Courses

Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies is an interdisciplinary program focused on understanding the impact of gender and sexuality on the world around us and on the power hierarchies that structure it. This course provides an overview of key concepts, questions, and debates within feminist studies both locally and globally, focusing mainly on the experiences, historical conditions, and concerns of women as they are shaped by gender and sexuality.  We will read a variety of texts--personal narratives, historical documents, and cultural criticism --across a range of disciplines, and will consider how larger structural systems of both privilege and oppression affect individuals' identities, experiences, and options. We will also examine forms of agency and action taken by women in the face of these larger systems.

Full details for FGSS 2010 - Introduction to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

This course offers an introduction to the questions, topics, approaches, and theories that characterize the field of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Studies. Using an interdisciplinary approach (literature, history, anthropology, media, law, and science), we will explore categories such as sexual norms, human rights, power, feminism, queerness, gender/sex, censorship/ moral panic, and identity in Euro-American as well as in postcolonial and global terms. Through a variety of films, primary and secondary sources, you will formulate questions and provide answers to the relationship of these categories with organizing structures, including race, ethnicity, religion, family, marriage, reproduction, the economy, and the state. While we investigate how sexual identities in African, South American, and Asian contexts converge with or challenge Euro-American discourses, we will look at the tools LGBT studies offers for understanding power and culture.

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

How does literary language depict the experience of physical suffering? Can a poem or a novel palliate pain, illness, even the possibility of death? From darkly comic narratives of black plague to the rise and fall of hysteria to depictions of the AIDS crisis, this course examines literature centered on medical practices from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Why have medical practices changed, and how do writers address their political, social, and ideological implications? Readings will include a broad range of genres, including poetry (Dickinson, Whitman, Keats), fiction (McEwan, Chekhov, Gilman, Kafka, Camus), theater (Kushner), nonfiction prose (Woolf, Freud), and critical theory (Foucault, Scarry, Canguilhem, Sontag).

Full details for FGSS 2350 - Literature and Medicine

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

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

This course focuses on African American women in the 20th century. The experiences of black women will be examined from a social, practical, communal, and gendered perspective. Topics include the Club Woman's movement, suffrage, work, family, black and white women and feminism, black women and radicalism, and the feminization of poverty.

Full details for FGSS 2512 - Black Women in the 20th Century

"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

This course investigates the rich body of Roman laws on slaves, crime, and women and children. Students will explore the evolution of power over marginalized groups and penalties for crimes at the beginnings of the Western legal system in order to consider ideas of identity, agency, responsibility, and punishment from a cultural and historical perspective. Through an examination of the legal sources (in translation) and the study of the rise and changes of governmental institutions of justice, this course will examine the evolution of jurisprudence: the development of conceptions of power and shifts in the understanding of just punishment. The course is designed as an introduction to these topics suitable for all students.

Full details for FGSS 2806 - Roman Law: Slavery, Crime, and Gender

This course explores what has been termed "the modern plague."  It investigates the social history, cultural politics, biological processes, and global impacts of the retrovirus, HIV, and the disease syndrome, AIDS. It engages material from multiple fields: life sciences, social sciences, & humanities as well as media reports, government documents, activist art, and community-based documentaries. It explores various meanings and life-experiences of HIV & AIDS; examines conflicting understandings of health, disease, the body; investigates political struggles over scientific research, biomedical & public health interventions, and cultural representations; and queries how HIV vulnerability is shaped by systems of power and inequality. As well, we come to learn about the practices, the politics, and the ethics of life and care that arise in "the age of epidemic."

Full details for FGSS 2841 - Viruses- Humans-Viral Politics (Social History and Cultural Politics of HIV & AIDS)

Why are boys more likely than girls to be diagnosed with autism, and why are women more likely than men to be diagnosed with depression? Are there different "gay" and "straight" brains? And how does brain science interact with gender and sexuality in popular debate? Reading and discussing the original scientific papers and related critical texts, we will delve into the neuroscience of gender.

Full details for FGSS 3210 - Gender and the Brain

This course examines the ways in which sex and gender impact the expression of severe psychopathology. We will study biological, psychological, and cultural factors associated with sex and gender as they influence the epidemiology, phenomenology, etiology, diagnosis, and course of illness in major forms of psychopathology: specifically, schizophrenia, major affective illness, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and personality disorders. We will also examine the complicated roles of race, class, sexuality, and gender identity as they relate to these conditions. These topics will be examined through the frameworks of psychological science and feminism in an attempt to understand the effects that gender and science have on one another and the ways in which they influence the understanding of mental illness.

Full details for FGSS 3320 - Gender and Psychopathology

New media remain central to ongoing struggles over the constitution of the public sphere in Asia. In high measure, censorship affects the Internet and visual media (including digital, independent cinema), and government agencies are particularly wary of the viral qualities of new media. Extensive state investment into Internet control is offset by the fact that the Internet remains a primary site of political dissent and organizing. New media and communications technologies further continue to engender novel forms of political expression and notions of collectivity. In the past few years activists and artists as well as mass publics have thus forged distinct modes of expression in and around new media that, while frequently evading state prohibition, nevertheless present incisive political critique. The course will examine features unique to digital media—such as the viral, mimetic, archival, and amplificatory properties of the Internet—and ask how politicized media make use of these features to intervene into contexts of censorship and occlusion. We will draw on Asian media contexts also to interrogate assumptions about progressive politics. Investigating the logics of contemporary digital media in relation to the field of political expression, the course complicates received notions of non-Western political public spheres as illiberal, or lagging behind a stage of political development posited as normative.

Full details for FGSS 3376 - Digital Asia

Topic Spring 2019: Child Refugees and Politics: Children comprised 52 percent of the worldwide refugee population of 68.5 million in 2017. Traveling with families as well as unaccompanied, they appear in media accounts as the most vulnerable and at risk of all refugees. In this course, we will consider to what degree this assignation of vulnerability, often corresponding with victimhood, shapes the journeys and lives of refugee children. We will use the growing body of feminist scholarship on vulnerability in law, philosophy, migration studies, and other fields to investigate how "vulnerability" creates categories of worthy and unworthy victims. In the U.S., for example, images of babies and toddlers being separated from Central American parents prompted outrage. Yet images of teenage boys in makeshift tents in the New Mexico desert went largely uncovered. At what age does a child no longer deserve sympathy and protection? In what ways does vulnerability overshadow children's agency? How might vulnerability be rearticulated so as to address children's specific needs, at different ages? Our main focus will be Central American and Mexican children crossing into the U.S. at the southern border, but we will make comparisons to other groups throughout the world.

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

This course will offer an historical overview of responses to bodily and cognitive difference.  What was the status of the monster, the freak, the abnormal, the (dis)abled, and how are all of these concepts related?  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 difference as a negative attribute to reshaping our architectural and more broadly social constructions important for everyone?  What are our ethical responsibilities towards those we label as "disabled"?  Authors to be studied include: Ambroise Paré, Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers, Simon Baron-Cohen.

Full details for FGSS 3520 - (Dis)ability Studies: A Brief History

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors.  Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives.  As "unbound" energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life.  Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology.  Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Full details for FGSS 3651 - Freud and the Invention of Psychoanalysis

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 3991 - Undergraduate Independent Study

This course is a capstone seminar for FGSS majors and minors. It serves as an opportunity to synthesize various strands of feminist analysis and feminist theory gained during your undergraduate education and to extend them in new directions. We will ask: what do feminist theories and concepts mean for your research interests, your activist practices, and your life and career? How can feminist analytical perspectives inform your current and future pursuits? We will make feminist theoretical frameworks and analytical moves transparent and formally explicit, highlight intersectional, queer, transnational, and postcolonial perspectives; b) sharpen your feminist analytics through independent research; and c) integrate it into your research project, culminating in a capstone paper. In Spring 2019, we will explore these questions through the theme of displacement and belonging. We will read texts on refugees and refuge, on queer belonging, and on loss and connection in the aftermath of slavery. 

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

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

Full details for FGSS 4035 - Intersectionality in Disability Studies

If "the past is a foreign country," is it a country full of oppressed women? We can, with some smugness, agree that it may have been dreadful to be a woman or sexual minority in the Middle Ages, but it's nowhere near that simple. Also un-simple are medieval notions of race. Scholars long assumed that the European Middle Ages were entirely white and/or that since "race" as a concept hadn't been invented yet, it wasn't an issue. But both racial and gender difference matter tremendously, then as now. Together, we will think about race and gender as imagined at a time before the world we now know came into being, asking what the pre-history of difference might have to do with us and our future.

