Spring 2016

“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” From Lord Byron to Lady Gaga, geniuses have always been bad news. Much of the cultural anxiety around genius is related to sex. Sigmund Freud’s essay on Leonardo Da Vinci defined genius in terms of sexual frustration. Edward Carpenter argued that genius was the third sex. Cesare Lombroso argued that genius was a genetic component of criminality. Christine Battersby thought the idea of genius was a tool for female oppression. In this course, we will look at changing ideas of genius and gender, from the Renaissance to the present. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI.

Professor Bergland
10 Hour

This course explores urbanization as a gendered process, tracing the shifting intersections of gender, class, race, and sexuality in North American urban history. We'll question how women and men experienced an increasingly urban and industrial economy as workers, consumers, immigrants, radicals, reformers, consumers, and intellectuals. We'll also assess their roles in the political and cultural movements that defined 20th century urban life. Readings in urban studies, cultural history, and social history expose students to critical perspectives on these topics, and explore feminist approaches to architecture, city planning, and economic development. Dist: TMV; WCult: CI

Professor Rabig
2A Hour

This course explores the theoretical underpinnings of some of the most highly contested issues in society today. We will look at a spectrum of positions on such issues as: questions of difference and equality; women’s health and reproductive rights; identity and identity politics; morality-pornography-violence; eco-feminism-environmentalism; children, family, and human rights; and the representation/performance of femininity/masculinity. Special emphasis will be placed on the connection between theory and practice. Open to all students. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Aguado
11 Hour

This course will examine the ways in which "deviant" sexual and gender behavior and identities, and the political movements that emerge from them, have been conceptualized in U.S. culture. We will cover basic LGBT cultural and political history and the interplay between sexuality, gender, race, class, ethnicity, and economics. Classes will be a mix of lecture and discussion. Students will be expected to work with primary documents (including novels and film), recent work in queer theory and historical analysis. Open to all students. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Lim
10A Hour

This course is a critical examination of the historical and contemporary status of black women in the United States, as presented in fiction, primary accounts, and social science literature. We will explore the nature, extent, and consequences of the multiple discriminations of race, sex, and class, as the context in which these women shaped their social roles and identities within the black community and the larger society. We will consider the themes of family, motherhood, and sexuality; educational, economic and political participation; aesthetics and religious traditions; and self and social images. Open to juniors and seniors. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor King
2A Hour

This course will explore the nature, extent, and consequences of gender inequality in society. Changing gender roles will be examined in relation to class and race, the socialization process, the experience of women in the family, and the experience of women as paid and unpaid workers under both capitalism and socialism. Finally, we shall analyze work and family conflict, looking at gender inequality, consequences for families and employers, policy, and implications for social structural change. Open to second-year students and above. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.

Professor Smith
2A Hour

This course examines what it means to be a woman, man, boy, or girl in everyday life. We will explore how gendered beliefs affect the expectations, experiences, and opportunities of women and men. This course includes discussion of a number of different perspectives, including several feminist perspectives. Possible topics include: are there only two genders?, gendered language, masculinity during young adulthood, the wage gap, work-family balance, media images, and hooking up. Dist: SOC.

Professor McCabe
2A Hour

The course will focus on the relationship between the lived body (embodiment) and our experiences of others (alterity). Phenomenological analyses stress that 'encountering an other' is necessarily grounded on embodiment – in how we experience our own body and the bodies of others. We will consider embodied experiences of: the racial other, the female body, and expressions of mental disorder. We will draw both from classical phenomenological analyses (Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Fanon) and contemporary discussions. Dist: TMV; WCult: CI.

Professor Aldea
2 Hour

Sex (biological differences between men and women) and gender (social constructions of those differences) are not straightforward or natural, and it naturally follows that gender inequalities and gender oppression are also not straightforward and natural. Therefore, we will pay close attention to the issue of power - in terms of control and distribution of resources and the enforcement of gender roles and sexuality. We will also look at how Western gender ideals have been imposed on people in other parts of the world. We will talk about concepts, perceptions, images, stories, encounters, games, connections, and disconnections. Finally, we will explore questions of practice and resistance. Dist: INT or SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Billings
10A Hour

This course explores issues of social justice and cities in terms of the spatial unevenness of money and power within and among cities, between cities and their hinterlands, and between cities of the world. We will examine how multiple dynamic geographic processes produce spatial and social inequalities that make cities the locus of numerous social justice issues. We will also look at how urban communities and social groups are engaged in working for social change. Dist: SOC; WCult; CI.

