This course will analyze the narrative accounts of African American women since the nineteenth century. Working from the hypothesis that religious metaphor and symbolism have figured prominently in Black women's writing (& writing about Black women) across literary genres, we will explore the various ways Black women have used their narratives not only to disclose the intimacies of their religious faith, but also to understand and to critique their social context. We will discuss the themes, institutions, and structures that have traditionally shaped Black women's experiences, as well as the theologies Black women have developed in response.

This seminar investigates the historical experiences of women in the Caribbean from the era of European conquest to the late twentieth century. We will examine how shifting conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and the body have shaped understandings of womanhood and women's rights. We will engage a variety of sources - including archival documents, films, newspaper accounts, feminist blogs, music, and literary works - in addition to historical scholarship and theoretical texts. The course will include readings on the Spanish-, English-, and French-speaking Caribbean as well as the Caribbean diaspora.

This course considers how environmental racism shapes urban inequality. We will discuss how racial and gender bias have conditioned proposals for the future of cities and the planet. We will also address how people who have experienced racial and gender marginalization have formed relationships with land, water, and non-human life in response to crisis. We will address environmentalist work in geography, critical race studies, city planning, queer and trans theory, and disability studies along with novels, journalism, and film to analyze how ideas of race and gender and questions of urban and planetary futures have informed one another.

This course is designed to explore how centering Black and Native/Indigenous feminist epistemologies (ways of knowing), theories, methods, themes, cultural production, and decolonial and abolitionist struggle reorient the field of American Studies. If we orient American Studies around and through Black and Native/Indigenous gendered, sexualized, feminist and queer modes of survival and ingenuity; what themes, debates, and questions rise to the surface and become salient?

Song. Dance. Man. Woman. These are the basic components of the Broadway musical theatre. How have musical theatre artists, composers, lyricists, librettists, directors, choreographers, and designers worked with these building blocks to create this quintessentially American form of art and entertainment? This course will explore conventional and resistant performances of gender and sexuality in the Broadway musical since the 1940s. Why are musicals structured by love and romance?

This seminar focuses on the social institutions and symbolic meanings of gender, sexuality, family, and the household through the lenses of race, culture, and historical contexts. We will study how understandings of masculinity and femininity, the orientation of desire, sexual acts, and sexual identities impact gender roles in the household across various cultural and social contexts. We will ground our work in historical and ethnographic research on the connections between colonialism, chattel slavery, capitalism, and gender, sexual relations, and the family.

Since the recent election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the question of who belongs has become central to South Asian politics. These questions of power and belonging reverberate in the diaspora. Because the US is a settler-colonial state, many South Asians find themselves at the interstices of American and South Asian systems of power and flows of capital. In order to examine these processes, this class will use interdisciplinary thematic units across South Asian and Asian American Studies to examine caste, race/racialization, gender/gendering processes and colonialism in the Indian American diaspora.

An examination of the moral principles governing love and sex. Questions to be addressed include: Do we ever owe it to someone to love him or her? Do we owe different things to those we love? Do we owe it to a loved one to believe better of him than our evidence warrants? What is consent, and why is it morally significant? Is sex between consenting adults always permissible, and if not, why not? Are there good reasons for prohibiting prostitution and pornography? Everyone has opinions about these matters. The aim of the course is to subject those opinions to scrutiny.

This course explores questions and practices of liberation in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 60s, we will study a poetics and politics of liberation, paying special attention to the role played by language and imagination when ideas translate onto social movements related to social justice, structural violence, education, care, and the commons. Readings include Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Diamela Eltit, Audre Lorde, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gayatri Spivak, Zapatistas, among others.

The Body: we all have one and inhabit it in a myriad of ways, as a source of joy, a contradiction to be reckoned with, a failed experiment, an inadequate container for all that we are, and an unending mystery. In traditional workshops we don't discuss what we are writing about and why; content and context come second to craft. In Vital Signs we will explore narratives of the body, beginning by reading material illustrative of a wide-range of expression and experience while working toward finding language for our individual physical and emotional experience.

This class expands the conceptual boundaries of fashion beyond designer labels and celebrity trends toward an address of the socio-technological function of fashion in East Asia. The central aim of the course is to engage thinking about fashion as a multilayered site where East Asia's media infrastructure, gender politics, labor systems, and non-human entities intersect. Scrutinizing the role of the state as well as the industry's racialized grammars, we will examine how fashion articulates with presumed binaries of class, ideology, gender, age and race in understanding East Asian national and diasporic formations.

