GNDST-101 Introduction to Gender Studies
This course is designed to introduce students to social, cultural, historical, and political perspectives on gender and its construction. Through discussion and writing, we will explore the intersections among gender, race, class, and sexuality in multiple settings and contexts. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to a variety of questions, we will consider the distinctions between sex and gender, women's economic status, the making of masculinity, sexual violence, queer movements, racism, and the challenges of feminist activism across nations, and possibilities for change. We will also examine the development of feminist theory, including its promises and challenges.
GNDST-122 Who Makes Your Clothes? Gender and Labor in the Global Apparel Industry
The organization of production across national borders has transformed labor markets around the world, with profound effects on workers' lives. What role have social constructions of gender played in shaping employment outcomes in the global economy? What has been the impact of these employment dynamics on gender relations? What strategies are available to increase wages, promote equal opportunity, fight discrimination in the workplace, and secure greater control over working hours and conditions? This introductory course engages with these questions through an in-depth study of gender and labor in the global apparel industry.
GNDST-123 Gender and Empire
Gender politics have been instrumental to imperial conquest, invasion, occupation, and colonization for centuries, and this link persists today as neocolonial management strategies and philanthropic aid. Gender-focused cultural practices in regions coveted by imperial power are used as pretext for military, cultural, scientific, and economic interventions. Whether widow burning in South Asia, female genital cutting in East Africa, veiling in Afghanistan, homophobic violence in Arab nations, or sexual practices in Africa allegedly leading to the spread of AIDS, Global North leaders use ideological projections of gender and sexual norms and ideals to take control and subjugate.
GNDST-201 Methods and Practices in Feminist Scholarship
This is a class about doing research as a feminist. We will explore questions such as: What makes feminist research feminist? What makes it research? What are the proper objects of feminist research? Who can do feminist research? What can feminist research do? Are there feminist ways of doing research? Why and how do the stories we tell in our research matter? Some of the key issues and themes we will address include: accountability, location, citational practices and politics, identifying stakes and stakeholders, intersectionality, inter/disciplinarity, choosing and describing our topics and methods, and research as storytelling. The class will be writing intensive and will culminate in each student producing a research portfolio.
GNDST-204 Women and Gender in the Study of Culture
GNDST-204BX Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Introduction to Black Sexual Cultures/Sexuality Studies'
This course examines the ways in which race, gender, and class have shaped the experiences of people of African descent. It explores how the concept of sexuality offers a unique lens for rethinking both historical and contemporary discussions on the formation of Black identity and personhood, while being particularly attentive to a queer archive. By prioritizing Blackness, the course critically engages with the interconnections between race, gender, and sexuality, aiming to separate whiteness from LGBTQ+ studies and heterosexuality from Black studies. With a focus on how Black individuals have asserted social and sexual agency despite systemic oppression, we will draw on frameworks coming out of critical race theory, Black feminist thought, queer and trans*-of-color critique, as well as attend to genres of creation that include literature, art, performance, new media, and the erotic. By the end of this course, students will have gained a deeper appreciation for the complexity and diversity of Black sexuality, as well as the cultural and political implications that surround its productions. They will be equipped with the critical tools to engage in meaningful dialogues about representation, expression, and the power of pleasure within the context of Black life and sexual legacies.
GNDST-204CM Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Critical Relationality'
Grounded in queer, feminist, and decolonial concerns with social belonging, this class begins from the critical insight that "the family" is neither an inevitable nor ideal way to organize our social worlds. From histories of marriage to sciences of mating systems to politics of polyamory, we will explore monogamy's meanings and how its logics shape our worlds. Drawing on indigenous, multispecies, crip, and queer feminist insights, we will also explore relating and belonging beyond the settler family. Over the course of the semester students will become familiar with debates about human nature and belonging and a variety of critical and creative approaches to reading and engaging them.
GNDST-204CP Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Trap Doors and Glittering Closets: Queer/Trans* of Color Visual Cultures of Resistance'
In 2014, Time magazine declared the "Transgender Tipping Point" as a popular moment of transgender people's arrival into the mainstream. Using a queer and trans* of color critique, this course will unpack the political discourses and seeming binaries surrounding visibility/invisibility, recognition/misrecognition, legibility/illegibility, belonging/unbelonging and aesthetics/utility. How might we grapple with the contradictions of the trapdoors, pitfalls, dark corners and glittering closets that structure and normalize violence for some while safeguarding violence for others? This course will center the 2017 anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility.
GNDST-204CW Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Androgyny and Gender Negotiation in Contemporary Chinese Women's Theater'
Yue Opera, an all-female art that flourished in Shanghai in 1923, resulted from China's social changes and the women's movement. Combining traditional with modern forms and Chinese with Western cultures, Yue Opera today attracts loyal and enthusiastic audiences despite pop arts crazes. We will focus on how audiences, particularly women, are fascinated by gender renegotiations as well as by the all-female cast. The class will read and watch classics of this theater, including Romance of the Western Bower, Peony Pavilion, and Butterfly Lovers. Students will also learn the basics of traditional Chinese opera.
GNDST-204ET Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Rovers, Cuckqueens, and Country Wives of All Kinds: The Queer Eighteenth Century'
With the rise of the two-sex model, the eighteenth century might be seen to be a bastion of heteronormativity leading directly to Victorian cisgender binary roles of angel in the house and the bourgeois patriarch. Yet, beginning with the Restoration's reinvention of ribald theater, this period was host to a radical array of experimentation in gender and sexuality, alongside intense play with genre (e.g., the invention of the novel). We will explore queerness in all its forms alongside consideration of how to write queer literary histories.
GNDST-204FA Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Fascism, Gender and Sexuality: Far-Right Movements in 20th Century Europe'
This course explores the use of gender in historical and contemporary fascist movements, examining the ways in which fascist movements construct images of "masculine" and "feminine" to shape ideology. We will look at the rhetoric of gender equity to enforce regression and oppression systems, and how these rhetorics are used as tools to enforce xenophobic and racist narratives against immigrants to the US and Europe. This course will incorporate theoretical readings from political and social histories of 20th century Europe, gender and sexuality, as well as media sources like film, journalism and social media.
GNDST-204FT Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Feminist, Queer, Trans Disability Studies'
This course introduces Disability Studies concepts and discussion from a feminist, queer, and trans perspectives, specifically centering on Black, Indigenous, People of Color disabled people. Through this, we'll see the differences in disabled communities, the tensions within the field, and learn to center the most marginalized. Here, the focus is on scholarship, activism, and arts that center disabled people, their histories, struggles, and dreams. We'll also discuss the differences between the Disability Rights and Disability Justice movements and how they represent the demands and needs of disabled communities.
GNDST-204GQ Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Global Queer Narratives'
This course explores contemporary transnational representations of LGBTQ+ identities in literature, film, and digital media and cultures. We will examine the role of storytelling in not only reflecting queer lived experiences, but also the possibilities of narrative as a corrective, restorative project for imagining alternative worlds and futures. In considering global contexts, this course does not assume singular definitions of LGBTQ+ identities, but rather uses the transnational to decenter Eurocentric definitions of gender and sexuality as well as intersecting categories of race and ability. Authors may include Audre Lorde, Samra Habib, Frieda Ekotto, and Pajtim Statovci.
GNDST-204GV Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Gendered Violence from Medieval to Contemporary Spain'
This survey course will review the complex interaction of gender and violence as a personal and institutional issue in Spain from Medieval times to the present. What are the ideological and sociocultural constructs that sustain and perpetuate violence against women? What are the forms of resistance women have put into play? Among the texts, we will study short stories by Lucanor (thirteenth century) and María de Zayas (seventeenth century), song by Bebé and movie by Boyaín (twentieth century), contemporary news (twenty-first century), and laws (from the thirteenth century to the present).
GNDST-204NB Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Nonbinary Romanticism: Genders, Sexes, and Beings in the Age of Revolution'
With the onslaught of American, French, Haitian, and South American revolts and revolutions, the Atlantic world, much of Europe, and its colonial/industrial empire were thrown into a period of refiguring the concept of the raced, national, and gendered subject. This course considers what new forms of gender, sex, sexuality, and being were created, practiced, or thought, however momentarily, in this tumultuous age. Specific attention is given to conceptions of nonbinary being (of all varieties). Authors may include E. Darwin, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Lister, M. Shelley, Byron, Jacobs.
GNDST-204QT Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Queer and Trans Writing'
What do we mean when we say "queer writing" or "trans writing"? Are we talking about writing by queer and/or trans authors? Writing about queer or trans practices, identities, experience? Writing that subverts conventional forms? All of the above? In this course, we will engage these questions not theoretically but through praxis. We will read fiction, poetry, comics, creative nonfiction, and hybrid forms. Expect to encounter work that challenges you in terms of form and content. Some writers we may read include Ryka Aoki, James Baldwin, Tom Cho, Samuel R. Delany, kari edwards, Elisha Lim, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Eileen Myles, and David Wojnarowicz.
GNDST-204RE Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Representations of Labor in Latin American Cinema'
A broad introduction to the study of visual representation in Latin American, Spanish, and U.S. Latina/o cultures. Students will examine the articulation of a variety of topics in media such as film, television, fine arts, Internet, and/or video. The specific course contents and examples examined will vary each semester.
GNDST-204RV Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Perspectives on Revolutionary Parenting'
In this space, we center the radical potentials of mothering/parenting alongside reproductive justice. We'll discuss how mothering/parenting operates in relation to the state, medical structures, borders, and other apparatuses. This course also considers what practices make mothering/parenting and reproductive justice as a space of potential liberation. What and who constitutes a mother/parent? How can the practice of parenting and reproductive justice be a liberatory practice? We'll look at texts such as Revolutionary Mothering and the history of community mothering spaces such as STAR House.
GNDST-204SJ Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Art, Public Space, and Social Justice Activism'
What are some ways that art can disrupt oppressive structures of power? This course explores the ways in which contemporary artists centuries have responded to the call for political change and social justice, particularly with regards to issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability. Drawing from interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives, we will examine the role of visual and performance art within public spaces in shaping and furthering social movements and protest. Some possible themes and issues include public memory, artistic citizenship, counterpublics, "material" and "immaterial" artistic forms, and the collective impact of art activism on the social imagination.
GNDST-204TA Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Transgender Literature'
Transgender literature has had a significant impact on how we talk about transness (and gender) and the kinds of trans stories we are able to tell. Although trans identities may find expression in texts as early as Metamorphoses (Ovid), this course will look at literature from the 20th and 21st centuries. Considering a wide range of genres -- novels, poetry, short stories, memoir, and young adult literature -- we will think about how writers talk about their bodies, their transitions, and their histories. Drawing upon fields such as history, medicine, and social science, this course will look at trans literature as both a product of these histories and as a powerful tool for critical liberation.
GNDST-204TJ Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Transforming Justice and Practicing Truth to Power: Critical Methodologies and Methods in Community Participatory Action Research and Accountability'
This course will offer an overview of select methodologies and methods from Community-based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR), Participatory Action Research (PAR), collaborative ethnography and other social justice research interventions such as radical oral history, grassroots research collectives, experimental digital archives, research and data justice networks and organizations. We will center on questions of "accountability"; that is, to whom, for whom, and to what end do processes of accountability serve those already in power? Moreover, we will investigate the chasms between academia and activism in order to explore the possibility of unlikely collaborative research alliances.
GNDST-204TN Women and Gender in the Study of Culture: 'Feminist Transnationalities'
This course explores recent histories, contexts, debates, and representations of feminist thought and movement across national, political, and cultural domains. Through engagement with narrative, ethnographic, and artistic sources, we consider how coalitions and solidarities have been built, in resistance to gendered and racialized oppressions, that not only challenge dominant feminist discourses but also reimagine possibilities for antiracist and anticolonial worldmaking. Topics include Black feminist internationalism, Marxist and socialist feminisms, migration and the politics of borders, trans inclusivity, as well as critiques of binaries such as west/east, local/global, and victim/agent.
GNDST-206 Women and Gender in History
GNDST-206BF Women and Gender in History: 'The Historical-Grammar of Black Feminist Thought Across the Caribbean and the Americas'
This class aims to raise student awareness of and exposure to different cultural backgrounds and contributions of Black feminist thought, womanism, and afro feminism across the Caribbean and the Americas. We will take a historical journey exploring the roles of cisgender Black women and gender-non-confirmative Black people in the formations of Black feminist thought, highlighting their contributions and struggles in dismantling the Western matrix of domination, but also in the radical building of new societies. Students will learn about the groundbreaking theories and methodologies that helped pave the way for contemporary feminist organizations and social movements.
GNDST-206CG Women and Gender in History: 'Women and Gender in China'
This 200-level seminar introduces students to gender relations in the history of China. It offers students a broad historical narrative of women's lives from early China through the imperial period, and concludes with the power dynamics of gender relations in modern China in the twentieth century. The course is organized chronologically with thematic focus on the politics of marriage and reproduction; the state's shifting perspectives on women's social roles; and how women interpreted and responded to the changing cultural landscape.
GNDST-206FM Women and Gender in History: 'Feminist and Intersectional Science Studies'
Gender and race are social categories, yet science had often treated them as natural kinds. This course joins the history and anthropology of science with studies of sex, sexuality, gender, and race to examine how Western science has constructed, sustained, and critiqued these categories over time. Moving chronologically, the course will introduce students to central texts, theories, and research methods in feminist and intersectional science studies, asking: What is the genealogy of such categories as sex, gender, sexuality, and race? How have such classifications shaped scientific ideas of "life," "nature," and "reason"? How have these categories been used to mark sameness and difference, and how have subjects impacted by those differences shaped the field of feminist science studies?
GNDST-206MA Women and Gender in History: 'Mary Lyon's World and the History of Mount Holyoke'
What world gave rise to Mary Lyon's vision for Mount Holyoke and enabled her to carry her plans to success? Has her vision persisted or been overturned? We will examine the conditions, assumptions, and exclusions that formed Mount Holyoke and the arrangements of power and struggles for justice that shaped it during and after Lyon's lifetime. Topics include settler colonialism and missionary projects; northern racism and abolitionism; industrial capitalism and the evolution of social classes; debates over women's education, gender, and body politics; religious diversity; and efforts to achieve a just and inclusive campus. Includes research based on primary sources.
GNDST-206NT Women and Gender in History: 'Histories of Native American Women'
This course explores the histories of Native American women, from origins to the present day. This course also introduces students to Indigenous methodologies. We will look at topics such as origin stories, Indigenous feminism, the fur trade, Removal, reservations, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. Major themes include kinship, community, gender, race, material culture, sovereignty, reproduction, matrilineal societies, survivance, and diplomacy.
GNDST-206US Women and Gender in the Study of History: 'U.S. Women's History since 1890'
This course considers the historical evolution of women's private lives, public presence, and political engagement within and beyond the borders of the United States, from the 1890s to the present. How have U.S. racism, consumer capitalism, immigration, and changing forms of state power shaped women's experiences and possibilities? How have regimes of gender, sexuality, bodily comportment, and reproduction evolved in relation to national and global changes? Emphasis will be placed on the experiences and perspectives of working-class women, women of color, and colonized women.
GNDST-210 Women and Gender in Philosophy and Religion
GNDST-210BD Women and Gender in Philosophy and Religion: 'Women and Gender in Buddhism'
Can women become Buddhas? Why is the Buddha called a "mother"? Who gets to ordain? Why would anyone choose celibacy? Who engages in religious sexual practices and why? This course examines the centrality of gender to Buddhist texts, practices, and institutions. We pay particular attention to the challenges and opportunities Buddhist traditions have offered women in different historical and cultural contexts. Throughout the course we consider various strategies of empowerment, including feminist, postcolonial, queer, trans*, and womanist.
GNDST-210JD Women and Gender in Philosophy and Religion: 'Women and Gender in Judaism'
This course examines gender as a key category in Jewish religious thought and practice. Students examine different theories of gender and intersectional feminisms, concepts of gender in a range of Jewish sources, and feminist Jewish responses to those sources. Students work with the Judaica collection at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and consider material culture as a source for women's and gender studies. Topics may include: how Jewish practice and law regulate sexuality and desire; feminist, queer and trans methods of engaging patriarchal texts; methods of studying women and gender in Jewish cultures; racialization.
GNDST-210NR Women and Gender in Philosophy and Religion: 'Reimagining American Religious History: Race, Gender, and Alterity'
This course invites its participants to place critical race and gender studies perspectives in dialogue with the emergence of new religious movements in the United States. Course participants rely on the presupposition that only through a thorough examination of religious traditions on the 'margin' can we fully understand the textured meaning of American religious history as a sub-discipline. Privileging the founding stories and institutionalization of minoritized American religious groups, the course considers how subaltern voices have shaped and transformed American religious life.
GNDST-210SL Women and Gender in Philosophy and Religion: 'Women and Gender in Islam'
This course will examine a range of ways in which Islam has constructed women -- and women have constructed Islam. We will study concepts of gender as they are reflected in classical Islamic texts, as well as different aspects of the social, economic, political, and ritual lives of women in various Islamic societies.
GNDST-210WR Women and Gender in Philosophy and Religion: 'Womanist Religious Thought'
As a conceptual framework which reconsiders the rituals, scriptures, and allegiances of religious black women, womanist thought has expanded the interdisciplinary canon of black and feminist religious studies. This course is a survey of womanist religious scholars from multiple religious traditions: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Yoruba-Ifa -- as well as theorists who understand womanism as a "spiritual but not religious" orientation. Course participants will use the interpretive touchstones of cross-culturalism, erotics, earthcare, and health -- among others -- to examine contemporary womanist religious thought.
GNDST-210YD The Gender of Yiddish
Yiddish and questions of gender have a long history. The language was called "mame-loshn" (mother tongue); it was associated with home and family. Jewish women were the primary intended readers of Yiddish, beginning with religious literature for those who could not read Hebrew and developing into a modern, secular, often moralizing literature. Despite the strong connections between Yiddish and women, women writers have been marginalized and underestimated. This course will explore the gendered history of Yiddish, including through the lens of queer theory. We will also read English translations of literature by modern Yiddish women writers who are being rediscovered today through new translations and scholarly attention.
GNDST-212 Women and Gender in Social Sciences
GNDST-212EC Women and Gender in Social Sciences: 'Gender and Labor in the Global Economy'
Globalization has not only changed the way we consume: it has also profoundly transformed production and the nature of work across the globe. Using case-studies of employment and work in the agricultural, manufacturing and service sectors in a range of countries, this course analyzes the gender and class dimensions of these transformations, examines the contradictory tendencies inherent in these processes and explores alternatives for policy and action.
GNDST-212HS Women and Gender in Social Sciences: 'Psychology of Human Sexuality'
This course is an introduction to the psychological study of human sexuality. We will take a psychobiosocial perspective in this course, covering topics such as reproductive anatomy and physiology, sexual response, sexually transmitted infections, contraceptive choices, pregnancy and birth, attraction and dating, love, sexual and relational communication, and consent. The goals of the course are to have students develop a strong understanding of human sexual biology, identity, behavior, and health, to understand how each of these areas is impacted by social context, and to engage with current research in the field.
GNDST-212RC Women and Gender in Social Sciences: 'Gender, Race, and Capitalism'
How does capitalism depend on gender, race and sexuality? In turn, how are gender, race, and sexuality defined through our economic lives? Why are women so often cast as the solution to poverty in the Global South? Is sex work distinct from other types of work? How can we think about the household as the fundamental socio-economic unit in light of queer and feminist critiques of the nuclear family? In this course, we will examine these types of intersections, taking our cue from an interdisciplinary social science literature featuring feminist political economists, theorists of racial capitalism, economic sociologists and anthropologists, and scholar-activists. We will think through both the large scale of global macroeconomic systems, as well as the microlevel of everyday life and culture. No prior background in economics or politics is assumed. After considering the historical origins of capitalism, we will survey topics including work, social reproduction and care labor, debt, finance, development, and universal basic income.
GNDST-221 Feminist and Queer Theory
We will read a number of key feminist texts that theorize sexual difference, and challenge the oppression of women. We will then address queer theory, an offshoot and expansion of feminist theory, and study how it is both embedded in, and redefines, the feminist paradigms. This redefinition occurs roughly at the same time (1980s/90s) when race emerges as one of feminism's prominent blind spots. The postcolonial critique of feminism is a fourth vector we will examine, as well as anti-racist and postcolonial intersections with queerness. We will also study trans-theory and its challenge to the queer paradigm.
GNDST-241 Women and Gender in Science
GNDST-241HP Women and Gender in Science: 'Feminist Health Politics'
Health is about bodies, selves and politics. We will explore a series of health topics from feminist perspectives. How do gender, sexuality, class, disability, and age influence the ways in which one perceives and experiences health and the access one has to health information and health care? Are heteronormativity, cissexism, or one's place of living related to one's health status or one's health risk? By paying close attention to the relationships between community-based narratives, activities of health networks and organizations and theory, we will develop a solid understanding of the historical, political and cultural specificities of health issues, practices, services and movements.
GNDST-241HR Women and Gender in Science: 'Feminist Engagements with Hormones'
This course takes a transdisciplinary and multi-sited approach to explore the social, political, biocultural, and legal complexities of hormones. Hormones "appear" in many discussions about reproductive and environmental justice, identity, health and chronicity. But what are hormones? What are their social, political and cultural histories? Where are they located? How do they act? The course will foster active learning, centering feminist pedagogies of collaborative inquiry. Examples of topics to be explored are: transnational/transcultural knowledge production about hormones; hormonal relations to sexgender, natureculture, bodymind; and hormone-centered actions and activism.
GNDST-241PH Women and Gender in Science: 'Pharmocracy: Empire by Molecular Means'
Since the 1950s, the pharmaceutical industry -- one of the world's largest economic sectors and a core constituent of globalized corporate power -- has built a transnational empire that controls not only gender, sex, health, food chains, science, politics, stock markets, and private/public distinctions, but has completely changed what it means to be human or animal. We will study these transformations, and how pharmocracy produces knowledge through experimentation on impoverished humans and animals. In the context of the post-9/11 legal emergency frameworks, pharmocracy is also the nearly impenetrable tangle between pharma, academia, public health, and the military biosecurity bureaucracies.
GNDST-241RA Women and Gender in Science: 'Rethinking Aids'
Many aspects of COVID-19 have their roots in the 1980s AIDS epidemic -- politically, scientifically, culturally. A careful reexamination of the mainstream narrative of the HIV/AIDS phenomenon and the history from which it emerged is therefore urgent. The course will focus on the unprecedented scientific narratives around HIV and AIDS, as well as their continuation into present-day Africa, on the backdrop of advances in immunology, virology, and genetics. It will also scrutinize the burgeoning political and neoliberal economic constellations later known as pharmocracy, which appropriated and weaponized novel radical forms of activism that had emerged from within gay minority culture.
GNDST-290 Experiential Learning Topics
GNDST-290 topics present an opportunity for students to apply feminist theory to practice. They emphasizes connections across academic research, pedagogy, and scholarship in relation to community-centered social action. The courses involve community engagement in various forms, enabling students to participate in practicum and practice-based experiential learning in collaboration with community partners. Topics and approaches will vary every semester.
GNDST-290EX Experiential Learning
This course helps students explore gender theory, and the analysis of power more generally, in concrete "real-world" connections between academia, communities, scholarship, creative expression, and social action. In January, students will find placement at an organization, foundation, or business that incorporates a feminist, and/or queer focus. Class sessions provide cohort space to reflect on students' experiences at work. We will also focus on analyzing the institutional structures that characterize philanthropic organizations, also known as the "NGO-industrial complex". We will also practice how to respond to job ads, build a resumé, and prepare for job interviews.
GNDST-290KM Experiential Learning: 'Transdisciplinary Hybridity: Exploring Possibilities for Queer Feminist Knowledge-Making'
Students will learn about and experiment with a variety of possibilities for queer feminist knowledge-making. First, we'll engage with "transdisciplinarity" and "hybridity" as concepts and practices in activist-scholar projects of disciplinary disentanglement. Then, accompanied by the work of writers, artists, scientists, and organizers involved in queer feminist knowledge-making along and against the borders and boundaries of genre, time, and expectation, we'll experiment with methodological and representational eclecticism. Course activities foreground collaboration and reflexivity as tools for sustainable community, racial, and disability justice centered activist-scholarship.
GNDST-295 Independent Study
GNDST-333 Advanced Seminar
GNDST-333AD Advanced Seminar: 'Abolitionist Dreams and Everyday Resistance: Freedom Memoirs, Struggles, and Decolonizing Justice'
This seminar will offer close theoretical readings of a variety of anti-colonial, abolitionist, anti-imperialist, insurgent and feminist-of-color memoir, autobiographical and social justice texts. We will read works from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Assata Shakur, Patrisse Cullors, Grace Lee Boggs, Audre Lorde, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinna, Leila Khaled, Fannie Lou Hamer, Sarah Ahmed, Lee Maracle, Kai Cheng Thom, Angela Davis, Sojourner Truth, adrienne maree brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mary Brave Bird, Jamaica Kincaid, Gabby Rivera and Haunani-Kay Trask. We will center the interlinking and capacious concepts of liberation, revolution, freedom, justice and decolonization.
GNDST-333AE Advanced Seminar: 'Race, Gender and Sexual Aesthetics in the Global Era'
Reading across a spectrum of disciplinary focuses (e.g. philosophies of aesthetics, post-structural feminisms, Black cultural studies, and queer of color critique) this course asks the question what is the nature of aesthetics when it negotiates modes of difference? This course explores the history and debates on aesthetics as it relates to race, gender, and sexuality with particular emphasis on Black diaspora theory and cultural production. Drawing on sensation, exhibitions, active discussion, observation, and experimentation, emphasis will be placed on developing a fine-tuned approach to aesthetic inquiry and appreciation.
GNDST-333BW Advanced Seminar: 'De Brujas and Other "Bad Women" in the Spanish Atlantic'
During the Spanish Empire (15th-18th centuries), women who violated the social order by failing to uphold the expected sexual morality and gender norms of the "ideal woman" were considered a danger or catergorized as "raras". They were silenced, criticized, punished, and some burned at the stake as witches. Students will study contradictory discourses of good and evil and beauty and ugliness in relation to gender in the Spanish Atlantic. We will analyze historical and literary texts as well as film versions of so-called "bad" women -- such as the Celestina, Elena/o de Céspedes, Antonio/Catalina de Erauso and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
GNDST-333CF Advanced Seminar: 'Free Them All: Abolition Feminism and Anticarceral Action Research'
This course will center the activism, theories and praxis of abolition feminism. We will collectively study how interpersonal violence (gender, racial, sexual, ableist) is intertwined with state violence (from domestic policing to militarism abroad). Through investigating the legal history of the criminalization of survivors alongside mainstream antiviolence research and statistics, we will challenge the use of criminological binaries such as victim/perpetrator and violent/nonviolent. Partnering with coalitions like Survived and Punished National, this course is structured by a series of anti-carceral action research projects such as contributing to active survivor defense campaigns.
GNDST-333CM Advanced Seminar: 'Gender, Sexuality, and Communism'
Using the frameworks of transnational and anticolonial feminisms, this course explores the genealogies, constellations, and contestations of feminist thought in the post-Soviet world. We will consider its unique formations in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, focusing especially on "peripheral" perspectives, such as Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, students will engage with narrative, historical, archival, and ethnographic sources, giving attention to the relationship between gendered subjectivity and state practices. Topics may include: cultures of dissent, women's movements, queer intimacies and LGBTQ+ rights, and transnational collaborations.
GNDST-333EC Advanced Seminar: 'Gender Inequality and Economic Development: Challenges, Contradictions, and Contestations'
This course explores the complex relationships between economic development and gender inequality in the global South. Students will be introduced to the theoretical frameworks and debates that shape the analysis of gender and economic development and will draw on these frameworks to analyze interactions between gender relations and economic development policies and processes in different contexts. Topics include the household as a unit of analysis; the gender division of labor: paid and unpaid work: the feminization of the labor force in the global economy; poverty; asset inequality; the informal economy; environmental governance; microfinance; and migration.
GNDST-333EG Advanced Seminar: 'Eggs and Embryos: Innovations in Reproductive and Genetic Technologies'
This seminar will focus on emerging innovations in the development, use and governance of reproductive and genetic technologies (RGTs). How do novel developments at the interface of fertility treatment and biomedical research raise both new and enduring questions about the 'naturalness' of procreation, the politics of queer families, the im/possibilities of disabilities, and transnational citizenship? Who has a say in what can be done and for which purposes? We will engage with ethnographic texts,documentaries, policy statements, citizen science activist projects, and social media in order to closely explore the diversity of perspectives in this field.
GNDST-333EM Advanced Seminar: 'Flesh and Blood: Naturecultural Embodiments'
What does it mean to be (in?) a body? Who counts as whole, broken or food? How do discipline, punishment, use, reproduction, and illness come into play? What are agency, animacy, knowledge, consciousness in relation to embodiment? Western rationality has produced and disciplined a coherent, bounded, defended, racialized, and gendered bodily Self through medicine, psychiatry, nutrition, education, sexology, thanatology, obstetrics, and other disciplines. We will explore this production and its continual undoing, through topics such as medical diagnosis, disability, death and burial cultures, infection, diet, breastfeeding and dairy, chronic illness, depression, queerness, and hormone replacement.
GNDST-333ER Advanced Seminar: 'Theorizing Eros'
The erotic is a rich site of queer feminist thinking about the costs of the imposition of sexuality as an interpretive grid. The course begins with the study of sexuality as a knowledge system, with a focus on racial and colonial histories of sexuality, then moves on to considerations of the erotic. In both Lordean and Foucauldian genealogies, eros operates as a set of possibilities, or capacities -- for pleasure, joy, fulfilment, satisfaction -- that exceed "sexuality" and can inspire ways of rethinking nature, need, and relationality. Lynne Huffer, L.H. Stallings, Adrienne Marie Brown, Sharon Holland, and Ela Przybylo, among others, help us think capaciously about what the erotic can do.
GNDST-333FM Advanced Seminar: 'Latina Feminism(s)'
In this seminar, we will explore the relationship between Latina feminist theory and knowledge production. We will examine topics related to positionality, inequality, the body, reproductive justice, representation, and community. Our approach in this class will employ an intersectional approach to feminist theory that understands the interconnectedness between multiple forms of oppression, including race, class, sexuality, and ability. Our goal is to develop a robust understanding of how Latina feminist methodologies and epistemologies can be tools for social change.
GNDST-333GH Advanced Seminar: 'Girlhood Studies in Critical Race and Political Economy'
This course explores some of the central themes in girlhood studies through critical race and political economy lenses. We will dig into questions such as: What does it mean to be socially considered a girl? Who defines girlhood? How is girlhood defined, shaped, and experienced in different societies, cultures, and periods? How do historical hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality affect the girlhood experience? As we enter the heart of this interdisciplinary academic field that seeks to understand the complexities of existing as a girl, we will revisit the origins and evolution of the field as a distinctive area of study.
GNDST-333GS Advanced Seminar: 'Gender and Sexual Minority Health'
This course is a critical overview and investigation of health as it relates to the experiences of gender and sexual minority people. We will begin with exploring theoretical understandings of health and marginalization, and use those as frameworks to examine various domains of health. Areas of interest will include mental health, sexual and reproductive health, substance use, disability, and issues related to body size and image. We will end by looking at other structural issues that affect gender and sexual minority health, such as access to care, health education, and health policy.
GNDST-333HH Advanced Seminar: 'Love, Gender-Crossing, and Women's Supremacy: A Reading of The Story of the Stone'
A seminar on the eighteenth-century Chinese masterpiece The Story of the Stone and selected literary criticism in response to this work. Discussions will focus on love, gender-crossing, and women's supremacy and the paradoxical treatments of these themes in the novel. We will explore multiple aspects of these themes, including the sociopolitical, philosophical, and literary milieus of eighteenth-century China. We will also examine this novel in its relation to Chinese literary tradition in general and the generic conventions of premodern Chinese vernacular fiction in particular.
GNDST-333KA Advanced Seminar: 'Korean American Feminist Poetry'
Poetry by Korean American feminist writers has burgeoned in the 21st century with new generations of poets contributing to life of American letters. Reading works by Theresa Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Don Mee Choi, Mary-Kim Arnold, and others, we will discuss how each writer evokes racial and ethnic identity and intersections with gender and other political concerns, as well as the choices each poet makes regarding form and style. Students will gain insight into a great diversity of approaches to writing poetry and will create a portfolio of their own poems based on our discussions. Most classes will involve group critique of writing; several will involve visits with our authors. All are welcome.
GNDST-333MC Advanced Seminar: 'Latinas/os/x and Housing: Mi Casa Is Not Su Casa'
Housing is closely tied to quality of life and the health of neighborhoods and communities. As a main goal of the "American Dream," homeownership has important significance on an individual and societal level. For immigrants, this goal is often out of reach as a result of racism and discriminatory housing policies. This interdisciplinary seminar explores Latinas/os/x relationship to housing and homeownership by examining the history of exclusionary housing policies in the United States. By exploring a range of topics (affordability, ownership, gentrification, etc), we will develop a sharper understanding of why housing is one of the most pressing issues for Latinas/os/x today.
GNDST-333ME Advanced Seminar: 'Feminist Media Studies'
How is pop culture a site of social struggle? This course engages students in the scholarly field of feminist media studies in order to illuminate how popular culture indexes complex political terrains. With attention to intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability and disability, we will analyze representation across wide-ranging media forms. What can feminist theory tell us about media's production and reception? What can media theory tell us about feminist discourses, movements, and activism? Throughout, students will assess their own roles as consumers and producers of media and also as critical thinkers navigating shifting political landscapes and mediated environments.
GNDST-333MS Advanced Seminar: 'Multi-Species Justice? Entangled Lives and Human Power'
How can we change animal exploitation and re-situate the human more equitably with other species? Through animal rights? Justice? Abolition? Dismantle human exceptionalism? Animal emancipation? Companionship? Co-existence? Stewardship? What are the uses and limits of the discourses from which critical animal studies borrows conceptually, for example: antiracism, feminism, disability studies, nationalism, transformative justice, and so on. We will explore different scenarios of human-nonhuman entanglements, such as training, rescue, the animal industrial complex, the politics of extinction, hunting, infection, predation, breeding/reproduction and others.
GNDST-333MX Advanced Seminar: 'Media and Sexuality'
Sex and sexuality are frequently at the forefront of innovation in media and technology, from the beginnings of photography, film, and video to the rise of the internet, artificial intelligence, and big data. Combining critical frames from Media Studies and Sexuality Studies, this seminar investigates what happens when media and sexuality intersect. We will ask how media and technology bolster new forms of sexual expression, communication, and embodiment. And, at the same time, we will examine how emerging technologies enable new modes of social regulation and surveillance. Throughout, we will foreground queer, trans, and feminist perspectives on media histories and digital futures.
GNDST-333PA Advanced Seminar: 'Natural's Not in It: Pedro Almodóvar'
This course studies the films of Pedro Almodóvar, European cinema's favorite bad boy turned acclaimed auteur. On the one hand, students learn to situate films within the context of contemporary Spanish history (the transition to democracy, the advent of globalization, etc.) in order to consider the local contours of postmodern aesthetics. On the other hand, the films provide a springboard to reflect on larger theoretical and ethical debates related to gender, sexuality, consumer culture, authenticity, and authorship.
GNDST-333PG Advanced Seminar: 'Who's Involved?: Participatory Governance, Emerging Technologies and Feminism'
Deep brain stimulation, genome sequencing, regenerative medicine...Exploring practices of 'participatory governance' of emerging technologies, we will examine the formal and informal involvement of citizens, patients, health professionals, scientists and policy makers. What initiatives exist at local, national and transnational levels to foster science literacy? How do lived experiences of nationality, ability, class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality become visible and/or disappear within constructed frameworks of participatory governance? How can feminist ethnographic research and feminist theory contribute to a larger project of democratizing knowledge production and governance?
GNDST-333QH Advanced Seminar: 'Queering the Horror: Collective Memory, Political Violence, and Dissident Sexualities in Latin American Narratives'
The bloody dictatorships that took place in the Southern Cone and the armed conflicts in Colombia, Guatemala and Peru during the 20th century left behind a legacy of political violence and collective trauma. These states themselves became sadistic death machines, where bodies became territories of punishment and discipline as well as of struggle, resistance, and difference. We will analyze how recent cultural production (film, novel, short stories, and theater) along with theoretical texts imagine and represent those "body struggles" through queer and female bodies, and how they replace the masculine icons of the left-wing militants and the state military terrorists.
GNDST-333QJ Advanced Seminar: 'Queer Objects'
This course explores the relationship between the temporal and material structures of everyday life-including objects, housing, gifts, dress, food, drugs, sex toys, accessories, and technologies-and queer identities, communities, and practices. Taking an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach that includes narrative, archival, ethnographic, visual, and historical sources, we will consider not only how queer life shapes and is shaped by objects, but also the extent to which "objecthood" can be tied to structural and state power through the politics of consumption. Topics and themes may include material feminisms, the queer archive, queer aesthetics, biopolitics, and affect theory.
GNDST-333QM Advanced Seminar: 'The Queer Early Modern'
This course combines early modern texts with various related secondary readings that will enable students to better understand the way that sexuality-both normative and nonnormative-was portrayed and interpreted in Renaissance literature. As we progress through the course, we will discuss what defines queer history and histories of sexuality, how the history of sexuality in the past informs the present, and, ultimately, the ways in which we can use early modern literature to better understand ourselves today. Course texts will include Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, John Lyly's Galatea, Shakespeare's sonnets, and the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Katherine Philips.
GNDST-333RN Advanced Seminar: 'Race / Nation / Gender: Feminist Studies of Scientific, Medical and 'Patient' Mobility'
This seminar explores the potentially novel entanglements of 'race', 'nation' and 'gender' through the increasing transnationalization of scientific and medical practices, the mobility of practitioners and consumers, and the mobilization of scientific and medical knowledge by individuals and communities, as well as governmental and civil society organizations. We will engage with the multiple tensions in feminist research on topics such as diversity, population and medical genomics, and reproductive and medical tourism as the multiple and shifting identities of experts and 'lay' individuals call attention to the power and problematics of scientific, medical and patient 'diasporas'.
GNDST-333RT Advanced Seminar: 'Body and Gender in Religious Traditions'
Do bodies matter in religious traditions? Whose bodies matter? How do they matter? By studying religious body ideals and practices, we examine the possibilities and problems different kinds of bodies have posed in religious traditions. Topics include religious diet, exercise, and dress; monasticism, celibacy, and sexuality; healing rituals, and slavery and violence. We pay special attention to contemporary challenges to problematic body ideals and practices coming from feminist, disability, postcolonial, queer, and trans theorists and activists.
GNDST-333SE Advanced Seminar: 'Black Sexual Economies'
At once viewed as a dysfunction of normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation, Black sexualities are intimately linked to and regulated by political and socioeconomic discourses. Slavery studies scholars remind us of how it has proven foundational for modern notions of race and sex by making explicit links between labor and exploitation. Thus, this course moves through themes such as slavery historicity, intersections between Black feminisms and Black sexualities, sexual labor/work, pleasure, and the erotic, in order to consider the stakes of our current critical approaches to Black sexual economies and interrogate its silences and possibilities.
GNDST-333SJ Advanced Seminar: 'Art, Public Space, and Social Justice Activism'
What are some ways that art can disrupt oppressive structures of power? This course explores the ways in which contemporary artists for centuries have responded to the call for political change and social justice, particularly with regards to issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability. Drawing from interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives, we will examine the role of visual and performance art within public spaces in shaping and furthering social movements and protest. Some possible themes and issues include public memory, artistic citizenship, counterpublics, "material" and "immaterial" artistic forms, and the collective impact of art activism on the social imagination.
GNDST-333SS Advanced Seminar: 'Gender and Class in the Victorian Novel'
This course will investigate how gender and class serve as structuring principles in the development of the Victorian novel in Britain, paying attention to the ways in which the form also develops in relation to emerging ideas about sexuality, race, nation, and religion. Novelists include Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, and Gaskell and we will read examples of domestic fiction, detective fiction, social realist novels, and the Victorian gothic.
GNDST-333TH Advanced Seminar: 'Transforming Harm and Mutual Aid: A Transformative Justice Lab'
The overall goal of this course is to make explicit connections between mutual aid and transformative justice, and the intertwined place-based and community histories in which these interventions continue to be made. Students will leave with a grounded understanding of the connections, tensions and differences between transformative justice and restorative justice and criminal justice. Alongside Dean Spade's Mutual Aid Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), students will be introduced to the radical history of mutual aid-- learning the difference between "charity" and "solidarity" -- and how mutual aid might interrupt systemic to interpersonal harm.
GNDST-333TX Advanced Seminar: 'Abolition and Radical Textiles'
How do the topics of abolition and textiles come together? Marginalized communities have historically used folkloric, textile arts and material culture to amplify abolitionist causes. From secret quilt codes of the Underground Railroad to an abolitionist community sustained by a silk mill in Florence, Massachusetts how might thinking with textiles intervene on patriarchal systems rooted in rigidity, isolation and punishment? From the social devaluation of domesticized and feminized labor of weaving, quilting, sewing to banners, students will theorize and experiment with textiles, leaving with a grounded understanding of how textiles/fibers can and have played an essential role in the history of abolition.
GNDST-333WE Advanced Seminar: 'Weird Feelings: Unsettling Latin American Short Fiction'
In this course we will read and discuss a group of short stories written by contemporary female, queer and trans Latin American authors. These stories deal with (among other weird feelings and states) the uncanny, the unsettling and the horror of daily life as well as processes of becoming, embodiment and disidentification. This course considers the intersections of identity and imagination, race, gender, and class. Special attention is given to the way in which these writings depict oppression and resilience and how they reinvent the Latin American short story writing tradition. Authors may include Ivan Monalisa, Guadalupe Nettel, Mariana Enriquez, Camila Sosa, and Claudia Salazar.
GNDST-333WP Advanced Seminar: 'Women, Politics, and Activism in United States History'
From the Revolution to the Nineteenth Amendment, the denial of women's right to vote shaped their activism across a wide range of movements and initiatives. Patterns of mobilization and leadership that emerged in that era left powerful legacies. We will consider forces that have driven women to polarized political views and efforts that have united them across differences, from the 1770s to the present. How have the actions of Indigenous, African American, and immigrant women shaped the nation's political landscape? How have race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration, and empire informed women's activism? Student efforts will culminate in the production of a substantial research paper.
GNDST-392 Senior Seminar
This course brings seniors together to develop and carry out a capstone project related to their specific interests while exploring the relationships among theory, activism, research and practice in gender studies and/or critical social thought. Projects can take different forms. Seniors with diverse interests, perspectives, and expertise will have the opportunity to reflect on the significance of their education in relation to their current and past work, their capstone or senior projects, their academic studies as a whole or their engagements outside of academia. Course readings and discussion will be shaped by students in collaboration with the instructor.
GNDST-395 Independent Study
