This course explores the ways in which the body, as a reflection and construction of the self, is tied to social, cultural and political relations. Through this examination of the role that our bodies play in daily life we will delve into the study of gender, race, sexuality and power. We focus on several major areas: (1) after Roe and the medicalization of bodies (contraception, abortion, new reproductive technologies), (2) sex education and the Internet as sites of bodily learning (3) body work (nail salons, surrogacy) (4) the use of the body as a vehicle for performance, self-expression and identity (tattoos, getting dressed). Throughout the course we will discuss how ideas about bodies are transported across national borders and social, sexual and class hierarchies.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Crosslisted Courses: SOC 10 4Y
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Hertz
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Introduction to the interdisciplinary field of women's and gender studies with an emphasis on an understanding of the "common differences" that both unite and divide women. Beginning with an examination of how womanhood has been represented in myths, ads, and popular culture, the course explores how gender inequalities have been both explained and critiqued. The cultural meaning given to gender as it intersects with race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality will be studied. This course also exposes some of the critiques made by women's studies' scholars of the traditional academic disciplines and the new intellectual terrain currently being mapped.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Musto, Staff
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes:
Some have argued that Elvis Presley was the greatest cultural force in twentieth-century America. This course will consider the early career of Elvis Presley as a unique window for the study of race, class, gender, and heteronormative sexuality in postwar popular American culture. Specifically, we will look at the blending of African American and other forms of musical style in Presley's music, the representation of masculinity and sexuality across a sampling of his films and television performances, and key cultural film texts from the 1950s, and we will end by evaluating Presley's lasting impact as a unique icon in American cultural history.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 20
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Creef
Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of trans studies. We will explore the long history of gender-variant identities and the prevalence of gender diversity in America as well as global societies, leading to the development of "transgender" as a recent social category and phenomenon. In this course we examine the ongoing development of the concept of transgender as it is situated across social, cultural, historical, legal, medical, and political contexts. Drawing on this interdisciplinary framework, we will explore central questions posted by the field of transgender studies. What “natural,” “obvious,” or “timeless” ideas about gender, sex, and sexuality turn out to be none of those things? How does transgender politics intersect or diverge from feminist politics, queer politics, and anti-racist politics? How has transgender studies required that we re-conceptualize the ways we think about bodies, communities, medical science, and media representation? The readings and materials will reflect a range of voices, including diverse forms of scholarship like memoir and manifesto, as well as film, art, graphic novels, memes, and blog posts.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Nordgren
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
This course explores love and intimacy in transnational context. In this course, we will examine the systems of meaning and practices that have evolved around notions of love and intimacy and investigate their broader political significance. We will further explore how love and intimacy are linked to economics, consumption practices, structural inequalities, disruptive technologies, and shifting ideas about subjectivity. If we accept that love, intimacy, and sexuality are socially constructed, how much agency do we exercise in whom we love and desire? How and in what ways do our experiences and expectations of love and intimacy shift as a result of economic arrangements, mobility, and technology? Finally, what, if any, ethical frameworks should mediate our intimate connections, desires, and labor with others?
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Musto
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
Health is a powerful manifestation of the economic, political and cultural substructures of society. This course uses a public health approach, a focus on health at the population level and attention in the distribution of disease, to explore the strategies related to and the power of health activism. Focusing on examples throughout U.S. history and in the present day, we will apply an intersectional lens to understand how inequalities (e.g. race, class, gender and sexual identity) are embodied via health and impact individuals and communities. Using a case study approach we will examine social movements (eg, AIDS activism, reproductive justice, workers’ rights), as well as structural efforts (eg, healthcare reform and legal challenges) to discuss collective struggles and successful strategies for transformation.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken WGST 310.
Instructor: Agenor
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes: This course is also offered at the 300-level as WGST 310.
