Spring 2021 Course Guide : Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies : UMass Amherst

WGSS

Attention Majors and Minors - requirements have changed! Students who enter the major or minor Fall 2020 or after are under new requirements. For those of you that will need the distribution requirements: sexuality studies, critical race feminisms, transnational feminisms. For questions, contact Karen Lederer, Chief Undergrad Advisor.

WGSS 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m. - Derek Siegel
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m. - Sandra Russell
UWW Section – Adina Giannelli

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

WGSS 201 – Gender and Difference: Critical Analyses
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Rachel Briggs

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

WGSS 205 – Feminist Health Politics
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Svati Shah

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 286 – History of Sexuality and Race in the U.S.
Monday, Wednesday 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Discussions Friday
Laura Briggs

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 291P – From Shrek to Killing Eve: Gender and Pop Culture
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Rachel Briggs

This course examines popular culture—including television, film, music, music videos, sports, and social media—from a feminist perspective. We will watch and read a range of popular media and look at popular culture as a site of political and social ideology, interrogating how popular culture works to normalize and perpetuate oppression. Course content will address the question of how film and television produce meaning around race, gender, and other identities and what popular culture says about society. Course content will include the changing of LGBT depictions throughout recent history, the impact of the Hayes code, and the continues representational violence that occurs through the trope of “bury your gays” which continues to be an issue in film and television. We will watch films, such as Shrek, to explore satire and its limit and will watch television shows, such as Killing Eve and Black Mirror, to look at how they utilize generic conventions to disrupt normative meanings around gender, violence, and technology. We will also take a deep dive into social media and its effects on current politics and our own experiences with social media usage. This will be examined within the broader context of propaganda, the rise of authoritarianism, and distorted representations of fascism in popular media. We will also examine the relationship of media and pop culture to social justice and the potential for different types of media to disrupt norms, such as hip-hop culture, short stories that resist normative structures, and various films/TV shows.

WGSS 292L/AFROAM 292L – Losing Gender
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Biko Caruthers

Have you ever felt that gender is a bit odd? Ever feel a little perplexed about "gender reveal parties" and the obsession around an unborn child's genitals? Binaries are strange, knowing the range of thought, expression and creativity humanity* is capable of. Why are we told there are two main genders? What happens when you take all of this into account alongside histories of slavery and conquest? This course will take seriously the claim that gender is anti-Black, that slavery marked an epochal rupture and that slavery is a technology for producing a kind of human. Following the work of Hortense Spillers' Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book, this course is interested in thinking through how the politics gender differentiation was and still is central to black subject making in the New World. One of the objectives for this course, is to develop a way to advocate for a politics vested in the abolition of gender in the long run and in the short-run, doing the work in thinking about how race, gender, and sexuality has been vital to subject making.

WGSS 293*/AFROAM 293C - Race, Sexuality, and the Law in Early America
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Anne Kerth

What is race? What is sexuality? And how did early American history shape the legal structures that would come to define racial and sexual identities and possibilities? In this course, students will examine how African, European, and Native American ideas about race and sexuality influenced the development of colonial, early Republican, and antebellum America, with a special focus on the evolution of American legal frameworks undergirding racial and sexual hierarchies. Topics covered include initial encounters between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans; the birth and evolution of racial slavery; interracial sex and marriage; citizenship and belonging; and legal and extra-legal violence.

WGSS 293W - Beauty as Work: Nail Salons, Fashion and Medical Tourism
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Miliann Kang

How have bodies become both the site and the vehicle for new forms of labor, consumption, production and reproduction? What does the commercialization of the body and embodied exchanges reveal about interconnections between personal, local, national and global contexts? This course will examine enactments of body labor in locations and processes ranging from nail salons, beauty pageants, cosmetic surgery, surrogacy, medical tourism to frontline healthcare work within the pandemic. Drawing on interdisciplinary feminist, transnational and ethnic studies scholarship, it centers bodies and body labor as lenses through which to examine race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, labor, migration and globalization.

WGSS 293R/HISTORY 293R – US Women Against Imperialism: Resistance and Resilience
Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Adeline Broussan

This course explores the relationship of women (cis, trans, identifying as non-binary) to the social, cultural, economic, and political developments shaping the United States as an empire from 1890 to the present. It examines the regulation of womxn's bodies and sexualities, the gendered narrative of imperialism, and womxn's resistance to imperial power at home and abroad. This course will specifically focus on how class, race, ethnicity, and sexual identity have affected womxn's historical experience through a transnational lens. It questions the mainstream historical narrative to reclaim the voices of underrepresented and/or silenced groups.

WGSS 295D - Democracy Works: People, Power and Government
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Jo Comerford

This is an incredible and rare opportunity. Jo Comerford is the Massachusetts State Senator from Hampshire, Franklin, and Worcester district (including Amherst!).

Civil Rights leader, Dolores Herta, is famous for saying, "The only way Democracy can work is if people participate." With this in mind, class participants will take a deep dive into Massachusetts state government to explore the legislative and budget processes focusing on where people - as individuals and as part of social movements - are powerful. This course will start with the basics and move on to the intersection of inside and outside strategy and organizing.

WGSS 340 – Critical Prison Studies
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Laura Ciolkowski

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 393G – Global Mommy Wars
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Miliann Kang

How has motherhood become a highly contested site for racial politics? How are mothers pitted against each other in ways that undermine 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. These old mommy wars have not gone away, but they have been sutured to newly virulent debates focused on racialized discourses regarding tiger mothers, "anchor babies," birthright citizenship and family separations at the border. This course will focus on constructions of Asian American motherhood while situating these in comparison to scholarship and debates regarding Black, Latinx, Native and Indigenous and White mothers and motherhood. It will draw on a wide range of materials, including feminist and ethnic studies scholarship, public debates, policy initiatives, media representation, and creative writing to explore how race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, nation and migration have shaped current and historical constructions of motherhood. This course will count towards the theory requirement for WGSS majors.

WGSS 395N/ANTHRO 395N – Gender, Nation and Body Politics
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Amanda Johnson

In this course, we will examine feminist theorizations, critiques, and accounts of gender and sexuality in the context of nation-state formations, colonization, globalization, and migration. We will interrogate how the gendered body becomes a target of violence, regulation, and objectification, but also functions as a site of resistance. We will also examine how the body serves as a marker nation and identity, and a locus generating knowledge, both scientific and experiential. Some issues we will cover include racialization, labor, citizenship, heteronormativity, reproduction, schooling, and incarceration, as well as the role of anthropology and ethnography in both understanding and enacting political engagements with these issues.

WGSS 491J/691J - Just Economies?
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Kiran Asher

The modern economy is shaped by uneven capitalist development and premised on exploiting colonialized/raced, gendered, sexualized and non-human Others. That is, racial, sexual and environmental violence are at the heart of social relations of production and reproduction, but they are also invisibilized or undervalued under capitalism. Thus, critical analyses of the systemic inequities engendered by colonial/racial capitalism, and imagining just economies is fundamental to abolition and climate justice. A wide range of intellectuals and activists—feminists, post-colonial, transnational, black, queer, decolonial, indigenous and others—are engaged in these tasks. We will engage in close reading of some of their works, particularly the writings of Silvia Federici, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Cindi Katz, Ruthie Gilmore, Dean Spade, Donna Haraway, and Gayatri Spivak.
This an advanced level interdisciplinary seminar open to undergraduates and graduates. Everyone learns at their level and pace but should have a solid working knowledge (through course work or self-study) of core concepts of political economy of development, feminism, and social theory. This course counts towards the theory requirement for WGSS majors.

WGSS 491E/691E and /ANTHRO 491E – Queer Ethnographies
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Svati Shah

Ethnography, the signal methodology of anthropology, is now a widespread research method, taken up by scholars across disciplines seeking to understand social processes in everyday life. Queer scholars in the United States pioneered the use of ethnographic methods within the US, arguing that queer communities constituted 'subcultures' that should be studied in their own right. This course begins with these earlier works, from the 1970s and 1980s, and will quickly move to a survey of contemporary queer ethnographic work. The course will end with a consideration of ethnographic film that addresses the everyday lives of LGBTQI people and movements from around the world. Students will come away from the course with a better understanding of the theoretical critiques that ethnography makes available for scholars of sexuality and gender, and of the history of ethnography within anthropology. This course will count towards the theory requirement for WGSS majors.

WGSS 494TI – Unthinking the Transnational
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Kirsten Leng

This course is about the framework of transnational women's and gendered activisms and scholarship. We will survey the field of transnational feminist research and praxis, locating structures of power, practices of resistance, and the geographies of development at work in a range of theories and social movements. The course will not only examine the implementation of feminist politics and projects that have sought to ensure some measurable social, cultural, and economic changes, but also explore the ways conceptions of the `global' and `transnational' have informed these efforts. Students will have the opportunity to assess which of these practices can be applicable, transferable, and/or travel on a global scale. We will focus not only on the agency of individuals, but also on the impact on people's lives and their communities as they adopt strategies to improve material, social, cultural, and political conditions of their lives. Satisfies the Integrative Experience for BA-WoSt majors.

