the historical circumstances of its production. Some of the topics we will consider are the mutual construction of photography and anthropology; the “queer camera;” the use of photography in social movements for racial justice; and the gaze, self-fashioning and social media.

CLS 233 – Gender and Sexuality in Greco-Roman Culture
Monday, Wednesday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Nancy J. Shumate

The construction of gender, sexuality, and erotic experience is one of the major sites of difference between Greco-Roman culture and our own. What constituted a proper man and a proper woman in these ancient societies? Which sexual practices and objects of desire were socially sanctioned and which considered deviant? What ancient modes of thinking about these issues have persisted into the modern world? Attention to the status of women; the role of social class; the ways in which genre and convention shaped representation; the relationship between representation and reality.

EAL 245 – Writing, Japan and Otherness
Monday, Wednesday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Kimberly Kono

An exploration of representations of “otherness” in Japanese literature and film from the mid-19th century until the present. How was (and is) Japan’s identity as a modern nation configured through representations of other nations and cultures? How are categories of race, gender, nationality, class and sexuality used in the construction of difference? This course pays special attention to the role of “otherness” in the development of national and individual identities. In conjunction with these investigations, we also address the varied ways in which Japan is represented as “other” by writers from China, England, France, Korea and the United States. How do these images of and by Japan converse with each other? All readings are in English translation.

EAL 262 – Representation of Women in Chinese Culture
Monday. Wednesday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Lingqian Kong

Representations of women are often defined by how men see women or by how society expects women to look and behave. Many representations of women focused on women's emotions and their sexuality. As a socially and historically defined group, images of women played a crucial role in defining Chinese modernity. In the class, we will mainly study the representation of women in late imperial and modern China, exploring feminine and feminist literary ideology.

EAL 273 – Women and Narration in Modern Korea
Section 1: Tuesday, Thursday 10:50-12:05 p.m. Irhe Sohn
Section 2: Thursday 7:00-9:00 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 241 – The Empire Writes Back: Postcolonial Literature
Monday, Wednesday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Ambreen Hai

Introduction to Anglophone fiction, poetry, drama and memoir from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia in the aftermath of the British empire. Concerns include the cultural and political work of literature in response to histories of colonial and racial dominance; writers' ambivalence towards English linguistic, literary and cultural legacies; ways literature can (re)construct national identities and histories, and address dominant notions of race, class, gender, and sexuality; women writers' distinctivenesss and modes of contesting patriarchal and colonial ideologies; global diasporas, migration, globalization and U.S. imperialism. Readings include Achebe, Adichie, Aidoo, Dangarembga, Walcott, Cliff, Rushdie, Ghosh, Lahiri, Hamid, among others.

ENG 278 – Asian American Women Writers
Monday, Wednesday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Floyd D. Cheung

The body of literature written by Asian American women over the past 100 years has been recognized as forming a coherent tradition. What conditions enabled its emergence? How have the qualities and concerns of this tradition been defined? What makes a text central or marginal to the tradition? Writers to be studied include Maxine Hong Kingston, Sui Sin Far, Mitsuye Yamada, M. Evelina Galang, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Marilyn Chin, Paisley Rekdal, Lynda Barry, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee and Ruth Ozeki.

ENG 353 – Shakespeare’s Women, Women’s Shakespeare
Wednesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Naomi J. Miller

This seminar explores the significance of women’s voices in Othello, King Lear and The Tempest, viewed in conjunction with re-imaginings of these plays by women playwrights, producers, and directors, as well as women poets and novelists. The course explores how women artists have engaged with and transformed Shakespeare’s women at different cultural moments, exploring questions of adaptive appropriation across global and temporal boundaries as well as race and gender. The course will consider the voices of women of the early modern period, as well as modern women authors including Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Suniti Namjoshi, Elizabeth Nunez and Jane Smiley.

ESS 340 – Women’s Health: Current Topics
Monday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Barbara Brehm-Curtis

A seminar focusing on current research papers in women’s health. Recent topics have included reproductive health issues, eating disorders, heart disease, depression, autoimmune disorders and breast cancer. Strong biological sciences background, and permission of the instructor.

FRN 380 – Immigration and Sexuality
Monday, Wednesday 2:45-4:00 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 363 – Dissent: Disobedience, Resistance Refusal and Exit
Tuesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Instructor TBD
component

This seminar in political theory examines contemporary theories and practices of dissent, from civil disobedience to armed resistance to political exit. Are citizens morally obligated to obey unjust laws? What makes a law or political arrangement unjust? What kinds of protest actions are justified? What are the promises and limitations of nonviolence -- or violence? What effect do different forms of resistance have, and what is their political value? Is exiting -- quitting politics or leaving the polity -- a meaningful form of resistance? This course will engage with these questions by reading contemporary texts from political science, sociology, and philosophy, alongside works by practitioners of forms of disobedience and resistance.

