Courses

Courses by semester

Courses for Fall 2023

Complete Cornell University course descriptions are in the Courses of Study .

Course ID Title Offered
FGSS1100 FWS: Topics in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies
This course offers students the opportunity to study a wide range of fields from the perspectives of feminist and LGBT critical analysis, in a global context and with the purpose of promoting social justice. Our first-year writing seminars investigate how gender and sexuality are embedded in cultural, social, and political formations. FGSS pays close attention to the complex structures of power and inequality, tracing intersections and relationships among sexuality, race, class, age, ethnicity, and other aspects of identity within their specific contexts of history and geography. Topics vary by section.

Full details for FGSS 1100 - FWS: Topics in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Fall.
FGSS2010 Introduction to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies is an interdisciplinary program focused on understanding the impact of gender and sexuality on the world around us and on the power hierarchies that structure it. This course provides an overview of key concepts, questions, and debates within feminist studies both locally and globally, focusing mainly on the experiences, historical conditions, and concerns of women as they are shaped by gender and sexuality. We will read a variety of texts--personal narratives, historical documents, and cultural criticism--across a range of disciplines, and will consider how larger structural systems of both privilege and oppression affect individuals' identities, experiences, and options. We will also examine forms of agency and action taken by women in the face of these larger systems.

Full details for FGSS 2010 - Introduction to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Fall, Spring.
FGSS2160 Television
In this introductory course, participants will study the economic and technological history of the television industry, with a particular emphasis on its manifestations in the United States and the United Kingdom; the changing shape of the medium of television over time and in ever-wider global contexts; the social meanings, political stakes, and ideological effects of the medium; and the major methodological tools and critical concepts used in the interpretation of the medium, including Marxist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches. Two to three hours of television viewing per week will be accompanied by short, sometimes dense readings, as well as written exercises.

Full details for FGSS 2160 - Television

Fall.
FGSS2281 Gender, Family, and Confucianism in East Asia
This course offers a broad understanding of the crucial roles East Asian women played in culture, the economy, and society from antiquity to the early twentieth century. By rethinking the pervasive stereotype of the passive and victimized East Asian women under by staunch Confucian patriarchy, it aims to examine women's struggles, negotiations, and challenges of the normative discourse of femininity, with a focus on patrilineal family, the female body and reproduction, domesticity and women's economic labor, women's work, literacy and knowledge, and the modernization of women. We will examine how Confucian notions of gender and family were, far from being fixed, constantly redefined by the historical and temporal needs of East Asian contexts. This examination is undertaken through a combination of reading original texts and secondary scholarship in various disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, history, literature, and material culture.

Full details for FGSS 2281 - Gender, Family, and Confucianism in East Asia

Fall.
FGSS2421 Worlding Sex and Gender
An introduction to the anthropology of sex, sexuality and gender, this course uses case studies from around the world to explore how the worlds of the sexes become gendered. In ethnographic, ethnohistorical and contemporary globalizing contexts, we will look at: intersexuality and supernumerary genders; physical and cultural reproduction; sexuality; and sex-based and gender-based violence and power. We will use lectures, films, discussion sections and short field-based exercises.

Full details for FGSS 2421 - Worlding Sex and Gender

Fall.
FGSS2665 Octavia Butler
MacArthur "Genius" grant winner Octavia Butler is famously known as a science fiction writer, but her novels, short stories and essays both adhere to and disrupt expectations in the genre. Throughout her writing career, Butler explored themes of space travel, time travel, African indigeneity, gender, race, spirituality, and ecological degradation. This class, will introduce students to Octavia Butler's work and the creative fields she helped spawn. Additionally, we will investigate and contextualize these themes alongside the scholarly fields of Black feminist studies, the environmental humanities, Black speculation fiction, Afrofuturism, disability studies and more!

Full details for FGSS 2665 - Octavia Butler

Fall or Spring.
FGSS3000 Feminist Theory
This course will work across and between the disciplines to consider what it might mean to think 'as a feminist' about many things including, but not limited to 'gender', 'women' and 'sexuality'. We will approach theory as a tool for analyzing relations of power and a means of transforming ways of thinking and living. In particular, we will investigate the cultural, social, and historical assumptions that shape the possibilities and problematics of gender and sexuality. Throughout we will attend to specific histories of class, race, ethnicity, culture, nation, religion and sexuality, with an eye to their particular incitements to and challenges for feminist thinking and politics.