WGSS 491J/691J - Just Economies?
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Kiran Asher

The modern economy is shaped by uneven capitalist development and premised on exploiting colonialized/raced, gendered, sexualized and non-human Others. That is, racial, sexual and environmental violence are at the heart of social relations of production and reproduction, but they are also invisibilized or undervalued under capitalism. Thus, critical analyses of the systemic inequities engendered by colonial/racial capitalism, and imagining just economies is fundamental to abolition and climate justice. A wide range of intellectuals and activists—feminists, post-colonial, transnational, black, queer, decolonial, indigenous and others—are engaged in these tasks. We will engage in close reading of some of their works, particularly the writings of Silvia Federici, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Cindi Katz, Ruthie Gilmore, Dean Spade, Donna Haraway, and Gayatri Spivak. This an advanced level interdisciplinary seminar open to undergraduates and graduates. Everyone learns at their level and pace but should have a solid working knowledge (through course work or self-study) of core concepts of political economy of development, feminism, and social theory.
This course fulfills the theory requirement for students accepted into the Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies.

WGSS 692*/AFROAM 692T - Gender and Power in the Atlantic World
Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Anne Kerth

This course examines the history of the Atlantic World through a gendered lens, exploring the ways in which European conquest and colonization of the Americas and the enslavement of millions of Africans and indigenous Americans gave rise to modern gender categories and hierarchies. In this course, students will engage with both foundational and more recent scholarly works on the subject, encountering a broad temporal and geographical range. Over the course of the semester, they will come to understand the ways in which the formation and reformation of gendered ideologies and identities lay at the center of Atlantic colonial and imperial projects, racial slavery, and nascent Western capitalism.

WGSS 693*/AFROAM 693C - The History of Love, Sex, and Marriage in Black America
Thursday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Traci Parker

Why aren't more African Americans married? Are African American women doomed to stay single? Is the two-parent black household a myth? These are some of the questions frequently asked about contemporary black relationships. This graduate course examines the history of African American love, sex, and marriage. Spanning slavery to present, this course investigates the political, economic, and social drivers that have shaped black love and family. It will pay special attention to the relationship between African American romantic and sexual encounters -heterosexual and queer - and mid-twentieth century social movements (e.g. Civil Rights and Black Power Movements). This course also will explore miscegenation; rape and sexual violence; free love and the sexual revolution; reproduction, childrearing, and family; pornography and sex work; marriage reform and welfare rights; and disease and medicine.

WGSS 695E - Theorizing Eros
Thursday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Angie Willey

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

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

This course was formerly titled: WGSS 691B - Issues in Feminist Research. This is a required course for students enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies. Those students will be given priority enrollment. Certificate students can contact @email if the class is full and they need to take the course.

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

UMASS

UMass Courses Outside of WGSS (Departmental)

AFROAM 392C – Race, Sexuality and the Law in Early America
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Anne Kerth

AFROAM 330 – Songbirds, Blueswomen, Soulwomen
Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
A Yemisi Jimoh

The focus for this course is the cultural, political, and social issues found in the music and history of African American women performers. The primary emphasis in the course will be on African American women in Jazz, Blues, and Soul/R&B, but students also will study African American women composers as well as Spiritual-Gospel and Opera performers.

AFROAM 591E – Black Feminist and Queer Insurgencies
Tuesday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Brit Rusert

This course traces black feminist and queer theories of militancy, insurgency, and revolutionary planning from Harriet Tubman to the present day. Untethering our perspective from the domain of normative masculinities, we will instead focus on forms of organization, revolt, and defensiveness (Nash) that are equally attuned to care, healing, and the transformative force of pleasure and desire (Hartman; Musser). We will study how people take care of each other in the face of state violence and the neoliberal state’s ongoing divestment from public infrastructure and services by exploring histories and experiments in mutual aid, community and armed defense, femme expertise and care webs (Piepzna-Samarasinha), revolutionary mothering (Gumbs, Martens, Williams), radical separatism and communal living, critical solidarities, sex radicalism, and abolition as a form of both radical imagination and social transformation. We will seek to map an alternative genealogy of black revolutionary theory through the history of black feminist and queer militancy. Throughout, we will be invested in the long-term work of black study (Moten and Harney) and utopian planning at the same time as we investigate practical tactics and strategies that approach white supremacy as a racial and gendered act of war that requires immediate mobilization and response.

ANTHRO 395N/WGSS 395N – Gender, Nation & Body Politics
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Amanda Johnson

COMM 394EI – Performance and the Politics of Race
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Kimberlee Perez

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

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

This course focuses on the economics of women, minorities and work in the labor market and the household. Using economic theory along with empirical investigation, we will study issues such as employment decisions, earnings determination, occupational choice, discrimination, and family formation. Emphasis will be placed on public policies related to the labor market experiences of women and minorities.

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature, and Culture
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m. - Caroline Heafey
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:15-12:05 p.m. – Yunah Kae
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:15-12:05 p.m. – John Yargo
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m. – Angela Rain Kim

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)

FRENCH 409 – Women in Modern French Society
Friday 12:20-1:10 p.m.
Eva Valenta

Course taught in French. Portraits of and by women in modern French society, drawing on literary and cultural texts mainly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Authors include Colette, De Beauvoir, Duras, Ernaux, and others. This course fulfills either the nineteenth or twentieth-century literature distribution requirement. Requirements: Active participation in class discussion; two short papers; two hour exams. Prerequisites: French 384

HISTORY 265 – US LGBT and Queer History
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
TBD

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, Thursday 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.

HISTORY 492W – Topics in US Women and Gender History
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Jennifer Fronc

This course will focus on selected topics in U.S. women's and gender history from 1877 to the present. In addition to analyzing women's experiences, we will also consider how gender has been mediated by class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Other topics will include women's political participation and social activism; reproduction, race, and eugenics; immigration and migration; shifting conceptions of gender and sexuality; and women's changing labor force participation.

HONORS 499DN – Women Organize for a Better World, Second Semester
Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Graciela Monteagudo

Throughout the planet, women create common spaces for a better world in response to threats to their livelihood. This course uses the concept ?woman? to refer to bodies feminized by power, to include both transgender and cis women. Students will analyze the axis of oppression and resistance that sit at the core of women?s experiences. Focusing on gender, sexuality, the economy, and ethnic/racial oppression will help students zero on the structural aspect of women’s organizing. Students will prepare to write their thesis by learning about a wide range of movements, such as movements against gender violence, against racism, for access to full reproductive rights, for living wages, and to de-naturalize domestic work’s hidden unpaid labor. HONORS 499DN is designed to encourage and support students as they focus on writing a 40-60 page-long thesis on a topic of their choice.

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)

LEGAL 397FS/POLISCI 394FI – Family and the State
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Diane Curtis

Why and how is the state involved in the definition of families, access to marriage, and intervention on behalf of children? This course will address these and other questions as we explore the ways in which the legal boundaries and connections between government and family have evolved over the last century in the United States. Issues of gender, race, class and sexual orientation will naturally play a significant role in these explorations.

POLISCI 291U – UMass Women into Leadership
Friday 12:20-1:10 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 392AP – Activism, Participation, and Protest
Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Sonia Alvarez

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

PORTUG 309 – Brazilian Women
Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Tal Goldfajn

Mixing biography, literary criticism and cultural history this course will explore women's experience through Brazilian history as well as introduce the achievements and contributions of women to the cultural and intellectual history of Brazil. Moreover we will discuss not only what Brazilian women have achieved but also how fundamental issues in Brazilian history have hinged on specific notions of gender. From Anita Garibaldi to Chiquinha Gonzaga and Nise da Silveira among others, the present course will examine the role of women in Brazilian history and culture, discuss the ways in which women have shaped Brazil's past and present, and analyze some of the ideas and experiences of women in Brazil. (Gen. Ed. SB)

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.

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 490J – Reproductive Justice
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Susan Shaw

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.

SOCIOL 106 – Race, Gender, Class & Ethnicity
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
TBD

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 & Society
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Amy Schalet

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)

SPORTMGT 597W – Women in Business
Monday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Nicole Melton

The purpose of this one-credit course is to provide students with a broad introduction to the experiences, barriers, opportunities, and networking for women in sport business. Students will examine a range of topics including but not limited to women in leadership, sexism and gender underrepresentation, networking, personal branding, managing up, negotiating, and other topics uniquely relevant to women working in sport business. Upon completion of this course, students should understand how the various dimensions of the gendered workplace influences the experiences of women in sport. Open to junior and senior SPORTMGT majors and MS-SPORTMGT and MBA/MS graduate students.Enrollment requirement for 1st yr. MBA/MS students. Please contact Sport Management Graduate Program Director for permission to register.

THEATER 334 – Contemporary Repertory: Women
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Regina Kaufmann

Explores how women voice themselves and their concerns through theatre/performance. Students will read texts and see performances by and about women and will examine them within their sociopolitical/historical contexts.

