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

WGSS

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

WGSS 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Section 1 – Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m. Derek Siegel
Section 2 – Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m. Tiarra Cooper

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
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m. Karen Cardozo
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m. Debadatta Chakraborty

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 1:00-2:15 p.m.
B Aultman

What is health? What makes health a matter of feminism? And what might a feminist health politics look like? These questions lay at the heart of this course. In Feminist Health Politics, we will examine how health becomes defined, and will question whether health and disease are objectively measured conditions or subjective states. We will also consider why and how definitions and standards of health have changed over time; why and how standards and adjudications of health vary according to gender, race, sexuality, class, and nationality; and how definitions of health affect the way we value certain bodies and ways of living. Additionally, we will explore how knowledge about health is created; how environmental conditions, social location, politics, and economic conditions affect health; how various groups have fought for changes to health care practices and delivery; and how experiences of health and illness have been reported and represented.

WGSS 240 – Introduction to Transgender Studies
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Cameron Awkward-Rich

This survey of transgender studies will introduce students to the major concepts and current debates within the field. Drawing on a range of theoretical texts, historical case studies, and creative work, we will track the emergence of "transgender" as both an object of study and a way of knowing. In particular, we will ask: what does it mean to "study" "transgender"? This guiding question will lead us to consider the varied meanings of ?trans? and how these meanings have been shaped by regimes of gender, racism, colonization, ableism, and medical and legal regulation; the tensions and intimacies between trans, disability, anti-racist, queer, and feminist theory/politics; and how 'trans' might help us to imagine other, more just worlds.

WGSS 275 – Literature and Social Justice: Gender, Race, and the Radical Imagination
Jude Hayward-Jansen

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

WGSS 286 – History of Sexuality and Race in the United States
Monday, Wednesday 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Discussion Sections Friday 9:05, 10:10, 11:15, 12:20
~~Kirsten Leng~~ 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 291C -Gender, Race and Capitalism
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Signe Predmore

How does capitalism depend on gender, race and sexuality? In turn, how are gender, race, and sexuality defined through our economic lives? Why are women so often cast as the solution to poverty in the Global South? Is sex work distinct from other types of work? How can we think about the household as the fundamental socio-economic unit in light of queer and feminist critiques of the nuclear family? In this course, we will examine these types of intersections, taking our cue from an interdisciplinary social science literature featuring feminist political economists, theorists of racial capitalism, economic sociologists and anthropologists, and scholar-activists. We will think through both the large scale of global macroeconomic systems, as well as the microlevel of everyday life and popular culture. No prior background in economics or politics is assumed. After considering the historical origins of capitalism, we will survey topics including work, social reproduction and care labor, debt, finance, poverty and development.

WGSS 293C/AFROAM 293C – Race, Sexuality and Law in Early America
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.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 295D – Democracy Works
Monday, Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Jo Comerford

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 295E – Envisioning/Enacting Social Change
Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Karen Cardozo

The 1970s feminist mantra "the personal is political" remains apt. How do our everyday choices reify or resist the current social order, which by many measures is dysfunctional and fundamentally unjust? At this advanced stage of global capitalism, many people engage the world primarily as consumers, a process inseparable from personal, professional, and commercial branding across various media platforms. How might we use our purchasing power as well as our creative capacity as producers to realize feminist futures? Yet we cannot enact what we cannot imagine. Reviewing the work of revolutionary thinkers behind various feminist movements, we will explore ways to envision and enact change at both the micro/personal and macro/societal levels. As we do, we will expand narrow notions of leadership for more inclusive and intersectional frameworks of activist impact.

WGSS 295W – Embodied Feminism, Healing Justice, and Social Movements for Collective Liberation
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Jennifer Cannon

This course will explore how somatic healing practices are changing social justice movements and challenging the neoliberal wellness industry. Counter to individual wellness models, feminist concepts of radical self-care are integral to collective liberation. Challenging the limitations of rationalism and mind-body dualism, we will begin to understand knowledge as generated through the body, including intuition, ancestral memory, and the dreamtime. Theoretical frameworks for the course include: Embodiment Studies, Critical Mindfulness Studies, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Black Feminist Thought. The following concepts will be explored: healing justice, embodied feminism, liberatory mindfulness, intergenerational trauma, decolonization, and cultural appropriation. Readings will include: Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Tricia Hersey, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Joanna Macy. The course will integrate an Embodiment Lab where we will engage with somatic practices and contemplative pedagogy.

WGSS 393Q/WGSS 693Q – Our Biologies: Queer Feminist Research
Tuesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Angie Willey

This course is a speculative, research-based class designed to explore biology in radically interdisciplinary ways. "Our" is a possessive pronoun that begs the question of who. Who are the "we" seeking knowledge? Who is being studied? Who decides how we know and what knowledges count? Who is benefiting from various knowledge projects? Who is harmed? In one sense, "our" is all of us - human and more-than-human planetary actors, imagined as separate, but deeply interconnected with one another. In this first sense "our" highlights the shared stakes of all of life in what kinds of stories get told about nature. In a second sense, "our" refers those of us whose biologies have been represented in violent or reductionist ways that have harmed us as groups. In a third sense, the "our" refers to knowledge-makers who have not been seen as producers of valuable information about the biological. These include academics in non-science disciplines who research bodies and ecologies in a variety of ways as well as activists who theorize and mobilize the biological in more-than-scientific ways. The class begins from the plural - biologies - to highlight that the kinds of stories we tell about bodies and natures are multiple. The plural also denotes diversity among organisms and in the scales and units we use to draw their boundaries. Pluralizing biologies - both the study and the stuff - helps us think biologically beyond hierarchies that tell us that a) certain kinds of disciplinary stories about the stuff are best and should be the only ones to count, and b) certain kinds of bodies and certain conceptualizations of nature can stand in for all the world.

WGSS 395V/DANCE 395V – Bodies, Movement and Queer Meaning in Contemporary Dance
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Erin Kouwe

What do we learn from the way we move through the world? What can movement teach us about relationship and identity? How can dance function as a realm to practice new ways of relating or building alternative futures? This class poses an inquiry into queer and feminist thought through the lens of dance. We recognize the body as a site of knowledge production and investigate how movement and performance can highlight the intersection of theory and lived experience. Class has a regular movement component: students will be guided through improvisational practices to develop their own methods of inquiry through movement. No previous experience with dance is necessary and dancers from all traditions are encouraged to join. Our practice will be in conversation with authors including adrienne marie brown, Audre Lorde, Ann Cooper Albright, Petra Kuppers, Jose Mu?oz, Fiona Buckland, and others. We will watch and be in conversation about performances by choreographers like Rosie Herrera, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Ananya Chatterjea, Miguel Guitierrez, and Ralph Lemon.