This course examines "dangerous bodies" - bodies that transgress existing gender and racial norms in Chinese and Sinophone cultures. Situated at the intersection of literary, film, performance, gender and ethnic studies, this course provides an introduction to the shifting social meanings of the body in relation to historical masculinity, femininity, and Chineseness. We examine different cross-dressed figures, ranging from Mulan, cross-dressed male opera singer, WWII Japanese/Chinese spy, to experimental queer cinema, in a study that unpacks whether these transgressive bodies represent social change or a tool for restoring traditional norms.

This course explores the fascination with animals in film, photography and popular culture, engaging critical issues in animal and environmental studies. In the context of global crises of climate change and mass displacement, course themes include the invention of wilderness, national parks, zoos and the prison system; the cult of the pet; vampires, werewolves and liminal creatures; animal communication, emotions and rights; queering nature; race and strategies for environmental justice. How can rethinking animals help us rethink what it means to be human? How can we transform our relations with other species and the planet itself?

A young Arthurian knight loses honor because he enjoys having sex with his wife. The Grail King is wounded near fatally in the genitals while trying to win the "wrong" woman. Young kings dress up and act like women in order to woo their prospective brides. This course will explore what it meant to be men and women in love (with each other or with God) in some of the most spectacular literary works of the German Middle Ages. The larger context for our discussion will be a more nuanced understanding of the history of gender. Readings and discussion primarily in modern German, some readings and discussion in English.

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of gender and sexuality studies. How do gender and sexuality emerge from networks of power and social relations? And how are they entangled and co-constituted with other axes of identity such as class, race, and ability? As we survey a wide variety of writers, texts, issues, and methods - historical and contemporary, theoretical and practical, artistic and scholarly - we will engage the diversity of thought and approach contained under the rubrics of feminist, gender, sexuality, and queer studies as foundation for further work in the field.

This course explores the intellectual history of media, sex, and the racialized body. We will analyze the representation of the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in film, advertisements, the fashion industry, reality TV, animation, and music videos. This course will also closely examine the predominance of White heteronormativity in film, the representation of gender in K-pop and K-dramas, and the sexualization of Blackness and Latinidad in Blaxploitation films and telenovelas.

Human reproduction is often taken for granted as a merely biological phenomenon, yet reproduction is laden with cultural meaning and import for individuals and for society as a whole. Despite its significance, reproduction is rarely addressed in the Princeton curriculum. This new lecture course explores human reproduction from a sociological perspective. It also seeks to introduce students to some of the basic modes of thinking in both sociology and gender and sexuality studies.

This course explores the intellectual history of the racialization of beauty. We will begin by analyzing how the history of Atlantic slavery and scientific racism set precedents for the contemporary dominant conceptualization of beauty in the body, art, and nature. Students will then concentrate on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in beauty pageants, advertising, and the plastic surgery industry. This course will also closely examine racialized fat phobia, the racial politics of hair, transnational colorism, and racialized exploitation in beauty service work.

This course explores the recent history of ideas about contemporary unfreedom, focusing on the influence of discourses about race, gender, and sexuality. We will study how scientific racism and racial capitalism fuel contemporary slavery. Students will analyze how the silencing of the pervasiveness of contemporary slavery is tied to the narrative of "abolition" and the globalization of economic dynamics based on the exploitation of predominantly people of color. This course will also examine the racialization of child exploitation, survivor criminalization, and representation of unfreedom in anti-trafficking campaigns.

Why does sex work raise some of the most fascinating, controversial and often taboo questions of our time? The course explores the intricate lives and intimate narratives of sex workers from the perspective of sex workers themselves, as they engage in myriad varieties of global sex work: pornography, prostitution, erotic dance, escorting, street work, camming, commercial fetishism, and sex tourism. Themes include: the 'whore stigma,' race, class and queer dynamics; law, labor and money; technologies of desire and spectacle; dirt, marriage and monogamy; carceral modernity; violence, agency and, above all, strategies for social transformation.

This course explores the interdisciplinary field of Gender and Sexuality Studies from its beginnings to the current state of the field. We range widely among genres and disciplines to consider how gender and sexuality is studied variously - in philosophy, literary studies, anthropology, sociology, history - attending to the abiding concerns that unite those studies, and the methodological differences that delimit them. Topics considered include queer-of-color critique, practices of queer world-making, gender-based violence and bodily vulnerability, experimental archives, and gender and sexuality as objects of university study.

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar surveys the history, central theories, diverse research methodologies, and varied practices that make up the field of feminist science and technology studies(STS). In the first section of the course, Foundations, students explore the historical development of this rich, and dynamic field of inquiry, and are introduced to fundamental claims, critiques, and debates that characterize the field. In the second section, Feminist STS in Practice, we examine a particular scholar or lab currently engaged in research practices and knowledge production underwritten by feminist STS principles each week.