UMass Courses Outside of WGSS (Component)

For component courses, majors and minors must focus their work on WGSS topics in order for these courses to count. Note that 100-level courses only count towards the minor.

AFROAM 345 – Southern Literature
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Yelana Sims

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 394 – African American Anthropology
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Amanda Johnson

This course will introduce students to both the study of African-diasporic peoples in the Americas by anthropologists, as well as the practice of anthropology by African American scholars. We will contextualize African American anthropologies within the historical developments, social movements, cultural and artistic production, and political philosophies that have shaped African American communities. By critically engaging with seminal texts and writings, we will consider contradictions, challenges, critiques, and contributions present within African American Anthropology. This course will also work to de-marginalize gender, sexuality, and class in conceptions of race and Blackness, attending to the complexity and nuance in interpretations and analyses of African American culture and communities.

ANTHRO 394AI – Europe After the Wall
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Julie Hemment

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a seismic event that took the world by storm. It gave rise to dizzy optimism and hope for a new, post-ideological age and greater global unity, within and beyond Europe. Twenty years on, these hopes have not been realized. Cold War hostilities are alive and well and although the EU has expanded, Europe is, arguably, more divided than ever. This course explores the implications of the Wall and its passing for Europe, focusing on anthropological accounts of the (former) East bloc. The course is divided into three main parts: Europe behind the Iron Curtain (the cultural logics of state socialism); What Came Next? (the fall of the wall, international interventions to `democratize’ post-socialist space); and a section that explores the post-socialist present. During this last bloc, we will explore themes of gender and generation, nostalgia and the politics of history, and the return of the state. As we go, we’ll be reading some of the most exciting new ethnographies of the region, grounded accounts that explore the transformations in social and cultural logics, power relations and practices that accompanied political and economic change. Through a mixture of group work, collaboratively designed projects and reflection papers, assignments are specifically tailored to enable you to bring the threads of your Gen Ed experience together as you consider the specific topics of the Cold War, state socialism and the global implications of its passing. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-Anth majors.

CHINESE 241 – Contemporary Chinese Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 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.

COMM 284/FILM-ST 284 – Possible Futures: Science Fiction in Global Cinema
Friday 10:10-1:10 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. (Gen. Ed. SB, DG)

COMM 338 – Children, Teens and Media
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Erica Sharrer

In this seminar, we will explore the role of media (television, Internet, video games, mobile media, film, etc.) in shaping the lives of children and teens. We will consider how much time children devote to various media, what they think about what they encounter through media, and the implications of media for children's lives. We will draw on social science research to examine a wide range of topics, including: depictions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in ads, programming, and other media forms; the role of media in the development of adolescent identity; media uses and effects in the realms of educational TV and apps, advertising and consumer culture, violence, and sex; and the possibilities of media literacy, parental rules and dialogue, and public policies to shape children's interactions with media.

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.

COMP-LIT 231 – Comedy
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m. - Kathryn Lachman
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m. – Rafael Freire

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 391SF – International Science Fiction Cinema
Tuesday 7:00-10:00 p.m.
Discussions Thursday and Friday
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.

ECON 397MI – City, Industry, and Labor in Colonial Ind, 1750-1950
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Priyanka Srivastava

Focusing on Calcutta (present day Kolkata) and Bombay (present day Mumbai), the two most important port cities and industrial centers of British India, this course examines how trade and industrialization shaped urban society and politics in colonial India. We will explore themes that include the following: colonial trade, the gendered history of colonial labor migration, beginning of factory industries, the emergence of a class of industrial entrepreneurs and wage earners, the built environment of colonial cities, industrial housing, the development of labor unions and their interactions with the anti-imperialist nationalist politics.

EDUC 590Z – Critical Pedagogy for Media Literacy
Tuesday 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.

FILM-ST 344/JUDAIC 344/MIDEAST 344 – Film and Society in Israel
Wednesday 4:00-6:45 p.m.
Olga Gershenson

This course uses film to discuss Israeli society. Topics include: foundation of Israel, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Holocaust survivors, religion, gender, and interethnic relations. All film showings are with English subtitles. (Gen. Ed. AT, DG)

GERMAN 270 – From the Grimms to Disney
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Sara Jackson

This course focuses on selected fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (Hansel & Gretel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Iron Hans) and Hans Christian Andersen (Little Sea Maid, The Red Shoes), locating them in the 19th-century German or Danish culture of their origins and then examining how they became transformed into perennial favorites of U.S. popular culture through their adaptations by Disney (feature animation films), Broadway (musicals), or bestselling self-help books (Iron John, Women Who Run With the Wolves). As a point of comparison, this course will also introduce popular fairy-tale films of the former East Germany (GDR) from the UMass DEFA archives & library, which present the same stories as popular fare in a Cold War communinist cultural context. Conducted in English. (Gen. Ed. AL).

HISTORY 154 – Social Change in the 1960s
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Andrew Grim

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) Face to face class – first years only.

HISTORY 290A – African American History from Africa to the Civil War
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Cameesha Scruggs

This 4-credit General Education course introduces students to the study of African American History. It begins with a discussion of the early twentieth-century Black intellectuals who pioneered the field of African American History and how the field has grown and changed over the past century. The course then charts the history of the African and African American experience, mainly in North America/United States from the late 17th Century through the end of the US Civil War. The course material includes lectures and readings that highlight other geographic locations and major events in the African Diaspora, such as the Haitian Revolution, and considers the connections to people and events in the United States. Topics covered in this course include: the Middle Passage; African American culture, religion, and art; slavery and the US Constitution and US law; free Black communities in antebellum US; southern slavery and the domestic slave trade; slave resistance and rebellion; Black intellectual and literary traditions; Black women's and men's political activism; colonization and emigration movements; Black soldiers and civilians in the Civil War; emancipation and the end of slavery in the United States. (Gen.Ed. HS, DU)

HISTORY 397RR – 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)

HONORS 499DJ – Readings and Research in Disability, Second Semester
Monday, Wednesday, Friday
Ashley Woodman

In this course, students will explore disability through theory and research. First, students will be introduced to the definition and meaning of disability. Disability is a complex identity that can be viewed from a variety of social, cultural, historical, legal and political perspectives. Students will be introduced to conceptualizations of disability, models of disability, and historical perspectives as well as the intersection of disability with other social identities such as gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity. Students will review and discuss the challenges of conducting research with people with disabilities. Students will read and critique contemporary research involving people with disabilities as well as research on perceptions of disability among people with and without disabilities. Throughout the course, students will be scaffolded to design and implement an independent research project related to disability. Students are encouraged to use existing, publicly available data, but may also collect their own data within the UMass or broader community. Students will be advised on an individual basis to design a research project that is ethical, realistic given time and resource constraints, and a novel contribution to the field.

LEGAL 394AI – Law and Social Activism
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 12:20-1:10 p.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 effectve 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.

LEGAL 397EQ – Law and Inequality
Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Tania DoCarmo

This course examines the persistence of inequality based on race, class, gender and/or citizenship as it relates to law, both in the U.S. and internationally. We will examine the legal system from a critical perspective, incorporating material from law, history, sociology, and other disciplines. We will map some of the ways legal regimes and concepts contribute to the production, recognition and maintenance of power hierarchies, exploring and discussing questions such: as how and why the legal system has historically favored the rich and discriminated against the poor, nonwhites, women and immigrants; as well as the extent to which the legal system can be used to achieve social change.

PUBHLTH 389 – Health Inequities
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:15-12:05
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Jya Plavin

While the health and wellbeing of the nation has improved overall, racial, ethnic, gender and sexuality disparities in morbidity and mortality persist. To successfully address growing disparities, it is important to understand social determinants of health and translate current knowledge into specific strategies to undo health inequalities. This course will explore social justice as a philosophical underpinning of public health and will consider the etiology of disease rooted in social conditions. It aims to strengthen critical thinking, self-discovery, and knowledge of ways in which socioeconomic, political, and cultural systems structure health outcomes. (Gen. Ed. SB, DU)

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

This is an introductory course to radical social theory. Our focus is the history of social thought in the West, and the decolonial 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 build a better world. As a General Education course, our goal is for students to have the opportunity to discuss key societal issues through a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, history, economics, Black, Latinx, and gender and sexuality studies. Through analysis of readings and films, we will explore the connection between cultural processes and power in the West and the processes of colonization of Black and Indigenous People of Color on a global scale and across time and space.

STPEC 320 – Writing for Critical Consciousness
Monday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Graciela Monteagudo

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 research paper with a theme of your choosing. I 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; attendance is crucial.

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

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

STPEC Core Seminar II 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. Theories addressed include Autonomist Marxism, poststructuralism, and decolonial theory. We will research the connection between race, class, gender, sexuality, able-bodyness 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. This allows for deep engagement with a topic and to practice applying the critical methodological and theoretical tools developed through the STPEC curriculum.

