Spring 2026 Course Guide : Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies : UMass Amherst

WGSS Courses

Spring 2026 WGSS Courses

WGSS 187: Gender, Sexuality, and Culture
Mon/Wed 1:25-2:15PM, plus Friday discussion sections - Jude Hayward-Jansen
Online U+ Section - Paul Michael Thomson

This course is an introduction to some of the primary issues germaine to the study of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Pulling from a variety of disciplines and fields, this course will consider how gender and sexuality shape and are shaped by multiple interlocking nodes of identity including race, class, nationality, and ability. We will cover topics in feminist history, reproductive health and politics, gendered labor, family structures, queer and trans rights, and disability studies. Contextualizing women’s, gender, and sexuality studies within larger cultural histories of capitalism, colonialism, and globalization, this course will demonstrate the centrality of gender and sexuality to our lives. Required for students who joined the major after Fall 2025, recommended for others. (GenEd DU, I).

WGSS 201: Gender and Difference: Critical Analyses
Tu/Th 10:00 - 11:15AM
Elise Barnett

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. Required for the major and minor. Typically taken in the sophomore year.

WGSS 205: Feminist Health Politics
Tu/Th 10:00AM - 11:15AM
Kirsten Leng

This course serves as a broad introduction to feminist health politics. We will interrogate the concept of health from various perspectives and think about why and how health is a crucial issue for feminists. We will consider how we define health, why health matters, and how politics, economics, social conditions, culture, and historical factors affect health.

WGSS 220: Sustainability, Gender, and the Global Environment
Mon/Wed/Fri 11:15–12:05PM
Jacqueline Southern

Sustainability and gender are reemerging as key terms on many agendas in the context of a rapidly warming globe and exacerbated environmental destruction and socio-economic inequities. But mainstream approaches to sustainability seldom focus on how the global political economy and sustainable growth are premised on ecological harm and racial, gender, class, and other inequities. This course is a critical introduction to “sustainability.” It invites students to go beyond pragmatic, technical solutions, and explore issues of sustainability through the lenses of social and environmental justice. Through readings, lectures, and discussions we will examine the following questions.

• Why are sustainability and the environment key ecological and social issues today?
• What are their analytical connections to colonial capitalism and economic globalization?
• What does a feminist engagement with gender and the global political economy bring to our understanding of sustainability and related themes such as nature, work, food, money, energy security, “population,” and reproductive rights?

This course will enable students to participate in 21st-century discussions about these issues in informed and self-reflexive ways. A background in gender or feminist thinking through prior courses in WGSS (such as 187 and 201) is helpful but not required. (4 credits; Gen. Ed. SB, DG)

WGSS 240 – Introduction to Transgender Studies
Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45PM
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. (Q/T 5C Certificate).

WGSS 286 History of Sexuality and Race in the United States
Mon/Wed 10:10-11:00AM, plus Friday discussion sections
Laura Briggs

In recent years, books and courses that discuss the history of race, sexuality, gender, and reproduction have been banned and cancelled. While the demand for their silencing is a minority position, represented almost exclusively by non-historians, it has been taken up by people currently with political power. This demand has been couched in the name of the nation, accompanied by the claim that certain people (white, cisgendered, straight, nonimmigrant and male?) constitute the body of the nation, while others are taken to be outside of it.

This course asks: Should we agree that these more limited and narrow histories are a truthful version of who and what the United States is? Is this really the best or only version of the United States? What happens when we learn about histories of racism, abolition, decolonization, eugenics, nonbinary genders, reproduction, LGBTQ liberation, migration, and feminism? Is it possible that these contested histories of people struggling for freedom and rights is in fact a tradition within the United States to which we might aspire? (GenEd HS, DU).

WGSS 293C/AFROAM 272: Race, Sexuality, and the Law in Early America
Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45PM
Professor Kerth

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

WGSS 392N/692N - Trans Fem Arts and Activism
Mon 2:30-5PM
Niamh Juniper Timmons

This course centers the experiences, activism, and creative work of trans feminine people, a complex umbrella category which includes trans women as well as many (c)amab non-binary people, along with two-spirit and hijra communities who identify with trans femininity. This course positions Trans Studies, trans activism, and trans creative work as intrinsically related to other creative, activist, and academic fields (especially Black Studies and Indigenous Studies). Throughout the term, students will engage with historical and contemporary movements, while analyzing and producing creative work. Some areas of focus include work by Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, Kai Cheng Thom, Tourmaline, and Arielle Twist.

WGSS 340: Critical Prison Studies
Tu/Th 11:30-12:45PM
Laura Ciolkowski

There are currently over 1.9 million people living in prisons and jails (and almost 6 million people under carceral control) across the United States – more incarcerated people per capita than any other country in the world. Why do we lock up so many people and who bears the consequences? How do gender, race, sexuality, and class shape systems of policing, punishment, criminalization and control? What is “anti-carceral feminism” and what are some of the abolitionist critiques of the prison industrial complex? This course considers the history, theory and practice of carceral control along with the feminist anti-violence movements, Indigenous and Black radical organizing practices and political struggles that aim to disrupt and dismantle it. Key topics will include genealogies of justice (retributive, restorative and transformative), racial capitalism, anti-Blackness and incarceration; anti/carceral feminism, state and intimate violence; sexuality and criminalization; the school-to-prison pipeline and abuse-to-prison pipeline; art and activism in the age of mass incarceration; “carceral care,” disability and violence; reproductive justice and criminalization. A deeply interdisciplinary exploration of the cultural logics of prisons, policing, criminalization and punishment, the course draws on literature, critical theory, film, history, social science, psychology, art, visual culture and popular media to interrogate and explore the many dimensions of carcerality in the US.

WGSS 350: Global Mommy Wars
Tu/Thu 11:30-12:45PM
Miliann Kang

How have motherhood—and reproduction broadly-- become such highly contested sites for racial, gender, sexual, class, national and global politics? How are mothers pitted against each other in ways that undermine struggles for reproductive justice? What are the possibilities and challenges for re-imagining and restructuring contemporary motherhood? This course will draw on a wide range of materials, including feminist and ethnic studies scholarship, public debates, policy initiatives, media representation, and creative writing to explore how race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, nation and migration have shaped current and historical constructions of motherhood. (RHRJ 5C Certificate).

WGSS 391C: Feminist Childhood Studies
Tu/Th 1:00 - 2:15PM
Kirsten Leng

This course draws on interdisciplinary scholarship to examine how the meanings, definition, and values associated with childhood have changed over time, as well as the contentious political valences surrounding the figure of the child and childhood. We will also explore theorizations of power, children, and the family; the entanglements of care and coercion in childrearing; and the socialization of children. Finally, we will consider how the experience of childhood varies from our theorizations of it. (RHRJ 5C Certificate).

