This course explores the intellectual history of scientific racism, paying close attention to how its theories influence power and institutions today. Reading primary sources from the history of science, each class will trace the reverberations of scientific racism in media, education, politics, law, and global health. Our conversations will consistently analyze the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and age in the legacies of scientific racism. We will also examine the impact of scientific racism in public discourse about the Black Lives Matter Movement and collectively brainstorm for activism towards restorative justice.

This course surveys a genealogy of U.S. Black politics and culture in order to gain purchase on the idea of a "Black Radical Tradition." We will examine historical cases of deliberative activities, intimate life, and aesthetic choice in Black communities, orienting our discussions around the following questions: What are the stakes in defining the Black Radical Tradition? What qualifies as 'the political' for Black subjects? And, to what extent are conceptions of politics historically contingent? Students will develop inventive engagements with Black political history and learn concepts that are important to the study of race and politics.

In this interdisciplinary class, students of race as well as gender, sexuality, disability, etc. read deeply and broadly in academic journals as a way of learning the debates in their fields and placing their scholarship in relationship to them. Students report each week on the trends in the last five years of any journal of their choice, writing up the articles' arguments and debates, while also revising a paper in relationship to those debates and preparing it for publication. This course enables students to leap forward in their scholarly writing through a better understanding of their fields and the significance of their work to them.

The fat body operates at the conjuncture of political economy, beauty standards, and health. This seminar asks, How does this "f-word" discipline and regulate bodies in /as public? What is the "ideal" American public body and who gets to occupy that position? How are complex personhood, expressivity, health, and citizenship contested cultural and political economic projects? We will examine the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness using dance, performance, memoirs, and media texts as case studies. Intersectional dimensions of the fat body are central to the course. No previous performance experience necessary.

In almost every human society, women are expected to perform different tasks than men. Was there a biological or cultural reason for this? True - women are the only sex to give birth to date, but does that mean there is no escape from traditional sex roles? In this class we will explore female behavioral biology from an evolutionary and biocultural perspective. We will pair physiology and life-history theory with cultural outcomes to engage with feminism and social and political debates. Topics include menstrual taboos, sexual differentiation and gender identity, reproduction, contraception, women's health, workplace equality, etc.

Two major myths-about race and sex-have a negative impact on our society and inhibit an accurate understanding of what it means to be human. These myths create a false set of societally accepted 'truths' that in turn cause a range of problems. Busting deeply ingrained myths about human nature requires some effort. It means breaking the stranglehold of simplicity in our view of what is natural and forcing ourselves to realize that being human is very complicated. It means challenging common sense and our reliance on generalities and popular perception, and actually delving into the gritty details of what we know humans actually are and do.

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.

This seminar investigates how feminism and gender theory (from eco-feminism and intersectional feminism to queer and trans theory) can spearhead new methods of research, objects of study, and ways of seeing and analyzing spaces, buildings, and cities, as well as the human alliances within them. We study forms of organizing around women's and LGBTQ+ rights in cities, from the efforts of informal activist groups to those of institution building, and highlight these efforts as main sites for creative, architectural, and urban intervention in challenging heteronormative forms of living and instead providing spaces of care and kinship making.

From the height of the Asian American movement began at San Francisco State in 1968, the question of where Asian diasporic communities fit within the American racial matrix has been of pivotal interest for scholars, students, activists and artists across genres. This class seeks to explore Asian Americans' social location in the US. Using a relational intersectional feminist approach, this class will examine Asian Americans positionality in relation to Indigenous, Black and Latinx communities throughout the country. Students will engage and hone Asian American Studies interdisciplinary methods (historical, literary and filmic analysis).

Theater writer/director Steve Cosson and multimedia artist Jessica Mitrani collaborate with students on a theatrical interrogation of the book Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. The book features interviews with LGBTQ+ individuals in the 1930's. The class is a creative deep dive into these autobiographical accounts, manifesting strategies to adapt the text into performance, with close consideration of narrative; staging, acting/representation; design elements including video; music; etc., as well as how this historical material can be contextualized for the present. The class culminates in a collaborative workshop performance.

An introduction to the classical myths in their cultural context and in their wider application to human concerns (such as creation, sex and gender, identity, transformation, and death). The course will offer a who's who of the ancient imaginative world, study the main ancient sources of well known stories, and introduce modern approaches to analyzing myths.