Feminist scholarship demonstrates that American family life needs to be viewed through two lenses: one that highlights the embeddedness of family in class, race, heteronormativity, gender inequalities and another that draws our attention to historical developments – such as the aftermath of World War 2, technologies and government social policies. In 2015 same-sex marriage became U.S. federal law; but at the same time fewer people are marrying and parenthood is delayed. Moreover, new reproductive technologies coupled with the Internet and the wish for intimacy is creating unprecedented families. Topics covered vary yearly but include: inequalities around employment, the home front and childcare; intensive motherhood, social class and cultural capital; welfare to work programs; immigrant families and the American Dream. Finally, we will explore new developments from adoption to gamete donors by same-sex or single-parent families and how science and technologies are facilitating the creation of new kinds of kin. A special feature of this class is looking at the relationship of families and social policy.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: SOC 20 5
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Hertz
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
This multi-disciplinary course introduces a broad range of concepts and issues related to the highly diverse group we call “women” and their health with a primary focus on the United States. The class will cover three areas of inquiry. First, the course explores basic definitions, concepts, data, and narratives regarding women's health needs, status, and experiences, the social determinants of health, and women's health movements. Second, the course interrogates sexual and reproductive health as an intersection between health, gender, and broader social structures. Third, the course investigates current events as theaters or enduring patterns around women and health, such as healthcare reform, innovations in remote heath care delivery, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Agenor
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
Feminist scholars have long recognized Denmark and Sweden as among the most gender equal, sexually progressive countries in the world. Bolstered by a strong welfare state and egalitarian values, Sweden and Denmark have been held up as prototypes for their cultivation of gender inclusive policies. The course will cover a range of topics, including sexual and reproductive markets, sex education, and changing configurations of family. We will also examine how both countries’ welfare states are influenced by markets and consider the extent to which national legislation in a moment of heightened mobility and globalization is equipped to transform societal norms, promote gender equality, and foster sexual freedom and reproductive justice.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Hertz, Musto
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course proposes an analysis of popular cultural productions and the ways in which they represent Chicanxs and Latinxs. Cultural productions go beyond just entertaining an audience; they help to inform how we see ourselves and the world around us. These productions often support traditional stereotypes about marginalized groups. The course will encourage students to question the ways in which Chicanx/Latinxs are reduced to stereotypes that reinforce hierarchies of race and gender. By critically reading popular productions as analyzable cultural texts, we will ask: How do cultural productions perpetuate the "otherness" of Chicanx/Latinxs? What role does sexuality play in the representation of the Chicanx/Latinx subject? In what ways do cultural productions by Chicanx/Latinxs resist/challenge negative images?
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Mata
Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course serves as an introduction to Chicanx/Latinx theater and performance and the role that class, race, gender, and sexuality play in constructing identity on the stage. We will examine how members of the Chicanx/Latinx community-individuals often marginalized from mainstream theater productions-employ the public stage as a space for self-expression and resistance. Through an analysis of plays and theater/performance scholarship, we will identify common themes and important differences in the various productions. We will further consider how community, citizenship, and notions of belonging manifest themselves on the public arena of the stage. We will begin by studying the role of theater in the social justice movements of the 1960s and trace the changes that Chicanx/Latinx theater and performance have undergone in subsequent years.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Mata
Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
Traditional American medical history has emphasized the march of science and the ideas of the "great doctors" in the progressive improvement in American medical care. In this course, we will look beyond just medical care to the social and economic factors that have shaped the development of the priorities, institutions, and personnel in the health care system in the United States. We will ask how gender, race, class, and sexuality have affected the kind of care developed, its differential delivery, and the problems and issues addressed.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: WGST 108 or WGST 120 or WGST 222, or by permission of the instructor.
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
What is the carceral state? What do girls, women, and transgender individuals’ experiences of policing and punishment in 21st century America reveal about its shifting dimensions? Despite public concerns about mass incarceration in the United States and calls for criminal justice reform, mainstream commentators rarely account for the gendered, racialized, and class dimensions of punishment, nor address the growing ranks of girls, women, poor and gender nonconforming individuals that experience carceral control and oversight. Interdisciplinary in scope, this course critically examines how race, gender, sexuality and class intersect and shape people’s experience with systems of punishment and control. It further explores the economic, social, and political factors that have influenced the development of the contemporary American carceral state and scholarly, activist, and artistic responses to it.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: PEAC 20 1
Prerequisites: One WGST course or permission of the instructor.
