Courses

Online communication is becoming increasingly part of our daily interactions. This course examines the ways that feminism is talked about in the age of social media.  How do different online communities discuss feminist issues? What presuppositions are present in those discussions and who is the audience? Who decides what counts as feminism? Whose voices are being listened to (and why)? How does the internet medium affect the discourse?  This course will draw on the academic literature of both feminist/ gender studies and linguistics as well as nonacademic sources from current media to examine these questions. While we study the structure of online arguments, we will identify argumentation strategies that can be used to communicate more effectively in both academic writing and broader contexts.

Full details for FGSS 1113 - FWS: Social Justice Warriors and Cosmo: Online Feminist Discourse

Why did disco music emerge in gay, black communities? How did Riot Grrrls bring "girls to the front" of punk shows? From hip-hop to musical theater, from Dolly Parton to Prince, we will listen to a wide range of U.S. popular music and watch music videos as we explore how LGBTQ individuals and communities use sound to navigate identity and desire. Written histories and criticism by and about queer musicians and fans will help us to understand what "queer" means, while honing our close reading skills. Through personal narratives and multi-draft essays, we will practice writing about music and develop critical arguments about how popular music mediates queerness as identity, practice, and politics.

Full details for FGSS 1114 - FWS: Queer Identity and Popular Music

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.

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 a broad understanding of the active and dynamic cultural, economic, and social, and political roles played by Chinese women. By challenging the dominant stereotype of the passive and victimized Chinese woman, this course aims to examine women's struggles, negotiations, and challenges of the normative discourse of femininity and domesticity in terms of various disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, history, and literature. Through a combination of reading original texts with secondary scholarship, this course will discuss the issues of Confucianism and patriarchal family, the female body and sexuality, education and self-expression, women's work and religious activities, gender and the state, the modernization of women, etc.

Full details for FGSS 2267 - Women and Society in China

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 & 'supernumerary' genders; physical & cultural reproduction; sexuality; and sex- & gender-based violence & power. We will use lectures, films, discussion sections and short field-based exercises.

Full details for FGSS 2421 - Sex and Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective

The importance of sports to American society and popular culture cannot be denied, and this seminar will study sports films' vital significance in representing the intersection of sports, history, and social identities.  This seminar explores how the role of competition between individuals and teams in sports films relate to the competing discourses on race, gender, class, and sexuality in society at large. Additionally, we will examine how social issues are understood in sporting terms and concepts, such as: the hero and the underdog; urban and rural; natural talent versus hard work; and the individual versus team identity.

Full details for FGSS 2501 - Playing out Difference: History and Identity in Sports Film

This course explores the social, cultural and communal lives of black women in North America, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade, and ending in 1900. Topics include Northern and Southern enslavement, first freedoms in the North, Southern emancipation, color consciousness, gener-cross racially and issues of class.

Full details for FGSS 2511 - Black Women to 1900

How did the ancient Greeks and Romans understand differences in gender and sexuality? And how did their gendered identities intersect with other identity categories, like race, class, and citizenship status? In this introductory course we will explore these questions using a wide-ranging selection of philosophy, literature, medical writing, legal texts, magic spells, and material evidence. We will also ask how ancient ideas about sex and gender have influenced our own construction of these categories, and investigate the consequences of modern identification with antiquity. No prior knowledge about the ancient world is required, and all readings will be in English.

Full details for FGSS 2633 - Sex, Gender, and Identity in Ancient Greece and Rome

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

Blaxploitation films of the 1970s are remembered for their gigantic Afros, enormous guns, slammin' soundtracks, sex, drugs, nudity, and violence. Never before or since have so many African American performers been featured in starring roles. Macho male images were projected alongside strong, yet sexually submissive female ones. But how did these images affect the roles that black men and women played on and off the screen and the portrayal of the black body in contemporary society? This interdisciplinary course explores the range of ideas and methods used by critical thinkers in addressing the body in art, film, photography and the media. We will consider how the display of the black body affects how we see and interpret the world by examining the construction of beauty, fashion, hairstyles and gendered images as well as sexuality, violence, race, and hip-hop culture.

Full details for FGSS 3505 - Blaxploitation Film and Photography

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

This course provides an introduction to the theoretical and empirical literature on the sociology of sex and gender. The readings cover theory and methods, feminism, masculinity, intersectionality, international/comparative perspectives, gender roles, and recent sociological research in this area.

Full details for FGSS 4371 - Sociology of Sex and Gender

Hip hop has been dependent on women's contributions, yet female artists have had to work hard to contest their marginalization and objectification in the music and culture. Some of the most heated debates surrounding feminism, identity politics, and Black women are framed within the broad contours of hip hop. This course will explore how women are portrayed in hip hop music and culture, addressing women both as consumers and producers. We will draw on texts that analyze misogyny in hip hop music and music videos, while also looking at how both mainstream and peripheral female artists use hip hop to affirm their sexual power, articulate Black feminism, and create spaces for their artistic expression. We will utilize Black feminist theory, performance studies, and queer of color critique to complicate the ways in which women, gender, and sexuality are represented in hip hop music. While our analyses will center on music and on the United States, we will also consider art, fashion, and dance within Black, Latina, and Caribbean interactions with hip hop. We will investigate how youth construct gender and ethnic identities as they negotiate notions of African Diasporic belonging vis-à-vis hip hop. We will employ ethnographic, historical, sociological, literary, and interdisciplinary texts to explore these topics.

