Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) Program is administered by the chair and other members of the program’s core faculty. Core faculty are those who are actively involved in the program, who teach FGSS courses, advise FGSS majors and senior theses, and may serve as program chair. The program sponsors an annual symposium and the Diane Weiss Memorial Lecture.
Affiliated Faculty
Abigail Huston Boggs
BA, Wesleyan University; PHD, University Calif Davis
Assistant Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Assistant Professor of Sociology; Assistant Professor, Education Studies
Katie Brewer Ball
BA, Occidental College; MA, New York University; PHD, New York University
Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor of Theater; Associate Professor in Liberal Studies
Lisa Cohen
BA, Brown University; MPHIL, Yale University; PHD, Yale University
Associate Professor of English; Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Carolina Diaz
BA, Universidad Catolica de Chile; MA, Rutgers University; PHD, Rutgers University
Assistant Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Assistant Professor of Spanish; Assistant Professor, Latin American Studies
Kaisha Esty
BA, University of Nottingham; MA, University of Nottingham; PHD, Rutgers University
Assistant Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Assistant Professor, History; Assistant Professor of African American Studies
Elaine Gan
BA, Wellesley College; MFA, University of California, Santa Cruz; PHD, University of California, Santa Cruz
Assistant Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Assistant Professor of Science in Society; Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies
Megan H. Glick
BA, Northwestern University; MA, Yale University; MPHIL, Yale University; PHD, Yale University
Associate Professor, Science in Society; Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor of American Studies; Chair, American Studies; Coordinator, Disability Studies; Faculty Ambassador for Tenure-Track Faculty
Laura Grappo
BA, Wesleyan University; MA, Yale University; MPHIL, Yale University; PHD, Yale University
Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor of American Studies
Lori Gruen
BA, University of Colorado Boulder; PHD, University of Colorado Boulder
Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Professor, CPE; Coordinator, Animal Studies; Professor, Science in Society; Professor of Philosophy; William Griffin Professor of Philosophy
Nina Hagel
BA, Johns Hopkins University; MA, University of California, Berkeley; PHD, University of California, Berkeley
Assistant Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Assistant Professor of Government; Tutor, College of Social Studies
Natasha Korda
BA, Columbia University; PHD, Johns Hopkins University
Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Director, Center for the Humanities; Professor of English
Hari Krishnan
BA, University of Manitoba; MFA, York University; PHD, Texas Womans University
Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Professor, Global South Asian Studies; Professor of Dance
Douglas Arthur Martin
BA, University of Georgia Athens; MFA, The New School; PHD, CUNY The Graduate Center
Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor of English; Associate Director, Creative Writing
Elizabeth McAlister
BA, Vassar College; MA, Yale University; MA, Yale University; MPHIL, Yale University; PHD, Yale University
Professor, American Studies; Professor, Feminisit, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Professor, African American Studies; Director of Academic Writing; Professor of Religion
Laverne Melon
BA, Middlebury College; MS, SUNY at Binghamton University; PHD, Purdue University W Lafyte
Assistant Professor, Integrative Sciences; Assistant Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Assistant Professor of Biology; Assistant Professor, Neuroscience and Behavior
Jill G. Morawski
BA, Mount Holyoke College; MA, Carleton University; MAA, Wesleyan University; PHD, Carleton University
Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Professor, Science in Society; Professor of Psychology; Willbur Fisk Osborne Professor of Natural Science
Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer
BA, University of Illinois Urbana; MFA, Johns Hopkins University; PHD, Johns Hopkins University
Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor of Letters
Patricia Rodriguez Mosquera
BA, Autonoma University of Madrid; MA, Autonoma University of Madrid; PHD, University of Amsterdam
Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Professor of Psychology
Mary-Jane Victoria Rubenstein
BA, Williams College; MA, Columbia University; MPHIL, Cambridge University; MPHIL, Columbia University; PHD, Columbia University
Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Professor, Philosophy; Professor, Science in Society; Dean of the Social Sciences; Professor of Religion
Ashraf Rushdy
BA, University of Alberta; MA, University of Alberta; PHD, Cambridge University
Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Chair, African American Studies; Professor of English; Professor of African American Studies; Benjamin Waite Professor of the English Language; Professor in Liberal Studies
Anu (Aradhana) Sharma
BA, Eugene Lang College; MA, Columbia University; MA, Stanford University; PHD, Stanford University
Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Professor, Environmental Studies; Professor, Global South Asian Studies; Professor of Anthropology
Lauren Silber
BA, University of Connecticut; MA, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; PHD, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Associate Professor of the Practice, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor of the Practice, Education Studies; Associate Professor of the Practice in Academic Writing; Associate Professor of the Practice, English; Associate Professor of the Practice, American Studies; Assistant Director of Academic Writing; Associate Professor of the Practice, Center for Prision Education
Elise Springer
BA, Wesleyan University; MA, University of Connecticut; PHD, University of Connecticut
Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor of Philosophy
Mitali Thakor
BA, Stanford University; PHD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Assistant Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Assistant Professor, Anthropology; Assistant Professor of Science in Society; Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies
Elizabeth G. Traube
BA, Radcliffe College; MA, Harvard University; MAA, Wesleyan University; PHD, Harvard University
Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Professor of Anthropology
Jennifer Tucker
BA, Stanford University; MPHIL, Cambridge University; PHD, Johns Hopkins University
Professor, Science and Technology Studies; Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Professor, Environmental Studies; Professor of History; Director, Center for the Study of Guns and Society; Professor, Continuing Studies
Laura Ann Twagira
BA, Wellesley College; MA, Sarah Lawrence College; PHD, Rutgers University
Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor, Science and Technology Studies; Associate Professor of History; Tutor, College of Social Studies
Roman Utkin
MA, Kazan State University; MPHIL, Yale University; PHD, Yale University
Associate Professor, German Studies; Associate Professor of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies; Core Member; Associate Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Associate Professor in Liberal Studies
Kari Weil
BA, Cornell University; MA, Princeton University; PHD, Princeton University
University Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; University Professor, Environmental Studies; University Professor of Letters
Margot Weiss
BA, University of Chicago; MA, Duke University; PHD, Duke University
Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor of Anthropology; Associate Professor of American Studies; Coordinator, Queer Studies
Sarah Wiliarty
BA, Harvard University; MA, University of California, Berkeley; PHD, University of California, Berkeley
Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor of Government; Co-Chair, College of Social Studies; Tutor, College of Social Studies; Associate Professor, German Studies
Su Zheng
BA, Central Conservatory of Music; MA, New York University; PHD, Wesleyan University
Associate Professor, East Asian Studies; Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor of Music; Director of Undergraduate Studies
Chair
Kerwin Kaye
BA, University of Colorado Boulder; MA, University San Francisco; PHD, New York University
Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Chair, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Tutor, College of Social Studies; Associate Professor, American Studies
Faculty
Kerwin Kaye
BA, University of Colorado Boulder; MA, University San Francisco; PHD, New York University
Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Chair, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Tutor, College of Social Studies; Associate Professor, American Studies
Victoria Pitts-Taylor
BA, Ohio University; PHD, Brandeis University
Professor, Science in Society; Professor, Sociology; Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Henry Washington, Jr.
BA, Duke University; MA, Stanford University; PHD, Stanford University
Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Visiting Faculty
Zora Duncan
Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Caleb Knapp
Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
FGSS113F Reproductive Politics (FYS)
This course explores the history and current status of reproductive politics in the United States. By prioritizing issues of difference, including race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class, the course will consider how scientific and bioethical concerns intersect with matters of cultural ideology and social control. Issues covered will include: the history and legacy of the birth control movement; the ideological construction of "infancy"; changing attitudes towards pregnancy and childbirth; gendered and racialized conceptions of parenthood; abortion rights; the fetal personhood debates; the regulation of pregnancy within incarcerated and institutionalized settings; genetic engineering; reproductive justice; and so on.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST115F, STS115F
Prereq: None
FGSS115F Reporting from the Inside: Journalism, Activism, and Intimacy (FYS)
What is the role of the reporter in today's divided and divisive America? While one approach has been to dip into the lives of others, get the story, and get out, this class will focus on pursuing the deeply human stories that matter most to you, guided by your own experience so that you can intimately connect with your subjects, your world, and yourself. From Black Lives Matter to the #MeToo movement to LGBTQ and Trans Rights, we are seeing writers and activists reporting events in real time, as they happen to and around them, celebrating the journalist as participant. This is hardly a new phenomenon. Many major historical moments--the Great Depression, the fight for Civil Rights and Women's Rights, the AIDS crisis--have had reporters on the inside, covering their own communities. In this First Year Seminar, students will immerse themselves in this kind of "intimate reporting" and its historical contexts, and also create a newsroom of their own design: learning the fundamentals of journalism through story idea meetings, research, and interview strategies; editing and fact-checking techniques; social media engagement; and pitching their work. Students will leave the class with a portfolio of writing that explores, from their own points of view, issues of gender, class, race, and sexuality.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS118 Reproduction in the 21st Century
This course will cover basic human reproductive biology, new and future reproductive and contraceptive technologies, and the ethics raised by reproductive issues.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-BIOL
Identical With: BIOL118, PHIL118, STS118
Prereq: None
FGSS121F Are You a Feminist? (FYS)
Taking our cue from Beyoncé and the debates her music has produced, this First Year Seminar investigates the meaning of feminism by considering how writers, artists, activists, academics, and public intellectuals discuss the topic. Students' curiosity about feminism - as topic, politics, identity, and practice - will guide class meetings where we will discuss readings by prominent feminist writers, scholars, and critics. Students will leave the course with a clear sense of themselves as writers and thinkers, as well as an understanding of the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, and other social identities and of the multiplicities of feminisms in our contemporary moment.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: WRCT121F, AMST121F, ENGL121F
Prereq: None
FGSS123 Love, Sex, and Marriage in Renaissance Europe
This writing-intensive seminar will compare literary and artistic depictions of love, sex, and marriage during the Renaissance by authors and artists from England, Spain, France, Flanders, Germany, and Italy. We will read both male and female writers in genres ranging from poetry, the short story, and theater to the essay, the travel narrative, and the sermon. We will also examine other arts such as painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts (e.g., wedding chests). Questions we will explore include, but are not limited to, How were love and marriage related during the Renaissance? What role did sex, gender, and violence play in relationships between couples and within society? How do gender and genre affect the ways in which love, sex, and marriage are depicted? How did cultural differences influence writers' and artists' interpretations of love, sex, and marriage? And what about same-sex unions? Other topics will include virginity and celibacy, erotic literature, family and class structures, and divorce.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L123, COL123, MDST125
Prereq: None
FGSS123F Love, Sex, and Marriage in Renaissance Europe (FYS)
This seminar compares literary depictions of love, sex, and marriage from the 14th to the 17th centuries by writers from England, France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, Spain, and Sweden. (Students will be able to study writings from other parts of Europe over the course of the semester should they so choose.) We will read texts composed by women and men in genres including poetry, theater, the short story, the essay, the maxim, the travel narrative, and the sermon. Though the seminar is focused on literature, we will also consider painting, engravings, sculpture, and the decorative arts (e.g., wedding chests). We will explore questions such as: How were love and marriage related during the Renaissance? What roles did sex, gender, race, class, and violence play in relationships between couples and within society, and how were they represented in literature and art? How do gender and genre affect the ways in which love, sex, and marriage are depicted? How did cultural differences influence writers' and artists' interpretations of love, sex, and marriage? And what about homosexual love, same-sex unions, and depictions of dissident sexualities and genders? Finally, how do contemporary (21st-century) writers reimagine Renaissance representations of love, sex, and marriage, and why do Renaissance texts and images matter today? Other topics will include virginity and celibacy, friendship, erotic literature and pornography, religion, family and class structures, and divorce. This seminar engages students with university-level research by navigating search engines and databases (beyond a Google search!), honing their analytical skills, and polishing their academic prose. Students will also have the opportunity to write creatively should they so choose.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L123F, COL123F, MDST125F, WLIT249F
Prereq: None
FGSS123Z Love, Sex, and Marriage in Renaissance Europe
This seminar compares literary depictions of love, sex, and marriage from the 14th to the 17th centuries by writers from England, France, Germany, the Italian Peninsula, the Low Countries, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden. (N.B. Students will be able to study writings from other parts of Europe over the course of the semester should they so choose.) We will read texts composed by women and men in genres including poetry, theater, the short story, the essay, the maxim, the travel narrative, and the sermon. Though the seminar is focused on literature, we will also consider painting, engravings, sculpture, and the decorative arts (e.g., wedding chests). We will explore questions such as: How were love and marriage related during the Renaissance? What roles did sex, gender, race, class, and violence play in relationships between couples and within society, and how were they represented in literature and art? How do gender and genre affect the ways in which love, sex, and marriage are depicted? How did cultural differences influence writers' and artists' interpretations of love, sex, and marriage? And what about "homosexual" love, same-sex unions, and depictions of dissident sexualities and genders? Finally, how have contemporary (21st-century) writers reimagined Renaissance representations of love, sex, and marriage, and why do Renaissance texts and images matter today? Other topics will include virginity and celibacy, friendship, erotic literature and pornography, religion, family and class structures, and divorce. This seminar engages students with university-level research by navigating search engines and databases (beyond a Google search!), honing their analytical skills, and polishing their academic prose. Students will also have the opportunity to write creatively should they so choose.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L123Z, COL123Z, MDST125Z, WLIT249Z
Prereq: None
FGSS130F Thinking Animals: An Introduction to Animal Studies (FYS)
In 1789, British philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote: "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but, 'Can they suffer?'" This question, which challenged the social and legal norms of the 18th century that denied sentience to non-human animals, has influenced disciplines across the social sciences and humanities to focus on what has more recently become known as, "the question of the animal." Bentham's question has sparked centuries of debate about the sentience of non-human animals and our relationship to them. In this course, we will examine a range of theories and representations of "the animal" to understand the desire to tame or objectify animals (through zoos, factory farming, and taxidermy), as well as why they are often conceived of as guardians of inaccessible experience and knowledge, and how the human and its various gendered, classed, and racial manifestations have been conceived of through and against notions of animality. Readings may include Poe, Kafka, Derrida, Bataille, Haraway, and Coetzee (among others).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL130F, ENVS130F
Prereq: None
FGSS164F Hurting (FYS)
This course examines representations of harm (both received and enacted) at the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Through engagement with both artistic and social movements, we will explore questions about the ethics of representing pain. How do artists navigate depicting pain without simply reproducing violence? What constitutes an effective apology? (How) can complexly narrating the harm one has inflicted on others offer a reckoning rather than an excuse? How might we consider the relationship between identity and formal artistic choices, and how might such considerations open onto a more rigorous engagement of the social spaces texts make? How might we imagine and enact ecologies of care in the midst of ongoing histories of harm? We will consider these questions across media and genre and amidst structured self-reflection.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS175F Staging America: Modern American Drama (FYS)
Can modern American drama--as cultural analysis--teach us to reread how America ticks? Together we will explore this question as we read and discuss some of the most provocative classic and uncanonized plays written between the 1910s and the present. Plays by Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Mike Gold, workers theater troupes, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Amiri Baraka, Arthur Kopit, Ntozake Shange, Luis Valdez, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, Ayad Akhtar, and others will help us think about what's at stake in staging America and equip us as cultural analysts, critical thinkers, close readers of literature, and imaginative historians of culture and theater. This seminar will introduce first-year students to the kind of critical thinking developed in majors such as English; American Studies; African American Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; College of Letters; Theater Studies; and the Social and Cultural Theory Certificate.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL175F, AMST125F, AFAM152F, THEA172F
Prereq: None
FGSS187 From Shirtwaists to Hoodies: Fashion and Public Life
Pictured prevalently and worn close to the body, fashion is a powerful and personal means of expression and documenting public life. With a focus on the United States, this course presents a loose chronology of fashion, from the late nineteenth century to today, through a selection of themes that will allow students to consider it in terms of its social, political, economic and aesthetic impact. Through the interplay of image, clothing, and text, each week, we will explore the fashion industry from various perspectives, examining the key role makers and consumers play in constructing fashion both historically and today. Guest speakers and museum visits will enhance these perspectives. Specifically, we will question the ways we deploy dress and style to document public life, from the personal to the political, and how it informs our material and visual relationships with the world. In addition to lectures and readings discussion, class time will be allotted to students' fashion documentation projects. Fashion theory will also be introduced to ground our explorations of fashion, variously as a pictured and cultural entity, embodied practice, site of technological innovation, and tool for shaping one's identity.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CSPL
