Fall 2019

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.

Note: Half of all spaces in this course are reserved in each fall section for incoming first-year students.

9L Hour: Professor Moody
10 Hour: Professor O'Rourke
12 Hour: Professor Sargent
2 Hour: Professor Brison

The #MeToo movement is a response to gender-based harassment, assault, and violence. It is a form of resistance. This course examines and critiques the #MeToo movement. It covers the movement’s founding in 2006 by civil rights activist Tarana Burke; the benefits and limitations of intersectionality theory and approaches; feminist legal and critical race theories about sexual harassment and gender based violence; and competing analyses of contemporary #MeToo activism, particularly its spotlight on the wealthy and famous. The course includes elements of collaborative syllabus building, campus outreach activities, group project work, research into histories of resistance at Dartmouth (using College archives), and peer review of students’ written work. Throughout the term, we will draw connections among scholarship, current events, and our lives. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Munafo
2A Hour

This course examines gender as it relates to both women and men and as constituted by multiple factors such as place, space, class, sexuality, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, and culture—what some call categories of "difference." We will explore how these categories of difference shape women's and men's daily lives, our institutions, the spaces and places we live in, and the relationships between social groups in different places and between different places in the world. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Parikh
6B Hour

This is a general course about gender and politics in which we will examine the roles of women and men as voters, activists, and politicians. We will begin by examining a wide range of relevant issues, including: how gender affects political participation and partisan preferences, how boys and girls are socialized differently into politics, how public opinion regarding domestic and foreign policy sometimes differs for women and men, and how a different gender balance among office holders might be expected to affect representation, policy, and governance. The course will then critically examine various barriers that women may face in the pursuit of elected office in the U.S., and we will also expand our view beyond politics, by analyzing women in non-political leadership positions in order to draw useful comparisons. Finally, the course will examine the role of gender in an international context, comparing gender dynamics in the U.S. with those of other countries in order to better understand the future of women in politics in the U.S. and in the world at large. This course is appropriate for all students, from all majors (there are no prerequisites). Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor D. Brooks
12 Hour

This course was canceled after Fall term registration closed. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Professor Lin
2A Hour

This course will address a range of topics concerning gender that are of particular significance to indigenous communities.  These topics will be considered from historical, political, cultural and social perspectives.  In the context of this class, the term “indigenous” is a category that includes tribal nations of the United States including Hawaii, the First Nations of Canada, and the indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand.  The material is presented with particular concern for the diversity of indigenous groups and the variety of their own experiences and autochthony.  We will explore their responses to misconceptions of tribal gender roles and identities projected upon Native people by the agents and institutions of settler colonialism.  This approach opens a broader discussion about the many actions of indigenous communities to deconstruct and decolonize gender categories that are alien to the continuity, integrity, and vitality of their own traditions.  The interdisciplinary approach of this course will engage texts from philosophy, literature, semiotics, history, and policy, as well as gender studies from various socio-cultural perspectives. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Palmer
2 Hour

Transnational feminism, in its broadest vision, has been the project of “feminism without borders.” Rooted in intersectionality, justice, praxis, and solidarity, the banner of transnational feminism has assembled scholars and activists from diverse social and geopolitical positions through coalitions across global, regional, national, and local borders, both within and beyond the nation-state. This course begins with genealogies of global, women of color, and postcolonial or Third World feminisms and histories of movement-building from which transnational feminism emerged. Students will be introduced to themes of universalism, solidarity, positionality, and the problems with  speaking for “others,” especially Northern feminists representing women in the Global South. In the second part of the course, we turn to contemporary topics in transnational feminism, including globalization, development, war, militarism, labor, migration, climate change, and humanitarianism, and feminist mobilizing against injustice within and across borders. Dist: INT or SOC; WCult: NW.

Professor Huang
12 Hour

This course is an approved pre-requisite for the Foreign Study Program in Hyderabad, India.

As contemporary Jewish and Christian communities of faith face the question of the role of women within their traditions, many turn to the Bible for answers. Yet the biblical materials are multivalent, and their position on the role of women unclear. This course intends to take a close look at the biblical tradition, both the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament, to ask what the Bible does—and does not—say about women. Yet the course is called "Women and the Bible," not "Women in the Bible," and implicit in this title is a second goal of the course: not only to look at the Bible to see what it actually says about women but also to look at differing ways that modern feminist biblical scholars have engaged in the enterprise of interpreting the biblical text. Dist: TMV; WCult: CI.

Professor Ackerman
10A Hour

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? Dist: INT or SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Lim
6B Hour

Our social structure is full of unseen, unspoken, and unheard dynamics that create visible and invisible social walls. Students in this course have the unique opportunity to collaborate with a group of people from behind those social walls from two different perspectives: theoretical and practical. Students study the causes of this invisibility and social isolation (mainly pertaining to incarceration and addiction) by participating in an interdisciplinary arts program with local community members from these invisible populations while at the same time attending discussion-based seminars. This combination of practice and theory asks for students to go beyond a critical reflection on our society by contributing to constructive social actions towards change. Dist: ART; WCult: CI.

Professors Hernandez and Schweitzer
10A Hour

The seminar in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is designed as a culminating experience for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies students and preparation for future work such as independent research, honors thesis, graduate studies and advanced scholarship.

3A Hour
Professor Lim