WGSS 392AE: Housing Against Empire
Tu/Th 10:00- 11:15AM
Sarah Ahmad

One of the answers to what constitutes our “shared human reality” is the housing crisis. Whether it is in the form of skyrocketing rents, displacements caused by gentrification, infrastructural inequities, neoliberalism, and the global order of war, climate disaster, and dispossession, we all have a path to understanding the precarity, violence, and uncertainty that meets our shared obvious and plain desire for housing. This course explores the different configurations of the “house” – as the domestic household, as private space, as citizenship-affirming property, as investment and real estate – beginning in the twentieth-century to our contemporary moment to ask: what are the alternative political imaginaries for housing and inhabitation offered by writers and intellectuals across the Third World that resist the dooming logic of development and racial capitalism? What can we learn from the ways in which feminist, queer, and anticolonial writers and artists engage with ideas of the house, urban planning, and architecture during this time? Material might include the scholarship and literature by Keeanga Yamahhta-Taylor, Jane Jacobs, Samuel Delany, Frantz Fanon, June Jordan, Suad Amiry, Yoko Tawada, among others, as well as other media such as urban plans for cities such as Algiers and Jaffa, federal housing policy and institutional documents, films such as Patrick Keiller’s The Dilapidated Dwelling and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. (Counts for the theory requirement for majors)

WGSS 393/693: Transnational Asian and Asian American Feminisms
Tues 4-6:30PM
Miliann Kang

How are transnational Asian and Asian American feminist scholars, artists, activists and movements shaping and critiquing ties across oceans, countries and people? How do concepts such as the “Trans-Pacific” “inter-Asias” and “Asia as method” complicate fixed, U.S.-centric notions of identity, difference, history and politics? The course explores the possibilities and constraints for developing transnational critiques, solidarity, and movements that build on common concerns and frameworks while recognizing the heterogeneity, specificity and multiple sites which comprise current Asian and Asian American feminist scholarship and movements.

As an interdisciplinary course, it draws on a wide range of materials, including feminist and ethnic studies scholarship, public debates, policy initiatives, media representation, and creative writing. Students in the course will have opportunities to engage with interdisciplinary research in addition to public lectures and artists’ residencies. (AA 5C/UMass Certificates; counts for theory requirement for majors).

WGSS 494TI: Unthinking the Transnational – Political Activism, Geographies of Development, and Power (Integrative Experience Capstone)
Tu/Thu 2:30-3:45PM
Svati P. Shah

This course serves as the culminating experience for the WGSS major. The course is loosely structured around examining the implementation of feminist politics and projects, and the ways that 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. The theme for this year’s IE seminar accounts for disturbing political trends in the US, and internationally and how these trends implicate questions of gender, sexuality and race. Students will have the opportunity to focus and deepen their understanding of these issues by working on a specific individual research paper or collective small group research project (details will be distributed). This should be an original and specific research project, but must also link to the key themes of the course and broader general education studies. Students will be presented with information about the proper use of the Library Data Base as well as using Information Technology to enhance their learning and prepare for their research projects. Students can use this as a practical tangible resource for further studies or work. Required for primary majors (GenEd IE).

WGSS 492E/692E – Trans and Queer of Color Thought
Tuesday 11:30-2PM
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. (Q/T 5C Certificate; counts for theory requirement for majors).

WGSS 693B: Geographies of the "Imaginaire": Blackness, Worldmakings, and Intersectional Futures
Mon 10:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Beaudelaine Pierre

This graduate seminar centers Africa and the African diaspora. It puts emphasis on a myriad of efforts made by Africans and their descendants scattered across various parts of the world, rethinking culture, society, knowledge production, and social movements by engaging Blackness as a highly generative category. Seminar participants will reflect upon the formation and consolidation of Blackness as a mode of political identification from which various African descended thinkers—then and now—theorize poverty, unjust incarceration, geographic containment, economic dispossession, migration, premature death, and the future. Participants will have the opportunity to develop their work, whether a dissertation research paper or preparing for a qualifying exam. The seminar will also culminate into a conference on Black Geographies involving seminar contributors and participants.

WGSS 705: Feminist Epistemologies & Inter/Disciplinary Methodologies
Tu 2:30-5PM
Laura Ciolkowski

This graduate seminar in feminist epistemologies and inter/disciplinary methodologies is a core course for students pursuing the WGSS Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies. We ask: How do feminist epistemologies and research methodologies influence how and what we know? How do they determine the claims and consequences of our knowledge projects? Some of the central themes and structuring questions of the course include: What is feminist research? What makes research feminist? What is the relationship between disciplinarity and inter/disciplinarity? Knowledge and power? How might we address the ethics of representation and questions of accountability in our research and scholarship? What is the importance of positionality and subjectivity in our research and writing practices? How might we articulate feminist movements for justice with our research and scholarship?

“Feminist Epistemologies and Inter/Disciplinary Methodologies” aims to build an interdisciplinary community of feminist scholars and to support students’ progress in their individual degree programs while also challenging us to critique, intervene in, and move beyond our own disciplinary knowledge, scholarly and personal comfort zones, and critical practices. Over the course of the semester, we will have an opportunity to interrogate our own research methodologies and to develop feminist methodological approaches to the work we do. In particular, we will engage with and center critical research practices that honor the coconstruction of gender, sexuality, race, class, citizenship, nation, ability and other vectors of power, inequality, and difference.

UMass Courses Outside of WGSS

Umass Courses Outside of WGSS

AFROAM 272/WGSS 293C: Race, Sexuality, and the Law in Early America
Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45 PM
Professor Kerth

AFROAM 293J: Black Women, Representation and Power in Africa and the African Diaspora
Tu/Th 1:00 – 2:15 PM
Professor Covington-Ward

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

AFROAM 326: Black Women in U.S. History
Tu/Th 1:00-2:15 PM
Jordon Crawford

Using historical texts, film, television, and music, this course examines the history of African American women from slavery to the present. It will pay special attention to the convergence of race, gender, and class in shaping the black female experience; African American women’s activism against racial, gender, and economic injustices; and sex and sexuality. (HS, DU)

AFROAM 345: Southern Literature (Component)
Mon/Wed/Fr 10:10-11:00 AM
Andrew Brooks

This course explores Southern Black Literature through a sampling of literary productions from the U.S. South and the Global South (especially Brazil). We will prioritize texts and forms sprouting up from cultures of resistance to the many violences of racism, paying attention to representations of the Black body within such materials. In addition to exploring novels, narratives, and poetry, we will work with visual arts, music, films, and other cultural and historical sources. (AL, DU)

AFROAM 390A: Introduction to Global Black Studies
Tu/Th 2:30-3:45 PM
Professor Guzman

This Course uses the critical methodologies of the humanities and the social sciences to consider some of the questions provoked by the Global Black experience. Course Materials will allow students to survey the lasting contributions of Africans and their descendants to the development of various world civilizations and examine historical relationships between the individual actors and the larger social forces. The major themes that will be used to comprehend the experience of African-descended people are Loss, Identity, Gender, and Sexuality. A combination of student- led conversation and lecture will be used in the classroom.