WGSS 494TI – Unthinking the Transnational
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
~~Laura Briggs~~ Kiran Asher

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

WGSS 692D – Feminists on Debt
Thursday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Laura Briggs

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

WGSS 693G/AFROAM 693G – Gender in the Civil Rights Movement
Thursday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Traci Parker

In the 1950s and 1960s, as civil rights activists challenged Jim Crow, a system that was as much gendered as it was raced, they wrestled with historic assumptions about race and gender in American society. This course explores this and seeks to answer several major questions: What was the "gendered geography of Jim Crow"? How did race and gender shape the course of the Civil Rights Movement? What was the interplay between race, gender, and sexuality in this struggle? How did the mid-twentieth century Black Freedom Movement reinforce and challenge traditional notions of womanhood and manhood? While the Civil Rights Movement is the central focus of the course, we also will consider other mid-century liberatory movements (such as Black Power, Women's Liberation, and Gay Liberation Movements and the Sexual Revolution) that were influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and grappled intensely with race, gender, and sexuality in ways that have had major and lasting implications for Black gender relations and politics.

WGSS 693Q/WGSS 393Q – Our Biologies: Queer Feminist Research
Tuesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Angie Willey

WGSS 705 – Feminist Epistemologies and Interdisciplinary Methodologies
Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Cameron Awkward-Rich

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)

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

AFROAM 293J – Black Women, Representation, and Power in Africa and the African Diaspora
Monday, Wednesday 9:05 – 10:20 a.m.
Yolanda Covington-Ward

This course explores histories, cultures, and contemporary socio-political issues of relevance to women of African descent across the geographical spectrum of the Pan-African world: Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, and North America. What representations and stereotypes do others have of Black women? And how do Black women challenge misrepresentations and define themselves? The course begins by exploring ideas of feminism, black feminism, and womanism/Africana womanism as relevant ideologies for women of African descent. The course then uses novels, ethnographies, journal articles, and videos from Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, the United States and other countries to examine issues of identity, cultural representation, and self-definition for Black women. Topics covered include colonialism, sex tourism, skin-bleaching and colorism, intersectionality and the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, stereotypes of Black women, reproductive justice and Black maternal mortality, Black girl?s games, and women in Hip-Hop, etc.

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

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

COMP-LIT 390Q – World Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Corine Tachtiris

In this course, we will read a range of literary representations of what, in the US-Anglophone context, may be called queer or LGBTQIA+ identities. We will pay particular attention to non-Western literatures and cultures and to texts not originally in English. We will study how queer identities have developed separately and in relation to globally dominant US-Anglophone frameworks of queerness, and?with a focus on questions of power? we will examine how the global forces of colonialism and neoliberal capitalism have functioned in the construction of queer identities, often in conjunction with constructions of race and ethnicity. With literary texts as our primary material, we will investigate how authors use aesthetics, style, and genre as means of representing queerness.

ECON 397S – Gender and Economic Development
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Lynda Pickbourn

This course examines the complex relationships between the process of economic development and gender inequality. Students will be introduced to the theoretical frameworks and debates that have shaped the analysis of gender and economic development. This will be followed by an exploration of the interactions between economic development policy and gender relations in the global South. Topics covered will include the household as a unit of analysis; the gender division of labor; paid and unpaid work; asset inequality; microfinance; migration; the gendered impacts of economic restructuring and economic crisis; the feminization of labor in the global economy.

ECON 397WM – Economics of Women, Minorities, and Work
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.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. Sarah Ahmad
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:10-11:00 a.m. – Nataliya Kostenko
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:15-12:05 p.m. – Mitia Nath
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m. – Shwetha Chandrashekhar

Introduction to literature through a lens of gender identity and sexuality. Texts include fiction, plays, poems that deal with and inspire conversations about the public politics and personal experience of gender and sexuality, both in the past and present. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)

HISTORY 349H – Topics in European History: Sex & Society
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Jennifer Heuer

This honors course examines the social organization and cultural construction of gender and sexuality. We will look at how women and men experienced the dramatic changes that have affected Europe since 1789 and consider how much these developments were themselves influenced by ideas about masculinity and femininity. We will explore topics such as revolutionary definitions of citizenship; changing patterns of work and family life; fin-de-siecle links between crime, madness, and sexual perversion; the fascist cult of the body; battle grounds and home fronts during the world wars; gendered aspects of nationalism and European colonialism, and the sexual revolution of the post-war era.

HISTORY 393I – Indigenous Women in North America
Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Alice Nash

See department for description.

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

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

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 397WG – Women and Gender in Latin America
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Diana Sierra Becerra

This course uses gender as an analytical lens to understand key themes and periods of Latin American history, from the conquest of the Americas to the present-day neoliberal era. The course will illuminate how gender has shaped social relationships, institutions, identities, and discourses in the region. It will prioritize the role of women and how their individual and collective actions have shaped and transformed Latin America. Special attention will be paid to women's participation in social movements.

HISTORY 397WR – Women and Revolutions
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Diana Sierra Becerra

In the twentieth-century, working-class women built revolutions to dismantle oppressive systems and create a free society. They organized workers, waged armed struggle, and built alternative institutions. Why did women join revolutionary movements? How did gender shape their participation? How did women define revolutionary theories and practices? We will consult primary and secondary sources to understand the experiences and dreams of radical women. We will focus on historical case studies primarily from Latin America.

LABOR 201/SOCIOL 201 – Women and Work
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Clare Hammonds

This course will examine 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, DU)

LABOR 297WJ – Women in the Justice System
Thursday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Maria Puppolo

This course explores the intersection between women and the criminal justice system. The nature and extent of women as offenders, as victims, and as professionals in the criminal justice system will be explored, as well as theories related to offending and victimization. Also integral to the course is the relationship between victimization and offending and the intricacies of women's intersectionality with the criminal justice system as offenders, law enforcement and probation officers, correctional personnel, lawyers and judges.

PORTUG 309 – Brazilian Women
Monday, Wednesday 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.

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.

PSYCH 391LB – Psychology of the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Experience
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
John Bickford

Students in this course will explore psychological theory and research pertaining to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Topics include sexual orientation, sexual identity development, stigma management, heterosexism & homonegativity, gender roles, same-sex relationships, LGB families, LGB diversity, and LGB mental health. Senior Psychology Majors only. Prerequisite: PSYCH 241

STPEC 492H – Focus Seminar II
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Jorge Vasquez Arreaga

Topic Title: TRANS-AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES: RACE, GENDER, AND NATION
This course introduces the intersection of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism in the United States and Latin America & the Caribbean. We will analyze discourses on the nation and revolution, racial democracy, gender in Nation-building, and anti-racist struggles covering events from the late 19th century until the early 21st century. In this sense, the course connects the legacy of political struggles with contemporary process of resistance and focuses on students developing historical-comparative approaches. With particular attention to the case of the United States, Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Bolivia, the course engages with analytical perspectives from different fields such as Sociology, Gender Studies, African American History, Latin American Studies, and Decolonial Studies. These perspectives allow the analysis of racial projects and colonialism in the Americas and discuss references for constructing political subjects from anti-racist activism. We will read W.E.B. Du Bois, Irene Diggs, C.L.R. James, Saidiya Hartman, Jose Mariategui, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Aline Helg. The course includes the analysis of primary sources (i.e., 20th-century anti-colonial periodicals) using a digital teaching tool and the Special Collections at UMass Library.