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 691E/491E and /ANTHRO 491E – Queer Ethnographies
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Svati Shah

Ethnography, the signal methodology of anthropology, is now a widespread research method, taken up by scholars across disciplines seeking to understand social processes in everyday life. Queer scholars in the United States pioneered the use of ethnographic methods within the US, arguing that queer communities constituted 'subcultures' that should be studied in their own right. This course begins with these earlier works, from the 1970s and 1980s, and will quickly move to a survey of contemporary queer ethnographic work. The course will end with a consideration of ethnographic film that addresses the everyday lives of LGBTQI people and movements from around the world. Students will come away from the course with a better understanding of the theoretical critiques that ethnography makes available for scholars of sexuality and gender, and of the history of ethnography within anthropology. This class counts towards the theory requirement for graduate students enrolled in the Certificate for Feminist Studies.

WGSS 491J/691J - Just Economies?
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Kiran Asher

The modern economy is shaped by uneven capitalist development and premised on exploiting colonialized/raced, gendered, sexualized and non-human Others. That is, racial, sexual and environmental violence are at the heart of social relations of production and reproduction, but they are also invisibilized or undervalued under capitalism. Thus, critical analyses of the systemic inequities engendered by colonial/racial capitalism, and imagining just economies is fundamental to abolition and climate justice. A wide range of intellectuals and activists—feminists, post-colonial, transnational, black, queer, decolonial, indigenous and others—are engaged in these tasks. We will engage in close reading of some of their works, particularly the writings of Silvia Federici, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Cindi Katz, Ruthie Gilmore, Dean Spade, Donna Haraway, and Gayatri Spivak. This an advanced level interdisciplinary seminar open to undergraduates and graduates. Everyone learns at their level and pace but should have a solid working knowledge (through course work or self-study) of core concepts of political economy of development, feminism, and social theory.
This course fulfills the theory requirement for students accepted into the Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies.

WGSS 692*/AFROAM 692T - Gender and Power in the Atlantic World
Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Anne Kerth

WGSS 693*/AFROAM 693C - The History of Love, Sex, and Marriage in Black America
Thursday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Traci Parker

WGSS 695E - Theorizing Eros
Thursday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Angie Willey

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

AFROAM 591E – Black Feminist and Queer Insurgencies
Tuesday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Brit Rusert

This course traces black feminist and queer theories of militancy, insurgency, and revolutionary planning from Harriet Tubman to the present day. Untethering our perspective from the domain of normative masculinities, we will instead focus on forms of organization, revolt, and defensiveness (Nash) that are equally attuned to care, healing, and the transformative force of pleasure and desire (Hartman; Musser). We will study how people take care of each other in the face of state violence and the neoliberal state?s ongoing divestment from public infrastructure and services by exploring histories and experiments in mutual aid, community and armed defense, femme expertise and care webs (Piepzna-Samarasinha), revolutionary mothering (Gumbs, Martens, Williams), radical separatism and communal living, critical solidarities, sex radicalism, and abolition as a form of both radical imagination and social transformation. We will seek to map an alternative genealogy of black revolutionary theory through the history of black feminist and queer militancy. Throughout, we will be invested in the long-term work of black study (Moten and Harney) and utopian planning at the same time as we investigate practical tactics and strategies that approach white supremacy as a racial and gendered act of war that requires immediate mobilization and response.

AFROAM 692T – Gender and Power in the Atlantic World
Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Anne Kerth

AFROAM 693C – The History of Love, Sex, and Marriage in Black America
Thursday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Traci Parker

EDUC 621B – Race, Class, and Gender in Higher Education
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
TBD

The goal of this course is to explore the multiple sociocultural factors that influence the success of students and ask fundamental questions about the relationship between higher education and society. Why do some students learn more and "get further ahead" than others? Why do some students get more involved in co-curricular activities than others? What factors shape how institutions are run and organized, who attends four-year vs. two-year institutions, and what curricular materials are taught?

UWW Winter / Spring

UWW WINTER/SPRING

WGSS Majors and Minors must focus their papers or projects on WGSS topics to count courses listed as "component." 100-level courses only count toward the minor. All other courses listed 200-level and above automatically count. Registration

WGSS 286 – History of Sexuality and Race in the U.S.
Joy Hayward-Jansen

CLASSICS 335 – Women in Antiquity
Lauren Caldwell

~~Lives, roles, contributions, and status of women in Greek and Roman societies, as reflected in classical literature and the archaeological record.~~

COMM 288 – 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).

COMM 287 – Advertising as Social Communication
Sut Jhally
component

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.

COMM 394EI – Performance and the Politics of Race
Kimberlee Perez

EDUC 210 – Social Diversity in Education
Warren Blumenthal
component

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)

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture
Sharanya Sridhar

FRENCHST 280 – Love and Sex in French Culture
Patrick Mensah
component

Is love a French invention? How do we explore, through literature, the substance behind the stereotypical association of love, romance, and sexual pleasure with French culture? Do sex, passion, and love always unite in the pursuit of emotional fulfillment in human relations, according to this literature? What affiliations does this literature interweave between such relations of love, requited or unrequited, and pleasure, enjoyment, freedom, self-empowerment, on the one hand, and on the other hand, suffering, jealousy, crime, violence, negativity, notions of perversion, morbidity, and even death? How are problems of gender roles and human sexuality?i.e. Hetero-, bi-, homo- and other forms of sexuality--approached in this literature? What connections or conflicts are revealed in this literature between human love relationships and the social norms and conventions within which they occur, as well as the forms of political governance that have been practiced in France over the centuries?

FRENCHST 383 – African Film
Patrick Mensah
Component

This course offers an introduction to African film as an aesthetic and cultural practice. Students should expect to be familiarized with the key ideas and objectives that have inspired and driven that practice since the early 1960s, and be furnished with the technical tools and methodological skills that would permit them to understand, analyze, and think critically about the artistic and thematic aspects of the films that are screened. They should also expect the course to provide them with a critical peek into several cardinal issues of social and cultural relevance in contemporary Africa and its history. Issues of interest typically include, the nationstate and its declining status, imperatives of decolonization, economic dependency and structural adjustment programs, orality and changing traditional cultures, diasporic migrations, urbanization and its problems, gender relations, civil wars, child soldiers, gangs, and related themes. Filmmakers studied include, but are not limited to, Abderrahmane Sissako, Gillo Pontecorvo, Ousmane Sembene, Raoul Peck, Jean-Marie Teno, Dani Kouyate, Mweze Ngangura, Gavin Hood, Neill Blomkamp, Moufida Tlatli, Djibril Diop Mambety (please note that this list is subject to change, and shall be updated as future changes are made). The course is conducted in English, and requires no prior knowledge of the field. All films are streamed to your computer from the UMass library on demand. Required readings are provided online, and no book purchases are necessary. (Gen.Ed. AT, DG)

HISTORY 154 – Social Change in the 1960s
Julia Sandy-Bailey
component

HISTORY 264 – History of Health Care and Medicine in the U.S.
Emily Hamilton
component

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)

LEGAL 397R – Gender, Law, and Politics
Lisa Solowiej

This course explores legal constructions of gender by introducing case law, federal legislation, news stories, and scholarly essays concerning sexual inequality in the United States. Special attention will be paid to grassroots movements, particularly those surrounding suffrage, reproduction, sexual activity, and marriage. We will explore how the legal system, through regulation, has changed gender relations for both women and men concerning marriage, divorce, work, and family. We will also consider how these struggles for equality have varied across race, religion, sexual identity, and class with particular attention to feminist critiques of economic inequality.

SOCIOL 222 – The Family
Whitney Russell
component

First part: historical transformations in family life (relationships between husbands and wives, position and treatment of children, importance of kinship ties); second part: the contemporary family through life course (choice of a mate, relations in marriage, parenthood, breakup of the family unit). (Gen.Ed. SB, DU)

SOCIOL 248 – Conformity and Deviance
Janice Irvine
component

This course examines the social processes of rule-making and rule-breaking, and how categories of "normal" and "deviance" change historically. We examine different theories of conformity and deviance, using topics such as sexuality and politics.

SOCIOL 287 – Sexuality and Society
Skylar Davidson

SOCIOL 297D – Crime, Race, and Gender
TBD

This course examines the influence of gendered race relations on crime and justice. That is, we address the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, age, and geographic region. We also challenge common perceptions about the criminal justice system. We cover victimization and criminal behavior patterns, theoretical explanations, and the dynamics of differential involvement of specific groups in the criminal justice system. Designed to be a critical thinking course, the main focus will be to assess each of the main topics intensely and thoughtfully.

SMITH COLLEGE INTERSESSION
January 4 – February 11

AFR 249 – Black Women Writers
M, T, W, Th, F 1:40-2:55 p.m.
Daphne Lamothe

How does gender matter in a black context? That is the question we will ask and attempt to answer through an examination of works by such authors as Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Nella Larsen, Zora Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange and Alice Walker.