AFROAM 390S: I Strike the Empire Back: Black Youth Culture in the Neoliberal Age (Component)
Tu/Th 11:30-12:45 PM
Professor Swiderski

Using hip hop as a lens to explore the development of diasporic Black youth culture in the neoliberal age, this course considers the African American experience during the close of the 20th century and dawning of the 21st. Our investigation will be concerned with at least two things that we will examine in parallel throughout the semester. On one hand, we will dig deeply into the origins and evolution of hip-hop artistry––including visual art, dance, music, lyrics, and performance––as well as the impact of commercial forces on those forms. On the other hand, we will pay serious attention to the ascendance of conservative political leaders in the United States and England during the 1970s whose policies emphasizing deregulation and privatization reshaped the global economy according to the tenets of neoliberalism, in order to understand the impact of those global economic and political realignments on the generation of black people who gave birth to or, later, inherited hip hop. Of central importance here will be the Nixon
administration’s adoption of a policy of “benign neglect” toward low-income black communities living in the nation’s crumbling cities; the replacement of the War on Poverty with the War on Drugs; the enactment of “free trade” policies that accelerated the deindustrialization of the American economy and deepened the structural unemployment of black people; the militarization of municipal police forces; and the explosive growth of the carceral state.

AFROAM 590P: Black Feminisms (Undergrad/Grad)
Th 1:00-3:30 PM
Professor Torres

This course will survey some of the essential Black Feminist works concerning the antebellum to today. To have a contemporary understanding of the variations of Black Feminisms today, it is important to have a grasp on the historical context of Blackness in the western hemisphere. This includes experiences rooted in the antebellum that span beyond American national borders, including the islands of the Caribbean, the Americas, and their territories. Some theories will be concerned with history and others with philosophical questions, such as Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection or Katherine McKittrick’s Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Some major questions the content of this course is meant to engage students into thinking are: What is the relationship between Blackness, gender, and sexuality? How has the Black body served the politics of gender and sexuality throughout the diaspora? How has racialization enforced patriarchy through the state and in culture? How does Black Feminism offer radical world-building in the twenty-first century?

AFROAM 590STB: Black Labor History (Undergrad/Grad, Component)
Wed 11:15-1:45 PM
Professor Kerth

What is the relationship between work and freedom? This question lies at the heart of Black American liberation struggles, and at the heart of this course, which centers Black labor in the long arc of American history. Throughout the semester, we will explore the experiences of Black workers in a range of workplaces—from cotton fields to battlefields, from kitchens to factory floors, from schools to prisons. From slavery to the modern day, we will consider how the labor and labor struggles of Black men, women, and children have shaped individual Black lives and communities, as well as transformed the broader nation. Topics covered include slavery and capitalism; the Great Migration; the role of Black women in the workforce; the rise of the Black middle class; unions and racial labor politics; and carceral labor.

AFROAM 591G: Black Ecologies (Undergrad/Grad)
Mon 11:15-1:45 PM
Professor Rusert

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

AFROAM 692A: Literary Theory (Component)
Tu 1:00-3:30 PM
Professor Meeks

This course will take up literary theory since 1965 and how it has influenced and has been influenced by the study of African American literature and culture. The idea here is not to be comprehensive, but rather, to use the term popular a few years back, to stage a series of interventions into the sometimes-troubled relationship between “high” theory and its successors and African American Studies. Our task will not simply be to examine different “schools” of critical theory, but to consider how theory has informed and challenged African American literary studies and vice versa. We will also seek to historicize various critical moments or movements rather than simply view them as pieces of an intellectual toolbox.

AFROAM 692Q: African Diaspora Studies: Introduction to Concepts and Historiography (Component)
Tu 4:00-6:30 PM
Professor Lao-Montes

This course will offer an introduction to 1) key concepts and definitions e.g. diaspora, Pan- Africanism, Afro-centrism, etc. 2) the classic works in the field. 3) major trends in contemporary scholarship.
We will be reading a selection of works discussing the contours and history of the field as well as examples of recent scholarship. Two papers on major themes will be required. This course is required for the Graduate Certificate in African Diaspora Studies and is open both to students pursuing the certificate and to graduate students with a general interest in the subject.

ANTH 395N: Gender, Nation & Body Politics
Tu/Th 1:00-2:15pm
Amanda Walker 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.

ART-HIST 314 – Sexuality, Drama and Invention: The Baroque Artist in Italy
Mon/Wed 4:00 – 5:15 PM
Monika Schmitter

This course focuses on the lives, careers, and works of five famous Italian Baroque artists and architects: Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Guido Reni, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and Francesco Borromini. Intermittently, we also examine works by some of their important, but perhaps less well known, contemporaries, such as Domenichino, Guercino, and Pietro da Cortona. Special attention is given to the role of sexuality in the artists' lives and works as well as in seventeenth-century culture more broadly, and to the concepts of drama and invention in the theory and practice of Baroque art and architecture.

COMM 390STB: Stories in Motion (Component)
Tu/Th 11:30 AM- 12:45 PM
Anjuliet Woodruffe

This course aims to introduce students to the study of literature by exploring it through the lens of performance studies. In this course, we explore the interplay of literature and performance, by analyzing how texts `come alive? through performance and how performance deepens our understanding of literary works. We will explore different methods for performing texts (poetry, prose, drama), through the lens of performance. By examining literature through the lens of performance studies, students will investigate how both literature and performance serve as dynamic sites for examining culture, identity and the ways individuals and communities express their lived experience.

COMM 430: Stories of Race in the United States (Component)
Tu/Th 2:30-3:45 PM
Roopali Mukherjee

From film scripts to news reports, across memoirs, policy narratives, and mythologies of the nation, stories of race abound in the United States. This course examines the power of stories, a prevalent and familiar mode of communication, in constructing racialized people and communities and shaping racial histories and cultures in the US. Drawing on insights from critical race, ethnic, postcolonial, feminist, and queer studies, we explore the power of stories of race in defining and controlling racialized populations: from the erasure of indigenous people in settler-colonial discourses to the persistence of anti-Black racisms, the reemergence of ultra- Right White supremacist formations, and the racialization of the COVID-19 pandemic. Equally, we consider how Black, indigenous, and people of color engage in storytelling practices themselves, and the power of these counter-stories in disturbing and disrupting the power of dominant stories of race in the US. Incorporating primary texts from a range of genres: autobiography, fiction, sci-fi, news reports, film, TV, digital media, policy reports, court decisions: the course explores the power of stories of race to harm, imperil, and kill as well as to humanize, nurture, and celebrate.

