This discussion and lecture course introduces students to a range of issues, theories, and controversies within feminism, gender studies, and sexuality studies. It has several aims: to provide critical and analytical tools for thinking about gender; to explore key issues facing women and sexual minorities in the U.S. (and other) societies, and to discuss strategies for confronting them. The course will examine issues such as: body politics, sexuality, reproductive rights, sexual violence, gender and work, motherhood and family, homophobia, transgendered people's experiences in the US and abroad. Above all, the course is intended as an exploration of the tremendous diversity of thought contained under the general rubrics of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and as a vehicle for developing skills in writing and research, as well as analytical tools for further work in the field. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that its main emphases are on challenging the notion of one universalizing category of "woman," and to recognize the diverse ways in which national, sexual, ethnic, racial, classed and other kinds of differences produce multiple and often divergent relations of gendered power. It also whenever possible contextualizes within a global frame the central issues that have made up and continue to define the U.S. feminist tradition, in order to encourage students to recognize the role cultural difference plays in a variety of feminist issues and to decenter the U.S as a reference point for all feminist theory and politics. During days with lectures, two sections may combine for team-teaching. Otherwise, the sections meet separately for discussion. [ more ]

The French Revolution was an important turning point in world history. Besides ushering in an age of liberte (liberty) and egalite (equality), it also postulated the existence of a new revolutionary fraternite (brotherhood) between peoples of all backgrounds. Would revolutionary fraternity include women, African slaves, and Jews in the new democratic polity? French men and women debated these questions in ways that have had a direct impact on our contemporary discussions of race, gender, religious freedom and ethnicity. In this course, we will explore these debates, their Enlightenment roots, and the legacy of these debates for France's minorities today. Students will be introduced to various types of historical sources (rare books, art, opera, plays), as well as to the lively historiographical debates between historians of France concerning methodology, politics, and the goal of historical research. [ more ]

Mythologized as the land of the aurora borealis and the midnight sun, Scandinavia's five distinct nations--Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland--are often mistakenly associated with blond-haired and blue-eyed uniformity. Modern Scandinavia, however, is a place of great social and cultural diversity. From medieval Viking sagas to contemporary Nordic rap, the Scandinavian literary tradition is rich in tales of global exploration, childhood imagination, sexual revolution, and multicultural confrontation. Through readings of nineteenth-century drama, twentieth-century novels, and twenty-first century cinema, we will investigate a wide range of issues on class, ethnicity, and identity, including the indigenous reindeer-herding Sami people, Danish colonialism and the Greenlandic Inuit, Norwegian collaboration and resistance during World War II, and Nordic emigration (to North America) and immigration (from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East). Discussion will also focus on Scandinavia's leadership in gender equality and sexual liberation, Scandinavian political isolation and integration (into both the UN and the EU), and the global effects of Nordic pop (ABBA to Bjork), glamour (Greta Garbo to Helena Christensen), technology (Volvo to Nokia), and design (IKEA to H&M). Readings to include works by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Hans Christian Andersen, Karen Blixen, Astrid Lindgren, Halldor Laxness, Reidar Jonsson, and Peter H?eg. Films to include works by Ingmar Bergman, Lasse Hallstrom, Bille August, Colin Nutley, Lukas Moodysson, Josef Fares, Tomas Alfredson and Tomas Vinterberg. All readings and discussions in English. [ more ]

This course will offer an introduction to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender/queer studies, in part through examining historical, legal, literary, filmic, cultural studies, sociological, and popular texts, as well as work done under the umbrella of queer theory. Subjects covered may include the following: histories of sexualities in the U.S., feminism and its relation to queer studies; how sexuality is racialized; transgender and intersex theory and activism; globalization and sexuality; and strategies of resistance and visibility such as those evidenced by AIDS activism/theory and debates over gay marriage. An essential part of the course will be exploring how race, class, religion, and nationality contribute to the construction and lived experience of modern gender and sexual identities. Readings may include works by Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, Warner, Berlant, Stryker, Puar, Ferguson, Mu?oz, Freeman, El-Tayeb, Halberstam, Crimp, Lorde, Najmabadi, and Massad. This class meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it emphasizes empathetic understanding of gender and sexual diversity; studying relations of power and privilege as they apply to sexual, gender, racial, class and national identities and practices; and foregrounds critical theorization of gender and sexuality. [ more ]