Instructor: Melchor Hall
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
Drawing upon feminist, queer, and social science theories of gender and sexuality, this course will examine transformations in the lives of cisgender and transgender people in a contemporary U.S. context. Particular emphasis will be placed on technology, inequality, and activist and scholarly agitations for social justice. Questions we will explore include: To what extent are categories of gender, sexuality, race and class socially constructed? How have our understandings of these categories shifted across time and space? How do networked and mobile technologies shape identities and alter individuals' understanding and performance of gender, sexuality, race and class? Finally, how are carceral politics, border policies, precarious labor arrangements and surveillance practices, among other topics, shaped by race, gender, sexuality, class and citizenship and to what extent are these intersecting positionalities leveraged in building movements for justice?
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Musto
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
What is feminist research? What is feminist methods? This course addresses these questions by exploring a wide range of methods of interviewing, ethnography, surveys, archival research, focus groups, and participatory action research from a feminist perspective. The class introduces students to feminist approaches to research from across the humanities, natural and social sciences. The readings for the class explore topics of engaged research and feminist politics of knowledge production. The course focuses on situating multiple methods within feminist epistemologies, and critically examining self- reflectivity among researchers and the ways they influence research.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Hertz
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
What does consent have to do with politics and sexuality? From the “consent of the governed” to “affirmative consent,” notions of political and sexual agency and ethics develop in relation to consent. For example, much of the thinking about democracy and the exercise of bodily autonomy refers to consent. So, too, the contemporary feminist critique of rape culture advocates for the practice of affirmative, even enthusiastic, consent as an index of agency. We will ask: who can consent and, as importantly, who can withhold consent? Are all bodies, genders, and sexualities equally able to consent? We will read ancient and contemporary texts in order to gauge the historical scope of consent. We will spend some time with feminist theory from the 1980s that proposes new configurations of power, bodies, and pleasure, and explore how this work offers a counter discourse to neoliberal accounts of individual pleasure and risk. Sample texts: Anne Carson, Antigonick; C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides; Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly; Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body; Sandra Lee Bartly, Femininity and Domination; Sarah Schulman, Conflict is Not Abuse.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 24
Prerequisites: One WGST course or permission of the instructor.
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course will offer a critical representation of bodies across science, society, and public health. We explore a variety of approaches to studying the body that challenge the Cartesian dualism, which splits the mind from the body. We also draw from feminist theories that examine the body in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and power. The course content shows how social values can have material and physiological effects on bodies and in turn how aesthetic and medical representations of the body reflect social values. While the class focuses primarily on examples in the U.S., we will include some cross-cultural examples that reveal how bodies change through social and historical forces. Students will gain a critical understanding for how conceptions of the body are important for understanding markets, beauty, reproduction, public health and biomedicine writ large.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Using examples from everyday life, this course investigates how preferences for certain technologies are shaped by social arrangements that reflect power relations, including genetic testing, social media, and the construction of a wall on the US/Mexico border.By considering the origins, materiality, and practices of use for a diverse range of technologies, from the telephone to the underwire bra, this course will interrogate the socio-political and ethical fallout of consumer and medical technologies. Within the context of this history of technology as a means of manipulating nature and maintaining control over groups of people, we will also consider how users, tinkerers, and hackers challenge and negotiate the meanings and usage of technology in ways that contradict the intended use.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
A quarter century ago the Institute of Medicine defined the work of public health as "what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy." Historically rooted in a commitment to social justice, U.S. public health is now renewing this commitment through 1) an epidemiological shift to examine the social, economic, and political inequities that create disparate health and disease patterns by gender, class, race, sexual identity, citizenship, etc., and 2) a corresponding health equity movement in public health practice. This broad-ranging course examines the debates shaping the above as well as the moral and legal groundings of public health, basic epidemiology, and the roles of public and private actors. Highlighted health topics vary year to year.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: PEAC 240
Prerequisites: Open to Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors, or by permission of the instructor.