Full details for FGSS 3000 - Feminist Theory

Fall.
FGSS3160 Gender Inequality
The course will explore gender inequality from a social structural framework, connecting it with inequality in other intersecting areas of social life such as race, class, and sexuality. It fits with the departments strengths in the study of inequality and focuses on a key area of sociological study (gender) in relation with other intersecting structures such as race, class, and sexuality and intersecting domains such as work, family, and politics. It will also give students an opportunity to explore sociological thinking and sense of how social scientists thing about evidence, what the standards of evidence are in the social sciences, and the promises and shortcoming of various methodological tools for studying the social world.

Full details for FGSS 3160 - Gender Inequality

Fall.
FGSS3230 Gender and Development
The United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal 5 states that countries should "Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls" by 2030. In this course, we unpack the different and often competing definitions of 'empowerment' and 'gender equality' deployed in development, and consider the historical lineages of feminisms and development theory that led to women and girls as an important constituency. We examine the programs and policies associated with these lineages and consider how women's and girls' intersectional experiences of gender, shape the outcomes of the programs and policies designed to improve their lives. This course blends practice and theory, encouraging students to evaluate the material effects of diverse approaches to reducing gender inequality through case studies, writing, and readings in gender and development.

Full details for FGSS 3230 - Gender and Development

Fall.
FGSS3334 Black Body Politics: Histories, Theories, and Debates
The body has been crucially important to Black liberation politics. Not only has it been a site of contestation and control, but it has also served as a productive site of protest, alliance, and collective action, in ways both real and imagined. This course explores the historical debates and theories surrounding the body with a particular focus on how blackness informs bodily meanings and negotiations across the African diaspora. Weekly topics will allow students to consider the metaphorical and material dimensions of the body while also interrogating the very concept of embodiment, the ways in which individual bodies are constituted and reconstituted over time.

Full details for FGSS 3334 - Black Body Politics: Histories, Theories, and Debates

Fall.
FGSS3400 Refugees and the Politics of Vulnerability: Intersections of Feminist Theory and Practice
Topic Fall 2023: Learning from Movements: Refuge, Asylum, & Activism. Learning from Movements highlights refugee-led organizing and its intersections with un/documented and Indigenous beyond borders activism. We will work with and learn from refugee and asylum seekers led organizations that are started by and run by members of formerly displaced groups. These organizations build collectives and coalitions to organize communities across identities and legal categories and advocate for access to mobility and social justice. We will closely collaborate with these organizations and work on joint research projects.

Full details for FGSS 3400 - Refugees and the Politics of Vulnerability: Intersections of Feminist Theory and Practice

Fall.
FGSS3520 (Dis)ability Studies: A Brief History
This course will offer an overview of theoretical and historical responses to bodily and cognitive difference. What was the status of people with (dis)abilities in the past, when they were called monsters, freaks, abnormal? How are all of these concepts related, and how have they changed over time? How have we moved from isolation and institutionalization towards universal design and accessibility as the dominant concepts relative to (dis)ability? Why is this shift from focusing on individual differences as a negative attribute to reshaping our architectural and more broadly social constructions important to everyone? Authors to be studied include: Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, and Jasbir Puar.

Full details for FGSS 3520 - (Dis)ability Studies: A Brief History

Fall.
FGSS3588 Creating Renaissance Man (and Woman)
This course is dedicated to studying important works of literature that address what it means, in the Renaissance, to strive for excellence as a man or as a woman, especially in the public sphere and in love.

Full details for FGSS 3588 - Creating Renaissance Man (and Woman)

Spring.
FGSS3636 Queer Classics
This course engages classical antiquity and its reception through the prism of queer studies. Cruising Homer, Sappho, Euripides, Plato, Ovid and more, we will explore how queer theoretical frameworks help us account for premodern queer and trans bodies, desires, experiences, and aesthetics. We will trace how people historically have engaged with the classical past in political and affective projects of writing queer history and literature, constructing identities and communities, and imagining queer futures. We will unpack how classical scholarship might reproduce contemporary forms of homophobia and transphobia in its treatments of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in the classical past, and in turn how modern uses of the classical might reinforce or dismantle exclusionary narratives around 'queerness' today as it intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and class. Finally, we will consider how the work we are doing in this class (where the 'Queer' in 'Queer Classics' may be taken as an adjective or an imperative) relates to the ways that contemporary writers, activists, artists, and performers have animated the classical past with queer possibilities. All readings will be in translation; no knowledge of Latin and Greek is required.

