Courses

When we think of history, we tend to think of the archive, of tangible items that tell us about the past. These archives, however, often omit the experiences of marginalized groups, including members of LGBTQ+ communities. How does performance – from daily performances of identity to dramatic works to drag – help us understand LGBTQ+ histories that might otherwise be forgotten? This course explores this question through the analysis of scholarly and dramatic texts, including Brian Freeman's Civil Sex, about gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, David Román's work on "archival drag," and an opera about Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. With an emphasis on in-class discussions, peer-review, and collaborative writing workshops, this course fosters students' ability to analyze scholarly arguments and produce coherent, persuasive prose.

Full details for FGSS 1118 - FWS: Writing and Performing LGBTQ+ Histories

By posing seemingly simple questions such as what is love and who has the right to love, this introductory-level lecture course surveys how love has been experienced and expressed from the pre-modern period to the present. Through case studies of familial and conjugal love in Africa, Asia, the US, Europe, and South and Latin America, the course will examine the debates about and enactment's of what constitutes the appropriate way to show love and affection in different cultures and historical contexts. Among the themes we will explore are questions of sexuality, marriage, kinship, and gender rights. A final unit will examine these themes through modern technologies such as the Internet, scientific advances in medicine, and a growing awareness that who and how we love is anything but simple or universal.

Full details for FGSS 1940 - A Global History of Love

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 We will read a variety of texts--personal narratives, historical documents, and cultural criticism--across a range of disciplines, and will consider how larger structural systems of both privilege and oppression affect individuals'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

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

This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important fictional work by US Latina writers, including short stories, novel, and film, with a particular focus on social justice, gender advocacy work, and work by Afro Latinx writers.  We will begin with discussion of canonical figures like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, to provide a basis for our focus on more recent writers like Angie Cruz, Elizabeth Acevedo, Linda Yvette Chávez, and Carmen Maria Machado.

Full details for FGSS 2460 - Contemporary Narratives by Latina Writers

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

The rap superstar Drake, comedian Ilana Glazer, and muscleman Zac Efron are just three of the millennial Jewish stars examined in this course. We will ask how millennial Jewish stars depict Jewishness in terms of race, gender, sexuality. For instance, why has the rapper Lil Dicky chosen such an emasculating stage name, and why does Ilana Glazer embrace the outdated racial term "Jewess?" How do these names use historical Jewish stereotypes to fuel present-day comedy? We will trace racial, gendered, and sexual tropes about Jews from 19th-century theater to the newest YouTube sketches. We'll cluster these media around themes like women's pleasure, Jewish identity, cultural appropriation, anti-Semitism, and millennial financial struggles. We'll laugh hard, learn a lot, and see today's media through new eyes.

Full details for FGSS 2585 - Millennial Jewish Stars: Race, Gender and Sexuality

Why are the undead so long-lived? This course hunts the dangerous and subversive figure of the vampire across a variety of pages, stages and screens. From campy melodramas and raucous stage comedies, to lush cinematic epics and politically savvy television---and all the Draculas that have come and gone in between--we will explore how the vampire changes with medium, period, and genre. Using a variety of critical approaches we will consider why this most persistent cultural metaphor emerges in particular cultural moments, and what social anxieties and desires it articulates. We will interrogate the vampire's relationship to race and gender and analyze how the vampire is constructed, appropriated, adapted, reinvented, and performed in its many contexts, asking what it means for us to consume these texts.

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

Full details for FGSS 2762 - Desire and Modern Drama

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. In this course, we will delve into the neuroscience of gender difference. Reading the original scientific papers and related critical texts, we will ask whether we can find measurable physical differences in male and female brains, and what these differences might be. Do men and women solve spatial puzzles differently, as measured physiologically? Do nonhuman animals display sex-specific behaviors mediated by brain structure, and can we extrapolate these findings to human behavior? Why are boys three times more likely than girls to be diagnosed as autistic, and is there any connection between the predominantly male phenomenon of autism and other stereotypically male mental traits? Are there physical representations of sexual orientation in the brain, and how are these related to gender identity? And how are scientific studies represented and misrepresented in popular debate?

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

Women have from the beginning been integral members of Buddhist traditions. But their voices have often been silenced by male clergy. This course will explore ways in which images of women and the feminine have been manipulated within normative literature to serve a variety of ends. We will also look at the lives of real Buddhist women in premodern and contemporary times as we think about the complex ways women have made space for their own interests.

Full details for FGSS 3374 - Gendering Enlightenment: Attitudes toward Women in Buddhist Traditions

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

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

Religious beliefs, practices, and conflicts shape our world and influence global politics.  Yet mediatized depictions of religion can be reductive and polarizing.  Moreover, these depictions may be different from what people experience in their everyday lives.  In the contemporary theatre, we have the opportunity to consider representations of individuals' lived religion, the complex questions of belief, and challenges to faith from within and outside religious communities.  Through close readings of plays and related materials engaging with Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and other faith traditions, we will explore and discuss together the religious motivations, tensions, and dilemmas facing us today.  Our texts include, among others, Jesus Christ Superstar, Indecent, Angels in America, and Heroes of the Fourth Turning.

