Fall 2020

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.

Professor Jennifer Sargent
ARR, Remote, with synchronous components

Professor Mingwei Huang
ARR, Remote, with synchronous components

Professor Irene Kacandes
D, Remote, with synchronous components

Professor Francine A'Ness
BL, Remote, with on-campus components

This is a general course on women in politics. We will examine the role of women as politicians, activists, and voters. The course will examine a wide range of issue areas, including: female attitudes on war and conflict, the reactions of women to different kinds of campaign tactics and policy positions, the differing barriers women face to attaining elected office in different countries, and how the challenges thought to be faced by female political leaders compare with those faced by female business leaders. One key question we will explore concerns whether female politicians are treated differently than male politicians, and how that might affect their strategies for reelection and governance. Open to all students. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Deborah Brooks
E, Remote, with synchronous components

The nature of work, family life, and gender relations has changed dramatically over the last half century. This course examines these trends, with a focus on implications for gender inequality in society. We will focus on patterns in paid labor force participation and family life in the United States, and discuss the major debates surrounding the causes and consequences of such trends. We will also pay attention to how these patterns look across different races, ethnic groups, and socioeconomic status, as well as briefly examine how these trends compare to other countries. We will conclude by exploring the implication of gender inequality for families, as well as work-family policy debates. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.

Professor Kristin Smith
K, Remote, with synchronous components

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 Sabrina Billings
E, Remote, with synchronous components

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.

Professor Shamell Bell
G, Remote, with synchronous components

“The past does things.” These words were written by José Esteban Muñoz in his 2009 text Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. This course offers an opportunity to explore how past histories of domination continue to emanate into the present. Through the lens of feminist and queer of color performance, we will engage a diverse array of aesthetic forms—including performance and installation art, literature, poetry, film, music, and new media— in order to learn how cultural practitioners use the arts to sustain life in a world framed by overlapping legacies of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Our readings and materials will be interdisciplinary, spanning gender and queer studies, critical ethnic studies, American studies, and performance studies. Traversing 20th and 21st century cultural production, each week will be organized around artists and writers who actively engage the concept of memory as a political act against the denial or disavowal of violence. We set out to understand the social, political, and economic contexts in which artists create their work, addressing issues of race, gender, sexuality, nation, class, ability, and environmental decay. In doing so, we come to more intimately know how performances of time, memory, and trauma include a fervent belief in the potential of queer and feminist possibility. Throughout the term, students will participate in critical, creative, and collaborative assignments that will develop critical thinking, writing, and interdisciplinary engagement. Dist: INT or SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Anna Storti
D, Remote, with synchronous components

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 Mingwei Huang
ARR, Remote, with synchronous components

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 Reiko Ohnuma
F, Remote, with synchronous components

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 Misty De Berry
E, Remote, with synchronous components

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. Dist: SOC.

Professor Jacqueline Wernimont
K, Remote, with synchronous components