Full details for FGSS 3636 - Queer Classics

Fall.
FGSS3686 Feminism and Islam in North Africa
The course is a survey of Feminist Islamic thinkers from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, and their diaspora, featuring both French and Arabic texts in English translation. The purpose of the course is to critically explore the competing treatment of major gendered tropes in a Muslim context (the veil, the harem, polygamy, etc.) by North African thinkers, through their examination of qur'anic surats/hadiths, the evolution of tafsirs (tradion of qur'anic exegesis) as well as their conflicting approaches to secular western feminism. Readings might include: Fatema Mernissi, Asmaa Lamrabet, Qasim Amin, Naguib Mahfoud, Assia Djebar, Mona Eltahawy, and Nawal El-Saadawi.

Full details for FGSS 3686 - Feminism and Islam in North Africa

Fall.
FGSS3990 Undergraduate Independent Study
Individual study program intended for juniors and seniors working on special topics with selected reading or research projects not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with a FGSS faculty member who has agreed to supervise the independent study.

Full details for FGSS 3990 - Undergraduate Independent Study

Fall.
FGSS4153 Topics in Feminist Media Arts
Topic: Cyberfeminism in the Visual Arts; What was/is cyberfeminism? In this seminar, we will investigate the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of the accelerated technological developments of the latter half of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990's, critics have identified numerous manifestations in the visual arts as cyberfeminist yet this art sits uneasily between the histories of media arts, feminist, and activist art. Artistic production categorized as cyberfeminist centers on digital media and can expand to art in earlier media. We will explore the relation of cyberfeminism to current and previous feminist art and theory.

Full details for FGSS 4153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

Fall.
FGSS4265 Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World
This seminar explores the intertwined histories of sex, sexuality, and gender at the intersection of major themes in American transnational and global history: race, labour, empire, and the state. What would a queer history of American foreign relations look like? How has the legacy of sexual violence in plantation slavery underwritten the systems – such as private property, police power, white supremacy, and carcerality -- that structure modern American society and its international entanglements? How can a focus on gender help us to better understand the contemporary challenges of globalisation and the Anthropocene? Uncovering the pasts of the most marginalised historical actors – enslaved women, rape victims, trans and queer people – requires innovative methodologies and new relationships to the archive. In this seminar, then, we will also think about how we do gender history, and develop tools for reading, writing and researching that take us beyond the boundaries of the written record and into the realm of the speculative, the spectral, and the imaginary.

Full details for FGSS 4265 - Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World

Fall.
FGSS4333 The Velvet Underground Archive
The Velvet Underground remains one of the most acclaimed and influential rock groups to emerge within the culturally turbulent era of the late 1960s. From their association with Andy Warhol beginning in 1965, to their last recorded performance with Lou Reed in August 1970, the Velvet Underground revitalized rock 'n' roll as streetwise outsider art.  Lyrics tell of hard drugs, hustlers, and queer and transgender lives, while the music ranges from noise, drones, feedback, and minimalism to edgy pop tunes. In 2015 Cornell University acquired a substantial archive of Velvet Underground material, including rare photographs, posters, flyers, handwritten lyrics, rare recordings, and ephemera.  The first segment of this course will delve into music, lyrics, and the performance art of the Velvet Underground as an archive of underground and dissident art and identities in New York City; the second segment of the course will be devoted to working with the Cornell Velvet Underground Archive to develop student projects. This course is open to graduate students and fourth-year undergraduates by permission. Undergraduates should contact the instructor before enrolling.

Full details for FGSS 4333 - The Velvet Underground Archive

Fall.
FGSS4338 Queer Histories of North Africa
In this course, we will explore the history of queer lives and activism in Northern Africa. Today in most North African counties same-sex sexual activities are illegal and many LGBTQ+ people choose to hide their sexual orientation from large parts of their communities for fear of social discrimination, family rejection, violence, or murder. Historically speaking, then, queer desire and relationships have been restricted to sexually-segregated spaces in the private sphere. But queer people have been part of every major protest movement since the 1960s, and have struggled, more recently, for legal rights, including the right to marry, to organize, and to press charges when they are discriminated against. To recover the rich history of queer people and struggles in this understudied region of the African continent, we will look at primary sources, as well as historical monographs, film, fiction, music, and graphic novels.