Identical With: CSPL187, IDEA187, SOC265
Prereq: None
FGSS188 Introduction to History: Revolutionary Women
"I do not think the war would have been won without the women.... Now women have to liberate themselves." The fighter Maudy Muzenda's reflection on the role of women in Zimbabwe's liberation war speaks to a broader pattern in global history. Women have been central to the radical transformation of societies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas from the early modern era to the present. In this course we will examine revolutionary women who took up arms and others who protested for improved working conditions, voting rights, sexual liberty, and human rights. Our cases will include the history of political revolutions in France, Cuba, Russia, and China, as well as in Zimbabwe. We will also explore the critical role of women in the global Industrial Revolution, the Suffrage Movement, the rise of international feminisms, and the everyday struggles of women in multiple sexual revolutions.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST188
Prereq: None
FGSS200 Sex/Gender in Critical Perspective (FGSS Gateway)
Feminist, gender and sexuality studies is an exciting interdisciplinary field that addresses gender, sex, and sexuality as well as related issues of race, class, nation, and citizenship across multiple disciplines, epistemologies, methods, and vantage points. At its most fundamental, the field addresses how persons are identified and identify themselves as similar to and different from each other and the relation of these categories of difference to power relations. The study of feminist and queer thought on sex/gender and sexuality offers a critical lens through which to examine social structures and social problems, inequality, difference and diversity, identity and the self, belonging and community, and the possibility of social change, among other topics. This course will offer a broad introduction to the field and provide a foundation for further study of specific areas of interest. The primary goals are to (1) explore the multiple ways feminist and queer scholars have understood sex, gender, and sexuality; (2) explore different methods and styles of feminist thought and expression; (3) situate these in time and place, with attention to historical and cultural contexts; and (4) explore the intersections of sex, gender, and sexuality with race, nation, and other categories of difference. The course will cover aspects of first-wave feminism (e.g., suffrage and the abolitionist movement); second-wave feminism and critical theories of sex/gender; and contemporary feminism, including queer theory, intersectionality and race, and transnational and postcolonial feminism.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS200F Sex/Gender in Critical Perspective (FGSS Gateway)(FYS)
Feminist, gender and sexuality studies is an exciting interdisciplinary field that addresses gender, sex, and sexuality as well as related issues of race, class, nation, and citizenship across multiple disciplines, epistemologies, methods, and vantage points. At its most fundamental, the field addresses how persons are identified and identify themselves as similar to and different from each other and the relation of these categories of difference to power relations. The study of feminist and queer thought on sex/gender and sexuality offers a critical lens through which to examine social structures and social problems, inequality, difference and diversity, identity and the self, belonging and community, and the possibility of social change, among other topics. This course will offer a broad introduction to the field and provide a foundation for further study of specific areas of interest. The primary goals are to (1) explore the multiple ways feminist and queer scholars have understood sex, gender, and sexuality; (2) explore different methods and styles of feminist thought and expression; (3) situate these in time and place, with attention to historical and cultural contexts; and (4) explore the intersections of sex, gender, and sexuality with race, nation, and other categories of difference. The course will cover aspects of first-wave feminism (e.g., suffrage and the abolitionist movement); second-wave feminism and critical theories of sex/gender; and contemporary feminism, including queer theory, intersectionality and race, and transnational and postcolonial feminism.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS201 Queer Theories
This seminar will give you a solid foundation in queer studies. Although "queer" is a contested term, it describes -- at least potentially -- sexualities and genders that fall outside normative constellations. This theory-based, reading-intensive seminar considers multiple genealogies of queer theory, from foundational texts and authors in queer theory, queer of color critique, trans theory, and crip theory, to lesser-known but critically important interventions. Structured as a series of conversations, we explore multiple locations of theory and notions of "queer." Rather than understanding queer studies as a singular school of thought, we will continuously problematize queer studies as a mode of analysis, asking: What kinds of bodies or desires does queer describe? What are the politics of queer? What are the promises of queer theory, and what are its failures? What is the future of queer? This course is excellent preparation for a queer studies concentration in American studies. Students should expect to end the semester confident of their ability to read and draw on a range of queer theories.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST201
Prereq: None
FGSS202 Feminist and Queer Methods Across the Disciplines
This course aims to better equip students to conduct rigorous and politically-engaged interdisciplinary research by exposing them to (and inviting them to reflect on) the range of methodological approaches that feminist and queer thinkers employ across the humanities and social sciences. Engaging feminist and queer uses of such methods as oral history, ethnography, visual-cultural analysis, literary criticism, and archival research, we will explore how feminist and queer thinkers intervene in dominant knowledge production. Further, we will consider how, in our own research, feminist and queer commitments might necessarily reshape how and what kinds of questions we ask, how we select and marshal evidence, and how we engage our subjects and objects of analysis. Students will be expected to practice using methods that are unfamiliar to them and to reflect on their relationships to power, method, and disciplinarity as they develop their own research programs.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS203 Sex and Sexuality in Islam
Islamic societies have long traditions of commentary about the body and sexuality. Medieval Islamic texts are replete with references to homosexual and erotic love that challenge the assumption, common today, that Islamic society is restrictive by its very nature. In this course, we will explore how the body and connected understandings of sex and sexuality have been conceptualized by Muslims, both historically and in the contemporary world. Instead of essentializing the Islamic "viewpoint" on the body, we will survey the variety of opinions and ideas about the body that Muslims have held. We will draw on the Quran, early Abbasid erotic poetry and literature, Islamic medical manuals, philosophical works, belles-lettres, and contemporary sources, in order to trace how different understandings of the body and sexuality have unfolded over time. In particular, we will focus on the notion of complementarity between the sexes, the role of marriage and procreation, the effects of medical theories on understandings of bodily health and illness, the ethical and legal frameworks governing sexual conduct, and the references to homoeroticism, pederasty, and female same-sex desire found in Arabic and Persian love poetry and literature. While the course primarily focuses on the premodern period, it will also delve into contemporary Islamic discourses.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL202, RELI208
Prereq: None
FGSS204 Invoking the Earth Mother: Ecofeminisms and Indigenous Spiritual Ecologies
Over the past 50 years, a radical reshaping of our relationship to the organic world has infused national economic strategies, United Nations discourses, indigenous land rights movements, environmental legal frameworks, and a subtle mainstreaming of neopagan ritual practices and goddess worship in the Americas. This seminar will explore the social, legal and metaphysical aspects of myriad eco-feminist and indigenous spiritual ecologies. We will explore these worldviews and ritual practices from animist, pantheist, monist, and panentheist perspectives, with a particular focus on gender constructs, implicit and explicit, within these movements. What is the relationship between the 1970s environmental movement and the rise of Goddess worship in the U.S.? Between the United Nations and Amazonian ayahuasca practitioners? Legally, Should Trees Have Standing (Stone 1972)? Politically, Is the Goddess a Feminist (Hiltebeitel & Erndl 2000)? Is Mother Earth, ultimately, empowering for LGBTQ2S folks? Engaging emerging podcasts, shamanic documentaries, social manifestos, and provocative religious studies texts, students will wrestle with a profound set of humanistic questions that may prove crucial to our survival as a species, namely: under what circumstances do we successfully invoke the gods to self-regulate the ecologically destructive practices of our late-stage capitalism? Who invokes who, how and when, shared where? To whom do we tend to listen on these matters, and why are they quaked to speak?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI204, ENVS213
Prereq: None
FGSS206 Feminist Technoscience: Making Bodies, Bits, and Bombs
This course focuses on feminist transnational approaches to the study of science and technology. It introduces students to a range of critical and experimental figurations, post/decolonial theories and methods, and interdisciplinary reading and writing practices proposed by leading and emerging scholars who shape today's vibrant field of feminist STS. While the various approaches share strong commitments to justice, difference, and collective agency, they don't always mean the same thing. Students will learn to unpack affinities, tensions, and radical possibilities for living with greater care and less violence in a more-than-human, more-than-Western world. The course has three parts. Part I grounds students in canonical texts that have opened up multiple pathways for critically examining patriarchy, war, and technoscientific progress. These texts challenge binaries and hierarchies of nature-culture, organism-machine, modern-traditional, center-periphery and so on. Part II focuses on analyses of colonialism and racial capitalism, and the material-discursive apparatuses deployed to reconfigure how bodies, bits, and bombs come to matter. Part III looks at new works that refuse the end of history and propose a pluriverse of bold alternatives.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: STS210
Prereq: None
FGSS209 Feminist Theories
How does "feminist" (a political commitment) modify "theory" (an intellectual practice)? We will address this question by reading a range of contemporary feminist theorists working to analyze the complex interrelations of social differences (gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion, and so on), and relations of social domination and economic exploitation in a globalized world. The question "what is to be done?" will oversee our work.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: ENGL208
Prereq: None
FGSS211 Queer Pop Culture
This course introduces students to the intersections between sexualities and popular cultures in historical and contemporary contexts, focusing on queerness(es). We think about the politics of sexuality in and across a range of cultural forms -- including fashion, food, music, cinema, and beauty. We attend to how normative and non-normative notions and forms of sexuality are shaped by differences of race, language, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, region, and nationalism. We think of pop culture in an expansive way, that is, as everyday cultural forms, texts, practices, products, spaces, and histories that we engage with, use, enjoy, and participate in. We draw on women of color feminist studies, transnational feminist studies, global cultural and media studies, and queer/trans of color studies to explore the politics of sexuality through an intersectional framework across a range of public cultures and arts.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None
FGSS211Z Sexual Politics
This subject introduces ideas developed in feminist theory about the social and political construction of areas of experience relating to the body, gender and sexuality. Issues analysed in the subject include transsexualism, reproduction, pornography, sex work, sexual violence and sexual orientation. Students who complete this subject should be able to understand the ways in which issues connected with the body and sexuality are socially and politically constructed, understand the ways in which the construction of masculinity and femininity affects the learning and regulation of such areas of experience, and apply a variety of feminist approaches to the analysis of these issues.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS215 Special Topics: Experiments in Biography
In this course we will read a range of examples of shorter biographical writing (and some essays about this genre), focusing on experiments with this mode by U.S. writers of color, women, and queer practitioners who have been committed to broadening both its scope and its formal possibilities. As we analyze these attempts to capture a life on paper and to define this genre, you will work on short portraits and profiles of your own. Throughout the semester, we will ask: Whose lives get written, and by whom? What constitutes evidence of a life, according to whom? What gets left out? What sorts of facts and what kinds of language make someone live on the page? What kinds of research are necessary -- and possible? How does a writer's relationship to her subject inform such a portrait, and what are the ethics of that connection?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL215
Prereq: None
FGSS216 Global America: Gender, Empire & Internationalism Since 1890
This course explores the cultural history of America's relationship to the world across the long 20th century with particular attention to the significance of gender and sexuality. We will locate U.S. culture and politics within an international dynamic, exposing the interrelatedness of domestic and foreign affairs. While exploring specific geopolitical events like the Spanish-American War, World War I and II, and the Global Cold War, this course emphasizes the political importance of culture and ideology rather than offering a formal overview of U.S. foreign policy. How have Americans across the 20th century drawn from ideas about gender to understand their country's relationship to the wider world? In what ways have gendered ideologies and gendered approaches to politics shaped America's performance on the world's stage? How have geopolitical events impacted the construction of race and gender on the home front? In the most general sense, this course is designed to encourage students to understand American cultural and gender history as the product of America's engagement with the world. In so doing, we will explore the rise of U.S. global power as an enterprise deeply related to conceptions of race, sexuality, and gender. While reading key American studies texts in the history of the United States and the World, we will also examine films, political speeches, visual culture, music, and popular culture.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS217 Key Issues in Black Feminism (FGSS Gateway)
This course surveys key issues in the historical development of black feminist thoughts and practices through readings of canonical works especially from the 1980s and '90s that contribute to this extensive body of knowledge. Our aim is to engage black feminist and womanist theorists, activists and artists from the diaspora who are exploring intersections of race, class, sexuality, religion, and other indices of identity affecting their daily lives. To that end, we will take an interdisciplinary approach to unpacking the historical tensions and politics and poetics in theory/practice, representation/self-making and expression/performance. We will also examine more recent turns in #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName and #BlackGirlMagic and conclude with Post-Zora Interventions-- feminist interrogations on the borders anthropology, art, and activism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: ANTH201
Prereq: None
FGSS218 Introduction to Queer Studies
This course will examine major ideas in the field of queer studies. Relying upon theoretical, historical, and cultural studies texts, we will consider the representation and constructions of sexuality-based identities as they have been formed within the contemporary United States. We will explore the idea of sexuality as a category of social identity, probing the identities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender to try to understand what they really mean in various cultural, social, legal, and political milieus. In doing so, we will ask, What does it mean to study queerness? What do we mean by "queer studies"? How do institutions--religious, legal, and scientific--shape our understandings of queer identities? In what ways do sexuality and gender interact, and how does this interaction inform the meanings of each of these identity categories? How do other social categories of identification--race, ethnicity, and class--affect the ways in which we understand expressions of queerness? Moreover, what does studying queerness tell us about the workings of contemporary political, cultural, and social life?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST218
Prereq: None
FGSS219 "The History that Hurts": Reading Saidiya Hartman
This course will introduce students to the major works of the black literary theorist and cultural historian Saidiya Valarie Hartman (b. June 25, 1961), who was named a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Fellow in Literary History and Criticism and American History. After graduating from Wesleyan in 1984, Hartman earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1992; she is currently a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Students enrolled in this course will read and write about Hartman's trilogy of scholarly monographs: Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (W. W. Norton, 2019). Finally, if her new book project is published before the syllabus is finalized, then students enrolled in this course will also read and write about Hartman's fourth scholarly monograph (tentatively titled"N Folio: An Essay on Narrative and the Archive).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM219, AMST319, ENGL218
Prereq: None
FGSS220 Literature and Black Feminism: The Dramas of Black Capital
This class explores Black women's fiction as a mode of critique and intervention into Black Americans' complicated relationships with social and economic capital in the wake of US chattel slavery. How do Black people negotiate the transition from being to owning property? How does the persistence of capital, even in the absence of the system of racial slavery that ushered it into being, continue to shape Black institutional access and Black intramural relations? How are white, Western regimes of value--constructed as they are through the production of racial-sexual difference in dominant habits of thought and representation--contested and, at times, recapitulated in Black social life? How does Black women's literature take up these questions, and what about Black women's literature uniquely equips it to meet this challenge? Ultimately, the course takes seriously Black women's literature as Black feminist thought, exploring how it indicts and imagines beyond the violence of modern racial capitalism.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: AFAM222, ENGL213
Prereq: None
FGSS222 Identity and Jewish Literature: Sexuality, Race, and Gender
What, if anything, is Jewish literature? What, if anything, does it tell us about the history of the people called Jews? This course explores those questions through a variety of sources from Jewish writers, including Sholem Aleichem, Cynthia Ozick, Franz Kafka, I.B. Singer, and others (flexible based on student interest). Through these readings, we will explore how Jewish literature relates to broader questions of sexuality, race, gender, colonialism, etc., as well as specific questions of Jewish history, like the Holocaust and the state of Israel. All works will be read in translation and no previous knowledge of Jewish studies or Judaism is required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CJST
Identical With: CJST222, RELI222
Prereq: None
FGSS223 Sex, Money, and Power: Anthropology of Intimacy and Exchange
Sex and money--intimacy and economy--are often imagined to occupy distinct and separate spheres. Sex and intimacy are located in the private or domestic realm, in spaces of leisure, feelings, care, and personal connections. Money and economy, on the other hand, are purportedly public, located in the market and tied to labor, rationality, and impersonal (non)-relations. This course brings these spheres together, focusing on the links, exchanges, and circuits between the intimate and the economic in diverse cultural contexts.
