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

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

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 We will read a variety of texts--personal narratives, historical documents, and cultural criticism--across a range of disciplines, and will consider how larger structural systems of both privilege and oppression affect individuals'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 centers Black women who have often described their reproductive health experiences as fighting for our lives. While grounded in an exploration of Black women 's experiences in the US, this course also looks across the diaspora to issues of access, rights, and equity in reproductive health. Deeply inspired by the field of Black Feminist Health Science Studies, a field that advocates for the centrality of activism in healthcare and its importance for Black women's overall health and well-being, this course examines how issues of gender, race, class, ability, and power intersect to inform how reproductive health is conceptualized, practiced, and experienced. Ultimately, this course will yield a deeper understanding of how Black women have transformed existential and literal threats on their lives into a robust terrain of community-based activism and a movement for reproductive justice. We will read across a range of texts and genres from the historical and theoretical, to memoir and documentary. With what we learn together, we will craft contributions to public debates around healthcare issues impacting Black women. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for FGSS 2023 - Fighting for Our Lives: Black Women's Reproductive Health and Activism in Historical Perspective

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research. (ARKEO-COS)

Full details for FGSS 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

Language is a skin, the critic Roland Barthes once wrote: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. Sexual desire has a history, even a literary history, which we will examine through an introductory survey of European dramatic literature from the Ancient Greeks to the present, as well as classic readings in sexual theory, including Plato, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and queer theory.

Full details for FGSS 2760 - Desire

In contemporary China, as in many other places of the world, the ideology and social reality of gender relations is highly paradoxical. Women are flattered for their power as consumers and commitment to the family while they are also expected to engage in wage-earning employment. Men, on the other hand, face constant pressure of being tough and social problems such as costly betrothal gifts as unintended consequences of a gender regime that is supposedly male-oriented. Are these paradoxes a betrayal of the socialist experiment of erasing gender differences? Are they remnants of China's long imperial tradition? This course explores the power dynamics of gender relations in China from ancient times to the present. It leads students to examine scholarship that challenges the popularly accepted myth of lineal progression of China toward gender equality, and to understand women's and men's life choices in various historical settings. At the same time, this course guides students to adopt gender as a useful analytical category, treating China as a case study through which students are trained to engender any society past and present. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)

Full details for FGSS 2932 - Engendering China

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

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

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

The work of women artists has been central to the development of new media art. These rich and varied practices include installation, virtual reality environments, net art, digital video, networked performance, tactical media, video games, remix and robotics. This course will begin with an overview of feminist art and early experiments in performance and video art to then investigate multiple currents of digital media. Discussions will focus primarily on works by women artists from Europe, the Americas and Australia.

Full details for FGSS 3655 - Women in New Media Art

In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon defines parody broadly as repetition with critical difference, which marks difference rather than similarity. Taking a cue from Hutcheon, we will consider parody as a form of meaning making that is not necessarily used in the service of ridicule. Rather, we will examine a number of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century imitative works in order to distinguish the rich variety of political agendas and aesthetic rationales for recent parody. An emphasis on postmodern or contemporary performances and media that renovate images, ideas, and icons from modernism and modernity will unite our otherwise diverse efforts. Some of these efforts will also highlight what happens when an artist takes up a work made for one platform (for example, theatre, performance art, installation, cinema, television, the Web) and parodies it in another. Creators and works under consideration may range from Christopher Durang, Split Britches, and Pig Iron Theatre Company to The Simpsons, Cookie's Fortune, and Strindberg and Helium. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for FGSS 3740 - Parody

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. (PMA-HTC)

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

Fall 2024 Topic: Feminist Posthumanisms in Visual Arts. While feminist art in new media address traditional feminist concerns such as the female body, identity, representation, feminist history, and consumerism, others directly engage with recent theoretical currents on the Anthropocene, posthumanism, and new materialisms that view humans and non-humans as co-dependent. Non-humans include environmental factors, animals, plants, bacteria, and machines. This seminar will examine work by contemporary artists from various geographical areas and cultural traditions engaged with posthumanist perspectives in relation to relevant theoretical texts and previous feminist media arts.

Full details for FGSS 4153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

This class moves beyond a simple consideration of how lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender and queer people have been represented in the mainstream media. We will explore both how dominant media forms have traditionally represented LGBTQ people, as well as how LGBTQ people have seized the opportunities offered by alternative media practices and technologies to articulate passions and politics that dominant media forms have little or no investment in.

Full details for FGSS 4292 - Sexual Identities and the Media

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

What are the poetics and politics of ethnographic writing? How is this genre, what many would call the signature of cultural anthropology, distinct from other modes of scholarly writing? What are its possibilities, limits and effects? In this course we will read classic and experimental ethnographies and undertake exercises in ethnographic writing as a means to investigate ethnography as epistemology, genre and craft.

Full details for FGSS 4418 - Writing Ethnography: Theory, Genre and Practice

This seminar explores the educational lives and schooling experiences of girls and women, broadly inclusive, through ethnographic studies conducted in the U.S. and various regions of the world. Drawing on the anthropology of education and decolonial feminist theories, we ask: How do girls, women, and gender non-conforming people construct ways of knowing through prisms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, class, nation, and citizenship? In what ways do gendered narratives of development and risk, and forms of structural violence, shape their educational experiences and futures? Importantly, we consider girls and women as active learners and educators who craft their own lives and literacies across home, school, and community. We will identify diverse modes of feminist praxis and the possibilities for liberatory education.

Full details for FGSS 4458 - Girls, Women, and Education

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

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. 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 understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for FGSS 4509 - Toni Morrison's Novels

This course contemplates challenges associated with researching and representing LGBTQ+ pasts. We approach this topic from several angles: 1) by asking what constitutes queer and trans in different historical contexts and different geographical locations, when sexuality and gender are by their nature fluid; 2) by training in LGBTQ+ archival methods; and 3) by engagement with queer and trans artivists who make archives central to their praxis. We will visit Cornell's Human Sexuality collection, explore online repositories and academic databases (e.g., ONE and Cengage), and consider archive-based artistic projects (e.g., Killjoy's Castle and MOTHA). (PMA-HTC)

Full details for FGSS 4695 - Queer Archives and Archiving Queerness

An understanding of performance as object and lens, modality and method, is integral to scholarship and research across the humanities and social sciences. Charting the advent and defining principles of performance studies, this course explores the interdisciplinary history of the field, including its association with anthropology, visual studies, theater, gender studies, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, and critical race studies. This class examines performance as a means of creative expression, a mode of critical inquiry, and an avenue for public engagement. We will attend to both the practice of performance - as gesture, behavior, habit, event, artistic expression, and social drama - and the study of performance - through ethnographic observation, spectatorship, documentation, reproduction, analysis, and writing strategies. Through a study of research paradigms and key issues related to performance, we will explore not only what this highly contested term is and does, but when and how, for whom, and under what circumstances. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for FGSS 4835 - Performance Studies: Theories and Methods

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

Full details for FGSS 4990 - Senior Honors Thesis I

Fall 24 Topic: Feminist Posthumanisms in Visual Arts. While feminist art in new media address traditional feminist concerns such as the female body, identity, representation, feminist history, and consumerism, others directly engage with recent theoretical currents on the Anthropocene, posthumanism, and new materialisms that view humans and non-humans as co-dependent. Non-humans include environmental factors, animals, plants, bacteria, and machines. This seminar will examine work by contemporary artists from various geographical areas and cultural traditions engaged with posthumanist perspectives in relation to relevant theoretical texts and previous feminist media arts.

Full details for FGSS 6153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

Full details for FGSS 6371 - Sociology of Sex and Gender

An understanding of performance as object and lens, modality and method, is integral to scholarship and research across the humanities and social sciences. Charting the advent and defining principles of performance studies, this course explores the interdisciplinary history of the field, including its association with anthropology, visual studies, theater, gender studies, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, and critical race studies. This class examines performance as a means of creative expression, a mode of critical inquiry, and an avenue for public engagement. We will attend to both the practice of performance - as gesture, behavior, habit, event, artistic expression, and social drama - and the study of performance - through ethnographic observation, spectatorship, documentation, reproduction, analysis, and writing strategies. Through a study of research paradigms and key issues related to performance, we will explore not only what this highly contested term is and does, but when and how, for whom, and under what circumstances.

Full details for FGSS 6835 - Performance Studies: Theories and Methods

This course explores the intersections of critical disability studies and ethnography, the latter understood both as method and as mode(s) of writing. We will consider ethnography’s potential to intervene in medicalized or pathologizing frameworks of disability. We will interrogate ethnography’s tacit ableism and question the possibilities and challenges of a disabled ethnographic method. Centering questions of embodiment, we will draw on queer studies, Black studies, and feminist theory to collectively imagine disability as an emancipatory project that refigures the professional outputs and daily experience of academia.

Full details for FGSS 7335 - Ethnography and Disability

What are the poetics and politics of ethnographic writing? How is this genre, what many would call the signature of cultural anthropology, distinct from other modes of scholarly writing? What are its possibilities, limits and effects? In this course we will read classic and experimental ethnographies and undertake exercises in ethnographic writing as a means to investigate ethnography as epistemology, genre and craft.

Full details for FGSS 7418 - Writing Ethnography: Theory, Genre and Practice

This seminar explores the educational lives and schooling experiences of girls and women, broadly inclusive, through ethnographic studies conducted in the U.S. and various regions of the world. Drawing on the anthropology of education and decolonial feminist theories, we ask: How do girls, women, and gender non-conforming people construct ways of knowing through prisms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, class, nation, and citizenship? In what ways do gendered narratives of development and risk, and forms of structural violence, shape their educational experiences and futures? Importantly, we consider girls and women as active learners and educators who craft their own lives and literacies across home, school, and community. We will identify diverse modes of feminist praxis and the possibilities for liberatory education.

Full details for FGSS 7458 - Girls, Women, and Education