Spring 2025 Course Guide : Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies : UMass Amherst

WGSS Courses

Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies

Spring 2025 Courses

WGSS 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture

Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m. B Aultman

Online Section Laura Briggs

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

WGSS 201 – Gender and Difference: Critical Analyses

Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m. Reyna Orellana

Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m. Beaudelaine Pierre

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

WGSS 205 – Feminist Health Politics

Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-5:00 p.m.

Svati Shah

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

WGSS 220 – Sustainability, Gender, Global Environment

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

Sarah Ahmad

Gender, the environment and sustainability are key terms in debates about economic globalization and social justice. While not new, they are reemerging in the as part of the post-2015 sustainable development agenda. This course will introduce students to the perceived and existing links between women, gender, and the global environment as they appear in 21st century discussions about sustainable development. We will explore these debates by focusing on questions such as:

- When did the environment and sustainability emerge as key issues on global agendas?

- What are their connections to economic globalization? To colonialism and capitalism?

- How did women and gender become part of these discussions?

- How did governments, multilateral institutions (e.g. the United Nations, the World Bank), and development policies target third world women? Was it to meet their needs and address gender equality? Or was it for more efficient and effective environmental and sustainability outcomes?

- What were the results and implications of these interventions?

- In what guise are these interventions reemerging in the context of the ?green? economy, food security, and population and reproductive rights?

- How have women across the world organized to address concerns about the environment and sustainability?

- How have feminists engaged with issues of gender, the global environment and sustainability?

The primary goal of this class is to familiarize students with these debates in a way that will enable them to participate in 21st century discussions in informed, critical and self-reflexive ways. (Gen. Ed. SB, DG)

WGSS 275 – Literature & Social Justice: Gender, Race, and the Radical Imagination

Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.

Laura Ciolkowski

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

WGSS 286 – History of Sexuality and Race in the U.S.

Monday, Wednesday 10:10-11:00 a.m.

Discussions - Friday

Laura Briggs

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

WGSS 295D – Democracy Works: People Power in the Service of Racial and Social Justice and Better Government

Tuesday, Thursday 8:30-9:45 a.m.

Jo Comerford

Civil Rights leader, Dolores Herta, said, "The only way Democracy can work is if people participate."  With this in mind, class participants will take a deep dive into Massachusetts state government to explore the legislative and budget processes focusing on where people ? as individuals and as part of social movements ? are powerful.  This course will start with the basics of state government and grassroots advocacy and culminate at the intersection of inside and outside strategy and organizing. It is interactive ? applying knowledge through hands-on projects, with a concrete focus on what it takes to win legislative and policy victories. The course will also engage with the start up of the 194th session of the Massachusetts Legislature which begins on January 1, 2025.

WGSS 350 – Global Mommy Wars

Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.

Miliann Kang

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

WGSS 391C – Feminist Childhood Studies

Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.

Kirsten Leng

This course will draw on interdisciplinary scholarship to examine childhood from a feminist perspective. We will examine how the meanings, definition, and value 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 how feminists and queer studies scholars have theorized power, children, and the family, the entanglements of care and coercion in childrearing, and the gendered and sexed socialization of children. Furthermore, we will study how feminists and queer theorists have envisioned alternative practices of raising children beyond normative gender and sexuality.

WGSS 392X – Feminist Care Praxis

Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 p.m.

Kirsten Leng

With Feminist Care Praxis, we explore how feminists, queer studies scholars, and others theorize and practice care. Embracing the term "praxis", which denotes the blending of theory and practice, this course examines these questions simultaneously. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and the expertise of varied practitioners, it will not only immerse students within scholarship on subjects such as care and mutual aid and familiarize them with grassroots activism and projects, but also provide students will a range of practical skills they can use in their own lives and communities. Structured by the developmental life cycle, examples of themes and topics covered include reproductive health self-care, herbalism, models of care beyond the healthcare system, practical environmental stewardship, and street medics.

WGSS 393TA/693TA – Transnational and Asian American Feminisms

Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.

Miliann Kang

How are transnational Asian and Asian American feminist scholars destabilizing and complicating fixed, U.S.-centric notions of identity, difference, history and politics?  How does the history of U.S. imperialism and wars in Asia shape particularly gendered and sexualized transnational migration flows, neoliberal policies, global capitalist development, cultural practices and representation?  This course explores the possibilities and constraints for developing transnational critiques, solidarity, and movements that recognize common concerns, frameworks and struggles while recognizing the heterogeneity, specificity and multiple sites which comprise current Asian and Asian American feminist scholarship and movements.  Readings will include:  Lisa Lowe, Aihwa Ong, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, erin Khue Ninh, Candace Chuh, Edward Said, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Rhacel Parrenas, Svati Shah, Hae-yeon Choo, and others. This class counts towards the WGSS theory requirement for majors.

WGSS 395S/695S – Trans Phenomenology and the Politics of Ordinary Life

Wednesday 10:00-12:30 p.m.

B Aultman

What is a politics of the trans ordinary, of everyday life for the singularity of trans life? This course will develop a method to explore different answers to this question. That answer, trans phenomenology, will be defined as a style of reasoning that examines the variety of ways that transness cannot be reduced to `crossing? gender or sex. Course materials will include theoretical accounts from mostly contemporary (1990-present) phenomenologies and literature (fiction and non-fiction). Thinkers/authors include (but not limited to): Andrea Long Chu, Gayle Salamon, Tourmaline, Jay Prosser, Marquis Bey, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Emma Heaney. The course will endeavor to understand transness in terms of embodied and material practices that take place in a lifeworld. Trans phenomenology would therefore involve a serious philosophical reconsideration of how the worlds we inhabit manifests themselves. This course does not endorse a theory of essences among trans identities. As relational, transness is situated in contexts of living as racialized populations and communities. Rather, being trans involves living acts that construct worlds; improvisational acts as part of everyday modes of carrying on, of living, and of bearing conditions thought to unbearable; and affective relationships that structure our emotional ties to communities and other attachments that generate optimism and belonging.

WGSS 395T/595T - Transnational Bodies: Queer, Gender, Race and Writing

Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.

Beaudelaine Pierre

This course examines the ways that narratives produced by women, queer, and Black subjects across the African Diaspora have been sites of conflict over gender, nationhood, generation, race, class, sexuality, and other differences. It uses the framework of the Black diasporic subject to examine how bodies and borders are imagined, valued, and crossed in trans-national contexts. It takes up theories of affect, feelings, and emotions to examine the political and conceptual potential of the queer subject remapping technologies of power and control and surveillance against the alleged rationality of white humanism. Areas of inquiry include kinship, citizenship, imperialism, immigration, war, collective memory, and globalization through Black feminist and queer studies approaches to ethnography, performance, literature, film, play, and poetry.

WGSS 491E/691E – Queer and Trans Ethnographies

Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.

Svati Shah

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

WGSS 492U/692U – Who Owns the University?

Tuesday 10:00-12:30 p.m.

Claire Potter

This course offers a critical and feminist perspective on the American university as a physical and intellectual space where different constituencies negotiate power and knowledge. We will begin by examining the origins of the private university as designed to fortify free, white, Christian governance, and the later emergence of the public university as primarily coeducational and secular. Throughout, we will explore how different constituencies--students, faculty, administrators, boards of trustees, politicians, and the public--make demands on universities that reflect larger political transformations. The history of competing claims on universities is highly relevant at a moment when campus-based activists seek to intervene in national and world events; and powerful forces not only seek to control them, but also, in some cases, stigmatize and repress fields of knowledge that lead scholars to act. As students imagine a research focus for the semester, they may wish to consider the following questions: On what moral or pragmatic basis is power organized in the university? How are claims to authority negotiated within and between constituencies? How did the right to academic freedom come to be distributed unevenly? How has the university as a site for objectivity and reason been challenged over time? The course will primarily address contests over agency, rights, and knowledge in post-1968 higher education, and topics may include: the sexual revolution, student political dissent, Title IX and gender equity, the rise and decline of tenure, the design of physical and virtual campus spaces, scaled-up administrative structures, and the rise of campus policing.

