Courses

With the success of Hannah Gadsby's 2018 stand-up special "Nanette," connections among gender, sexuality, feminism, and stand-up comedy (once again) came to the fore of public discourse. In this class, we will interrogate these connections by looking at the work of queer women comedians who pioneered and shaped stand-up comedy- such as Jackie "Moms" Mabely, Margaret Cho, or Ellen DeGeneres- as well as performers who have been shaking up the world of stand-up comedy in recent years. The course will introduce students to some key concepts of feminism, as well as to select feminist theories related to comedy and humor. Students will practice and develop their critical skills via weekly short responses focusing on these concepts, a few longer essays, and creative writing assignments.

Full details for FGSS 1115 - FWS: Queer Women in Stand-Up Comedy

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 We will read a variety of texts--personal narratives, historical documents, and cultural criticism--across a range of disciplines, and will consider how larger structural systems of both privilege and oppression affect individuals'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

The Middle Ages are usually imagined as a time of manly men and feminine women: no room for gender ambiguity in Conan the Barbarian! Yet gender, then as now, was in fact unstable, multiple, and above all, constructed. This course explores the different ways masculinity was understood, manufactured, and manipulated in northern Europe – primarily early Ireland, England, and Scandinavia – using a variety of literary, legal, historical, archaeological, and artistic sources. Students will gain new perspectives on both gender and sex, on the one hand, and the history of medieval Europe, on the other.

Full details for FGSS 2082 - Of Ice and Men: Masculinities in the Medieval North

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 - Worlding Sex and Gender

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 and Gender in Ancient Greece and Rome

What does the representation of sexual encounter in the Arabian Nights ('Alf layla-wa layla) have to do with a politics of race and gender? This course explores the millenia-long history of mediations and translations of this ancient Perso-Arabic text across literature, film, and popular culture, in the Middle East and in Europe. We will pay attention to the transmission of phobic tropes about female sexuality and miscegenation, or "interracial" sex as they manifest in various versions of 1001 Nights across time and space.

Full details for FGSS 2701 - Forbidden Sex: Arabian Nights

This course explores the role of gender and sexuality in shaping the lives of Muslims past and present. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual histories, and religious treatises, we will analyze the key debates and discourses surrounding the intersection of gender and Islam. We begin by investigating Quranic revelations and hadith concerning gender and sexual ethics, female figures of emulation in early Islam, and feminist exegeses of the Quran. Continuing onward, we focus upon the everyday lives of Muslim women and non-binary individuals in medieval, colonial, and post-colonial contexts, highlighting the ways in which people negotiate and respond to the sexual politics of the times in which they live as we ask what, if anything, is specifically "Islamic" about the situations under discussion? Following this, we embark upon a history of sexuality within Islam, tracing the ways in which the categories of "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" came to exist in the Muslim world, as well as the history and positionality of trans communities past and present. We then continue with an exploration of Islamic feminism as it exists today, looking to the ways in which Muslim feminists have critically engaged both religious texts as well as Western feminist theory. Finally, the course concludes by analyzing the relationship between the study of Islam, gender, and empire.

Full details for FGSS 2770 - Islam and Gender

We experience our bodies as so much a part of who we are that we take them for granted. Yet the way we think about the body has a history of its own. This class looks at how the idea of "the body" gets constructed over time. How has the body come to have attributes called "gender," "sexuality," and "race"? Why have some bodies been seen as monstrous, perverted, and unholy, others as gorgeous, normal, and divine? What makes bodies pleasurable and dangerous? We'll find out by examining a broad range of evidence from the ancient era to the present day, including literature (Ovid, Kafka, Octavia Butler), philosophy (Plato, Descartes, Judith Butler), film, and the history of science.