Drawing on anthropological, feminist, Marxist, queer, and critical race theory, we will build
working definitions of key concepts: intimacy, division of labor, domestic labor, sexual labor, exchange, commodity, value, neoliberalism, consumer culture, and more. We'll test, apply, critique, and expand these concepts as we work through ethnographic case studies on contemporary sex work and tourism, marketing and pornography, reproduction and domestic labor, marriage, class and sexual lifestyle, labor and care work, and sex stores and commodities. We will connect economic, cultural, and political formations with race, ethnicity, nation, sexuality, class, and gender, scaling up to consider global and transnational exchanges and down to consider how these circuits impact families and communities. Throughout, we will ask: Whose labor is valued and recognized, and why? How do bodies accrue value, and in what kinds of marketplaces? When are intimacies--sexual and social--commoditized? How is race, gender, and sexuality central to these exchanges? How do new transnational circuits constrain and/or empower people? And finally, who benefits from these relations, and who does not?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ANTH203
Prereq: None
FGSS224 Mystics and Militants: Medieval Women Writers
In this class we will read a wide range of works written by European women between ca. 1100--1400, including courtly, devotional, and polemical texts. The course will explore ideologies of gender in the Middle Ages and examine the ways in which our authors confronted the antifeminist discourses of their eras with learning and imagination. We will consider such topics as constructions of sexuality and the body, "courtly love," mystical religious experience, heresies, humanism, and utopian realms. In short, we will read works by women who created their own forms of authority and in doing so, both influenced and defied the authorities of their time.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL232, MDST238, RL&L231
Prereq: None
FGSS226 Performance Curation as Relational Praxis
When we hear the word "curator" we might think of the iconic fictional character of Bette Porter--someone who works in a museum or gallery with a vision for how paintings, sculptures, and wall texts are put together for a show. In this class we will expand on this idea of the curator to explore what happens when we add performance to the task of curation. Or, put differently, we will ask what happens when we remove performance from the more theatrical tradition to add it into the gallery and museum space. Thinking between performance studies, visual art, and museum studies, this course explores the role of the performance curator. Connecting performance curation to community engagement, social practice, and transformative justice, we will explore the ways in which performance might address questions of racial inequality, gender variance, class access, and dis/ability. We will ask: How does performance live in art institutions? How do you compensate a performer for a fleeting piece of work? How does performance help us reimagine the space of the art institution itself? Does performance curation make possible new genres of performance? Can, and how, might we apply its practices back to more traditional theater contexts at the university, in the art world, and beyond?
In this class students will explore theories of performance curation as a practice of not only selecting and choosing, but of building relationships. We will look at museum shows, arts organizations, and performance scholars to eventually build individual proposals for our own performance events. Artists and scholars to be discussed include Nivald Acosta, Mariana Valencia, Justin Allen, Morgan Bassichis, Jamie Shearn Coan, Ralph Lemon, Thomas Lax, Adrienne Edwards, Tourmaline, Carolyn Lazard, The Poetry Project, Center for Experimental Lectures, Wendy's Subway, Adult Contemporary, and more.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA216
Prereq: None
FGSS227 Queen Mothers, Unruly Women: Histories of Gender and Sexuality in Africa
The 1929 Women's War is a touchstone for women's history in Africa. By 'sitting on a man' women in Nigeria shocked colonial authorities and demanded economic rights and a public voice. These unruly women danced in protest and rioted (sometimes nude), but their actions were not uncommon sights for their African audience. African women across the continent had long wielded power as queen mothers, prophets, and traders. Others challenged the constraints of ordinary domestic life through their labor, dress, or spirit possession. Gender and contested authority are central to everyday life and politics in Africa. In this course, we will study the history of political and domestic authority on the continent with special consideration for the ways in which gender, sexuality, and power intersect. These histories are diverse both in time and place. For this reason, this course will not present a single narrative of gender in African history. However, students who satisfactorily complete the course will be able to write knowledgeably about the major debates surrounding gender and sexuality in Africa. Major themes include: spiritual authority; domestic and sexual life; the division of labor; and the impact of colonial rule and post-colonial politics. We will examine how women (and also men) have grappled with these intricate social and political relations from the pre-colonial period into the post-colonial era.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST226
Prereq: None
FGSS228 Performing Identities (FGSS Gateway)
Despite the ways that "difference" matters in our social world, identity categories--particularly race, class, gender, and sexuality--are largely constructed. This course uses "performance" as a lens through which to better understand the constructedness of identity. Further, it explores how minority artists and theorists mobilize art and "performance" in their efforts to scrutinize these identity categories' coherence and authority. We will explore the following questions: To what extent can "identity" be understood as a biological truth? How do historical and political needs shape how categories of difference appear? What political potential might art and performance generate, especially for helping us to imagine beyond our current identificatory regimes? Ultimately, this course suggests that the "performativity" of identity might suggest possibilities for undoing its real oppressive implications.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS229 Trailblazing French Women in Science, Food, and the Arts
One could argue that all fields are mined for women, but certain domains are more closed than others. Such is the case for "haute" cuisine, haute couture, cinema, and the political sphere among others. This course seeks to examine the destiny of a group of women who established themselves in spaces traditionally reserved for men. Besides retracing and discussing their work, we will examine the discrimination they suffered and their strategies to overcome the norms. Finally, we will study the representations which were or are made of them through texts, articles, and films. These women include known figures such as Simone de Beauvoir and Marie Curie, but also others like the artist Annette Messager, the cook Hélène Darroze, the designer Coco Chanel, and more.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: FREN227
Prereq: None
FGSS229Z Thinking with Octavia Butler's "Wild Seed"
Blend: Monday and Thursday class time synchronous; additional class hours asynchronous.
Black speculative fiction writer Octavia Butler's novel "Wild Seed" (1980) begins on the African continent in the 17th century amid the rise of transatlantic slavery and concludes on a plantation in Louisiana on the eve of the 19th-century American Civil War. "Wild Seed" was the last published book in Butler's Patternist series, but it relates the earliest segment of that epic story, which follows a shape-shifter named Anyanwu and a body-jumper named Doro across geographies, centuries, classes, corporealities, genders, races, and even, in Anyanwu's case, across species. To quote one student: "It's the weirdest novel I've ever read." This seminar takes up the myriad and interwoven provocations Butler offers in "Wild Seed" by reading her novel alongside a wide range of scholarly literature in the fields of African and African diaspora studies, Indigenous studies, gender & sexuality studies, animal studies, history, disability studies, religious studies, and cultural studies, as well as visual arts. Rather than "apply" the syllabus texts directly to Butler's novel, we will attend to how her novel not only reflects--indeed, anticipates--such scholarly and artistic production, but also produces its own aesthetics and epistemologies.
The seminar unfolds part-synchronously (via Zoom) and part-asynchronously (via writing assignments, screenings, and research project check-ins). Twice-weekly virtual meetings will be centered on presentations of research projects that students will develop over the course of the month, engaging a particular theme or question that they will identify in Butler's work. As such, the syllabus texts are subject to change. Students will be expected to read "Wild Seed" in its entirety in advance of the first class and to have begun thinking about topics they might explore for their presentation and research project (the former being preparation for the latter). The seminar's asynchronous component will consist primarily of weekly writing exercises asking students to reflect on how the assigned texts converse with Butler's novel and vice versa and to comment on one another's analyses. Shared annotatable pdfs will be used to generate conversations about the readings outside of class and to identify questions and topics for discussion. The professor will consider proposals for a creative final project, but it, too, will require substantive research.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: AMST277Z, AFAM228Z
Prereq: None
FGSS230 Contemporary Korean Cinema and Society
This course offers an in-depth exploration of contemporary Korean cinema from the late 1990s to the present, emphasizing its intricate relationship with societal issues. Students will engage with a diverse array of films that not only demonstrate the artistic innovations of Korean filmmakers but also reflect the dynamic sociopolitical landscape of South Korea. Through guided analyses of film texts, we will employ various critical perspectives, including auteurism, national cinema, cultural studies, and genre theory, to enhance our understanding of cinematic narratives. A central focus of the course will be the examination of how gender, sexuality, and identity are portrayed in contemporary Korean films. Additionally, the course will investigate the impact of economic factors and transnational influences on the production and reception of Korean cinema, including the rise of genres such as "K-horror" and the rhetoric of transgressive violence. All films will have English subtitles, and all readings will be available in English; no prior knowledge of Korean film, history, or culture required. Join us on this captivating cinematic journey as we explore the intersections of films and society in contemporary Korea.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CEAS
Identical With: CEAS239, WLIT230
Prereq: None
FGSS231 Black Women and the Sacred
This course examines how Black women engage spiritual practices, in and beyond religious traditions to remake an anti-Black world. Black women have famously been called the "mule of the world." In this role, the Black woman is beast of burden, property, ungendered, enslaved. As such the Black woman constitutes a limit for the normal, the human, and thus the religious. In the study and practice of religions in the modern, western world, Black women are included through exclusion as heretics, demons, and witches. Nevertheless, Black women and their practices across normative formations of nation, race, and religion have cultivated social practices, ideas, and communities which form a counter-poetics, a counter-mythology, and an otherwise possibility of what religion, unbounded and non-normative might be. This course examines typical accounts of Black women in different religious traditions, but more importantly, the course examines how Black women's practices upset normal accounts of nation, race, gender, sexuality, and religion. Course focuses on digital humanities in learning and assignments. Books for purchase are not required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI211, AFAM210
Prereq: None
FGSS232 Gender and Spirituality in the United States
Reclaim your goddess energy. Worship at the altar within. Celebrate your moon cycle. Good vibes only. Messages like these invite women to sanctify themselves, find meaning in the workings of their bodies, and connect to supreme natural forces. They also have powered spiritual and political movements over the past 70 years. While we might we be inclined to relegate an interest in astrology, crystals, aromatherapy, yoga, or reiki to the realm of hobbies or health practices, this course will instead provide a more nuanced view. We will learn the historical and religious contexts of contemporary American spiritualities, particularly as they have been practiced by and marketed to women. We will answer questions such as: How different is spirituality from religion? Why has spiritual practice been commodified and gendered feminine since the New Age era of the 1960s? How has women's spirituality reflected changing ideals of womanhood and the feminine over time? Throughout the class, we will read and listen to popular spiritual content and contextualize it within broader struggles over identity, sexuality, and feminism. In particular, we will interrogate issues of religious appropriation and consider the effects of contemporary movements on the communities who have cultivated sacred practices for centuries.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI210
Prereq: None
FGSS233 Global Queer Studies
This course explores global experiences of LGBT/Q life, bringing an explicitly transnational lens to a field too often dominated by U.S.-centered perspectives.
Drawing on queer ethnography and film, we will explore the contours of queer and trans life around the globe, from the lives of gay men in Indonesia to Muslim yan daudu in Nigeria, gay tourism in post-Revolutionary Cuba, queer mati work among working-class Afro-Surinamese women, lesbian activism in India, LGBT asylum claims in Canada, the queer art of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, the everyday lives of lalas (lesbians) in China, and and the transnational lives of Filipino gay men in New York. Our aim is to challenge and expand Western categories and concepts of sexuality, gender, identity, and desire (both hetero- and homo-normative) and to center the ways sexual/gendered identities, cultures, and politics are shaped by colonialism, imperialism, racialization, migration, transnational media, and global capitalism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST233, ANTH233
Prereq: None
FGSS233Z Writing the Body
How does the body write? Do we trace our words with fingers and toes, with a pen and paper, with flour or glitter or dust or the soles of our feet? Can the written word remind us that we are more than our eyes or our heads? Writing the body is an attempt to link the worlds of the written and the somatic through the act of writing. This class is both a generative creative writing course and a theoretical exploration of the ways in which the body has been rendered in literature, poetry, and philosophy. Putting queer studies, disability studies, Black studies, and Indigenous studies into conversation with prose, plays, and poetry, students will explore different strategies of embodied writing. Looking to the work of Maggie Nelson, Jean-Luc Nancy, Eileen Myles, Christina Sharpe, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Melissa Febos, Hortense Spillers, Eve Tuck, Billy Ray Belcourt, Torrey Peters, Wendy Ortiz, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jordy Rosenberg, Gabrielle Civil, Ursula Le Guin, adrienne maree brown, and Frank O'Hara students will produce a written work that moves promiscuously between theory and creative nonfiction.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA236Z, ENGL255Z, DANC236Z
Prereq: None
FGSS234 Queer Russia
Russia is accustomed to playing the role of the "evil empire." The current ongoing war in Ukraine has resurrected the Cold War-era narratives about Russia as a dark, aggressive, and ruthless military power. The notorious legislation of recent years--whose functions range from barring Americans from adopting Russian orphans to criminalizing the so-called "gay propaganda"--have further solidified Russia's reputation as a country with little regard for human rights. Yet generations of Russian poets, artists, and writers have transformed the country's systematic oppression and violence into spectacular forms of protest and self-expression. This course focuses on gender and sexuality in exploring an alternative cultural history of Russia, which highlights its queer legacy from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine poetry, fiction, art, memoirs, plays, films, performances, and discursive texts that showcase uniquely Russian conceptions of marriage, gender relations, gender expression, and sexual identity. Attention will be paid to the ways in which Russian and Western narratives of queerness align and diverge. In English. No knowledge of Russian is required or expected.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES235, RULE235, RUSS235
Prereq: None
FGSS235 Writing on and as Performance
This course focuses on developing descriptive critical and creative writing skills in relation to both witnessing and staging live performance. Through close readings of texts by authors including José Esteban Muñoz, Jennifer Doyle, Eileen Myles, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, Lidia Yuknavitch, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Glenn Ligon, Eve Sedgwick, Fred Moten, and Billy Ray Belcourt, this course will challenge students to craft ideas and arguments by enhancing critical and creative writing skills. We will experiment with style and form from academic arguments, to performance lectures, artist interviews, and free-form creative prose essays. Students will complete in-class writing assignments and exercises in response to written, recorded, and live performances by a range of contemporary artists. Students will also be asked to complete hybrid creative writing assignments in response to prompts that imagine writing as always in conversation with performance. More specifically, students will write pieces about embodiment, sound, and the visual. This class is particularly interested in ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are shaped by language, and how language as a performative tool can be a site for "insurrection" (Moten) and "listening in detail" (Vazquez).