SOCIOL 106 – Race, Gender, Class & Ethnicity
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:15 – 12:05 p.m.
Kathleen Hulton

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 283 – Gender & Society
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Ana Villalobos

Analysis of: 1) historical and cross-cultural variation in positions and relationships of women and men; 2) contemporary creation and internalization of gender and maintenance of gender differences in adult life; 3) recent social movements to transform or maintain "traditional" positions of women and men. Prerequisite: 100-level Sociology course.

SPANISH 497LA – Latin American Women Writers
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Margara Russotto

See department for description.

UMass Courses Outside of WGSS (Component)

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

COMM 248 – The Folklore of New England
Monday, Wednesday 5:30-6:45 p.m.
Stephen Olbrys Gencarella

This course examines the folklore of New England and adjacent regions. It introduces students to the fundamentals of the study of folklore, including notions of tradition, the vernacular, expressive culture, performance, storytelling, material lore, customs, folk groups, community, and worldview. It surveys folklore genres including legend, myth, folktale, folk songs and ballads, proverbs, folk medicine, superstition, folk arts and crafts, rituals, holidays, festivals, and foodways. It illustrates these ideas and provides a history of the folklore of New England, including the precolonial and colonial periods as well as those of immigrant and recent groups to the region. Throughout the semester, we consider issues of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and related manifestations of social diversity?or lack thereof?in New England. We also analyze the role that folklore plays in creating, maintaining, challenging, and changing social norms and values. As such, this course assumes a critical perspective on folklore and on the concept of New England itself. (Gen. Ed. SB)

COMM 495A – Performance Ethnography
Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 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 100 – International Horror
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Celia Sainz Delgado

Using literature and film, this course will examine the genre of horror through the analysis of its psychological ramifications, its cultural specificities, and its social significance. We will consider what evokes fear and why, how particular forms of the monstrous evoke particular forms of fear, and what this reveals about the human condition. Featuring texts and films from many different countries, we will assess how historical experience and culture inform the depiction and meaning of fear as well as how horror engages social phenomena such as race, gender, and class. (Gen. Ed. AL, DG)

COMP-LIT 236 – Digital Culture
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Kate Edwards

This course explores the history and social implications of our digitized culture(s). Considering information technology in terms of its relationship to the self and society, we will discuss a wide-ranging set of issues related to digital cultures, such as online communities and social networking, internet addiction, and machine learning. We will also investigate the implications of digital cultures in terms of social categories including class, race, and gender. Students can expect to develop analytical and critical skills that will allow them to articulate well-researched and cogently-argued responses to issues surrounding the use of digital technologies. (Gen. Ed. I)

ECON 397MI/HISTORY 397CL – City, Industry, and Labor in Colonial India, 1750-1950
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.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.

ENGLISH 279 – Intro to American Studies
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Janell Tryon

Interdisciplinary approach to the study of American culture. Focus on issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Readings drawn from literature, history, the social sciences, philosophy and fine arts. Supplemented with audio-visual materialsofilms, slides of paintings, architecture, photography and material culture, and music. Required for students with a concentration in American Studies. (Gen. Ed. AL, DU)

GERMAN 397e – Weimar Cinema
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Mariana Ivanova

The Weimar Republic is known for its extremes: corrupt wealth existed alongside destitute poverty and an underground world of wild parties and glamour. In this course, we delve into the internationally acclaimed Weimar cinema, films made during the period of the so-called Golden Twenties in Germany. The period began with the end of World War I and came to a close with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, shortly before Hitler's rise to power. This short-lived period has become the symbol of a resolutely modern lifestyle, including gender equality and androgyny (the New Man and the New Woman), artistic innovation and experimentation, sexual emancipation, economic and political crises. Film was part of this vibrant and contested culture; indeed, it was the central art form. Filmmakers invented narratives and images that obliquely addressed trauma and paranoia and devised a visual language that still shapes genre such as horror, science fiction, film noir and melodrama. In this course, we will draw on sources from literature, art, photography, music and fashion as well as materials in psychology, criminology, and filmmaking to deepen our understanding of the time period and its films.

LEGAL 390P/SPP 390P – Politics and Policy in the American Police State
Monday, Wednesday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Kelsey Shoub

In this course, we will tackle each, with the aim of understanding of the basic contours of policing in the United States today through a public policy lens, including an understanding of: what the police do and who they are, challenges and problems facing the police and policing today, proposed policy changes, and possible tradeoffs or considerations when considering the current state of affairs and potential changes. Central to this is developing an understanding of power dynamics and hierarchies, how the police's presence is felt by the populations and people they interact with, and the public's response. Woven throughout are discussions of race, class, and gender as personal testimonials, anecdotes, and quantitative research have revealed differential policing patterns across groups and that members of different groups respond to police contact differentially. Although the course primarily asks about the contours of policing from a public policy lens, we will draw heavily from a range of intimately related disciplines including but not limited to history, political science, sociology, and public administration. Open to Senior and Junior Legal Studies majors only. Prerequisite: any 100-level SPP course, SPP 280, or LEGAL 250

LEGAL 266 – Rights, Liberties and the American Constitution
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Rebecca Hamlin

This course examines the critical role that the Supreme Court has played in shaping the landscape of rights and liberties in the United States over time. We begin with a discussion about the power and potential of textual rights protections. Then, we examine the historic rise of an organizational structure that supported legal mobilization to protect individual rights in the United States, and learn about why certain rights were protected before others. Then, we will look thematically at the topics of: religious freedom, speech, guns, rights of the criminally accused, and gender and sexuality discrimination, reading and analyzing many of the Court's landmark decisions. We will close the semester by looking at some of the most recent constitutional controversies involving personal freedom.

HISTORY 397GV – Greenwich Village After WW2
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Alice Nash

Every generation says that Greenwich Village was better when they were young. This interdisciplinary course focuses on the Village during a time of rapid change in the United States, from the end of World War II to the 1970s. This takes us from the return of men and women in the armed forces to the GI Bill, the Cold War, Civil Rights, and protests against the Vietnam War. Topics include Bohemians, Beats, and beatniks; preservation and urban development; music, dance, fashion, sex, sexuality, and social justice movements.

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

Students hone skills necessary to write in the genres that STPEC majors encounter most often in the course of their academic and professional careers. Contact department for details.

SOCIOL 330 – Asian Americans and Inequalities
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Moon-Kie Jung

At least since the 1960s, sociology and the other social sciences have largely sidestepped questions of inequality in relation to Asian Americans, simplistically and indiscriminately positing them as a "model minority." This course examines various forms of social inequality between Asian Americans and other groups as well as among Asian Americans, including those based on race, gender, class, citizenship, and sexuality.

SOCIOL 395K – Domestic Violence
Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Maria Puppolo

This course looks at domestic, partner, and family violence as a social problem. Students will learn about the feminist social movement that brought domestic violence to national attention, how protections were codified into law, and the major critiques that have since arisen. Final project will combine your experiences in the community with what you learn in class, as you and a small group propose a potential intervention into the social problem of domestic violence.

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

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 692D – Feminists on Debt
Thursday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Laura Briggs

WGSS 693G/AFROAM 693G – Gender in the Civil Rights Movement
Thursday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Traci Parker

WGSS 693Q/WGSS 393Q – Our Biologies: Queer Feminist Research
Tuesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Angie Willey

Description coming soon.