Full details for FGSS 4338 - Queer Histories of North Africa

Fall.
FGSS4451 Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema
Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writings in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Full details for FGSS 4451 - Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema

Fall.
FGSS4460 Women in the Economy
Examines the changing economic roles of women and men in the labor market and in the family. Topics include a historical overview of changing gender roles, the determinants of the gender division of labor in the family, trends in female and male labor-force participation, gender differences in occupations and earnings, the consequences of women's employment for the family, and a consideration of women's status in other countries.

Full details for FGSS 4460 - Women in the Economy

Fall or Spring.
FGSS4685 Feeling Free: Radical Aesthetics and Political Affects
This course studies how radical movements mobilize both aesthetic and affect in their political organizing. Broadly, the study of aesthetics concerns how we experience beauty in the world. Affect studies considers how our experience of the world operates at the level of sensation and feeling. For cultural workers from minoritized communities, how one feels and how one creates are linked and influenced by structures of power. "Feeling Free" considers how affect and aesthetic construct one another, cross over into each other, and how both are used in political action and radical movements. It looks especially to theories of affect and aesthetic that prioritize intersectional analyses regarding race, class, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity.

Full details for FGSS 4685 - Feeling Free: Radical Aesthetics and Political Affects

Fall.
FGSS4686 Textures of Friendship: Ethics, Politics, Crossings
We all have friends and value the company of others, but what does it mean to be in a friendship? Against the backdrop of our contemporary moment characterized by borders, oppression, and injustice, this course explores political imaginations and potentialities of friendship practices across borders (ethnic, religious, national, even species) as well as the forms of risks that they articulate. The disciplinary diversity of readings in this course aims at preparing students for completing a short-term ethnographic project on friendships on campus.

Full details for FGSS 4686 - Textures of Friendship: Ethics, Politics, Crossings

Fall.
FGSS4687 Trans Theory and Politics Across the Americas
This richly interdisciplinary course examines trans issues in the transnational context of North and South America. Focusing on the tensions and cross-pollinations of (especially US and Canadian) trans studies and (especially Argentinian) travesti theory, the course equips students to engage in critical epistemologies, to practice philosophical and cross-cultural analyses, and to attend to the nuances of language, law, and lived experience.

Full details for FGSS 4687 - Trans Theory and Politics Across the Americas

Fall.
FGSS4948 Pleasure and Neoliberalism
The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world through the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical, literary, and filmic reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, race, gender, and queerness. We highlight and conceptualize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking and deep attention to writing, you will refine your conceptual accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.

Full details for FGSS 4948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism

Fall.
FGSS4990 Senior Honors Thesis I
To graduate with honors, FGSS majors must complete a senior thesis under the supervision of an FGSS faculty member and defend that thesis orally before an honors committee. To be eligible for honors, students must have at least a cumulative GPA of 3.3 in all course work and a 3.5 average in all courses applying to their FGSS major. Students interested in the honors program should consult the DUS late in the spring semester of their junior year or very early in the fall semester of their senior year.

Full details for FGSS 4990 - Senior Honors Thesis I

Fall.
FGSS6153 Topics in Feminist Media Arts
Topic: Cyberfeminism in the Visual Arts; What was/is cyberfeminism? In this seminar, we will investigate the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of the accelerated technological developments of the latter half of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990's, critics have identified numerous manifestations in the visual arts as cyberfeminist yet this art sits uneasily between the histories of media arts, feminist, and activist art. Artistic production categorized as cyberfeminist centers on digital media and can expand to art in earlier media. We will explore the relation of cyberfeminism to current and previous feminist art and theory.

Full details for FGSS 6153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

Fall.
FGSS6265 Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World
This seminar explores the intertwined histories of sex, sexuality, and gender at the intersection of major themes in American transnational and global history: race, labour, empire, and the state. What would a queer history of American foreign relations look like? How has the legacy of sexual violence in plantation slavery underwritten the systems – such as private property, police power, white supremacy, and carcerality -- that structure modern American society and its international entanglements? How can a focus on gender help us to better understand the contemporary challenges of globalisation and the Anthropocene? Uncovering the pasts of the most marginalised historical actors – enslaved women, rape victims, trans and queer people – requires innovative methodologies and new relationships to the archive. In this seminar, then, we will also think about how we do gender history, and develop tools for reading, writing and researching that take us beyond the boundaries of the written record and into the realm of the speculative, the spectral, and the imaginary.