This course encourages students to experiment with their writing practices. Over the course of the semester students will be asked to write four separate creative/critical pieces, all of which will be workshopped in the space of the classroom.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA235, ENGL278
Prereq: None
FGSS236 Activism and Theories of Change
In this course we will explore strategies and theories of change that shape social justice movements, with particular reference to recent movements in the United States. We will discuss the benefits and risks of the many available strategies including direct action, grassroots mobilization, impact litigation, legislative campaigns, electoral campaigns, artistic protest, and public education. What strategic, ethical, or moral questions are raised by various types of protest and communications? The instructors will draw on their own experiences as activists for women's rights, queer rights, and social and economic justice. The course will be co-taught by Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Policy Leslie Gabel-Brett and guest instructor Beverly Tillery, former Executive Director of the Anti-Violence project in NYC who will focus on the ways BIPOC and Queer BIPOC communities are reshaping the social justice landscape by addressing the safety of trans women, challenging the gender binary and reforming and ending the carceral legal system. We will allow time to apply the course concepts to events that are occurring in real time during the semester including current campus protests. The instructors are deeply committed to maintaining a safe space for inquiry and learning where divergent opinions are welcome and respected. This course will be relevant to students interested in public policy, feminism, racial justice, gender and sexuality studies, and other social sciences, and will provide useful insight for future organizers and activists, lawyers, and public policy makers.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL235, AFAM235, IDEA235
Prereq: None
FGSS239 Animal Theories/Human Fictions
The question of "the animal" has become a recent focus of theory, although depictions of nonhuman animals can be traced to the very origins of representation. This course will move among literature, philosophy, art, and theory in an effort to trace the changing conceptions of human-animal difference and human-animal relations from 18th-century fictions of savage men and wild children to current theories of the posthuman. We will consider the ways that the representation of "the animal" intersects with theories of gender and race as it also contests the grounds of representation itself. Authors may include Rousseau, Poe, Sewell, Mann, Colette, Coetzee, Heidegger, Agamben, Derrida, and Harway.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL238, ENGL252
Prereq: None
FGSS240 The Gendering of Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective
This course presents a critical examination of issues explored and debated in recent studies of gender, sexuality, power, identity, and music from diversified music traditions, including Western art music, popular music, and world musics. Drawing upon interdisciplinary discourse on theories of feminism and gender, gay and lesbian musicology, as well as queer theory in ethno/musicology, through case studies and analysis of various musical examples, we will investigate the following topics: women's multiple roles in the historical and contemporary practices of music; desire, sexuality, and women's images in music; and how gender ideology, contextualized by sociocultural conditions, both constructs and is constructed by musical aesthetics, performance practice, creative processes, and the reception of music.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC291
Prereq: None
FGSS242 Intimate Histories: Black Women's Sexuality
Black feminist theory teaches us that African American women have historically confronted racism and sexism in addition to other forms of oppression. How has this experience shaped the sexual lives of everyday black women and famous figures? This course places the sexual at the center of African American women's history. It will examine how regimes of violence have intervened in black women's sexual freedom, from intimate bonds to reproduction to same-sex desire. It will cover black women's resistance to these regimes; to their sexual agency in diverse spaces from the plantation to the porn industry. This course will also tackle the enduring impact of the Jezebel stereotype in the history of black women's sexuality. Using primary and secondary sources, this class will fundamentally investigate the significance of African American women's sexual history in the histories of American sexual, racial, gender, and class politics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM242, HIST258
Prereq: None
FGSS243 Television: The Domestic Medium
Of all the mass media, television is the most intimately associated with domestic and familial life. Its installation in American homes over the postwar decade coincided with a revival of family life that encouraged an emphasis on private over public leisure. Most television is still watched at home, where viewing practices are interwoven with domestic routines and provide a site for negotiating family and gender relations. Television production is shaped at several levels by the images broadcasters and advertisers have of viewers' domestic lives: Broadcast schedules reflect socially conditioned assumptions about the gendered division of family roles; a common televisual mode of address uses a conversational style in which performers present themselves to viewers as friends or members of the family; and families or surrogate families figure prominently in the content of programming across a wide range of genres, including sitcoms, primetime dramas, daytime soaps, and talk shows. Sitcoms, in particular, have responded to and mediated historical shifts in family forms and gender relations over the past 50 years, and they will be a focus in this course. We will explore how television has both shaped and responded to larger cultural discourses about family and gender from the postwar era into the 21st century.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ANTH244, FILM349
Prereq: None
FGSS244 Feminist and Queer Theories of Social Reproduction
This course will introduce students to the study of social reproduction and power with an emphasis on feminist, queer, and transnational approaches to inquiry and action. We will begin by exploring key methodologies and theoretical framings for understanding contemporary "American" cultural, social, and political formations both within and beyond the territorial U.S., focusing on the effectiveness of discursive and historical modes of critical analysis. The subsequent sections of the course will turn to three case studies of the historical routes and transnational implications of U.S.-based political discourses around (1) population control and reproductive justice, (2) abolition and the prison-industrial complex, and (3) debt and higher education. By engaging with each area of inquiry through theoretical, historical, and grounded activist texts, we will think through the possibilities for utilizing academic work in concert with movement-based engaged scholarship to address the uneven distribution of life chances and the potential of imagining the world otherwise.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: SOC244
Prereq: SOC151
FGSS245 Intersectionality and Identity (FGSS Gateway)
Intersectionality has emerged as a central motif within both social analysis and political debate. We will examine the origins of this framework within black feminism and women-of-color activism, as well as the way this framework traveled to, and is used within, sociology and other disciplines. The course will also address critiques of intersectionality that have emerged within and outside of feminist theory, and extends the concept of intersectionality to think through intersections between various social identities and social institutions such as capitalism and colonialism.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: AMST254, SOC245
Prereq: None
FGSS246 Girlfriend, Sister, Self: 20th-c. Black Women's Writing
This course will examine textual and visual constructions of the girlfriend, sister, cousin, and daughter in 20th-century black women's writing. We will read works by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Veronica Chambers, and Marita Golden as narratives of women loving women (sexually and not) and as sites through which to engage black women's subjectivity more generally. In this course we will attend to the interior landscapes of individual black female subjects as well as the social landscapes that produce and/or complicate notions of love, kinship, friendship, and self. We will draw on African American literary theory, queer and affect theory, and black cultural memory as well as turn to influential works by bell hooks, Deborah McDowell, Kevin Quashie, and Valerie Smith, among others. How do writers of the period imagine and articulate the relationship between black women and their others?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM244
Prereq: None
FGSS247 Gender and Power in Chinese Literature
This course explores the intersections of gender, power, and performance in Chinese society. Drawing on literary and historical sources, theories of gender and sexuality, and with reference to media forms such as theater and film, we assess the significance of gender as an analytical framework for studying Chinese literature, culture, and society. What power dynamics drive conceptions of gender and gender ideology in Chinese literature and history? And how do discussions around gender roles and sexuality change in the modern and contemporary periods? Course topics include: Chinese feminism; depictions of women in classical literature; gender roles, family, and marriage; conceptions of the body; constructing identities; women writers; the "new woman"; themes of cross-dressing; classical romance narratives; gender performance in Chinese theater; queer narratives; and more.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CEAS
Identical With: CEAS240, WLIT229
Prereq: None
FGSS250 The Renaissance Woman
This course takes seriously the socioeconomic, cultural, religious, and physical restrictions placed on women writing in the 16th and 17th centuries. Through a selection of literary works, we will examine the ways in which early modern women exercised considerable authorial agency in the poetic-fashioning of the literary tropes, genres, and forms of thought that they inherited. Often re-forming, reinventing, revising, and re-imagining poetic spaces, these women developed their own styles of critique and creation from within their historically specific concerns. This course recovers works that were frequently written out of the study of the early modern during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to grapple with the imaginative voices of women writing under the constraints of their time.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL250
Prereq: None
FGSS252 Guns and Society
Students will discuss some of the key questions that animate the emerging interdisciplinary field of gun studies, considering guns as objects and symbols and as sites of both shared and contested meanings in everyday life. Readings will include recent scholarship about the evolution of gun technologies and the changing place of guns in U.S. society, from the colonial era through to the present day, exploring how the history of guns in U.S. history is relevant to other histories, including studies of race, gender, class, labor and capital, social movements, and military and civilian life. Special focus will be put on visual studies, museum studies and public history, science and technology studies, public health, and legal history. Assignments include four shorter (2-page) papers and a 15-page final research paper. Each student, working in small groups, will also deliver a 10-minute presentation and have opportunities for site visits to local museums and gun violence memorials such as the Coltsville National Historic Park (Hartford), Springfield Armory National Historic Site (Springfield, Massachusetts), and the Connecticut Gun Violence Memorial (New Haven).
(This course is a prerequisite for individualized humanities "labs" designed for students to delve into a particular aspect of the topic of guns and society in a more applied way in the spring semester, through special projects that can include an individually designed research paper, a museum/archives project, a theater sketch, a podcast, a high school teaching module, an art project, an exhibit in a local museum, an oral history project, or a syllabus, among other possibilities to be discussed with the instructor.)
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST231, STS231, AMST231
Prereq: None
FGSS255 Sex Work and Sex Trafficking: Empowerment, Exploitation, and the Politics of Sex
This course explores the history, politics, and social meaning of sex work. Focusing particularly but not exclusively upon prostitution, we will pay careful attention to the diverse range of social experiences that form sex work, as well as the way in which prostitution is used as a governing metaphor within sexual relations more generally. Some questions the course will consider: How has sex work changed over time, and what do these changes tell us about both the nature of sex work and about the broader society? In what ways is sex work similar to or different from other forms of service labor or other types of intimate relationship? How do questions of race, class, sexuality, and gender alter the meaning and experience of sex work? What sorts of desires and expectations do clients bring to interactions with sex workers, and in what ways have these shifted over time? Recent controversies concerning sex trafficking and underage prostitution will also be addressed, as will the effects of various regulatory schemes that have been developed around the world.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: SOC256
Prereq: SOC151
FGSS255Z Sex Work and Sex Trafficking: Empowerment, Exploitation, and the Politics of Sex
This course explores the history, politics, and social meaning of sex work. Focusing particularly but not exclusively upon prostitution, we will pay careful attention to the diverse range of social experiences which form sex work, as well as the way in which prostitution is utilized as a governing metaphor within sexual relations more generally. Some questions the course will consider: How has sex work changed over time, and what do these changes tell us about both the nature of sex work and about the broader society? In what ways is sex work similar to or different from other forms of service labor or other types of intimate relationships? How do questions of race, class, sexuality, and gender alter the meaning and experience of sex work? What sorts of desires and expectations do clients bring to interactions with sex workers, and in what ways have these shifted over time? Recent controversies concerning sex trafficking and underage prostitution will also be addressed, as will the effects of various regulatory schemes that have been developed around the world. The course will be taught synchronously, but students who are in time zones that would make participation difficult will have an asynchronous option.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: SOC256Z
Prereq: None
FGSS256 Social Movements
How, when, and why do social movements emerge? What motivates individuals to participate? What transforms problems into grievances and grievances to action? How should movements be organized, and what tactics should they use? What factors explain movement success and failure (and how should success and failure be defined)? What is a social movement, anyway? This course seeks to introduce some of the major ways scholars have approached such questions and, at the same time, to give a sense of both the high drama and the everyday details of social movement activism, using historical and sociological case studies. Course readings concentrate on U.S. movements, including racial justice, class, gender, and sexuality-based activism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: SOC246
Prereq: SOC151
FGSS258 A Celebration of Women in Jazz: A Critical Analysis of Gender
How can we take the lessons of Jazz with us into other spaces? In this course, students will study Women in Jazz and examine the broad impact of our social structures and power systems to consider how the lessons of Jazz can help us navigate our future. How can we take the values of Jazz, such as improvisation, listening skills, democracy, a celebration of diversity, and equity work, and use our agency to effect change for the better in our communities? This course will examine the traditionally male-dominated nature of Jazz, its history of misogyny, and underrepresentation of women and other gender expressions. Students will learn in general about the musical art form of Jazz, its history as Black American music, and its unique qualities including improvisation, the blues, and swing. There will be a strong focus on listening to music from women musicians, and students will learn how to actively listen to jazz and all music. Together, we will look at case studies of successful women musicians and composers from the history of Jazz through the present, reading biographical information and reviewing their performance and compositional contributions. Musicians may include Mary Lou Williams, Carla Bley, Terri Lynn Carrington, esperanza spalding, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Melba Liston, Lil' Hardin Armstrong, Dinah Washington, Abbey Lincoln, Toshiko Akiyoshi, and Marian McPartland.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS256, AFAM256, MUSC256
Prereq: None
FGSS262 "Before the 'Body' there is the 'Flesh'": Reading Hortense Spillers
This course will introduce students to the major works of the black feminist theorist and literary critic Hortense J. Spillers (b. April 24, 1942), one of the greatest essayists and most gifted intellectuals of our times. While her published writings are legion, Spillers is perhaps best known for her scholarly article titled "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (originally published by Diacritics in 1987). In addition to "Mama's Baby," then, together we will read and engage at close range with the essays collected in "Black, White, and in Color" (published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003) in order to reveal the extraordinary complexity and clarity of her thought.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM264, ENGL261
Prereq: None
FGSS264 Black Feminisms in the Americas: Politics, Representation, and Queer Ruminations of Elsewhere
This course will explore Black feminist intellectual productions, highlighting the many theoretical, political, and critically imaginative elements found throughout early and contemporary works. Our discussions will reflect on power, the production of knowledge, identity, inequality, and the politics and perils of Black feminist struggle. Relying on a variety of texts and media--such as writings, visual & performance arts, poetry, music, and film--students should expect to engage with key issues and debates, along with the epistemological challenges offered by queer of color critique, trans/national perspectives, and social alternatives emerging from across the Black (feminist) diaspora.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM246
Prereq: None
FGSS267 Revolution Girl-Style Now: Queer Performance Strategies
Looking to the rich cultural history of queer and feminist performance in the U.S, this course examines performances of gender, sexuality, obscenity, and refusal. In this class, we will ask how the terms "feminist" and "queer" come to determine a specific piece of theater or performance art. Is it the author's own political affiliation that establishes the work as feminist? Is it the audience's reading that gathers a work of art under a queer rubric? Furthermore, where does feminist performance meet queer performance? Topics will include feminist body art, AIDS activism, queer nightlife, installation and performance art, video art, and memoir. Focusing in on strategies for engaging the many meanings of the words "queer," we will pair theoretical readings with theatrical sites.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA267
Prereq: None
FGSS268Z Gender and History: Global Feminist Theories and Narratives of the Past
What is a female husband? In the 1980s an increasing number of feminist scholars posed questions about the relationship between biological sex and gender roles. Ifi Amadiume, who studied the history of female husbands in West Africa, asserted that such relationships between sex and gender needed to be studied in a global context. More than two decades after Amadiume's influential book Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (1987) was published, the scholarship on global gender and sexuality is vibrant and dynamic. These works have shown gender to be central to understanding society at different periods and geographical locations, but it is far from a universally understood category. This seminar will introduce students to the history of gender, sex, and the body from a global and comparative perspective with readings from the history of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. We will also cover the development of influential theories in the field and how they apply to the writing of history. For the first three weeks of the summer session we will focus on 1) Producing a Gendered Discipline 2) Feminist Theories and Sexualities and 3) Gender in the Archive. In the final week, students will produce a final research paper relating to one of four possible themes: International Feminisms, Women's Rights, Queering Histories, or Gender and Labor. Our readings for the week will guide an in-depth discussion of each topic. The course is especially appropriate for prospective history and feminist, gender and sexuality majors (this is a gateway course for FGSS), though all students interested in using gender as a category of historical analysis for their scholarly work in other fields are welcome.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST291Z, COL323Z
Prereq: None
FGSS269 Gender and History: Global Feminist Theories and Narratives of the Past (FGSS Gateway)
What is a female husband? In the 1980s an increasing number of feminist scholars posed questions about the relationship between biological sex and gender roles. The African scholar Ifi Amadiume, who studied the history of female husbands in West Africa, asserted that such relationships between sex and gender needed to be studied in a global context. More than two decades after Amadiume's influential book "Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society" (1987) was published, the scholarship on global gender and sexuality is vibrant and dynamic. These works have shown gender to be central to understanding society at different periods and geographical locations, but it is far from a universally understood category.
This seminar will introduce first- and second-year students to the history of gender, sex, labor, and feminist activism from a global and comparative perspective with readings from the history of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. We will also cover the development of influential theories in the field and how they apply to the writing of history. This course is especially appropriate for prospective history and feminist, gender and sexuality majors, though all students interested in using gender as category of historical analysis for their scholarly work in other fields are welcome.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST291, COL323
Prereq: None
FGSS271 Bad Sex
In a 2003 op-ed in support of same-sex marriage, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks writes, "Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations." Brooks is far from alone in this critique of promiscuity. What is it about "casual encounters" and hookup culture that so disturbs? Why is sex a magnet for anxieties about selfishness and irresponsibility? Why do we think of anonymity and intimacy in sex as mutually exclusive? What do we make of desires that are politically troubling? On what basis are particular forms of sex and sexuality vilified or valued? Is love the antidote to sexual hedonism, or hedonism in disguise? This course will consider widespread cultural anxieties about sex, sexuality, desire, and pleasure from sociological and psychoanalytic perspectives.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: SOC269
Prereq: SOC151
FGSS272 Knowing Their Place: Two Centuries of Women Generating Wonder in the Natural World
This seminar will examine the intersection of natural science, women's history, and poetic prose through the writings of Rachel Carson and the female nature writers who both preceded and succeeded her, including Mary Treat, Anna Botsford Comstock, Mabel Osgood Wright, Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Camille Dungy, and others. These women looked closely at the natural world and wrote intimately on botany, birdwatching, and the ecology of their local landscapes, teaching their readers to feel wonder and a sense of connection with place. What does it mean to know a landscape or an ecosystem intimately? How does a sense of place become political? How does gender affect perspective on the natural world and environmental stewardship? Each student will put these ideas into play in a portfolio of place-based personal essays.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS272, WRCT272
Prereq: None
FGSS274 Self & Social Transformation
Racism, sexism, and classism are deeply ingrained in our habits and feelings. It seems that in order to change objective conditions we need to change ourselves and our communities. But given that our habits and feelings are often unconscious and resistant to change, how do we philosophically go about doing this? This class tries to answer this question. It starts theoretically with ancient Greek and ancient Chinese virtue ethics as well as Foucault's later work on self-transformation. It then takes these concepts/theories and sees them in action in contemporary movements of self/community transformation. We start with a paradigmatic political activist movement of self-transformation: the Black feminist transformative justice movement with the goal of prison abolition. But as we progress, we will explore less obvious and seemingly more mundane movements of self- and community transformation such as Saba Mahmood's dawa movement from Egypt, Weight Watchers, and finally "ballroom" culture from Detroit. Anthropological ethnographies of these movements will help show how we can self-reflexively shape our own habits and transform ourselves.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL274, ANTH274
Prereq: None
FGSS275 Feeling Black Feminism
In this course we will explore the connected histories of the "felt life of black feminism" (Nash 2019) and Black feminist contributions to empowerment movements both inside and outside of the academy. Our class proceeds by reading some of the seminal texts that circulate as theory in US academic Black feminism alongside 20th and 21st century memoirs and poetry to explore how Black feminists articulate the relationship between their politics and the everyday psychic negotiations that comprise moments of rage, anxiety, melancholy, tenderness, joy, etc. This course engages in the study of collective minoritarian affect, feelings, and emotions as well as outlines their relationship to Black and/or women's liberation movements.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: AFAM274, AFAM275
Prereq: None
FGSS276 Black Performance Theory
What does it mean to perform identity, to perform race, to perform blackness? How is blackness defined as both a radical aesthetic and an identity? In this course, we will focus on theater and performance as a resource for thinking about black history, identity, and radical politics in excess of the written word. Following recent work in Black Studies and Performance Studies, this class will pay particular attention to the doing of blackness, the visible, sonic, and haptic performances that give over to a radical way of seeing, feeling, and being in an anti-black world. Plays, films, and texts might include works by Fred Moten, Alexander Weheilye, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Suzan Lori-Parks, Danai Gurira, Shane Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Dee Rees, Celiné Sciamma, Saidiya Hartman, Huey P. Copeland, Darby English, Lorraine Hansberry, Hilton Als, Spike Lee, Isaac Julien, Martine Syms, Tavia Nyong'o, and Daphne Brooks.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA266, AFAM266, ENGL263
Prereq: None
FGSS277 Feminist Philosophy and Moral Theory (FGSS Gateway)
This course explores the dialogue between feminist concerns and moral theory. It will explore not only how moral theory might support certain central feminist insights and aims but also why some feminists cast doubt on the project of "doing moral theory." Does the language of existing philosophical moral theories (reason, fairness, equality, utility, human nature, rights) sufficiently allow articulation of feminist problems? If not, how can feminist moral theorists move us beyond the grip of familiar gender-loaded oppositions? After surveying a range of perspectives on feminism and philosophy, we will give a deep reading to three book-length developments of feminist ethics: one from a Kantian perspective, one focused on care, and one focused on virtue ethics. As a gateway course for the FGSS program, this course serves to introduce critical thinking about the construction of gender and the intersection of gender with race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL277
Prereq: None
FGSS278 Magick and Her Practices, of Late
In this course we ask why paganism and Goddess worship have become "the fastest growing American religion," examining the tensions between science and society that so often provoke magic-infused social resistance movements. We explore the rise of Goddess worship in the Americas since the 1970s, considering its ties to ecofeminist, womanist, indigenous, and environmentalist movements. We examine the force of agency and its relation to ritual magic.