Full details for FGSS 3747 - Staging Faith: Contemporary Theatre and Lived Religions

This course examines how African writers, filmmakers, and internet media content creators engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, gender, queerness, genital surgeries, sex strike, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' commitment in highlighting forms of agency on the continent in addition to troubling longstanding and problematic colonialist tropes of pathologization of Africans. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious, yet empowering, nature of the body in the post-independence African experience. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (reaction papers, an abstract, and annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you to refine your understanding of body politics.

Full details for FGSS 3977 - Body Politics in African Literature, Cinema, and New Media

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 senior seminar constitutes the culmination of the FGSS major-it provides a unique opportunity to come together with all the other FGSS seniors to both put to use what has been learned and explore new aspects of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. In this particular seminar, we will attempt to answer, in short, the question of what it means to be a feminist today, at this point in time and place. Pursuing the intersections of theory and practice, we will explore issues and concerns in the areas that you have identified as central to your concept and/or critique of feminism.

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

Topic: Feminist Posthumanisms in the Visual Arts. While some feminist works of 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 engaged with posthumanist perspectives in relation to a body of relevant theoretical texts and previous feminist media arts.

Full details for FGSS 4153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

Anna Julia Cooper's pioneering publication of A Voice from the South (1892) underscores the centrality of black women in determining the possibilities for black racial uplift in the nation. Areas from local color and regionalism, to contemporary fields such as cultural geography, have underscored the impact of geography on identity. Such insights have increasingly underscored that region matters in shaping black women's identities in the U.S., along with their various cultural productions. Black women writers in the U.S. South played a salient role in shaping the black women's literature renaissance of the 1970s in both writing and theorizing literature, and thus, in expanding the conventional canons in African American and American literature more broadly. This course considers the new generation of writers of black women that has emerged in the U.S. South in more recent years in the twenty first century, whose writings have increasingly impacted the development of contemporary African American literature. This course is designed to meet this body of material with serious reading, study and critical analysis. Genres that we will explore include the novel, poetry, the essay and the memoir, along with visual art. We will consider a range of newer authors, including Edwidge Danticat, Honorée Jeffers, Tayari Jones, Valdez Perkins, Natasha Tretheway, Jesmyn Ward, and Shay Youngblood. Concomitantly, we will explore the visual art of Kara Walker. We will consider ways in which these writers build upon established themes and conventions in African American and black women's writing and the implications of their work for black feminist theory. Furthermore, we will examine the impact of their work within the emergent field of twenty first century African American literature and criticism.

Full details for FGSS 4403 - New Black Southern Women Writers

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

Feminist approaches to questions in metaphysics, epistemology, language, and value theory.

Full details for FGSS 4491 - Feminism and Philosophy

How has the fiction and art of queers of color transformed the worlds we know? How have their theoretical interventions created new queer freedoms and new understandings of race and sexualities?  In this course we will focus on the struggles against subjugation led by Black and Latinx artists and writers including Audre Lorde, Gabby Rivera, Marlon Riggs, Félix, González-Torres, Essex Hemphill, Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Cherríe Moraga. Building on their work, will turn to queer of color theory, a conceptual field that interrogates the ways race, gender, sexuality, regimes of embodiment, and class reinforce racializing technologies, in order to learn what queer of color thinkers can teach us about globalization, incarceration, immigration as well as joy, pleasure, intoxication, the unruly and the opaque.

Full details for FGSS 4505 - Queer Proximities

Often referred to as a "second skin", aesthetic representations of clothing open the possibility of reimagining the visual economy of race—the belief that race can be located in the body's visible features and characteristics. Bringing together the research methods of visual culture, material culture, and literary studies, and moving among photographic, painted, and literary portrayals by and of African Americans, we will explore fashion and clothing as aesthetic practices of everyday life that defy racism's flattening and objectifying effects. The course will pay particular attention to artwork that explores the multiple valences of "fabrication"—working with materials, making and fictionalizing—to reveal and reconfigure the psychic consequences of living under the gaze of white dominance. For longer description and instructor bio visit The Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for FGSS 4658 - Fabricating Race: Art, Clothing, Resistance

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 4691 - Race and Slavery, Old and Modern

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

This course analyzes how cultural beliefs about masculinity intersect with race, sexuality, and citizenship. To emphasize how masculine norms vary across cultures, we will use the plural term "masculinities." Treating gender as a relational system of power, we will investigate how masculinities are defined against femininities, and how different masculinities are defined against each other (for example, the stereotypes of the Latino "bad hombre" vs. the white "all-American football player"). Combining sociological studies with media analysis, we will ask the following questions and more: Where do beliefs about masculinities come from, and how do they change over time? How do these beliefs naturalize certain kinds of violence? How do these beliefs interact with, and help to create, ideas about race and nation?

Full details for FGSS 4757 - Be a Man! Masculinity, Race, and Nation

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

Liberal feminists and political theorists argue that sentiments such as compassion and empathy have the capacity to alert us to suffering, injustice, and oppression, and thus incite transformative political action. This interdisciplinary seminar explores the challenges to this theory by staging a conversation between postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories of affect, and anthropological critiques of humanitarian projects. Sentiments are mobilized to defend borders, wage wars, grant asylum to refugees, provide medical care and disaster relief, and inspire feminist activism. We will analyze how these gendered and racialized ethical projects and political regimes are co-constituted, and how they mediate access to resources and survival, as well as political agency, subjectivity, citizenship, and national belonging.

Full details for FGSS 4876 - Humanitarian Affects

This course examines how African writers, filmmakers, and internet media content creators engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, gender, queerness, genital surgeries, sex strike, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' commitment in highlighting forms of agency on the continent in addition to troubling longstanding and problematic colonialist tropes of pathologization of Africans. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious, yet empowering, nature of the body in the post-independence African experience. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (reaction papers, an abstract, and annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you to refine your understanding of body politics.

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

Topic: Feminist Posthumanisms in the Visual Arts. While some feminist works of 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 engaged with posthumanist perspectives in relation to a body of relevant theoretical texts and previous feminist media arts.

Full details for FGSS 6153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

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

Anna Julia Cooper's pioneering publication of A Voice from the South (1892) underscores the centrality of black women in determining the possibilities for black racial uplift in the nation. Areas from local color and regionalism, to contemporary fields such as cultural geography, have underscored the impact of geography on identity. Such insights have increasingly underscored that region matters in shaping black women's identities in the U.S., along with their various cultural productions. Black women writers in the U.S. South played a salient role in shaping the black women's literature renaissance of the 1970s in both writing and theorizing literature, and thus, in expanding the conventional canons in African American and American literature more broadly. This course considers the new generation of writers of black women that has emerged in the U.S. South in more recent years in the twenty first century, whose writings have increasingly impacted the development of contemporary African American literature. This course is designed to meet this body of material with serious reading, study and critical analysis. Genres that we will explore include the novel, poetry, the essay and the memoir, along with visual art. We will consider a range of newer authors, including Edwidge Danticat, Honorée Jeffers, Tayari Jones, Valdez Perkins, Natasha Tretheway, Jesmyn Ward, and Shay Youngblood. Concomitantly, we will explore the visual art of Kara Walker. We will consider ways in which these writers build upon established themes and conventions in African American and black women's writing and the implications of their work for black feminist theory. Furthermore, we will examine the impact of their work within the emergent field of twenty first century African American literature and criticism.

Full details for FGSS 6403 - New Black Southern Women Writers

Woman caring for the dead; women sacrificed; fatal female desire - these images have been constitutive for Western aesthetic and theoretical discourse. How is female agency, in word and deed, delimited in a world divided along the lines of public/private, state/family, visible/invisible, outside/inside, mind/body, culture/nature? How are knowledge and thought conditioned by positing gendered and racial others? Have investigations of "public feelings" (Cvetkovich, Berlant) changed the perspective on gendered affects (rage, revenge)?

Full details for FGSS 6410 - Female Acts: From Antiquity to Jelinek

How has the fiction and art of queers of color transformed the worlds we know? How have their theoretical interventions created new queer freedoms and new understandings of race and sexualities?  In this course we will focus on the struggles against subjugation led by Black and Latinx artists and writers including Audre Lorde, Gabby Rivera, Marlon Riggs, Félix, González-Torres, Essex Hemphill, Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Cherríe Moraga. Building on their work, will turn to queer of color theory, a conceptual field that interrogates the ways race, gender, sexuality, regimes of embodiment, and class reinforce racializing technologies, in order to learn what queer of color thinkers can teach us about globalization, incarceration, immigration as well as joy, pleasure, intoxication, the unruly and the opaque.

Full details for FGSS 6505 - Queer Proximities

Urban Representation Labs are intended to bring students and faculty into direct contact with complex urban representations spanning a wide media spectrum and evoking a broad set of humanist discourses. Students will leverage archival materials at Cornell to launch new observations and explore unanticipated approaches to urban culture that derive from previously understudied archival materials. The goal is twofold: to demystify the representational technologies involved in presenting the city, and to unpack the political, cultural, and aesthetic values and priorities embedded in every form of presentation. Urban Representation Labs are offered under the auspices of Cornell University's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities grant. For current special topic seminar description and application instructions, visit our urban seminars page.

Full details for FGSS 6819 - Urban Representation

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

Liberal feminists and political theorists argue that sentiments such as compassion and empathy have the capacity to alert us to suffering, injustice, and oppression, and thus incite transformative political action. This interdisciplinary seminar explores the challenges to this theory by staging a conversation between postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories of affect, and anthropological critiques of humanitarian projects. Sentiments are mobilized to defend borders, wage wars, grant asylum to refugees, provide medical care and disaster relief, and inspire feminist activism. We will analyze how these gendered and racialized ethical projects and political regimes are co-constituted, and how they mediate access to resources and survival, as well as political agency, subjectivity, citizenship, and national belonging.

Full details for FGSS 6876 - Humanitarian Affects

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

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