WGSS 705 – Feminist Epistemologies and Interdisciplinary Methodologies
Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Cameron Awkward-Rich

AFROAM 591G – Black Ecologies
Wednesday 12:00-2:30 p.m.
Britt Rusert

This seminar roots ecological catastrophe in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. We will read a number of works that illuminate the specific relationship between environmental degradation and the world that slavery made. We will be also interested in tracing how race, gender, and poverty are being mobilized as weapons of dispossession and extraction on the frontiers of capitalist exploitation today. Other topics will include: ecological thought in black critical theory; alternative models of sustainability and stewardship; black eco-poetics and climate fiction; environmental justice movements; new solidarities in climate activism. Readings will draw from a range of fields, including black critical theory; feminist, queer, and trans studies; disability studies; literary studies; and diaspora studies.

COMP-LIT 697G – Sex, Gender, and Identity in the Middle Ages
Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Daniel Armenti

See department for description

ENGLISH 891TR - Transnational Rhetorical Studies: Unraveling the Rhetorics of Empire, Political Economy, and Transglobal Relationships
Tuesday 10:00-12:30 p.m.
Rebecca Dingo

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to transnational studies in rhetoric. In doing so we look to the critical projects of transnational, feminist, postcolonial, international political economy studies to consider how they have served as a precursor to transnational rhetorical approaches. As a class we will consider how empires, economies, and transglobal relationships thrive through historical grammars and rhetorics. We will address how global capitalism, austerity politics, and the economic, social, and political conditions of contemporary neoliberalism, neocolonialism and neo-imperialism are supported by gendered, raced, and classed rhetorical patterns. Toward that end we will consider: What rhetorical frameworks and narratives of nation, empire, and economy underlie laws, policies, literatures, and media and shape processes of cultural and legal recognition and delimit public responses to violence and injustice? How do various rhetorics activate cultural and transnational narratives and social and political relations? And what might rhetorical methods and intervention—various means of disrupting, challenging, re-shaping these rhetorics and their material and cultural effects—look like in response to current transnational crises? Books will be available via e-campus and Amherst Books.

FILM-ST 697FF/SPANISH 697FF – Gender, Film, Theory and Practice
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Barbara Zecchi

See department for description.

HISTORY 791PG – History of Social Policy, Politics of Gender
Tuesday 11:30-2:00 p.m.
Libby Sharrow

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

UWW Winter / Spring

UWW WINTER/SPRING

Online Winter and Spring

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

WINTER 2023

COMM 288 – Gender, Sex and Representation
Sut Jhally

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

ENGLISH 121 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture
Mitia Nath

SOCIOL 287 – Sexuality and Society
Skylar Davidson

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

GERMAN 270 – From Grimms to Dianey
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. ALDG).

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

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

HISTORY 190S – Sex in History – A Global History of the Modern World
Tanya Pearson

This course will survey topics in the global history of sex and sexuality from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. We will explore continuities and changes in the definitions of sex and sexualities, the science and politics of sex and reproduction, the relationships between sex, sexuality, and imperialism, the sexual construction of social and cultural differences in different countries, changing portrayals of sex and sexuality by the state and by the media, social and legal activism with regard to issues of sex and sexuality, and the value of using sex and sexuality as a historical framework for issues in social, cultural, and political history. No prerequisites. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)

LEGAL 397R – Gender, Law and Politics
Chris Bailey

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.

SPRING 2023

WGSS 275 – Literature and Social Justice: Gender, Race, and the Radical Imagination
Jude Hayward-Jansen

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture

FILM-ST 353 – African Film
Patrick Mensah

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)

POLISCI 395f – Women and Politics
Sarah Tanzi

Women have made tremendous gains in every aspect of social, economic and political life in the United States, particularly since the second wave of the women's movement in the 1960s. Yet, women's progress in terms of achieving elected office has reached a puzzling plateau since the 1990s. We will examine the course of women's movements towards achieving political incorporation in the United States. We consider the debate over why women's political progress has stagnated and we consider the impact of the gender imbalance in American electoral politics - to what extent do these disparities matter? We begin by exploring women's suffrage campaigns and voting behavior in the period immediately following their achievement of the right to vote and beyond. We then turn to the relationship between women and party politics before discussing the challenges women face as candidates in American politics. We will focus on understanding why women remain underrepresented as legislators. We then consider the extent to which women's participation in campaigns and elections makes a substantive difference in policy making.

PSYCH 391MC – Multicultural Psychology: Intersections of Race, Class and Gender
Alexandrea Craft

This course explores intersections of race, class and gender within families, and attends to the ways in which families are differently impacted by identity, privilege and social marginalization. This course will also explore how different racial, social class or gender identities may impact therapy or clinical practice.

PUBHLTH 372 – Maternal and Child Health
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
Tuesday/Thursday 10:00-11:20 a.m.
Katrina Karkazis

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 209 - Feminism in Science and Medicine
Tuesday/Thursday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Katrina Karkazis

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

SWAG 243/AMST 240/EDST-240 - Rethinking Pocahontas
Tuesday/Thursday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Kiara M. Vigil

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

SWAG 252/HIST 252 – History of Race and Gender in Comics
Wednesday/Friday 12:30-1:50 p.m.
Christine N. Peralta
What can we learn about MLK and Malcolm X and from Magneto and Professor X? What can we learn about gendered and racialized depictions within comic books? As a catalyst to encourage looking at history from different vantage points, we will put comic books in conversation with the history of race and empire in the United States. Sometimes we will read comic books as primary sources and products of a particular historical moment, and other times we will be reading them as powerful and yet imperfect critiques of imperialism and racial inequality in U.S. history. Besides comic books, this course uses a wide range of material including academic texts, traditional primary source documents, and multi-media sources.

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

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

SWAG 294/BLST 294/EUST 294 - Black Europe
Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50 p.m.
Khary O. 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 309/BRUS 308/FAMS 308 - Writing Together
Saturday 7:00-9:30 p.m.
Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50 p.m.
Amelie E. Hastie

As an artistic and industrial form, film depends on acts of collaboration. Such acts take place at the level of production, whether on a Hollywood lot that might employ hundreds if not thousands of people to make a single film or in an independent artisan’s work in which one primary maker works with the subjects she films. Collaboration is also necessary in the exhibition of films: across the expanses between widescale distribution at multiplexes around the world, art-house and repertory cinemas, and small-scale screenings at galleries or colleges. And then, of course, film invites a response from its viewers; in the words of Modernist novelist and film critic Dorothy Richardson, viewers and films “cooperate” with one another. Drawing on these intrinsic facets of film, this seminar will link film to feminist action, which is itself dependent on collective action. Specifically, we will explore what happens when we link film and feminism historically, analytically, and, for the purposes of our class, through the act of writing.

