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 We will read a variety of texts--personal narratives, historical documents, and cultural criticism--across a range of disciplines, and will consider how larger structural systems of both privilege and oppression affect individuals'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 a broad understanding of the crucial roles East Asian women played in culture, the economy, and society from antiquity to the early twentieth century. By rethinking the pervasive stereotype of the passive and victimized East Asian women under by staunch Confucian patriarchy, it aims to examine women’s struggles, negotiations, and challenges of the normative discourse of femininity, with a focus on patrilineal family, the female body and reproduction, domesticity and women’s economic labor, women’s work, literacy and knowledge, and the modernization of women. We will examine how Confucian notions of gender and family were, far from being fixed, constantly redefined by the historical and temporal needs of East Asian contexts. This examination is undertaken through a combination of reading original texts and secondary scholarship in various disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, history, literature, and material culture. No knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean necessary. (SC)

Full details for FGSS 2281 - Gender, Family, and Confucianism in East Asia

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

This course introduces the field of sexuality studies to advanced undergraduates by examining the social, cultural, political, and historical dimensions of sexuality. We will read theoretical and empirical research with an emphasis on sociological perspectives and methods. We will develop an understanding of sexuality as a socially constructed system of stratification that is shaped by race, gender, class, and ability. Topics include sexual identity, behavior, and desire (such as heterosexuality and homosexuality), queer theory, the body, healthism, reproductive justice, and human rights.

Full details for FGSS 2310 - Sociology of Sexualities

This course critically examines the politics and ethics of knowledge production across the humanities and social sciences. It poses an expansive and complex question: how, by whom, and for whom is knowledge produced and to what ends? We will explore quantitative and qualitative research methods, theories of the archive and curation, and artistic and creative work as forms of knowledge production while centering questions of access across a range of categories, including but not limited to disability, language, geopolitical positioning, and neurodivergence. In a semester-long active learning project, students and faculty will collaboratively produce knowledge and disseminate it via the in-progress, open-access digital humanities platform Palestinian Pedagogy Network. (HC)

Full details for FGSS 2352 - How Do You Know? The Ethics and Politics of Knowledge

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 the human condition of Chinese women after 1949. In the name of the Women's liberation movement since the early 1900s, do Chinese women eventually hold up the half sky? From the cradle to the grave, what was most challenging in women's life? How did political, economic, and cultural forces frame women's professional careers and private life? No judgments nor imaginations. Using multi-media, such as Chinese independent documentary films, music, and photographs, students will discover the hidden stories behind the mainstream narratives. Workshops with film directors, pop music singers, and photographers offer students an unusual way of accessing all backstage field experiences.

Full details for FGSS 2575 - Tyranny and Dignity: Chinese Women from the Cultural Revolution to the White Paper Revolution

This course introduces students to ancient Greek drama, with a particular focus on the genre of tragedy and its relation to the cultural, political, and performance context of Athens in the 5th century BC. Students will read plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in English translation and explore how they address key themes such as gender, racialization, slavery, war, mourning, trauma, empathy, and justice. Students will also study how contemporary artists, writers, and communities have adapted and restaged Greek drama, transforming and animating these ancient scripts across various media (theater, film, literature, etc.) to speak to complex and urgent social issues today (e.g., state/institutional violence; sexual violence; racism and xenophobia; queer bodies and desires; mental health; disability and caregiving).

Full details for FGSS 2652 - Ancient Greek Drama

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

Full details for FGSS 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

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

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

A humanoid robot, an attic portal to another world, a haunted small town, an instance of time travel gone wrong—we will encounter all of these (and more) in this course on science and speculative fiction. Instructed in German, this course centers texts in German and/or about Germanophone spaces. Students will read novels, short stories, and poems; look at zines, comics, and webcomics; play through video games; and watch films. Class discussions will address topics like colonialism, climate change, escapism, dystopia/utopia, and formations of gender, sexuality, race, and nation. We will explore how narratives make use of worldbuilding, immersion, plot devices, and formal elements to unfurl these futuristic and fantastic places. Taught in German.

Full details for FGSS 3212 - Germanophone Science and Speculative Fiction

This course will examine the ways in which sex and gender impact the expression of severe psychopathology. We will try to understand these relationships using different levels of analysis. This will involve an exploration of biological, psychological, cognitive, and social 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 examine these topics through the frameworks of psychological science, feminism, and intersectionality, and attempt to integrate the offerings of each, to generate a nuanced understanding of mental illness.

Full details for FGSS 3320 - Gender and Psychopathology

In her pathbreaking text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman writes that young Black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise. This two-semester course endeavors to travel through those worlds using the cultural and musical forms of gospel and the blues as our compass. The first semester is guided by the work of scholars and writers like Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones and artists like Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Together we will interrogate the spectrum of lived experiences making for a kaleidoscopic sonic history of joy, pleasure, sorrow, resistance, and everything in between. (HC)

Full details for FGSS 3322 - Gospel and The Blues: A Black Women's History I, 1900-1973

Social Justice highlights refugee-led organizing and its intersections with un/documented and Indigenous beyond borders activism. We will work with and learn from refugee and asylum seekers led organizations that are started by and run by members of formerly displaced groups. These organizations build collectives and coalitions to organize communities across identities and legal categories and advocate for access to mobility and social justice. We will closely collaborate with these organizations and work on joint research projects.