We then dive into the purported roots of several modern magic traditions, including Wicca, Dianic witchcraft, Feri traditions, and Haitian Vodou, among others, and ask how these cosmovisions define and/or transcend our gendered personhoods.
As we find our way back to a renewed understanding of modern paganisms, students will design individual or small group projects wherein they experience, ethnographically consider and/or perform extant manifestations of magic and ritual, bringing peoples lived experiences into conversation with course readings. This class is taught as a twice-weekly seminar designed around written assignments and engaged discussions, while inviting but not requiring students to engage in phenomenological experiences outside of class that may inform their written work. Students will produce ethnographic essays that are both analytical and personally reflective.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI277, AMST171
Prereq: None
FGSS279 Magick and Her Practices, of Late: A Digital Humanities Course
As soon as you step foot into this course, you will become an active member of a podcasting production team, and the teaching modalities and weekly DH seminar format of this course are designed to promote small team engagement, pre-and post-production workshops, and an approach to aural argumentation that moves from written reflective essay to effective audio storytelling intended for public engagement.
In this course we ask why paganism and Goddess worship have become "the fastest growing American religion," examining the tensions between science and society that so often provoke magic-infused social resistance movements. We explore the rise of Goddess worship in the Americas since the 1970s, considering its ties to ecofeminist, womanist, indigenous, and environmentalist movements. Student teams will then dive differentially into case studies that explore the purported roots of these reclaiming traditions, including Wicca, Dianic Witchcraft, Feri traditions, and Haitian Vodou, among others, and produce podcast episodes for the broader University community that ponder where our human practices of magic originated, and why.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI278, AMST172
Prereq: None
FGSS284 Displaying Clothes: Fashion in the Museum
What are clothes doing in the museum and why do they attract so much public attention? This course explores fashion exhibitions in history and the practice of fashion curation today, a key component of critical cultural analysis. Part curatorial workshop, part seminar, in this class students consider issues that influence professional curatorial practices through readings, discussions, and site visits. Topics include the origins of museums, museum architecture, the ethics and cultural impact of collecting and display practices, the role of dress and textile objects in art, history, and science museums, visitor experience research, and the challenges facing museums in the twenty-first century. As a group the students will work on an exhibition project, developing its organization and design, object selection and research, and accompanying texts and label writing.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CSPL
Identical With: CSPL289, IDEA289, SOC279
Prereq: None
FGSS285 Gender and Slavery in the Atlantic World
For most of the 20th century, historians of slavery in the Atlantic world overlooked the critical role of gender in shaping the marketplace, culture, and experience of the institution. Slaveholding and its attendant violence were presumed to be the domain of men. With a tragically limited archive, the popularity of slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" (1845) reveal how the voices and perspectives of men have dominated our understanding of the enslaved experience. Since the 1980s, the work of black feminist historians such as Deborah Gray White's, "Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South" (1985) have unpacked the profoundly gendered nature of slavery in colonial America, the United States, and the Caribbean. This course embarks on an exploration of this important intervention. We will engage primary sources to illuminate the voices of enslaved women and debunk some of the historical myths of slavery and slaveholding. We will also visit classic and fresh secondary literature to understand the evolution of the field. Major themes include but are not limited to the Middle Passage experience, gendered violence, fertility, reproduction and motherhood, the Southern Belle archetype and slaveholding mistresses, notions of beauty and purity in black and white, and fugitivity.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM285
Prereq: None
FGSS286 Queer Activism and Radical Scholarship: Beyond Theory vs. Practice
This course explores the relationship between scholarship and activism, with a focus on intersectional radical queer scholarship and activism--queer left, black radical, trans, immigration, prison abolition, and sex work--in the United States. We will aim to connect the too-often bifurcated realms of academia and activism, theory and practice, research and action, so that we might think through the political stakes of knowledge-making in and outside the so-called "ivory tower," explore interdisciplinary methodologies we might use to study and learn from (and with) activists (including ethnography, oral history, and community archive), and gain insight into the histories and current realities of social justice movements, campus activisms, the work of a radical imagination, art and activism, and the impasse of the political present. To put their theory into practice, students will undertake a semester-long radical research project on a queer issue or activist organization--past or present--of their choice.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST286, ANTH286
Prereq: None
FGSS288 Gender and Sexuality in Chinese Narrative
This course pays particular attention to gender relations and representations of sexuality in Chinese narrative. This course will require close readings of translated Chinese novels, short stories and movies. We will explore themes and motifs such as gender roles in Confucianism, female chastity, same sex desire, cross-dressing, masculinity and femininity, manhood and misogyny, eroticism, the cult of qing (passion), the New Woman, socialist and post-socialist desires, and writing bodies in the era of globalization. In addition to providing a platform for appreciation of the aesthetic beauty of Chinese narrative, the course encourages students to think about how representations of gender and sexuality incorporate or confront the mainstream moral values and social principles in China.
All readings are in English, no prior knowledge of Chinese language or culture is required. No text book requirement.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CEAS
Identical With: CEAS278
Prereq: None
FGSS290 Global Film Melodrama
Often patronizingly dismissed as 'women's weepies', this course will examine the proliferation and transformation of melodrama film within various national, subnational, postcolonial, queer, and global contexts. The course will focus on the specific language ad conventions of melodrama. We will watch a wide range of films from India, China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iran, Egypt, Kenya, Spain, Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, and Mexico among various global film contexts. Importantly, this course will ask, what are the stakes and implications of 'Global' in "Global Film Melodrama"? Moving away from an additive model that often present global film histories as an addendum to the "mainstream" cinemas, the focus will instead be on the emergence and significance of melodrama, and its specific idioms within transnational contexts. The course is open to all sophomores including non-film minors and non-film majors at Wesleyan. No previous experience in Film is required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FILM
Identical With: FILM290, CEAS292
Prereq: None
FGSS291 Writing Women's Bodies: Gender and Sexuality in Latin America
This class explores the narrative fiction of 21st century Latin American women. Through an analysis of visuality, art, ecology, nanotechnology, sexuality, and memory, among other themes, we study the ways in which women construct their bodily experience and forge ethical relations with the world through linguistic and aesthetic innovation. We will read authors such as Samanta Schweblin, Gabriela Wiener, Brenda Navarro, María Gaínza, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Juliana Javierre, and Lina Meruane.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN293, LAST293
Prereq: SPAN221
FGSS293 Pleasure and Power: An Introduction to Sexuality Studies (FGSS Gateway)
This course seeks to denaturalize some of what are often the most taken-for-granted aspects of daily life: our bodies and genders, our erotic desires, and our sexual identities. To this end, this course will provide a critical-historical overview of dominant Euro-American understandings of sexuality and their embodied legacies.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: AMST294
Prereq: None
FGSS294 Queering Latin America: Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Literature and Film
This course studies important and groundbreaking films, novels, and poetry by contemporary gay, lesbian, and transgender artists. It focuses on their strategies to survive, respond to, and defy the changing socio-political Latin American landscape of the last 80 years. We will introduce some key critical concepts and debates from queer theory to guide our discussions. Some of the artists we will study include: Alejandra Pizarnik, Lucía Puenzo, Manuel Puig, Pedro Lemembel, Karim Aïnouz, Lorenzo Vigas, Rosamaría Roffiel, and Norma Mosgrovejo, among others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN294, LAST294
Prereq: None
FGSS295 Queer Opera
Opera is a total art: It weds elaborate fashions with scene design and lighting to create incredible dramas set to music. For this reason, opera forces us to think interdisciplinarily about the narratives it portrays. Every action, every emotion, every decision and recognition in the drama is conveyed to the audience in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways. Operas are also fantastic living experiments in the performative representation of human sexuality. In addition to all of the love and sex that occurs explicitly on the opera stage--and there is plenty of that--operatic narratives also bear witness to changing structures of normativity; regimes of social control are thematized, sometimes lampooned, and often transgressed within the drama, and operas allow us to see how this unfolds within an interconnected ensemble of media. This course serves to introduce students to the world of the opera stage and, through that world, the foundational texts of queer theory. Together we will explore operas from the 17th century to the present day, opera theory of the past century, and queer theory of the past three decades to ask what these bodies of knowledge have to teach each other.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC294
Prereq: None
FGSS299 Constructing Black Interiors
An allusion to Elizabeth Alexander's noteworthy book of essays, this course will consider the way in which notions of the "interior" or "interiority" have been central to Black identity formation and Black cultural expression. We will begin by exploring the social and political reasons for this development and investigate the relationship between African American cultural production and the regulative force of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability as systems of social organization. Making recourse to Black studies, theater and performance studies, affect theory, queer theory, geography, sociology, and their disciplinary intersections, we will attempt to engage the materiality of this spatial metaphor, encountering writers and artists who use text and image to construct interior space and do so in ways that challenge social structures and normative conceptions of identity.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS301 Black Speculative Fictions and the Anthropocene
The genre of black speculative fiction--in the form of literature, art, music, and theory--provides a generative framework through which to (re)think understandings of race, gender, sexuality, class, the body, disability, citizenship, and the human. Often couched as taking place in the "future," black speculative fictions also engage the past and critique the present. This makes the genre a critical resource for addressing the Anthropocene. The term "Anthropocene" first emerged from the discipline of geology in 2000. Scientists proposed that Earth had entered a new epoch (following the Holocene) in which "humans" had become geological forces, impacting the planet itself. However, the term Anthropocene raises numerous questions. What does it mean to think about the human at the level of a "species"? What constitutes evidence of the Anthropocene and when did it begin? Who is responsible for the Anthropocene's attendant catastrophes, which include earthquakes, altered ocean waters, and massive storms? Does the Anthropocene overemphasize the human and thus downplay other interspecies and human-nonhuman, animate-inanimate relations? Or does it demand a (potentially fruitful) reconceptualization of the human? Further, how does artificial intelligence complicate definitions of the human and, by extension, of the Anthropocene? Centering the work of black speculative thinkers and placing it in conversation with scientific studies ranging from marine biology and geology to cybernetics, this course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the Anthropocene that endeavors to (re)conceptualize the human, ecological relations, and Earth itself. Texts engaged will include: novels, art, music, theory, and scientific studies.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: AFAM312, E&ES125
Prereq: None
FGSS302 Critical Perspectives on the State
This course builds on Marxist, poststrucuturalist, feminist, anarchist, and cultural analyses to take a critical approach to the state--what it is and what it does. We will examine how the state is imagined by those who write about it and struggle against it. Where does the state begin? How do states act, and what are the consequences of these acts? How is rule consolidated and how are individuals and communities annexed to the project of rule? How do people engage with state acts and ideologies? We will read texts drawn from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, feminist theory, political theory, philosophy, sociology, and geography, that examine the nature, everyday workings, and effects of state power. Drawing upon ethnographic examples from around the world, we will analyze how states are cultural artifacts that produce and regulate people's identities and bodies, reproduce social inequalities, and engender resistances of all sorts. Some of the topics we will discuss include bureaucracy, governmentality, the security state, the prison industrial complex, terror and militarism, law and justice, citizenship, democracy, refugees, anti-state movements, the "man" in the state, and welfare and post-welfare politics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: ANTH302
Prereq: None
FGSS303 Reproductive Politics and the Family in Africa
This course will introduce students to broad discourses and issues related to reproduction and the family in modern Africa. We will study maternal and sexual health and technologies of reproduction, but for us reproduction will be an object of historical inquiry. One of the driving questions for this course will be how reproduction has been given meaning socially. How have African societies understood abortion, infanticide, or other medical means of controlling fertility and childbirth? What has been the relationship between the family and the state? We will also examine ideas about sexuality and love, changing notions of parenthood, childhood health, and what constitutes an ideal family. Finally, we will interrogate how these ideas influenced health policy and political ideologies which, in turn, changed conceptions of motherhood, fatherhood, and the family.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST302, STS302
Prereq: None
FGSS304 Pantheologies: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, World
Pantheism teaches that the world itself is divine. The idea seems simple enough, yet it has suffered extraordinary ridicule at the hands of western philosophers and theologians, who have considered "matter" to be lifeless, dark, and feminine (which is to say, as different as possible from "God.") This course will explore this generalized panic over pantheism--in particular, the anxieties it encodes over gender, race, nationality, and class, and the contribution such anxieties have made to an unequally distributed attack on the "environment."
Seeking an alternative to our raced and gendered ecocidal metaphysic, the course then turns to contemporary pantheologies. To what extent are recent theories of cosmology, complexity, and materiality setting forth subtle pantheisms? What are the feminist, anti-racist, and ecological stakes of these theories? Properly conceived, what is pantheism; is it ultimately distinguishable from atheism; and what use are any of these platforms in developing an ethic and politic of environmental justice?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI305, STS305
Prereq: None
FGSS305 Techniques of the Liar: Performance, Artifice, Fraud
This seminar is a cultural and intellectual history of fraudulence, fiction, and faking it. We will explore both specific performance practices as well as theorizations of artifice, fraud, and authenticity. Topics will include illusion, ventriloquism, and sleight of hand; mimetic acting and the manufacture of "emotion"; dance technique and the concealment of effort; and musical improvisation and the politics of invention. We will also consider the complexities of drag, camp, and minstrelsy and historicize their surrounding discourses, centering the contributions of feminist, queer, and critical race studies. Looking at a range of (predominantly U.S.-based) practices from the mid-19th century to the present, we will consider how artifice and theatricality have been historically reviled as qualities inherent to femininity and queerness, respectively; how "authenticity" is both gendered and racialized; and how hiding, fabulation, exaggeration, and duplicity have also offered means of freedom or resistance.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: THEA306
Prereq: None
FGSS306 Black Feminist and Trans Theories of the Hu/Man
This seminar provides an introduction to Black feminist and trans theories' interventions into the modern Western category of the human and its violent exclusions. Since their inception, Black feminist and trans theories have brought attention to the violence of what Sylvia Wynter has called our "genres of the human," and in so doing, have laid bare the very preoccupations of power that condemn the non-white, non-cisgender being to sub-Human status and death in the material and discursive economies of racial capitalism. Students will develop broad knowledge of Black feminist and trans theories' provocations regarding the intersecting identity categories that organize our world, and will be encouraged to develop their own critical approaches that are attentive to the hegemony of racialized gender and its attendant violences.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: AFAM304
Prereq: None
FGSS307 Mobilizing Dance: Cinema, the Body, and Culture in South Asia
This course focuses on questions of "mobility"--cultural, social, and political--as embodied in two major cultural forms of South Asia, namely "classical" dance and cinema. Using Tamil cinema and Bharatanatyam dance as case studies, the course focuses on issues of colonialism and history, class, sexuality and morality, and globalization. The course places the notion of "flows of culture" at its center and examines historical, social, and aesthetic shifts in these art forms over the past 150 years.