COMM 490STE: Communicating Wellness
Tu/Th 4-5:15 PM
Max Gonen

This course examines what wellness is, where we encounter it and how it exists as a social discourse and a cultural story. From workplace health initiatives and meditation practices to diet cultures, experiential retreats, and digital influencer economies, we trace how wellness is staged, embodied, and commodified. Drawing on Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, Media Studies and Feminist Studies, we will approach wellness through the lenses of ritual, embodiment, and
spectatorship, asking how it is performed both in media and in everyday life. You’ll practice methods that blur theory and lived experience, including writing from the body, analyzing myths, and observing rituals of care. These projects will reflect back what wellness means in culture and to us.

COMM 490STF: Feminist Data Analysis
Tu/Th 10-11:15 AM
Larissa Miller

In this course we will think through working with data from a feminist perspective. We will explore historical feminist critiques of technology before diving into data practices in the present and imagining better data futures through a creative final project. We will examine power, epistemology, paradigms, positionality, infrastructure, and invisible labor within the context of data use and practices. This is a theory driven course; you are not expected or required to have coding or data science experience. We will experiment with datasets and popular data tools and scaffold a final project that speaks to your interests. Through this course, you will learn how to better contextualize and critically engage with the data you encounter or collect yourself.

COMM 615: Survey of Performance Studies (Component)
Mon 11:00 AM-1:45 PM
Kimberlee Perez

This course is a survey in performance studies. As such, we will overview the history of the field, major tenets, paradigms, theories, methodologies, and directions. As a field of study, performance studies is interdisciplinary, practiced across fields, and specifically as a subfield and tradition in Communication. Beyond the field, we will look to the ways theories are produced as and through performance, how theories analyze as and through performance and how performance as a methodology is practiced as aesthetic communication, ritual, everyday life, ethnography, and more. Students will demonstrate their understanding of performance in all these ways through writing and analysis as well as through different kinds of performance practices. Students should leave the survey with an understanding of the breadth of performance studies and be prepared to use performance theories and methodologies in research, an area focus, or in further seminars.

COMM 790STB: Cultural Studies (Component)
Tu 4:00-6:45 PM
Roopali Mukherjee

This seminar examines the theoretical perspectives that lie behind the formation of cultural studies. Instead of discussing works claiming to do cultural studies, we will read a number of authors, from whom cultural studies draws its concepts and analytic procedures. Special attention will be given to structuralist and poststructuralist writings. Authors we will read include Derrida, Foucault, Nancy, Althusser, Laclau, Hamacher, and others.

COMPLIT 470/670: Medieval Woman Writers
Tu/Th 2:30-3:45pm
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, Jahn-Malek Khatun, 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.

COMPLIT 383/FILMST 383: Avant Garde Film
Th 4:00-7:00pm, Discussion Sections meet on Fridays
Barry Spence

Focus on narrative problems of love, desire, sexual identity, daily life, and death. These films' investigations of how we might gain distance on our life fictions by questioning and undermining viewer identification with narrative. (Gen.Ed. AT)

COMPLIT 394TI: Literary Theory and Criticism
Tu/Th 11:30-12:45pm (Component)
Maria Barbon

A seminar on literary criticism east and west, from the classical period to the Renaissance in Europe, as well as in ancient China and the medieval Islamic world. Commonalities in all our texts: what constitutes art and beauty in verbal expression? What is the purpose of literature? Who may have access to literature? What are sacred and canonical texts, and how shall they be approached? What is the connection between literature and truth, literature and morality? What are the proper techniques for composing good literature? What is the function of the study of rhetoric? Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-CompLit and BA-REEStu majors.

ENG 378: American Women Writers
Tu/Th 11:30-12:45
Sarah Patterson

Representations of American Womanhood. In this class, we will review American writers' concepts of womanhood with women's advocacy literature as a point of orientation. Primarily drawing from nineteenth-century literature, we will draw from a rich selection of genres including novels, poetry, supplicant appeals, and autobiographical narratives that relate to perceptions of women's societal successes and shortcomings. This class is especially suited for students who are interested in tracing a history of reformers' and missionaries' contributions to women's access to educational and religious institutions and to charitable industries. The primary goal of the course is for students to study representations in historical literature about women's place in society including in domestic, work-related, political and avant-garde spheres of identify formation. A secondary goal is for students to identify the ways writing and activism provided pathways for women's artistic expression, visibility and empowerment. Primary readings in association with the fundamentals of literary analysis will uncover major junctures in evolving notions of woman-centered and feminist thought in American culture. Students will pay special attention to writers Margaret Fuller, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins and Zitkala-sa, among others.

FILMST 440: Woman's Global Cinema
Tu 3:00-5:30, Discussion Th 2:30-3:20
Daniel Pope

A close examination of films directed by women from around the globe through the viewpoint of gender and film theories. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)

HIST 349H: Topics in European History: Sex & Society
Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45 PM
Jennifer Heuer

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

HIST 378/LEGAL 378: Sex and the Supreme Court
Tu 1:00-3:30 PM
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).

HIST 378R: History of Reproductive Rights Law Tu/Th 10:00-11:15 AM
Jennifer Nye

HIST 490A: Practical Magic
Mon/Wed 4:00-5:15 PM
Diana Sierra Becerra

Witches, ghosts, priestesses, healers, and other entities have been driving forces in the destruction of oppressive worlds. This course will explore the role of religion and spirituality in liberation movements. It will center femmes (people subjected to misogyny) and their creation of otherworldly power that resists heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and imperialism. We will learn how practices such as deity worship, ancestor veneration, hauntings, spiritual cursing, collective ritual, and more, have been used to birth new worlds.

JOURNAL 480: Arts & Culture Journalism (Component)
Tu/Th 10:00-11:15 AM
Kelsey Whipple

This course enables students to become explorers, arbiters and communicators of culture. That includes a wide variety of journalistic beats, such as music, food, film, television, art, travel and fashion. By developing cultural journalism skills, students will learn how to assess and diagnose what art is worth consuming and what is not, what audiences need to know and what they do not and how best to communicate all of the above. And they will learn how to cover culture in a variety of ways, including reporting, criticism and first-person essay writing. Finally, by studying the history, theory and practice of cultural journalism, students explore how class, race, gender and other identity factors influence how we respond to cultural products and creators. This course combines both theoretical concepts and practical lessons to teach students how to strengthen their critical-thinking skills, their cultural authority and their journalistic credibility while sharpening their authorial voices and their understanding of popular culture.