Instructor: Harrison
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
This course will serve as an introduction to representations of Asian/American women in film beginning with silent classics and ending with contemporary social media. In the first half of the course, we examine the legacy of Orientalism, the politics of interracial romance, the phenomenon of "yellow face", and the different constructions of Asian American femininity, masculinity, and sexuality. In the second half of the course, we look at "Asian American cinema" where our focus will be on contemporary works, drawing upon critical materials from film theory, feminist studies, Asian American studies, history, and cultural studies.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: CAMS 241
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Creef
Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Instructor:
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Units: 0.5
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Instructor:
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring; Fall
Notes:
How do we account for the many similarities and differences within and between human populations? Axes of human “difference”– sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality – have profound consequences. These differences shape not only group affiliation and identity but have been shaped by colonial and national histories. They shape social structures such as socioeconomic status, professions, work mobility, as well as stereotypes about personal traits and behaviors. The biological sciences have been very important in the history of differences. Scientists have contributed to bolster claims that differences are determined by our biology – such as research on sex and racial differences, notions of the “gay” gene, math abilities, spatial ability etc. Conversely, scientists have also contributed to critiquing claims of difference – challenging the idea that sex, gender, race, sexuality are innate, and immutable. How do we weigh these claims and counterclaims? We will begin with a historical overview of biological studies on “difference” to trace the differing understandings of the “body” and the relationship of the body with identity, behavior and intellectual and social capacity. We will then examine contemporary knowledge on differences of sex, gender, race, class, and sexuality. Using literature from biology, anthropology, feminist studies, history and science studies, we will examine the biological and cultural contexts for our understanding of “difference.” How do we come to describe the human body as we do? What is good data? How do we “know” what we know? The course will give students the tools to analyze scientific studies, to understand the relationship of nature and culture, science and society, biology and politics.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: WGST 254
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Van Arsdale, Subramaniam
Distribution Requirements: NPS - Natural and Physical Sciences; SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
In this course, we will explore the ways individuals and nations reconfigure their conceptions of sex, gender, and race due to globalization. We will explore transnational phenomena such as sex trafficking, sex tourism, and marriage migration. We will address questions such as: In an era of increasingly fast-paced and multifaceted globalization, how do we formulate sexual, gender, and racial identities across national and cultural boundaries? How do migrants renegotiate their gender, sexual, and racial identities in their new countries of residence? What motivates sex tourists to travel to other countries to form intimate relations? How do these sex tourists influence the sexual, gender, and racial identities of the local people they interact with?
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course takes a critical perspective on the field of public health by applying a feminist lens to examine current health crises such as pandemics, police brutality, racism, and gender violence. Drawing on Black feminism and critical race studies we examine how logics of race/racism, gender binaries, and hierarchies of power and knowledge shape the ways in which public health concerns are defined and intervened upon. We explore emergent research topics that have only recently been framed as legitimate public health issues, such as gun control and policing. In order to understand how far the field has come in expanding its scope of study, and why it has taken this long, the course historically situates the field of public health within an intersectional framework. We end by examining past and present inspirations of how public health contributes to people’s well-being.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Staff
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course examines how media constructs expressions of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality through normative and transgressive representations of gender and race within media. Through readings, screenings, and class discussions, we will examine how gender, sexuality, and race are constructed within a cultural domain of power that not only constitutes but also is constituted by the production, consumption, and interpretation of media.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course examines how LGBTQ+ individuals have been depicted in media. Grounded in queer theory and queer of color critique, the class charts the evolution of such depictions, mapping the progress media industries have made in representing LGBTQ+ people onscreen, while also thinking critically about the work still left to do. It asks the following questions: who has helmed these portrayals, both behind and in front of the camera? How have these different representational modes informed (ostensibly) straight audiences’ understandings of queer identities? How do these cinematic depictions of queerness impact members of the LGBTQ+ community?