In traditional workshops content and context come second to craft. Here we will explore writing political fiction, the politics of fiction and writing as political engagement. We'll read widely, from the most realistic depictions of the American political process and the varieties of immigrant experience to the work of afrofuturists and feminists. The personal is the political and our frame will range from the global to the domestic. We will write stories that inhabit experiences other than our own. This course will allow students to make interdisciplinary connections between courses on history, politics and identity and creative writing.

Bharatanatyam, butoh, hip hop, and salsa are some of the dances that will have us travel from temples and courtyards to clubs, streets, and stages around the world. Through studio sessions, readings and viewings, field research, and discussions, this seminar will introduce students to dance across cultures with special attention to issues of migration, cultural appropriation, gender and sexuality, and spiritual and religious expression. Students will also learn basic elements of participant observation research. Guest artists will teach different dance forms. No prior dance experience is necessary.

Disability is front and center in a global social justice revolution. But who are the disabled artists and ideas behind this movement? How can we embrace Radical Accessibility and Care in our daily artistic practices? This course invites all artists, from choreographers to theater makers, film makers, visual artists, writers and composers to immerse in a highly collaborative, improvisational, experimental and inclusive community to explore Disability Justice as a framework for creative, dramaturgical and curatorial practices.

This course introduces students to twenty-first-century Asian women writers (Japan, Korea, China) whose works achieved global popularity through translation in the past two decades. Written by writers living in East Asian countries dealing with capitalist developments, financial crises, and neoliberal free trade agreements, the texts collectively suggest the global interest and transmission of women's rights and LGBTQ movements in Asia and beyond. We explore, firstly, the meaning of "capitalism" as seen by the author in each text, and secondly, a commodified urban-based cosmopolitan culture that depends on the continued orientalism of Asia.

This course studies the entanglement between ideas of personhood and the history of ideas about beauty. How does beauty make and unmake persons -socially, legally and culturally- at the intersection of race, gender and aesthetics? Let us move beyond the good versus bad binary that dominates discussions of beauty to focus instead on how beauty in literature and culture have contributed to the conceptualization of modern, western personhood and its inverse (the inhuman, the inanimate, the object). We will trace beauty and its disruptions in the arenas of literature, visual culture, global capitalism, politics, law, science and technology.

This class considers short poems of the 16th and 17th centuries that are variously concerned with love, desire, and sexual intimacy. What are the modes of address in the erotic lyric? How do poems represent the subject and object of desire, and how do they represent the ethics of the erotic encounter? What is the social, political, and philosophical work of a personal and intimate poetry? Alongside a wide range of poems (including at least one contemporary collection placed in dialogue with the earlier poems), the course will include several short theoretical readings on the representation of desire.

This course examines the complex role of gender and sexuality in Francophone Africa's literature and visual cultures. Framed primarily by postcolonial criticism, we will explore how Francophone African writers, filmmakers, and artists treat historical and contemporary issues connected to women and marginal sexualities' experiences, and how they appropriate vernacular/conventional modes of writing and filmmaking in their works. By reading critical writings alongside the novels and films, we will explore questions such as: How stories shape our understanding of gender roles? From whose perspective are they told? What do they exclude/repress?

This course explores the recent 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 hypersexualization of Blackness and Latinidad in Blaxploitation films and telenovelas.

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, structural violence, and climate change 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 the annual U.S. TIP Report.

This seminar is an in-depth exploration of Michel Foucault's work as not only theorist of power, but as theorist of knowledge as well. To this end, we will engage in close readings of selections of Foucault's work from his Archeological and his Genealogical Periods, as well as from his lecture series at the Collége de France. In the course of this survey, we will explore Foucault's account of the historical emergence of biopower as a unique form of power over "life, itself," as well as his critical explorations of the "human sciences," such as human biology, the science of sexuality, and psychiatry, along with other social sciences.

Feminist Futures explores the way in which recent writers have transformed science fiction into speculative fiction - an innovative literary form capable of introducing and exploring new kinds of feminist, queer, and multi-cultural perspectives. These books confront the limitations imposed on women and imagine transformative possibilities for thinking about gender roles and relationships, the body, forms of power, and political and social structures.