The course is both studio- and lecture-based. It includes learning rudimentary Bharatanatyam technique, watching and analyzing film dance sequences, and participating in guest master classes in ancillary forms such as Bollywood dance and Kathak (North Indian classical dance). The studio portion of this course is for beginners, and no previous dance experience is necessary.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-DANC
Identical With: DANC307, ANTH306, GSAS307
Prereq: None
FGSS309 Christianity and Sexuality
This course will explore a range of Christian teachings on, attitudes toward, and technologies of sex and sexuality. We will read medieval and modern theologies of sexuality, as well as contemporary historical, sociological, and cultural studies. Points of focus will include confession, mysticism, marriage, celibacy, queer and trans practices and identities, and reproductive justice.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RELI
Identical With: RELI379, MDST379
Prereq: None
FGSS310 The Senses and the Subject in Cinema and Poetry
In this course, we will study a mixture of emotionally stimulating and structurally difficult contemporary cinema and lyric poetry, as well as select philosophical and theoretical approaches to the senses and the subject. Do theories and notions of the senses assume the subject, and/or subjectivity? If so, then how? What is the relationship between embodiment, the senses, the world, racialization, blackness, and being? How do select Western theoretical, aesthetic, and poetic frameworks represent and think as such? While cinema and lyric poetry might seem like strange neighbors, this course specifically foregrounds them as "repositor[ies] of synesthesia," where not only the reconstitution of the subject after some disturbance (i.e., sensorial, physiological, social, historical, etc.) will be relevant to how we read, but also when that either does not happen or constitutively cannot happen. (Note that some short fiction may also be part of the course readings.)
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL320, AMST304
Prereq: None
FGSS311 Abolitionist University Studies
This course explores historical materialist theorizations of the practices and future possibilities of the U.S. university as a tool of social reproduction and space of potentially revolutionary thought. In so doing, the readings, assignments, and discussion will be inspired by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's provocation to reinterpret abolitionism as "not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society." Students will consider how conventional renderings of the university in higher education studies, critical university studies, and the popular cultural imaginary are predicated upon an often romanticized and fundamentally limited geographic and historical understanding of the work of colleges and universities. In response, the course cultivates a more capacious conceptualization of the historical and contemporary function of the university as a social form. In taking up abolitionism as both a method and critical analytic, the course will challenge students to imagine the revolutionary possibilities of an abolition university that aligns itself with movements beyond the institution, while reflecting on the particular importance and challenge of enacting such a vision in our current political moment.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CHUM
Identical With: SOC399M, EDST399
Prereq: None
FGSS312 Women's Political and Sexual Revolutions--Middle East and South Asia
This course examines the role of politically organized women's movements, individual pioneers, hashtag and virtual campaigns, and the activism of grassroots and working-class movements in 20th-century Middle Eastern and South Asian contexts, with a focus on their political and sexual struggles, demands, and achievements.
The course is divided into two parts; it introduces a brief history of the nature and dynamics of women's movements in the MENA and SA regions. The second half of the course focuses on feminist documentation and debates around Muslim women's piety, sexuality, and political representation in a broader interdisciplinary frame. The course will examine how religious sensibility intersects with sexual orientation, gender identity, violence, sex work, the military, and even fashion. It will study these intersections as reflected in Muslim women's writings, desires, activism, and demands for sexual freedoms or against sex crimes, in different countries and under different legal regimes and geographies.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS313 The Black Charismatic
In this course we will explore the interplay between black politics and popular culture in the post-civil rights era. More specifically, we will examine the aesthetics of affective (commonly called "charismatic") black political leadership by attending to Tavis Smiley's yearly "State of the Black Union" address, 2000-2010. We will rely almost entirely on film, video, and digital archives in order to trace the eleven-year-long evolution of Smiley's annual event, while focusing our hermeneutic attention on the racialized and gendered performances of Louis Farrakhan, Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, and others. Through close readings of their televised performances, then, this course will require students to think and write about the practice and rhetoric of the black charismatic. How might the black charismatic threaten to undermine the political opportunities afforded by the success of the modern civil rights movement? How did Smiley's yearly event create the illusion of a black public sphere? What are the unintended consequences of substituting affect for political action? Similarly, what are the potential perils of a politics that results in ephemeral catharsis without dangerous political consequences? While participating in the general discussion across the semester, students will be searching out specific research topics of their own, topics relating the seminar conversation to original research questions about: the new liberalism of black politics; the crisis of the black public intellectual; the importance of technology (particularly the ways in which new media have changed, even upended the political habitus itself); and the relationship between gender (particularly black masculinity), charismatic leadership, and respectability politics. Authors will include (in no particular order): Adolph Reed, Richard Iton, Hazel Carby, Hortense Spillers, Houston Baker, Erica Edwards, Melissa Harris-Perry, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: AFAM314, RELI323
Prereq: None
FGSS314 All the Feels: Affect Theory and Cultural Studies
Butterflies in your chest. Perspiration on your upper lip. A racing heart. Every day we witness and manage sensorial experiences; quite often these negotiations illuminate the ways in which powerful norms and institutions shape our daily lives. This course explores the relationship between the seemingly individualized experience of feeling and the social world of power by introducing students to the vibrant field of affect studies. A recent "turn" in critical theory, affect theory is interested in embodiment, the senses, and sensorial experience, questioning the dominance of rationality and cognition by exploring the role emotions and feelings play in our social worlds. This course will focus predominantly on affect theory as it emerged from queer, feminist, and racialized minoritarian discourses in order to ultimately contemplate the ways theories of affect, feeling, sensation, embodiment, and emotion open up literary and cultural texts.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT302, ENGL308
Prereq: None
FGSS315 Entertaining Social Change
"Our problem," Tom Frank writes, "is that we have a fixed idea of what power is, of how power works, and of how power is to be resisted." This is especially true of "entertainment." Power that may not seem like power--only, say, like "fun" or "amusement"--can be especially powerful. A thread that connects all of our texts will be: how has the systemic critique of social contradictions been popularized as compelling and fascinating in modern times? A related concern: what are the seductions and violence built into "enjoyment"--"enjoyment" that reproduces "Americans"? We will "entertain" the diverse strategies that progressive moviemakers have developed to entertain Americans--to teach, persuade, seduce, provoke, upset, anger, and move them through laughter, tears, and not least of all ideas--so that Americans will be more inclined to "entertain" social critique that inspires and envisions social change.
Our critical focus will be on the popularizing (and sometimes the selling) of social critique in movies including Straight Outta Compton, Malcolm X, Medium Cool, Network, El Norte, Smoke Signals, Before the Flood, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Salt of the Earth, Matewan, and The Big Short. We will place special emphasis on self-reflexive movies about "entertainment" and about labor/social movement organizing. Entertainment, we will see, plays a key role in organizing and reorganizing Americans. In doing so, it can place limits on our vision of what--and who--needs to be changed. By putting our movies in conceptual dialogue and making these limits more visible, we will help one another think, see, and feel beyond these limits. As we are "entertained" (and we will be) we will consider the stakes of being "entertained."
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST315, ENGL309
Prereq: None
FGSS316 Decoloniality, Feminism, and Human Rights
Is decolonialism only about flag-burning, taking a knee, and bringing down statues of colonial figures? The course will study anticolonial critiques and theories about historic and current settler colonialism and connect these with the prevailing racial, gendered, and economic imperial order. Key classic texts will be studied about how former imperial powers continue to neocolonize the world through tax havens, as well as by leveraging the concept of human rights and often at the expense of gender rights. Specific case studies will be examined to illustrate the range of activism and global creative protests that widen the paths to a decolonized feminist future.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS317 Sexuality, Gender, and Science
This course will consider how the concepts of gender and sexuality have been treated in scientific fields, focusing primarily on the 19th and 20th centuries. We will examine the history of ideas about gender and sexuality as reflected in the development of sexology, theories of homosexuality, psychology, and endocrinology. We will also discuss contraceptive and reproductive technologies, the inclusion of women in clinical trials, women in scientific professions, and recent studies that use algorithmic predictions of sex or sexual orientation. Readings may include selections from Sigmund Freud, Siobhan Somerville, Emily Martin, Sarah Igo, Laura Briggs, Ronald Bayer, Sandra Morgen, David Serlin, Allan Bérubé, Dorothy Roberts, Johanna Schoen, Jennifer Terry, Carolyn Herbst Lewis, Steven Epstein, Riley Snorton, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Mar Hicks, and Safiya Noble.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: SISP317
Prereq: None
FGSS320 Staging Race in Early Modern England
This course analyzes the dramatic representation of race in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We will examine the historical emergence of race as a cultural construct in relation to related conceptions of complexion, the humoral body, gender, sexuality, and religious, ethnic, and national identity. Readings focus on three racialized groups: Moors, Jews, and Native American "Indians." After reading the play-texts in relation to the historical moment in which they were first produced (using both primary and secondary sources) we will then consider their post-Renaissance performance histories, including literary, theatrical, and film adaptations.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL280, CHUM289, THEA290
Prereq: None
FGSS321 BioFeminisms: Science, Matter, and Agency
This course rethinks feminism's relationship to nature, the body, and biological matter in light of new considerations of ontology in science studies, cultural studies, and feminist thought. We will read contemporary treatments of science, of Darwin and evolutionary theory, of neurobiology and epigenetics, and other fields and disciplines that consider biological matter, and think about them in feminist and queer frameworks. Readings will include "new materialists" alongside other works on the "new biology" and the "new sciences," and we will also revisit some second- and third-wave feminism. The course raises issues that challenge traditional boundaries of the body and self, conventional ideas of agency, and dualisms of mind/body. Readings include works by Donna Haraway, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Elizabeth Grosz, Karen Barad, Vicki Kirby, and Elizabeth Wilson, among others.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: STS321
Prereq: None
FGSS322 Decolonizing Gender and Sexuality
This course seeks to examine ways in which the history and ongoing presence of coloniality (including the deeply embedded forms of racial domination which coloniality generates) have shaped and been shaped by structures of gender and sexuality. The class will examine ways in which gender and sexuality have been mobilized historically and are mobilized today in ways that support imperial projects, even when presenting themselves in the guise of "protecting human rights," humanitarianism, or feminist/LGBT projects. In addition to linking together what Chandra Mohanty has described as the "One Third" and "Two Thirds" worlds, this discussion-based seminar seeks to reconnect the disparately gendered intimate and global spheres, situating the feminized "private" domains of love, sex, and caring within and around fields of action such as geopolitics and global political economy. Decolonial thinkers challenging Eurocentric framings will receive particular attention within the course.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS323 Staging Blackness: African American Theater
This course surveys the dynamism and scope of African American dramatic and performance traditions. We begin with a deep historical examination of 19th century blackface minstrelsy that then progresses into a long-view of how black American dramatists and theater-makers have self-fashioned black dramatic narratives, black aesthetics, and black representations into the twenty-first century. In all cases, we are interested in surveying the ways in which these artists work within varying modes of dramatic expression and focus their plays and performances on such topics as class, ethnicity, era, fragmentation, gender, history, region, revolution, nationality, race, sexuality, and spectatorship.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL385, THEA323, AFAM323
Prereq: None
FGSS324 Interpreting the "New World": France and the Early Modern Americas
The impact and long-lasting effects of the "discovery" of the "New World" on Europeans cannot be overestimated. This advanced seminar will compare and contrast styles of expedition and conquest among the European nations, though the course will focus on the French context and the various events and encounters that occurred in the early modern Americas, particularly between 1492 and 1610, a period that laid the groundwork for the subsequent colonial project. Throughout the course, we will pay special attention to the Amerindians' points of view. In turn, students will examine the insights and blind spots in 16th-century French navigators', cosmographers', cartographers', and intellectuals' interpretations, representations, and negotiations of difference by critically engaging with concepts such as nature, culture, alterity, gender, sexuality, marriage, religion, exchange, possession, conquest, and war. Reading, writing, and class discussions will be in French.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: FREN324, COL324
Prereq: None
FGSS326 Using Drugs: Race, Drugs, and the Colonial Present
This course addresses a variety of issues ranging from the social variation in and construction of drug experiences; the nature of scientific knowledge regarding drug use and the brain; the global trade in drugs and its relationship to histories of colonialism and contemporary forms of Western hegemony; notions of health, harm, and rehabilitation; and the various strategies that contemporary states rely upon in addressing issues pertaining to drug use (particularly criminal justice measures and interventions focused on harm reduction). The course places particular emphasis on the ways drug use is framed in relation to questions of freedom, justice, and the self, ultimately forming a part of a disciplinary apparatus that impacts everyone, whether we directly use drugs or not. Ultimately, drug use is often framed as an issue of "lost productivity" and/or "lost reproductivity," with "rehabilitation" framed as a way of restoring productive activity and eugenic reproduction.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM329, AMST328
Prereq: None
FGSS327 Litanies for Survival, Plots for Revolution
This seminar centers black-feminist and queer-of-color theory, literature, and art from the 1970s to the present in order to interrogate and reimagine revolution and revolutionary praxes. We will examine the interrelatedness of art and activism, hope and despair, collaboration and erotics. Key questions include: How does "survival" put pressure on "revolution," and vice versa, particularly in light of contemporary and imminent catastrophes, local and planetary? How does a joint consideration of survival and revolution affect interpretations of the past, understandings of the present, and imaginings of the future? What political work might intellectual and creative labor perform? Is revolution an event, a practice, or both? A useful term or a ruse?