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 691E/491E – Queer and Trans Ethnographies

Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.

Svati Shah

WGSS 393TA/693TA – Transnational and Asian American Feminisms

Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.

Miliann Kang

WGSS 695S/395S – Trans Phenomenology and the Politics of Ordinary Life

Wednesday 10:00-12:30 p.m.

B Aultman

WGSS 705 – Feminist Epistemologies and Interdisciplinary Methodologies

Tuesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.

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 co-construction of gender, sexuality, race, class, citizenship, nation, ability and other vectors of power, inequality, and difference.

UMass Courses Outside of WGSS

AFROAM 293J – Black Women, Representation, and Power in Africa and the African Diaspora

Tuesday & Thursday 1:00PM-2:15PM

Yolanda Covington-Ward

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

AFROAM 326 – Black Women in U.S. History

Tuesday & Thursday 2:30PM-3:45PM

Olivia Haynes

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

ENGLISH 205 – Introduction to Post-Colonial Studies

Tuesday & Thursday 11:30AM-12:45PM

Shakuntala Ray

This course surveys literatures written in English from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.  In doing so it asks what unites the diverse literatures gathered under the rubric "postcolonial".  Is postcolonial simply a descriptive category, or does it suggest an oppositional or troubled stance towards colonialism and modernity?  To consider this question we will take up major issues and debates within postcolonial studies, namely: nationalism and nativism, subalternity, feminism, development, and globalization.  Throughout we will be concerned with questions of identity formation, representation, and literary form.

COMM 431 – The Intersectional Internet: Race, Gender, and Digital Media

Tuesday & Thursday 4:00PM-5:15PM

Roopali Mukherjee

This course explores the intersectional impacts of race and gender on digital media, and, in turn, how digital media impact contemporary race and gender identities, politics, and formations in an increasingly global and networked society. What, we ask, do race and gender as well as sexuality and class mean within digital media spaces? How do histories of racism and sexism shape and inform new patterns of online hate and violence? How do digital media enable profoundly raced and gendered practices of surveillance, silence, and exploitation, and, in turn, how do they provide opportunities for women, queers, and communities of color to trouble these practices and patterns? Centering intersectional approaches to digital media studies that emphasize critical race, feminist, and queer-of-color critiques, the course invites students to engage with their own digital selves and experiences to understand how networked affordances configure digital identities, spaces, and politics, and how raced and gendered differences shape social networking sites, gaming communities, mobile applications, and other emerging media. Course readings focus primarily on racial and gender formations in a US context, introducing ways that race has shaped aspects of our digital world? from the infrastructures and policies that support technological development, to algorithms and the collection of data, to the interfaces that shape engagement. The course also highlights scholarship on how communities of color have deployed new media in ways that expand the public sphere, contest the status quo, and give voice to their creativity, passion, and desires. Imagining a digital future free from racism, misogyny, hate, and exploitation, the course invites students to offer thoughtful and carefully researched critiques of the ways that digital media help or hinder us in crafting and presenting our identities, how they enable or weaken our access to and participation within public spheres, and how they empower or disempower us to create and effect antiracist and feminist social change.

ENGLISH 378 – American Women Writers

Tuesday & Thursday 11:30AM-12:45PM

Sarah Patterson

Fiction by women exploring the social and sexual arrangements of American culture.

FRENCHST 409 – Women in Modern French Society

Tuesdays 4:00PM-6:30PM

Eva Valenta

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

GERMAN 363 – Witches: Myth and Reality

Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:25PM-2:15PM

Kerstin Mueller Dembling

This course focuses on various aspects of witches/witchcraft in order to examine the historical construction of the witch in the context of the social realities of women (and men) labeled as witches.  The main areas covered are:  European pagan religions and the spread of Christianity; the "Burning Times" in early modern Europe, with an emphasis on the German situation; 17th-century New England and the Salem witch trials; the images of witches in folk lore and fairy tales in the context of the historical persecutions; and contemporary Wiccan/witch practices in their historical context.  The goal of the course is to deconstruct the stereotypes that many of us have about witches/witchcraft, especially concerning sexuality, gender, age, physical appearance, occult powers, and Satanism.  Readings are drawn from documentary records of the witch persecutions and witch trials, literary representations, scholarly analyses of witch-related phenomena, and essays examining witches, witchcraft, and the witch persecutions from a contemporary feminist or neo-pagan perspective.  The lectures will be supplemented by related material taken from current events in addition to visual material (videos, slides) drawn from art history, early modern witch literature, popular culture, and documentary sources.  Conducted in English.  (Gen Ed. I, DG)

HISTORY 301 – Women and Gender in Latin America
Tuesday & Thursday 10:00AM – 11:15AM
Diana Sierra Becerra

This course uses gender as an analytical lens to understand 500 years of Latin American history, from the conquest of the Americas to the present-day neoliberal era. We will learn how patriarchy and gender shapes power relations, including political and economic institutions, social relationships, and identities. In turn, we will also explore how the individual and collective actions of women? from witches and beauty queens to armed revolutionaries? have transformed the region. In some cases, their actions have confronted the power of colonizers, fascists, and imperialists. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)

HISTORY 349H – Topics in European History: Sex & Society

Monday & Wednesday 4:00PM – 5:15PM

Jennifer Heuer

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

HISTORY 357 – Women and Revolutions

Tuesday & Thursday 1:00PM – 2:15PM

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 1:00PM-3:30PM

Jennifer Nye

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.

HISTORY 378R – History of Reproductive Rights Law

Thursday 1:00PM – 3:30PM

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

HISTORY 492H – Witchcraft, Magic & Science

Tuesday & Thursday 2:30PM-3:45PM

Brian Ogilvie

component

The foundations of modern science and scientific method were laid in the Scientific Revolution of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. This period would be seen as a golden age by the philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the founders of the history of science in the twentieth century. Yet the period from 1550 to 1650 also saw widespread interest in occult powers and natural magic, and it was the height of the "witch craze" in Europe, a period in which about fifty thousand Europeans, most of them women, were tried and executed for the crime of diabolical witchcraft. Are these trends contradictory or complementary? Historians have disagreed vehemently about whether the Scientific Revolution, a triumph of rational thought, was opposed to the Renaissance interest in the occult, demonology, natural magic, and witchcraft, or whether these aspects were part and parcel of the intense study of the natural world that characterized early modern science. For example, Isaac Newton was both the founder of modern physics and a dedicated alchemical adept. Were these aspects of his life compatible? Or did they coexist in an uneasy tension, reflected in the fact that Newton never published his alchemical writings? This course will address these questions on the basis of intensive study of the primary sources and selected readings from modern historians of science, European culture, and occult knowledge. Though our focus will be on early modern Europe, we will look to the High Middle Ages for the origins of many European concepts of demonic and occult powers and the origins of modern notions of scientific explanation. On the most fundamental level, this course is about the history of reason and rationality: what did it mean to approach a problem reasonably, and what - if anything - did modern science add to the ways in which human beings justify their claims to know something?

JUDAIC 383 – Women, Gender, Judaism

Tuesday & Thursday 2:30PM – 3:45PM

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 11:30AM-12:45PM

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)

POLISCI 258 – Gender, Conflict, and Security

Tuesday & Thursday 4:00PM – 5:15PM

Jenna Norosky

This course investigates the gendered dimensions of armed conflict, foreign policy, international governance, peace-building, and post-conflict insecurities. Students will engage with academic and policy debates about how gendered power distributions shape international and human security. We will explore the issues raised in these debates by considering historical and contemporary global cases, including the role of masculinity in foreign policy, women's participation in political violence, gender- based civilian targeting, international post-conflict courts and transitional justice.

POLISCI 291U – Umass Women Into Leadership

Monday & Wednesday 4:00PM – 5:15PM

Michelle Groncalves

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.

SOCIOL 283 – Gender & Society

Monday & Wednesday 4:00PM – 5:15PM

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.

PUBHLTH 328 – Fundamentals of Women’s Health

Tuesday & Thursday 4:00PM – 5:15PM

Maegan Boutot

This course will provide a comprehensive overview of issues related to health in women, addressing areas including but not limited to biology, psychology, geography, economics, health policy, and social issue.

