Feminist and Gender Studies
Feminist and Gender Studies Website
Professor LEWIS; Associate Professor GUESSOUS (Chair); Associate Professor KUMAR
Mission Statement
Feminist and Gender Studies fosters inquiry into modalities of power as they are mediated by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, class, nation and citizenship, age, and ability. Through teaching, scholarship, and service, we study and develop these interdisciplinary and feminist theories and critical practices in collaboration with artists, activists, and scholars at ϳԹ and beyond.
Vision Statement
The aim of Feminist and Gender Studies is to embody a feminist ethos of critical engagement and responsiveness that is attentive to shifting relations of power; to be an intellectual, political, and creative space for the pursuit of exemplary collaborative initiatives locally, regionally, nationally, and transnationally; and to remain conversant with myriad intellectual legacies while reimagining the possibilities of feminist knowledge and practice.
Major Requirements
Students seeking to major in Feminist and Gender Studies must complete 14 units, which includes two units (FG404 and FG405) designated for the senior capstone project. All electives must be approved by the major advisor.
- FG110 Introduction to Feminist and Gender Studies or FG114 Introduction to Queer Studies
- FG200 Feminist Theory
- FG211 Critical Feminist Methodologies
- FG322 Junior Seminar
- FG404 Senior Project
- FG405 Advanced Senior Project
- FG416 Senior Seminar
- One Elective (100 or 200-level)
- One Elective (200-level)
- One Elective (200 or 300-level)
- Two Electives (300-level)
- Two Cross-Listed Electives
Minor Requirements
Students seeking to minor in Feminist and Gender Studies must complete 6 units. No senior capstone or integrative experience project is required for minors. All electives must be approved by the major advisor and none of these may include cross-listed courses.
- FG110 Introduction to Feminist and Gender Studies or FG114 Introduction to Queer Studies
- FG200 Feminist Theory
- FG211 Critical Feminist Methodologies
- One Elective (100 or 200-level)
- Two Electives (300-level)
Courses
Feminist and Gender Studies
An examination of feminism in Asia. Emphasis will be placed on the diversity of goals and strategies adopted by Asian women for liberating themselves from oppressive attitudes and customs as well as for empowering them. Traditional philosophical works, contemporary literature, film, and journal articles by Asian women will be consulted. (Not offered 2024-25).
According to its creators, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was created after the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin “as a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society” and as “an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.” In response, #AllLivesMatter was created more informally to counter what many felt was an exclusionary focus on Black lives at the expense of others, gaining popularity after utterances from Canadian singing group The Tenors, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and author Terry McMillan, and many others. This, however, is just one example of the debates that ensue regarding the causes and consequences of various forms of protest, especially that which is entrenched in discourses about race, gender, sexuality, and other social, cultural, and political markers. Focusing primarily on Feminist and Critical Media Studies, this course allows students to examine mediated constructions of and debates about protests as early as Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831 and as recently as the anti-fascism protests at the University of California-Berkeley in August 2017. (Summer only 2024-25).
Students considering majors in history, political science, pre-law, or the humanities will need to hone their critical thinking and analytical skills while simultaneously developing a broad understanding of the complexities of the American government, history, and society. Designed for pre-college students, this course examines the deeply rooted interconnectedness between race and the law. Students will study the origins of Critical Race Theory (CRT), its major themes, such as liberalism, counter-storytelling, and intersectionality, and critiques of CRT, with a particular focus on political, legal, scholarly, and popular discourses. (Summer only 2024-25).
Introduces theories and methodologies that examine the relationships between power and markers of identity, such as gender, sexuality, race, class, nation, and dis/ability. Informed by the civil rights, student, labor, LGBTQ, and women’s movements, this course encourages student reflection on their participation in institutions of power and in effecting change. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: SHB requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPUS requirement.
How sex roles shape our experiences. Sources and consequences of the differences between males and females. Biological processes, participation in the economy and the family. Possibilities for and consequences of changing sex roles. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement.
What are LGBT/Queer Studies? What does it mean to identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender? Who gets to create knowledge about LGBTQ people? This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying these questions by wrestling with the changing nature of LGBT and Queer as categories across time and space/location. Studies a critical consciousness on LGBTQ issues that recognizes the ways gender and sexuality are complicated by intersectional experiences of race, class, and nationality. Interrogates gender, sex, the “body,” erotic pleasure, sexuality, and sexual orientation as social constructions embedded in power structures, analyzing the impact of myriad intellectual and activist approaches to social policy, popular culture, law and governance, science, and public discourse. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPUS requirement.