SWAG 324/GERM 324 - Literature after Fascism: 1945 to 1989
Tuesday/Thursday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Jonas Rosenbrueck

Can there be literature “after Auschwitz”? This class investigates how German literature attempts to come to terms with the atrocities committed under National Socialism and produce a new understanding of German identity after 1945. If Nazi politics centered on a “purification” of the German nation along racial, sexual, and gendered lines, we will then ask how post-war Germany reworked notions of racialization, gender, and nationhood to overcome fascist legacies. How did literary works contribute to the construction of a post-fascist nation and its transition to a liberal democratic state? To answer this, we will explore the various ways in which German-language authors after 1945 articulated new notions of “Germanness,” masculinity and femininity, as well as normative and non-normative sexualities. Throughout, our focus will be on the possibilities and limits of literature in participating in these processes. Literary works may include texts by Wolfgang Koeppen, Günter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Anna Seghers, Christa Wolf, Gerhard Fritsch, and Thomas Bernhard. In addition to literary and historical research, writers of critical theory, political philosophy, and psychoanalysis will help us think through fascism and its aftermath, in particular Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Klaus Theweleit, and Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. Small-group work and frequent writing exercises will allow students to develop their oral and written fluency in German. Conducted in German.

SWAG 342/FREN 342 - Women of Ill Repute
Tuesday/Thursday 10:00-11:20 a.m.
Laure A. Katsaros

Prostitutes play a central role in nineteenth-century French fiction, especially of the realistic and naturalistic kind. Both widely available and largely visible in nineteenth-century France, prostitutes inspired many negative stereotypes. But, as the very product of the culture that marginalized her, the prostitute offered an ideal vehicle for writers to criticize the hypocrisy of bourgeois mores. The socially stratified world of prostitutes, ranging from low-ranking sex workers to high-class courtesans, presents a fascinating microcosm of French society as a whole. We will read selections from Honoré de Balzac, Splendeur et misère des courtisanes; Victor Hugo, Les Misérables; and Gustave Flaubert, L’éducation sentimentale; as well as Boule-de-Suif and other stories by Guy de Maupassant; La fille Elisa by Edmond de Goncourt; Nana by Emile Zola; Marthe by Joris-Karl Huysmans; La dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils; and extracts from Du côté de chez Swann by Marcel Proust. Additional readings will be drawn from the fields of history (Alain Corbin, Michelle Perrot) and critical theory (Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva). We will also discuss visual representations of prostitutes in nineteenth-century French art (Gavarni, Daumier, C. Guys, Degas, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec). Conducted in French.

SWAG 347/BLST 347 - Race, Sex & US Military
Tuesday/Thursday 2:30-3:50 p.m.
Khary O. 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 348/HIST 348 – History of Asian American Women
Monday 2:00-4:45 p.m.
Christine N. Peralta

This seminar will explore the intersections of gender, migration, and labor, with a particular focus on Asian American women in the United States (broadly defined to include the U.S.’s territories and military bases), from 1870 to the present. Through transnational and woman-of color feminist lenses, we will investigate U.S. colonial and neo-colonial formations which disrupt local economies, compelling women to migrate from their homes across national borders and then channeling them into limited employment opportunities in some of the most exploitative industries in the United States, including manufacturing, agricultural, and domestic work. Students will do close analysis of historical evidence, including written documents, images, film, and newspapers. There will also be intensive in-class discussion and varying forms of written work, which will culminate in a final research paper on a topic chosen by the student.

SWAG 365/ENGL 372 - Reading the Romance
Tuesday 1:00-3:45 p.m.
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 377/HIST 376 – Sex, Gender, Body in South Asia
Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50 p.m.
Mekhola S. Gomes

This course explores how categories of sex, gender, and the body have been configured in South Asian history. We will draw upon primary sources including texts, images, films, and documentaries. We will also read scholarly literature that explores South Asian history through the analytics of sex, gender, and body. We will begin by exploring gender in early South Asian history through poetry in translation as well as selections from epic texts, including sections of the K?mas?tra that may be widely known but are rarely analyzed within their original historical and courtly contexts in South Asia. Through these poetic and literary texts, we will explore notions of pleasure, love, and intimacy, analyze the intersections between imperialism, sexuality, gendered bodies and colonial rule, and critically examine colonial debates and legal regimes around “widow burning” or sati in colonial South Asia. Finally, we will examine connections between masculinity and the operation of exclusionary nationalisms through the policing of bodies, agency, and love in contemporary South Asia. Throughout, we will pay attention to how social, political, and ethical formations have interacted with gendered bodies and selves in South Asian history.

SOCI 308/AMST-308/EDST-308 - Gender and Education
Tuesday/Thursday 10:00-11:20 a.m.
Kristen V. 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.

LJST 132/SWAG 132 - Legal Science Fiction
Monday/Wednesday 8:30-9:50 a.m.
Michaela J. Brangan

Science fiction conjures novel social arrangements in which questions of law inevitably emerge. Is a very smart robot just property? How should space be governed? If we can predict future crimes, can we punish future “criminals”? The answers to these questions are rooted in theories of what makes “the good society” and prompt us to think about how our own laws function with, against, or under the influence of scientific inquiry. In this course, we will consider how the speculative imagination approaches topics like civil rights, criminal law, labor, reproduction, corporate regulation, privacy, and property, analyzing science fiction texts and films alongside legal cases and theories of justice. Today, we regularly encounter legal conundrums that once seemed futuristic. Genetic engineering threatens the traditional framework of equality that provides the basis of rights. Algorithms, once thought to be a way to resolve race and gender biases, instead encode these biases into our everyday lives. How we order and improve human life is always a matter of legal concern, but regulation is often seen as anathema to technological progress. Why is this the case? Can this tension be resolved?

LJST 260 - Feminist Legal Theory
Tuesday/Thursday 8:30-9:50 a.m.
Nica M. Siegel

In the twentieth century, American feminist movements made significant strides in securing suffrage, formal equality under the law, reproductive justice, and the possibility of economic independence through paid labor. And yet, the entry of (some) women into the public sphere has only intensified the urgency of a series of underlying questions: Is it desirable to demand legal transformations in the name of the identity “woman,” and if so, how should we incorporate considerations of gender and queerness, class, race, ability, and nationality? What is the relation between the formal emancipation of some women and intensified forms of domination of other women, for example, in the sphere of care work? What are the histories, logics, and political economies of these relations? What is the family, what is its relationship to reproduction, and how should its legal attachments, obligations, and relationships be understood from a feminist perspective? How did individual choice become the privileged legal mechanism for feminist forms of freedom and what is the status of choice today? We will aim to develop our understanding of these distinct but deeply linked questions of feminist thinking and methodology, with an emphasis on American writers and their postcololonial and anti-racist critics, and to appreciate conflicting points of view and longer histories within these debates.

Hampshire

CSI 178 – Queer Feelings: The Affectiveness Politics Race, Feminism and Queerness
Monday, Wednesday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Stephen Dillon

In the last decade, queer scholars have turned away from the study of identity and textuality to consider the role of affect and emotion in the production, circulation, and regulation of sexuality, race, and gender. This course examines a new body of work in queer studies, feminist studies, and sexuality studies that explores emotion and affect as central to the operation of social, political, and economic power. Topics will include mental illness, hormones, happiness, sex, trauma, labor, identity, and social movements, among others. Students will work to consider how emotions and affect are connected to larger systems of power like capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, terrorism and war, the prison, the media, and medicine.