FRN 230 – Contemporary Chinese Women’s Writing
M, T, W, Th 10:10-12:10 p.m.
Dawn Fulton

France is home to the largest overseas Chinese community in Western Europe. This course looks at how Francophone women writers and artists of Chinese origin critique and celebrate French culture in their work. Focusing on contemporary fiction, film, and graphic art, we consider the role of canonical French literature during the Cultural Revolution, portrayals of Sinophone cultures in France, and the relationship between language and stereotype. Through the lens of gendered and multigenerational immigration narratives, we also study such topics as translation, food, sexuality, and exile.

HST 264/LAS 264 – Women and Revolutions
Tuesday 9:20-12:10 p.m./Tuesday, Thursday 1:40-2:55 p.m./Thursday 10:55-12:10
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 268 – Decolonizing U.S. Women’s History 1848-present
Tuesday, Thursday 1:40-4:30 p.m./Thursday 10:55-12:10 p.m.
Jennifer Guglielmo

Survey of women’s and gender history with women of color, working-class women and immigrant women at the center and with a focus on race, class and sexuality. This course is guided by the cultural and theoretical work of women of color feminists to decolonize knowledge, history, and the world. Topics include labor, racial formation, colonialism, imperialism, im/migration, popular culture, citizenship, education, medicine, war, consumerism, feminism, queer cultures, capitalism and neoliberalism. Emphasis on discussion and analysis of original documents.

HST 286 - Recent Historiographic Debates in the History of Gender and Sexuality
Tuesday, Thursday 7:05-10:00 p.m./Thursday 3:15-4:30 p.m.
Darcy 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.

SOC 236 – Beyond Borders: The New Global Political Economy
Monday, Wednesday 1:40-4:30 p.m./Tuesday 1:40-3:40 p.m.
Payal Banerjee

This course introduces students to the basic concepts and theories in global political economy. It covers the history of economic restructuring, global division of labor, development, North-South state relations, and modes of resistance from a transnational and feminist perspective. Issues central to migration, borders and security, health, and the environment are central to the course.

THE 202 – Sculpting Women’s Bodies: 1915-1970
Monday, Wednesday 9:30-12:00
Catherine Smith

The study of seven eras of women’s dress through the construction techniques of each era. What are the options to change shape and style in clothing? How did each era use these to make distinct shapes, which reflect the context of the women’s lives?

SPRING 2021 UWW COURSES

WGSS 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Adina Giannelli

COMM 271 – Humor in Society
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)

COMM 394EI – Performance and the Politics of Race
Kimberlee Perez

EDUC 210 – Social Diversity in Education
Warren Blumenfeld
component

EDUC 595G – LGTBQ Issues in Education
Warren Blumenfeld

How can we develop language, attitudes, and practices that validate and support all students along the spectrums of gender expressions, identities, and sexualities? How are issues related to gender and sexuality diversity connected to privilege, power, and oppression? Participating in this online course will allow you to consider how we can think ethically, critically, and in socially just ways about LGBTQ issues in education and how to cultivate affirming and supportive learning environments for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) students. Drawing on work from the fields of anti-oppression education, critical pedagogy, and queer theory, we will examine how heteronormativity, heterosexism, and genderism/transgender oppression play out in educational contexts and explore ways to promote gender and sexuality equity within schools. We will discuss the complexities of sex, gender, and sexuality, and address contemporary issues facing educators who want to implement LGBTQ curriculum. You will be able to demonstrate your learning by creating an applied project on a topic of your choice. This course is open to any student interested in this topic. No pre-requisites.

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture
Kate Perillo

PUBHLTH 372 – Maternal and Child Health in the Developing World
Kelsey Jordan

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

Five Colleges

Amherst

SWAG 200 – Feminist Theory
Monday, Wednesday 12:30-1:50 p.m.
Jennifer 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 206/ARHA 284/EUST 284 – Women and Art in Early Modern Europe
Tuesday, Thursday 1:30-2:50 p.m.
Nicola Courtright

This introductory discussion-based course will examine how prevailing ideas about women and gender shaped visual imagery in Europe from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and how these images, in turn, presented surprisingly varied pictures of women and their domains. Artists vividly expressed the paradoxical power that women possessed even more than language could. Both admired and feared in their societies, aristocrats, queens, mistresses, saints, witches, heroines, and housewives were all depicted in art in elevated and debased manners, sometimes as eroticized subjects and at other times as powerful, idealized actors—occasionally both at the same time. We will analyze the art and material goods that women paid for and what it communicated about them; women’s homes and the objects they held; the portrayal of women from merchant societies in Italian city-states to aristocratic women in India, of female saints, heroes and rulers, including Elizabeth I of England and Maria de' Medici of France; and the troubling imagery of rape. These different types of art raise questions about biological theories about women; feminine ideals of beauty; what marriage meant in different societies; the relationship between the exercise of political power and gender; women’s expression of transcendent spirituality; and what the portrayal of indigenous and enslaved women in Dutch and Spanish colonies conveyed about race.

SWAG 231/ANTH 232 – Contested Bodies: Race, Gender, Embodiment in Biomedicine
Tuesday, Thursday 10:10-11:30 a.m.
Jennifer Hamilton

Using primary and secondary materials as well as documentaries and feature films, this course explores conceptualizations and representations of race and sex in health and medicine. We begin by looking at the histories of race and sex in Western science. We will examine gendered and racialized pathologies, such as hysteria and drapetomania, and consider how scientific thought intersects with larger political and economic movements. We will then move into a discussion of the uses of race and sex in contemporary biomedicine. Why is the pharmaceutical industry developing drugs geared toward different racial groups? How have advances in reproductive technologies challenged or reinforced our understandings of our bodies? Why and how is sexuality a key site of scientific debate? Finally, how has the genomic age reshaped (or reinforced) our understandings of race, sex, and sexuality?

SWAG 240/ARCH 240/ARHA 240 – Women in Architecture
Tuesday, Thursday 10:10-11:30 a.m.
Margaret Vickery

This course begins with an examination of gendered, architectural spaces and how and why they were structured for women in the 19th century in both Britain and America. Looking at primary and secondary sources, students will gain insight into societal norms and how they conditioned architecture generally associated with women, such as houses, asylums, and early women’s colleges. This study will serve as a platform from which to understand the pressures upon women and the pioneers who rejected such norms and pursued architecture as a profession. The latter half of the course will look at the work of early women architects, the hurdles they faced and the examples they set. The course will conclude with a critical examination of women architects practicing today and how they navigate the profession. It is open to non-majors and will introduce interested students to issues surrounding the architectural canon, equity, and the history of gendered spaces in architecture. Depending on enrollment, this course will be taught in person or as a hybrid course.

SWAG 247/HIST 245 – U.S Carceral Culture
Monday, Wednesday 2:10-3:30 p.m.
Jen Manion

An overview of punishment from the Enlightenment to modern times. Topics include theories of criminality; birth of the penitentiary; growth of carceral culture; role of reform movements; relationship between slavery, abolition, and punishment; rise of criminology, eugenics, and sexology; persistence of poverty among carceral subjects; and the emergence of mass incarceration. Primary sources for consideration include newspaper articles, reform and abolition organizational records, official prison reports, and legal and sociological papers. Secondary readings will be primarily historical with some critical theories of difference and power including critical race theory, feminist theories of intersectionality, queer theory, and contemporary critical prison studies.

SWAG 263 – Trans Theories of Race
Tuesday, Thursday 10:10-11:30 a.m.
Stephen Dillon

The slogan "black trans lives matter" has circulated widely in the last half-decade to describe the historical erasure and violence experienced by transgender people of color. What historical intersections between gender and race gave rise to this slogan? How can we think of race as inseparable for trans politics and transgender studies? This course examines the history of the political, economic, and epistemological connections between race and transgender politics. Focusing on the United States, we will examine how normative conceptions of gender and sexuality emerged out of histories of settler-colonization, enslavement, racial science, and racist law. With a firm historical grounding, we will then explore contemporary issues such as immigrant detention, labor politics, bathroom bills, media representation, transgender rights and resistance, hormones, and much more. Students are expected to have some familiarity with theories and histories of race, gender, and sexuality. Students should also be prepared to engage a variety of written texts ranging from poetry, historical documents, and memoir to dense, difficult theoretical essays.

SWAG 276/RELI 276 – Women and Religion in Greece and Rome
Tuesday, Thursday 3:50-5:10 p.m.
Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos

Girls playing the bear. Sacred virgins buried alive. Women starving themselves for God. How does each of these occurrences fit within the religious experiences of ancient women? What, if anything, can they tell us about women’s lives? This course explores these and related questions by considering the place of women within the religious frameworks of the Mediterranean basin from approximately 500 B.C.E. to 600 C.E. We will examine evidence for women’s religious practices from literary, material, and legal sources, as well as the intersection of religious polemic and discourses about gender. We will also discuss the challenges of reconstructing women’s lives and practices. To do this, we will utilize insights from various disciplines, including religious studies, sociology, gender studies, history, archaeology, and literary studies.

