Winter 2017

In this course we will examine how writers and artists from India and the west have depicted and interacted with India over the past 400 years. We will study a variety of genres such as travel accounts, memoirs, myths, novels, histories and films. Of particular interest will be the works of women writers and how they portray the status of and issues associated with women in the various regions of India. Through close literary and cultural analysis, we will explore how images are created and for what purposes, and what effect these creations are designed to have on the public of a certain time period and for posterity.

Professor Beasley
12 Hour

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 Aguado
12 Hour

This course will examine pre-twentieth century texts and historical events that set important precedents for the development of contemporary feminist theories and practices. We will survey some of the writings that consolidate legitimated patriarchal/misogynist ideologies in Western worlds (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, the fathers of the Church, the philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Rousseau). We will analyze different ways in which women historically have articulated strategies of contestation and/or resistance to systems of power based on gender differentiation. Readings may include works by French medieval thinker Christine de Pizan; sixteenth-century Spanish cross-dresser Catalina de Erauso; seventeenth-century Mexican intellectual and nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz; Mary Wollstonecraft; Maria Stewart, the first African-American political woman writer; the nineteenth-century American suffragists; and anarchist leader Emma Goldman. Open to all students. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Rabig
10A Hour

The family is an important social institution, a complex set of roles and rules that are organized to preserve and promote important functions in our society. The roles give rise to positions such as parent, child, spouse, stepfather, and so on. The rules offer us guidance about how to act in these roles and are regulated by social norms, public opinion, law, and religion. The important functions include public ones, like raising children, and caring for the elderly, and private functions, such as providing love, intimacy, and companionship to family members. In this course, we will learn about the family as both a social institution and as a set of private relationships. One theme underlying our learning is that the form, function, and definition of the family vary across historical and cultural contexts. Another key theme is that social class and gender intersect with family well-being. We explore contemporary debates and issues affecting the family, with an emphasis on utilizing research evidence to inform public policy. Dist: SOC; WCult: W. 

Professor Walton
10 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
11 Hour

This course will use both elite and popular Hindu religious texts in conjunction with contemporary sociological and anthropological accounts, scholarly analyses, visual art, and film to explore the diverse identities and roles of India's many goddesses, both ancient and modern. Special emphasis will also be given to the relationship between goddesses and women. Open to all classes. Dist: TMV; WCult: NW.

Professor Ohnuma
2 Hour

The status of Muslim women around the world and the notion of gender equality in Islam are highly debated topics with high stakes and real life consequences. This course is about issues of gender in Islamic and Muslim texts and their historical relevance. We will make critical study of the constructions of gender, femininity, masculinity, sexuality, gender relations, marriage and divorce in classical Islamic texts and the roles these texts have played in Muslim life. We will examine Muslim thought on gender relations in their historical contexts and in relation to one another. Through in-class discussions, readings and the final essay, students will strengthen their global literacy on issues of gender, demonstrate global historical trends in ideas on gender, recognize theoretical and historical similarities and differences, analyze the role of texts in society, and recognize, critique, and assess key themes related to marriage, divorce, sexuality, and gender relations across genres of Islamic texts. Dist: TMV; WCult: NW.

Professor Ayubi
2A 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
12 Hour

This class examines the ways American commercial television has historically "assumed" gendered positionings of its audience, as well as operates as one of the strongest cultural touchstones of gendered identity in patriarchal, consumer society. After tracing television's place in the construction of gendered ideals through the history of the situation comedy, we examine "gender-specific" genres, such as sports, westerns, cop shows, and soap operas. Representative programs will be screened, and feminist essays on television history/theory are among assigned readings. Open to all students. Dist: ART; WCult: CI.

Professor Desjardins
10A Hour

This course will examine the phenomenon of moral panic in nineteenth-century British literature and culture through two linked but distinctive forms of sexual subjectivity:  female heterosexuality and male homosexuality, connected forever in the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act that set the stage for the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde.  We will consider the relationship between realist and sensationalist literary forms to trace the emergence and regulation of distinctly modern sexual subjectivities in mid- and late-nineteenth-century Britain.  Requirements will include weekly reading responses, occasional class presentations, a midterm paper, and a final paper.  Dist: LIT; WCult: W.

Professor Dever
3A Hour

Students will explore the perspectives of contemporary Latina/o, Asian American, Black, and Native American theater artists/performers. Our examination will also consider the socio-historical and political contexts engaged through these artists' works. We will also consider the relationship between the construction of identity and strategies of performance used by playwrights/performers to describe race, gender, sexuality, class, subjectivity, and ideas of belonging. Texts examined will include works by Moraga, Highway, Wilson, Parks, Gotanda, and Cho. Dist: ART; WCult: CI.

Professor Mayorga
10A Hour

This course is an introduction to the history of feminism in the Arab world from the 19th century to the present. It examines some of the most important socioeconomic and political issues as well as literary and artistic trends that were or continue to be central to feminist activism and cultural production in the region. Throughout the term students will engage with a wide range of primary sources (newspaper articles and op-eds, memoirs, novels, poems, photographs and films) that will help them develop a nuanced and critical understanding of the diverse and dynamic experiences of women in the Arab world. This course has no prerequisites. WCult: NW; Dist: INT or LIT.

Prof. Morsi
2A Hour