Spring 2024 Course Guide

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.

WGSS 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
B Aultman

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

WGSS 201 – Gender & Difference: Critical Analyses
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m. – Debadatta Chakraborty
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m. – Reyna Orellana

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

WGSS 205 – Feminist Health Politics
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
B Aultman

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

WGSS 240 – Introduction to Transgender Studies
Monday, Wednesday 2:30 3:45 p.m.
Cameron Awkward-Rich

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

WGSS 250 – Introduction to Sexuality Studies
Univ+ (online)
Nicole Leroux

This interdisciplinary course will help students to understand what the terms "sexuality studies" and "trans studies" mean, by providing a foundation in the key concepts, historical and social contexts, topics, and politics that inform the fields of sexuality studies, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, and queer studies. Course instruction will be carried out through readings, lectures, films, and discussions, as well as individual and group assignments. Over the course of the semester, students will develop and use critical thinking skills to discern how "sexuality" and "gender" become consolidated as distinct categories of analysis in the late nineteenth century, and what it means to speak about sexuality and transgender politics and categories today. Topics include queer theories and politics, trans theories and politics, LGBTQ social movements within and outside of the U.S., relationships with feminist reproductive justice movements, heterosexuality, gender norms, homophobia, and HIV/AIDS and health discourses. The range of materials covered will prioritize developing analyses that examine the interplay between sexuality and class, gender, race, ethnicity, and neoliberalism. (Gen. Ed. SB, DG)

WGSS 286 – History of Sexuality and Race in the U.S.
Monday, Wednesday 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Friday discussions
Kirsten Leng

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary feminist study of sexuality. Its primary goal is to provide a forum for students to consider the history of sexuality and race in the U.S. both in terms of theoretical frameworks within women's and gender studies, and in terms of a range of sites where those theoretical approaches become material, are negotiated, or are shifted. The course is a fully interdisciplinary innovation. It will emphasize the links rather than differences between theory and practice and between cultural, material, and historical approaches to the body, gender, and sexuality. Throughout the course we will consider contemporary sexual politics "from the science of sex and sexuality to marriage debates" in light of histories of racial and sexual formations. (Gen. Ed. HS, DU)

WGSS 291N – Critical Relationship Studies: Belonging Beyond the Family
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Angie Willey

Grounded in queer, feminist, and decolonial concerns with social belonging, this class begins from the critical insight that “the family” is neither an inevitable nor ideal way to organize our social worlds. The nuclear family has a history. The first half of the course considers "monogamy" from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. From histories of marriage to sciences of mating systems to politics of polyamory, we will explore monogamy's meanings and how its logics shape our worlds. In the second half of the class we will explore a broader world of relationality. Drawing on indigenous, multispecies, crip, and queer feminist insights, we will explore relating and belonging beyond the settler family. Over the course of the semester students will become familiar with debates about human nature and belonging and a variety of critical and creative approaches to reading and engaging them.

WGSS 392FT – Feminist, Theory, Technoscience
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Angie Willey

Note: This course counts towards the theory requirement for majors.

Feminist science studies is a rich and diverse radically interdisciplinary field with genealogies in science practice, history, social sciences, and philosophy. Science studies has been a vital resource to feminist, queer, critical race, postcolonial, and disability theory and has also been profoundly shaped and extended by work in these fields. We will explore the contemporary preoccupations and concerns of this exciting field by conducting a careful reading of a new open-source journal (2015-present) devoted to it. Catalyst: Feminism Theory Technoscience has for almost a decade now dedicated itself to radical re-imaginings of both science studies and science itself. As we read and explore these new directions, we will consider such questions as: What do we know? How do we know it? What counts as science? What knowledge systems have been excluded from the category? What and how do we know when we decenter the human? What might it look like to “queer” or “crip” science and feminist approaches to reading and making it? Students will build critical lenses and a robust vocabulary for understanding sciences, their critics, and the ways of knowing and wording these critical engagements enable.

WGSS 393A – Feminism and Social Justice Activism
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Laura Briggs

What are the problems that activists are try to solve? How do feminist, queer, and trans activists come to have such an outsized role in so many movements—from Black Lives Matter to prison abolition to climate justice, immigration, and indigenous land and water struggles? Why is this the case from Idle No More in Canada to Fees Must Fall in South Africa to the movement to overthrow the governor in Puerto Rico? This course will explore the issues in contemporary movements through histories, writings, and conversations with contemporary activists.

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

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

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

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

WGSS 494TI – Unthinking the Transnational
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Kiran Asher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 345 – Southern Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 5:30-6:45 p.m.
Elise Barnett

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

ANTHRO 391N – Gender, Nation and Body Politics
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Amanda Johnson

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

CLASSICS 335 – Women in Antiquity
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:25-2:15 p.m.
Lauren Caldwell

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

COMP-LIT 470/670 – Medeival Women Writers
Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Jessica Barr

This course explores the rich world of writing by women in the Middle Ages from the point of view of current theoretical perspectives. Writers include Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Jah?n-Malek K?tun, Hildegard of Bingen, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and others. We will discuss themes including love and desire in women?s writing; representations of women in medieval literature and philosophy; gendered representations of sanctity; and critical approaches derived from feminist theory.

ECON 343 – Economics of Gender, Race 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.
Open to students with STPEC, ECON, RES-ECON, or MGRECON as their primary major.
Prerequisite: ECON 103 or RES-ECON 102 The prerequisite for the course is Introduction to Microeconomics (Economics 103 or Resource Economics 102). Prior knowledge of statistics and/or econometrics is helpful for the course as a large portion of the relevant literature we will be discussing is empirical in nature. Open only to ECON/ STPEC/ RES-ECON/MGRECON primary majors until after juniors enroll, then open to all on November 13.

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature, and Culture
Section 1 – Tuesday, Thursday 10:15 a.m. Sarah Ahmad
Section 2 – Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:10-11:00 a.m. Jarrel De Matas
Section 2 – Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:15 – 112:05 p.m. Thakshala Tissera
Section 4 – Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m. Rowshan Chowdhury

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 357 – Women and Revolutions
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 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 the theories and practices of revolutionary movements? We will consult diverse sources to understand the experiences and dreams of radical women. Historical case studies from Latin America will be our main focus. These histories offer critical lessons that can inform our present-day struggles to get free.

HISTORY 378J – Social Justice Lawyering
Thursday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Jennifer Nye

Audre Lorde famously said that ?the master?s tools will never dismantle the master?s house,? and yet social justice movements and marginalized people continue to turn to the law to advance their social justice goals. From fighting Jim Crow segregation to challenging the Muslim travel ban and the separation of refuge children at the border, litigation and judicial review have 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. Students will also be provided an opportunity to attend the Rebellious Lawyering Conference at Yale Law School, the largest student run public interest law conference in the country. https://reblaw.yale.edu/
Open to Seniors, Juniors & Sophomores only.