This course investigates the differences and similarities between male and female communication in contemporary American society within the framework of communication and feminist theory from a number of contexts, including interpersonal communication in family contexts and the work environment, public communication about gender in the media, and interpersonal and mediated communication in the education system. (Not offered 2024-25).
An introduction to feminist theology and ethics in the Christian and Judaic tradition, with attention to such issues as God, love, justice, community, sexuality, liberation, and ecofeminism. Readings to include Ruether, Plaskow, McFague, Welch, and Heyward. (Not offered 2024-25).
An examination of research and theory on psychological gender differences and similarities. This course will explore the ways in which gender is a system of meanings that operate at the individual, interactional, and cultural level to structure people's lives. Special attention is made to methodological issues, and to feminist critiques of traditional methods of data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
What does it mean to be 'mad'? Is madness in the eyes of the beholder? This course examines the concept of madness as it has been applied to women from historical, psychological, social and feminist perspectives. Our goal will be to critically examine the diagnostic criteria used by the psychiatric community and popular culture to case material and investigate the 'logic' of madness, asking to what extent madness might be a reasonable response to unreasonable conditions. This course will include a careful consideration of the rising use of psychopharmacology, particularly in the treatment of depression in women. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
(Not offered 2024-25).
Surveys and historicizes feminist theories, including, but not limited to, Black feminism, Transnational feminism, Xicanisma, Marxist feminism, Transfeminism, and Ecofeminism. This course encourages students to understand feminist theory as a multivocal intellectual project grounded in shifting geopolitical conjunctures. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: SHB requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPUS requirement.
A survey of women artists in Western Europe and America from ancient to modern times, contrasting feminist and conventional perspectives. Social and historical context as well as special problems faced by women. Why have there been so few 'great' women artists? Are there qualities unique to women's art? Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: HP requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement.
Cultivates deeper understanding of theories, concepts, and interdisciplinary sub-fields within Feminist & Gender Studies. Emphasizes ways of connecting, synthesizing, and employing theories and concepts, continuing to pay attention to foundational texts and concepts, while recognizing the always shifting landscape of the field. Assignments require intermediate-level independent thinking and research skills. Courses and instructors vary annually. .5 or 1 unit.
We will examine theories of race, class, and gender construction in the United States and other societies, focusing on their intersections in such areas as labor, sexual relations, community, law, and other forms of cultural production. We will analyze 'identity politics' as a standpoint and as vehicle for, or obstacle to, social change. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Examines feminist approaches, modes of inquiry, and debates about the politics of knowledge production. In exploring these concerns, this course focuses on how feminist scholars ask methodological and epistemological questions about positionality, objectivity/subjectivity, authority, voice, and (inter)disciplinarity. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement.
Studies the competencies necessary for analyzing mass media codes and conventions and interpreting the meanings and ideologies generated by texts in TV, film, radio, internet, and other industries, especially regarding how race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, citizenship, and other social, cultural, and political markers are constructed. Examines the impetuses for and implications of these constructions, including the ways in which they are revised, resisted, and reproduced. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Diverse Cultures and Critiques requirement. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: AIM requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: SHB requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPUS requirement.
Examines how the identities of marginalized communities in Berlin, such as Black Germans, Jewish Germans, Turkish Germans, migrants, refugees, victims of Neo-Nazi terrorism and police brutality, and LGBTQI communities, are predicated on racism, heterosexism, colonialism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression. Additionally, considers how these communities resist, reject, revise, and reproduce these narratives as they construct their own subjectivities. May meet either the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures or Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: SHB requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
The interconnections between feminism and ecology. Ecofeminism explores the links between systems of domination such as sexism, racism, economic exploitation and the ecological crisis. We will assess criticism of ecofeminism and evaluate the potential of this philosophy for political practice. May meet either the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures or Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
The course will consider the scientific description of women at various historical periods and its impact on the social experiences of women. We will explore the lives and work on individual women scientists and assess their contribution to science. We will examine the current feminist critiques of science. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPUS requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Examines dominant discourses about the veil and about Muslim women in order to trace the making, trajectory and effects of the so-called “problem” of the veil. Analyzes how the veiling practices of Muslim women have been an object of scrutiny, commentary, disavowal and incitement to discourse ever since 19th century Western travelers began writing about the Muslim women they encountered and the veils that concealed them from their sight. Readings include works by/about late nineteenth and early twentieth century Western Orientalists and missionaries; early male reformers from the Middle East; contemporary Middle Eastern and Western feminists. We will also examine a number of contemporary debates and controversies about the veiling practices of Muslim minorities in the US and Europe (in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and France). 0.5 unit or 1 unit. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement.