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course will offer a critical introduction to queer theory, a major theoretical framework within women’s and gender studies that emerges from the study of sex and sexuality as a guiding force in social and political life. The course will start with an expansive background on the history and development of queer theory, before exploring some of the key debates that continue to animate the field. Specifically, we will consider the complicated relationships between queer theory, feminist theory, and queer of color critique. Finally, the course will consider the relationship between queer theory and forms of queer expression in literature and culture, such as in Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home and its musical adaptation.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Staff
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
The Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II has always had a vexed relationship with the camera. Cameras and other recording devices were banned in the camps until spring 1943. This course engages with the legacy of this incarceration experience in visual culture and American historical memory. Using a gendered lens, we look at how the camps have been documented and remembered in photography, film, graphic memoir, camp newspapers, museum exhibitions, and new media since 1942. We will closely examine the photography of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Miyatake, the intersection of internment camps and Indigenous lands, women filmmakers and activists, and explore major digital archives and recent augmented reality installations focusing on the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 20
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Creef
Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
Westerns, a complex category that includes not only films but also novels, photographs, paintings, and many forms of popular culture, have articulated crucial mythologies of American culture from the nineteenth century to the present. From Theodore Roosevelt to the Lone Ranger, myths of the Trans-Mississippi West have asserted iconic definitions of American masculinity and rugged individualism. Yet as a flexible, ever-changing genre, Westerns have challenged, revised, and subverted American concepts of gender and sexuality. Westerns have also struggled to explain a dynamic and conflictive "borderlands" among Native Americans, Anglos, Latinos, Blacks, and Asians. This team-taught, interdisciplinary course will investigate Westerns in multiple forms, studying their representations of the diverse spaces and places of the American West and its rich, complicated, and debated history.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: AMST 274
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Creef, P. Fisher (American Studies)
Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
AIDS changed how we live our lives, and this course looks at writings tracing the complex, sweeping ramifications of the biggest sexual-health crisis in world history. This course looks at diverse depictions and genres of H.I.V./AIDS writing, including Pulitzer Prize-winning plays like Angels In America and bestselling popular-science "contagion narratives" like And the Band Played On; independent films like Greg Araki's The Living End and Oscar-winning features and documentaries like Philadelphia, Precious, and How to Survive a Plague. We will read about past controversies and ongoing developments in AIDS history and historiography. These include unyielding stigma and bio-political indifference, met with activism, service, and advocacy; transforming biomedical research to increase access to better treatments, revolutionizing AIDS from death sentence to chronic condition; proliferating "moral panics" about public sex, "barebacking," and "PrEP" (pre-exposure prevention), invoking problematic constructs like "Patient Zero," "being on the Down Low," "party and play" subculture, and the "Truvada whore"; and constructing a global bio-political apparatus ("AIDS Inc.") to control and protect populations. We will look at journal articles, scholarly and popular-science books (excerpts), as well as literary and cinematic texts. Also some archival materials from ACT UP Boston, the activist group. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: WGST 294
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: González
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies; LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
In the U.S. more women than men live in poverty. This class will highlight how income inequality and the disproportion of wealth are gendered and racialized, impacting women of color at higher rates. Throughout the course we will examine how such economic processes as globalization and such ideologies as neoliberalism influences employment, labor, wages, health, social life, families, and other societal structures. Applying feminist theories, we will also contextualize the life experiences of women of color from their perspectives and question dominant ideals that perpetuate the concept of meritocracy. We will also engage and learn about the different ways women of color resist economic inequality through life skills and strategies, activism, and social movements.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Social understandings of the relationship between human health and the environment are visible and malleable in moments of crisis, from industrial disasters, weather-related catastrophes, and political conflict, as everyday events like childbirth and routine sickness. But these understandings vary dramatically across time and community. This course addresses the complex dynamics at work in the representations of and responses to health and the environment that emerge during moments of crisis. By studying the way these constructions are shaped by social, political, technological, and moral contexts, we will analyze the role of nature, knowledge, ethics and power in such contemporary problems as human migration, hunger, debility, and disease. The class will together consider the meaning of crisis and how it is shaped by social systems such as gender, sexuality, ability, class, and race.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: ES 30 2
Prerequisites: Open to Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors or by permission of the instructor. A 200 level WGST course is recommended.