CSI 234 – How we get free: Feminism for Another World
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:50 p.m.
Stephen Dillon

This course examines how feminist activists, theorists, artists, and writers have imagined freedom within the interlocking systems of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, settler-colonialism, and U.S. empire. By thinking across creative forms like poetry, essay, dance, visual art, political organizing, sculpture, photography, film, and music the course explores how form shapes imagination and how imagination shapes the possibilities for creating a different world.

CSI 259 – Feminists of Color Solidarities
Monday 1:00-3:50 p.m.
Lili Kim

In the wake of COVID-19 pandemic that laid bare the inequalities of our society and the public execution of George Floyd and other Black Americans, as well as the pandemic anti-Asian American violence, meaningful social and political alliances between communities of color have never been so critically important. This course examines the history of feminists of color solidarities and activisms in their shared fight against racism, sexism, capitalism, and imperialism. The emergence of the U.S. Third World Feminist Left during the 1960s and 1970s saw ending imperialism and colonialism as a necessary part of their fight, and the feminists of color drew inspiration from Third World feminism and decolonization activities. The images of revolutionary Third World women engaged in anti-colonial struggles in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, especially during the Vietnam War era, inspired U.S.-based feminists of color and helped them embrace leftist Third World solidarity politics. Organizations such as the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) in New York city, which grew out of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), brought together Black, Puerto Rican, and Asian American women in the socialist fight to end imperialism, sexism, capitalism, and racism. Utilizing the rich archival sources found in the Sophia Smith Collection (TWWA records, Miriam Ching Yoon Louie papers, National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum papers) as well as the Triple Jeopardy newspapers found in the Marshall I. Bloom papers at the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, students will have an opportunity to work to produce a substantial research project.

CSI 315 – Ecofeminism
Tuesday, Thursday 10:30-11:50 a.m.
Malgorzata Grebowicz

Ecofeminism begins from the assumption that the environmental crisis and patriarchy are inextricably linked and must be studied and addressed together. This course introduces students to the classic arguments in ecofeminism. We will study its roots in feminist critiques of colonialism and development, as well as feminist critiques of the natural sciences and technoscience. We will discuss meat-eating, pet-keeping, having children, among other practices, and the role of patriarchy in the environmental movement and conservation. We will also consider arguments in queer ecology, to determine where queer and feminist ecologies are in agreement, and where they are at odds.

CSI 275 – Hopes and Fears: Religion, Gender, and Possessions from the Middle Ages to the Pilgrims
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:50 p.m.
James Wald

What can the hopes and fears of a given society tell us about it and ourselves? Did the gravest "sins" in old Europe and the North American colonies involve food, money, or sex? Among the hallmarks of modernity were the rise of new social formations (classes) and the commercialization of daily activities and relations. Did traditional institutions and belief systems hamper or facilitate the changes? What roles did religious and national contexts play? Did the increase in the sheer number of "things" change the way people thought? What changes did the family and private life undergo? At the heart of the course is the concept of culture as a process through which individuals and groups struggle to shape and make sense of their social institutions and daily lives.

HACU 214 – Queer Dance: Theory and Practice
Tuesday, Thursday 10:30-11:50 p.m.
Lailye Weidman

In her book, Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, Clare Croft proposes queer dance as a space of radical difference, where multiple identities, subjectivities, and politics collide, propelling artists and audiences into world-making action. This course will begin with Croft's text and expand into other creative and scholarly frameworks for considering the power and potential of queer dance. Rather than treating "queer" as a monolith, we will examine queer dance through various and intersectional lenses, centering queer artists of color, disabled artists, and trans and gender non-conforming artists as those who have defined and moved forward notions of queerness through dance. In addition to readings, we will engage with dance performances both live and on video. And, we will dance, move, and create choreography in dialogue with class materials and our group conversations. This course emphasizes the relationship between theory and practice as a key place for creating one's own queer methodologies. All levels of experience and identities welcome.

IA 210 – Geographies of Desire: Queer and Feminist Narratives of the South
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:50 p.m.
Faune Albert

The US South is both a geographical region and an imaginative construct-a landscape, as Patricia Yaeger writes, of 'dirt and desire.' Southern narratives reveal an obsession with bodies, with racial and gender politics, and with what Yaeger calls the 'unthought known.' In this course, we'll explore a diverse array of queer and feminist Southern narratives from the mid-twentieth century through the present. Considering these narratives within the South's long legacy of slavery and segregation, we'll examine what they show us about the complex intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the US South and the nation more broadly. In doing so, we'll interrogate the ways in which voices from the margins of the South have used writing and creative practice as a way of locating themselves within this space and history, bringing to light both the 'monstrous intimacies' and radical forms of connectedness that have long existed in the South, and imagining new ways of being and belonging.

Mt. Holyoke

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

This is a class about doing research as a feminist. We will explore questions such as: What makes feminist research feminist? What makes it research? What are the proper objects of feminist research? Who can do feminist research? What can feminist research do? Are there feminist ways of doing research? Why and how do the stories we tell in our research matter? Some of the key issues and themes we will address include: accountability, location, citational practices and politics, identifying stakes and stakeholders, intersectionality, inter/disciplinarity, choosing and describing our topics and methods, and research as storytelling. The class will be writing intensive and will culminate in each student producing a research portfolio.

GNDST 204FT - Feminist, Queer, Trans Disability Studies
Monday, Wednesday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Niamh Timmons

This course introduces Disability Studies concepts and discussion from a feminist, queer, and trans perspectives, specifically centering on Black, Indigenous, People of Color disabled people. Through this, we'll see the differences in disabled communities, the tensions within the field, and learn to center the most marginalized. Here, the focus is on scholarship, activism, and arts that center disabled people, their histories, struggles, and dreams. We'll also discuss the differences between the Disability Rights and Disability Justice movements and how they represent the demands and needs of disabled communities.

GNDST 204QT/ENGL 219QT - Queer and Trans Writing
Tuesday, Thursday 10:30-11:45 a.m.
Andrea Lawlor

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

GNDST 204RP/LATST 250RP/CST 249RP - Race, Racism, and Power
Tuesday, Thursday 10:30-11:45 a.m.
Vanessa Rosa

This course analyzes the concepts of race and racism from an interdisciplinary perspective, with focus on Latinas/os/x in the United States. It explores the sociocultural, political, economic, and historical forces that interact with each other in the production of racial categories. We will focus on structural, systemic, and institutional racism and processes of racialization. The course examines racial inequality from a historical perspective and investigates how racial categories evolve and form across contexts. The analysis that develops will ultimately allow us to think rigorously about social inequality, transformation, and liberation.

GNDST 204RV - Perspectives on Revolutionary Parenting
Monday, Wednesday 3:15-4:30 p.m.
Niamh Timmons

In this space, we center the radical potentials of mothering/parenting alongside reproductive justice. We'll discuss how mothering/parenting operates in relation to the state, medical structures, borders, and other apparatuses. This course also considers what practices make mothering/parenting and reproductive justice as a space of potential liberation. What and who constitutes a mother/parent? How can the practice of parenting and reproductive justice be a liberatory practice? We'll look at texts such as Revolutionary Mothering and the history of community mothering spaces such as STAR House.