PUBHLTH 444 – Reproductive Justice

Tuesday 4:00PM – 6:30PM

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.

ANTHRO 384 – African American Anthropology

Tuesday & Thursday 11:30AM – 12:45PM

Amanda Johnson

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

COMM 338 – Children, Teens and Media

Tuesday & Thursday

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.

HISTORY 337AH – Race, Sex, and Empire: Britain and India

Tuesday & Thursday 2:30PM – 3:45PM

Priyanka Srivastava

Focusing on the period of British rule in India from the late eighteenth to early twentieth century, this course offers students the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of how race, sexuality, and gender shaped the history of imperialism, including its imposition and modes of rule, as well as resistance to it. The course is organized around weekly themes, primary and secondary readings, films, visuals, and other resources. Key themes include: colonial knowledge systems and the practices of cultural representations; the ?woman question? and colonial power; the workings of racialized labor regimes; practices of race-mixing and racial segregation in the colony; dominant notions of sexual propriety and sexual deviance and its impact on gender relations in India as well as Britain; science, medicine and colonial power; and finally, the impact of colonial configurations of race, gender, and sexuality in shaping anti-imperialist ideas and practices.

HISTORY 349H – Topics in European History: Sex and Society

Monday & Wednesday 4:00PM – 5:15PM

Jennifer Heuer

JOURNAL 390G – Reporting about Gender and Sexuality

Tuesday & Thursday 10:00AM – 11:15AM

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.

PSYCH 354 – Diversity and Development: The Child in Context

Tuesday & Thursday 8:30AM – 9:45AM

Maureen Perry-Jenkins

Component

This course will examine children's development and socialization in the context of families, communities, and the larger social context. We will examine how race, ethnicity, gender and social class shape children's development over time. An ecological perspective will be used that highlights the multiple levels of influence that shape a child's life and which recognizes the active role of the individual in shaping, as well as being shaped by, their social worlds. The complex interactions among families, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, government, and historical time period will be explored as they serve to provide opportunities and risks for the developing child. Moreover, we will explore how the intersection of children's identities, related to gender, race and social class, uniquely shape development across contexts. Ultimately, the goal of this course is to focus on the developing child in the real world. To understand humans we must understand the groups from which they come, the context of their human community, and the complex interplay between the individual and these settings. We will also examine how public policies at both federal and state levels have direct and indirect effects on child development.

PSYCH 391LB – Psychology of the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Experience

Tuesday & Thursday 2:30PM – 3:45PM

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 389 – Health Inequities

Tuesday & Thursday 2:30PM – 3:45PM

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 106 – Race, Gender, Class & Ethnicity

Monday & Wednesday 2:30PM – 3:45PM

Annie Hikido

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

Monday & Wednesday 4:00PM – 5:15PM

Ana Villalobos

SOCIOL 287 – Sexuality & Society

Tuesday & Thursday 10:00AM – 11:15AM

Jules Purnell

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)

SOCIOL 344 – Gender and Crime

Monday & Wednesday 2:30PM – 3:45PM

Staff

The extent and causes of gender differences in crime, from the "streets" to the "suites." Topics include problems in the general measurement of crime, historical and cross-cultural differences in the gender gap, the utility of general theories of the causes of crime in explaining the continuing gender gap, and a detailed look at the question and magnitude of gender discrimination in the American criminal justice system.

COMM 431 – The Intersectional Internet: Race, Gender and Digital Media

Tuesday & Thursday 4:00PM – 5:15PM

Roopali Mukherjee

ENGLISH 132 – Gender, Sexuality, Literature, and Culture

Tuesday & Thursday 10:00AM – 11:15AM

Nataliya Kostenko

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 301 – Women and Gender in Latin America

Tuesday & Thursday 10:00AM – 11:15AM

Diana Sierra Becerra

This course uses gender as an analytical lens to understand 500 years of Latin American history, from the conquest of the Americas to the present-day neoliberal era. We will learn how patriarchy and gender shapes power relations, including political and economic institutions, social relationships, and identities. In turn, we will also explore how the individual and collective actions of women?from witches and beauty queens to armed revolutionaries?have transformed the region. In some cases, their actions have confronted the power of colonizers, fascists, and imperialists. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)

HISTORY 337AH – Race, Sex, and Empire: Britain and India

Tuesday & Thursday 2:30PM – 3:45PM

Priyanka Srivastava

ART-HIST 314 – Sexuality, Drama and Invention: The Baroque Artist in Italy

Tuesday & Thursday 10:00AM – 11:15AM

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.

HISTORY 378 – Sex and the Supreme Court

Tuesday 1:00PM – 3:30PM

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).

PUBHLTH 160 – My Body, My Health

Tuesday & Thursday 10:00AM – 11:15AM

Andrea Ayvazian

Principles of health promotion and wellness with an emphasis on helping you get the most out of your college experience. Using active, socially engaged approaches we will examine topics such as resilience and stress, social image, healthy eating, social activism, substance use, healthy relationships, and human sexuality (Gen.Ed. SI, DU).

COMM 430 – Storied of Race in the United States

Tuesday & Thursday 5:30PM-6:45PM

Roopali Mikherjee

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.

Graduate

COMM 790STA – Sex in the Moving Image: Race and Affect

Monday 4:00PM-6:45PM

Ayanna Dozier

Taking the labor of women’s bodies, specifically the performance and labor of sex as a starting point, this seminar will examine cinematic portrayals of transactional intimacy. By centering working girls the seminar aims to analyze how these figures both fulfill and troubles heteronormative fantasy. The seminar will engage with literature that provides insight to the language around transactional intimacy to engage with the, still, contested field of terminology to center how these working girls define themselves. Moreover, by centering cinematic accounts of transactional intimacy, the seminar seeks to expand our understanding of body labor that is not solely fixed to pornographic accounts but that is a useful framework for non sex workers as well. Methodologically, this class will engage with feminist film criticism, critical race studies, and affect theory as both a model to read cinema and the labor of sexuality.

SPP 590STJ – Health Inequities in the Global South

Monday 11:00AM-1:30PM

Purendra Nuthanapati

Despite significant advances in medical knowledge and profession in the global south, health care continues to present inequality, discrimination, and inaccessibility to a large majority of people.  Global south has been witnessing a drastic shift towards privatization, deregulation of health markets, cutbacks in the state health programs, reduced barriers to capital flight and massive amounts of resource extraction and land grabbing by small elites since 1990s.  Given this scenario, the course will engage with some of the questions pertaining to equity and access in health care such as:  What are the imperatives for the state in its obligations to ensure universal access to health care?   How do social hierarchies and social relations in terms of caste, class and gender influence health care institutions and professional networks in the delivery of services? What are the implications of rising clinical trials and pharmaceuticals in terms of cost, exclusions and ethical questions? What is the critical role for communities in the health care system today?  Why do landless, the self-employed, the displaced, women, tribal and other marginalized communities have less access to health services?

ENGLISH 891MX – Transgender Marxism: Theories, Debates, Cultural Productions

Wednesday 4:00PM – 6:30PM

Jordy Rosenberg

This class is an opportunity for intensive study in one of the most promising areas of development in Trans Studies, a field of thought aptly described by Elle O?Rourke and Jules Gleeson as "Transgender Marxism." The course will explore the intersection of Marxist thought and struggles around gender and sexuality. We will address classic areas in Marxist thought - such as production/reproduction, capital accumulation, extractivism, the commodity-form, and fetishism - as well as more vanguard areas of the field - such as metabolic rift theory and eco-socialism - alongside major LGBTQIA movements, movements for racial justice, sex workers' rights, industrial labor and workplace struggles, health activism, land struggles, mutual aid, and immigrant rights. Authors will include Leslie Feinberg, Treva Ellison, Tithi Bhattacharya, Kay Gabriel, Lou Cornum, C. Riley Snorton, Kadji Amin, Jules Gill Peterson, Sophie Lewis, M.E. O?Brien, and Eman Abdelhadi, among others.