Instructor: Harrison
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
This course provides an in-depth analysis of how the formative scholarship of the 1990s not only continues to impact the field of WGST today, but also animates popular social and political debates happening in the world around us. It explores the misunderstood ideologies at the center of contemporary controversies like the “don’t say gay” Florida bill, or bans on critical race theory, by returning to the WGST texts that pioneered these frameworks. Covering topics like gender performativity, intersectionality, queer theory, cultural theory, reproductive justice, transgender theory, and U.S. Third World Feminisms, this course takes a deep dive into all things 1990s to help students understand how the recent past informs the politics of today.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: WGST 120 and one 200 level WGST course. Open to Juniors and Seniors only.
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
A feminist cultural studies approach to the representation of race, class, gender and sexuality in film, photography, and art featuring Native Americans. This course examines the longstanding legacy of the Hollywood Western and its depiction of "reel injuns" before exploring the rich history of Native American self-representation and visual sovereignty in film and culture.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Recommended for Juniors and Seniors with background in WGST, AMST, or CAMS.
Instructor: Creef
Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
More women leaders are in work settings and public office than any prior point in history. However, the fraction of women who are CEOs, board members of major corporations, heads of state and elected representatives in global assemblies remains shockingly small by comparison to the sheer numbers of women workers, consumers, and family decision makers. This course will examine the way that gender, race, and class shape women's access to positions of leadership and power at work. Questions to be considered include: (1) Why are there so few women leaders in work settings? (2) What can we learn about leadership from women who have achieved it? Four modules for the course are (1) Strategies developed by women who lead; (2) Efforts to achieve parity through policies, e.g., glass ceilings, affirmative action; (3) Tensions between work, family and carework; and (4) Profiles of Productive Rule Breakers. Students will research women leaders in all sectors and countries.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: SOC 30 6
Prerequisites: Open to Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors. Priority will be given to SOC and WGST majors and minors.
Instructor: Hertz
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course examines Techno-Orientalism as a global science fiction genre in literature, film, and social media to understand the broad historical and social formations of Otherness, Aliens, Citizenship, and Immigration. We also study racial assumptions in popular culture, discourses of the human and human rights, science and technology industries, and anti-Asian violence during the global pandemic. Finally, we also interrogate the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and geopolitical divisions and interactions in Asian/American Studies and Postcolonial Studies from the past to the present.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Recommended for juniors or seniors with background in WGST, Asian American Studies, CAMS, Media Arts, East Asian Studies.
Instructor: Creef
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
Epidemics and pandemics lay bare the economic, political and cultural substructures of society. The history of changing explanations for infectious diseases dictate differing responses by health personnel and governmental entities. The seminar explores the intersectional aspects of race, gender, class, and sexuality that shape reactions and efforts to contain disease. Epidemics to be explored include plague, syphilis, smallpox, cholera, polio, HIV/AIDS, flu and COVID-19.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 20
Prerequisites: One WGST course at the 200 level or permission of the instructor. Not open to students who have taken WGST 210.
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes: This course is also offered at the 200-level as WGST 210, though not always in the same semester/year.
This course examines the politics facing contemporary U.S. families and potential policy directions at the State and Federal Levels. Discussion of the transformation of American families including changing economic and social expectations for parents, inequality between spouses, choices women make about children and employment, daycare and familial care giving, welfare and underemployment, and new American dreams will be explored. Changing policies regarding welfare and teen pregnancy will also be examined as part of government incentives to promote self-sufficient families. Expanding family (i.e. single mothers by choice, lesbian/gay/trans families) through the use of new reproductive technologies is emphasized as examples of legislative reform and the confusion surrounding genetic and social kinship is explored. Comparisons to other contemporary societies will serve as foils for particular analyses. Students will learn several types of research methodologies through course assignments. Student groups will also produce an original social policy case.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: SOC 311
Prerequisites: One 100 level and one 200 level course in either WGST or Sociology. Open to Juniors and Seniors; to Sophomores by permission of the instructor.
Instructor: Hertz
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This is a supervised, independent fieldwork project resulting in a research paper, documentary, policy initiative, creative arts presentation, or other research product. This project, developed in conjunction with a WGST faculty member, will have a significant experiential component focusing on women's lives and/or gender. Students may (1) work in an organization, (2) work with activists or policy makers on social change issues or social policy issues, or (3) design their own fieldwork experience.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Open to majors or minors only. Permission of the instructor required.
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes:
This seminar is structured as a critical engagement of transnational feminism(s) in a global context. In this course, we will explore how neoliberal globalization, human rights discourses and an intersecting array of complexes — including those of a humanitarian, non-profit, and prison industrial variety - dually shape and constrain agitations for justice across national, political, and technological borders and boundaries. We will further track how and in what ways ideas about different feminism(s), women's, LGBTQ, transgender and human rights, and paradigms of justice travel across borders, shape systems of response, and promote and/or ameliorate the vulnerability and life opportunities of particular bodies located within particular geopolitical contexts.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: One course in WGST.
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes: Ann E. Maurer '51 Speaking Intensive Course.
What are ethnographic methods? And what is feminist ethnography? This course addresses these questions by exploring the method of ethnography from a feminist perspective. The class grounds ethnographic methods in anthropology and explores examples from across the social sciences. The readings for the class explore topics of engaged research and feminist politics of knowledge production. The course focuses on situating ethnographic methods within feminist epistemologies, and critically examining ethnographic examples by attending to race, gender, and power.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: One WGST Course or one 100 level STEM course. Open to Juniors and Seniors; to Sophomores by permission of the instructor.
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course focuses on the politics of human reproduction which is inextricably linked with nation states, as well as cultural norms and expectations. Reproductive issues and debates serve as proxies for more fundamental questions about the intersecting inequalities of citizenship, gender, race, class, disability and sexuality. What does reproductive justice look like? We will discuss how the marketplace, medical technologies and the law are critical to creating social hierarchies that are produced, resisted and transformed. We ask: Why is access critical to control for the use of fertility technologies (both pre-and during pregnancy), gamete purchase, egg freezing? How is each accomplished and by whom? How are new technologies in reproduction coupled with the global marketplace creating a social hierarchy between people (e.g. gamete donors, gestational carriers). Finally, what is the relationship between the commercialization of reproduction and the creation of new intimacies and forms of kinship? The course emphasizes both empirical research situated in the U.S. and research involving transnational flows.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: SOC 322
Prerequisites: Open to juniors and seniors only; must be a WGST or SOC major or minor or a junior or senior who has taken WGST 211/SOC 205.
Instructor: Hertz
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
This course examines literatures that challenge the construction of borders, be they physical, ideological, or metaphoric. The theorizing of the border, as more than just a material construct used to demarcate national boundaries, has had a profound impact on the ways in which Chicana/Latinas have written about the issue of identity and subject formation. We will examine how the roles of women are constructed to benefit racial and gender hierarchies through the policing of borders and behaviors. In refusing to conform to gender roles or hegemonic ideas about race or sexuality, the Chicana and Latina writers being discussed in the course illustrate the necessity of crossing the constructed boundaries of identity being imposed by the community and the greater national culture.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Any WGST 100-level course and WGST 200-level course or permission of the instructor.
Instructor: Mata
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
The stories we tell about the world make certain futures possible, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. This course reveals how Western historical, theoretical, and scientific ways of knowing understood both women and nature as inferior and thus needing to be controlled. Pushing back against the ideas of any inherent binary separations between sex/gender and nature/culture, we will examine feminist ecological possibilities for planetary futures. Learning from the intertwined histories of environment, race, and gender, that have led to both personal and global inequity and disaster, we will also engage solutions that imagine different futures. Recognizing that solutions to environmental problems require a feminist attunement, we can start to understand the implications that our ethical commitments have to the future of life on the planet.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: ES 328
Prerequisites: Any WGST 200-level course or ES-200-level course. Juniors and Seniors only.