GNDST 204SJ/ARTST 280SJ - Art, Public Space, and Social Justice Activism
Monday, Wednesday 1:45-3:00 p.m.
Sandra Russell

What are some ways that art can disrupt oppressive structures of power? This course explores the ways in which contemporary artists centuries have responded to the call for political change and social justice, particularly with regards to issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability. Drawing from interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives, we will examine the role of visual and performance art within public spaces in shaping and furthering social movements and protest. Some possible themes and issues include public memory, artistic citizenship, counterpublics, "material" and "immaterial" artistic forms, and the collective impact of art activism on the social imagination.

GNDST 206US/HIST 276/CST 249US - U.S. Women's History since 1890
Tuesday, Thursday 10:30-11:45 a.m.
Mary Renda

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

GNDST 210SL/RELIG 207 - Women and Gender in Islam
Monday, Wednesday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Amina Steinfels

This course will examine a range of ways in which Islam has constructed women--and women have constructed Islam. We will study concepts of gender as they are reflected in classical Islamic texts, as well as different aspects of the social, economic, political, and ritual lives of women in various Islamic societies.

GNDST 333CF/CST-349CF - Free Them All: Abolition Feminism and Anticarceral Action Research
Thursday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Ren-yo Hwang

This course will center the activism, theories and praxis of abolition feminism. We will collectively study how interpersonal violence (gender, racial, sexual, ableist) is intertwined with state violence (from domestic policing to militarism abroad). Through investigating the legal history of the criminalization of survivors alongside mainstream antiviolence research and statistics, we will challenge the use of criminological binaries such as victim/perpetrator and violent/nonviolent. Partnering with coalitions like Survived and Punished National, this course is structured by a series of anti-carceral action research projects such as contributing to active survivor defense campaigns.

GNDST 333EM/CST 349EM - Flesh and Blood: Naturecultural Embodiments
Tuesday, Thursday 1:45-3:00 p.m.
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 333GS/PSYCH-319GS - Gender and Sexual Minority Health
Wednesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Corey Flanders

This course is a critical overview and investigation of health as it relates to the experiences of gender and sexual minority people. We will begin with exploring theoretical understandings of health and marginalization, and use those as frameworks to examine various domains of health. Areas of interest will include mental health, sexual and reproductive health, substance use, disability, and issues related to body size and image. We will end by looking at other structural issues that affect gender and sexual minority health, such as access to care, health education, and health policy.

GNDST 333MC/LATST-350MC/CST-349MC - Latinas/os/x and Housing: Mi Casa Is Not Su Casa
Tuesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Vanessa Rosa

Housing is closely tied to quality of life and the health of neighborhoods and communities. As a main goal of the "American Dream," homeownership has important significance on an individual and societal level. For immigrants, this goal is often out of reach as a result of racism and discriminatory housing policies. This interdisciplinary seminar explores Latinas/os/x relationship to housing and homeownership by examining the history of exclusionary housing policies in the United States. By exploring a range of topics (affordability, ownership, gentrification, etc), we will develop a sharper understanding of why housing is one of the most pressing issues for Latinas/os/x today.

GNDST 333PG/ANTHR 316PG - Who's Involved?: Participatory Governance, Emerging Technologies and Feminism
Tuesday, Thursday 9:00-10:15 a.m.
Jacquelyne Luce

Deep brain stimulation, genome sequencing, regenerative medicine...Exploring practices of 'participatory governance' of emerging technologies, we will examine the formal and informal involvement of citizens, patients, health professionals, scientists and policy makers. What initiatives exist at local, national and transnational levels to foster science literacy? How do lived experiences of nationality, ability, class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality become visible and/or disappear within constructed frameworks of participatory governance? How can feminist ethnographic research and feminist theory contribute to a larger project of democratizing knowledge production and governance?

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

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

GNDST 333SE/AFCNA 341SE/CST 349SE - Black Sexual Economies
Tuesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Sarah Stefana 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.

GNDST 333UU/LATST 360/CST 349UU - Latina/o Immigration
Monday, Wednesday 1:45-3:00 p.m.
David Hernandez

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

GNDST 333VV/FMT-330EX - Women Experimental Filmmakers
Thursday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Robin Blaetz

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

Smith

SWG 238 - Women, Money and Transnational Social Movements
Wednesday/Friday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Ana Del Conde

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

SWG 241 - White Supremacy in the Age of Trump
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Loretta 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 267 - Queer Ecologies: Considering the Nature of Sexualized Identities
Tuesday/Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Evangeline Heiliger

What is learned by reading Queer Ecologies alongside Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood? What does Over the Hedge have to do with environmental racism (Hamilton)? In short, these texts ask us to consider what it means to have a racialized and sexualized identity shaped by relationships with environments. We will ask: How is nature gendered and sexualized? Why? How are analytics of power mobilized around, or in opposition to, nature? We will investigate the discursive and practical connections made between marginalized peoples and nature, and chart the knowledge gained by queering our conceptions of nature and the natural.

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

Grounding our work in the current scholarship in lesbian history, this course explores lesbian, queer and bisexual communities, cultures and activism. While becoming familiar with the existing narratives about lesbian/queer lives, students are introduced to the method of oral history as a key documentation strategy in the production of lesbian history. How do we need to adapt our research methods, including oral history, in order to talk about lesbian/queer lives? Our texts include secondary literature on 20th-century lesbian cultures and communities, oral history theory and methodology, and primary sources from the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC). Students conduct, transcribe, edit and interpret their own interviews for their final project. The oral histories from this course are archived with the Documenting Lesbian Lives collection in the SSC.

SWG 271 - Reproductive Justice
Tuesday/Thursday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Loretta Ross

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 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Jennifer M. 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 300qt - Building Queer and Trans Lives
Thursday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Evangeline Heiliger

This seminar considers “building” as both metaphor and practice in queer and trans feminist epistemologies. What systems and institutions (e.g. white supremacy, settler colonialism, binary gender, ableism, late-stage capitalism, the carceral state) do queer and trans epistemologies slate for demolition or destruction? Should certain structures (e.g. medical, educational, political, scientific, housing) and relationships (e.g. platonic, romantic, sexual, caregiving, community) be repaired or renovated? What needs to be built from scratch, or salvaged from existing resources to ensure sustainable, accessible, non-violent, joyful modes of living? We draw on queer, trans, Black feminist, critical disability, and feminist science studies blueprints for world-building.

SWG 327 - Queer Theory
Wednesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Jennifer M. DeClue

This course brings together foundational and contemporary queer theoretical texts to discuss the history and production of sexuality and gender in the U.S. We will practice close reading canonical queer theoretical texts alongside scholarly interventions to the canon that emerge from queer of color critique, trans theory, and black queer studies. We will study the ways that queer theory, from these different vantage points, challenges norms of knowledge production, temporality, space, gender, and belonging.

AFR 360/ENG 323 - Toni Morrison
Tuesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Daphne M. 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.

AFS 222 - African Music, Gender and Sexuality
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Kuukuwa Andam

This course uses African Music as a tool to analyze gender and sexuality issues in Africa. It discusses relevant issues in gender and sexuality across the continent, using selected African songs which feature these issues as centralized themes. It also examines the lived experiences of African musicians, both historical and modern, as a means of discussing social norms on gender and sexuality and their subversion.