HISTORY 378R – History of Reproductive Rights Law
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Jennifer Nye

This course will explore the history and development of reproductive rights law in the 20th and 21st century United States, centering primarily on 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 and justice issues, including forced/coerced 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, especially based on age, class, race, sexual orientation, relationship status, immigration status, and ability. We also will examine the role lawyers have historically played in advancing (or constraining) the goals of the reproductive rights and justice movement(s) and will explore the effectiveness of litigation as a strategy to secure these rights. Finally, we will explore the relationship between reproductive rights and reproductive justice and consider whether reproductive justice can be obtained through advocating for reproductive rights. Open to Seniors, Juniors & Sophomores only. Prior law related coursework helpful, but not required.

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

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

JOURNAL 390G – Reporting About Gender and Sexuality
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Kelsey Whipple

This concepts and critical thinking course examines the relationship between journalism, gender and sexuality in newsrooms, news coverage and news audiences, with attention to both historical developments and modern issues. Students will analyze how news and popular media construct, depict and reinforce gender and sexuality, particularly in relation to race, class and privilege, with the help of historical artifacts, news coverage, nonfiction books, popular media clips, first-person experts and feminist, queer, political and communication theories. In doing so, we will dive into modern and recurring issues of masculinity, femininity, patriarchy, misogyny and other dimensions of identity and power with a focus on the potential for transformation in media interpretations and depictions of these critical issues. Together, we will interpret and question predominant cultural understandings of gender and sexuality and think creatively about how journalism might be applied to challenge conventional understandings of what it means to be female or male, straight or queer.

JUDAIC 383 – Women, Gender, Judaism
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Susan Shapiro

Historically, the figure of the "Jew" has been thought of as male. Making male experience normative has in turn shaped how Judaism itself has been understood. Shifting the basic terms and focus to include attention to women, gender, and sexuality significantly re-shapes our understanding of both Judaism and of Jewish culture/history. This course not only "fills in the blanks" of the missing women of Jewish history and tradition, but attends to questions of contemporary forms of Jewish women's and men's gendered lives, identities and sexualities. Beginning with the Bible, the course proceeds historically, concluding with contemporary views of and debates surrounding matters of gender and sexuality.

LABOR 201 – Women and Work
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 a.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)

LEGAL 357 – Gender, Law, and Politics
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Chris Bailey

Public policies are not gender-neutral, and thus political actors play a crucial role in shaping gender relations in ways that produce and reproduce inequalities between genders. This course explores legal constructions of gender by introducing case law, federal legislation, and scholarly essays concerning sexual inequality in the United States. Special attention will be paid to grassroots movements, particularly those surrounding suffrage, political participation, 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, education, 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.

LEGAL 378/HISTORY 378 – Sex & the Supreme Court
Tuesday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Jennifer Nye

This course focuses on the U.S. Supreme Court and its rulings regarding sex and sexuality. We will examine several hot button issues confronted by the Supreme Court, 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. Some questions we will consider include: What is the constitutionality of government regulation of sexual behavior, sexual material, reproduction, and sexuality 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? In ruling on these issues, is the Court interested in liberty, equality, privacy, dignity, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or something else? We will consider how the Court and advocates framed these issues, used or misused historical and scientific evidence, and how the argument and/or evidence changed depending on the audience (i.e. the Court or the general public).

MIDEAST 233 – Sex, Bodies, and Gender in the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to the Present
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Malissa Taylor

An exploration of Middle Eastern views about sexuality, the body, and gender since the rise of Islam. The class examines these topics through social relations as well as medical and legal constructs. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)

PHIL 371 – Philosophical Perspectives on Gender
Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Eleonore Neufeld

This course will offer systematic examination of a variety of philosophical issues raised by the existence of gender roles in human society: Is the existence or content of such roles determined by nature? Are they inherently oppressive? How does the category gender interact with other socially significant categories, like race, class, and sexual orientation? What would gender equality look like? How do differences among women complicate attempts to generalize about gender? In the last part of the course, we will bring our theoretical insights to bear on some topical issue related to gender, chosen by the class, such as: Is affirmative action morally justifiable? Should pornography be regulated? Is abortion morally permissible? Reading will be drawn from historical and contemporary sources. Methods of analytical philosophy, particularly the construction and critical evaluation of arguments, will be emphasized throughout. (Gen.Ed. SB)

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

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

PSYCH 301DG – Disability Identity: Intersections of Race, Gender and Sexuality
Monday 4:00-6:30 p.m. - Online
Capria Berry

This course is designed to help students gain an understanding of disability through an intersectional lens. Disability justice, black disability politics, feminist, queer and crip theories will serve as some of the theoretical and epistemological underpinnings for the term. Disability with race, gender, and sexuality will be explored not only in theory, but in the lived experience on personal, cultural, and institutional levels.

PSYCH 391LB – Psychology of the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Experience
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
John Bickford

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

PUBHLTH 444 – Reproductive Justice
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Aline Gubrium

This course is designed to explore social scientific, feminist, and critical approaches to women?s reproductive health issues. We will place women’s health and reproduction in its broader socioeconomic and political contexts. We will explore the gendered, racialized, cultural, sexual, and classed dimensions of women’s reproductive health, with special attention to the long-term health effects of racism, poverty, and sexism.

SOCIOL 106 – Race, Gender, Class & Ethnicity
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:25-2:15 p.m. – C.N. Le
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.

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 1:00-2:15 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 492W – Spanish American Women Writers
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Jorge Sanchez

No description available.

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.

ART-HIST 388/688 – Special Topics in Asian Art
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Christine Ho

This course surveys the art of China's modern age, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century with the treaty port cultures following the second Opium War in 1860, and ending with the 2008 Olympics. Topics include urban print cultures, modern ink painting, Sino-Japanese exchanges, arts institutions, popular and mass culture, socialist state art, experimental art and exhibitions in the Reform era, and art of the diaspora. We consider recurring questions over definitions of the avant-garde, political participation and representation, modernity and tradition, nationalism and transnationalism, urbanization and globalization, and gender and identity. All readings in translation.

COMM 284 – Possible Futures: SciFi Cinema
Friday 10:10-1:10 p.m.
Kevin Anderson

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

COMM 338 – Children, Teens and Media
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Erica Scharrer

In this seminar, we will explore the role of media (television, Internet, video games, mobile media, film, etc.) in shaping the lives of children and teens. We will consider how much time children devote to various media, what they think about what they encounter through media, and the implications of media for children's lives. We will draw on social science research to examine a wide range of topics, including: depictions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in ads, programming, and other media forms; the role of media in the development of adolescent identity; media uses and effects in the realms of educational TV and apps, advertising and consumer culture, violence, and sex; and the possibilities of media literacy, parental rules and dialogue, and public policies to shape children's interactions with media. Open to Senior and Junior Communication majors only. Prerequisites: COMM 121 This course was formerly numbered COMM 397U: ST-Children, Teens and Media. If you have taken COMM 397U, you cannot take this course.