Science is commonly held to be the objective, empirical pursuit of natural facts about the world. In this course, we will consider an array of theoretical, methodological, and substantive challenges that feminism has posed for this account of science, and for the practice of scientific knowledge production. In the course of this survey, we shall engage a number of key questions such as: is science gendered, racialized, ableist or classist? Does the presence or absence of women (and another marginalized individuals) lead to the production of different kinds of scientific knowledge?

Since the publication in the 1980s of the seminal essay by Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes," feminist scholarship has sought to decolonize knowledge by decentering the Global North and rejecting the universalization of Western experiences. Differences in experiences across cultures and nations became a focal point of feminist inquiry. Universal claims engendered suspicion, leading many to reject analysis of larger systems such as "patriarchy." The avoidance of ethnocentrism also became a priority. How do we achieve these goals? In other words, how do we decolonize feminist knowledge?

This course is an introduction to the rich tradition of Latin epic after Vergil's Aeneid and to the study of allusion as a literary technique. We will focus on the motif of the descent to the underworld, from Vergil's own account of Aeneas' journey to consult the shade of his father, through the epic of the early empire (Lucan, Statius, Silius) and late antiquity (Claudian), to the renaissance (Petrarch, Vida). The pace is designed to allow students to build skills in reading Latin epic poetry.

This course explores how feminist thought & activism circulates globally by examining a variety of feminist movements in the Middle East & North Africa. Beginning with modern feminist thought and activism in mid-19th century Syria & Egypt, we'll trace feminist movements in various contemporary contexts, from Morocco, Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon & Egypt in the 20th century, to women's participation in the Arab Spring and transnational Islamic movements in the 21st century. We'll map the local and geopolitical discourses that have shaped regional feminisms, and ask how local feminisms are transnational or global.

How has the nexus of gender, society, and the performing arts been theorized, constructed, and experienced at different times and in different places in South Asian cultures? What have been the impacts of modernity on the performing arts in South Asia? In exploring these and related questions we will draw from music, dance, film, literature, and ethnographic and historical sources as we consider the complexities of social and cultural discourses in relation to gender and the performing arts.

Sexuality is fundamental to the organization of society -- both in the U.S. and across the world. Though sexuality carries important personal significance, the understanding of why and how it influences our lives is inextricably woven into a complex, global fabric. The aim of this course is to unravel this fabric and reveal the deeply globalized nature of sexuality in the modern era and how this shapes understandings of sexuality, the sexual identities available to us, and how the state regulates it -- especially from a global, comparative perspective.

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.

Studies a variety of texts (poetry, comedia, mystery play, letters) written by the most celebrated female Hispanic writer of the seventeenth century, widely considered to be the first feminist of the American hemisphere. Discussions include: rhetoric and feminism; Sor Juana's literary forbearers; freedom and repression in the convent; correspondence with other writers in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru; performances of gender and sexuality in colonial Mexico. Sessions to view and analyze first editions of Sor Juana's works of the Legaspi collection will be held at the Rare Books and Special Collections in Firestone.

This course will explore how women's rights activists, lawyers, and legal scholars have considered legal institutions and law to be arenas and resources for transforming women's lives and gender norms, identities, and roles. Since the early 1970s, feminist legal scholars and lawyers have challenged traditional understandings of law and the core civic values of freedom, justice, and equality. Others have questioned whether litigation-centered approaches to reform have harmed more than helped advance the goal of women's equality and liberation.

This course surveys the history, theory and practice of casting within U.S. entertainment industries over the last 150 years to evince the creative, industrial and social features of the always-evolving casting apparatus. As we explicate the interpretive dilemma of deciding which actor is "right" (or "wrong") for a role, we will also confront how casting structures determine who does (and does not) have access to artistic opportunity; how exclusionary and exploitative casting practices persist; and how the artistic, social and ethical implications of the casting apparatus have inspired efforts to transform it.

From Cross Colours to boom boxes, the 1990s was loud and colorful. But alongside the fun, black people in the U.S. dealt with heightened criminalization and poverty codified through the War on Drugs, welfare reform, HIV/AIDS, and police brutality. We will study the various cultural productions of black performers and consumers as they navigated the social and political landscapes of the 1990s. We will examine works growing out of music, televisual media, fashion, and public policy, using theories from performance and cultural studies to understand the specificities of blackness, gender, class, and sexuality.