LEGAL 378/HIST 378: Sex and the Supreme Court
Tu 1:00-3:30 PM
Jennifer Nye

PSYCH 391LB: Psychology of the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Experience
Tu/Th 2:30-3:45 PM
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

SOC 201: Women & Work
Tu/Th 11:30 AM-12:45 PM
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)

SOC 222: The Family
Mon/Wed 9:05-9:55 AM
Ana Villalobos

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

SOC 283: Gender & Society
Mon/Wed 4:00-5:15 PM
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.

SOC 287: Sexuality & Society
Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45 PM

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)

SOC 320: Soc of Eating Disorders
Tu/Th 10:00-11:15 AM
Megan Relin

This course is designed to look at eating disorders through the lens of Sociology. We will be discussing relevant topics such as social narratives around body image and media (including social media), gender norms, race, feminism, socioeconomic influences related to weight, the history of some of these variables and how they've evolved over time. We will also look at issues related to development and mental health including self-esteem, peer relationships, family systems/environment, mood disorders, trauma, diagnoses, healthcare policy and treatment. Lastly, as its relevant to you as students, we will look at college life and eating disorders as it is often a time when eating disorders develop or peak.

SOC 388: Gender & Globalization
Tu/Th 4:00-5:15 PM

Examines how globalization impacts gender relations, as well as how beliefs about femininity and masculinity influence globalization. Focuses on particularly important contexts, including: global production, international debt, migration, sex, tourism and war.

SOC 395K: Domestic Violence
Tu 4:00-6:30 PM
Maria Puppolo

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

WGSS Graduate Level Courses

Graduate Level

Graduate WGSS Classes

WGSS 392N/692N - Trans Fem Arts and Activism
Mon 2:30-5PM
Niamh Juniper Timmons

WGSS 492E/692E – Trans and Queer of Color Thought
Tues 11:30-2pm
Cameron Awkward-Rich

WGSS 693B: Geographies of the "Imaginaire": Blackness, Worldmakings, and Intersectional Futures
Mon 10:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Beaudelaine Pierre

WGSS 393T/693T: Transnational Asian and Asian American Feminisms
Tues 4-6:30PM
Miliann Kang

WGSS 705: Feminist Epistemologies & Inter/Disciplinary Methodologies
Tu 2:30-5PM
Laura Ciolkowski

Amherst College SWAG Courses

Amherst College Sexuality & Gender Studies Courses – Spring 2026

SWAG 123 / CLAS 123: Greek Civilization
MWF 11:35 AM – 12:25 PM
Professor Griffiths

We read in English the major authors from Homer in the eighth century BCE to Plato in the fourth century in order to trace the emergence of epic, lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, history, and philosophy. How did the Greek enlightenment, and through it Western culture, emerge from a few generations of people moving around a rocky archipelago? How did folklore and myth develop into various forms of “rationality”: science, history, and philosophy? What are the implications of male control over public and private life and the written record? What can be inferred about ancient women if they cannot speak for themselves in the texts? How does slavery work in a culture when it is based on capture rather than racial difference? What do we hear when people in bondage are given voice in epic and drama? Other authors include Sappho, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Thucydides. The course seeks to develop the skills of close reading and persuasive argumentation. Limited to 40 students.

SWAG 164 / HIST 164: Queer America 1625 – 1890
WF 1:05 PM – 2:20 PM
Professor Manion

Long before terms such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender were coined, people challenged gender norms and engaged in same-sex sex, love, and relationships. This course introduces students to the dynamic, contested, inspiring, and sometimes quite challenging histories of this wide-ranging group of queer and trans people in the first 250 years of American history. We will learn about the lives, loves, values, and occupations of a racially and geographically diverse group of people. What laws existed to regulate the freedom and lives of queer and trans early Americans? What role did religion play in shaping dominant attitudes? Were queer and trans people isolated or in community? Did they live in all parts of the country, whether rural, urban, or suburban or did they more commonly reside in certain regions? By working extensively with primary source documents such as laws, diaries, personal letters, court records, newspaper articles, novels, and memoirs, we will learn not only about individual experiences but also how their friends, neighbors, and families understood them. How did individuals navigate contradictions between their own desires, prevailing cultural norms, religious beliefs, and existing legal codes? While individuals survived and thrived in many contexts from Puritan New England to the U.S. military to working class enclaves in New York city to rural homesteads, they faced tremendous hardship while doing so. Students will walk away with a rich and nuanced understanding of what life was like for queer and trans Americans before the emergence of visible, safe, and organized LGBTQ communities. Limit to 25 students.

SWAG 201 / LLAS 202 / POSC 201: Drug Trafficking
MW 11:35 AM – 12:50 PM
Karl Lowenstein Senior Lecturer Picq

Drug trafficking is now a major aspect of international relations. This course approaches the international political economy of drug trafficking, from its trade routes on global markets to its influence in shaping nation-states. As governments declare “wars on drugs” from Colombia to the Philippines, narco-politics permeate local and national government, define international relations, and inspire pop culture. The course has three main goals: 1) to offer an empirical overview of drug trafficking globally, 2) to analyze how it operates, from local recruitment to transnational alliances and mechanisms of money laundering in fiscal paradises, and 3) to understand how it shapes the current international system, from pop culture to sovereignty. We compare the different operating systems of Mexican drug cartels like Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación to the Albanian Mafia and gangs like Mara Salvatrucha in El Salvador and Los Choneros in Ecuador. In the process, we discuss their cultural impacts, from the “narco-corrido” music in Mexico to their relation to religion and sexuality. We also shed light on body politics to understand the nexus of drug trafficking with poverty, racialization, and colonial regimes of dispossession. This course navigates the labyrinths and complex pathways of drug trafficking from electoral politics to its investment in extractive industries like mining to understand how narco dynamics have come to de facto rule states and communities worldwide. Limited to 40 students.

SWAG 209 / ANTH 209 / SOCI 207: Feminist Science Studies
MW 1:05 – 2:20 PM
Professor Karkazis

This seminar uses feminist theory and methods to consider scientific practice and the production of medicoscientific knowledge. We will explore how medicine and science reflects and reinforces social relations, positions, and hierarchies as well as whether and how medicoscientific 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). Limited to 20 students.