Introduces students to a transnational feminist approach by critically analyzing gendered controversies from different historical-political conjunctures and parts of the world. Examples might include debates on Sati (widow immolation) in colonial India, so-called honor-killings in the Middle East, foot-binding in China, female circumcision in Sub-Saharan Africa, veiling and the practices of Muslim parents (such as exempting their children from co-ed swimming and/or gym classes) in contemporary Europe, and gender-testing in the Olympics. Among the questions that this course will ask: What gendered practices tend to elicit public outrage? What kinds of power relations does this outrage both depend on and enable? Which bodies tend to become the objects of moral panic? What anxieties are articulated, projected and displaced through these controversies? And what can we learn about modernity, colonialism, multiculturalism, feminism, humanitarianism, and power by analyzing the politics of such gendered controversies from a critical transnational feminist perspective? Meets the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Religion and myth of ancient Greece and Rome in relation to that of the ancient Mediterranean (Akkadian, Hittite, Sumerian, Egyptian). Female presence in art, literature and religion compared to treatment of women in their respective cultures. Theoretical approaches to the understanding of myth (Comparative, Jungian, Structuralist) in relation to myths as they are encoded in their specific cultures. Students may trace a myth through Medieval, Renaissance and modern transformations in art, music, poetry and film, or study myth in other cultures (e.g. Norse and Celtic). May meet either the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures or Social Inequality requirement.
Examines the role of women from French colonies in Africa and Caribbean in the anti-colonial Negritude movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Studies how the ideology and values of the Negritude movement engaged with the major political and aesthetic ideologies of the day. Students have the option of reading the class material in the original French for French or Comparative Literature credit. (Not offered 2024-25).
An introduction to the anthropological study of the modern Middle East and its diasporas that foregrounds how gender and sexuality are inhabited, embodied and negotiated in everyday life by differently situated individuals and communities. Themes for the course include the modern refashioning of gender and sexuality; agency, power and subjectivity; law and citizenship; piety and secularity; feminism, multiculturalism and the politics of translation. These themes are explored through richly contextualized historical, ethnographic, autobiographical, and fictional accounts in places as diverse as Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, as well as in various diasporic locations including France and Germany. Considers dominant representations of the region and the normative assumptions about tradition, modernity, religion, secularism, law, gender, family and sexuality underlying them. 0.5 unit or 1 unit. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
This course will focus on a comparative study of the voice of Chinese women writers in the 1920s and 1980s, examine women writers' works in a social-historical context, and discuss the difference of women's places and problems in traditional Chinese culture and modern Chinese society. The course will also try to define the similar and different expressions of 'feminism' as a term in the West and the East. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Focus on how conservative Roman republican ideals were reconciled in an increasingly Hellenized empire dominated by an imperial dynasty. Topics include the changing status of traditional gender types and established class systems, the role of rulers, women and freedmen in Tacitus, Juvenal Martial, Suetonius, Seneca, Apuleius, Lucian, Plutarch, Aristides, Dio Chysostom and Claudian. Attention will also be given to representations of women and imperial families in art and statuary. (Not offered 2024-25).
Examines the following questions: Are there politically relevant differences between the sexes, and if so, are they the product of nature and/or convention? What is/ought to be the relation between the political community and private attachments? How has liberalism answered these questions? How does consideration of gender challenge liberal theories such as contract, individual rights, and human nature? Readings in both political theory and in feminist literature. (Not offered 2024-25).
Examines human sexualities, especially personal, social, political, and cultural concepts about sex and sexuality, from a feminist framework that is rooted in intersectionality—a perspective that considers how power, race, class, gender, sex, and ethnicity shape our experiences. Additionally, the course focuses on sex research, sex education, sex behaviors, economies of sex work, and mediated representations of sex, such as erotica, Kink, and pornography Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
How do musical experiences help define gender roles and sexuality? These experiences are examined across a wide range of musical genres and cultural contexts. How might gender and sexual identity be shaped, for example, by writing the biography of a homosexual classical composer, joining a community of heavy metal fans, singing as an Italian castrato, or a 19th-century Indian courtesan, impersonating Elvis? Theoretical approaches drawn from feminist studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory. (Not offered 2024-25).