This course explores the ways that law structured women's lives and how women shaped the law in U.S. history, from the colonial period to the present. While tracing changes in women's legal status over time, this course is also concerned with those issues, it also considers law as a lived aspect of people's lives: how it structured identities, relationships, and material circumstances. It also deals with diversity among women, in terms of race, class, and sexuality. You will leave with a greater understanding of women's relationship to law and current legal issues facing all Americans, not just women.

The prison is a growth industry in the U.S.; it is also a central institution in U.S. political and social life, shaping our experience of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and political possibility. This course explores the history of incarceration over the course of more than two centuries. It tracks the emergence of the penitentiary in the early national period and investigates mass incarceration of the late 20th century. Topics include the relationship between the penitentiary and slavery; the prisoners' rights movement; Japanese internment; immigration detention; and the privatization and globalization of prisons.

The ancient Greeks imagined a woman's body ruled by her uterus. Medieval Christians believed in a womb touched by God. Renaissance doctors uncovered the 'secrets' of women through dissection, while early modern states punished unmarried mothers. This course will ask how women's reproductive bodies were sites for the production of medical knowledge, the articulation of state power, and the development of concepts of purity and difference from ancient Greece to 18th-c. Europe. The course will incorporate sources as varied as medieval sculptures of the Madonna, Renaissance medical illustrations, and early modern midwifery licenses.

The seminar will draw on Anibal Quijano's work to explore three major themes: the intertwined notions of race and gender in Latin America; the understanding of gender and patriarchy in the work of contemporary decolonial feminist theory; and the oppressive intersectional inequalities introduced by the Conquest and colonization that continue to shape our world. Although Quijano's scholarship tends to be read in a disjointed and disconnected way, this course will take a more unified approach. This seminar will be taught by PLAS fellow Rita Segato, an internationally acclaimed anthropologist and feminist thinker.

Analyzing LGBTQ politics and public policy in the US and globally. Assessing the impact of the descriptive representation of LGBTQ+ people on public policy, legislation, legal reform and social change. Comparing domestic issues with LGBTQ politics around the world: in the global north and south. Understanding the role that elected officials, activists and voters can have in driving change, affecting their colleagues, constituents and neighbors. Considering internal tensions and conflicts within the LGBTQ family, as well as coalitions and allied movements. Students will focus on a community which resonates with them personally.

This course will introduce students to the richness and diversity of women's writing in India; it will open many windows into regional Indian societies, cultures, and subcultures; and it will allow students to examine social issues and cultural values from women's perspectives. By studying women's writings from at least ten major Indian languages (in English translation), students will be able to identify differences and disagreements among different canons as well as some common features among them that justify the category of Indian women's writing.

This course offers an introduction to theory, perspectives, and empirical research in the Sociology of Gender. The course covers a combination of canonical and contemporary work, consider traditional and current debates, and will include local and global material. This is a reading and writing intensive class.

This course assesses and analyzes the impact of the descriptive representation of marginalized communities on public policy, legislation, legal reform and social change. We focus on dimensions of sexual orientation, identity, gender, ethnicity and race, and the intersectionality of these communities. We seek to understand the role that elected officials can have in driving change, affecting their colleagues and constituents. We consider internal tensions and conflicts between marginalized groups, as well as coalitions and allied movements.

This course offers an intensive survey of ongoing efforts to revisit and revise the American theatrical canon and repertoire. Students will examine the economic, institutional and cultural forces shaping the landscape of new play production in the United States as they also read a broad selection of plays from the contemporary American theater. Working in partnership with McCarter Theatre's "Bard at the Gate" initiative, students will develop dramaturgical and other resources in response to this uniquely curated virtual platform for noteworthy but overlooked plays by BIPOC, female, LGBTQIA+, and disabled artists.

In this Princeton Challenge course, students will participate in building a relationship between a historically significant Black theater company, Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick, and the university community. Co-taught by Sydne Mahone, Director of play development at Crossroads 1985-1997, students will research the theater through its people and its art, while making the role of women in Black art-making more visible. Students will consider their own role in movements for change, and the role of storytelling as a call to action. Our work will culminate in creative responses and roadmaps for continuing community relationship.

Every life delivers a story (or three) worth telling well. This workshop rehearses the writing and performance skills necessary to remake the raw material drawn from lived experience into compelling autobiographical storytelling. As we engage the thematic focus of "Princeton, History and Me," we will explore autobiographical storytelling as both a practice and a process as we also evince (and confront) the personal, moral, ethical and artistic dimensions of the stories we choose to tell about ourselves, about Princeton, and the stories that remain to be told about both.