SWAG 219 / PHIL 221: Phil Perspectives/Gender
TT 11:35 AM – 12:50 PM
Visiting Professor Antony

This course will offer a systematic examination of a variety of philosophical issues raised by the existence of gender roles in human society: What’s the connection between biological sex differences and gender roles? Are gender roles 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?Limited to 20 students

SWAG 258 / HIST 258: Medical Injustice
WF 10:05 – 11:20 AM
Professor Manion

This course will examine the history of medicine in the U.S. with a focus on the roots and persistence of structural violence, discrimination, and stigma. The history of medicine was long viewed as the study of the development of new approaches to disease prevention and treatment. However, pathbreaking scholarship on the racist roots of American medicine has called for an examination of how broader social, cultural, and political norms and values shaped medical training and practices. Slavery and colonialism transformed early modern medicine. Specialists in gynecology and obstetrics led the attack on healers and midwives while using enslaved women to practice their methods. This group became leaders of the organized movement to elevate the status of university-trained doctors. We will explore the history and legacy of the American Medical Association in launching the first coordinated campaign against abortion. We will examine the eugenics movement and its effects on those it viewed as racially inferior and/or sexually deviant, including the forced sterilization of BIPOC women and the new classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder. We will study the growth of psychiatry as a specialty, its propagation of abuse against LGBTQ people in the form of lobotomies, electroshock treatment, aversion and conversion therapies, and its legacy as the root of modern homophobia and transphobia. Medical stigma, discrimination, and bias have had profound and devastating consequences for generations of people denied access to lifesaving treatment and care, from the criminalization of abortion to the Tuskegee experiments to HIV/AIDS to transgender healthcare. Two class meetings per week. Limited to 20 students.

SWAG 265: Manhood and Masculinity
MW 4:05 – 5:20 PM
Professor Karkazis

What does it mean to be a “real man” in the contemporary United States? What impact does masculinity have on sports, pop culture, and health, for example? How do race and sexuality impact masculinity? These are just a few of the questions that we will begin considering in this course. Masculinity, like "whiteness," has long been an opaque social category, receiving scant attention as a focus of study in its own right. But within the past few decades social scientific scholarship on the cultural construction of masculinity and on men and masculinities as complex and changing symbolic categories are the subject of intense theorization. This was born in part from the recognition that early feminist and gender theory focused almost exclusively (and for obvious political reasons) on the position and experience of women. Men, except where they were situated as part of the problem (the abuser, the oppressor, the patriarch), were neither the object nor the subject of study. This course critically analyzes manhood and masculinity as socially constructed and ever-changing concepts deeply entangled with race, class, disability, and sexuality. We will interrogate how masculinities influence actions and self-perceptions as well as analyze how masculinity promotes hierarchies of power and privilege in groups, organizations, and institutions, such as education, work, religion, sports, family, media, and the military. We will investigate the origins and development of masculinity, its expressions, and its problematic manifestations (including hegemonic masculinity, violence, sexual assault, health outcomes, etc.). By the end of the course, students should have an understanding of the ways that masculinity has shaped the lives and choices of men and women, boys and girls and should also be able to identify and question the taken-for-granted aspects of masculinity. Limited to 20 students.

SWAG 301 / BLST 301: Queer of Color Critique
Thursday 2:35 – 5:20 PM
Associate Professor 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. Requisite: BLST 236 / SWAG 235 Black Sexualities or similar 200-level gender and sexuality course or consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Limited to 18 students.

SWAG 320 / EUST 311 / SPAN 310: #SeAcabó: Women’s Voices
MW 2:35 – 3:50 PM
Professor Brenneis

Spain’s reckoning with misogyny and machismo came to a boiling point over a non-consensual kiss on live television after the Spanish national soccer team won the Women’s World Cup in 2023. The #SeAcabó movement, like #MeToo in the United States and #NiUnaMenos in Latin America, represents a reckoning with decades of patriarchy, abuse and the underestimation of women. But how did we get to this moment? From the early twentieth century through today, the status of Spanish women has experienced dramatic reversals. From militia fighters to housewives to trans activists, Spanish women’s lives have been determined by laws, politics, education, the Catholic Church, and societal expectations. In this class, we will listen to Spanish women as they tell their stories of sexism, racism, and classism in historical accounts, film, television, graphic novels, narrative, and poetry. We will examine how women’s public and private lives have been transformed through decades of social and political upheaval, arriving at a present moment when a multicultural community of women in Spain is making its voices heard while they stand up against gender-based violence, xenophobia, homophobia, and other forms of exclusion. Conducted in Spanish. Prerequisite: Spanish 301 or permission of instructor.

SWAG 321 / ASLC 321 / FAMS 321: Gender & Bollywood Films
Thursday 8:30 – 11:15 AM
Professor Shandilya

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 historical romance Bajirao Mastani (2015) to the contemporary Gangubai Kathiwadi (2022), women dominated actionthrillers Kahaani (2012) and Raazi (2018), LGBTQ romances Kapoor and Sons and Aligarh (2016) among others. Recommended: At least one course in FAMS or SWAGS.

SWAG 332 / SPAN 330 / FAMS 338 / LLAS 330: Latin American Cinema
TT 2:35 – 3:50 PM
Professor Schroeder Rodríguez

How have Latin Americans represented themselves on the big screen? In this course we will explore this question through close readings of representative films from each of the following major periods: silent cinema (1890s–1930s), studio cinema (1930s–1950s), Neorealism/Art Cinema (1950s), the New Latin American Cinema (1960s–1980s), and contemporary cinema (1990s to today). Throughout the course we will examine evolving representations of modernity and pay special attention to how these representations are linked to different constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. We will conclude the course with a collective screening of video essays created by students in the course. The course is conducted in Spanish. Requisite: SPAN 301 or consent of instructor.

SWAG 334 / BLST 330 / ENGL 312: Caribbean Literature
MW 1:05 – 2:20 PM
Professor Bailey

This course offers a comprehensive study of selected Caribbean literature from the perspective of postcolonial and globalization studies. Writers include Dionne Brand, Achy Obejas, Edwidge Danticat, and Kai Miller. Themes include colonization, migration, diasporas, gender and sexuality, immigration, and the experiences of the urban residents. Limited to 15 students.

SWAG 346 / POSC 343: 20th Century Visions
TT 10:05 – 11:20 AM
Assistant Professor Park

In this course, we study the political visions of four major twentieth-century theorists: Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault. What forms of power did each of these thinkers surface? What social transformations did they call for? How did they imagine that transformation could be achieved? Devoting equal parts of the term to each author, we will dwell in, and move between, very different political problematics: the cultural production of “woman”; the psychic effects of racialized colonial rule; the perpetuation of capitalism through the sowing of false needs; the consecration of sex as identity. Yet we will also keep an eye on certain broad questions and themes. These include the production of the human subject by power; the ruses by which contingent social orders such as capitalism or colonialism come to appear as natural, total, or timeless; and the difference between surface and radical freedom. Readings will be drawn from: The Second Sex (Beauvoir); Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon); Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse); and The History of Sexuality, Volume One (Foucault). Nearly all of our work in this course will be devoted to understanding the authors on their own terms. The focus is on interpreting texts. Students who would like to develop close-reading skills are especially encouraged to consider this course. Recommended requisite: prior coursework in philosophy or political theory (in any department) may be helpful, especially for first- and second-year students. Limited to 18 students.