Full details for FGSS 4145 - Race and Gender in the Middle Ages

What spaces are available for imagining non-normative sexualities and non-binary genders in mainstream and alternative media? This class moves beyond a simple consideration of how lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender and queer people have been represented in the mainstream media to consider how media offer LGBTQ people alternative platforms for queer world-making. Further, this course is an exploration in our own queer world-making. Each assignment asks you to create a visual work that engages with materials from the class and from popular and queer media. This course is not about making "good" or "pretty" art, but about using creative processes to think differently—queerly—about LGBTQ representations. This class guides an adventure in looking differently at the world, including the media world, through the practice of queer making.

Full details for FGSS 4292 - Sexual Identities and the Media

This course uses the lens of temporality to track transformations in notions of urban personhood and collective life engendered by recent trans-Asia economic shifts. We will develop tools that help unpack the spatial and cultural forms of density and the layered histories that define the contemporary urban fabric of cities such as Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The course combines the investigation of the cinemas and literatures of the region with the study of recent writing on cities from Asian studies, film studies, queer theory, urban studies, political theory, religious studies, cultural geography, literary theory, and anthropology.

Full details for FGSS 4504 - The City: Asia

The body is a universal. How we construct our understandings of it is not. In this class we will investigate conceptions and treatment of the early-modern body (1400-1700) mainly in Europe with excursions to China, Japan, Africa. Among our topics will be: classical understanding of the body and gender; cross-cultural practices of medicine and anatomy; aesthetics and the nude; definitions of beauty and the grotesque. Criminal, sinful and saintly bodies; death, the macabre, and  the mortal, divine body of Christ; the ambiguous gender of children; the formation of identity through portraiture; the science of sexuality and art of erotics as well as correspondences among bodies, domestic and public spaces, the macrocosm and microcosm will round out our study. We will work with historical materials with an eye for current practices in bodily identities.

Full details for FGSS 4601 - Space, Gender, Body in Early Modern Art

The majority of existing union members are women and workers of color, and, since the mid-1980s, the majority of newly organized workers have been women of color, particularly black women and recent immigrants from Latin America. Yet, with the exception of just a handful of unions, the labor movement still has been slow to build on this support and enthusiasm. This course will focus on the challenges and possibilities created by the changing demographics of race and gender in the contemporary labor movement. Through a combination of readings, small group discussions, guest speakers, and library and on line research, short essays and one longer research paper; the course will examine these issues from an historical, demographic, labor relations, and sociological perspective.

Full details for FGSS 4845 - Labor, Race, and Gender

The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will follow adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world though to the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, pornography, culture, movie viewing, gender and queerness. We will rethink and theorize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (weekly reaction papers, and a final paper), the students will refine their theoretical, conceptual, and artistic accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.

Full details for FGSS 4948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism

It is a truism that early modern society was a 'patriarchal' one in which men had authority -- but how did that authority operate and what were its limits? How did the exercise of power between men and women intersect with religious, literary, legal and political institutions? We will approach these questions chronologically, examining the impact of the Reformation, the English Revolution, the Enlightenment, the rise of middle class and polite culture. We will also explore them methodologically and generically, with an eye to how different kinds of evidence and sources can produce different kinds of conclusions. Historians' hypotheses will be tested by analysis of primary sources.

Full details for FGSS 4950 - Gender, Power, and Authority in England, 1600 to 1800

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

Full details for FGSS 4991 - Senior Honors Thesis II

This course examines black feminist theories as they are articulated in the cross-cultural experiences of women across the African Diaspora. We will explore a variety of theories, texts and creative encounters within their socio-political and geographical frames and locations, analyzing these against, or in relation to, a range of feminist activisms and movements. Some key categories of discussion will include Black Left Feminism, Feminist Movements in Latin America and the Caribbean and African feminisms. Texts like the Combahee River Collective statement and a variety of US Black feminist positions and the related literature as well as earlier black feminist articulations such as the Sojourners for Truth and Justice will also be engaged. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own research projects from a range of possibilities.