SWAG 294/BLST 294/EUST 294 – Black Europe
Tuesday, Thursday 3:50-5:10 p.m.
Khary Polk

This research-based seminar considers the enduring presence of people of African descent in Europe from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment, a fact that both confounds and extends canonical theories of African diaspora and black internationalism. Focusing particularly on the histories of black people in Britain, Germany, and France, this course will take an interdisciplinary approach in its study of the African diaspora in Europe. We will examine literature, history, film, art and ephemera, as well as newly available pre-1927 audio recordings from Bear Family Records (http://www.black-europe.com/) in effort to better comprehend the materiality of the black European experience. These inquiries will enable us to comment upon the influence black people continue to have upon Europe today. Reading the central texts in the emerging field of Black European Studies—including African American expatriate memoirs, Afro-German feminist poetry, and black British cultural theory—student work will culminate in an annotated bibliography and a multimedia research project.

SWAG 307/POSC 307 – States of Extraction: Nature, Women and World Politics
Monday, Wednesday 12:30-1:50 p.m.
Manuela Picq

The global energy boom has increased states’ dependency on commodities across the world. From the Arctic to the Amazon, nation-states are putting large territories up for sale in an effort to turn nature into ‘quick cash.’ The unparalleled levels of extraction are accompanied by unparalleled violence against women, with levels of femicide on the rise in most of the world. Governments have expanded the extractive frontier, mining highlands, damming rivers, and clearing forests without prior consultation. As ecosystems are collapsing, contaminated and set ablaze, nature defenders activate social resistance to defend their territories, lifeways and nature. Many of these defenders are women, who are fighting the commodification of nature as well as their own bodies and work. We analyze the extraction of resources in nature and women as two sides of a coin, positing the fight against the climate crisis and gender equality as complementary processes. This class offers an activist approach to study political ecology with a gender lens. We analyze the politics of extraction at large: the class discusses water struggles and extractive industries like oil and agribusiness from the Philippines to Peru, Indigenous resistance on the ground and the legal advocacy pushing for the rights of nature framework. We use the work of feminist economists like Silvia Federici and analyze the leadership of women defenders like Berta Caceres to explore the ways in which extraction of nature and bodies are fundamental aspects of capitalist states. The course engages theoretical tools and comparative perspectives to grasp current debates in political ecology, gender studies, and indigenous politics to help students identify alternatives for the future. It also seeks to foster a critical inquiry to bridge lasting divides between academia and activism in local and global contexts.

SWAG 308/AMST 38/SOCI 308 – Gender, Feminisms, and Education
Tuesday, Thursday 1:30-2:50 p.m.
Kristin Luschen

The relationship between girls’ empowerment and education has been and continues to be a key feminist issue. For instance, second wave liberal feminist approaches sought to make schools more equitable through equal access to educational resources for girls and the elimination of gender discrimination. Yet the relationship between gender and schooling remains a complex site of research and policy. In this course we will examine how various feminist perspectives have defined and addressed the existence of gender inequality in American schools. We will begin by examining theories that address the production of gendered experiences within the context of U.S. schools and classrooms. Utilizing an intersectional approach, we will explore how the production of gender identities in educational contexts is shaped by the realities of our race, class, ethnic, and sexual identities. We will draw on empirical research and theory to analyze pedagogies, policies, and programs that have been developed to address gender inequality and schooling, including those that address fluid notions of gender. Students will complete the course with a complex view of feminism and an understanding of how feminist approaches have shaped the debates within gender and educational reform.

SWAG 316/ENGL 316 – Immersive Accompaniment: Reading the Bildungsroman
Monday, Wednesday 4:50-6:10 p.m.
Benigno Sanchez-Eppler

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

SWAG 317/SPAN 405/EUST 317 – Women in Early Modern Spain
Monday, Wednesday 2:10-3:30 p.m.
Catherine Infante

This course will examine the diverse and often contradictory representations of women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain as seen through the eyes of both male and female writers. This approach will allow us to inquire into how women represented themselves versus how they were understood by men. In our analysis of this topic, we will also take into consideration some scientific, legal, and moral discourses that attempted to define the nature and value of women in early modern Spain. Works by authors such as Cervantes, María de Zayas, Calderón de la Barca, and Catalina de Erauso, among others, will offer us fascinating examples and different approaches to the subject. Conducted in Spanish.

SWAG 329/BLST 377/ENGL 368 – Bad Black Women
Tuesday, Thursday 1:30-2:50 p.m.
Aneeka 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 345/HIST 345/LLAS 345 – Gender and Sexuality in Latin America
Tuesday 1:30-4:15 p.m.
Mary Hicks

Popular mythologies of Latin America have historically relied on hyper-masculine archetypes, including the conquistador, the caudillo, and the guerrillero to explain the continent’s past, culture and political development. By contrast, students in this course will be asked to bring women, gender and sexuality from the margins to the center of Latin American history. In doing so, we will reevaluate four transformative historical moments: the Spanish conquest, the wars of independence, the emergence of industrial capitalism, and the proliferation of late twentieth-century political revolutions. Through an exploration of these key periods of upheaval we will assess how social conflict was frequently mediated through competing definitions of masculinity and femininity. In addition, this course will explore the ways in which women’s activism has been central to social and political movements across the continent. Furthermore, we will investigate how the domain of sexual practice and reproduction underpinned broader conflicts over racial purity, worker power, and the boundaries of citizenship in racially and ethnically diverse societies. The course will culminate in a final research paper on a topic chosen by the student.

SWAG 345/BLST 347 – Race, Sex, and Gender in the U.S. Military
Tuesday, Thursday 11:50-1:10 p.m.
Khary Polk

From the aftermath of the Civil War to today's "global war on terror," the U.S. military has functioned as a vital arbiter of the overlapping taxonomies of race, gender, and sexuality in America and around the world. This course examines the global trek of American militarism through times of war and peace in the twentieth century. In a variety of texts and contexts, we will investigate how the U.S. military's production of new ideas about race and racialization, masculinity and femininity, and sexuality and citizenship impacted the lives of soldiers and civilians, men and women, at "home" and abroad. Our interdisciplinary focus will allow us to study the multiple intersections of difference within the military, enabling us to address a number of topics, including: How have African American soldiers functioned as both subjects and agents of American militarism? What role has the U.S. military played in the creation of contemporary gay and lesbian subjectivity? Is military sexual assault a contemporary phenomenon or can it be traced to longer practices of sexual exploitation occurring on or around U.S. bases globally?

SWAG 349/LJST 349/POSC 349 – Law and Love
Wednesday 2:10-4:40 p.m.
Martha Umphrey

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

SWAG 365/ENGL 372 – Reading the Romance
Tuesday 1:30-4:15 p..
Krupa Shandilya

Do people the world over love in the same way, or does romance mean different things in different cultures? What happens when love violates social norms? Is the “romance” genre an escape from real-world conflicts or a resolution of them? This course analyzes romantic narratives from across the world through the lens of feminist theories of sexuality, marriage, and romance. We will read heterosexual romances such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, alongside queer fiction such as Sarah Waters’ Fingersmiths and Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness. We will also pay attention to the Western romantic-comedy film, the telenovela and the Bollywood spectacular.

SWAG 381/HIST 381 – Global Transgender Histories
Tuesday 1:30-4:15 p.m.
Jen Manion

This seminar will explore the histories of transgender identities, activism, and communities around the world. Some questions to be engaged include: What concepts have been used to understand gender variant, expansive, and nonconforming people throughout history? How have war, violence, and legacies of colonialism, enslavement, and exploitation shaped the terms and conditions by which people of transgender experience and expression understood themselves and were perceived by others? How have transgender people advocated for self-determination, legal rights, and medical care? How has the transgender rights movement intersected with the civil, disability, women’s, and the LGBTQ rights movements? Students will work with primary sources such as newspaper accounts, legal codes, medical journals, religious texts, memoirs, and manifestos as well as pathbreaking historic studies of transgender people in China, England, Germany, Iran, Thailand, and the United States.

SWAG 411/POSC 411 – Indigenous Women and World Politics
Tuesday 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Manuela Picq
Indigenous women are rarely considered actors in world politics. Yet from their positions of marginality, they are shaping politics in significant ways. This course inter-weaves feminist and Indigenous approaches to suggest the importance of Indigenous women’s political contributions. It is an invitation not merely to recognize their achievements but also to understand why they matter to international relations. This course tackles varied Indigenous contexts, ranging from pre-conquest gender relations to the 1994 Zapatista uprising. We will learn how Indigenous women played diplomatic roles and led armies into battle during colonial times. We will analyze the progressive erosion of their political and economic power, notably through the introduction of property rights, to understand the intersectional forms of racial, class, and gender violence. Course materials explore the linkages between sexuality and colonization, revealing how sexual violence was a tool of conquest, how gender norms were enforced and sexualities disciplined. In doing so, we will analyze indigenous women’s relationship to feminism as well as their specific struggles for self-determination. We will illustrate the sophistication of their current activism in such cases as the Maya defense of collective intellectual property rights. As we follow their struggles from the Arctic to the Andes, we will understand how indigenous women articulate local, national, and international politics to challenge state sovereignty.