This seminar is offered in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities' Fall 2018-Spring 2019 theme, "Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures." Assigned readings will include the work of scholars participating in the Center's Monday night lecture series, and students will be required to attend several lectures over the course of the semester.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: AFAM326
Prereq: None
FGSS329 Waiting: Bodies, Time, Necropolitics
This interdisciplinary course draws from social theory, gender studies, medical anthropology, disability studies and science studies to address the social stratification of time in corporeal terms. Many theorists have described the 21st century as marked by acceleration; this course addresses its counterpoint: the slow, interminable wait, the being made-to-wait, and the socially structured scenes and experiences of waiting. How can we understanding waiting in the city emergency room for the mentally ill immigrant? What is it in the gender transition clinic? The polluted, toxic neighborhood? The refugee camp? We will begin by surveying multiple frameworks through which we can theorize time and its suspension. We will then focus on experiences of waiting in intersectional terms, that is, in relation to gender and sexuality, race, class, and dis/ability. We will explore how practices that produce life, health, and well-being (biopolitics) can also be necropolitical, when attention, care, or action is given to some, but prolonged or suspended for others. Readings will include works on necropolitical theory (Georigo Agamben, Achille Mbembe), medical and state subordination and abandonment (Javier Auyero, Joao Biehl), and queer and crip time (Lee Edleman, Elizabeth Freeman, Alison Kafer). We will explore a wide range of experiences of waiting, from those related to cancer diagnosis (Sarah Jain), gender assignment surgery (Alexandre Baril), to environmental toxicity (Michelle Murphy) and asylum seeking (Jennifer Bagelman).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FGSS
Identical With: STS329
Prereq: None
FGSS331 Queer and Trans Aesthetics
This seminar will consider contemporary trans and queer theory foregrounding race, class, disability, migration, diaspora, indigeneity, and colonization alongside the work of BIPOC queer and trans artists in particular. The course's animating (and unfixable!) questions include: How do artists produce and intervene in understandings of gender and/or sexuality through their work? What does it mean for an artist or viewer to describe an image, object, or performance as "queer" or "trans"? What constitutes a "queer" or "trans" reading of visual culture? How might various formulations of "queer" and "trans" relate to, put pressure on, and/or resist "aesthetics"? What is the relationship between an artist's self-identification and/or their resistance to categorization (e.g., in terms of race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, nationality) on the one hand, and audiences' efforts to engage and interpret their art on the other? Put another way: What, if anything, does an artist's "identity" (asserted and/or imposed) have to do with their art? And what does a viewer's "identity" (asserted and/or imposed) have to do with how they approach and interpret visual culture? Several artist talks and/or class visits (all virtual) are being organized in conjunction with the seminar.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: THEA311, SOC300, AFAM331, AMST326
Prereq: None
FGSS333 About Clothes: Styles, Histories, Activisms, Poetics
What kinds of work go into the making and wearing of clothes, and what kinds of work do clothes do? This course is a chance to think together about how a range scholars, journalists, curators, and others have written about, handled, studied, preserved, and displayed clothing. At the same time, we will pay close attention to what it means for you to live in relation with your clothes. In conversation with works of literature, historical and curatorial scholarship, visual art, reporting, activism, and more, we will investigate clothes as objects of imagination and resistance, as well as elements of material culture. As we think about the global circuits that have informed various fashion systems, we will consider how particular textiles and textures, cuts of cloth, and racialized, gendered, and sexualized ideas of style emerged in conjunction with particular forms of labor -- and will also note how sustained attention to this multi-billion-dollar business has been devalued historically. Over the semester, you will conduct your own writing experiments at the intersections of language, image, identities, and the materiality-ephemerality of clothing.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENGL332
Prereq: None
FGSS334 Gender and Sexuality in Japanese History Across the Premodern/Modern Divide
This seminar explores both changes and continuities in Japanese conceptualizations of gender and sexuality between premodern and modern times. Structured around the notion that modernization produced a paradigmatic shift in Japanese life and thought, the course will examine gender and sexuality as both discourse and practice, considering how Japanese people described, experienced, and shaped gender roles and sexual life in their daily existences. We will investigate the dominant gender system and understandings of gender and sexuality operating in Japan before and during the Edo period (1600-1868), then consider the influence of Western views and concepts like the male/female and heterosexual/homosexual binaries on Japanese society and culture from the Meiji period (1868-1912) through postwar times. Other topics include gendered differences in education, gender performance in kabuki, female and male prostitution, the "gender crisis" of the Japanese modern girl, the salaryman and professional housewife archetypes, and postwar gay masculinities.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST327, CEAS326
Prereq: None
FGSS335 The Work of Art Against Work: Art, Labor, Politics
Understandings of late 19th- and early 20th-century avant-gardes are tied inextricably to leftist theory, particularly that of the Frankfurt School. This advanced seminar will consider the legacies of that entwinement, while focusing more specifically on its transformations from the late 20th century to the present: We will examine how artists have engaged the "work" of art in relation to the rise of post-Fordism, a globalized economy, and new theories of work and anti-capitalism. We will pay special attention to gendered notions of work and the division of labor (including "craft," affective labor, domestic work, care work, sex work, and more), to debt and racial capitalism, and to the rise of speculative finance and its links to the art market and the patron class.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM325
Prereq: None
FGSS341 Contemporary Trans Literatures
This course will explore the creative and critical output of trans and gender non-conforming writers, paying special attention to poetry, narrative fiction, and memoir. What literary traditions do trans and gender non-conforming writers draw from to establish our own inhabitations of style and form? How do trans and gender non-conforming writers attend to the erotic dimensions of writing? How do trans literatures address the relation between race, gender and sexuality? What can transness illuminate about the relation between literature and the law? What are the ethical stakes of trans literature? In addition to a deep engagement with the racial politics of transness in the United States, we will make an equal effort to consider perspectives from the global south in our pursuit of answers to these questions.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS342 Queer Robotics: Cyborgs in Science Fiction & Anthropology
What do representations of robots and cyborgs in popular film, sci-fi literature, and cultural anthropology tell us about gender, sexuality, race, and what it means to be "human"? In this class we will use critical race studies, queer and feminist theory, disability studies, and science and technology studies (STS) to analyze representations of "cyborg" bodies in speculative fiction and ethnography. Our case examples explore the politics of the body through narratives of military research, artificial intelligence, sex work, urbanism and segregation, biotech research, prosthetics and athleticism, new reproductive technologies, and more. We will engage with poetry, film, visual art, and speculative fiction to explore how bodies are dreamed, crafted, and represented.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: STS342
Prereq: None
FGSS343 Imitations of Life: Experimental Bodies at the Interface of Science and Culture
This seminar will examine scientific and cultural practices of corporeal simulation, or, practices of bodily substitution, imitation, and re/modeling. Topics examined will include: reproductive surrogacy; gender reassignment surgeries; experimental subject protocols; prosthetic enhancements; xenotransplantation; biometrics and alternative forms of bodily imaging; the use of nonhuman animals as human proxies; the rise of personalized medicine, and more. Students will engage with a wide range of case studies and theoretical materials from interdisciplinary perspectives. Special attention will be paid to the relationship between scientific discourses of "universality" and "particularity," where socio-cultural forms of difference (e.g., race, gender, disability, etc.) are at once ignored and exacerbated. While most of the material addressed in the class will relate to recent phenomena, we will also be attentive to relevant histories of corporeal differentiation and reimaging.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM, SBS-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM343, STS343
Prereq: None
FGSS345 Women's Lib, Women's Lit
The social movement known as second-wave feminism, but often referred to at the time as "Women's Lib," took center stage in much of the best-selling fiction of the 1970s. This course will look at popular fiction that concerned itself with women's issues and the way it popularized, memorialized, complicated, and contested feminism in the popular imagination. We will look at a range of novels that focused attention on the nature of and possible solutions to women's political, material, and sexual subjection by men. Although our focus will be on the 1970s, we will look at both some important pretexts, and some later responses to the ongoing crises of gendered inequality in the 1980s. We will pay particular attention the gendering of publishing and reception, exploring the contexts in which these books were produced, marketed, reviewed, and read.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL344
Prereq: None
FGSS346 Entangled Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments of Central Asia
Musical instruments exist at the intersection of material, cultural, and social worlds. Entangled in webs of human and non-human relationships, they are at once tangible and symbolic sounding objects that hold significant meanings for the communities they serve. This course will explore the social roles and cultural meanings of musical instruments in Central Asia, a region once traversed by the Silk Road, which extends from the borderlands of China in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west, and from Russia in the north to the frontiers of Afghanistan in the south.
Drawing on theories and ideas derived from interdisciplinary studies of material and sound culture, the course will examine how instrument making and performance are shaped by and entangled with social systems of value and cosmology, political ideology, ecology, and economy. Class meetings will focus on case studies of bowed and plucked lutes, zithers, mouth harps, end-blown flutes, and frame drums among historically nomadic and sedentary peoples of Central Asia. Through these case studies, students will learn about the origins and historical trajectories of individual musical instruments from the pre-modern period to the Soviet and post-Soviet eras; consider the social and political connotations of various performance configurations and repertoires; discuss the status of instruments in Islam and indigenous spiritual belief-systems, and the roles of musical instruments as symbols of national identity, objects of cultural heritage, and global commodities.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM304, ANTH304, REES204
Prereq: None
FGSS347 Melodrama and the Woman's Picture
Within film history and criticism, the usage of the term "melodrama" has changed over time, as has the presumed audience for the genre. This course will investigate the various ways in which melodrama and the woman's picture have been understood in the United States and around the world, beginning in the silent period; ranging through the 1930s, '40s, and '50s; and culminating in contemporary cinema. We will pay particular attention to issues of narrative construction and visual style as they illuminate or complicate various analytical approaches to melodrama and speak to gender, sexuality, race, and class. Screenings include films directed by D. W. Griffith, Evgenii Bauer, Oscar Micheaux, John Stahl, Frank Borzage, Naruse Mikio, King Vidor, Wu Yonggong, Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli, Max Ophuls, Mizoguchi Kenji, Kim Ki-young, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar, Ann Hui, Lars von Trier, Farah Khan, and Luca Guadagnino, among others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FILM
Identical With: FILM347
Prereq: FILM304 OR FILM307
FGSS350 Historicizing Early Modern Sexualities
This course will examine recent historical and theoretical approaches to the history of sexuality in early modern English literature (ca. 1580-1680). Our focus will be the historical construction of sexuality in relation to categories of gender, race, religion, and social status in a variety of sources, both literary and nonliterary, verbal and visual, including poetry, plays, masques, medical treatises, travel narratives, and visual media. Topics covered include intersecting constructions of the sexed/gendered/racialized body; diverse sexual practices; sexual identities prior to the homo/hetero divide; and the histories of pornography and masturbation.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL349, CHUM345
Prereq: ENGL201
FGSS351 Queer of Color Critique
This course will examine and interrogate the field of queer studies with particular focus on the ways in which queer scholarship and queer political movements function alongside critical race theory, ethnic studies, and sociopolitical antiracist efforts. Students will be asked to consider the history of queer studies and queer politics, the contemporary state of queer movements, and future visions of queer life. We will take an interdisciplinary approach, and we will rely upon a diverse range of theoretical, historical, and cultural studies texts. We will explore the normative parameters of both sexual and racial identities, probing the terms of identification to consider their meaning in the contemporary moment and in relationship to various cultural, social, legal, and political milieus. Throughout the course we will consider, What does it mean to study queerness and to study race? How do institutions--religious, legal, and scientific--shape our understandings of both queer and racial identities? In what ways do sexuality and race interact, and how does this interaction inform the meanings of each of these identity categories? Furthermore, how have queer movement and scholarship both supported antiracist efforts and, also, how have they been complicit in cultural and institutional forms of racial oppression? How do other social categories of identification such as gender, ethnicity, and class, shape the ways in which we understand expressions of race and queerness?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST351, AFAM351
Prereq: None
FGSS352 Black Thought and Critical Theory
This course follows Stuart Hall's insistence in "What is this 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" that the theoretical articulations of "blackness" are always "conjunctural." We will investigate how black thought has been conjoined with critical theory through phenomenology, pragmatism, Marxism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. In our readings of a variety of 20th- and 21st-century thinkers, we will elaborate the philosophical richness and contradictory tensions embedded in the notion of "blackness" at specific historical and theoretical conjunctions. How is "blackness" useful for social theory? Must we assume there is a transhistorical identity to "blackness"? In what ways does "blackness" conjoin with the conceptualizations of gender, sexuality, class, and religion? Black thought and critical theory is the provocation that we attend to the tensions these questions raise. In this course, we will read the works of James H. Cone, Cornel West, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Frank Wilderson, Calvin Warren, Tommy J. Curry, Stuart Hall, and Frantz Fanon.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL352, AFAM352
Prereq: None
FGSS353 Destroying the Audience: Limits of Performance and Representation in the Theater of (Non) Being
Young Jean Lee's Theatre Company, active between 2003 and 2016, is most known for a series of "racial-identity plays," written and directed by Lee, which adopt an experimental approach to the critique of racial politics, driven by the motto "destroy the audience." On the one hand, this course will explore literary and artistic works that express an ambivalent, if not antagonistic, relationship to the presence of an audience. On the other hand, this course will consider the role and function of the audience as a social category by considering how the concept of audience (broadly understood) contributes to cultural production about race and gender as a potentially active element in the creative process. Students can expect to read and/or view drama, visual art, performance, film, and self-writing (autobiography and memoir) which, explicitly or implicitly, address the presence of the audience as a way of tackling larger social and cultural problems related to race and ethnicity. The goal will be to foster an understanding of the politics of gender, sexuality, ability, language, and class that determine how these issues are conceptualized and articulated. This course will employ an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of primary and secondary texts, engaging audience studies, performance studies, ethnic studies, and disability studies, in addition to queer/trans of color, postcolonial, and legal theory, to historically contextualize and theoretically ground a cultural understanding of the relation between audience and racial performance.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: THEA353, AMST354, ENGL364
Prereq: None
FGSS354 Social Science, Black Life: Wells-Barnett, Du Bois, and Hurston's Empirical Experiments
This class has two interrelated areas of focus: first, the racist habits of imag(in)ing blackness's presumed racial-sexual difference that preoccupied social science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and second, the formative role that social scientific research and methods played in black people's quests for institutional inclusion during this same period. In their early years, canonical sociology and anthropology consistently proved unable to capture the beauty and complexity in black life, instead lending empirical authority to cultural ways of seeing blackness as inherently pathological. A counter-discourse of black expression took shape, attempting to overcome the negative impact that dominant empirical thought might have on black peoples' struggle for normative citizenship. Focusing particularly on the careers of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston, we will explore the contradictory relationship that subsequently emerged between blackness and institutional power--discernible in empiricism's primacy during the long era of postbellum black inclusion. Rather than seeking evidence of black intellectuals' departure from empiricism and its attendant violences, we will explore the messiness of their efforts to experiment with and imagine beyond their misrepresentation and erasure in dominant empirical discourses. Indeed, black artists and intellectuals sometimes recapitulated the violence of empiricist paradigms and their enabling truth claims despite their sound political intentions. In considering the nexus of social science and black life in this period, then, we will also consider the intramural politics of racialized gender, the myriad costs of institutional incorporation, and the stubborn durability of epistemological authority. Secondary texts include works by Hazel Carby, Roderick Ferguson, Kevin Gaines, Julian Go, Avery Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Reiland Rabaka, Michel-Rolph Truillot, Autumn Womack, Alexander Weheliye, Sylvia Wynter, and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: SOC318, AFAM354
Prereq: None
FGSS355 Social Movements Lab
What can we learn from social justice activists about the economic, political, and environmental struggles facing us today, including mass incarceration, immigration, economic precarity, and the violence of the state? Where are the critical sites of queer, trans, left, feminist, black, indigenous, disability, and environmental struggle? How do these movements converge, and where do they diverge? This participatory, interdisciplinary research seminar enables you to embark on an independent, semester-long research project on the social movement or activism of your choice. We'll start with some foundational reading on multidisciplinary social movement research; archival, ethnographic, and participatory methodologies; and histories of social justice struggles in the U.S. The remainder and majority of the seminar is laboratory style, taking shape around your particular projects. Each week, we will collaboratively analyze one or two projects, mapping out and comparing methods, goals, visions, struggles, and contexts of the movements under study. Our goal is to understand a range of social justice activisms in their economic, political, and historical context, with an eye toward integrating activist scholarship and social change. The activism you research can be contemporary or historical; local, national, or global; and can take any shape: direct action, community organizing, activist philanthropy, art as activism, etc. You do not need previous experience or activist contacts for this course--just passion and the desire to learn collaboratively!
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM355, ANTH355
Prereq: None
FGSS357 Sex and Gender: From Synapse to Society
From movies like Think Like a Man to songs like "God Made Girls," from federal policies to gender reveal parties, much of our experience is defined by an ideology of gender dichotomy and an endorsement of fundamental sex differences in behavior. But does science agree? The field of neuroscience is bursting with research that both supports and questions inherent differences in the brains and behavior of men and women. In this course we will be taking an open and critical look at this scientific literature. We will begin by clarifying what it means, biologically, to be male/female, determine the limits to these definitions, and evaluate how these biological elements (genes/hormones/anatomy) interact with our environment and society to influence our behavior and gender identity. Additionally, we will evaluate nonhuman animal and human data regarding sex differences in behaviors (e.g., aggression, verbal communication) and neuropathological states (e.g., addiction, autism spectrum disorder). Student evaluation will include effortful participation, biweekly concept checkpoints, a final paper/presentation, and weekly editorials.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: BIOL357, NS&B357
Prereq: BIOL182 AND NS&B213
FGSS360 Special Topics: Writing Lives
In this course, students will read profiles, biographies, and theories of biography, texts that focus on the stakes of writing the lives of women, people of color, people with disabilities, and queer subjects. As we analyze these attempts to capture a life, to define the problems of this form, and to expand its possibilities, students will work on their own biographical writing. Throughout the semester, we will ask: Whose lives get written, and by whom? What constitutes evidence of a life, according to whom--and what gets left out? What kinds of research are necessary? How does a writer's relationship to her subject inform such a portrait, and what are the ethics of that relationship?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL360
Prereq: None
FGSS361 Queer & Trans Erotic Archives
Is it possible to capture and archive ephemeral, flickering pleasures? This course addresses this question by problematizing the relationship between embodied pleasures and affective memories on the one hand and historical analyses on the other. Based on Derrida's critique of archives' selective preservation mechanisms and reification of normative narratives, queer studies scholars have tried to create their own "counter-archives," often by means of an alternative reading of conventional archives. First, participants will discuss the ethics of reenactments and appropriations of archived desires, analyzing specific case studies that will be an entry point into broader issues related to the scholar's involvement in the voyeurism of the archive. Second, participants will discuss how a focus on queer cultures leads to a rethinking of what constitutes archival material, expanding this definition to include erotica and porn, feelings, ephemera, performances, and mass media. Course readings will also reveal the artificiality of the established boundaries between high and low culture, between authoritative knowledge and experiments with bodily pleasures. The course interrogates pornography's potential as a historical source that reveals non-normative fantasies. Participants will discuss the relationship between sexual fantasy and social reality, between representations of idealized boundless pleasure, and historical contexts of stigmatization, pathologization, and institutional violence. This will lead to debates on archival sexual activism and minoritized bodies in the archive, in order to fully grasp the contraposition between over-determination and queer utopianism.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Prereq: None
FGSS362 Visualizing Black Remains
This advanced seminar engages African Diaspora critical thought and aesthetic production (visual art, performance, film, literature) that grapple with the appetite, effects, and stakes of representing Black remains. What does this visual reproduction make possible or obscure, and what is its relationship to violence? The class will also encourage students to think about the ethics of reparation/repatriation in relation to forms of loss and dispossession that can neither be repaired/repatriated nor visually evidenced (in conventional ways). In those instances, how do contemporary critical thinkers and/as contemporary artists help us rethink loss, mourning, objecthood, violence, empathy, and reparation?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: AFAM363, ANTH362, ENGL363, THEA362
Prereq: None
FGSS363 Body Politics: Desire, Sexualities, and Gender, Past and Present
Sexuality as a category to define, construct, and control the "self" has been seen as a product of the 18th and 19th century. This course turns to ancient Greek society to look at body politics before sexuality and to examine the different ways in which sex and gender are experienced and constructed.