This course examines the interaction of women's musical lives with politics, society, and spirituality, and will focus primarily on the twentieth century. We will look at artists like Aretha Franklin and South Africa's Miriam Makeba and their relationship to the Civil Rights struggles in their countries; Joni Mitchell, Holly Near, punk rocker Patti Smith, and performance artist Laurie Anderson and their relationship to the feminist movement; Mary Lou Williams, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith and the integration of women into jazz; Joan Tower, Marin Alsop, Maria Callas, Marian Anderson and the traditions of Western Classical Music; and the role of the ingenue and character roles in the Broadway musical - from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Stephen Sondheim. In addition to twentieth century women, we will also review the lives of women frame drummers of earliest history, as well as the seminal figures Amy Beach, Clara Schumann, and the mystic visionary Hildegard von Bingen. Women's diaries and oral histories will be a major source for the class, as well as video and extensive listening to recordings. (Not offered 2024-25).
Women in American society, from colonial times to 1860, including issues of race, class and servitude; transformations in pre-industrial work and family relationships; women and slavery; women and religion; women's efforts to reorder their lives and society. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Women in American society from 1860 to the present, including Victorian women on the pedestal and in the factory; social and domestic feminism in the progressive era; work in the home; urban women; immigrant and minority women; women in wartime; contemporary feminism. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
An exploration of construction of gender and the status of women in Hindu, Islamic, and Buddhist cultures, with attention to both texts and practices. Readings survey a variety of topics including marriage, sexuality, sati, Islamic law, devotion, renunciation, and tatra.) (Not offered 2024-25).
Economic agreements, existence of multinational corporations, information technology, and dissemination of popular culture all remind us that globalism is real, diminishing national boundaries and changing people's lives. This course will cover issues women encounter globally. Utilizing comparative historical perspective we will study the role of religion, nationalism, and secularism in shaping women's roles. We will also examine issues such as women's roles in political parties and governments, education, health and the effect of international agreements on women's status. (Not offered 2024-25).
An exploration of the social history of the American family from its extended kinship form through the development of the nuclear family ideal, to the more valid forms existing in contemporary society. Emphasis is placed on how gender and race structure relationships within the family as well as the family forms themselves. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement.
Conducts interdisciplinary examinations of the development of LGBTQ social movements in the U.S. by linking the context, goals, and outcomes of movements to the dynamics of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, immigration status, and geography. Studies how LGBTQ social movements impact and are impacted by cultural and governmental institutions and how these relationships have determined contemporary queer life, politics, and thought, especially the complex social processes that determine the myriad investments and risks of mainstream LGTBQ politics. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPUS requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Explores the role gender plays across diverse sites in South and Central Americas, as well as the Caribbean. Social movements, division of labor, sexualities, power struggles and violence are among areas examined from feminist, ethnographic and comparative perspectives. Emphasis on gender’s intersections with ethnic, national, linguistic, class and geographical diversity demands students’ strong grasp of empirical information about the region. (Also listed as Anthropology 238). May meet either the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures or Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
A cross-cultural approach to gender, emphasizing variability in the ways gender shapes social interaction and organization. After addressing the relationship between biological sex and culturally constructed gender and diverse sex-gender systems, the course proceeds to closely examine non-binary gender systems, where 'third' (or more) genders emerge: hijras in India, berdaches in diverse Native American peoples, and travestis in Brazil. Diverse anthropological and feminist theoretical frameworks are applied. (Not offered 2024-25).
Introduces students to Black, Third Wave, and Transnational feminist studies of hip hop music, fashion, dance, film, and other aspects of the culture. Pays particular attention to ways feminist scholars examine hip hop theories and politics concerning race, gender, sexuality, class, age, and other social, cultural, and political markers, especially the ways power and dominance are reproduced, revised, and resisted within the culture. .25 unit, .5 or 1 unit.