Full details for FGSS 3400 - Social Justice: Special Topics

This course will offer an overview of theoretical and historical responses to bodily and cognitive difference. What was the status of people with (dis)abilities in the past, when they were called monsters, freaks, abnormal? How are all of these concepts related, and how have they changed over time? How have we moved from isolation and institutionalization towards universal design and accessibility as the dominant concepts relative to (dis)ability? Why is this shift from focusing on individual differences as a negative attribute to reshaping our architectural and more broadly social constructions important to everyone? Authors to be studied include: Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, and Jasbir Puar.

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

“My existence is a scandal,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of “art for art’s sake” and all that was considered exquisite, ironic, or obscene, the Decadent aesthetes of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of language, beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional moral strictures. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, and especially Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, fashion, and design, including music by Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss and artworks by James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustave Moreau.

Full details for FGSS 3550 - Decadence

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 Psychoanalysis

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 3693 - Race, Slavery, and Cinema

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 - Intersectional Disability Studies

How was the category "woman" constituted in the Middle Ages? Not assuming that women were the same then as now, this course, in dialogue with contemporary trans and genderqueer theory, will look at medieval gender in a new light. Considering works by women, like the Book of Margery Kempe, some primary texts about women, like the trial of Joan of Arc, and some scholarship about alternatives to the binary of women and men, like Leah DeVun's The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, this course will examine "woman" as a constructed category and "The Middle Ages" as one instance of the long work of making involved in issuing women into the common-sense category that they now occupy.

Full details for FGSS 4116 - Inventing Women in the Middle Ages

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. (SC)

Full details for FGSS 4127 - The Body Politic in Asia

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

Full details for FGSS 4491 - Feminism and Philosophy

How has history shaped our notion of Black girlhood? What is our collective understanding of Black girlhood? How do we see and understand Black girls? Black Girlhood Studies is a multidisciplinary field that draws on education, literature, psychological, and sociological perspectives as tools to see and honor Black girls' lived experiences. In this seminar course, we will use a mixture of lectures and facilitated discussions to provide an overview of Black girlhood as it relates to historical and current-day social, political, and cultural constructions of Black girlhood within and beyond the United States. We will also interrogate how Black girls deconstruct and interrupt these social constructions by engaging in scholarly works, popular press articles, poetry, music, film, and novels. Throughout the course, we will make space to imagine a world where Black girls' ways of knowing, being, and experiencing the world are honored.

Full details for FGSS 4561 - Black Girlhood Studies: Rememory, Representation, and Re-Imagination

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 is a theoretical exploration of digital biopolitics, a convergence of how digital technologies mediate, govern, and regulate life, particularly within frameworks of power and control. Extending the concept of biopolitics—the governance of populations through the imbrication of life processes into political calculations to enhance the former—the course foregrounds how computational systems, algorithms, and data practices shape and are shaped by cultural, political, and economic forces. The interdisciplinary course, linking political philosophy, media theory, and race studies, thinks with a wide range of scholars for whom digitality, as it encounters biopolitics, is generative for a deeper understanding of the datafied world. This exploration follows sections, including data as a resource, digital embodiment and corporeality, digital labor and necropolitics, and biopolitical resistance in digital spaces. Foundational to the course are inquiries about posthumanism and ethics, such as: How does the digital reconfigure traditional boundaries between human and non-human, self and other? As technology mediates biopolitical power, who holds systems accountable for harm and injustice?

Full details for FGSS 4944 - Digital Biopolitics

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 - Witches, Whores and Wives: Patriarchy and Resistance in Renaissance England

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. (SC)

Full details for FGSS 6127 - The Body Politic in Asia

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

Full details for FGSS 6301 - Queer Media Studies

As Théophile Gautier said of Decadent aesthetics, “It is an ingenious, complex, learned style, full of shades and refinements of meaning, ever extending the bounds of language, borrowing from every technical vocabulary, taking colors from every palette and notes from every keyboard; a style that endeavors to express the most inexpressible thoughts, the vaguest and most fleeting contours of form, that listens, with a view to rendering them, to the subtle confidences of neurosis, to the confessions of aging lust turning into depravity, and to the odd hallucinations of fixed ideas passing into mania.” "Decadent" is an enduring term of political abuse, but also defines a canonical aesthetic movement ironically fascinated throughout the past two centuries with the style of empires in decline, including ours.

Full details for FGSS 6551 - Decadence and the Modern Novel

This course is a theoretical exploration of digital biopolitics, a convergence of how digital technologies mediate, govern, and regulate life, particularly within frameworks of power and control. Extending the concept of biopolitics—the governance of populations through the imbrication of life processes into political calculations to enhance the former—the course foregrounds how computational systems, algorithms, and data practices shape and are shaped by cultural, political, and economic forces. The interdisciplinary course, linking political philosophy, media theory, and race studies, thinks with a wide range of scholars for whom digitality, as it encounters biopolitics, is generative for a deeper understanding of the datafied world. This exploration follows sections, including data as a resource, digital embodiment and corporeality, digital labor and necropolitics, and biopolitical resistance in digital spaces. Foundational to the course are inquiries about posthumanism and ethics, such as: How does the digital reconfigure traditional boundaries between human and non-human, self and other? As technology mediates biopolitical power, who holds systems accountable for harm and injustice?

Full details for FGSS 6944 - Digital Biopolitics