COMP-LIT – Comedy
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Rafael Freire

Comedy is ambivalent: it can serve as a tool to challenge the status quo (for instance, in the form of satire) but it can also reinforce existing power structures (for example, by making fun of marginalized groups). In this course, we will reflect precisely on comedy?s socio-political significance, by focusing on categories such as class, gender, and race, as well as on non-Anglophone literary traditions. Course materials may include a wide range of genres and media (plays, short stories, films, and videos). (Gen. Ed. AL)

COMP-LIT 348 – Labor & Working Class-Fiction
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Jacquelyn Southern

Most people work, and the meanings of their paid and unpaid work?as well as the social place of working people?have been extensively imagined and narrated in fiction and poetry. This course explores literature by, for, and about workers around the world?dating from early capitalism to the present, comparing workers? experience internationally, and ranging from the heroic age of proletarian literature to today?s critical, often pessimistic writing on class, the workplace, and postindustrial society. We will pay special attention to genres in which working-class themes and writers have been prominent (such as vernacular songs and poetry, the strike novel, and autobiographical writing), and will ask how the class experience is inflected through the lens of gender, nationality, race, and other markers of social difference. (Gen. Ed. AT, DG)

FILM-ST 345 – Cinema of the Lusophone World
Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Patricia Martinho Ferrerra

This course is designed as an introduction to Brazilian, Portuguese and Lusophone African cinemas and cultures. The selected films will afford students an opportunity to engage with film theory and criticism, and to examine a variety of topics such as the formation of national identity, gender and family dynamics, social inequalities, rural vs. urban societies, migration, civic agency, race relations, and major political and historical events that have impacted the contemporary societies of the Portuguese-speaking world (Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, and S?o Tome and Principe). Class will be conducted in English. The films will be shown in the original language with subtitles. Portuguese majors have the choice to complete their assignments in Portuguese.

GERMAN 275 – The Scientific Mind
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Sara Jackson

In thiscourse, taught in English, students will explore how the concept of the scientific mind develop in German sciences, literature, art, and philosophy from the eighteenth century to the present. By examining parallel and intersecting developments in cultural products and in the natural sciences, we will examine how knowledge was separated into different fields. Importantly, in doing so we will examine and discuss how socio-cultural and political value was assigned to different ways of thinking and different modes of production, and how those values have shaped the way we view ourselves and others, particularly in constructed categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and ability. This is an introductory course. There are no prerequisites, and no prior knowledge is required. (Gen. Ed. AL, DG)

HONORS 499DJ – Readings & Research in Disability
Monday, Wednesday 230-3:45 p.m.
Ashley Woodman

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

LABOR 203/SOCIOL 203 – Sports, Labor, and Social Justice
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Jerry Levinsky

Protests by professional and amateur athletes against racial and gender discrimination are not new or isolated events in U.S. history. In fact, sports have long been connected to the social, economic, and political issues of the day. With a particular focus on labor and civil rights struggle, our goal is to better understand the history of sports as it relates to social class, race, and gender. Students will analyze current controversies through this critical approach to sports and society.

LEGAL 266/POLISCI 763 – 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.

LEGAL 394FI – Family & The State
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Diane Curtis

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

PUBHLTH 389 – Health Inequities
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Linnea Evans

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

SOCIOL 290Z – Generation Z Culture
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Amy Schalet

Generation Z has been called the most progressive generation since the 1960s. This course takes an in-depth sociologically informed look at what makes the generation of young Americans born between 1997 and 2012 different from previous generations. We ask what Gen Z has in store for American society and culture, and for sociological theory. In Part I, we establish what sociologists mean by Gen Z and this generation?s culture. In Parts II, III, and IV, we consider the topics of gender and sexual justice, racial justice, and economic justice and democratic participation through the lens of Generation Z culture. For each one of these topics, we use sociology not only to drill down into the problems, but also to exercise our sociological and transformative imaginations to think of solutions. Come prepared to read deeply (this course uses original academic articles, and will teach you how to digest and use them) and talk honestly ? also to listen well, learn, and change!

SOCIOL 330 – Ascian 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.

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

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

SPANISH 424 – Latinx Popular Culture
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Stephanie Fetta

This course examines the mapping of race, gender, and sexuality onto Latinx bodies in popular culture. Working chronologically from the early 20th century to the present, we will examine popular depictions of Latinx people in television, film, music, and print culture. In particular, we will analyze how moral panic has been historically displaced onto Latinx bodies - from Carmen Miranda to Alicia Machado. We will also consider Latinx bodies as agents of resistance to normative discourses, such as those of purity, cleanliness, and religiosity. Course readings and viewing will range from popular culture texts to critical readings from feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory. Proficiency in written and spoken Spanish and English is required.

Graduate Certificate students can petition for courses to count with this Google Form.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UWW Winter/spring

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

WINTER

COMM 288 – Gender, Sex & 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
Sarah Ahmad

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

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

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

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

LEGAL 357 – Gender, Law, and Politics
Chris Bailey

Public policies are not gender-neutral, and thus political actors play a crucial role in shaping gender relations in ways that produce and reproduce inequalities between genders. This course explores legal constructions of gender by introducing case law, federal legislation, and scholarly essays concerning sexual inequality in the United States. Special attention will be paid to grassroots movements, particularly those surrounding suffrage, political participation, 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, education, 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.

PUBHLTH 340 – LGBTQ Health
Kelsey Jordan

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

SOCIOL 287 – Sexuality & 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)

UWW – Child Abuse and Neglect
Lisa Fontes

This interdisciplinary course explores the causes and effects of child abuse and neglect, prevention strategies, and ways to intervene with children, families and communities. The course draws on psychological, sociological, public health, feminist, legal, and criminal justice approaches. The course addresses child sexual abuse, physical abuse, child neglect, and psychological maltreatment. The course has a focus on ways to make child maltreatment services relevant to culturally diverse people within the United States.