ANTHRO 614 – CARE: Doing, Knowing, Being

Tuesday 10:00AM-12:45PM

Lynnette Arnold

What counts as care? For whom? In what contexts? And to what effects? In this course, we will draw on a range of ethnographic work, including cultural and linguistic anthropology, as well as feminist and indigenous theory, media, and activist literature to explore contemporary issues of care. In the three aspects of the class - doing, knowing, being - we examine care as a concrete everyday practice, one that is rooted in and shapes ways of understanding the world, and which has far-reaching implications that both reproduce and resist multiple intersecting inequalities. We will explore methodology. We will ask political questions. We will encourage a deeper consideration of care, not only through research and scholarship, but also in the interdependent ways in which we live our lives.

Undergraduate University +

ANTHRO 106 – Culture Through Film

TBD

Online

Eunice Caetano E Silva

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

LEGAL 394EI – Social Justice in Practice: Law, Politics, and Policy

Friday 3:00PM – 5:30PM

Sindiso MnisiWeeks

This discussion-based community-engaged course provides theoretical content and professional training on the impact of cultural differences ? due to the intersectionality of age, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, class, nationality, religion, occupation, and other factors ? on access to legal services and resources, public policy protection, and, by extension, social justice. The course familiarizes students with strategies for cross-cultural communication, conflict resolution and organizational capacity building that center on cultural humility ? essential knowledge and skills for future legal practitioners, policy makers, public service leaders, and community actors. Cultural humility is the ?ability to maintain an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented (or open to the other) in relation to aspects of cultural identity that are most important to? the individual or group (Hook et al., 2013). Through a combination of readings, class activities, group discussions, and continuous reflection, students examine ways of applying cultural humility to law, policy, and practice with a view to securing the inclusion of and justice for people of all identities in an increasingly diversifying and globalizing society. This course has two major learning components: classroom learning and community service learning. Students will therefore reflect, throughout the semester, on the connections between course content and their internship sites. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for Legal Studies majors.

UWW 357 – Sexual Violence: Multidisciplinary & Anti-Oppression Approaches

TBA

Staff

This interdisciplinary course explores sexual violence in the United States from psychological, sociological, public health, feminist, legal, social justice, and criminal justice perspectives. It addresses the sexual victimization of teenagers and adults of all genders in a variety of social contexts, using an anti-oppression framework. The course also focuses on ways to make sexual violence prevention and intervention services better suited to culturally diverse people. (Gen. Ed. SB, DU)

PSYCH 391DG Seminar – Disability: Intersections of Race, Gender and Sexuality

Monday 4:00PM – 6:30PM

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.

WGSS Graduate Level Courses

Graduate Level

GRADUATE LEVEL WGSS COURSES

WGSS 691E/491E – Queer and Trans Ethnographies

Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.

Svati Shah

WGSS 393TA/693TA – Transnational and Asian American Feminisms

Tuesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.

Miliann Kang

WGSS 695S/395S – Trans Phenomenology and the Politics of Ordinary Life

Wednesday 10:00-12:30 p.m.

B Aultman

WGSS 705 – Feminist Epistemologies and Interdisciplinary Methodologies

Tuesday 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.

COMM 790STA – Sex in the Moving Image: Race and Affect

Monday 4:00PM-6:45PM

Ayanna Dozier

ENGLISH 891MX – Transgender Marxism: Theories, Debates, Cultural Productions

Wednesday 4:00PM – 6:30PM

Jordy Rosenberg

ANTHRO 614 – CARE: Doing, Knowing, Being

Tuesday 10:00AM-12:45PM

Lynnette Arnold

Courses for Winter 2025

Winter 2025 Courses

FILM-ST 380 - The Horror Film

Barry Spence

Monsters, slashers, and legions of the undead have terrorized audiences and haunted Hollywood's silver screen for a hundred years. This course will focus on the horror film, one of the most longstanding film forms, but one for which there is no clear scholarly consensus as to its definition. We will undertake an overview of the horror film in American cinema, focusing on the period from 1930-1999. We will give careful study to twelve landmark examples. How do we define this genre? What are the form's salient characteristics? What stylistic and formal techniques, what visual aesthetics, what themes, character types, sound design strategies, and conventions of narrative structure typify the American horror film, and what are the affective aspects of the horror film experience? These are some of the horror-related questions this course will explore

GERMAN 270 - From The Grimms To Disney

Sara Jackson

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

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

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

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 394AI - Law and Social Activism
Caitlyn Pierce

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

SPORTMGT 280 - History of Baseball in America
Doron Goldman
Matthew Katz

A view of American history from 1840-2010 through the eyes of our national pastime including labor battles between owners and players, famous Managers and Commissioners, legendary players and their accomplishments, struggles of minorities, women and immigrants, legislature and judicial involvement in baseball, and the Steroid era.

ANTHRO 106 - Culture Through Film
Sharonee Dasgupta

ART-HIST 324 - Modern Art, 1880-present
Nathan Stobaugh

This course takes a new and interactive look at 20th Century art, from the move toward total abstraction around 1913 to the development of Postmodernism in the 1980s.  We examine the impact on art of social and political events such as World War I, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism, the Mexican Revolution, the New Woman in the 1920s, World War II, the Cold War, and the rise of consumer culture.  We will investigate the origins and complex meanings of movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Mexican Muralism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art.  We will reconsider and reevaluate major issues in Modern art and culture such as the evolution of personal expression, the recognition of non-western culture in Euro-America, the interest in abstraction as a universal language, new technologies in art, the politics of the avant-garde and its attempts to reconnect art and life, issues of gender, race and representation, the role of myth and the unconscious, and the dialogue between art and popular culture. (Gen. Ed. AT, DG)

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).

COMP-LIT 100 - International Horror
Ekim Akyildiz

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

ECON 105 - Introduction to Political Economy
Staff Instructor

Introduction to economic analysis for majors and nonmajors. Facts and concepts basic to understanding the U.S. economy today. Topics may include:
unemployment, economic development, inequality, technology, social wealth, environment, government economic policy, economic alternatives, race and gender, and discrimination. Contrasting theoretical perspectives.  (Gen.Ed. SB, DU)

ENGLISH 132 - Gender, Sexuality, Literature, and Culture
Rowshan Chowdhury

FILM-ST 387 - The Western in Transnational Cinema
Barry Spence

The Western is one of the oldest of film genres. Usually considered the first Western movie, The Great Train Robbery, released in 1903, is arguably the film that established cinema as a commercial industry of formidable potential. From its earliest instances the Western has been a key cultural expression of the American mythos and has played an integral role in the formation of American identity. We can look at the Western as a cultural form rich in themes concerning: the construction of gender identity; racial politics; the establishment of social order in conflict with the lure of frontier self-determination; the romance of the outlaw; narratives of redemption; vigilante retribution versus the rule of law; human resiliency in and conquest of the natural world; the subjugation (or extermination) of indigenous peoples' and this is to name only an obvious few. But the Western has also been a pivotal form in the history of storytelling media in a very diverse range of nations and cultural contexts, from Japan to India to Italy to Germany to Australia to South Africa to Brazil to Mexico.
This course will, on the one hand, examine the cultural history and legacy of the Western genre in the cinema of the United States. We will study iconic and revisionist examples, looking at both formal and thematic aspects of this cinema as well as its historical relationship to American identity and its social policies and politics. On the other hand, a large part of this course will focus on the Western in relation to a highly diverse range of cinema cultures throughout the world. In particular, we will study the genre's impact on, but also its inheritance from, the cinema traditions of Italy, Japan, China, India, South Korea, and nations of the Global South. This course is designed to challenge conventional understanding of the Western genre by exposing students to interdisciplinary theories oriented toward comprehending the diverse cultural, social, and political perspectives embodied by the transnational engagement with the Western. (Gen. Ed. AT, DG)

LINGUIST 101 - People and Their Language
Magda Oiry

Language is a uniquely human instinct. It is also our most important cultural artifact. This course examines language as an instinct and as a social construct that dynamically shapes and is shaped by history, class, status, ethnicity, gender, and institutions like the media and the law. (Gen.Ed. DU, SB)

MIDEAST 151 - Water, Oil, and Blood: The Middle East in Global Policy
David Mednicoff

This course is a basic, interdisciplinary introduction to the contemporary Middle East, and uses three substances central to contemporary society as organizing metaphors for issues that help define the region that stretches from Morocco to Iran. We consider a wide range of topics including the modern legacy of Western colonialism in the region, the impact of oil, the roles of religion, gender politics, Arab-Israeli conflicts, and US policies towards the region. Satisfies the modern 100-level requirement for the Middle Eastern Studies major. (Gen. Ed. SB, DG)

SOCIOL 287 - Sexuality & Society
Skylar Davidson

SPORTMGT 200 - Sociology of Sport & Physical Activity
Charles Macaulay

An examination of the social relations within the institution of sport and their role in the reproduction and transformation of society. Topics include socialization, stratification, gender relations, race and ethnicity, and social change.  (Gen.Ed. SB, DU)

UWW  377 - Child Abuse & Neglect: Multidisciplinary Approaches
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.

