Summer 2019

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

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 Sargent
12 Hour

NEW Cross List! WGSS 24.02/HIST 070/MES 19.04 Gender and the Modern Middle East and North Africa

In this course, we will study histories of the modern Middle East and North Africa and examine the ways that issues relating to gender and sexuality have affected the politics and social worlds of the region over the course of the past several centuries. This course begins with the medieval Islamicate Empires — Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman — and then moves through the end of empire, the colonial era, the establishment of the nation state, and the emergence of modern cultural, political, and religious movements. In doing so, we will situate the histories and social worlds of the region in a global frame, asking how global political and economic transformations have affected the region. At the same time that we attend closely to these histories, we will also examine the ways in which the category of “woman” has been mobilized in popular and political discourses in the 18th-21th centuries, paying particular attention to how Muslim and Middle Eastern women have been represented in various political discourses, as well as how they have represented themselves. Through close readings of both primary sources (in translation) and secondary literature — including historiographical, theoretical, and literary texts as well as film and music— we will also tackle the questions, controversies, and stereotypes that have animated debates in both scholarly and popular literature on such topics as the veil, feminism, revolution, human rights, LGBT issues, masculinity, and war. Dist: SOC; WCult: NW.

Professor Nikpour
11 Hour

Approved and added to timetable June 19, 2019!

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
2A 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 46.01/PHIL 04 Philosophy and Gender

This course will focus primarily on the following questions:  What is feminism?  What is sexism?  What is oppression?  What is gender?  Is knowledge gendered?  Is value gendered?  What is a (gendered) self? What would liberation be?  In exploring these issues, we will examine the ways feminist theorists have rethought basic concepts in core areas of philosophy such as ethics, social and political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of law, and philosophy of mind. Open to all classes. Dist: TMV. WCult: CI.

Professor Brison
3B Hour

WGSS 52.04/ENGL 63.04/LACS 30.12 Arts Against Empire: Fictions of Revolution and Solidarity in the Americas

Anticolonial struggle and movements for social justice have always been accompanied by a range of cultural practices, including fiction, art, music, film, murals, theater, graffiti, and theory. This course explores that tradition of cultural activism, considering attempts to narrate revolutionary formation, imagine solidarity, and write decolonial theory. We will begin by examining revolutionary nationalist and anti-imperialist culture in the Americas—ranging from the memoirs of Che Guevara and Malcolm X to Nuyorican and Chicano Movement literature—in order to consider the formation of revolutionary subjects, and how 20th century ideas of revolution were raced and gendered. We will then consider how novelists, artists, photographers, filmmakers, and activists attempted to imagine solidarity with revolutionary movements and suffering others in the Americas, from Central America solidarity photography to performance art in solidarity with Guantanamo Bay prisoners. We will pay special attention to the work of feminist and queer solidarity artists, writers, and performers. Finally, we will examine contemporary activist cultural projects, such as PanAmerican public art road trips and hashtag-activism. Students will have the opportunity to produce a creative or multimedia final project. Dist: INT or LIT. WCult: NW.

Professor Stuelke
6B Hour

WGSS 53.05/ENGL 65.06 The Poetry and Rhetoric of Love, from Petrarch to Social Media

What we call "love poetry" has generally been a way of expressing much more than the emotional and erotic fascination of one person with another. Often it seems to bypass the love-object altogether, and focuses instead on power relations or poetic achievement. Beginning with early examples, and moving on to contemporary and modern poems, our course will place love poems by men and women in the context of an ongoing poetic tradition, recent feminist criticism and theory, and talk about love and sex in recent popular culture. This last will include: excerpts from recent books about dating and seduction, film, contemporary song lyrics, dating websites, and campus culture. Dist: LIT. WCult: W.

Professor Zeiger
11 Hour

WGSS 67.05/GOVT 86.35/AAAS 20 Feminist Theory

This seminar is designed to provide an overview of significant themes and debates within feminist theory. It is organized around several topic areas - most centrally Intersectionality and the Body (including the racially marked body, the covered body and the body in motion, across both national and gender boundaries). Dist: SOC.

Professor Threadcraft
3B Hour

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