Full details for FGSS 4402 - Women in Hip Hop

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 from 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 will be 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

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

This seminar will investigate the narrative uses of history and memory in US fiction, focusing particularly on the impact of gender on these representations. How do US writers use history in their fiction, and to what ends? What are the effects on drawing on received historical narratives and what are the effects of constructing one's own history to fill a void in the received historical narrative? What's the difference between history and fiction, anyway? We will start from such questions in order to explore the extent to which history—personal or public—is produced by memory and reshaped by fiction. Authors under consideration may include: Julia Alvarez, Alison Bechdel, Pat Barker, Joy Kogawa, Toni Morrison, Monique Truong, and August Wilson.

Full details for FGSS 4521 - Gender, Memory, and History in Twentieth Century Fiction

Images of tattooed, inscribed, and marked bodies abound in popular media, from television series to blogs, from performance art to popular literature. When the body becomes a canvas or text, this raises crucial questions about the interactions between individual bodies, culture/s, and society/ies. In this course we will pay particular attention to the shifting meanings of body modification in different cultural, theoretical, and historical contexts. Course material will include texts, films, and artwork by Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Lalla Essaydi, Zhang Huan, Franz Kafka, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mirta Kupferminc, Christopher Nolan, Renata Salecl, Stelarc, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Qiu Zhijie, and others, as well as television series, internet forums, and other popular culture formats.

Full details for FGSS 4607 - Written on the Body

In the 1920s sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote a preface for Radclyffe Hall's modernist novel of gender transformation, The Well of Loneliness, nominating it as a vital document in the sexual scientific record; by the 1960s, spurious sexological prefaces had become the norm for racy pulp fictions attempting to evade censorship law by feigning scientific merit. How does literature shift between serving as sexological data and transforming sexology into a literary conceit? How do literature and sexology variously define deviance, perversion, the normal and the pathological? This course will center the relationship between sexology and literature as two modalities for organizing the social meaning of sex. We will ask how sexology instrumentalizes literature for science, and how it generates new, different, and critical aesthetic strategies.

Full details for FGSS 4755 - Sexology and the Novel

The term "epidemic" travels widely and wildly in contemporary worlds.  But, what, when and where is "the epidemic"? How and why does epidemic unfold? This senior seminar offers an interdisciplinary exploration of infectious diseases.  Our investigations take us from medieval Europe's "Black Plague," to Tuberculosis in early twentieth century United States and its global resurgence at the turn of the twenty-first, to Ebola and its ongoing, periodic outbreaks today. We consider the consequences epidemics have for how we live and imagine shared ecological futures.  Examining work from the life sciences, social sciences, and arts & humanities, we explore the ways in which life and death, disease and survivability, health and thriving are shaped by infectious microbes, embodied eco-social forces, and contingent regimes of knowledge-power. 

Full details for FGSS 4841 - What is (an) Epidemic? (Infectious Diseases in Historical, Social, and Political Perspective)

Liberal feminists and political theorists argue that sentiments such as compassion and empathy have the capacity to alert us to suffering, injustice, and oppression, and thus incite transformative political action. This interdisciplinary seminar explores the challenges to this theory by staging a conversation between postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories of affect, and anthropological critiques of humanitarian projects. Sentiments are mobilized to defend borders, wage wars, grant asylum to refugees, provide medical care and disaster relief, and inspire feminist activism. We will analyze how these gendered and racialized ethical projects and political regimes are co-constituted, and how they mediate access to resources and survival, as well as political agency, subjectivity, citizenship, and national belonging.

Full details for FGSS 4876 - Humanitarian Affects

In this course, you will explore nakedness as a form of protest by various social movements and in compelling fictional texts. As you analyze nakedness from ancient Greece to 21th century Africa, Asia, and Latin America, you will also be attentive to the variables of race, gender, and bodily abilities and how they complicate this mode of political speech. Primary texts include Devi's "Draupadi," Ngugi's Wizard of the Crow, Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes, Tennyson's "Godiva," Auden's "Cave of Nakedness," videos of Femen, gay parades, and Occupy Wall Street. You will read these visual and literary texts in conjunction with theoretical reflections on shame/injury, exposure, and humanity by Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Nancy, and Berger. Assignments will clarify and build upon the readings and films and include reflection papers, analytical, and argumentative essays.

Full details for FGSS 4947 - Bio-Politics and Poetics of Nakedness

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

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 from 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 will be 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

This course provides an introduction to the theoretical and empirical literature on the sociology of sex and gender. The readings cover theory and methods, feminism, masculinity, intersectionality, international/comparative perspectives, gender roles, and recent sociological research in this area.

Full details for FGSS 6371 - Sociology of Sex and Gender

Liberal feminists and political theorists argue that sentiments such as compassion and empathy have the capacity to alert us to suffering, injustice, and oppression, and thus incite transformative political action. This interdisciplinary seminar explores the challenges to this theory by staging a conversation between postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories of affect, and anthropological critiques of humanitarian projects. Sentiments are mobilized to defend borders, wage wars, grant asylum to refugees, provide medical care and disaster relief, and inspire feminist activism. We will analyze how these gendered and racialized ethical projects and political regimes are co-constituted, and how they mediate access to resources and survival, as well as political agency, subjectivity, citizenship, and national belonging.

Full details for FGSS 6876 - Humanitarian Affects

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

The voice occupies a peculiar phenomenological position, on one hand emanating from material bodies and conveying that materiality with register, mannerism, grain, and break; on the other hand existing as disembodied sound waves, and an internalized sonorous Other. This course will explore the many cultural and conceptual approaches to the voice and its role in the production of music, language, desire, subjectivity, embodiment, and the human.  Students will workshop projects developed within the course or already underway as part of a dissertation, article, performance, or recording.

Full details for FGSS 7312 - Vocality and Embodiment