Women in Japanese History from Ancient Times to the 19th Century
Monday, Wednesday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Marnie S. Anderson

Topics course. 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 264/LAS 264 – Women and Revolutions
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Diana Sierra Becerra

Women have been key players in revolutionary movements. They have organized militant workers' movements, built alternative institutions, and waged armed struggle. Why have women joined revolutionary movements? How did gender shape their participation? How have women defined the meaning and practice of revolution? We will consult primary and secondary sources to understand the goals of radical women and how they shaped revolutionary theories such as Marxism, Maoism, anarchism, and feminism. We will focus on historical case studies from the twentieth-century Global South.

HST 270 – Oral History and Lesbian Subjects
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Kelly P. Anderson

Topics course. This course explores the history of lesbian/queer communities, cultures and activism. While becoming familiar with the existing narratives about lesbian lives, students are introduced to the method of oral history as a key documentation strategy in the production of queer histories. Our texts include secondary literature on late-20th-century lesbian culture and politics, oral history theory and methodology, a walking tour of Northampton, and primary sources from the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC). Students conduct, transcribe, edit and interpret their own interviews for their final project. The oral histories completed for the class become part of the Documenting Lesbian Lives collection in the SSC. Not open to first year students.

HST 286 – Historiographic Debates in the History of Gender of Sexuality
Wednesday 7:00-10:00 p.m.
Darcy C. Buerkle

This course considers methodologies and debates in modern historical writing about gender and sexuality, with a primary focus on European history. Students develop an understanding of significant, contemporary historiographic trends and research topics in the history of women and gender.

HST 355 – Gender and the Aftermath of War in the Twentieth Century
Thursday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Darcy C. Buerkle

Topics course. 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.

IDP 208 – Women’s Medical Issues
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Leslie Richard Jaffe

A study of topics and issues relating to women’s health, including menstrual cycle, contraception, sexually transmitted infections, abortion, mental health, nutrition, osteoporosis, the media’s representation of women and gender bias in health care. Social, cultural, ethical and political issues are considered, as well as an international perspective.

ITL 344 – Women in Italian Society: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Tuesday, Thursday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Giovanna Bellesia

Topics course. This course provides an in-depth look at the changing role of women in Italian society. Authors studied include Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa Morante, Dacia Maraini and Elena Ferrante. A portion of the course is dedicated to the new multicultural and multiethnic Italian reality with a selection of texts written during the last 20 years by contemporary women immigrants. Limited enrollment. Permission of the instructor required. Conducted in Italian.

REL 214 – Women in the Hebrew Bible
Monday, Wednesday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Joel S. Kaminsky

This course focuses on the lives of women in ancient Israelite society through close readings of the Hebrew Bible. We look at detailed portraits of female characters as well as the role of many unnamed women in the text to consider the range and logic of biblical attitudes toward women, including reverence, disgust and sympathy. We also consider female deities in the ancient Near East, women in biblical law, sex in prophetic and Wisdom literature, and the female body as a source of metaphor.

SOC 237 – Gender and Globalization
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Payal Banerjee

This course engages with the various dimensions of globalization through the lens of gender, race and class relations. We study how gender and race intersect in global manufacturing and supply chains as well as in the transnational politics of representation and access in global media, culture, consumption, fashion, food, water, war and dissenting voices.

SOC 253 – Sociology of Sexuality: Institutions, Identities and Cultures
Monday, Wednesday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
William Cory Albertson

This course examines sexuality from a sociological perspective, focusing on how sexuality is constructed by and structures major social institutions. We examine the social construction of individual and collective identities, norms and behaviors, discourses, institutional regulation, and the place of sexuality in the state, education, science and other institutions, and social movements. Consideration of gender, race, class, time and place are integrated throughout. Topics include the social construction of sexual desire and practice, sexuality and labor, reproduction, science, technology, sexuality and the state, sexuality education, globalization, commodification, and social movements for sexual purity, sexual freedom and against sexual violence. Prerequisite: SOC 101. Enrollment limited to 35.

WLT 266 – Modern South African Literature Cinema
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Katwiwa Mule

A study of South African literature and film with a focus on adaptation of literary texts to the screen. We pay particular attention to the ways in which the political, economic, and cultural forces of colonialism and apartheid have shaped contemporary South African literature and film: for what purposes do South African filmmakers adapt novels, biographies and memoirs to the screen? How do these adaptations help us visualize the relationship between power and violence in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa? How do race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity complicate our understanding racial, political and gender-based violence in South Africa?