Professor Ellison
12 Hour

This collaboratively taught course seeks to answer the call of activists around the country to examine racialization, state violence, and inequality in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. To begin, it offers a context for the events in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Then, it situates those events in a broader history of race and racism in the United States. Finally, the course highlights black feminist and queer approaches to questions of trauma, community, politics, and survival. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Teaching Collective
2 Hour

This introductory, multidisciplinary course examines women's religions ideas, beliefs, concerns, actions, rituals and socio-cultural experiences in African societies and cultures from a comparative, historical and gender perspective. We will look at women's experiences of social change in African religions, the encounter with Islam, slavery, Christianity, and colonialism. We will analyze the articulations of economic and political power or lack of power in religious ideas as we ask questions such as: What are the different antecedents and circumstances in which women exercise or are denied agency, leadership, power and happiness in their communities? Texts will include nonfiction, fiction, and film narratives. Open to all students. Dist: SOC; WCult: NW

Professor Baum
10A Hour

This course focuses on the emerging counter-tradition, within American modernism and within the larger tradition of poetry in English, of American women poets in the twentieth century. Taking our cue from Adrienne Rich, who ambiguously titles one book of essays On Lies, Secrets and Silences (is she for or against?), we will follow debates about what makes it possible to break previous silences--and to what degree and in what ways it is useful or satisfying to do so. Topics within this discussion will include sexuality, race, illness, literary modes, female literary succession, and relations with the literary tradition. We will read in the work of eight or nine poets and recent critical and theoretical writings, with some attention in the first weeks to important female and male precursors. The syllabus will include such writers as Edna St.Vincent Millay, HD, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Louise Gluck, Rita Dove. Dist: LIT; WCult: W.

Professor Zeiger
11 Hour

This course examines how issues of race and sexuality are elemental to radical formulations of queer theory. We will begin with a deep study of U.S. feminist and queer of color critiques to understand how social formations are embroiled in nationalist, colonial as well as free market ideals and practices. Our focus on the quotidian and staged experiences of those who identify or are identified as an outsider, misfit, or the Other is an invitation to intensively analyze and perform what it means to be at once queer and gendered, queer of color, and queer and wild. From accents and affects to styling and production, we will read a range of manifestos, performances, literature, and art that conform to and yet also deviate from what is normal or acceptable in mainstream, U.S-American society. The key words in the title, "Of Color, Wildness and Fabulosity," are suggestive of alternative queer practices in the U.S. and around the world that engage, exceed or even explode dominant categories of race, gender and sexuality. It explores, in other words, queer theory and praxis using diasporic perception or minority perspectives. Dist: INT or ART; WCult: NW.

Professor Lim
2A Hour

This course is WGST's curricular connection with the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth's annual spring research seminar.  Each offering of WGST 96 will center on texts written or created by GRID's guest speakers and complemented with other relevant theoretical, critical, or artistic material.  Students matriculated in WGST 96 will automatically be considered GRID Fellows and will have the opportunity of meeting and directly engaging in conversation with the authors and artists studied in the course.  In addition to regular class sessions, students will also attend the GRID seminar meetings and public lectures.  Students will be expected to produce a publishable paper on a topic of their choice as it relates to the theme of the seminar.  Final projects may be co-authored with any GRID Fellow.  Prerequisites: Major or Minor in WGST; or Permission by Instructor.

In Spring 2016: "Gender Matters: Feminist Ecologies and Materialisms"

Plastic islands in the North Pacific; accelerating hurricane conditions around the post-Katrina Gulf Coast; the toxic afterlives of global warfare, from depleted uranium to land mines to chemical warfare. What is happening to 'nature,' not only as a material world but a symbolic concept, in these places where environmental destruction, economic exploitation, and political injustice converge? Where does the human begin or end, separated from non-human animals, organic material, and technological innovation? This course begins from the idea that there is nothing especially new about these forms of ecological catastrophe as they unfold across various hierarchies of life, other than a widening scalar reach that now encroaches upon the walls of First-World privilege. We will examine various methodologies for thinking with and through the history of feminist, anti-racist, and social justice approaches as they have continually developed survival tactics in the face of planetary degradation and immiseration and generated new ways of making livable worlds.

Professor Hantel
Mondays 3-6 PM, GRID seminar meetings as scheduled

Professor Leuner
9L Hour
Dist: Lit; WCult: W

Professor Moreton
12 Hour
Dist: SOC; WCult: W.