SWAG 347 / BLST 347 / HIST 347: Race, Sex, US Military
TT 10:05 – 11:20 AM
Associate Professor Polk

From the aftermath of the Civil War to today's "global war on terror," the U.S. military has functioned as a vital arbiter of the overlapping taxonomies of race, gender, and sexuality in America and around the world. This course examines the global trek of American militarism through times of war and peace in the twentieth century. In a variety of texts and contexts, we will investigate how the U.S. military's production of new ideas about race and racialization, masculinity and femininity, and sexuality and citizenship impacted the lives of soldiers and civilians, men and women, at "home" and abroad. Our interdisciplinary focus will allow us to study the multiple intersections of difference within the military, enabling us to address a number of topics, including: How have African American soldiers functioned as both subjects and agents of American militarism? What role has the U.S. military played in the creation of contemporary gay and lesbian subjectivity? Is military sexual assault a contemporary phenomenon or can it be traced to longer practices of sexual exploitation occurring on or around U.S. bases globally? Limited to 25 students.

SWAG 400 / POSC 407: Contemporary Debates
Wednesday 2:35 – 5:20 PM
Professor Basu and Professor Shandilya

This seminar will explore the ways anticolonial and post-colonial religious nationalist movements employ gendered appeals and mobilize women and sexual minorities. Are there fundamental, irreconcilable tensions between religion and nationalism, on the one hand, and the freedom of women and LGBTQ communities, on the other? How might political movements both challenge and re-inscribe dominant narratives of the nation? What are some alternative feminist and queer imaginaries? We will examine varied modes of agency and activism—through art, poetry, literature, cinema, and electoral politics among others. Limited to 25 students. Not open to first-year students.

Hampshire College WGSS Courses

Hampshire College Courses - Spring 2026

CSI 108: The Virgin Mary
Tu/Th 7:40-9:00 PM
Jutta Sperling

The Virgin Mary is not Catholic. When, in 431, the Council of Ephesus declared the Virgin Mary to be Theotokos or God-Bearer, she had already been venerated in Egypt since the third century as a re-instantiation of Isis. The syncretism of her cult explains her ubiquitous popularity in medieval Byzantium and the Latin West, but also early Islamic Syria, Ethiopia, and colonial Latin America. Her frequent depiction on moveable wooden panels (icons) and mosaics accompanied her early rise to liturgical prominence. By 1200, she rivaled Jesus Christ in religious importance, not only through her role as intercessor, but also as dispenser of divine grace in the form of breastmilk. She was the most active miracle-working saint in all of Christianity; Muslims worshiped her on occasion, as well. Her frequent depiction on icons, altarpieces and devotional panels accompanies - and, in part, explains - the development of figurative art in the West. In colonial America, she became known as the Conquistadora; the introduction of her cult ended prior religious forms of expression, but also helped them to partially survive in a new context.

CSI 201: Trans Film: Appreciation
Mon/Wed 1:00-2:20 PM
Reuven Goldberg

This course will survey trans film across genres-documentary, sleaze, horror, comedy, romcom-to consider the various ways that trans has been represented in moving image from the mid-century to today. Special emphasis in this course will be placed on observation, description, and appreciation as our primary methodologies.

CSI 209: Gender Justice in Economies
Mon/Wed 9:00-12:10 AM
Marina Durano

Women's movements have long engaged politically with economic issues, pointing out how these affect them in different ways. Whether they are farmers, factory workers, domestic workers, or unpaid care workers, global women's movements confront systemic issues at the global level as well. As they expose and oppose violations to their human rights, women are also searching for alternatives and proposing sustainable, gender-just economies. In this course, we focus on contemporary dimensions of the political movements pushing for alternative economics as well as ongoing policy debates. Indeed, the question is what is a gender-just economy?

CSI 215: Trans Film: Theory
Mon/Wed 2:30-3:50 PM
Reuven Goldberg

What is trans film? This course will survey trans film across genres-documentary, sleaze, horror, comedy, romcom-to consider the various ways that trans has been represented in moving image from the mid-century to today. This version of the course, running contiguously with another section of Trans Film, will focus on theory, from trans and queer studies, to film theory.

CSI 239: Feminism and Its Discontents
Wed 1:00-3:50 PM
Professor Loza

Are you critical of the limits of white feminism? Eager to analyze the imperial feminism of a novel, film, or game? Perhaps, produce a script for a podcast series or a YouTube video essay from a postcolonial feminist perspective? This course provides a supportive, structured, and collaborative environment for students to pursue their own intersectional feminist research project. We will read scholarly works that offer historical and contemporary perspectives on feminism. Students will learn the research skills needed to design, refine, and complete a substantial non-fiction writing project. The seminar will provide intellectual community and productive feedback at all research stages. Final projects will consist of a research abstract, an annotated bibliography, a detailed outline, a rough draft, and a completed script or paper. Students will give a short presentation on their research at the end of the semester.

CSI 251: Queer Poetics
Tu/Th 1:00-2:20 PM
Reuven Goldberg

This course attends to English-language queer poetry from the 20th and 21st centuries. What is a poem? What makes a poem queer? With special attention to both form and style, this class will consider various examples of queer poetry and will engage with questions of history, social organization, intertextuality, and queer theory to understand some of the meanings of queer poetics.

HACU 205: Black Feminism Today
Tu/Th 6:00-7:20 PM
Sheila Lloyd

In this course, we will consider and study how Black feminist writing, specifically prose, operates as a mode of "living and feeling, dreaming and being," as Jennifer Nash calls it. Examining and theorizing Black life in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, Black feminism today questions theories that would reduce Black life to Black death. In refusing this reduction, Black women offer alternatives through their aesthetic choices to center "beauty, intimacy, and care . . . as fierce and rigorous practice[s] of Black survival" and thriving, as Tina Campt argues. Writers will include Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Marquis Bey, and Imani Perry among others. Presentations and frequent short, in-class writing assignments will spark the work to be done in longer writing assignments and final projects that will be negotiated with the instructor.

IA 265: Queer Monstrosity in Horror
Tu/Th 2:30-3:50 PM
Caoimhe Harlock

In this hybrid lit/film seminar and creative writing course, we'll explore queer monstrosity in horror film, literature, and comics, including topics such as trans horror, images of motherhood, and race in horror. Together, we'll discuss prominent works of queer horror by drawing on theorists like Susan Stryker and Toni Morrison and develop creative writing projects (prose, comics, or screenplays) that unpack what horror means to us as writers and artists. How does horror help us interrogate traditional notions of gender and embodiment? Does our love of queer monstrosity tell us something dark about our own culture or point to some kind of power lying hidden in the shadows? We'll answer these questions and more! Possible texts: The Haunting of Hill House, I Saw the TV Glow, Silence of the Lambs, Hereditary, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, The Gilda Stories, Carmilla, Get Out, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Witch, &c.