SWAG 416/ECON 416 – Economics of Race and Gender
Monday, Wednesday 2:10-3:30 p.m.
Jessica Reyes

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

Hampshire

CSI 217 – The Battle Between Science and Religion in Sexual and Reproductive Health Policy
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Marlene Fried

This course explores past and current debates over the role of religion and science in public policy, specifically in the areas reproductive rights, health and justice. We look both at claims that science and religion are inevitably in conflict, as well as arguments for their compatibility. Topics may include: claims that abortion is linked to breast cancer and causes a form of post-traumatic stress disorder; the refusal of some public officials to issue marriage licenses to people who identify as LBGTQ; the debates over public funding for abstinence-only sexuality education, and coverage of abortion and contraception in the Affordable Care Act. We will look at these issues in the context of broader societal debates over the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in public schools and challenges to claims about the objectivity of science.

HACU 250 - Settler Mythologies, Imperial Ideologies: Colonialism & Popular Culture
Monday, Wednesday 6:00-7:20 p.m.
Suzanne Loza
component

Historically, settler states and imperial regimes have disenfranchised and dispossessed racialized Others by constructing ideological frameworks that justify and obscure the ongoing violence of the colonial process. Through a close examination of film, television, music, and digital media, this course will explore how contemporary US popular culture fabricates and disseminates imperialist fantasies and settler mythologies. It will interrogate the political meanings embedded in popular culture and ask: What do imperial productions and settler creations reveal about the tangled relationships between race, history, and desire? How do colonial and imperial settings propagate racism, sexism and ableism; anxieties about class, gender, and sexuality; and concerns about the white (settler) colonial state's ability to digest and domesticate non-normative Others? What are the material consequences of romanticizing imperialism and settler colonialism? Can cultural industries rooted in racial and sexual conquest be decolonized? How does one disrupt and subvert the white (settler) colonial gaze?

HACU 277 - Planet on Fire: Reimagining the Future of the World
Monday, Wednesday 10:40 – 12:00 p.m.
Jennifer Bajorek
component

The desire to save our planet from imminent destruction is shared by growing numbers of people all over the world. Yet debates about climate change, environmental disaster, mass extinction, and possible solutions to them continue to be framed by discourses that have their roots in capitalist, imperialist, and patriarchal worldviews. This course examines critical and creative approaches to sustainability and extinction that challenge us to go beyond these frames. Through readings in philosophy, literature, art, environmental humanities, and social science, we will look at histories, thought systems, and imagined worlds that teach us to understand the past, present, and future of the planet differently and that offer radical new possibilities for imagining what Anna Tsing calls "the promise of cohabitation," or life on earth. Topics to include ecofeminism, queer ecologies, and global indigeneity; climate apartheid, resource wars, and the climate refugee; regenerative agriculture, food justice, and sustainability in prisons.

Mt. Holyoke

Mount Holyoke moved to a “flex/immersive” seminar/discussion style semester - the list for the first mini-semester is listed in Fall 2020. No information was available about their second mini-semester as of 10/29/20. See their website for more information or talk to someone in our Five College Exchange Office about taking courses there.

Please check the Mount Holyoke courses page for days/times for these courses.

The first mini-semester of spring is 1/1/9/21-3/12/21 and the second is 3/18/21-5/11/21.

FIRST MINI-SEMESTER - 1/19/21-3/12/21

GNDST 204QT/ENGL 219QT Queer and Trans Writing
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 206CG/HIST 296CG – Women and Gender in China
Lan Wu

This seminar introduces students to gender relations in the history of China. It offers students a broad historical narrative of women's lives from early China through the imperial period, and concludes with the power dynamics of gender relations in modern China in the twentieth century. The course is organized chronologically with thematic focus on the politics of marriage and reproduction; the state's shifting perspectives on women's social roles; and how women interpreted and responded to the changing cultural landscape

GNDST 333BF/CST 349BF – Black Feminist Thought
Richie Barnes

This course offers a foundational investigation of African-American and other African descendant women's contributions to feminist theory as a heterogeneous field of knowledge encompassing multiple streams of gender- and race-cognizant articulation and praxis. While Black feminism's historical development will be sketched, our focus will be on the literature and theory of writers like Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Barbara Smith. We explore these and other foundational texts as representatives of the contexts within which Black Women's Studies emerged along with various subaltern feminisms mobilized by other women of color in the Global North and South.

GNDST 333EM/CST 349EM – Naturecultural Embodiments
Christian Gundermann

What does it mean to be (in?) a body? Who counts as whole, broken or food? How do discipline, punishment, use, reproduction, and illness come into play? What are agency, animacy, knowledge, consciousness in relation to embodiment? Western rationality has produced and disciplined a coherent, bounded, defended, racialized, and gendered bodily Self through medicine, psychiatry, nutrition, education, sexology, thanatology, obstetrics, and other disciplines. We will explore this production and its continual undoing, through topics such as medical diagnosis, disability, death and burial cultures, infection, diet, breastfeeding and dairy, chronic illness, depression, queerness, and hormone replacement.

GNDST 333WE – Weird Feelings: Unsettling Latin American Fiction
Adriana Pitetta

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

SECOND MINI SEMESTER- 3/18/21-5/11/21

GNDST 204GV/SPAN 230GV – Gendered Violence in Spain

Nieves Romero-Diaz

This survey course will review the complex interaction of gender and violence as a personal and institutional issue in Spain from Medieval times to the present. What are the ideological and sociocultural constructs that sustain and perpetuate violence against women? What are the forms of resistance women have put into play? Among the texts, we will study short stories by Lucanor (thirteenth century) and María de Zayas (seventeenth century), song by Bebé and movie by Boyaín (twentieth century), contemporary news (twenty-first century), and laws (from the thirteenth century to the present).

GNDST 206US/HIST 276 – U.S. Women’s History Since 1890
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 210JD/JWST 234/RELIG 234 – Women and Gender in Judaism
Mara Benjamin

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

GNDST 333AM/ENGL 372 – Gender and War in American Narrative
Leah Glasser

This seminar will focus on depictions of war in the context of gender. When asked how we might prevent war, Virginia Woolf suggested that we must invent new language and methods rather than follow the path of the traditional "procession of educated men." What language emerges in works about the effects of war? Texts will include essays and films as well as selected works by writers such as Alcott, Whitman, Crane, Twain, Hemingway, Woolf, Silko, Morrison, and O'Brien.

GNDST 333PM – Poetry & Image: Form of Identity
Samuel Ace

Description not available. Please see website.

GNDST 333SE – Black Sexual Economies
Sarah Smith

At once viewed as a dysfunction of normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation, Black sexualities are intimately linked to and regulated by political and socioeconomic discourses. Slavery studies scholars remind us of how it has proven foundational for modern notions of race and sex by making explicit links between labor and exploitation. Thus, this course moves through themes such as slavery historicity, intersections between Black feminisms and Black sexualities, sexual labor/work, pleasure, and the erotic, in order to consider the stakes of our current critical approaches to Black sexual economies and interrogate its silences and possibilities.

GNDS 333YA/ENGL 392YB – The Yellow Robot: Race/Fembots
Jerrine Tan

Saudi Arabia recently became the first nation to grant citizenship to a female cyborg, prompting criticism that the robot now has more rights than women in the country. This class will explore issues at the intersections of race, power, gender, sexuality, and technology. We will read theorists such as Wendy Chun and Lisa Nakamura on race and technology, as well as Anne Cheng's work on race, aesthetics, and the nonhuman. We will also consider films such as Ex Machina and The Ghost in the Shell against Koreeda's Air Doll, and Kwak Jae-Yong's Cyborg, She. How are intelligence and humanity proscribed by race? What do gender, sexuality, and race have to do with mechanized labor?

Smith

SWG 220 – Introduction to Queer Studies
Monday, Wednesday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Catherine Victoria Dawson

See department for description.

SWG 238 – Women, Money and Transnational Social Movements
Monday, Wednesday 1:40-2:55 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 3:15-4:30 p.m.
Loretta Ross

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

SWG 271 – Reproductive Justice
Tuesday, Thursday 10:55-12:10
Carrie 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.

SWG 290 – Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture
Monday, Wednesday 10:55-12:10 p.m.
Jennifer Declue

In this course we will consider the manner in which norms of gender and sexuality are reflected, reinforced, and challenged in popular culture. We use theories of knowledge production, representation, and meaning-making to support our analysis of the relationship between discourse and power; our engagement with these theoretical texts helps us track this dynamic as it emerges in popular culture. Key queer theoretical concepts provide a framework for examining how the production gender and sexuality impacts cultural production. Through our critical engagement with a selection of films, music, television, visual art, and digital media we will discuss mainstream conventions and the feminist, queer, and queer of color interventions that enliven the landscape of popular culture with which we contend in everyday life.