Full details for FGSS 6265 - Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World

Fall.
FGSS6331 Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema
Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writings in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Full details for FGSS 6331 - Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema

Fall.
FGSS6333 The Velvet Underground Archive
The Velvet Underground remains one of the most acclaimed and influential rock groups to emerge within the culturally turbulent era of the late 1960s. From their association with Andy Warhol beginning in 1965, to their last recorded performance with Lou Reed in August 1970, the Velvet Underground revitalized rock 'n' roll as streetwise outsider art.  Lyrics tell of hard drugs, hustlers, and queer and transgender lives, while the music ranges from noise, drones, feedback, and minimalism to edgy pop tunes. In 2015 Cornell University acquired a substantial archive of Velvet Underground material, including rare photographs, posters, flyers, handwritten lyrics, rare recordings, and ephemera.  The first segment of this course will delve into music, lyrics, and the performance art of the Velvet Underground as an archive of underground and dissident art and identities in New York City; the second segment of the course will be devoted to working with the Cornell Velvet Underground Archive to develop student projects. This course is open to graduate students and fourth-year undergraduates by permission. Undergraduates should contact the instructor before enrolling.

Full details for FGSS 6333 - The Velvet Underground Archive

Fall.
FGSS6685 Feeling Free: Radical Aesthetics and Political Affects
This course studies how radical movements mobilize both aesthetic and affect in their political organizing. Broadly, the study of aesthetics concerns how we experience beauty in the world. Affect studies considers how our experience of the world operates at the level of sensation and feeling. For cultural workers from minoritized communities, how one feels and how one creates are linked and influenced by structures of power. "Feeling Free" considers how affect and aesthetic construct one another, cross over into each other, and how both are used in political action and radical movements. It looks especially to theories of affect and aesthetic that prioritize intersectional analyses regarding race, class, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity.

Full details for FGSS 6685 - Feeling Free: Radical Aesthetics and Political Affects

Fall.
FGSS6686 Textures of Friendship: Ethics, Politics, Crossings
We all have friends and value the company of others, but what does it mean to be in a friendship? Against the backdrop of our contemporary moment characterized by borders, oppression, and injustice, this course explores political imaginations and potentialities of friendship practices across borders (ethnic, religious, national, even species) as well as the forms of risks that they articulate. The disciplinary diversity of readings in this course aims at preparing students for completing a short-term ethnographic project on friendships on campus.

Full details for FGSS 6686 - Textures of Friendship: Ethics, Politics, Crossings

Fall.
FGSS6687 Trans Theory and Politics Across the Americas
This richly interdisciplinary course examines trans issues in the transnational context of North and South America. Focusing on the tensions and cross-pollinations of (especially US and Canadian) trans studies and (especially Argentinian) travesti theory, the course equips students to engage in critical epistemologies, to practice philosophical and cross-cultural analyses, and to attend to the nuances of language, law, and lived experience.

Full details for FGSS 6687 - Trans Theory and Politics Across the Americas

Fall.
FGSS6741 German Critical Theory and American Radical Thought
This seminar explores the nexus of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and American Black and queer thought. While the legacy of the Frankfurt school (Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) is often traced forward to the work of Juergen Habermas and other contemporary Germans, there is another on-going and more radical legacy taking place in American Black and queer thought. This seminar will look at central texts of Critical Theory and their resonances (as both expansion and critique) in contemporary Black and queer thinking. We will create dialogues around themes such as: Adorno, Fumi Okiji, and Fred Moten on jazz & music; Bloch and José Estaban Muñoz on hope and utopia; Marcuse and Angela Davis on liberation; Adorno and Oshrat Silberbusch on the non-identical as resistance, etc.

Full details for FGSS 6741 - German Critical Theory and American Radical Thought

Fall.
FGSS6948 Pleasure and Neoliberalism
The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world through the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical, literary, and filmic reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, race, gender, and queerness. We highlight and conceptualize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking and deep attention to writing, you will refine your conceptual accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.

Full details for FGSS 6948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism

Fall.
FGSS6990 Topics in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Independent reading course for graduate students on topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students develop a course of readings in consultation with a faculty member in the field of Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for FGSS 6990 - Topics in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Fall, Spring.
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