Full details for FGSS 2780 - Body as Text: Pleasure and Danger

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

This course studies the life experiences and political struggles of black women who have attained political leadership. It will study their rise to political power through an examination of the autobiographies of women from the Caribbean, the U.S., Africa and Brazil. Political figures such as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Shirley Chisholm, Benedita da Silva will serve as some of the primary sources of analysis and discussion. Students will have the opportunity to select and follow a political leader and her challenges closely. The first half of the course will examine some of the general literature on the subject; the second half will study the women in their own words. We will attempt to have some available local political leaders visit the class.

Full details for FGSS 3206 - Black Women and Political Leadership

This course explores cultural representations of Afro-Asian intimacies and coalition in novels, songs, films, paintings, and poems. What affinities, loves and thefts, and tensions are present in cultural forms such as anime, jazz, kung fu, and K-pop? Students will consider the intersections and overlap between African and Asian diasporic cultures in global cities such as New York, Chicago, Havana, Lahore, Kingston, and Hong Kong to ask the question: when did Africa and Asia first encounter each other? This will be contextualized through a political and historical lens of the formation of a proto-Global South in the early twentieth, Afro-futurism, women of color feminisms, and Third World solidarity and internationalism. Tackling issues of race, gender, sexuality, and resistance, this seminar also reckons with the intertwined legacies of the institutions of African enslavement and Asian indenture by reading the novels of Patricia Powell and the paintings of Kehinde Wiley, for instance. Students will work in groups to produce Afro-Asia DJ visual soundtracks as part of the final project.

Full details for FGSS 3310 - Afro-Asia: Futurism and Feminisms

This course explores written and visual biographies of African American and African women in the fashion industry as a launching point for thinking about beauty, race, gender and class. Some of the questions that will be explored during the semester are: How do ethnicity and femininity intersect? How are authenticity and difference commodified? How do women construct identities through narrative or craft themselves through body modification? How do women negotiate their relationships to their bodies, families and nations? Contemporary television programs, global fashion and cultural studies will also be discussed. Students will write self-narratives about their relationships with cultural standards of beauty.

Full details for FGSS 3540 - Modeling Race, Fashioning Beauty

In this course, we will critically examine the production and performance of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender through literature and contemporary performance genres such as spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theatre.

Full details for FGSS 3754 - Spoken Word, Hip-Hop Theater, and the Politics of the Performance

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

Topic:  Simone de Beauvoir & Moral Philosophy.

Full details for FGSS 4261 - Topics in 20th C. Philosophy

From Switched-On Bach to Synthpop and EDM, since the late 1960s electronic synthesizers have expanded the sonic palette and identity formation of popular musicians, leading to new concepts of sound and performance as well as communal, technological, and human interfaces. This course will explore the cultural history of analog synthesizers and their progeny of digital devices (samplers, sequencers, drum machines) and desktop technologies that revolutionized popular music soundscapes and embodiment. Synthesis will be considered as both a musical technology and theoretical concept that together spark imagined cyborg identities and post-human futures, challenging and resynthesizing categories of gender, sexuality, and race. Student will also have the opportunity to engage with Cornell's Robert Moog Archive and develop research, creative, or curation projects that may be featured in the spring 2020 exhibition and programming to celebrate this collection.  This course is open to graduate students and fourth-year undergraduates by permission.  Undergraduates should contact the instructor before enrolling.

Full details for FGSS 4312 - Synthesizing Pop: Electronics and the Musical Imagination

In this course we will trace how the wider participation of women in the public sphere affected media, gender roles, and sexuality in early nineteenth-century England. Women, as well as men, responded vigorously to the French Revolution and to the British reaction against it. Women were able, during the Romantic period, to accomplish widely contrasting achievements, such as these: follow up A Vindication of the Rights of Man with A Vindication of the Rights of Women; win fame and earn a living by writing Italian sonnets, or by writing closet dramas; win a separation payment after an affair with the Prince of Wales and then thrive as a writer and intellectual; and, of course—as Mary Shelley did, at age 19—write and publish Frankenstein. This seminar aims to understand, interpret, and even participate in the history of women's writing and achievements in the public sphere—as well as—also important—more private imaginative experiences. No previous knowledge of pre-twentieth century literature is necessary.

Full details for FGSS 4331 - Women, Real and Imagined: British Romanticism

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

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

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison received her M.A. in English at Cornell University in 1955.  To study her, in a way, is to gain a deeper understanding of how she journeyed on from her days as a student here to become one of the world's greatest writers, how she has helped to transform world literature, and  how she has  shaped  Cornell's great legacy.  In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels.  Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language.  Furthermore, from novel to novel, she is even known for developing features such as the very first sentence with great contemplation, an approach that also demonstrates her commitment to form.  As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the "love trilogy" on which she focused her repertoire for several years.  The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study.  By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced critical understanding of it.  The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and help them to become more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.  Morrison's novels have placed her at the vanguard of the globalization of the novel itself, and she is, undisputedly, one the most famous and innovative writers in the world.  She emerged as one of the greatest and most prolific writers of the twentieth century, and her audiences have continued to be captivated by her literary genius in this millennial age.  She is one of the most revered writers within the American literary establishment and has helped to reshape it both as a critic and novelist.  Her work can help one to develop more mastery in reading the novel as a genre.  Indeed, her thinking about this area is so original and pivotal that her fiction and critical works are absolutely indispensable for all serious students and scholars in fields such as American literature.  Its impact on African American literature is equally vital.  We will focus on reading the repertoire of novels by Morrison, including The Bluest Eye, Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003),  A Mercy (2008) Home (2012), and God Bless the Child (2014).  We will screen the 1998 film adaptation of her novel Beloved, along with documentaries related to Morrison such as Gail Pellet and Bill Moyers's Toni Morrison:  A Writer's Work and Gary Deans, Alan Hall and Jana Wendt's Toni Morrison: Uncensored.

Full details for FGSS 4509 - Toni Morrison's Novels

This course examines contemporary literary and cultural memory work that mediates the emergence of nuclear energy in Asia and the Pacific after World War Two as a transpacific settler colonial and racial institution and discourse.  Building on current environmental humanities scholarship on the nuclear Pacific, this course foregrounds racial ecologies as well as women of color and queer of color critique as key methods to analyses of geo-cultural politics of transpacific nuclear modernity. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses

Full details for FGSS 4641 - Racial Ecologies of Transpacific Nuclearism

Why might a novelist choose to focus on food (or a chef) in order to tell a particular tale?  How do writers use the language of food to explore issues such as gender, sexuality, race and nation? What can a study of food tell us about the dynamic of power and its circulation in US culture? This class interrogates the ways food functions as a symbol in literary texts; we will also consider how writers deploy narrative form and language to capture the sensual pleasures of food. Our entrees will consist of novels and short stories, but sides may include memoir, food essays, and cookbooks.

Full details for FGSS 4645 - Culinary Literature, Literary Food

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)

This course explores the philosophical concept of biopolitics and its diverse translations and/or adaptations across multiple disciplines and across the globe (Africa, Far East, South East Asia, and the Americas). We will trace the concept of biopolitics and its attendant notions-Biopower, Sovereignty, Governmentality-as they emerge in the work of Michel Foucault and analyze the multiple disciplinary and geographical directions in which they have travelled. Throughout the semester, we shall examine 1. the innovative thinking around biopolitics in the works of Arendt, Esposito, Agamben, Hardt and Negri, 2. the connections and entanglements of the concept with postcolonial theory in Mbembe, Samaddar, Sakai, Mezzadra, 3. the extension and complication of biopolitical logistics over to non-human bodies in Uexküll, Sloterdijk, Wolfe, Shukin. Additionally, we will examine theorizations of new stylistics of power as well as emerging forms of agency and political organizing in the biopolitical sphere. Key terms include race, postcoloniality, animality, capture, embodiment, agency, technology.

Full details for FGSS 4944 - Biopolitics: New Directions

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

From Switched-On Bach to Synthpop and EDM, since the late 1960s electronic synthesizers have expanded the sonic palette and identity formation of popular musicians, leading to new concepts of sound and performance as well as communal, technological, and human interfaces. This course will explore the cultural history of analog synthesizers and their progeny of digital devices (samplers, sequencers, drum machines) and desktop technologies that revolutionized popular music soundscapes and embodiment. Synthesis will be considered as both a musical technology and theoretical concept that together spark imagined cyborg identities and post-human futures, challenging and resynthesizing categories of gender, sexuality, and race. Student will also have the opportunity to engage with Cornell's Robert Moog Archive and develop research, creative, or curation projects that may be featured in the spring 2020 exhibition and programming to celebrate this collection.  This course is open to graduate students and fourth-year undergraduates by permission.  Undergraduates should contact the instructor before enrolling.

Full details for FGSS 6312 - Synthesizing Pop: Electronics and the Musical Imagination

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

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison received her M.A. in English at Cornell University in 1955.  To study her, in a way, is to gain a deeper understanding of how she journeyed on from her days as a student here to become one of the world's greatest writers, how she has helped to transform world literature, and  how she has  shaped  Cornell's great legacy.  In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels.  Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language.  Furthermore, from novel to novel, she is even known for developing features such as the very first sentence with great contemplation, an approach that also demonstrates her commitment to form.  As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the "love trilogy" on which she focused her repertoire for several years.  The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study.  By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced critical understanding of it.  The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and help them to become more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.  Morrison's novels have placed her at the vanguard of the globalization of the novel itself, and she is, undisputedly, one the most famous and innovative writers in the world.  She emerged as one of the greatest and most prolific writers of the twentieth century, and her audiences have continued to be captivated by her literary genius in this millennial age.  She is one of the most revered writers within the American literary establishment and has helped to reshape it both as a critic and novelist.  Her work can help one to develop more mastery in reading the novel as a genre.  Indeed, her thinking about this area is so original and pivotal that her fiction and critical works are absolutely indispensable for all serious students and scholars in fields such as American literature.  Its impact on African American literature is equally vital.  We will focus on reading the repertoire of novels by Morrison, including The Bluest Eye, Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003),  A Mercy (2008) Home (2012), and God Bless the Child (2014).  We will screen the 1998 film adaptation of her novel Beloved, along with documentaries related to Morrison such as Gail Pellet and Bill Moyers's Toni Morrison:  A Writer's Work and Gary Deans, Alan Hall and Jana Wendt's Toni Morrison: Uncensored.

Full details for FGSS 6513 - Toni Morrison's Novels

This course examines contemporary literary and cultural memory work that mediates the emergence of nuclear energy in Asia and the Pacific after World War Two as a transpacific settler colonial and racial institution and discourse.  Building on current environmental humanities scholarship on the nuclear Pacific, this course foregrounds racial ecologies as well as women of color and queer of color critique as key methods to analyses of geo-cultural politics of transpacific nuclear modernity. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses

Full details for FGSS 6641 - Racial Ecologies of Transpacific Nuclearism

This course explores the philosophical concept of biopolitics and its diverse translations and/or adaptations across multiple disciplines and across the globe (Africa, Far East, South East Asia, and the Americas). We will trace the concept of biopolitics and its attendant notions—Sovereignty, Governmentality—as they emerge in the work of Michel Foucault and analyze the multiple disciplinary and geographical directions in which they have travelled. Throughout the semester, we shall examine 1) the innovative thinking around biopolitics in the works of Arendt, Esposito, Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Wolfe, 2) the connections and entanglements of the concept with postcolonial theory/black studies in Mbembe, Weheliye, Comaroff, Mezzadra, 3) the extension and complication of biopolitics in gender, feministand sexuality studies, and new media studies.  Ultimately, we will examine theorizations of new stylistics of power as well as emerging forms of agency and political organizing in the biopolitical sphere. Key terms include race, postcoloniality, feminism, agency, and new media.

Full details for FGSS 6944 - Biopolitics: New Directions

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