Gender and Sexuality Studies
- AAS 303/GSS 406/HUM 314: Topics in Global Race and Ethnicity: Scientific Racism: Then and NowThis 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.
- AAS 306/GSS 428: Topics in Race and Public Policy: Institutional Anti-Blackness and the Power of NamingWho decided which first names are deemed "difficult to pronounce?" Why are the words "fear," "ignorance," "belief," and "guilt" used to normalize racism? Why do history textbooks avoid the use of the word "genocide" when addressing Atlantic slavery? This course explores the recent intellectual history of the role of naming and coded language in institutional anti-Blackness. Each class will analyze how structures of power have intentionally erased their histories and contemporary acts of racial oppression through linguistic and epistemic control, while also paying close attention to the language of resistance in Black activism.
- ANT 337/GSS 279: Queer BecomingsThe goal of this course is to understand what queer lifeworlds are like in diverse cultural and sociopolitical contexts. What is the relationship between queerness and larger forces such as culture, coloniality, global capitalism, religion, and the state? What counts as queer and whose recognition matters? What is the nature of the work of becoming that is involved, and what resources do they draw upon in doing so? What factors enable or curtail these possibilities? Is queer always radical and against the norm? We will answer such questions by reading ethnographies, theories, and biographies that focus on queer lifeworlds across the world.
- CLA 212/HUM 212/GSS 212/HLS 212: Classical MythologyAn 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.
- CLA 329/GSS 331: Sex and Gender in the Ancient WorldThis course explores the ideas of sex, sexuality and gender in ancient Greek and Roman literature to better understand how these worked in the social, cultural and political spheres of antiquity. We will analyze the primary literary and material evidence we have for sexuality and gender in Greece and Rome, and survey the modern scholarly approaches to those same texts. Topics will include: interactions between the sexes (courtship, extramarital desire, sex and marriage); same-sex desire and homosociality; the status of women and men in terms of social function, age and religious activity; and transgressions.
- COM 376/AAS 371/GSS 439/LAS 376: Crafting Freedom: Women and Liberation in the Americas (1960s to the present)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.
- ENG 319/THR 217/GSS 441: Staging Sex in the City of London: From Country Wives to FleabagsThis course charts a dominant motif of British stage comedy from the Restoration -- when all hell broke loose with the return of the monarchy in 1660, the introduction of the actress, and the emergence of professional women playwrights -- until the present day. We'll look at work by men and women celebrated for their always witty but often controversial representations of the sexual/romantic escapades of their contemporaries. Prepare to be disturbed as well as amused. One issue we'll want to consider: Why did men's work become canonical while their female colleagues, equally successful in their own day, were disappeared from the story?
- ENG 339/COM 342/GSS 438: Topics in 18th-Century Literature: Love Gone WrongShakespeare wrote, "the course of true love never did run smooth" and Freud wrote of the "vicissitudes" of the passions, yet most readers regard heterosexual love stories as transparent, intelligible, and above all inevitable. We will read classic 18th-century novels from England, France, and Germany that show roads to and through the love plot to be rocky and full of impasses and swerves, with no certain endpoint. Such "vicissitudes" mark the very form of the narratives we will encounter. Class will examine issues such as gender fluidity, cross-dressing, queerness, love-madness, violence, repression, and panic.
- ENG 555/GSS 555/LAS 505: American Literary Traditions: The Other America: Caribbean Literature and ThoughtHow do Caribbean writers articulate literary and theoretical imaginaries that shift our thinking about this archipelago of islands, its diaspora, and the globe? How does the Caribbean demand an account of entangled legacies of indigenous decimation, enslavement, colonization, and revolution? This seminar will center what the Caribbean necessitates in thought: relation, ruination, decolonization, environmental precarity, the plantation matrix, and translation. We also pay attention to how Caribbean writers have conceptualized counter-humanisms that shift and texture critical theorizations of race, feminism, and queerness.
- ENV 357/AMS 457/GSS 357/ENG 315: Empire of the Ark: The Animal Question in Film, Photography and Popular CultureThis 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?
- GSS 208/AAS 208: Media, Sex, and the Racialized BodyThis 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.
- GSS 299: Foucault, Power, and KnowledgeThis 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.
- GSS 303/AMS 313: Feminist Futures: Contemporary S. F. by WomenFeminist 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.
- GSS 324: Science After FeminismScience 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?
- GSS 337/MTD 302/THR 347/AMS 336: Gender Crossings in American Musical TheaterThis course offers an intensive survey of gender crossings on the American musical theater stage. The course's study of American musicals (in terms of form, content and context) will be anchored in a historical exploration of world theatrical traditions of cross-gender performance. The course will examine multiple modes of cross-gender performance, while also considering musicals that stage gender role reversals and those that open questions of gender expression and identity.
- GSS 373/AMS 383/ENG 332: Graphic MemoirAn exploration of the graphic memoir focusing on the ways specific works combine visual imagery and language to expand the possibilities of autobiographical narrative. Through our analysis of highly acclaimed graphic memoirs from the American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese traditions, we examine the visual and verbal constructions of identity with an emphasis on the representation of gender dynamics and cultural conflict.
- GSS 500: Theories and Methods in Gender and Sexuality StudiesThis 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.
- GSS 504/ENG 507: Race, Gender and the AnthropoceneWhat does the Anthropocene have to do with gender, race and sexuality? This course explores the ways in which urgent environmental issues intersect with questions of gender, race and sexualities. Exploring films, images and non-fiction writing, we engage themes such as the invention of the wilderness idea; being Black in nature; Indigenous lifeways and land rights; feminist and queer ecologies; animal, tree and plant intelligence; slow violence; the commons; COVID and climate; masculinities, militarization and climate change; gender and environmental justice, and strategies for change.
- HIS 519/GSS 519/HOS 519: Topics in the History of Sex and Gender: History of Women/Gender/Sexuality in the U.S.This seminar surveys the allied fields of women's history, gender history, and the history of sexuality, situating recent works in the context of canonical texts and longstanding debates in the field. Please see instructor for a draft of the syllabus.
- NES 347/GSS 386: Islamic Family LawThis course examines the oulines of Islamic family law in gender issues, sexual ethics, family structure, family planning, marriage and divorce, parenthood, child guardianship and custody, etc. The course starts with a general survey of Islamic legal system: its history and developments, structure and spirit, and the attempts of the Muslim jurists to come to terms with the challenge of time.
- NES 374/GSS 343: Global Feminisms: Feminist Movements in the Middle East and BeyondThis 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.
- POL 422/GSS 422: Seminar in American Politics: Gender and American PoliticsThis course considers how gender enters and shapes politics, primarily in the US context. It addresses a range of questions that center elections: How did women gain the right to vote? Are women voters really different than men voters? Are women politicians really any different than men politicians? Has women's involvement in electoral and institutional politics changed anything? It also considers how the gendered space of the American electoral system has limited its effectiveness in delivering outcomes desired by some groups of women, what their alternatives might be, and how those alternatives have been and continue to be pursued.
- SOC 221/AAS 221/GSS 221: Inequality: Class, Race, and GenderWidening inequality is a key challenge of the 21st Century. This course introduces students to the sociological study of inequality and stratification, motivated by the question of how disparities of wealth, income, and life chances have variously grown, shrunk, and transformed in the United States during recent decades. Distributional inequality and race/class /gender gaps will be examined amid changing systems of education, work and labor markets, housing, healthcare, wealth/financial security, and criminal justice/policing.
- SOC 311/GSS 451: Sexuality in Global ContextsSexuality 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.
- SPI 373/GSS 205: Women, Law and Public PolicyThis 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.
- THR 329/ENG 263/GSS 442/MTD 329: A Queer and Mysterious Analysis of William IngeThis course combines queer centered analysis of mid century American Drama and songwriting with student generated research and performance. Using Inge's plays Picnic and Dark at the Top of the Stairs, we will investigate the codes both real and imagined embedded in the work, and the narratives we assume, project on, and long for in the American theatre cannon. Students will do research and build individual work in conversation with these themes as well as participate in workshopping a new production of Dark at the Top of the Stairs.
- THR 332/AAS 389/GSS 342/LAO 332: Movements for Diversity in American TheaterTheater artists routinely bend, twist and break all kinds of rules to create the imaginary worlds they bring to life on stage. Why, then, has the American theater so struggled to meaningfully address questions of equity, diversity and inclusion? In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical overview of agitation and advocacy by theater artist-activists aiming to transform American theatre-making as both industry and creative practice, as we connect those histories with the practices, structures and events determining the ways diversity is (and is not) a guiding principle of contemporary American theater.
- VIS 373/AAS 398/ART 372/GSS 440: Curating Within Obscurity: Research as Exhibition Structure and FormHow can posthumous research on a curatorial subject influence the structure and form of an exhibition or a new conceptual artwork? This course retraces the steps taken to produce McClodden's 2015-2019 artistic and curatorial work centering the lives of three Black gay men - poet Essex Hemphill, writer/poet Brad Johnson, and composer Julius Eastman - in order to examine key concepts central to research-based practice. Students will be expected to produce a research/exhibition study of an artist whom they feel has been obscured posthumously.