GQS 201: Introduction to Gender, Queer, and Feminist Studies
Professor Heather White
T/TH 9:30-10:50am, M/W 3:30-4:50pm
This course serves as an introduction to Gender, Queer and Feminist Studies. It surveys the history of feminism, and then explores the rise and trajectories of gender studies and queer studies. The course engages with the ways in which gender, sexuality, race, class, ability/disability, and other facets of identity intersect with each other. Students will consider the implications of activism as well as the academic development of these disciplines, and they will engage with the ways that the readings touch upon their own lives.
GQS 320: Queerly Scientific
Professors Laura Krughoff, Megan Gessel
T/TH 11am-12:20pm
This course is organized around a set of interlocking questions: Who tells the story of scientific knowledge? Through what lens? Who does the work of producing scientific knowledge? To what end? While "the sciences" are often figured as disciplines and practices that both value and produce objectivity and facts -- categories imagined to exist independent of the identities of the people making scientific inquiry or serving as the object of that inquiry -- this course seeks to situate scientific knowledge within the matrix of gender, race, and sexuality that is inextricable from the human experience. We ask: How would a more diverse scientific community change the lives of those working in the sciences? And how would it change science?
GQS 335: Gender and Genre
Professor Laura Krughoff
T/TH 9:30-10:50am
This course takes as its jumping-off point Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: a Biography. This novel’s long afterlife in adaption for the stage and the screen indicates that the enduring thematic heart of the text is its fantastical encounter with gender. Woolf’s novel is, notably, humorously, and impossibly mis-genred as a biography. The question for this class, then, is as follows: how do genre and form inform, circumscribe, explode, and/or ramify what can be thought and said about gender? What constitutes reality, fidelity, or truthfulness in fiction, film, memoir, or theory? The primary way students will engage with the texts that serve as the backbone of this course is creative. Students will read two novels, inflected by Woolf’s Orlando, and then write their own gender-bending fiction, analyze two genre-bending memoirs and write their own creative nonfiction, and apply a work of queer theory that refuses the dichotomy between scholarship and personal writing to other course texts.
GQS 360: Genealogies and Theories: Gender, Feminist, and Queer Theories
Professor Heather White
M/W 2-3:20pm
This course surveys the history/ies and development of feminist, gender and/or queer theories, with an emphasis on theories produced in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The course familiarizes students with key feminist, gender and queer theoretical debates and concepts, requires them to read, think, speak, and write critically about these theories; and encourages them to employ these feminist and queer theories and concepts in critical analyses of contemporary institutions and practices, as well as in their own lives. Topics examined include power, privilege, domination, identity, difference, intersectionality, post/colonialism, trans/nationalism, (standpoint) epistemology, anti/essentialism, discourse, performativity, gender, femininity, masculinity, sexuality, embodiment, and cyborgs.
Cross-Listed Courses:
AFAM 101: Introduction to African American Studies
Professor LaToya Brackett
T/TH 2-3:20pm
This course provides an examination of intellectual and creative productions, developments, and events that have come to be recognized as the discipline of African American Studies. The course explores literature, history, popular culture (music, television, magazines, newspapers, movies, film documentaries), and politics as a way to identify the historical and political origins and objectives of Black Studies and the 1960s Black Liberation struggles, the early academic and social concerns of Black Studies advocates, the theoretical and critical approaches to Black Studies as a discipline, and the early objectives of Black Studies in relation to present goals of multiculturalism.
LTS 200: Latina/o America: A Critical Introduction to Latina/o Studies
Professor Jairo Hoyos Galvis
M/W 2-3:20pm
More than 50 million Latinos live in the United States of America, which makes the U.S the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. In this course, students analyze the cultural, historical, political and social experiences of U. S. Latinos, or "Latinx America." This course understands the place of Latinx communities in the rising U.S. nation as a political and economic agent that shaped the history of the world in the 19th and 20th century. First, the course examines the roots of the US Hispanic populations, and also how colonization imposed Hispanic cultures and languages in North, Central and South America. Second, the course analyzes the experiences of the Latinx communities in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries through various topics: Latino immigration, practices of racism and colonization, strategies of resistance, political and social movements, U.S. policies regarding Latino communities, and Latinx gender practices, among others
CONN 210: Law, Gender and Justice in South Asia
Professor Trishna Senapaty
TBA
In this course students will read selections from three ethnographies across different regions of South Asia to examine the relationship between law, gender and justice. These ethnographies will address 1) specific laws and the mark they leave on intimate and familial-life 2) trace how social movements, and struggles for justice in South Asia and its diasporas bring people together in dialogue with, and in resistance to law 3) how such resistance and activism is gendered 4) the informal negotiations and alternate approaches to conflict resolution adopted in contexts where legal institutions are hostile or inaccessible. These ethnographies will be read alongside key dialogues in south Asian and transnational feminism. The course engages perspectives from anthropology, feminist and legal studies.
HIST 305: Women and Gender in Pre-Modern Europe
Professor Katherine Smith
T/TH 9:30-10:50am
This course examines the construction of gender in European contexts from Late Antiquity through the medieval and early modern period, addressing historical continuity and change in understandings of femininities, masculinities, and gender nonconformity, as well as in related ideas about sexuality, marriage, family, and romantic love. Students gain an understanding of how gender intersected with social, economic, political, educational, and religious structures in premodern Europe, and consider the merits of various historical approaches to gender. Special topics to be considered include: gendered concerns with virginity and celibacy; marriage and domestic life; reproductive health; the location of LGBTQI+ identities in premodernity; courtly love and its paradoxes; gender and labor in preindustrial economies; and the gendering of educational institutions.
SOAN 316: Cultural Politics of Global Development
Professor Monica DeHart
T/TH 11am-12:20pm
This course examines how culture, identity, and ethics are implicated in economic development efforts around the globe and here at home. Through a critical examination of major development theories and their assumptions about the nature of the global system and the meaning of difference within it, the course explores whose ideas about development matter, how they manifest in terms of particular policies and politics, and what stakes they pose for different social groups. In particular, the course explores how race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, health, environment, and education, among other things, have structured development differences. In doing so, the course interrogates the role that colonialism, science, capitalism, and activism have played in shaping development norms and challenges to them. The course engages interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to development through a combination of theoretical and ethnographic texts, as well as experiential learning. This course counts as one of the core courses for the Global Development Studies Designation.
ENGL 346: Jane Eyre and Its Afterlives
Professor Priti Joshi
M/W 3:30-4:50pm
This course is concerned with the endurance of the "Jane Eyre" story (itself an elaboration of the Cinderella myth). Beginning with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), students examine a variety of stories, novels, and films that rework aspects of Brontë’s vision. Students study the context of each revision and its commentary on the original text and examine shifts in the critical and feminist reception of these texts. Texts vary, but are selected from the following: Braddon, Gissing, James, Woolf, Forster, du Maurier, Rhys, Kincaid, Balasubramanyam, Winterson. Students produce both creative and analytic work.