Amherst College SWAG Courses

Amherst College Spring 2025 SWAG Courses

SWAG-200 - Theories in Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies
Tuesday & Thursday 10:00AM-11:20AM
Ever E. Osorio Ruiz 

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-258 - American Medical Injustice
Wednesday & Friday 12:30PM-1:50PM
Jen 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.

SWAG-282 - The Model's Gaze
Friday 10:00AM-12:30PM
Zoë Dostal 

What does European art history look like when seen from models’ perspectives? Starting in the Renaissance, the ability to convincingly depict the human form became regarded as the height of artistic achievement, and life models became central to artistic learning and practice. Although models were fundamental to art making, their identities, stories, and artistry have often been omitted from the study of art history. More often than not, models were from marginalized groups, leading to their exploitation for art’s sake. Furthermore, access to models remained largely forbidden for women artists. In this class, we will grapple with this troublesome history and interrogate the crucial contribution of the model’s labor to European art from the sixteenth century to the present day. We will study life drawings, depictions of modeling sessions, and resulting final works like history paintings and sculpture, alongside sources including memoirs and archival records, to develop a fuller understanding of the role of models. We will also consider topics like dissection and anatomical study, mannequins, and plaster casts. Our meetings will be divided between in-depth class discussion and activities such as life drawing, visiting collections, and speaking with contemporary art models to gain critical perspectives on the past and ethical practices in the present.

SWAG-294 - Black Europe
Tuesday & Thursday 2:30PM-3:50PM
Khary O. Polk 

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

SWAG-304 - Black Women's Stories of HIV/AIDS and Reproductive Justice
Tuesday & Thursday 1:00PM-2:20PM
Jallicia A. Jolly 

This course will introduce students to community-engaged research through the exploration of Black women’s experiences of HIV/AIDS, reproductive injustice, and community organizing, aiming to amplify marginalized voices and stories while introducing students to engaged research methodologies. It will bridge academia and activism, utilizing oral histories and creative works of HIV-positive Black women to expose, understand, and address systemic injustices. By participating in this community-engaged research course, students will deepen their understanding of the intersectional conversations central to reproductive justice: bodily autonomy, the right not to have children, and the right to give birth and raise children with dignity and care in sustainable communities. It builds upon the ongoing engaged research of the Black Feminist Reproductive Justice, Equity, and HIV/AIDS Activism (BREHA) Collective and Black Feminist Health Science Studies in the African Diaspora.

SWAG-322 - Feminist Writing in Latinx America
Tuesday & Thursday 1:00PM-2:20PM
Ever E. Osorio Ruiz 

Through the reading of novels, testimonios, manifestos, digital media posts, and non-fiction monographs, we will investigate the connections between key historical events in the Americas and the intellectual and cultural work of Latina, Latinx, and Latin American feminist writers. We will learn about the pressing social and feminist issues of the hemisphere and what theories of the present are emerging from the diverse forms of writing and story-telling of Cristina Rivera Garza, Sara Uribe, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rigoberta Menchú, Comandanta Ramona, Gladys TzulTzul, among others.

SWAG-334 - Caribbean Literature in the Age of Globalization
Tuesday & Thursday 11:30AM-12:50PM
Carol Y. 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 - Twentieth-Century Visions: Beauvoir, Fanon, Marcuse, Foucault
Tuesday & Thursday 10:00AM-11:20AM
Jaeyoon 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 Discipline and Punish or The History of Sexuality, Volume One (Foucault).

SWAG-409 Black Feminist Health Science Studies & the African Diaspora
Tuesday 2:30PM-5:15PM
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?

SWAG-436 - Race, Gender, and Sexuality in U.S. History
Wednesday 2:30PM-5:00PM
Jen Manion 

This course introduces students to critical theories of difference in thinking and writing about the past. We will read major works that chart the history of the very concepts of race, gender, and sexuality. We will explore how these ideas were both advanced and contested by various groups over the years by reading primary sources such as newspaper articles, personal letters, court records, and organizational papers. Movements for women’s rights, racial justice, and LGBTQ liberation have dramatically shaped these debates and their implications. In particular, feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory provide powerful arguments about how we formulate research questions, what constitutes a legitimate archive, and why writing history matters. Students will learn to identify and work with an archive to craft a major research paper in some aspect of U.S. history while engaging the relevant historic arguments about race, gender, and/or sexuality.

SWAG-466 - Democratic Theory and Sexuality: Past and Present
Tuesday & Thursday 2:30PM-3:50PM
Theophile Deslauriers 

This course examines the relationship between movements for sexual liberation and theories of democracy. It is structured around two moments in history: (i) the emergence of early arguments for gay liberation in Britain between 1880 and 1930; and (ii) the renewed debates about the democratic possibilities and limitations of queer theory in the past three decades. The historical focus is on Britain because an intellectually rich gay liberation movement emerges there while Britain was at the forefront of debates about representative democracy. From these two vantage points, we will examine several persistent and important questions about sexuality and democracy. Do sexual minorities have anything distinctive to say about democracy? Is resistance to sexual oppression best conducted via traditional democratic institutions, or through radical transformations of everyday life and other extra-institutional means? Is a democratic queer politics possible independent of other marginalized groups, or can it only be realized as part of a broader coalition of oppressed groups? Must queer democratic theory reject normativity, or can it articulate a positive theory of value? These questions are open and debatable, and this course is an attempt to explore them so that students are prepared to enter the long-running debates about them. Students are not expected to come to this course with answers already prepared. 

Hampshire College WGSS Courses

Hampshire College

CSI-0245-1 Reconsidering the Italian Renaissance: Rebellion, Authoritarianism, Racism

TTH 01:00PM 02:20PM

Jutta Sperling

Reconsidering the Italian Renaissance: Rebellion, Authoritarianism, Racism: In light of current political developments and the demand for decolonial approaches to European histories, this course asks: What is the relevance of the Italian Renaissance today? We will discuss the extent to which the Florentine Republic's struggle for survival in the midst of wars and despotic/oligarchic/authoritarian usurpations might, again, be of interest to us, and analyze the persecution of gay men and queer sexualities, the control of women's reproduction, and the emergence of racism - topics, which, likewise, remind eerily of today's political agendas. We will critically examine Renaissance cultural productions (humanist history writing, portraiture, perspective, mapping, erotic art) while also appreciating the politics of beauty in architecture, urban planning, and figurative art. Other topics include: the African presence; the gendered politics of charity; patriarchal families; domestic slavery; the conquest of America in the Renaissance imagination. Keywords:European History, Art, Politics, Italian Renaissance, Decolonial
Race and Power

HACU 205 - Black Feminism Today

TTH 06:00PM 07:20PM

Sheila Lloyd

Black Feminism Today: 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. Keywords: Black, feminism, women, writing, theory