We will approach sex and gender roles as organizing principles of private and public life. Using literary, scientific, historical, legal, and philosophical sources as well as material evidence, we will address issues including the creation of woman, conceptions of the male and female body, the legal status of men and women; what constitutes acceptable sexual practices and for whom (e.g., heterosexual relationships, homoeroticism, prostitution, adultery); and ideas regarding desire, self-control, masculinity and femininity, and their cultivation in social and political contexts. How ancient approaches to gender and sexuality are in dialogue or have informed recent debates will be a question throughout the course by looking at theoretical approaches and contemporary movements and debates. We will end by looking at how ideas about sexuality in classical antiquity were used in Romer v. Evans, otherwise known as the 1993 Colorado Gay Rights Case.
For CLST Major requirements, this course counts toward the concentrations of Literature and Performance and History, Politics, and Social Justice.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLST, SBS-CLST
Identical With: CLST363, COL364
Prereq: None
FGSS366 Queering the Dancing Body: Critical Perspectives on LGBTQ Representation
This course focuses on questions of "queering" dance as a historical, cultural, social, and political enterprise. Focusing on both historical and postmodern dance contexts, the course explores key issues around gender and identity, with special reference to the concepts of performativity, impersonation, sexuality, and transformation. The course places the notion of "flows of gender and transformation" at its center, and examines historical, social, and aesthetic shifts in these ideas over the past 50 years. It draws on case studies ranging from female/male dance traditions of impersonation in India, China, Japan, and Indonesia, to postmodern shifts of "classical" dance (such as the all-male cast of Matthew Bourne's "Swan Lake") and more popular forms such as voguing and "RuPaul's Drag Race."
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-DANC
Identical With: DANC366, GSAS366
Prereq: None
FGSS369 The Politics of Accessibility: Disability and Intersectional Feminism
This course will examine the social, historical, and political factors that have mediated the visibility of disabled people, as well as the legibility of disability as a marker of identity. As part of global discourses on human rights, disability activism has been a source of significant political change, intimately tied to struggles for the civil rights of racialized, gendered, and working class populations; at the same time, disability activists have pushed for a deeper critique of the assumptions and biases that condition and restrict access to political participation and social/cultural engagement. In order to unpack these connections, we will develop an interdisciplinary and intersectional academic practice, exploring a multitude of activist, artistic, and critical interventions in popular media, social media, documentary film, creative writing, and academic scholarship that have attempted to shift and transform cultural understandings of disability.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS371 Sister Acts: Black Feminist/Womanist Theater of the African Diaspora
This course surveys the dynamism and scope of contemporary feminist/womanist drama written by black women playwrights of the African Diaspora. Reading select plays from Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, England, and the United States, alongside theory and criticism, we examine the impact of race, gender, identity, and sexuality politics on black feminist/womanist theater. Throughout our study of these dramatic texts, their performances, and their subsequent critiques, we are equally invested in the bridges and the gaps, the audibles and the silences, and the overlaps and the divides, as they are formed. Significantly, this analytic undertaking involves a simultaneous critique of the role of the playwright, the spectator, and the critic of black feminist/womanist theater. At all times, consideration is given to the ways in which these playwrights collectively use theater as a platform to explore black and female and diasporic subjectivities across regional, national, and, at times, linguistic differences.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL371, THEA371, AFAM371
Prereq: None
FGSS374 Abolition and Social Praxis
This course will examine some of the analyses of society, social power, and societal reform advanced and practiced by diverse activists who organize their work around the theme of abolition. Inspired by activist efforts to eliminate prisons and policing, abolition is here understood as an attempt to link a worldview that advocates for the disassembly of existing, oppressive social structures combined with efforts to generate new, more liberatory forms of social relationship in the here and now. As a form of activism, abolition thus brings utopian dreams to bear upon concrete practice, seeking to generate new structures of agency and pointing toward ways in which liberal notions of consent occlude deep forms of structural power and implicit constraint. Students will be asked to take on an activist project as part of the course.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM374, SOC280
Prereq: None
FGSS379 Gendered Belonging and the Politics of Inclusion
If inclusion and belonging are tied to recognition, how do marginalized subjects establish their legibility and "right to appear"? This course addresses social exclusions around gender nonconformity and examines legal, activist, and artistic practices that contest them. Using several contemporary case studies, including fights over the sex segregation of bathrooms, controversies over the diagnosis and treatment of trans* youth, and the movements defending the lives of trans* women of color and advocating for trans* people in immigrant detention, the course will address how U.S.-based social contests over sex/gender are implicated in hierarchies of race, citizenship, and dis/ability, and situated in (neo)colonialism, racial capitalism, and geopolitics in complex ways.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS381 Afro-pessimism, Gender, and Performance
This class engages African and African diaspora critical thought and aesthetic production (dance, visual art, performance art, installation, film) to think about colonial dispossession, objectification, and reparation. We will address topics such as the repatriation of artifacts and other ephemera taken from Europe's colonies that are housed in the archives of European cultural institutions. The objects in question have been described as either artwork, artifacts, or anthropological fetish objects (depending on which field one engages with). How can we rethink our understanding of objecthood as irreducible to "inanimate" things but as also signaling a regime of imperial domination and enslavement that violently turned African personality into a status of objecthood? What does it mean to think about the object (broadly defined) in relation to loss and the (im)possibilities of repatriation and reparation? How does the Black performer's body's disappearance/remains endow the Western art institution? The course will encourage students to think about repatriation as well as certain losses that can neither be repaired/repatriated nor evidenced in conventional ways. In those instances, how do contemporary critical thinkers and/as contemporary artists help us rethink loss, mourning, as well as the promises and ends of reparation? The assigned readings offer ways to think about colonial archives not merely as neutral repositories of past events, but also as performances; as enactments of power, aesthetic value judgment, and hierarchical arrangements of knowledge production. The theoretical, art historical, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and creative reading materials engage contemporary scholars', artists', and activists' response to both the recorded and ephemeral archives of Black dispossession. Students are encouraged to engage in events and workshops outside of the classroom, such as visiting library archives, attending performances, gallery exhibits, and film screenings.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM371, AFAM370, THEA373
Prereq: None
FGSS382 Bordering Bodies: Diaspora, Transnational Feminism, and Sexuality
This interdisciplinary course explores the politics of migration, refuge, exile, border, diaspora, and home from transnational feminist, queer diasporic, and trans of color perspectives. Our main themes include citizenship, memory, intimacy, belonging, movement, land, nationhood, and statehood. We will explore how sexuality is integral to each of these as processes and structures of power.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 3.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS385 Race, Capital, and Sexual Consent
Race, Capital, and Sexual Consent will focus on the early 19th century through to the Progressive Era. It will explore racialized sexual markets, from what Black feminist historian Adrienne Davis has called "The Sexual Economy of American Slavery," to the Victorian-era marriage market, to continuing and emerging sex work and pleasure economies. This course will focus on areas of overlap, tension, and reinforcement within and between these racialized sexual markets. Fundamental to this class will be the question of if/how sexual consent is configured within these markets, and what this means in the broader evolution of American liberalism in the 19th- and early 20th-century U.S.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM385, AFAM385, HIST332
Prereq: None
FGSS386 Women and Politics
In this course we will study a variety of topics related to the theme of women and politics: women's political participation, the gender gap, women in political parties, female leadership, and women's issues. Because women's political engagement is affected by their position in society and in the economy, we will also study topics such as inequality, power, discrimination, and labor force participation. Although we will consider these issues in the U.S., our approach will be strongly cross-national.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GOVT
Identical With: GOVT385
Prereq: None
FGSS387 Feminist Dispute Resolution
Is feminist negotiation possible? What would egalitarian alternative dispute resolution (ADR) entail? In the first part of this course, we will study and practice traditional dispute resolution techniques. Each student will participate in two-person and multiparty mediations, arbitrations, and quasi-judicial presentations. In the second part of the course, we will study and practice feminist dispute resolution techniques, including "invitational rhetoric." Students will then draw upon the course readings and in-class negotiation exercises to answer questions such as: Should we match dispute resolution strategies to parties' personalities or desired outcomes? Whose conception of fairness and social good should guide our negotiation practices? Are dispute resolution techniques gendered? By the end of the course, students will be more confident negotiators. They will also be able to discuss, debate, and recommend strategies for resolving conflicts and contributing to social justice. Students will be assessed based upon: their preparation for negotiations; their participation in negotiations; their performance on a written mid-term examination; and their performance on a final oral examination addressing the question: "Is feminist negotiation possible?"
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS390 Politics and Society in Japanese Women's Writing
How have some of modern Japan's most celebrated and insightful authors responded to key events and social conditions in contemporary Japan? What sorts of perspectives have these authors brought to issues of industrial pollution, or to youth crime and social change under capitalism, or to ongoing crises in Okinawa and Fukushima? This course seeks to hear the voices of these authors--and the social actors with whom they engage--by grappling with key modern Japanese literary texts in English translation.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CEAS
Identical With: CEAS390, WLIT322
Prereq: None
FGSS393 The Politics of Authenticity
Is there such a thing as an authentic self? If so, can politics help us realize it? Fifty years ago, authenticity was a thriving political ideal, invoked by radical feminists, black liberation movements, gay and lesbian activists, Marxists and conservatives alike. Over the past four decades, however, political appeals to authenticity have come under heavy scrutiny. Some claim that appeals to authenticity inadvertently marginalized individuals who are not "true women," "real blacks," or "actual natives." Others argue that the idea of an authentic culture can be deployed to constrain individual members of cultural minorities. Where does authenticity reside--in gender, sexuality, experience, or culture--and how do we know which one is "real"? Is it worth faulting politicians for hypocrisy if there is no such thing as a "true self"? What becomes of certain emancipatory or justice claims--such as those coming from trans-politics or multiculturalism debates--without a notion of authenticity? In this course, we will discuss what authenticity is or might be, how it has been conceptualized in political theory and contemporary social movements, and why it has become an object of widespread suspicion and continuing appeal.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GOVT
Identical With: GOVT393
Prereq: None
FGSS395 Afterparty: End Times, Pleasure, and Clean Up
What do we do in end times, or "after the party" as Joshua Chambers Letson would have it? Already exhausted, with streamers and confetti scattered on the ground, what happens after the party is over? How do we pick up the pieces and move on? Can narratives of perpetual end times create new beginnings and new horizons? Beginning at the end, this course will engage conversations in science fiction, Black studies, art and performance, Indigenous studies, queer of color critique, and environmental justice to explore the work of endings and beginnings, of hope and hopelessness, of destruction and desire. We will pay particular attention to questions of futurity and pleasure as they are manifest in the aesthetic. Writers and artists to be discussed will include N.K. Jemisin, Sylvia Winter, Ursula Le Guin, Katherine McKittrick, Ohan Breiding, Franny Choi, Saeed Jones, Calvin Warren, Joshua Chambers Letson, Dana Luciano, David Wojnarowicz, adrienne maree brown, Autumn Brown, José Esteban Muñoz, Nick Estes, Dionne Brand, Samuel Delany, Tourmaline, Allison Akootchook Warden (AKU MATU), Jordan Peele, and M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi. Students will be invited to craft both creative and theoretical responses to class assignments.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: THEA393, AMST303
Prereq: None
FGSS397 Difficult Women: Post/Feminism in Television Comedies and Dramedies
Although postwar family sitcoms represented women as homemakers, one of the first and most popular sitcom wives also articulated discontent with domestic femininity. Lucy Ricardo became the prototype of the "unruly woman," a figure with feminist potential whose desires exceed and disrupt dominant gender norms. As those norms have shifted, so have TV's unruly women. Second-wave feminism, anticipated in I Love Lucy, was incorporated into a 1970s cycle of comedies centered on single working women whose career aspirations were rewarded. Over the following decades, a postfeminist sensibility dominated television comedies and dramas and became central to a gendered neoliberalism in which energetic individuals "empower" themselves. In recent years, a new type of female protagonist has emerged. Alongside the can-do optimism of single-women comedies from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Sex and the City to 30 Rock and Parks and Rec, a stream of comedies and dramedies, made largely by and for women, have depicted a variety of flawed, difficult, unruly women coming of age under conditions of socioeconomic precarity, whose less focused energies seem to articulate a more uncertain, downbeat, post-recessional mood. In this course we will situate the latter cycle in relation to both the longer history of televisual representations of women and to the current state of feminist politics. Among the shows we will look at are: I Love Lucy, Bewitched, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Sex and the City, Ally McBeal, Girlfriends, The Mindy Project, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, Girls, Insecure, Broad City, Better Things, Two Broke Girls, New Girl, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, Unreal, Abbott Elementary, Fleabag, Dear White People, and Somebody Somewhere.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM397, AMST391, ANTH397, FILM202
Prereq: None
FGSS401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate
Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
FGSS402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate
Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
FGSS405 Senior Seminar
This course is a required seminar for senior FGSS majors. Structured as a workshop, the goal of this course is to develop a collaborative intellectual environment for majors to work through the theoretical, methodological, and practical concerns connected with their individual projects. Seminar topics to be examined will be based on students' research projects, and participants are expected to engage critically, yet generously, with the projects of their peers. We begin by addressing feminist methodologies, including questions of praxis, representation, and theory. Participants are expected to lead discussions on readings relating to their own projects, submit written work on their senior research in stages (project proposal, annotated bibliography, drafts), and do class presentations.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Prereq: None
FGSS407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)
Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
FGSS408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)
Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
FGSS409 Senior Thesis Tutorial
Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
FGSS410 Senior Thesis Tutorial
Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
FGSS411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate
Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
FGSS412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate
Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
FGSS419 Student Forum
Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
FGSS420 Student Forum
Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
FGSS444 Race and Reproduction
This interdisciplinary course explores the intimacy of race and reproduction against the backdrop of capitalist modernity. We scrutinize the policies, priorities, and perversions of slave owners, the racially differentiated family planning programs under apartheid, the eugenicist movements and the criminalization of poverty in the United States to interrogate what is generated by the incapacitation of blackness across scales of time and space. We examine the Marxist feminist elaboration of the concept of social reproduction and then consider black feminist rejoinders that center the reproductive labor of black women -- as slaves, as domestic workers -- that implicate violence and ownership in the mediation of biological and social reproduction as a set of racializing practices in which value is generated, accumulated, and expropriated. Finally, the course considers the proliferation of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in the 20th century, the recourse to surrogacy, and family abolition to interrogate the extent to which the "race-reproduction bind" is disaggregated or reanimated in the present.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ANTH325, AFAM329
Prereq: None
FGSS466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate
Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
FGSS469 Education in the Field, Undergraduate
Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None
FGSS491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial
The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
FGSS492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial
The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT