Summer 2016

Note that the New Class Schedule goes into effect beginning in Summer 2016.

WGSS 10 Sex, Gender, and Society

How has current thinking about sex, gender, and sexuality formed our experiences and understandings of ourselves, the world we inhabit, and the world we envision? This course investigates basic concepts about sex, gender, and sexuality and considers how these categories intersect with issues of race, class, ethnicity, family, religion, age, and/or national identity. The course also considers the effects of sex, gender, and sexuality on participation in the work force and politics, on language, and on artistic expression. In addition to reading a range of foundational feminist texts, materials for analysis may be drawn from novels, films, the  news, popular culture, and archival resources. Open to all students. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Lim
2A Hour

WGSS 48.07/FRIT 34.01 Sex and Gender in the Italian Renaissance

This interdisciplinary course explores conceptions of sex and gender in Italian Renaissance literature and visual art. We'll trace a social history of love and sex in Renaissance Italy, examine how sex and sexual bodies were represented in literature and in images, and look at how governments and the Church attempted to manage and punish sexual transgression. Themes we will investigate include representations of male and female bodies, gender roles for both men and women, sexual violence, same-sex desire, and cross-dressing.

Professor Quaintance
10 Hour

WGSS 65.07 Queer Popular Culture

This course explores queer popular culture in the performing and media arts, from expressive visual and sonic cultures that include film, performance, music and television to museum and fashion shows, and street carnivals. We will look at conceptions of queerness that play with hyperbolic genders, sexualities and racializations, and interrogate their value, significance and meaning as cultural and/or political expressions. Is queer popular culture a way to sell LGBT life styles as metrosexual taste, or is it a way to challenge the heteronormative mandates set by the market, the state, and their regulatory institutions? 

Professor Lim
Tuesdays 4:30-7:30 PM

WGSS 66.05/AAAS 81.05 Telling Stories for Social Change

Our social structure is full of unseen, unspoken, and unheard dynamics. These hidden and irresponsible social behaviors have always contributed to the building of visible and invisible social walls. Behind these walls, a growing invisible population has found a way into visibility into society through addiction, violence, and crime. This course offers students the unique opportunity to collaborate with a group of people from behind those social walls from two different perspectives: theoretical and practical. For one class each week, students will study the root cause of social isolations and invisibility mainly pertaining to incarceration and addiction, in an active learning classroom. For the other half, students will travel to Valley Vista, an alcohol and chemical dependency treatment center in Bradford, Vermont, and participate in an interdisciplinary arts program there. Its goal is the creation and performance of an original production that will facilitate the patients' voices. The final project for the course will combine research on themes related to addiction, rehabilitation, transition, facilitation, and critical analysis and self-reflection on the effectiveness of community-based learning and performance in rehabilitation.  Dist: ART; WCult: CI.

Professors Hernandez and Goldthree
2A Hour

WGSS 67.04/COLT 57.08/INTS 17 Humanities and Human Rights (NEW)

This course will focus on the deep connections between democracy and the role of the arts in the public sphere.  We will focus on the work of artists who deem that the role of their creations is to generate dialogue around issues of social justice. We will study the work of writers,  filmmakers, documentarians, photographers, and poets, individuals, who make "energy" (intellectual energy) usable in different places and contexts.  This course will cross disciplinary boundaries and follow the "comparative method" scrupulously.  We will be reading literature with care and learning how to read literarily—with intensive textual scrutiny, defiance, and metatheoretical awareness—a wide array of theoretical, visual and filmic texts.  Pending Faculty Approval.

Professor Martín
Thursdays 4:30-7:30 PM

Associated Course

SOCY 44/LATS 5 Complexities of Latino Identities in the United States

Professor Gomez
10A Hour