Race and Power

CSI-101 - Race & Identity in Counseling Psychology & Mental Health

TTH 10:30AM 11:50AM

Gaurav Jashnani

Race & Identity in Counseling Psychology & Mental Health: This course introduces the role of political and sociocultural factors in appropriate, effective and ethical counseling, and in mental health more broadly. This is a theoretical, practical and experiential course that will focus on expanding awareness of your own values and biases; developing critical thinking and awareness of differing experiences and worldviews; and increasing your sensitivity to how sociocultural identities influence prospective clients and others. The focus of the course is on people as social beings with a range of intersecting identities that can deeply shape their mental health and prospective therapeutic relationships. The course concentrates on factors such as race, gender, class, sexual identity, religion, and (dis)ability, and engages with topics like institutional violence, discrimination, power, oppression, and socialization. Students will produce an autobiographical term-paper scaffolded throughout the semester, as well as a final project and smaller weekly assignments. Keywords: Race, gender, power, psychology, mental health, Race and Power

CSI-199 - Hashtags, Memes, and Trolls: Politics in the Age of Social Media

TTH 10:30AM 11:50AM

Professor Loza

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

CSI 298 Critical Studies of Youth, Age, and Generation

MW 01:00PM 02:20PM

Rachel Conrad

Critical Studies of Youth, Age, and Generation: What would it mean for age to be understood as an axis of power and a category of sociopolitical dynamics such as gender, race, or class? How does ageism or age-related injustice intersect with other forms of injustice? How does the idea of generations inform studies of sociology, history, literature, or youth-produced culture? What do critical studies of youth and age add to our understanding of education, antiracism studies, literature, ethnic studies, history, psychology, and the arts? This course is open to students working at any stage of their Division II concentration on topics intersecting with critical approaches to youth, age, and/or generation across a broad spectrum of curricular areas including (but not limited to) the arts, education, creative writing, childhood studies, literary studies, sociology, and critical psychology. Students will formulate and pursue their own questions and projects relevant to youth, age and/or generation Keywords: Youth, Childhood, Age, Division II Supported Project

HACU-0245-1 Setter Mythologies, Imperial Ideologies: Colonialism & Popular Culture

TTH 01:00PM 02:20PM

Professor Loza

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

Race and Power

IA-0265-1 Queer Monstrosity in Horror Fiction and Film

TTH 02:30PM 03:50PM

Caoimhe Harlock

Queer Monstrosity in Horror Fiction and Film: 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. Keywords: horror, creative writing, queer, comics, film, Race and Power

NS-0102-1 Queering STEM Education

TTH 10:30AM 11:50AM

Juliet (Julie) Johnston

Queering STEM Education: 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! Keywords: STEM, Education, Outreach, pedagogy, queer

CSI-0239-1 Feminism and Its Discontents (A Division II Supported Project Seminar)

W 01:00PM 03:50PM

Professor Loza

Feminism and Its Discontents (A Division II Supported Project Seminar): 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. Completion of this course fulfills the Div II Supported Project Requirement Keywords: Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Media Studies, Research, Non-Fiction Writing

Division II Supported Project.

CSI-0145-1 Indigenous and Decolonizing Pedagogy

TTH 09:00AM 10:20AM

Noah Romero

Indigenous and Decolonizing Pedagogy: This course offers a theoretical overview and practical application of decolonizing pedagogy-an approach to teaching and learning that promotes reciprocity, balance, healing, sustainability, and the inherent sovereignty of Indigenous and dispossessed peoples. Founded on pedagogical work from Indigenous, Black, queer, feminist, and person-of-color scholars and practitioners, this course aims to support all students interested in curriculum and instruction in developing a strong practical and theoretical foundation from which to actualize reparative educational processes. Students will explore how community-sustaining, decolonial, and relational teaching practices can enhance student learning while working to redress historical traumas and build solidarities between schools, families, and communities. Keywords: Native American and Indigenous Studies, education, teaching

Race and Power

CSI-0215-1 Trans film: Theory

MW 02:30PM 03:50PM

Reuven Goldberg

Trans film: Theory: 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. Keywords: trans, film, moving image, documentary, theory

CSI-0251-1 20th & 21st Century Queer Poetics

TTH 01:00PM 02:20PM

Reuven Goldberg

20th & 21st Century Queer Poetics: 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. Keywords: poetry; queerness; enjambment; poetics

Race and Power

IA-0202-1 Writing New Worlds: Fiction and the Political Imaginary

MW 01:00PM 02:20PM

Caoimhe Harlock

Writing New Worlds: Fiction and the Political Imaginary: This intermediate level workshop is for students interested in pursuing the art of writing fiction. We'll ground our exploration of craft in the question: "what roles does imagination play in the political project of changing the world?" Beginning from the premise that one must first imagine what the world might look like before one pursues the material and social activism necessary to change it, we'll look at how marginalized authors working in science fiction, queer and trans lit, Afro-futurism, and other genres have used fiction to imagine the possibilities of political and cultural change. We'll use that knowledge to develop our own original works of fiction and then workshop, iterate, revise, and improve our creative writing in the context of a supportive community of artists. Note: this class is primarily intended for those with at least some previous experience with creative writing keywords: creative writing, fiction, literature, science fiction, fantasy

CSI-0172-1 Critical Philosophies of Race

TTH 10:30AM 11:50AM

Jina Fast

Critical Philosophies of Race: The meaning of race has been scrutinized across philosophical traditions and subdisciplines. Philosophers have asked questions such as the following: What is race/what does it mean in contemporary societies? What roles does race play not only in social and political domains, but also in individual modes of embodiment, identity, and self-consciousness? How does whiteness exist as an unacknowledged norm in philosophical thinking and society, and how can this norm be critically reassessed and overcome? How are race, racialization, and racism phenomenologically experienced? In what ways is racism coded into cultural and political forms of power in contemporary societies? In law? In the valuing of citizenry and life? How do conceptions and experiences of race differ across cultures? This survey course will examine the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological issues that are generated by our concepts of race and racism. Keywords: Philosophy, Critical Theory, Racism, Anti-Racism, Black feminist Theory Race and Power

HACU-0241-1 Race and Representation

TTH 02:30PM 03:50PM

Jennifer Bajorek

Race and Representation: This course will examine questions of race and representation through contemporary art, literature, and visual and cultural theory. Students will consider the complex and intertwined histories of race and representation across a range of media and genres (painting, photography, film, video and new media art, performance, short fiction, spoken word, and poetry), periods, and cultural spaces. Critical and theoretical readings will span colonial and postcolonial contexts; engage with Orientalism, primitivism, Indigenous futurism, and Black feminist philosophy; and be drawn from art history, media theory, postcolonial theory, and thinkers taking intersectional approaches to race in both visual and literary studies. Students will also be introduced to current debates about the "inherent racism" of photography, the politics of abstraction, and data healing. Keywords: Art History, Visual Studies, Contemporary Art, Art Theory, Photography History,Race and Power

Mount Holyoke Gender Studies Courses

MHC Spring 2025 Gender Studies Courses

GNDST-201 - Methods and Practices in Feminist Scholarship
Sandra Russell - Tuesday & Thursday 10:30AM-11:45AM
Prereq: GNDST-101

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

GNDST-204FT - Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Feminist, Queer, Trans Disability Studies'
Niamh Timmons - Monday & Wednesday 1:45PM-3:00PM
Prereq: GNDST-101.

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

GNDST-206NT - Women and Gender in History: 'Histories of Native American Women'
Patricia Dawson
Crosslisted as: HIST-296NT

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-206US - Women and Gender in the Study of History: 'U.S. Women's History since 1890'
Mary Renda - Monday & Wednesday 3:15PM-4:30PM
Crosslisted as: HIST-276

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

GNDST-210SL - Women and Gender in Philosophy and Religion: 'Women and Gender in Islam'
Amina Steinfels - Monday & Wednesday 11:30AM-12:45PM
Crosslisted as: RELIG-207

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

GNDST-212EC - Women and Gender in Social Sciences: 'Gender and Labor in the Global Economy'
Linda Pickbourn-Smith
Prereq: 4 credits in gender studies or in the social sciences.

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-212RC - Women and Gender in Social Sciences: 'Gender, Race, and Capitalism'
Signe Predmore
Prereq: 4 credits in gender studies or in the social sciences

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

GNDST-221QF - Feminist and Queer Theory: 'Feminist and Queer Theory'
Christian Gundermann, Sarah Smith - Tuesday & Thursday 10:30AM-11:45AM
Prereq: GNDST-101.

