Courses

Mass extinction, drought, toxic pollution: When the world's on fire, does gender really matter? In this course, we will examine the relationship between the degradation of the earth and the oppression of women, analyzing how novels and films—like The Witch, Mad Max: Fury Road, Okja, Parable of the Sower, Annihilation, and The Vegetarian—link feminist and environmental thinking. Students will develop both analytic and creative skills in their writing assignments, which will include a traditional literary analysis paper, a film review, a zine,  "poetree," and a final research paper. Ultimately, we will consider how an interwoven vision of environmental and social justice might help us to live in, write through, and build a more just world beyond our hazardous ecological present.

Full details for FGSS 1116 - FWS: Ecofeminism: Gender and Ecology in a World on Fire

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 We will read a variety of texts--personal narratives, historical documents, and cultural criticism--across a range of disciplines, and will consider how larger structural systems of both privilege and oppression affect individuals'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 central issues, debates, and theories that characterize the field of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Studies. Starting from the assumption that neither "sex" nor "sexuality" is a private experience or category, we will explore some of the ways that these powerfully public and political terms have circulated in social, legal, economic, and cultural spheres.  We will also examine how these categories are situated in relation to other formative categories including race, ethnicity, religion, family, marriage, reproduction, the economy, and the state. Using a comparative and intersectional approach, we will read from various disciplines to assess the tools that LGBT studies offers for understanding power and culture in our contemporary world.

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

In this course we will examine LGBTQ+ history in the United States with a focus on its recovery and public representation—what are the stakes of researching, preserving, and commemorating the LGBTQ+ past? We will investigate how archival, scholarly, curatorial, and creative practices shape popular conceptions of LGBTQ+ life, politics, and culture, and how those practices and conceptions have changed with evolving understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and oppression. Students will build skills in archival research and historical interpretation and explore possibilities and challenges in building archives and presenting LGBTQ+ history in a variety of public contexts—museums, libraries, monuments, movies and television, and community-based oral history projects. For their final project, students will locate and research a selection of archival materials (periodicals, letters, pamphlets, songs, advertisements, etc.) either online or at Cornell Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections, producing a final research paper and a proposal for a public history project.

Full details for FGSS 2335 - Making Public Queer History

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

Full details for FGSS 2620 - Performing Death and Desire: Vampires on Stage and Screen

"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 presents a cultural and historical perspective on ideas of agency, responsibility, and punishment through foundational texts of western law. We will primarily focus on three main areas of law: (1) slavery and (2) family (both governed by the Roman law of persons), and (3) civil wrongs (the law of delict or culpable harm). Through an examination of the legal sources (in translation) and the study of the reasoning of the Roman jurists, this course will examine the evolution of jurisprudence: the development of the laws concerning power over slaves and women, and changes in the laws concerning penalties for crimes. No specific prior knowledge needed.

Full details for FGSS 2806 - Roman Law

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

How have movements for sexual liberation used performance as a means of self-expression and strategies for social justice? How have theatrical stages served as sites of queer sociality and crucibles of invention, where history is made and remade by social actors?

Full details for FGSS 3250 - Staging Gay and Transgender Histories

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

"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

This course is dedicated to studying important works of literature that address what it means, in the Renaissance, to strive for excellence as a man or as a woman, especially in the public sphere.

Full details for FGSS 3588 - Creating Renaissance Man (and Woman)

How is the figure of the child constructed in popular culture? When and to what degree do children participate in the construction of these representations? This course surveys a variety of contemporary media texts (television, film, and the internet) aimed at children ranging in age from pre-kindergarten to young adults. We explore how these texts seek to construct children as empowered consumers, contesting adult conformity. Our theoretical approach complicates definitions of childhood as a time of innocence and potential victimhood and challenges normative constructions of childhood as a time for establishing "proper" sexual and gender identities. Taking a cultural studies approach, the class will consider the connections between the cultural texts and the realms of advertising, toys, and gaming.

Full details for FGSS 3591 - Kids Rule! Children's Popular Culture

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

What does it mean to live in the aftermath of slavery? How has the human history of slavery contributed to the production of "natural" values that we take for granted—such as community, property, citizenship, gender, individuality, and freedom? This course explores the history of enslavement throughout the human past, from the ancient world to the modern era. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between slavery and the construction of racial blackness. We will explore various institutionalized forms of servitude throughout time and space, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic worlds, from eunuchism to concubinage, from slavery in the Roman Empire to "modern slavery" and sex trafficking. Readings will be in English and will engage a variety of dynamic sources: theoretical, historiographical, anthropological, religious, legal, literary and multimedia.

Full details for FGSS 3692 - Race and Slavery, Old and Modern

"One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one" wrote Simone de Beauvoir. How does such an odd becoming happen? What can literature teach us about it? Does anyone ever achieve "being a woman" and how do we ("we"??) survive always falling short of the implicit ideal? We will think about the power afforded by receptivity, passivity, bottoming, emotionality and openness, whether or not these are enacted by people born, designated or living as female.  What are some of the dimensions of femininity's diversity, even in the United States, today? This course is intimately informed by intersectional queer, women of color and trans* perspectives, which will be at the center of our inquiry. It will cover film, literature, personal essays and gender theory.

Full details for FGSS 3725 - Femininity as Masquerade

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.

Full details for FGSS 3740 - Parody

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 2020, 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

This course examines how modern Spanish writers and doctors represented the human body as they grappled with disease and disability.  Reading fiction alongside medical and anthropological texts we will examine notions of the normal/abnormal, beautiful/ugly/ and healthy/infected as they change over time.  We also look at the ways in which these concepts are inflected by other identity categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and class.

Full details for FGSS 4020 - Reading the Body in Medicine and Fiction

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

Visions of bodily corruption preoccupy ruler and ruled alike and prompt campaigns for moral, medical, and legal reform in periods of both stability and revolution.  This seminar explores the links between political, sexual, and scientific revolutions in early modern and modern Asia.  The focus is on China and Japan, with secondary attention to South Asia and Korea.  Interaction with the West is a major theme.  Topics include disease control, birth control and population control, body modification, the history of masculinity, honorific violence and sexual violence, the science of sex, normative and stigmatized sexualities, fashion, disability, and eugenics.  The course begins with an exploration of regimes of the body in "traditional" Asian cultures.  The course then turns to the medicalization and modernization of the body under the major rival political movements in Asia: feminism, imperialism, nationalism, and communism.

Full details for FGSS 4127 - The Body Politic in Asia

Marriage was the widely expected norm within African societies. The institution was an important marker of adulthood, linking individuals and lineages in a network of mutual cooperation and support. Marriage practices and the concomitant gender expectations varied significantly between societies, and over time. As a result, marriage and divorce are especially rich terrain for exploring social history, women's agency, discursive constructions of 'women', masculinity and gender relations of power. This course explores some of the newest scholarship on marriage by Africanist scholars. The readings demonstrate the wide cultural variety in marriage as well as the dynamic relationship between marriage and historical change. They especially highlight women's roles and expectations in marriage, masculinity and the ways men and women negotiated the rules and boundaries of marriage. 

Full details for FGSS 4291 - Marriage and Divorce in the African Context

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks.  Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens.  Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Full details for FGSS 4701 - Nightlife

The course examines how postcolonial African writers and filmmakers engage with and revise controversial images of bodies and sexuality--genital cursing, same-sex desire, HIV/AIDS, genital surgeries, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' troubling of problematic tropes and practices such as the conception in 19th-century racist writings of the colonized as embodiment, the pathologization and hypersexualization of colonized bodies, and the precarious and yet empowering nature of the body and sexuality in the postcolonial African experience. As we focus on African artists and theorists, we also read American and European theorists, including but not certainly limited to Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Joseph Slaughter, detecting the ways in which discourses around bodies in the African context may shape contemporary theories and vice versa.

Full details for FGSS 4945 - Body Politics in African Literature and Cinema

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

Visions of bodily corruption preoccupy ruler and ruled alike and prompt campaigns for moral, medical, and legal reform in periods of both stability and revolution.  This seminar explores the links between political, sexual, and scientific revolutions in early modern and modern Asia.  The focus is on China and Japan, with secondary attention to South Asia and Korea.  Interaction with the West is a major theme.  Topics include disease control, birth control and population control, body modification, the history of masculinity, honorific violence and sexual violence, the science of sex, normative and stigmatized sexualities, fashion, disability, and eugenics.  The course begins with an exploration of regimes of the body in "traditional" Asian cultures.  The course then turns to the medicalization and modernization of the body under the major rival political movements in Asia: feminism, imperialism, nationalism, and communism.

Full details for FGSS 6127 - The Body Politic in Asia

This course explores the changing historical relationship between the body's biological sex, individual subjectivity, and identity. It asks how culture shapes scientific understandings and possibilities of sex, gender and identity. And it seeks to make historical sense of the shifts that have enabled a revolutionary increase in transgender existence today by comparing histories of transgender in specific cultural contexts. When possible, we analyze the role of subjectivity—one's sense of one's relationship to the physical body—in the politics of transgender identities. We examined and critique contemporary theories about the category of "transgender" and its relationship to the body, self, and physical sex, which is understood as malleable rather than fixed.

Full details for FGSS 6164 - Trans: Bodies, Sexes and Histories

Marriage was the widely expected norm within African societies.  The institution was an important marker of adulthood, linking individuals and lineages in a network of mutual cooperation and support.  Marriage practices and the concomitant gender expectations varied significantly between societies, and over time.  As a result, marriage and divorce are especially rich terrain for exploring social history, women's agency, discursive constructions of 'women', masculinity and gender relations of power.  This course explores some of the newest scholarship on marriage by Africanist scholars.  The readings demonstrate the wide cultural variety in marriage as well as the dynamic relationship between marriage and historical change.  They especially highlight women's roles and expectations in marriage, masculinity and the ways men and women negotiated the rules and boundaries of marriage.

Full details for FGSS 6291 - Marriage and Divorce in the African Context

In this course we will examine LGBTQ+ history in the United States with a focus on its recovery and public representation—what are the stakes of researching, preserving, and commemorating the LGBTQ+ past? We will investigate how archival, scholarly, curatorial, and creative practices shape popular conceptions of LGBTQ+ life, politics, and culture, and how those practices and conceptions have changed with evolving understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and oppression. Students will build skills in archival research and historical interpretation and explore possibilities and challenges in building archives and presenting LGBTQ+ history in a variety of public contexts—museums, libraries, monuments, movies and television, and community-based oral history projects. For their final project, students will locate and research a selection of archival materials (periodicals, letters, pamphlets, songs, advertisements, etc.) either online or at Cornell Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections, producing a final research paper and a proposal for a public history project.

Full details for FGSS 6335 - Making Public Queer History

How have movements for sexual liberation used performance as a means of self-expression and strategies for social justice? How have theatrical stages served as sites of queer sociality and crucibles of invention, where history is made and remade by social actors?

Full details for FGSS 6755 - Staging Gay and Transgender Histories

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