SPRING

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

This interdisciplinary course will help students to understand what the terms "sexuality studies" and "trans studies" mean, by providing a foundation in the key concepts, historical and social contexts, topics, and politics that inform the fields of sexuality studies, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, and queer studies. Course instruction will be carried out through readings, lectures, films, and discussions, as well as individual and group assignments. Over the course of the semester, students will develop and use critical thinking skills to discern how "sexuality" and "gender" become consolidated as distinct categories of analysis in the late nineteenth century, and what it means to speak about sexuality and transgender politics and categories today. Topics include queer theories and politics, trans theories and politics, LGBTQ social movements within and outside of the U.S., relationships with feminist reproductive justice movements, heterosexuality, gender norms, homophobia, and HIV/AIDS and health discourses. The range of materials covered will prioritize developing analyses that examine the interplay between sexuality and class, gender, race, ethnicity, and neoliberalism. (Gen. Ed. SB, DG)

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature & Culture
Sally Luken

In this class, we will explore five fundamental theoretical concepts in the Humanities and apply them to a handful of 20th-21st century literary texts written by authors of color. These fundamental concepts include scholarship on Race, Gender, Disability, Class, and Culture itself. We will read core scholars such as Robert McRuer, Devon Carbado, Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, Jennifer Morgan, and Kevin Quashie. Each theoretical text will accompany a literary text including James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Lena Nsomeka-Gomes's 'When I Was A Little Girl,' Cameron Awkward-Rich's Sympathetic Little Monster, as well as a film, Paris Is Burning, and one episode from the television series Pose. The goal of this class is to take complex theoretical concepts and simplify them. In this spirit, the final assignment of the class is to create a digital collection of TikTok videos in which each student takes a theoretical concept and boils it down for a general audience. These videos will be created on a weekly basis wherein each student tackles a particular concept and posts their video on the Moodle. These TikToks then serve as asynchronous weekly material that assists students in their understanding of these difficult concepts. The two skills we work to develop in this class are close reading of dense theoretical texts, and then the ability to explain and describe complex ideas to others, outside of an academic context.

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.

SWAG 200 – Theories in Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:20 a.m.
Katrina Karkazis

This course provides an introduction to historical and contemporary intersectional and interdisciplinary feminist theory. We begin the course by first asking the questions: What is theory? Who gets to participate in theory building? How is feminist knowledge production influenced by power, privilege and geopolitics? We will explore the ways in which feminism is multi-vocal, non-linear, and influenced by multiple and shifting sites of feminist identities. This exploration includes the examination and analysis of local and global feminist thoughts on gender/sex, race, sexuality, disability, reproductive justice, colonialism, nationalism as they effect and shape social and economic forms of power and oppression. The emphasis of the course will remain focused on the theories produced by feminist, Black, queer, trans, indigenous, and transnational scholars, among others, to help explain and resist dominant or exploitative forms of power.

SWAG 209 / ANTH 209 / SOCI 207 – Intersectional Feminist Science Studies
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:50 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 227 / POSC 228 – Lovers and Friends: A Democratic Idea?
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:50 p.m.
Jared Loggins

In his 1955 Notes on a Native Son, James Baldwin framed his democratic obligation to the United States in romantic terms when he wrote that “because I love America more than any other country in the world, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Only two years later, soon after Martin Luther King Jr. had become the most public face of the Civil Rights Movement, he instructed his congregation that “love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” From Aristotle in the ancient world to Frederick Douglass and David Walker in the 19th century to W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Baldwin, King, and Audre Lorde in the 20th, politics is framed in terms of the love we owe each other. What has been the theoretical upshot of framing political obligation in terms of love and friendship? What has this framing obscured and mystified? Is love and friendship an important pre-requisite for democratic citizenship or a dangerous political fantasy? This course is about the contested terrain of love as a political metaphor. We will investigate love and its cognates—care, trust, friendship, betrayal, sacrifice, resentment, desire—as conceptual terms deployed throughout the late-19th and 20th centuries to frame contests over citizenship, political obligation and responsibility, futurity, and democratic practice more generally. We will ask questions such as: What is love and friendship’s object of desire as a way of thinking democratic politics? Is there such a thing as civic love and political friendship? When, if ever, is it appropriate to love political enemies? Can we trust strangers? Should the state love its citizens? Is politics a matter of desire? Should some political members be expected to sacrifice more than others? Can we care for others without loving or befriending them? Have we come to love or desire a vision of democracy that is actually a hindrance to our flourishing? This is a discussion-based course. High participation is a requirement and care will be taken to cultivate an environment in which students feel comfortable embarking on a shared journey of intellectual discovery. We will spend time in the course perfecting our ability to reason with each other by drawing on textual evidence to support our claims. There will be weekly reflection assignments as well as a final paper. Finally, this course will involve a practical component: students will be strongly encouraged to submit by the end of the semester a plan for how they might apply insights in the course to everyday life (political organizing, internships, volunteer work, etc.)

SWAG 243 / AMST 240 / EDST 240 – Rethinking Pocahontas: An Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:2 p.m.

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, Gender, and Comic Books
Wednesday, Friday 8:30-9:50 a.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 257 / BLST 257 / THDA 257 – Black and Queer Agency in World War II Military Performance
Monday, Wednesday 2:00-3:20 p.m.
Riley Caldwell-O’Keefe

This course provides an exploration of the African American and LGBTQ military experience during World War II. We will study WWII military theatrical performance, the racialized and gendered construction of “American” and military identities during this time, and racial segregation in the US military during WWII. We will deepen our understanding of this topic by looking closely at military servicemembers’ experiences such as the Black, queer, scholar-artist Owen Dodson who served in the Navy at Camp Robert Smalls, a segregated unit for Black sailors within Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois. His provocative and strategic theatrical productions by and for Black soldiers were designed to bring together the Black community through performance that provided a space of resistance, beauty, and agency. Our work together in this course will draw on interviews and other first-person accounts, scholarly texts and theory, poetry, literature, music, playscripts, and archival documents such as personal and official military correspondence. Students will learn or further develop archival research methodologies, deepen critical reading skills across textual genres, and individually or collaboratively engage in research on a topic relevant to Black or LGBTQ military servicemembers' agency during World War II.

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 Indian writer Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, and Caribbean author Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea.

SWAG 301 / BLST 301 – Queer of Color Critique: Theory and Practice
Tuesday 1:00-3:45 p.m.
Khary O. Polk

This interdisciplinary methods course explores the emergent field of Queer of Color Critique, a mode of analysis pioneered by LGBTQ people of color. Using theories and approaches from the discipline of performance studies, the explicit mission of the seminar is to acquaint students with the history, politics, art, and activism of queer and trans people of color while also strengthening student research skills in four overlapping areas: archival research, close-reading, performance analysis, and community engagement. Course activities include working in the Amherst College Frost Archives, the production of a performance piece, and structured engagement with contemporary LGBTQ activism in the Pioneer Valley and the larger world.

SWAG 307 / POSC 307 – States of Extraction: Nature, Women, and World Politics
Tuesday 1:00-3:45 p.m.
Manuela Picq

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

SWAG 309 – Writing Together: Film and Feminist Collectivity
Monday, Wednesday 2:00-3:30 p.m.
Amelie 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, arthouse 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. The subjects of our writing will be women-directed films. Though we will consider some earlier models of women makers, our attention will be focused on global artists working in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As we explore their films, our coursework will be divided into three units, which will invariably overlap with and sustain one another. Hence, we will explore writings about film by various feminist “collectives”; we will produce individual essays in a workshop format; and we will collectively produce a means of exhibition of the work of the students beyond our classroom.

SWAG 311 / AMST 309 / BLST 309 – Island Bodies and Bodily Autonomy
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Jallicia A. Jolly

This course explores Black women’s health and activism through an Africa diasporic lens that bridges intellectual work, grassroots action, and community-based learning. Grounded in faculty-student collaborations, it engages a range of materials and methodologies that explore historical and contemporary experiences of reproductive justice, cultural politics, debt and inequality, tourism, citizenship, and agency in the Caribbean. This course combines interdisciplinary coursework with practical work in communities drawing on examples from the United States, Jamaica, and the broader Caribbean region to activate learning in action that prioritizes the lived experiences and indigenous expertise of local actors and grassroots organizations. A Spring Break study abroad trip to reproductive justice sites and networks in the Caribbean region will provide an experiential component that grounds our inquiries and supports efforts to take collective actions. This course prioritizes critical reflection and reciprocity as central values in our collective learning experiences: Students and the faculty will build mutually beneficial and equity-based relationships with community leaders and organizations foregrounding reciprocity between the needs and outcomes of communities by fostering collaboration, respect, and attentiveness to power dynamics. Reflection that will support critical thinking, meaning-making, and hands-on activities to help students connect their community engagement experience with the learning objectives of the course and to their lived experiences is a central component of this course. Ultimately, students will start to think about ways to combine their personal reflections and on-site experiences in order to start to challenge different systems of oppression.

SWAG 321 / ASLC 321 / FAMS 321 – Gender and Bollywood Cinema
Tuesday 1:00-3:45 p.m.
Krupa Sandilya

Bombay cinema, popularly known as “Bollywood Cinema,” is one of the largest film industries in the world. This course focuses on Bollywood cinema and its local and global offshoots to think about questions of gender, sexuality and agency. The course considers questions such as: What beauty standards are imposed on women in Bollywood and how do they connect to colonialism, race and empire? Do LGBTQ romances in Bollywood endorse homonormative narratives? How do we read the sexualization of the female body in song and dance numbers? Do women directors make more feminist films? Films range from the classic Umrao Jaan (1981) to the contemporary Gangubai Kathiwadi (2022), women dominated action-thrillers Kahaani (2012) and Raazi (2018), LGBTQ romances Kapoor and Sons and Aligarh (2016) among others.

SWAG 348 / HIST 348 – History of Asian American Women: Migration and Labor
Wednesday 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 377 / ASLC 376 / HIST 376 – Sex, Gender, and the Body in South Asian History
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:50 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 Kāmasūtra 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.

SWAG 409 / AMST 313 / BLST 410 – Black Feminist Health Science Studies & the African Diaspora
Tuesday 2:30-5:15 p.m.
Jallicia A. Jolly

This research tutorial will explore a diverse archive of contemporary and historical texts that foregrounds Black feminist health science studies (BFHSS) which focuses on a social justice science that understands the health and well-being of marginalized groups to be its central purpose. This course enables students to contribute to the robust interdisciplinary and transnational research agenda of the Black Feminist Reproductive Justice, Equity, and HIV/AIDS Activism (BREHA) Lab that bridges the medical humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences. In this shared research project, students will be able to more clearly define new modes of inquiries on racism, gender, class, sexuality, and health that engage intersecting arenas of scholarship and activism, including the medicalization of race, feminist health studies, reproductive justice, and disability studies. To this end, we explore several questions: What is a black feminist approach to health among Afro-diasporic peoples and communities? What are the key terms, methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and political stakes associated with a BFHSS field? How can BFHSS expand our collective research inquiries on wellness, inequality, and society? Finally, how can this field contribute to broader efforts for social justice concerning the health, wellness, and longevity of the most vulnerable communities?

HACU 185 - Sample!Remix!Slash!: Fandom, Appropriation, and The Law
Tuesday, Thursday 10:30-11:50 a.m.
Susana Loza
component

This seminar delves into the dynamics, debates, and desires that drive pop fandom. In this class, we ask: What is fan culture? Does it build community? Are fans different from other consumers? What are the ethics and politics of fandom? What are the aesthetic, social, and legal ramifications of fan-produced forms such as mash-ups, remixes, YouTube videos, and fanfic/slash that borrow, customize, and reinterpret pop commodities? How do such textual appropriations call into question the boundaries between high and low, production and consumption, intellectual property and fair use? Do fan-produced forms challenge or reinforce Romantic notions of authorship and authenticity? Particular attention will be paid to: the queering of heterosexist pop texts; the racialized and sexualized construction of masculinity and femininity; the politics of sampling, remixing, and mashing; and the role of the Internet, blogs, and social networking technologies in fan culture. This course is reading-, writing-, and theory-intensive.

NS 224 – Sexual/Reproductive Health & Technology
Wednesday, Friday 9:00-10:20 p.m.
Cory Gatrall

This course takes a creative, transdisciplinary approach to the exploration of sexual/reproductive health and technology. We will look inside and beyond the body in order to understand how people make and prevent the making of new people, and the systems in which those acts take place. Topics include (but are not limited to!) sex, gender, pregnancy, abortion, birth, and assisted reproductive technologies.

CSI 225: Reproductive Justice
Tuesday, Thursday 10:30-11:50 a.m.
Jina Fast

Black women activists and organizers first coined the term "reproductive justice" in the summer of 1994 while organizing to expand the scope of the Clinton administration's Health Security Act. As a critical theoretical framework, reproductive justice moves beyond the abortion "choice" debates, encompassing a wide range of issues impacting the reproductive lives of marginalized people, including but not limited to the right to have children, not have children, parent the children one has, access safe contraception, comprehensive and culturally informed sex education, prevention and treatment for STIs, access to liberated and liberating birth methods, technologies, and outcomes, what it means to queer access to ARTs, ethical questions around surrogacy, the racialized and colonialist politics of foster care and adoption, adequate prenatal and pregnancy care, adequate wages, and safe(r) homes. In this class we will cover theory and community practices that emerge from a reproductive justice framework as well as what a such a framework suggests for related and intersecting justice issues.

IA 226 – Making Visible: Writing Difference, Disability, and Illness
Wednesday, Friday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Faune Albert

How can we translate the lived experiences of difference, disability, and illness, variously defined, to the page, rendering in language what necessarily exceeds it? What are our ethical imperatives when writing about these topics? In this course, we will think, write, and talk about what it means to inhabit the world in ways that situate one outside of an imagined norm. Together we'll explore the complex connections between the body and mind and the relationship of trauma to difference, disability, and illness. We'll consider the place of science in these conversations: what does it illuminate and what are its limitations? And we'll approach the challenges, and the pain, of writing about difference, disability, and illness while also opening ourselves to the possibilities of transformation and joy that these experiences give to us, not only on the personal but on the societal level, too. This is a workshop course and a Race & Power-affiliated course; as such, we will spend time exploring the intersections between the movements for disability justice and racial justice and the ways in which issues of race, gender, and power inflect lived experiences of difference.

CSI 249 – The Post-Racial State: Ideology, Politics and the Media
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:20 p.m.
Susana Loza
component

In the wake of Obama's historic presidency, the American media triumphantly declared that we are living in post-racial times. But is race dead? Are we color-blind? If so, how do we explain the resurgence of white supremacy during and after the Trump presidency? Utilizing an interdisciplinary amalgam of Ethnic Studies, Critical Race Theory, Media Studies, US Third World Feminism, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Political Philosophy, and Post-Colonial Theory, this course will investigate how "race" continues to shape American society in the post-civil rights era. Topics to be covered include: the social construction of race, racial formation, panethnicity, class-based and gendered racialization, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, double-consciousness, colonialism, essentialism, institutional racism, commodification of race/ethnicity, identity politics, colorblind ideology, cultural appropriation, resistance, and citizenship. Particular attention will be paid to affirmative action, immigration, hate speech, hate crimes, reparations, racial profiling, and the reactionary rise of the right. This course is reading-, writing-, and theory-intensive.

HACU 266 – Gothic Shadows: The Thriller as Genre in Literature and Film
Monday, Wednesday 10:30-11:50 a.m.
Eva Rueschmann
component

The course explores the thriller as a popular literary and film genre. An amalgam of intrigue, suspense and mystery, the thriller evolved from Gothic romance novels and both Victorian adventure tales and 'sensation' (crime) fiction in response to shifting social anxieties. We focus on several influential forms of the genre, including Gothic-influenced romantic thrillers dramatizing threats to women and the constraints of the domestic sphere; and espionage stories and related crime thrillers reflecting fears of deception, conspiracy, war and the pursuit of power and wealth. Thrillers evoke a world of psychological and existential uncertainty, where everyday life is infused by suspicion and paranoia and where haunting and psychological doubles express the complexity of identity. Classic thriller novels and films as well as contemporary reformulations and queering of the genre will be discussed. A third of the course will also focus on how BIPOC writers and filmmakers have used this popular genre for social critique, to address the social and political dimensions of fear, race relations and racism, and the disenfranchisement of Native Americans.

CSI 278 – Queer Hope and Pleasure
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:50 p.m.
Dana Ahern

In Cruising Utopia, Jose Munoz describes the possibility for queerness through the opening oneself up to the "perception of queerness as manifestation in and of ecstatic time." Ecstasy allows for us to see the paradoxes in pleasure, giving space to the contradictions, nuances, and differences, and in that, opening up what is meant in thinking with the future and potentiality. This course is grounded in women of color feminisms and explores the development of theories on hope, futurism, and utopia. The reading follows foundational texts in affect, queer, and critical race theories, examining their genealogies critically. We will examine debates within the context of future studies, starting with the notion of queer utopia by Jose Munoz and situating it within the larger context of women of color feminisms. We will analyze the development of these theories and explore the limits, possibilities, and new directions of the scholarship.

GNDST 204QT/ENGL 219QT – Queer and Trans Writing
Monday, Wednesday 10:00-11:15 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 206NT/HIST 296NT – Histories of Native American Women
Monday, Wednesday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Patricia Dawson

This course explores the histories of Native American women, from origins to the present day. This course also introduces students to Indigenous methodologies. We will look at topics such as origin stories, Indigenous feminism, the fur trade, Removal, reservations, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. Major themes include kinship, community, gender, race, material culture, sovereignty, reproduction, matrilineal societies, survivance, and diplomacy.

GNDST 210BRD/RELIG 241 – Women and Gender in Buddhism
Monday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Susanne Mrozik

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

GNDST 210NR/RELIG 225NR – Reimagining American Religious History: Race, Gender, and Alterity
Monday, Wednesday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Meredith Coleman-Tobias

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

GNDST 212EC – Gender & Labor in Global Economy
Tuesday, Thursday 10:30-11:45 a.m.
Lynda Pickbourn-Smith

Globalization has not only changed the way we consume: it has also profoundly transformed production and the nature of work across the globe. Using case-studies of employment and work in the agricultural, manufacturing and service sectors in a range of countries, this course analyzes the gender and class dimensions of these transformations, examines the contradictory tendencies inherent in these processes and explores alternatives for policy and action.

GNDST 241PH – Pharmocracy: Empire by Molecular Means
Monday, Wednesday 1:45 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Christian Gundermann

Since the 1950s, the pharmaceutical industry -- one of the world's largest economic sectors and a core constituent of globalized corporate power -- has built a transnational empire that controls not only gender, sex, health, food chains, science, politics, stock markets, and private/public distinctions, but has completely changed what it means to be human or animal. We will study these transformations, and how pharmocracy produces knowledge through experimentation on impoverished humans and animals. In the context of the post-9/11 legal emergency frameworks, pharmocracy is also the nearly impenetrable tangle between pharma, academia, public health, and the military biosecurity bureaucracies.

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

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

GNDST 333MS – Multi-Species Justice
Monday, Wednesday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Christian Gundermann

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

GNDST 333QJ – Queer Objects
Tuesday, 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Sandra Russell

This course explores the relationship between the temporal and material structures of everyday life -- including objects, housing, gifts, dress, food, drugs, sex toys, accessories, and technologies -- and queer identities, communities, and practices. Taking an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach that includes narrative, archival, ethnographic, visual, and historical sources, we will consider not only how queer life shapes and is shaped by objects, but also the extent to which "objecthood" can be tied to structural and state power through the politics of consumption. Topics and themes may include material feminisms, the queer archive, queer aesthetics, biopolitics, and affect theory.

GNDST 333RT/RELIG 352 – Body/Gender in Religions Tradition
Thursday 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 333TF – Trans Fem & Arts and Activism
Tuesday, Thursday 1:45 – 3:00 p.m.
Niamh Timmons

This course centers the experiences, activism, and creative work of Trans Fem& people, which includes, but is not limited to, trans women, Two-Spirit, Hijra, (c)amab people, and others who identify with trans femininity. Throughout the term, we'll engage historic and contemporary activisms, read and watch creative work, and do our own creative work. We'll focus on activism ranging from Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries to Famillia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement and creative work by artists such as Kai Cheng Thom, Tourmaline, and Arielle Twist.

