By posing seemingly simple questions such as what is love and who has the right to love, this introductory-level lecture course surveys how love has been experienced and expressed from the pre-modern period to the present. Through case studies of familial and conjugal love in Africa, Asia, the US, Europe, and South and Latin America, the course will examine the debates about and enactment's of what constitutes the appropriate way to show love and affection in different cultures and historical contexts. Among the themes we will explore are questions of sexuality, marriage, kinship, and gender rights. A final unit will examine these themes through modern technologies such as the Internet, scientific advances in medicine, and a growing awareness that who and how we love is anything but simple or universal. (ASIAN-GE, HIST-HTR)

Full details for FGSS 1940 - A Global History of Love

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 We will read a variety of texts--personal narratives, historical documents, and cultural criticism--across a range of disciplines, and will consider how larger structural systems of both privilege and oppression affect individuals'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

This course offers an introduction to central issues, debates, and theories that characterize the field of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Studies. Starting from the assumption that neither sex nor sexuality is a private experience or category, we will explore some of the ways that these powerfully public and political terms have circulated in social, legal, economic, and cultural spheres. We will also examine how these categories are situated in relation to other formative categories including race, ethnicity, religion, family, marriage, reproduction, the economy, and the state. Using a comparative and intersectional approach, we will read from various disciplines to assess the tools that LGBT studies offers for understanding power and culture in our contemporary world.

Full details for FGSS 2290 - Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies

Medicine has become the language and practice through which we address a broad range of both individual and societal complaints. Interest in this medicalization of life may be one of the reasons that medical anthropology is currently the fastest-growing subfield in anthropology. This course encourages students to examine concepts of disease, suffering, health, and well-being in their immediate experience and beyond. In the process, students will gain a working knowledge of ecological, critical, phenomenological, and applied approaches used by medical anthropologists. We will investigate what is involved in becoming a doctor, the sociality of medicines, controversies over new medical technologies, and the politics of medical knowledge. The universality of biomedicine, or hospital medicine, will not be taken for granted, but rather we will examine the plurality generated by the various political, economic, social, and ethical demands under which biomedicine has developed in different places and at different times. In addition, biomedical healing and expertise will be viewed in relation to other kinds of healing and expertise. Our readings will address medicine in North America as well as other parts of the world. In class, our discussions will return regularly to consider the broad diversity of kinds of medicine throughout the world, as well as the specific historical and local contexts of biomedicine.

Full details for FGSS 2468 - Medicine, Culture, and Society

While the march toward the Civil War centers race in our recollection of the nineteenth century, the question of slavery’s abolition was deeply intertwined with issues of gender and citizenship. One challenge of narrating these interwoven movements is accounting for the embodied intersection of these debates: Black women. This introductory course approaches the complexities of antebellum America through 5 prominent figures of the period bearing the same first name—Harriet Robinson Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Wilson. Read together, these women illuminate the nuances of racialized and gendered belonging in the United States. Their literary and historical traces also invite engagements with Black feminist reading and archival praxes. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for FGSS 2505 - Reading Harriet: An Introduction to Race, Gender, and Belonging in the Antebellum United States

This course focuses on the human condition of Chinese women after 1949. In the name of the Women's liberation movement since the early 1900s, do Chinese women eventually hold up the half sky? From the cradle to the grave, what was most challenging in women's life? How did political, economic, and cultural forces frame women's professional careers and private life? No judgments nor imaginations. Using multi-media, such as Chinese independent documentary films, music, and photographs, students will discover the hidden stories behind the mainstream narratives. Workshops with film directors, pop music singers, and photographers offer students an unusual way of accessing all backstage field experiences. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)

Full details for FGSS 2575 - Tyranny and Dignity: Chinese Women from the Cultural Revolution to the White Paper Protests

What does it mean to be queer in the Middle East? How do queer Muslims and Arabs navigate their sexuality around contemporary legal barriers to same-sex sexual intercourse and social disapprobation? How do the sexual and emotional lives of contemporary queer Muslims and Arabs differ or resemble the lives of people in the pre-modern period? Taking students from the dawn of Islam to the current day, this course charts the history of sex, sexuality, the family and queerness in the Middle East. Along the way, students will learn about Islamic legal and scriptural approaches to sexuality, the importance of sexuality to the propagation of colonialism and empire, post-colonial approaches to sexuality and sexual difference and beyond. (HIST-HGS)

Full details for FGSS 2727 - The Queer Middle East

Why are boys more likely than girls to be diagnosed with autism, and why are women more likely than men to be diagnosed with depression? Are there different gay and straight brains? And how does brain science interact with gender and sexuality in popular debate? Reading and discussing the original scientific papers and related critical texts, we will delve into the neuroscience of gender. In this course, we will delve into the neuroscience of gender difference. Reading the original scientific papers and related critical texts, we will ask whether we can find measurable physical differences in male and female brains, and what these differences might be. Do men and women solve spatial puzzles differently, as measured physiologically? Do nonhuman animals display sex-specific behaviors mediated by brain structure, and can we extrapolate these findings to human behavior? Why are boys three times more likely than girls to be diagnosed as autistic, and is there any connection between the predominantly male phenomenon of autism and other stereotypically male mental traits? Are there physical representations of sexual orientation in the brain, and how are these related to gender identity? And how are scientific studies represented and misrepresented in popular debate?

Full details for FGSS 3210 - Gender and the Brain

This course will examine the ways in which sex and gender impact the expression of severe psychopathology. We will try to understand these relationships using different levels of analysis. This will involve an exploration of biological, psychological, cognitive, and social factors associated with sex and gender as they influence the epidemiology, phenomenology, etiology, diagnosis, and course of illness in major forms of psychopathology: specifically, schizophrenia, major affective illness, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and personality disorders. We will examine these topics through the frameworks of psychological science, feminism, and intersectionality, and attempt to integrate the offerings of each, to generate a nuanced understanding of mental illness.

Full details for FGSS 3320 - Gender and Psychopathology

This popular course was introduced here at Cornell a decade ago. This year will mark the third time that we’ve been able to offer it, in light of all the moving parts and unique components that pulling it off requires. Beyoncé’s recent albums and related tours, namely Renaissance and Cowboy Carter, have taken her iconicity to new heights evidenced in contexts from the 2024 Olympics to advertisements for Levi’s Jeans. Her song “Freedom” from her Lemonade album was the anthem for the 2024 presidential campaign of Vice President of Kamala Harris. As a musical artist, Beyoncé emerged at the forefront of activism during the past decade, and helped to advocate for a more inclusive vision of the U.S. as a nation, while drawing attention to the long-overlooked contributions of African Americans to the genre of country music. All of these dimensions of her artistry and many more are important to study in order to understand her national and global impact. In this course, we examine her contributions, along with various figures connected to her, including her closest family. Beyoncé’s trajectory from Houston, Texas as a member of the group Destiny's Child to international fame and superstardom and a successful career as a solo singer, actress, clothing designer and entrepreneur holds important implications for critical dialogues on the U.S. South and national femininity. We will carefully trace Beyoncé's journey to global fame and iconicity and the roles of the music business, social media and technology, fashion, and film in her development.

Full details for FGSS 3350 - Beyoncé Nation: The Decennium

Social Justice: Special Topics explores feminist, anthropological, and interdisciplinary perspectives on social justice. It connects domestic and international concerns and fosters active and engaged learning, research, and discovery.

Full details for FGSS 3400 - Social Justice: Special Topics

?My existence is a scandal,? Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of ?art for art?s sake? and all that was considered exquisite, ironic, or obscene, the Decadent aesthetes of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of language, beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional moral strictures. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, and especially Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, fashion, and design, including music by Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss and artworks by James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustave Moreau. (ENGL-PST)

Full details for FGSS 3550 - Decadence

Mainstream media would have us believe that driving a new Toyota Prius, recycling, and shopping clean at Whole Foods would make us all food environmentalists, right? Additionally, climate change and environmental degradation are often discussed as if they are phenomena that affect us all equally. Despite these dynamics, research in recent years tells us that while there might be some general ways that we experience our constantly changing physical environments-race, gender, and location very much affect how we experience Nature. In this course we will use literature from across the African diaspora to investigate how looking at race, gender, and location produces very different ideas about environment, environmentalism, and Nature itself.

Full details for FGSS 3565 - Black Ecoliterature

This course examines a range of issues surrounding the experience of gender in the modern workplace. Topics will include such things as the historical role of gender in the workplace and workplace sex segregation; norms of masculinity; the intersectionality of issues including race, gender identity, and disability; gendered legal issues; work-family issues; pay equity; gender discrimination; harassment and bullying; union representation; and many others. Students will be exposed to both research and practical applications of various topics.

Full details for FGSS 3820 - The Gendered Workplace

This senior seminar constitutes the culmination of the FGSS major-it provides a unique opportunity to come together with all the other FGSS seniors to both put to use what has been learned and explore new aspects of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. In this particular seminar, we will attempt to answer, in short, the question of what it means to be a feminist today, at this point in time and place. Pursuing the intersections of theory and practice, we will explore issues and concerns in the areas that you have identified as central to your concept and/or critique of feminism.

Full details for FGSS 4000 - Senior Seminar in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

A recognition of the importance of intersectionality has become increasingly key to not only understand the complexity of social identity and lived experience, but to combat discrimination and oppression. While the course has a centering focus on the disability experience-in part because of the way in which disability is often left out of intersectional considerations-it will reveal how the economic, legal, and political structures of power and privilege that disadvantage people with disabilities cannot be looked at on a disability-specific basis alone. Thus we will give necessary attention to the disability experience as it overlaps and connects with lived experiences of race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and citizenship, among others. In looking particularly at the realms of employment, education, the law, and health care, we will explore the efficacy of legal and policy initiatives that are already in place, and in doing so, strongly consider the growing need for, and value of, intersectional approaches to discrimination and oppression.

Full details for FGSS 4035 - Intersectional Disability Studies

This seminar addresses the intersection of communication, culture, and identity through an examination of gender and the U.S. media system. After introducing students to key approaches to studying gender and mediated communication, the course will cover topics in four subunits: (1). Mediated representations of gender, sexuality, and intersectionality; (2). Diversity in media industries and gendered labor markets; (3). Gendered audiences and fan cultures; and (4). Gender, power, and identity in a digital era of communication. We will explore these topics through literature from sociology, communication and media studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and internet/new media studies.

Full details for FGSS 4260 - Gender and Media

Feminist approaches to questions in metaphysics, epistemology, language, and value theory.

Full details for FGSS 4491 - Feminism and Philosophy

How has history shaped our notion of Black girlhood? What is our collective understanding of Black girlhood? How do we see and understand Black girls? Black Girlhood Studies is a multidisciplinary field that draws on education, literature, psychological, and sociological perspectives as tools to see and honor Black girls' lived experiences. In this seminar course, we will use a mixture of lectures and facilitated discussions to provide an overview of Black girlhood as it relates to historical and current-day social, political, and cultural constructions of Black girlhood within and beyond the United States. We will also interrogate how Black girls deconstruct and interrupt these social constructions by engaging in scholarly works, popular press articles, poetry, music, film, and novels. Throughout the course, we will make space to imagine a world where Black girls' ways of knowing, being, and experiencing the world are honored.

Full details for FGSS 4561 - Black Girlhood Studies: Rememory, Representation, and Re-Imagination

In this upper-level undergraduate/graduate seminar, students will analyze the survival strategies employed by people (of color) assigned female at birth as they perform versions of queer masculinities—on stage, on screen, in literature, in visual culture, and in everyday life.

Full details for FGSS 4702 - Performing Queer Masculinities

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 4991 - Senior Honors Thesis II

What forms of feminist justice and futurity might we envision on a burning planet, scorched by climate breakdown, forest fires, plantations, the retrenchment of nation-state borders, and a toxic thirst for oil and self-devouring economic growth? How are feminist thinkers theorizing the relations that characterize this inhumane era in which we now find ourselves? This course begins with theorizations of the planetary condition from the Great Acceleration since World War II to world systems mired in the inheritance of genocide and enslavement. It then branches to contemporary feminist studies on trafficking, capitalists, monocrops, and technology.

Full details for FGSS 6020 - Feminism for an Inhumane Age

In this upper-level undergraduate/graduate seminar, students will analyze the survival strategies employed by people (of color) assigned female at birth as they perform versions of queer masculinities—on stage, on screen, in literature, in visual culture, and in everyday life.

Full details for FGSS 6702 - Performing Queer Masculinities

This course offers an introduction to theoretical and practical aspects of the interdisciplinary field of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, providing graduate students with a range of disciplinary approaches and issues. We will explore both the disciplinary specifics of FGSS scholarship and the interdisciplinary breadth of gender/sexuality's reach as an analytic lens. While many of our graduate courses train students in highly specialized areas of feminist theory, this course aims to teach students how to find common intellectual ground from interdisciplinary perspectives without sacrificing the complexity of any disciplinary approach.

Full details for FGSS 6880 - Proseminar in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies