Courses

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

How are migrants and refugees typically depicted in film and news media accounts of their lives and journeys? How can an intersectional feminist analysis of gender, sexuality, race, and class help us to see this media from a more holistic perspective? Course texts bring together intersectional feminist theories of power. In this class you will read and discuss texts by feminist theorists, activist-scholars, critical media scholars, and journalists such as Sarah Ahmed, bell hooks, Edward Said, and Angela Davis. Students will put feminist theory into practice (praxis) through direct engagement assignments in collaboration with local immigrant rights organizations. Through course assignments, students will develop tools to critically analyze the media they consume, and also to intervene into racist and sexist media representations through their writing.

Full details for FGSS 1117 - FWS: Feminist Praxis, Representation, and Migration

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 We will read a variety of texts--personal narratives, historical documents, and cultural criticism--across a range of disciplines, and will consider how larger structural systems of both privilege and oppression affect individuals'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

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

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

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 - Race and Sex: Arabian Nights

This lecture traces the history of LGBTQ+ identities, relationships, and politics in the United States from the early 19th century to the present. We will consider, in particular, the shifting meanings of same-sex romantic and sexual relationships; the evolution of modern conceptions of sexual and gender identity as shaped by race and class; the emergence and policing of LGBTQ+ communities; and the history of LGBTQ+ activism and its intersections with broader movements for social and economic justice. Students will learn to read and analyze a range of historical scholarship, as well as primary texts in the history of gender and sexuality including memoirs and letters, periodicals, photographs, and political manifestos.

Full details for FGSS 2722 - LGBTQ History in the United States

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 will study medieval women writers and some of the contexts and methodologies that might help us assess their works and lives. There will be some attention to writings to women, and we'll sample the vast range of writings about women; but the main focus will be on writing (apparently) by women, considered historically and in the literary, religious, and other terms that the writings invite, as well as modern theories and historical stratagems for approaching the topic. Early texts will include Perpetua's martyrdom, Heloise's letters, Hildegard of Bingen and other visionaries, poetry by Marie de France and some trobaritz, then a substantial part of the term will treat visionary writings, family letters, poetry collections, and even drama by women in late medieval England. This class may be used as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

Full details for FGSS 3130 - Medieval Women Writers

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 Feminism

Topic Fall 2020: The Time and Space of Immigrant Detention in the U.S.: Migration is about movement, yet the journey often ends in the denial of movement, especially if one migrates to the U.S. This country detains more immigrants than any other country in the world, often in deplorable conditions. Yet many people in this country do not know about these conditions, which amount to imprisonment for the simple act of crossing a border without papers. The centers are often geographically isolated, compounding the isolation of the people being held there. The situation has been exacerbated in the last three years due to increasingly draconian policies advanced by the Trump administration, making immigrant detention an urgent human rights issue. This class examines the practices and politics of detention, focusing on the temporal and spatial conditions that make detention so difficult for those inside. Connecting theory and practice, we will also visit people being held at the Buffalo Federal Detention Center, exploring how we address social injustice while not "speaking for" or "on behalf of" the people most affected by these injustices. How do we approach these issues through an intersectional lens that attends to the complex interplay of gender, sexuality, race, class, and religion? How do we avoid constructing hierarchies of immigrants who are more vulnerable (such as children) than others? What constitutes an effective and affective feminist theory and practice?

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

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

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

"My existence is a scandal," Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram the effect of his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of "art for art's sake" and all that was considered artificial, unnatural, or obscene, the Decadent writers of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional ethical moorings. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, A. C. Swinburne, and especially Oscar Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, and design.

Full details for FGSS 3550 - Decadence

For a long time area studies have overlooked the over-determined links of gender, race/ethnicity, and social class in fields related to East Asia and the trans-Pacific regions. Little attention has been paid to how to conceptualize gender and race/ethnicity; how to analyze the mutual implication of sexism, racism, and class essentialism (some call it "class racism"), and how to understand the relationships of these topics to the broader contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. This course is designed to offer a series of discussions about the following problems: (1) the historically specific modes of sexism and racism in social spaces related to Japan and other places in the trans-Pacific; (2) the mutual implication of sexism, racism, and social class in various contexts including those of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism; (3) the roles of gender, race, and social class in the United States' knowledge production about East Asia in general; and (4) the conceptions of gender and race in the social formations particular to East Asia. The assigned readings include both English and Japanese materials. However, those who register in ASIAN 3388 are exempt from reading the materials in Japanese.

Full details for FGSS 3580 - Theorizing Gender and Race in Asian Histories and Literatures

In recent years, feminist theory has begun to have an impact on archaeological thought. It is now recognized that gender is likely to have been a relevant dimension of social organization in past societies. Some archaeologists are also trying to take into account the differing interests and experiences of children, adults of reproductive age, and the elderly. This course will not be limited to any period or geographical area, but will range widely in examining how feminist theory has been applied to archaeological data and models. We will consider whether it is necessary to identify women and men, adults and children in the archaeological record in order to take gender and age into account. We will also examine the uses of archaeological data by contemporary feminists.

Full details for FGSS 3700 - Gender and Age in Archaeology

From White Chicks to Blackkklansman, American film has often depicted characters who conceal their race or gender, like black male cops "passing" as wealthy white women. This class will examine how Hollywood has depicted race and gender "passing" from the early 20th century to the present. While tracing common themes across films, we will also study the ideological role of passing films: how they thrill audiences by challenging social boundaries and hierarchies, only to reestablish familiar boundaries by the end. We will not treat these films as accurate depictions of real-world passing, but rather as cultural tools that help audiences to manage ideological contradictions about race, gender, sexuality, and class. Students will finish the course by creating their own short films about passing.

Full details for FGSS 3707 - Hidden Identities Onscreen

In addition to nourishing the body, food operates as a cultural system that produces and reflects group and individual identities. In this class we will examine foodways-the behaviors and beliefs attached to the production, distribution, and consumption of food-to explore the way food practices help shape our sense of gender, race, sexual orientation, and national identity. In doing so we will focus primarily on literature and film but will also range into the fields of anthropology, sociology, and history. Some questions under discussion: How do factors such as gender, class, race, and religion shape the foods we eat and the circumstances in which we eat them? How do writers use the language of food to explore issues such as gender, sexuality, class, and race?

Full details for FGSS 3720 - Food, Gender, and Culture

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 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

Considering the archipelagic turn, this course takes a transnational approach to geographies, ecologies, literatures, and cultures of island chains. How are archipelagoes understood in relations of power to the mainland? Taking up Michelle Stephens and Brian Roberts "Archipelagic American Studies" students will depart from the conventional and continental definition of the United States and center a hemispheric approach to the Americas. Students will also consider the soundscapes of island cartographies and how gender and sexuality is mapped onto the land. How do island formations provide a framework for understanding militarization, Indigenous sovereignty, creolization, extractive capitalism, and imperialism? Archival analysis as well as experimentation with digital cartography and DJ'ing tools to produce original research theorizing islands will be part of the final project.

Full details for FGSS 4123 - Archipelagoes: Cartographies of Race, Sound, and Sexuality

Black women first began to shape the genre of autobiography during antebellum era slavery. They were prolific in developing the genre of autobiography throughout the twentieth century, to the point of emerging as serial autobiographers in the case of Maya Angelou. Significantly, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings(1970), the first autobiography of six by Angelou, along with autobiographies by a range of other black women writers, helped to launch the renaissance in black women's literature and criticism in African American literature during the 1970s. In this course, we will focus on how black women have continued to write and share their personal stories in the new millennium by examining autobiographies that they have produced in the first years of the twenty-first century. More broadly, we will consider the impact of this writing on twenty-first century African American literature, as well as African diasporan writing in Africa and the Caribbean. In the process, we will draw on a range of critical and theoretical perspectives.  We will read memoirs and autobiographies by a range of figures, including Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lewis, Monica Coleman, Serena Williams, Gabrielle Union, and Tiffany Haddish, among others. 

Full details for FGSS 4212 - Black Women's Autobiography in the 21st Century WritingHerStory

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

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

Having a voice is often seen as a central metaphor for a person's agency. Having a voice allows a person to be heard as well as to speak. Yet, how we speak or sing, and how our voices are heard is socially constructed and varies based on many different identity factors including race, gender, and sexuality. From black opera divas and transgender jazz musicians to lesbian rock singers and cross identity voice over actors, this seminar will explore how to analyze and make meaning out of the use of voices within music and media: materially, culturally, and historically. For additional information visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for FGSS 4654 - Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Voice

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

Considering the archipelagic turn, this course takes a transnational approach to geographies, ecologies, literatures, and cultures of island chains. How are archipelagoes understood in relations of power to the mainland? Taking up Michelle Stephens and Brian Roberts "Archipelagic American Studies" students will depart from the conventional and continental definition of the United States and center a hemispheric approach to the Americas. Students will also consider the soundscapes of island cartographies and how gender and sexuality is mapped onto the land. How do island formations provide a framework for understanding militarization, Indigenous sovereignty, creolization, extractive capitalism, and imperialism? Archival analysis as well as experimentation with digital cartography and DJ'ing tools to produce original research theorizing islands will be part of the final project.

Full details for FGSS 6123 - Archipelagoes: Cartographies of Race, Sound, and Sexuality

This course investigates how sexuality, broadly conceived, is produced, represented, and enacted through a variety of media. We will consider how groups of people collectively produce their erotic identifications, practices, and connections through media and in space. These affinities may be transient or life-long, co-present or virtual, of the majority or marginalized. Rather than assuming sex is a private matter, we will analyze the ways sexuality is constituted through media engagements, in physical and online spaces, and in the ways that mediated desire play out in broad movements of consumerism and neoliberal aspirations. We will consider sexual cultures from a transnational perspective and in historical context. The course will address how structural hierarchies such as gender, race, sexual identification, and location help to shape sexual media.

Full details for FGSS 6301 - Media and Sexuality

As Théophile Gautier said of Decadent writing, "It is an ingenious, complex, learned style, full of shades and refinements of meaning, ever extending the bounds of language, borrowing from every technical vocabulary, taking colors from every palette and notes from every keyboard; a style that endeavors to express the most inexpressible thoughts, the vaguest and most fleeting contours of form, that listens, with a view to rendering them, to the subtle confidences of neurosis, to the confessions of aging lust turning into depravity, and to the odd hallucinations of fixed ideas passing into mania."  We associate this aesthetic with Oscar Wilde in English, but we will explore it as a modernist innovation also for more recent canonical novelists, from Henry James to Thomas Pynchon.

Full details for FGSS 6551 - Decadence and the Modern Novel

For a long time area studies have overlooked the over-determined links of gender, race/ethnicity, and social class in fields related to East Asia and the trans-Pacific regions. Little attention has been paid to how to conceptualize gender and race/ethnicity; how to analyze the mutual implication of sexism, racism, and class essentialism (some call it "class racism"), and how to understand the relationships of these topics to the broader contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. This course is designed to offer a series of discussions about the following problems: (1) the historically specific modes of sexism and racism in social spaces related to Japan and other places in the trans-Pacific; (2) the mutual implication of sexism, racism, and social class in various contexts including those of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism; (3) the roles of gender, race, and social class in the United States' knowledge production about East Asia in general; and (4) the conceptions of gender and race in the social formations particular to East Asia. The assigned readings include both English and Japanese materials. However, those who register in ASIAN 3388 are exempt from reading the materials in Japanese.

Full details for FGSS 6580 - Theorizing Gender and Race in Asian Histories and Literatures

In recent years, feminist theory has begun to have an impact on archaeological thought. It is now recognized that gender is likely to have been a relevant dimension of social organization in past societies. Some archaeologists are also trying to take into account the differing interests and experiences of children, adults of reproductive age, and the elderly. This course will not be limited to any period or geographical area, but will range widely in examining how feminist theory has been applied to archaeological data and models. We will consider whether it is necessary to identify women and men, adults and children in the archaeological record in order to take gender and age into account. We will also examine the uses of archaeological data by contemporary feminists.

Full details for FGSS 6700 - Gender and Age in Archaeology

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