Through a focus on film, this course interrogates Hip Hop as a historically constituted discursive claim—a representation, a partial and inconsistent realm of interpretation, a site of constantly contested meanings that are always impure, ambivalent, and ambiguous. This includes, but is not limited to, examining the first films focused on defining Hip Hop, such as Wild Style (1983); the first to star mainstream Hip Hop artists, such as Boyz ‘n the Hood (1991); and films accompanied by soundtracks largely or entirely featuring Hip Hop music, such as Above the Rim (1994). (Not offered 2024-25).
Considers the meanings, problems, and possibilities of contemporary identity politics. Explores different approaches toward identity and politics, including liberal, existential, and traditionalist understandings. Traces the emergence of a new kind of identity politics out of racial, feminist, and queer movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Assesses contemporary discussions of identity and politics, in relation to both the history of Western thought and contemporary multicultural societies. Authors discussed may include Locke, Sartre, MacIntyre, Fanon, Young, Taylor, Butler, Elshtein, Appiah, and Nicholson. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: HP requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: SHB requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
This course treats gender roles and family life throughout the European past, with comparative attention to families of other historical cultures and to relationships within non-human primate communities. It emphasizes the historical agency of women and children generally elided from traditional master narratives of Western Civilization, demonstrating how feminist and ethnohistorical approaches can reveal their experience. Course materials will include historiographical and anthropological literature as well as primary documents, literary works and visual sources. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: HP requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement.
This course treats gender roles and family life throughout the European past, with comparative attention to families of other historical cultures and to relationships within non-human primate communities. It emphasizes the historical agency of women and children generally elided from traditional master narratives of Western Civilization, demonstrating how feminist and ethnohistorical approaches can reveal their experience. Course materials will include historiographical and anthropological literature as well as primary documents, literary works and visual sources. 1 unit Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
An introduction to feminist theology and ethics in the Christian and Judaic traditions, with attention to feminist thought in Asian religions as well. Topics include God, love, justice, community, liberation, sexuality, reproduction, and social transformation. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Japanese women writers wrote the most heralded novels and poetic diaries in the classical literary canon; this celebration of women's literary contributions is an anomaly among world literatures. Yet for over five hundred years, women's literary voices were silenced before reemerging in the modern era, when a renaissance of 'women's literature' (joryu bungaku) captured popular imagination, even as it confronted critical disparagement. This course traces the rise, fall and return of writing by women and the influence of attitudes toward gender on what was written and read through a wide array of literary texts, historical documents, and cultural artifacts. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
An exploration of constructions of gender and the status of women in Hindu and Islamic cultures, with attention to both texts and practices. Primary and secondary readings survey a variety of topics from classical and modern periods, including marriage, sexuality and reproduction, sati, Islamic law, devotion, renunciation and tantra. (Not offered 2024-25).
An exploration of constructions of gender and the status of women in Hinduism and Buddhism, with primary focus on normative developments in ancient and medieval India and the impact of this formative history on the lives of contemporary women. Readings from primary and secondary materials, with attention to both ideology and practice. (Offered in alternate years.) (Not offered 2024-25).
Conducts transnational, intersectional, and feminist analyses of the construction and embodiment of multiple masculinities engendered by colonialism, race, class, nationality, gender nonconformity, disability and minority subcultures. Centrally engages masculinities’ varied entanglements with femininity, effeminacy, female bodiedness, and binary imaginations that undergird gender, relying on interdisciplinary examinations of popular cultural texts, history, ethnographies, creative writing, art, and autobiography to aid our examinations. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPUS requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Introduces features of what might be called a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer literacy and theoretical tradition. Uses classical, Renaissance, modern postmodern, and contemporary literature, criticism, and film to examine the complicated status and experience of non-majority sexualities. Considers writers, theorists and activists who have explored the relationships among sexuality, knowledge, and literature, including Plato, Michel Foucault, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Nella Larsen, Leslie Feinberg and Jeanette Winterson. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
The course analyzes sexual roles and sexual practices in the world before the concept of 'sexual identity' emerged in the late nineteenth century. It examines how different religious traditions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, and Buddhism, viewed sex, and explores a wide variety of topics, including pornography, prostitution, and same-sex sexual behavior, throughout the pre-modern world. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
The course begins with an examination of the birth of 'sexuality' in late nineteenth-century Europe and then explores the acceptance of and resistance to this new conceptual model throughout the world. Topics include heterosexuality and homosexuality, intersexuality, and 'perversion'. The course concludes with an analysis of the contemporary cultural wars over sexuality in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Variable topics course including selected themes organized along regional, generic, interdisciplinary, and cultural boundaries. Also may address specific treatments of women characters in works by and women during different periods of English and American literary history. (Not offered 2024-25).
