Winter 2018

Note: Course times are subject to change, and despite our best efforts, information on this page may be incorrect. The official timetable published by the Registrar's Office is the final and correct version of course listings and distributive credits.

WGSS 07.04 Women in Journalism

This course will focus on the contributions of women journalists in the US and around the globe to coverage of human rights, geopolitics, war, freedom of speech, violence against women, reproductive rights, health, educational opportunity for girls/women, sex slavery/trafficking, climate change and the environment, religion, artistic freedom and other critical issues. Three writing assignments will include a profile, a radio commentary and a feature-length investigation, using original reporting, that sheds light on a social justice issue. Two drafts of each writing assignment are required. We will also hold regular workshops on reporting and writing. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.

Professor Jetter
12 Hour

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 Kacandes
2 Hour

WGSS 15 Roots of Feminism

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 Gallagher
11 Hour

WGSS 26.02/HIST 29 Women and American Radicalism Left and Right

This course will trace the involvement of U.S. women in radical political movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present including: Abolitionism; Anti-lynching; Socialist Trade Unionism; the Ku Klux Klan; the Communist Party; the National Welfare Rights Organization; the Civil Rights Movement; the New Left; the New Right; the direct-action wing of the anti-abortion movement; Earth First; and the neo-Nazi American Front. It will also examine the relationship between feminist ideologies and non-gender-specific radical political ideologies centered on race, class, and other social identifiers. Open to all classes. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Orleck
2 Hour

WGSS 30.04 Women, Work, and Wealth (NEW)

It is one of the most famous sentences in the English-language canon, a short-hand for the entire foundation of modern economics: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” wrote Adam Smith in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations, “but from their regard for their own interest.” But of course none of those men actually served the lifelong bachelor his dinner: his mother did, and whether she did so from benevolence, self-interest, or some less easily classified motivation, the field of political economy was defined by her exclusion from its questions and answers. This course interrogates the sexual and racial contracts at the heart of modern economic relations, and asks how returning mothers, wives, daughters, and servants to the history of capitalism alters our assumptions about economic man. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Moreton
10A Hour

WGSS 33.01/AAAS 25/SOCY 46 Constructing Black Womanhood

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; self and social images. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor King
2 Hour

WGSS 33.03/JWST 53/REL 19.22 Gender and Judaism

Examining the intersections between gender, religious practice, cultural identity, and personal belief, this class will draw upon contemporary gender theory, religious texts and contemporary interpretations of Jewish thought and culture to examine the construction of Jewish identity through a feminist lens.  Authors will include Alder, Boyarin, Heschel, Gilman, Peskowitz, Levitt and Biale.  The class will also investigate questions of race, ethnicity, assimilation and Jewish gender issues in popular culture, including films and the work of performers Cantor, Benny, Berg, Midler, and Sandler. Dist: TMV; WCult: CI.

Professor Greenblatt
2A Hour

WGSS 36.01/ANTH 31 Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective

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

WGSS 37.03/GEOG 25/SOCY 49.22 Social Justice and the City

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 Gerlofs
10 Hour

WGSS 41.05 Gender and Violence: Transnational Feminist Analyses (NEW)

This course introduces students to the relationship between gender and violence in both local and global formations of power. Together, we will critically examine how everyday people and feminist activists identify, theorize, and challenge systemic modes of gendered violence across transnational feminist perspectives. Our investigations lead us to a myriad of historical and contemporary issues. Such topics include transnational feminist perspectives on domestic violence; militarization and women’s health; media and representation; sexual violence; colonialism; gendered and racial discrimination; trafficking of women; the prison-industrial complex; gendered care labor; immigration and deportation; international relations and religion; feminist coalitions on gendered violence; and media networks and globalization. Dist: INT or SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Gallagher
12 Hour

WGSS 43.04/REL 42 Goddesses of India

his 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
10 Hour

Foreign Study Program in Hyderabad, India

AMES 29, D.F.S.P. Director's Course - Professor MacEvitt

Foreign Study Program in Hyderabad, India

AMES 28, D.F.S.P. Course - University of Hyderabad Staff

Foreign Study Program in Hyderabad, India

AMES 27, D.F.S.P. Course - University of Hyderabad Staff