GNDST 333TH/CPRE 372 – Transforming Harm and Mutual Aid: A Transformative Justice Lab
Monday 1:30-4:20 p.m.
Ren-yo Hwang

The overall goal of this course is to make explicit connections between mutual aid and transformative justice, and the intertwined place-based and community histories in which these interventions continue to be made. Students will leave with a grounded understanding of the connections, tensions and differences between transformative justice and restorative justice and criminal justice. Alongside Dean Spade's Mutual Aid Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), students will be introduced to the radical history of mutual aid-- learning the difference between "charity" and "solidarity" -- and how mutual aid might interrupt systemic to interpersonal harm.

SWG 238 – Women, Money, and Transactional Social Movements
Monday 1:40 – 2:55 p.m., Wednesday 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 the current era. This course centers on the political linkages and economic theories that address the politics of women, gender relations and capitalism. Students research social movements that challenge the raced, classed and gendered inequities, and the costs of maintaining order. The course assesses 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 analyzes the history, prevalence and current manifestations of the white supremacist movement by examining ideological components, tactics and strategies, and its relationship to mainstream politics. Students 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 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 270 – Oral History and Lesbian Subjects
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25 – 10:40 a.m.
Kelly P. Anderson

Grounding the 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 and queer lives, students are introduced to the method of oral history as a key documentation strategy in the production of lesbian history. How do research methods need to be adapted, including oral history, in order to talk about lesbian and queer lives? 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. Prerequisite: SWG 150 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 20.

SWG 271 – Reproductive Justice
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m. – 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. Prerequisite SWG 150 or equivalent.

SWG 300AH – Abortion History, Law, and Politics
Thursday 1:20 – 4:00 p.m.
Carrie N. Baker

On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, reversing a half-century-long precedent of constitutional abortion rights. This course explores the history, law and politics of abortion in the U.S. before, during and after Roe. The course examines ideologies, strategies and tactics of the abortion rights movement as well as the anti-abortion movement, focusing in particular on the gender and racial politics of these movements. Discussions include abortion access, anti-abortion violence, “crisis pregnancy centers,” fetal personhood campaigns, the criminalization of pregnancy, abortion pills, telemedicine abortion and self-managed abortion. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Enrollment limited to 12. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

SWG 300QC – Queer Conversation
Friday 1:20 – 4:00 p.m.
Amy Howe

What does queer life look like when placed in conversation with religious ideas of conversion, rebirth and transformation? How is the queer subject recognized as (il)legible through practices of confession, ritual and re-creation? This course situates conversations about community, transformation, ritual and critique in the studies of religion and queer theories. The class looks at case studies including faith-based ex-gay movements, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and transnational Afro-Latinx Santería practices. Students write independent analytical and reflective pieces which culminate into a workshopped final research paper or curated artistic piece. Enrollment limited to 12. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

AFR 249 – Black Women Writers
Wednesday 1:20 – 2:35 p.m., Monday 1:40 – 2:55 p.m.
Karla Zelaya

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

AFR 366RS – Race, Sex, and Tourism
Tuesday 9:25 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.
Traci-Ann Wint

Tourism is often lauded as the key to economic development for many countries. However, scholarly work has shown that historical relationships to imperialism and colonialism impact how people and places experience tourism. This course introduces students to debates, methods and conceptual frameworks in the study of race, sex and tourism. Through a review of scholarly texts, tourism paraphernalia, films and travelogues, the course examines the social, political and ethical considerations inherent in multiple forms of tourism including eco-tourism, wellness or health, sun-sand-sea, heritage, dark and voluntourism in locales ranging from the Caribbean and the Americas to Africa and Europe. Enrollment limited to 12. Juniors and Seniors only. Instructor permission required.

AFS 222 – Fanta Faces and Coca-Cola Bodies: Popular Culture, Gender, and Sexuality in Africa
Tuesday, Thursday 2:45 – 4:00 p.m.
Kuukuwa Andam

This course uses popular culture as a tool to analyze gender and sexuality in Africa. It discusses relevant issues in gender and sexuality across the continent, using selected African songs and movies, which feature these issues as centralized themes. It also examines the lived experiences of African actors, musicians and artistes, both historical and modern, as a means of discussing social norms on gender and sexuality and their subversion. Enrollment limited to 18. (E)

AMS 201 – Introduction to American Studies
Wednesday, Friday 1:10 – 2:35 p.m.
Christen Mucher, Evangeline Heiliger

This course provides an introduction to American Studies through the interdisciplinary study of American history, life and culture. Students develop critical tools for analyzing cultural texts (including literature, visual arts, music, fashion, advertising, social media, buildings, objects and bodies) in relation to political, social, economic and environmental contexts. The course examines the influence of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and transnationality on conceptions of citizenship, and struggles over what it means to be an “American,” and how this has shaped the distribution of power, resources and wellbeing in the United States.

ENG 241 – The Empire Writes Back: Postcolonial Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 1:20 – 2:35 p.m.
Ambreen Hai

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

ENG 333JL – A Major Writer in English- Jhumpa Lahiri
Wednesday 1:20 – 4:00 p.m.
Ambreen Hai

Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri became an overnight star in 1999 with her first short story collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies. She has since published many novels, story collections and essays. Internationally acclaimed for her beautifully crafted, deeply moving fiction about migration, love, loss, belonging, unbelonging, home and family, this trilingual twenty-first century writer has already generated an astonishing body of scholarship. This course focuses on Lahiri’s fiction and non-fiction, her themes and techniques, and includes her recent work in translation. The intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender and class is central to the analysis. Supplementary readings include postcolonial, Asian American and feminist theory, history and literary criticism. Enrollment limited to 12. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

ESS 340 – Current Issues in Women’s Health
Monday, Wednesday 10:50 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.
Barbara Brehm-Curtis

A course focusing on current research papers in women’s health. Recent topics have included reproductive health issues, eating disorders, heart disease, depression, autoimmune disorders and breast cancer. Cannot be taken S/U. Prerequisites: ESS 140 or a strong biological sciences background. Enrollment limited to 12. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required.

FMS 248 – Women and American Cinema: Representation, Spectatorship, Authorship
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25 – 10:40 a.m.
Kiki Loveday

A survey of women in American films from the silent period to the present, examining: 1) how women are represented on film, and how those images relate to actual contemporaneous American society, culture and politics; 2) how theoretical formulations, expectations and realities of female spectatorship relate to genre, the star and studio systems (and other production and distribution modes), dominant and alternative codes of narration and developments in digital and new media modes; and 3) how women as stars, writers, producers and directors shape and respond to, work within and against, dominant considerations of how women look (in every sense).