We will read a number of key feminist texts that theorize sexual difference, and challenge the oppression of women. We will then address queer theory, an offshoot and expansion of feminist theory, and study how it is both embedded in, and redefines, the feminist paradigms. This redefinition occurs roughly at the same time (1980s/90s) when race emerges as one of feminism's prominent blind spots. The postcolonial critique of feminism is a fourth vector we will examine, as well as anti-racist and postcolonial intersections with queerness. We will also study trans-theory and its challenge to the queer paradigm.

GNDST-333EC - Advanced Seminar: 'Gender and Economic Development in the Global South'
Linda Pickbourn-Smith - Tuesday & Thursday 3:15PM-4:30PM
Restrictions: This course is open to juniors and seniors
Prereq: GNDST-101

This course explores the complex relationships between economic development and gender inequality in the global South. Students will be introduced to the theoretical frameworks and debates that shape the analysis of gender and economic development and will draw on these frameworks to analyze interactions between gender relations and economic development policies and processes in different contexts. Topics include the household as a unit of analysis; the gender division of labor: paid and unpaid work: the feminization of the labor force in the global economy; poverty; asset inequality; the informal economy; environmental governance; microfinance; and migration.

GNDST-333GS - Advanced Seminar: 'Gender and Sexual Minority Health'
Corey Flanders - Monday 1:30PM- 4:20PM
Crosslisted as: PSYCH-319GS
Prereq: PSYCH-204 or GNDST-201.

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

GNDST-333PA - Advanced Seminar: 'Natural's Not in It: Pedro Almodóvar'
Justin Crumbaugh - Tuesday & Thursday 10:30AM-11:45AM Friday 1:30-4:20PM
Crosslisted as: SPAN-340PA, FMT-330PA
Prereq: Two courses in Spanish at the 200-level above SPAN-212.
Notes: Taught in Spanish.

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

GNDST-333SE - Advanced Seminar: 'Black Sexual Economies'
Sarah Smith - Tuesday 1:30PM-4:20PM
Prereq: Two courses in Gender Studies or Africana Studies.

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

Smith College SWG Courses

Smith Spring 2025 Gender Studies Courses

SWG 217 – Sexual Violence in the U.S. Today
Wednesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Lisa Aronson Fontes

This course explores sexual violence in the United States from psychological, sociological, public health, feminist, legal, social justice, and criminal justice perspectives. It addresses the sexual victimization of teenagers and adults (not children) of all genders in a variety of social contexts, using an anti-oppression framework. The course also focuses on ways to make sexual violence prevention and intervention services better suited to culturally diverse people.

SWG 220 – Introduction to Queer and Trans Studies
Monday 1:40-2:55 p.m., Wednesday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Cat Dawson

This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of queer studies, including its historical formations and recent innovations. The course explores 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 examine a wide range of media and forms of documentation ranging from archival material and oral histories, to critical theory. The course attends to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability, and puts these and other topics or identifications in conversation with course material and discussions.

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

Flickers of global finance capital across computer screens cannot compare to the travel preparations of women migrating from rural homes to work at computer chip factories. Yet both movements, of capital and people, constitute vital facets of globalization in 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 257 - Colloquium: Queer Northampton 
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Kelly P. Anderson 
Crosslisted as: HST

This course focuses on the growing field of queer American history. This course explores 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, students 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 pays close attention to the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality, and the ways that difference has shaped queer history. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Enrollment limited to 20.

SWG 267 - Colloquium: Queer Ecologies: Race, Queerness, Disability and Environmental Justice 
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Evangeline Heiliger
Crosslisted as: AMS 267

This course examines interrelationships of race, sex, sexuality, gender, queerness, disability, class, embodiment, nation, Indigeneity, nature, and sustainability through critical engagement with a body of scholarship known as Queer Ecologies, e.g. anti-racist feminist and queer scholarship on science, labor, popular culture, cultural and environmental preservation, politics, bodies, and sexual and reproductive practices. The course draws theoretical muscle from feminist science studies, queer of color critique, critical race theory, crip theory, feminist theory, and more. Students learn basic participant observation methods, read scholarship, and analyze cultural artifacts such as web and print advertisements, television shows, films, and fiction. Enrollment limited to 18.

SWG 271 - Colloquium: Reproductive Justice 
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Loretta Ross 
Crosslisted as: PPL
Prereq: SWG 150 or equivalent.

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 300js -  Topics in the Study of Women and Gender-Justice and Security 
Thursday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Ana Del Conde 

This course explores understandings of security and justice from a feminist perspective. It draws upon a trans-disciplinary range of social theories and materials from both the US and international contexts (mostly in the Global South) to critically explore how traditional practices of security authorize and protect specific interests while destabilizing and rendering vulnerable other populations. The course centers grassroots practices of security, peace and justice that challenge prevailing militarized and securitized assumptions and practices. At the heart of this course is a commitment to questioning our conceptions of how security works around the intersections of power and oppression (i.e., gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.). Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.

SWG 321 -  Marxist Feminism 
Tuesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Elisabeth Brownell Armstrong 
Crosslisted as: ENV

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. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.

SWG 360 -  Memoir Writing 
Monday 1:40-4:20 p.m.
Cornelia D.J. Pearsall 

How does one write a life, especially if it’s one’s own? This writing workshop addresses the profound complexities, challenges and pleasures of the genre of the memoir, through intensive reading, discussion, and both analytical and creative writing. Readings are 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 the most urgent aesthetic and ethical questions. The attention is to craft, both in the memoirs read and those written. Writing sample required. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. 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 - Seminar: Contemporary Topics in Africana Studies-Race, Sex & 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. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.

AMS 245 - Feminist & Indigenous Science 
Tuesday, Thursday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Evangeline Heiliger

This course considers such questions as: What does one know and how does one know it? What knowledges count as science? How is knowledge culturally situated? How has science been central to colonialism and capitalism, and what would it mean to decolonize science(s)? Is feminist science possible? The course looks at key sites and situations in media and popular culture; science writing; sociological accounts of science; creation stories; and traditional knowledges in which knowledge around the categories of race, gender, sex, sexuality, sovereignty and dis/ability are produced, contested and made meaningful. Enrollment limited to 35.

ARH 290mm - Colloquium: Topics in Art History- Monuments and (Mis)remembering
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Cat Dawson

This course looks at the shifting role of monuments in Western culture, from public representation of the values of dominant culture to those that challenge what Kara Walker calls the “monumental misrememberings” central to most historical monuments. The class investigates the role that monuments play in forming—and disrupting—the stories told about history. The course attends to narratives of both domination and minoritization, foregrounding work by Black, Indigenous, and queer artists, across continents and centuries. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20

EAL 273 - Colloquium: Women and Narration in Modern Korea 
Tuesday, Thursday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Irhe Sohn

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

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

This course focuses on the legacy of confessional poetry written by women and queer, trans and nonbinary writers in the US. Frequently misread as self-indulgent, the poets under our purview use radical self-disclosure to trouble the social and legal treatment of gender and sexuality as “private” concerns unworthy of political engagement. In so doing, they resist the universalized heteronormativity of the mainstream confessional tradition and contemporary poetry writ large. Poets studied include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Paul Monette, Essex Hemphill, Claudia Rankine, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Danez Smith. Enrollment limited to 30.

ENG 277 - Postcolonial Women Writers 
Tuesday, Thursday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Ambreen Hai

A study of 20th-21st century women writers in English from Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean. Students read a variety of genres in their historical, cultural and political contexts, to address questions such as: how have women writers addressed the challenges of contesting sexism and patriarchy from within their home cultures as well as the impacts of western imperialism? How have they combined feminism with anti-colonialism, and addressed issues of race, class, gender, sexuality or nationhood, war, migration and diaspora? How have they deployed the act of writing as cultural work? Writers include Adichie, Aidoo, Cliff, Desai, Emecheta, Hosain, Kincaid, Satrapi and Zadie Smith. 