Full details for FGSS 6207 - Black Feminist Theories: Sexuality, Creativity, and Power

This course uses the lens of temporality to track transformations in notions of urban personhood and collective life engendered by recent trans-Asia economic shifts. We will develop tools that help unpack the spatial and cultural forms of density and the layered histories that define the contemporary urban fabric of cities such as Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The course combines the investigation of the cinemas and literatures of the region with the study of recent writing on cities from Asian studies, film studies, queer theory, urban studies, political theory, religious studies, cultural geography, literary theory, and anthropology.

Full details for FGSS 6504 - The City: Asia

"I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me," the critic Roland Barthes once wrote. How do we take pleasure in a text, even when it appears to betray us? How do we speak of the erotics of style beyond the mere thematic interpretation of sexual representation? Has such an erotics even been written yet? To explore a methodology for contemplating this elusive embrace between the aesthetic and the erotic, we will consider influential works of psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, and queer theory alongside a survey of great modernist novelists whose innovative experiments in prose style have proved most sensual and most challenging, among them Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ronald Firbank, and Djuna Barnes.

Full details for FGSS 6554 - Modernist Fiction and the Erotics of Style

The body is a universal. How we construct our understandings of it is not. In this class we will investigate conceptions and treatment of the early-modern body (1400-1700) mainly in Europe with excursions to China, Japan, Africa. Among our topics will be: classical understanding of the body and gender; cross-cultural practices of medicine and anatomy; aesthetics and the nude; definitions of beauty and the grotesque. Criminal, sinful and saintly bodies; death, the macabre, and  the mortal, divine body of Christ; the ambiguous gender of children; the formation of identity through portraiture; the science of sexuality and art of erotics as well as correspondences among bodies, domestic and public spaces, the macrocosm and microcosm will round out our study. We will work with historical materials with an eye for current practices in bodily identities.

Full details for FGSS 6601 - Space, Gender, Body in Early Modern Art

New media remain central to ongoing struggles over the constitution of the public sphere in Asia. In high measure, censorship affects the Internet and visual media (including digital, independent cinema), and government agencies are particularly wary of the viral qualities of new media. Extensive state investment into Internet control is offset by the fact that the Internet remains a primary site of political dissent and organizing. New media and communications technologies further continue to engender novel forms of political expression and notions of collectivity. In the past few years activists and artists as well as mass publics have thus forged distinct modes of expression in and around new media that, while frequently evading state prohibition, nevertheless present incisive political critique. The course will examine features unique to digital media—such as the viral, mimetic, archival, and amplificatory properties of the Internet—and ask how politicized media make use of these features to intervene into contexts of censorship and occlusion. We will draw on Asian media contexts also to interrogate assumptions about progressive politics. Investigating the logics of contemporary digital media in relation to the field of political expression, the course complicates received notions of non-Western political public spheres as illiberal, or lagging behind a stage of political development posited as normative.

Full details for FGSS 6676 - Digital Asia

The majority of existing union members are women and workers of color, and, since the mid-1980s, the majority of newly organized workers have been women of color, particularly black women and recent immigrants from Latin America. Yet, with the exception of just a handful of unions, the labor movement still has been slow to build on this support and enthusiasm. This course will focus on the challenges and possibilities created by the changing demographics of race and gender in the contemporary labor movement. Through a combination of readings, small group discussions, guest speakers, and library and on line research, short essays and one longer research paper; the course will examine these issues from an historical, demographic, labor relations, and sociological perspective.

Full details for FGSS 6845 - Labor, Race, and Gender

This course offers an introduction to theoretical and practical aspects of the interdisciplinary field of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, providing graduate students with a range of disciplinary approaches and issues. We will explore both the disciplinary specifics of FGSS scholarship and the interdisciplinary breadth of gender/sexuality's reach as an analytic lens. While many of our graduate courses train students in highly specialized areas of feminist theory, this course aims to teach students how to find common intellectual ground from interdisciplinary perspectives without sacrificing the complexity of any disciplinary approach. The course is designed for graduate minors in FGSS and students with a specialized interest in feminist theory. Although it is not required, the course is strongly recommended for students obtaining a graduate minor in FGSS.

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

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

Full details for FGSS 7850 - International Gender Rights Seminar