(Not offered 2024-25).
The course will explore the philosophical and rhetorical dimensions of women's bodily experiences. We will examine issues of women's identity, subjectivity and embodiment through an investigation of body image, race, reproduction, and sexuality. Readings will focus on theoretical discussion of these issues. We will also rely on film, music, and narrative to understand the relationship(s) between women's bodies, their identities, and their definition in society. Most importantly, we will also draw from our own experiences as women, and/or the experiences of women we know, to help us make sense of the information we read. (Not offered 2024-25).
Studies the multifarious cultural, economic, and political effects of globalization on conceptualizations of “sexuality” and gender in order to situate cultural and historical understandings of gender and sexuality in their geopolitical specificity. Examines the benefits and pitfalls of how social justice is often defined through a global human rights framework through interdisciplinary studies of queer, feminist postcolonial theory, globalization studies, literature, film, and ethnography. Examines globalized sexual identities, sexual practices, queerness, and transnational capital in relation to notions of the local-global, nationhood, diaspora, borders, margins, and the urban-rural, situated in gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, third world and transnational feminism, and postcolonial studies. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPUS requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
n advanced examination of the ways in which sexual identities, desires and practices are socially constructed and, as such, how they vary historically and culturally. Addresses a range of theoretical and methodological approaches that have contributed to the sociological study of sexuality, including psychoanalytic theory, survey research, social constructionism, feminist theory, critical race theory and queer theory. Specific topics include the political economy of sex; the construction of sexual identities; intersections of sexuality, gender, race and class; social movements; sexuality and institutions; families; marriage 'moral panics.' Offered in some years as a field research and writing course. (Not offered 2024-25).
(Not offered 2024-25).
After examination of the birth of ‘sexuality’ in late nineteenth-century Europe, exploration of the acceptance of and resistance to this new conceptual model throughout the world. Attention to heterosexuality and homosexuality, intersexuality, and ‘perversion,’ concluding with analysis of the contemporary cultural wars over sexuality in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Analysis of sexual roles and sexual practices in the world before the concept of 'sexual identity' emerged in the late nineteenth century. Examination of how different religious traditions such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, and Buddhism have viewed sex, and exploration of a wide variety of topics including pornography, prostitution, and same-sex sexual behavior throughout the pre-modern world.
Generates complex understandings of theories of identity and subjectivity within relevant sub-fields of Feminist & Gender Studies, paying attention to intellectual and activist legacies and methodological questions. Building on prior intellectual work, students position themselves within relevant sub-fields in service to their developing critical preoccupations, so these courses emphasize advanced level independent thinking and research, including more engagement with advanced contemporary texts. Courses and instructors vary annually. .5 or 1 unit.
This course introduces students to Critical Whiteness Studies, the scholarly interrogation of the social construction of whiteness: how whiteness converges with gender, socioeconomic status, and other social markers, to create and maintain fundamental sources of societal stratification. The course examines the historical and contemporary social, cultural, and political origins of and resistance to white supremacy and white privilege, particularly in the United States. Students will consider the economic and political forces responsible for the construction and maintenance of whiteness, and will critique the multiple axes of race, gender and class to understand the various mechanisms of privilege. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: SHB requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPUS requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
An exploration of the many 'feminisms' which pattern the rich and expanding field of feminist theory. Focus will be on feminism's intersection with many of the important theoretical movements of the 20th century, e. g., American pragmatism, French philosophies, Marxism, postmodernism, with special emphasis on postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, black, lesbian and gay studies, etc. Possible theorists are: Butler, Kristeva, Irigaray, Lorde, Hooks, Wittig, de Lauretis, Belsey, Minh-ha. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Examines Black feminist theory through the lens of key Black feminists, such as bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker. Relying primarily on a guiding principle of Black feminism, the idea that racism, sexism, and class oppression are inextricably linked (also known as intersectionality), we will discuss various topics such as Black women’s relationships with Black men, motherhood, work inside and outside of the home, and religion and spirituality, among others. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: SHB requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPUS requirement.