GOV 269 – Feminist Political Thought
Tuesday, Thursday 2:45 – 4:00 p.m.
Nathan DuFord

Feminist political thought functions in two ways: first, to critique the masculinist and patriarchal forms of thought in mainstream political philosophy; and second, to generate forms of political thinking that advance the cause of liberation. This course develops these two strains of thinking. Students consider the politics of gender, sex and sexualities, law, formal and informal institutions, the political subject, and the roles that race, class, sexuality and nationality play feminist political thinking.

HST 223AT – Women and Gender in Japanese History- Ancient Times to the 19th Century
Monday, Wednesday 9:25 – 10:40 a.m.
Marnie S. Anderson

The dramatic transformation in gender relations is a key feature of Japan’s premodern history. How Japanese women and men have constructed norms of behavior in different historical periods, how gender differences were institutionalized in social structures and practices, and how these norms and institutions changed over time. The gendered experiences of women and men from different classes from approximately the seventh through the 19th centuries. Consonant with current developments in gender history, exploration of variables such as class, religion and political context that have affected women’s and men’s lives. Enrollment limited to 18.

HST 265 – Race, Gender, and U.S. Citizenship, 1776-1865
Monday, Wednesday 9:25 – 10:40 a.m.
Elizabeth S. Pryor

Analysis of the historical realities, social movements, cultural expression and political debates that shaped U.S. citizenship from the Declaration of Independence to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. From the hope of liberty and equality to the exclusion of marginalized groups that made whiteness, maleness and native birth synonymous with Americanness. How African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants and women harnessed the Declaration of Independence and its ideology to define themselves as citizens of the United States. Enrollment limited to 40.

JUD 217 – Motherhood in Early Judaism
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.
Sari Fein

How did early Jewish communities imagine mothers, and what does this reveal about communal ideas of gender, family and identity in early Judaism? This course considers various manifestations of mothers in early Judaism through exploration of such literary sources as the Bible, rabbinic literature and the pseudepigrapha, as well as artifacts from material culture such as Aramaic incantation bowls, synagogue wall paintings and other archeological evidence. No prior knowledge of Judaism is expected (E).

LAS 201QL – Queer Latine Embodiments: Affect, Race, and Aesthetics
Wednesday 1:20 – 2:35 p.m., Monday 1:40 – 2:55 p.m.
Vicente Carrillo

What modes of resistance do queer and trans bodies of color deploy to navigate an anti-queer/trans world? What lessons do bodies offer? This course focuses on queer and trans representation in cultural production, performance studies approach to queer Latine research and the importance of embodied knowledges. The course addresses topics around affect, desire, queer nightlife, anti-queer/trans moral panics and public space. Students become familiar with scholarship in the growing field of queer Latine studies while developing a stronger critical analytic on how race, class, sexuality and gender inform the reading of bodies. Enrollment limited to 20. (E)

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, students 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. Students consider accounts of some large-scale liberal and conservative social movements in the United States, and conduct an in-depth analysis of an activists oral history obtained from the Voices of Feminism archive of the Sophia Smith collection.

SPN 230DM – Latin American and Peninsular Culture and Society- Domestica
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25 – 10:40 a.m.
Michelle Joffroy

This course explores the realities and representation of women’s domestic labor from the thematic perspectives of precariousness (a condition and expression of subjectivity under globalization) and intimacy (understood as both an experience of affect and a condition of labor). This course uses short fiction, documentary and film from the Spanish-speaking world (the Americas and Spain) and the Portuguese-speaking world where appropriate, to explore the ways in which women’s transnational domestic labor has shaped new cultural subjects and political identities in the public as well as the private sphere. Students work on the theme of women’s domestic labor from the perspective of their choosing (for example, human rights, migration policies, racial and gendered labor regimes, neoliberal reforms and resistance).

SPN 230WW – Latin American and Peninsular Culture and Society- Creative Writing By and With Spanish Women Writers
Monday, Wednesday 10:50 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.
Reyes Lazaro

This is a hinge course between Beginning-Intermediate and Advanced-Intermediate courses. Its goal is the acquisition of linguistic and cultural literacy, and the development of student's capacities as a writer and reader of Spanish. On occasion, the class might work on some grammar, according to need, but this is not a grammar course. Short stories, biographical pieces, a play, biographies, essays and poems by (mainly) Spanish women writers from the 12th-century to present day, as well as one novel. The class creates essays and a zine inspired by short stories, biographical pieces, a play, biographies, essays and poems by (mainly) Spanish women writers from the 12th-century to present day, as well as one Spanish novel. Enrollment limited to 20

SPN 260DL – Latin American Cultural History- Decolonizing Latin American Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 2:45 – 4:00 p.m.
Michelle Joffroy

This course offers critical perspectives on colonialism, literatures of conquest and narratives of cultural resistance in the Americas and the Caribbean. Decolonial theories of violence, writing and representation in the colonial context inform the study of literary and cultural production of this period. Readings explore several themes including indigenous knowledge, land and the natural world; orality, literacy and visual cultures; race, rebellion and liberation; slavery, piracy and power; and the coloniality of gender. Prerequisite: SPN 220 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 19.

ENV 327 – Environmental Justice and Decolonial Aspirations in an Urbanizing World
Wednesday 7:00 – 9:30 p.m.
Efadul Huq

This course explores global environmental justice and decolonial planning issues, debates and policies in the context of an urbanizing world marked by race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, caste, class and other lines of difference. The course draws from scholarship in urban studies, anthropology, sociology, geography and other related fields to develop an appreciation of global environmental injustices. With particular attention to decolonial planning approaches, students learn about efforts to redress environmental injustices, whether through formal planning and policies, social movements, community organizing or everyday environmentalism. The course covers environmental issues at multiple scales from around the world and explores the interrelatedness of themes. Prerequisite: ENV 101. Priority given to ENV majors.

ENV 255 – Ecofeminism
Monday, Wednesday 10:50-12:05 p.m.
Heather Rosenfeld

What is the relationship between gender, feminism and the environment? Ecofeminism unites scholars and activists who have asserted that environmentalism is a feminist issue, that nature is gendered or that gender liberation and environmental liberation are linked. This course introduces students to the theory and practice of ecofeminism from the late twentieth century to the present. While this course is titled “Ecofeminism,” some would consider it more apt to use a lens of “ecofeminisms,” foregrounding the considerable variation in theories, assumptions and activist movements. Recognizing this variation, students study debates within ecofeminism and define ecofeminism expansively.