Instructor: Subramaniam
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
In 2015 a global movement began at the University of Cape Town to decolonize education, research, and tackle institutional racism in academia. This course gives students an introductory engagement of decolonial research practices. Decolonizing research and knowledge means to center the concerns and perspectives of non-Western individuals on theory and research. Thus, this course will be a process of “unlearning” social and scientific standards that we have taken as universal, resisting coloniality in academic production of knowledge, and moving research into action. This course will broadly discuss research methods and praxis in social sciences and in public health/medicine.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: WGST 332
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Franklin
Distribution Requirements: EC - Epistemology and Cognition
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
From Hollywood’s casting couches, to the Copenhagen City Hall and the highest echelons of the French media establishment, to the feminists in Mexico and Argentina and the demands of those in Japan, Iran, and Egypt, the #MeToo movement has raised a global wave of protests against sexual abuse. The expression of women’s voices has been undeniably transformed since the hashtag's emergence, but the aims and results of the movement, and the consequences faced by those accused, have varied from place to place. Students will consider #MeToo from a comparative and multilingual perspective, analyzing texts and media from around the globe, in a collective effort to grasp how culture, language, and nation condition the international struggle for women’s rights.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Crosslisted Courses: WGST 336
Prerequisites: At least one Language & Literature course at the 200-level in any modern language department or by permission of the instructor.
Instructor: Bilis
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Other Categories: CSPW - Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing
Typical Periods Offered: Every three years
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Feminist scholars, activists, and community organizers have been at the forefront of the US and transnational abolitionist movement to address structural violence, including but not limited to violence that occurs in jails, prisons, and immigration detention facilities. Anti-carceral feminists share a broad commitment to divesting in carceral systems and resisting racist ideologies and carceral feminist projects fueling the “global prison industrial complex.” Anti-carceral feminist efforts have culminated in a rich yet understudied body of work animated by intersectional and transnational insights. Interdisciplinary in scope, this seminar explores anti-carceral feminist research and activism in the United States and transnationally. In addition to engaging with anti-carceral feminist research, this seminar will explore abolitionist feminist methods and organizing strategies to facilitate safety, accountability, and transformative justice.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: WGST 120 and WGST 221, or permission of the instructor.
Instructor: Musto
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Grounded in feminist and critical race theory, this course provides students with the theoretical and historical backgrounds so that they can critically consider contemporary feminist movements and their lineage to early feminist activism and theory. The class considers how social media platforms and technological infrastructure enables contemporary digital activism. Contemporary movements the course will explore include Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Women's March, Reproductive Justice.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: WGST 120 and one 200 level course. Open to Juniors and Seniors only.
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Equine cultural studies has become one of the most exciting fields to emerge out of Critical Animal Studies for how it looks at the intersection of humans and horses across histories, cultures, and the humanities. This seminar will provide an introduction to Equine Cultural Studies through the lens of feminist studies in its focus on the boundaries between horses and humans. Some of the questions we explore include: Did Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) inspire the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention Against Cruelty to Animals as well as the backlash against Victorian women’s corsets? Is there a feminist way to ride a horse? How does feminist thought offer a unique interrogation of race, flesh, and femaleness that sheds new light on equine studies? How has the horse been an integral partner in therapeutic healing in both Native and Indigenous communities as well as in non-Native communities?
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: ES 343
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. At least one course in either WGST or ES or ANTH 240 is recommended. This course is intended for juniors and seniors.
Instructor: Creef
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Open to juniors and seniors.
Instructor:
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring; Fall
Units: 0.5
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Instructor:
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Permission of the department.
Instructor:
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes: Students enroll in Senior Thesis Research (360) in the first semester and carry out independent work under the supervision of a faculty member. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with Senior Thesis (370) in the second semester.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: WGST 360 and permission of the department.
Instructor:
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes: Students enroll in Senior Thesis Research (360) in the first semester and carry out independent work under the supervision of a faculty member. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with Senior Thesis (370) in the second semester.