Explores the social and political issues of the period 1880-1950 in the development of modern dance and studies the people -- mostly women -- who were the innovators of this unique form. Viewing of videotapes, readings about each artist, and interactive projects designed to develop full understanding of each choreographer, innovator, and dancer. Practical dance techniques will also be studies. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Builds on Critical Race Theory (CRT), which interrogates the role of race and racism in law and politics, by focusing on the experiences of women of color regarding racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. Explores major themes in Critical Race Feminism, including, but not limited to, work, parenting, sexual harassment, rape, and domestic violence, female genital cutting, and immigration. (Not offered 2024-25).
An exploration of the writings of several important feminist theorists often labeled collectively as 'French feminism,' including Beauvoir, Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva. Focus on the key concepts of the Other, feminist interpretations of Lacanian psychoanalysis, language and gender, difference and the body, and also on critiques of these ways of understanding gender. (Not offered 2024-25).
Critical Race Feminism (CRF) originates from Critical Race Theory (CRT), which examines the role of race and racism in law and politics. CRF focuses on the experiences of women of color regarding racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. This course explores the major themes in CRF, including, but not limited to, work, parenting, sexual harassment, rape, and domestic violence, female genital cutting, and immigration. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Explores the geopolitics, uneven power relations, normative assumptions and exclusions that go into the making of feminist politics transnationally. Examines how the politics of gender and sexuality get enmeshed in imperial, Eurocentric, nationalist, neoliberal, racialized, heteronormative, homonormative, military, elitist and other transnational circuits of power. Explores how feminist politics operate not only as struggles against various forms of power but also as modalities of power. Considers the ethical implications this has for our understanding and practice of feminist politics transnationally. 1 unit. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement.
Explores key texts and debates in Middle Eastern and Islamic feminist studies in order to think about the politics of feminism, feminist subjectivity, and the relationship between feminism and modernity. Parochializes universalizing assumptions about feminism and women’s rights by focusing on the contributions of a non-Western feminist tradition. Asks critical questions about the transnational politics of translation, and the normative assumptions, aporias and exclusions that are constitutive of feminist thought and politics, with a particular attention to questions of tradition and of religion and secularism. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
Forces shaping public policies and decisions; internal politics of the national bureaucracy, the Presidency and Congress. Applies theories of policymaking to such cases as the environment, race and military affairs. (Women's Studies credit available only for appropriate paper topics.) (Not offered 2024-25).
Prepares students to conceptualize and articulate the theoretical frameworks and methodologies that will guide their senior capstone projects. Students will produce an annotated bibliography and senior capstone project proposal.
Detailed study of one of the following groups: 1) histories, 2) comedies and romances, 3) major tragedies, 4) a number of the works grouped according to a thematic principle. (Not offered 2024-25).
Examines how performances since 1960 by queer artists have challenged conventional ideas about the body, sexuality and selfhood. Uses readings by theorists such as Michael Foucault, Michael Warner, and Jose Esteban Munoz to identify strategic positions adopted by artists working in literature, film, drama, musical theatre, dance and performance art. (Not offered 2024-25).
A comparative study of the diversities of behavioral systems of animals. Lecture, laboratory and field work include ethological theories and methods, emphasizing observation, denotation and analysis of behavior. (Not offered 2024-25).
Library or primary research or a combination thereof in an area of Feminist and Gender Studies in which the student has a personal interest and the background to undertake the project. Must be arranged at least one block in advance.
Library or primary research or a combination thereof in an area of Women's Studies in which the student has a personal interest and the background to undertake the project. Must be arranged at least one block in advance.
Comparative study of works of Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Cuban authors, as well as Latin American writers in exile in the United States, including works by Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, Cristina Garcia, Nicholasa Mohr, and Julia Alvarez. (Not offered 2024-25).
Critical study of the literary production of authors of Mexican heritage in the United States from 1848 to the present, with emphasis on contemporary Chicano works including Rivera, Anaya, Valdez, El Teatro Campesino, Cisneros, Castillo, and Moraga. (Offered alternate years.) (Not offered 2024-25).
This course examines relationships between U.S. law and Hip Hop. Taking an interdisciplinary approach—with a particular focus on politics, Legal Consciousness, Critical Race Theory, and Hip Hop Studies—the course attends to topics including crime and justice, mass incarceration, gender, Constitutional Law, Intellectual Property Law, Corporate Law, Criminal Law, and Real Property Law. (Not offered 2024-25).
Traces the development of the women's liberation movement in China, the growth of 'Communist Party Feminism,' the transition of women from 'beasts of burden to second-class citizens. ' (Not offered 2024-25).
Womanist theology is talk about God that concentrates on the religious experience of African-American women. Alice Walker's term, womanist, refers to a black feminist who transmits the wisdom of black women's cultural heritage and is concerned with issues of both racism and sexism. As theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher describes the problem, 'little attention has been given to women's nature in Euro-centric ontologies, and black women have been excluded most of all. ' If humankind has been conceived as 'man' to the exclusion of women, 'woman' has been conceived as white women to the exclusion of women of African descent. What it means to be black and female is an ontological questions: what does it mean to be human in relation to God and the world when one is black and female? This course will explore the question from historical, contemporary, ministerial, and personal perspectives as a way of understanding black women and their religious development. (Not offered 2024-25).
Cults of masculinity have been intrinsic to South Asian culture for millennia. Whether in ancient vedic literature, or in the heterodox traditions of Buddhism and Jainism and the Hindu epics that followed; whether in the ascetic traditions of yoga, the popular puranas, or the lives of modern-day saints -- the leading Man has been carefully fashioned to represent power, purity and prestige. This course examines such texts and traditions from diverse periods in Indian history in order to identify and deconstruct the ideologies that divinize masculinity and masculinize divinity. May meet either the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures or Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Critical Learning: AIM requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
May meet either the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures or Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
This course will focus on gender issues and public policy. The course will encourage you to look for the structural influences that condition individual options and choices and provide some new tools for analyzing women's lives. Looking at gender justice from a public policy perspective should alert you to the importance of political battles over policy in shaping the context in which women operate as social actors. Our focus will not be on the technical aspects of policy making, but rather on the implicit and often explicit assumptions about gender incorporated into policy and on examining the context and causes of policy shifts over time. We will also be attentive to women as political claimants seeking to influence policies that affect their lives, and to the different ways that women experience politics. One of the primary goals of this course is to address the problem of agreeing on a definition of gender justice and the consequent challenges involved in developing gender-justice policies. Topics may include: reproductive technology and control; sexual violence; workplace problems (discrimination, pay equity, childcare); welfare; women's health; military obligation. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
A study of various Hindu goddesses, including their iconography and particular powers, as well as the ritualistic ways in which they are worshipped in diverse regions of India, with a glimpse of feminist appropriations of Kali in the West as well. Primary and secondary readings include poetry, theology, and historical-critical studies, and films depicting various rituals. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Global Cultures requirement. (Not offered 2024-25).
We'll study prose works - ranging from previously neglected texts such as Hope Leslie to familiar texts such as Little Women - by American women of the nineteenth century. We'll look at some fundamental issues that creative women have faced during this time: the social construction of womanhood, the urgent moral and political issues of the day, the emergence of an American literary culture, and how each writer situated herself in relation to the power of the written word. We'll be looking at how literature of this period both reflects and shapes the lives of middle-class women, affluent women, women of color, immigrant women, working women, married women, single women, girls embarking on womanhood and older women coming to terms with their life choices and social constraints. (Not offered 2024-25).
An examination of research and theory on psychological gender differences and similarities. 'Nature and nurture' explanations for differences are explored. Special attention is paid to methodological issues, and to critiques of traditional, and androcentric methods of data collection and analysis. (Not offered 2024-25).
Three centuries of texts by African-American women who have conspired with, rebelled against, and created literary traditions, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Pauline Hopkins, Rita Dove, Andrea Lee, and Nella Larsen. (Not offered 2024-25).
This independent study, guided by the assigned faculty capstone advisor, results in a completed draft of the written component of the senior capstone project.
This independent study continues the work of FG404: Senior Project, resulting in the completion of the senior capstone project.
This course is designed for the student to intern with an organization that is closely related to the work of one or more standard feminist and gender studies courses. Students will consider a body of feminist theory and/or critique in light of an organization’s actual goals and practices. In addition to providing assistance to the organization, students will conduct a feminist critique of the philosophy, structure and workings of the organization during and after the internship period. Must include readings and writing assignments as determined by the faculty member and student, and must be arranged at least one block in advance. (Not offered 2024-25).
(Not offered 2024-25).
Provides advanced engagement with feminist and gender studies texts for seniors who have completed their capstone projects.