FMS 248 - Women and American Cinema: Representation, Spectatorship, Authorship 
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Wednesday 7:30-9:30 p.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).

FRN 230ww - Colloquium: Topics in French Studies-Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean 
Monday, Wednesday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Dawn Fulton

An introduction to works by contemporary women writers from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. Topics studied include colonialism, exile, motherhood and intersections between class and gender. The study of these works and of the French language is informed by attention to the historical, political and cultural circumstances of writing as a woman in a former French colony. Texts include works by Mariama Bâ, Maryse Condé, Yamina Benguigui and Marie-Célie Agnant. Basis for the major. Restrictions: FRN 230 may not be repeated. Enrollment limited to 18. Course taught in French.

FRN 320 - Women Defamed, Women Defended 
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Eglal Doss-Quinby

The voices of medieval women juxtaposed with the voices of men seeking to defame them (the antifeminist tradition.) How did women writers of the Middle Ages engage with the conventions and rhetoric of misogyny? To what extent did they question the traditional gender roles of their society? How did they represent female characters in their works, and what do their statements about authorship reveal about their understanding of themselves as champions of women? Readings include the love letters of Héloïse, the lais and fables of Marie de France, the songs of the trobairitz and women trouvères, and the writings of Christine de Pizan, alongside excerpts from the major antifeminist tracts of the Middle Ages.

HST 280gi - Colloquium: Topics in United States Social History-Im/migration and Transnational Cultures 
Wednesday, Friday 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Jennifer Mary Guglielmo

Explores significance of im/migrant workers and their transnational social movements to U.S. history in the late 19th and 20th centuries. How have im/migrants responded to displacement, marginalization and exclusion, by redefining the meanings of home, citizenship, community and freedom? What are the connections between mass migration and U.S. imperialism? What are the histories of such cross-border social movements as labor radicalism, borderlands feminism, Black and Brown Liberation, and anti-colonialism? Topics also include racial formation; criminalization, incarceration and deportation; reproductive justice; and the politics of gender, sexuality, race, class and nation. Enrollment limited to 18.

HST 383dw - Seminar: Topics in Research in U.S. Women's History-Domestic Worker Organizing 
Tuesday 1:20-4:00 p.m.
Jennifer Mary Guglielmo

This is an advanced research seminar in which students work closely with archival materials from the Sophia Smith Collection and other archives to explore histories of resistance, collective action and grassroots organizing among domestic workers in the United States, from the mid-18th century to the present. Domestic work has historically been done by women of color and been among the lowest paid, most vulnerable and exploited forms of labor. Student research assists the National Domestic Workers Alliance, as they incorporate history into their political education curriculum and use history as an organizing tool in their current campaigns. Previous course in U.S. women’s history and/or relevant coursework in HST, SWG, AFR, SOC or LAS recommended. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.

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.

JUD 227 - Women and Gender in Jewish History 
Wednesday 1:20-2:35 p.m., Monday 1:40-2:55 p.m.
Sari Fein

An exploration of Jewish women’s changing social roles, religious stances and cultural expressions in a variety of historical settings from ancient to modern times. How did Jewish women negotiate religious tradition, gender and cultural norms to fashion lives for themselves as individuals and as family and community members in diverse societies? Readings from a wide range of historical, religious, theoretical and literary works in order to address examples drawn from Biblical and rabbinic Judaism, medieval Islamic and Christian lands, modern Europe, America and the Middle East. Students' final projects involve archival work in the Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History.

NSC 320 - Sex and the Brain 
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Mikaela Laine
Prereq: NSC 210

In this course students journey into how sex (and where relevant, gender) can and should be considered as a variable in biomedical research, with a focus on brain function and health. The course covers how and why the sex of research subjects has historically been overlooked and how males have been considered the “default” model systems for whole species and beyond. The class discusses the dimensionality of sex as a variable, learning about sex-related factors (such as chromosomes and hormones) that impact humans dynamically. The class explores research demonstrating within-sex variability, cross-sex similarities and sex-related differences in brain structure, function and health in various species, while critically evaluating this work through the lenses of rigor, ethics and equity.. Enrollment limited to 25.

PSY 265 - Colloquium: Political Psychology 
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Lauren E. Duncan
Prerequisite: PSY 202

This colloquium is concerned with the psychological processes underlying political phenomena. The course is divided into three sections: Power and social structure, Leaders and followers, and Social Movements. In each of these sections, students examine how psychological factors influence political behavior and how political acts affect individual psychology. Enrollment limited to 25.

PSY 364 - Research Seminar: Intergroup Relationships 
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Randi L Garcia
Prereq: PSY 201, SDS 201, SDS 220 or equivalent; and PSY 202

Offered as PSY 364 and SDS 364. Research on intergroup relationships and an exploration of theoretical and statistical models used to study mixed interpersonal interactions. Example research projects include examining the consequences of sexual objectification for both women and men, empathetic accuracy in interracial interactions and gender inequality in household labor. A variety of skills including, but not limited to, literature review, research design, data collection, measurement evaluation, advanced data analysis and scientific writing are developed. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.

PSY 374 - Seminar: 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 activist's oral history obtained from the Voices of Feminism archive of the Sophia Smith collection. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.

SAS 201 - Mother-Goddess-Wife-Whore: Female Sexuality and nationalism in South Asian Cinema 
Tuesday, Thursday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Syeda Rubaiyat Hossain

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

SDS 364 - Research Seminar: Intergroup Relationships 
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Randi L Garcia
Prereq: PSY 201, SDS 201, SDS 220 or equivalent; and PSY 202

Research on intergroup relationships and an exploration of theoretical and statistical models used to study mixed interpersonal interactions. Example research projects include examining the consequences of sexual objectification for both women and men, empathetic accuracy in interracial interactions and gender inequality in household labor. A variety of skills including, but not limited to, literature review, research design, data collection, measurement evaluation, advanced data analysis and scientific writing are developed. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.

SOC 237 - Gender and Globalization 
Monday 1:40-2:55 p.m., Wednesday 1:20-2:35 p.m.
Payal Banerjee
Prereq: SOC 101

This course engages with the various dimensions of globalization through the lens of gender, race and class relations. We study how gender and race intersect in global manufacturing and supply chains as well as in the transnational politics of representation and access in global media, culture, consumption, fashion, food, water, war and dissenting voices. Enrollment limited to 25.

SOC 253 - Sociology of Sexuality: Institutions, Identities and Cultures 
Monday, Wednesday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Nancy E. Whittier
Prereq: SOC 101

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

SPN 230ww - Topics in 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 Lázaro

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. Restrictions: SPN 230 may be repeated once with a different topic. Enrollment limited to 20.

WLT 100cw - Topics: Introduction to World Literatures-Cannibals, Witches, Virgins 
Wednesday 1:20-2:35 p.m., Monday 1:40-2:55 p.m.
Katwiwa Mule

An examination of the rewritings and adaptations of the three iconic figures of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—Caliban the demi-devil savage other, Sycorax the devil-whore, and Miranda the virgin-goddess—by writers from different geographies, time periods and ideological persuasions. Using texts such as Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban, Lemuel Johnson’s Highlife for Caliban, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, the class seeks to understand how postcolonial, feminist and postmodern rewritings of The Tempest transpose its language and characters into critiques of colonialism, nationhood, race, gender and difference. Restrictions: WLT 100 may be repeated once with a different topic.

SOC 312 - Seminar: Women, Criminality and Punishment 
Tuesday 9:25 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Erica Banks
Prereq: SOC 101

While research on what happens once formerly incarcerated women return to society has attracted more attention among scholars, activists and experts in corrections in recent years, women’s carceral experiences remain understudied. Therefore, this course centers the experiences of women and how gender shapes their experiences with crime and punishment. This course examines why women commit crimes, why feminist theoretical frameworks better inform our understanding of women’s experiences with crime, incarceration and reentry, the major challenges women face after incarceration and the lasting effects incarceration has on the lives of women. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12.  Instructor permission required.

Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies

W401 South College
150 Hicks Way
Amherst, MA 01003
413-545-1922
wgss-dept@umass.edu