NS 102: Queering STEM Education
Tu/Th 10:30-11:50 AM
Juliet Johnston

We are going to organize and host an outreach event for LGBTQ+ young folks who are interested in STEM called Queer Science. While preparing for this, we will learn about teaching pedagogy, educational evaluations using quantitative and qualitative assessments, science communication, mentorship, and community organizing across the Five Colleges. We will interrogate these pedagogical foundations and create our own aspirational vision for Queering STEM education. We will connect with LGBTQ+ scientists across the Five Colleges and help them build fantastic interactive demonstrations to inspire LGBTQ+ young folks. The efforts of this course will lead to hosting a fantastic Queer Science Day event and to a publishable report about how to inspire future LGBTQ+ scientists into STEM fields!

Mount Holyoke Gender Studies Courses

Smith College SWG Courses

Smith College Courses - Spring 2026

Please consult the SWG website for more information.

SWG 220 Introduction to Queer Studies

This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of queer studies, including its historical formations and recent innovations. We will explore the roots of queer theory in feminist theories of subjectivity and desire, queer of color critique, and queer critiques of traditional domains of knowledge production, including psychoanalysis and visual culture. Students will examine a wide range of media and forms of documentation ranging from archival material and oral histories, to critical theory. Throughout the course we will attend carefully to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability, and will put these and other topics/identifications in conversation with course material and discussions.

SWG 227 Colloquium: Feminist and Queer Disability Studies

In the essay "A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer," writer-activist Audre Lorde forges pioneering connections between the work of social justice and the environmental, gendered, and healthcare inequities that circumscribe black and brown lives. Following Lorde’s intervention, this course examines contemporary feminist/queer expressive culture, writing, and theory that centrally engages the category of dis/ability. It will familiarize students with feminist and queer scholarship that resists the medical pathologization of embodied difference; foreground dis/ability’s intersections with questions of race, class, and nation; and ask what political and social liberation might look like when able-bodiedness is no longer privileged.

SWG 237 Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism

This practicuum course is an academic complement to the work students interning with the Meridians journal as Praxis interns, Quigley Fellows, STRIDE Fellows, MMUF, Meridians interns, etc. will be doing. Run by the journal Editor, the class will discuss the scholarly, creative, artistic, archival and artistic work published in Meridians and how it is informed by - and contributes to - intersectionality as a paradigm and practice. Students will also become familiarized with feminist journal production processes and ethics, promotion and marketing strategies, co-curricular events planning and archival research.

SWG 238 Women, Money and Transnational Social Movements

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

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 267/ AMS 267 Colloquium: Queer Ecologies: Race, Queerness, Disability and Environmental Justice

Offered as AMS 267 and SWG 267. What is learned by reading Queer Ecologies alongside Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, or Over the Hedge as environmental racism? The class considers what it means to have a racialized and sexualized identity shaped by relationships with environments. How is nature gendered, racialized and sexualized? Why? How are analytics of power mobilized around, or in opposition to, nature? How are conceptions of “disability” and “health” taken up in environmental justice movements? Students investigate the discursive and practical connections made between marginalized peoples and nature, and chart the knowledge gained by queering our conceptions of nature and the natural.

SWG 270 Colloquium: Oral History and Lesbian Subjects

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.

SWG 271 Colloquium: Reproductive Justice

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

SWG 290 Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture

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

SWG 300ah Seminar: Topics in the Study of Women and Gender- Abortion History, Law and Politics

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.

SWG 300qt Seminar: Topics in the Study of Women and Gender- Building Queer and Trans Lives

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

SWG 303 Seminar: Queer of Color Critique

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

SWG 305 Seminar: Queer Histories & Cultures

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

SWG 311 Seminar: Queer Conversions

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 seminar course will situate conversations about community, transformation, ritual, and critique in the studies of religion and queer theory. We will look at case studies including faith based ex-gay movements, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and transnational Afro-Latinx Santería practices. Students will write independent analytic and reflective pieces, which will culminate into a workshopped final research paper or podcast essay.

SWG 314 Seminar: Documenting Queer Lives

This course examines visual and literary documentations of queer life by reading memoirs and screening short and feature length documentaries films. We consider the power and value of documenting queer lives while examining the politics of visibility as impacted by race, class and gender. We will attend to the expansiveness of the term "queer" and consider the performativity of gender and the fluidity of sexuality in our analysis of each text. Students will produce a short film, write a short biography or propose another mode of documenting experiences of queer life as members of, or in solidarity with, the LGBT community.

SWG 318 Seminar: Women Against Empire

Anti-imperialist movements across the globe in the 20thcentury carried with them multiple projects for the liberation and equality of people. These movements sought to build sovereign nations independent of colonial power and to develop radically new social orders. For women in these movements, the problem of empire had complex regional and local inflections that began with the politics of reproduction. This course will look at three sites of women’s involvement contesting empire: first, the struggles of anti-imperial movements, second, women in the nationalist movements after formal independence and third, women’s movements in the current age of empire that has developed alongside the stealth of economic globalization and remote-control warfare.

SWG 321 Seminar: Marxist Feminism

Marxist feminism as a theory and a politics both imagines alternate, liberatory futures and critiques present social orders. Beginning with a simple insight: capitalism relies on the class politics of unpaid, reproductive "women’s work," Marxist feminists in the 19th century sought to imagine new social connections, sexualities and desire to overthrow patriarchy, slavery, feudalism and colonialism. Today, queer of color and decolonial feminist theory, alongside abolition, environmental and reproduction justice movements, rejuvenate this tradition of Marxist feminism. This seminar focuses on theoretical writings from around the world to better understand radical social movements from the past and the present.

SWG 327 Seminar: Queer Theory

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

SWG 333 Seminar: Sexual Harassment and Social Change

This course is an interdisciplinary examination of sexual harassment and assault historically and today in a variety of locations, including the workplace, schools, the home, the military, and on the street. We will explore the emergence and evolution of social movements against sexual harassment and assault, and how these movements advanced law and public policy on these issues in the United States. A central focus will be on how relations of power based on gender, race, class, sexuality, age, disability, and nationality shape people’s experiences of sexual harassment and assault and their responses to it.

SWG 360 Seminar: Memoir Writing

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

SWG 377 Seminar: Feminist Public Writing-Calderwood

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

Summer Classes