AMS 201 - Introduction to American Studies
Tuesday/Thursday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Christen Mucher, Evangeline Heiliger

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 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Pinky Hota

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.

CLS 233 - Gender and Sexuality in Greco-Roman Culture
Tuesday/Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Nancy J. Shumate

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

ECO 201 - Gender and Economics
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Lucie Schmidt

This course uses economic analysis to explore how gender differences can lead to differences in economic outcomes in households and the labor market. Questions to be covered include: How does the family function as an economic unit? How do individuals allocate time between the labor market and the household? How have changes in family structure affected women's employment, and vice-versa? What are possible explanations for gender differences in labor force participation, occupational choice, and earnings? What is the role of government in addressing gender issues in the home and the workplace? How successful are government policies that primarily affect women? Prerequisites: ECO 150.

ENG 219 - Poetry, Gender, and Sexuality, and the Limits of Privacy
Monday 1:40-2:55 p.m.
Wednesday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Melissa Parrish

This course focuses on the legacy of confessional poetry written by women and queer, trans and nonbinary writers in the US. Frequently misread as self-indulgent, the poets under our purview use radical self-disclosure to trouble the social and legal treatment of gender and sexuality as “private” concerns unworthy of political engagement. In so doing, they resist the universalized heteronormativity of the mainstream confessional tradition and contemporary poetry writ large. Poets studied include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Paul Monette, Essex Hemphill, Claudia Rankine, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Danez Smith.

ENG 278 - Asian American Women Writers
Wednesday/Friday 1:20-2:35 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 323/AFR 323 - Toni Morrison
Tuesday 1:20 4:00 p.m.
Daphne M. Lamothe

ENG 391 - Contemporary South Asian Writers in English
Tuesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Ambreen Hai

This course will explore the rich diversity of late 20th and 21st century literatures written in English and published internationally by award-winning writers of South Asian descent from the U.S, Canada, Britain, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. These transnational writers include established celebrities (Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai) and newer stars (Monica Ali, Aravind Adiga, Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie). Among many questions, we will consider how writers craft new idioms and forms to address multiple audiences in global English, how they explore or foreground emergent concerns of postcolonial societies and of diasporic, migrant, or transnational peoples in a rapidly globalizing but by no means equalizing world.

FRN 320 - Women Defamed, Women Defended
Monday/Wednesday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Eglal Doss-Quinby

What genres did women practice in the Middle Ages and in what way did they transform those genres for their own purposes? What access did women have to education and to the works of other writers, male and female? To what extent did women writers question the traditional gender roles of their society? How did they represent female characters in their works and what do their statements about authorship reveal about their understanding of themselves as writing women? What do we make of anonymous works written in the feminine voice? Readings include the love letters of Héloïse, the lais and fables of Marie de France, the songs of the trobairitz and women trouvères,and the writings of Christine de Pizan.

GOV 224 - Globalization From an Islamic Perspective
Wednesday/Friday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Bozena C. Welborne

This course explores the complex challenges facing Muslim-majority states when it comes to their political, economic, and social development in the 21st century. In particular, we will be exploring the various Islamically-inspired ideas ("isms") that have emerged with the onset of globalization; from Islanic feminism and Islamic environmentalism to political Islam and Islamic banking.

GOV 363 - Dissent: Disobedience, Resistance, Refusal and Exit
Tuesday 9:25- 12:05 p.m.
Erin R. Pineda

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. Prerequisite: coursework in political theory or equivalent.

HST 253 - Women and Gender in Contemporary Europe
Tuesday/Thursday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Darcy C. Buerkle

Women’s experience and constructions of gender in the commonly recognized major events of the 20th century. Introduction to major thinkers of the period through primary sources, documents and novels, as well as to the most significant categories in the growing secondary literature in 20th-century European history of women and gender.

HST 259fm - Topics in African History-Femininities, Masculinities and Sexualities in Africa
Wednesday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Monday 3:05-4:20 p.m.
Jeffrey S. Ahlman

This course examines the political, social and economic role of women, gender, and sexuality in African history, while paying particular attention to the ways in which a wide variety of Africans engaged, understood, and negotiated the multiple meanings of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality in the changing political and social landscapes associated with life in Africa. Key issues addressed in the course include marriage and respectability, colonial domesticity regimes, sex, and religion. Additionally, students interrogate the diversity of methodological techniques scholars have employed in their attempts to write African gender history.

HST 267 - United States, 1877-1945: Race, Capitalism, Justice
Wednesday/Friday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Jennifer Mary Guglielmo

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 286 - Recent Historiographic Debates in the History of Gender and Sexuality
Wednesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Darcy C. Buerkle

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

HST 383dw - Topics-Research in U.S. Women's History-Domestic Worker Organizing
Tuesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Jennifer Mary 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. Recommended: previous course in U.S. women’s history and/or relevant coursework in HST, SWG, AFR, SOC or LAS.

PSY 265 - Political Psychology
Tuesday/Thursday | 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Lauren E. Duncan

This colloquium is concerned with the psychological processes underlying political phenomena. The course is divided into three sections: Leaders, Followers and Social Movements. In each of these sections, we examine how psychological factors influence political behavior, and how political acts affect individual psychology.

PSY 374 - Psychology of Political Activism
Tuesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Lauren E. Duncan

This seminar focuses on people’s motivations to participate in political activism, especially activism around social issues. Readings include theoretical and empirical work from political psychology paired with personal accounts of activists. We consider accounts of some large-scale liberal and conservative social movements in the United States. Students conduct an in-depth analysis of an activists oral history obtained from the Voices of Feminism archive of the Sophia Smith collection.

SAS 201 - Mother-Goddess-Wife-Whore: Female Sexuality and nationalism in South Asian Cinema
Wednesday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Monday 3:05-4:20 p.m.

This course examines the relationship between female sexuality and nationalism in South Asian cinema, focusing on the crucial role that gender plays in the formation of postcolonial national identities, both on screen and beyond. We will also consider diverse forms of cinematic resistance, especially the work of directors who challenge gender norms. We will look at films from Bollywood and from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and Afghanistan. We will also have guest-lectures by South Asian activists and filmmakers.

SOC 224 - Family and Society
Monday/Wednesday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Courtney Adams Bouthiller

This course examines social structures and meanings that shape contemporary family life. Students look at the ways that race, class and gender shape the ways that family is organized and experienced. Topics include the social construction of family, family care networks, parenthood, family policy, globalization and work.

SOC 253 - Sociology of Sexuality: Institutions, Identities and Cultures
Monday 3:05-4:20 p.m.
Wednesday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Nancy E. Whittier

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.

ENV 327 - Environmental Justice in an Urbanizing World
Monday 9:25-12:05 p.m.
Efadul Huq

This course will explore global environmental justice issues, debates, and policies in the context of an urbanizing world marked by race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, caste, class, and other lines of difference. We will draw from scholarship in urban studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, and other related fields to develop an appreciation of global environmental injustices and efforts to redress these injustices, whether through formal planning and policies, social movements, community organizing, or everyday environmentalism. We will cover environmental issues at multiple scales from around the world and explore the interrelatedness of themes. Prerequisite: ENV 101. Priority given to ENV majors. Enrollment limited to 12. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.