SWG 300 – Queer Visual Studies
Thursday 7:05-10:00 p.m.
Bridgette Baldwin

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 303 – Queer of Color Critique
Wednesday 1:40-4:30 p.m.
Jennifer Declue

Students in this course gain a thorough and sustained understanding of queer of color critique by tracking this theoretical framework from its emergence in women of color feminism through the contemporary moment using historical and canonical texts along with the most cutting-edge scholarship being produced in the field. In our exploration of this critical framework, we engage with independent films, novels and short stories, popular music, as well as television and digital media platforms such as Netflix and Amazon. We discuss what is ruptured and what is generated at intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality.

SWG 305 – Queer Histories and Culture
Tuesday, Thursday 10:55-12:10 p.m.
Kelly Anderson

This course is an advanced seminar in the growing field of queer American history. Over the course of the semester, we will explore the histories of same-sex desire, practice, and identity, as well as gender transgressions, from the late 19th century to the present. Using a wide range of sources, including archival documents, films, work by historians, and oral histories, we will investigate how and why people with same-sex desire and non-normative gender expressions formed communities, struggled against bigotry, and organized movements for social and political change. This course will pay close attention to the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality and the ways that difference has shaped queer history.

SWG 377 – Feminist Public Writing: Calderwood Seminar
Tuesday, Thursday 1:40-2:55 p.m.
Carrie Baker

This interdisciplinary course will teach students how to translate feminist scholarship for a popular audience. Students will practice how to use knowledge and concepts they have learned in their women and gender studies classes to write publicly in a range of formats, including book and film reviews, interviews, opinion editorials, and feature articles. We will explore the history and practice of feminist public writing, with particular attention to how gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, disability, and citizenship in women’s experiences of public writing. We will also some of the political and ethical questions relating to women’s public writing.

CROSS-LISTED COURSES

AFR 289 – Race, Feminism and Resistance in Movements for Social Change
Monday, Wednesday 7:05-8:20 p.m.
Paul Joseph Lopez Oro

This interdisciplinary colloquial course explores the historical and theoretical perspectives of African American women from the time of slavery to the post-civil rights era. A central concern of the course is the examination of how black women shaped and were shaped by the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality in American culture.

AFR 360/ENG 323 – Toni Morrison
Wednesday 1:40-4:30 p.m.
Daphne Lamothe

This seminar focuses on Toni Morrison’s literary production. In reading her novels, essays, lectures and interviews, we pay particular attention to three things: her interest in the epic anxieties of American identities; her interest in form, language, and theory; and her study of love.

AMS 201 – Introduction to the Study of American Society and Culture
Tuesday, Thursday 10:55-12:10 p.m.
Evangeline M. Heiliger/Kevin 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.

ANT 238 – Anthropology of the Body
Tuesday, Thursday 4:50-5:40
~~Pinky Hota~~ Pat Mangan

Anthropology vitally understands bodies as socially meaningful, and as sites for the inculcation of ethical and political identities through processes of embodiment, which break down divides between body as natural and body as socially constituted. In this class, we engage these anthropological understandings to read how bodies are invoked, disciplined and reshaped in prisons and classrooms, market economies and multicultural democracies, religious and ethical movements, and the performance of gender and sexuality, disease and disability. Through these accounts of the body as an object of social analysis and as a vehicle for politics, we learn fundamental social theoretical and anthropological tenets about the embodiment of power, contemporary politics as forms of "biopolitics," and the deconstruction of the normative body.

ANT 257 – Urban Anthropology
Tuesday, Thursday 9:20-10:35 a.m.
Caroline Melly
component

This course considers the city as both a setting for anthropological research and as an ethnographic object of study in itself. We aim to think critically about the theoretical and methodological possibilities, challenges and limitations that are posed by urban anthropology. We consider concepts and themes such as urbanization and migration; urban space and mobility; gender, race and ethnicity; technology and virtual space; markets and economies; citizenship and belonging; and production and consumption.

AMS 340 – Queer of Color Critique
Monday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Evangeline Heiliger

Investigates genealogies of feminist/queer of color theorizing, focusing on queer of color critique.

EAL 273 – Women and Narration in Modern Korea
Tuesday, Thursday 3:15-4:30
Thursday 7:05-9:35 p.m. Film
Irhe Sohn

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

ENG 218 – Monstrous Mothers
Tuesday, Thursday 1:40-2:55 p.m.
Lily Gurton-Wahter/Jina Boyong

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

ENG 278 – Asian American Women Writers
Monday, Wednesday 1:40-2:55 p.m.
Ambreen Hai

The body of literature written by Asian American women over the past 100 years or so has been recognized as forming a coherent tradition even as it grows and expands to include newcomers and divergent voices under its umbrella. What conditions enabled its emergence? How have the qualities and concerns of this tradition been defined? What makes a text--fiction, poetry, memoir, mixed-genre--central or marginal to the tradition and how do emergent writers take this tradition in new directions? writers to be studied may include Maxine Hong Kingston, Sui Sin Far, Cathy Song, Joy Kogawa, Jessica Hagedorn, Monique Truong, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ruth Ozeki, and more.

ENG 291 – Tell me a Story: The Power and Purpose of Narrative Writing
Thursday 9:25-12:05 p.m.
Amy Ellis Nutt

See department for description.

ENG 363 – Race and Environment
Wednesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Jina Boyong Kim

See department for description

ENG 391 – Modern South Asian Writers in English
Tuesday 1:40-4:30 p.m.
Ambreen Hai
component

We study key texts in the diverse tradition of 20th- and 21st-century South Asian literature in English, from the early poet Sarojini Naidu to internationally acclaimed contemporary global and diasporic writers from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal. Topics include: the postcolonial fashioning of identities; Independence and Partition; women’s interventions in nationalist discourses; the crafting of new English idioms; choices of genre and form; the challenges of historiography, trauma, memory; diaspora and the (re)making of “home;” life post-9/11 Islamophobia. Writers include: Anand, Narayan, Manto, Rushdie, Attia Hosain, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Naqvi, Adiga, Upadhyay. Supplementary readings on postcolonial theory and criticism.

ESS 340 – Women’s Health: Current Topics
Monday, Wednesday 10:55-12:10 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.

GOV 267 – Problems in Democratic Thought
Tuesday, Thursday 1:40-2:55 p.m.
Gary Lehring
component

What is democracy? We begin with readings of Aristotle, Rousseau and Mill to introduce some issues associated with the ideal of democratic self-government: participation, equality, majority rule vs. minority rights, the common good, pluralism, community. Readings include selections from liberal, radical, socialist, libertarian, multiculturalist and feminist political thought.

GOV 363 – Dissent: Disobedience, Resistance, Refusal and Exit
Wednesday 1:40-4:30 p.m.
Erin Pineda
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.

HST 267 – United States Since 1877
Monday, Wednesday 10:55-12:10 p.m.
Paula Tarankow
component

Survey of the major economic, political and social changes of this period, primarily through the lens of race, class and gender, to understand the role of ordinary people in shaping defining events, including industrial capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, mass immigration and migration, urbanization, the rise of mass culture, nationalism, war, feminism, labor radicalism, civil rights and other liberatory movements for social justice.

HST 383 – Domestic Worker Organizing
Wednesday 1:40-4:30 p.m.
Jennifer Guglielmo

This is an advanced research seminar in which students work closely with archival materials from the Sophia Smith Collection and other archives to explore histories of resistance, collective action and grassroots organizing among domestic workers in the United States, from the mid-18th century to the present. Domestic work has historically been done by women of color and been among the lowest paid, most vulnerable and exploited forms of labor. Your research will assist the National Domestic Workers Alliance, as they incorporate history into their political education curriculum and use history as an organizing tool in their current campaigns.

PSY 266 – Psychology of Women and Gender
Monday, Wednesday 1:40-2:55 p.m.
Randi Garcia

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

REL 238 – Mary: Images and Cults
Tuesday, Thursday 10:55-12:10 p.m.
Vera Shevzov
component

Whether revered as the Mother of God or remembered as a single Jewish mother of an activist, Mary has both inspired and challenged generations of Christian women and men worldwide. This course focuses on key developments in the “history of Mary” since early Christian times to the present. How has her image shaped global Christianities? What does her perceived image in any given age tell us about personal and collective identities? Topics include Mary’s “life”; rise of the Marian cult; Marian apparitions (e.g., Guadalupe and Lourdes) and miracle-working images, especially in Byzantium and Russia; liberation and feminism; politics, activism, mysticism, and prayer. Devotional, polemical and literary texts, art and film.

SOC 216 - Social Movements
Monday, Wednesday 3:15-4:30 p.m.
Nancy Whittier
component

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

SOC 237 – Gender and Globalization
Tuesday, Thursday 1:40-2:55 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
Tuesday, Thursday 3:15-4:30 p.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.

SOC 255 – The Bollywood Matinee
Tuesday, Thursday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Payal Banerjee

See department for description.