Hollywood cinema has long been fascinated with the border between the United States and Mexico. This course will examine representations of the U.S.-Mexico border, Mexican Americans, and Chicana/os in both Hollywood film and independent media. We will consider how positions on nationalism, race, gender, identity, migration, and history are represented and negotiated through film. We will begin by analyzing Hollywood "border" and gang films before approaching Chicana/o-produced features, independent narratives, and experimental work. This course will explore issues of film and ideology, genre and representation, nationalist resistance and feminist critiques, queer theory and the performative aspects of identity. [ more ]

This course uses economic analysis to explore how gender differences can lead to differences in economic outcomes, in both households and the labor market. Questions to be covered include: How does the family function as an economic unit? How do individuals allocate time between the labor market and the household? How have changes in family structure affected women's employment, and vice-versa? What are possible explanations for gender differences in labor force participation, occupational choice, and earnings? What is the role of government in addressing gender issues in the home and the workplace? How successful are government policies that primarily affect women (e.g., comparable worth policies, AFDC/TANF, subsidization of child care)? The course will focus on the current experience of women in the United States, but will place these gender differences in a historical and cross-cultural context. [ more ]

Although some protest that the U.S. is heading toward European-style socialism, social welfare programs in the U.S. differ in important ways from those in other wealthy and democratic nations. This course focuses on the adoption and development of policies to address poverty and inequality in the U.S. The issues we will explore include: What is poverty, and how do Americans perceive its dangers to individuals as well as the political community? What economic, historical, and sociological theories have been advanced to explain poverty? Why has the U.S. adopted some approaches to reduce poverty but not others? What enduring political conflicts have shaped the U.S. welfare state? [ more ]

Science fiction is a genre well known for its ability to envision new realities, and Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) is among the most highly regarded science fiction writers. Butler's uncanny ability to imagine the future anew and to merge those ruminations with her experiences as an African American woman provide powerful commentary on -- and often disrupt -- modern understandings of race, gender, and human embodiment. We will explore questions such as: What role does `gender' play in Butler's fiction? How does Butler's treatment of the `alien' cause us to reconsider what it means to be human? How does Butler incorporate `race' and the concept of `other' into her fiction, and how do these techniques help us situate contemporary discussions of a post-race society? We will examine the relationship between Butler's visions for the future and what her narratives of future worlds invariably suggest about the present. We will read key texts including the best-selling text Kindred (1979), the haunting dystopian novel Parable of the Sower (1994), the popular vampire text Fledgling (2005), and the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories (1996). We will also explore contemporary engagement with Butler's work including the relationship between the main character from her book Dawn (1987), and Henrietta Lacks, the African American woman from whom the immortal cell line (HeLa) used for medical research derives. This tutorial will engage Octavia Butler's work broadly, and with particular attention to how the concepts `race,' `gender', `alien' and `body' are interrogated in her writings. [ more ]

In 1857, both Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal were put on trial for sexual indecency and "crimes against public morality." In 1868, Le Figaro attacked Zola's novel Therese Raquin as "putrid literature" for its depiction of adultery, murder, and scandalous sexuality in nineteenth-century Paris. A century later, Gide, Colette, and Duras continued to shock French readers with their extraordinary novels on male and female homosexuality, inter-generational lovers, and bi-racial relationships. In this course, we will examine a wide range of issues on eroticism and sexuality in nineteenth- and twentieth- century French literature, including marriage and adultery, seduction and desire, love and betrayal, prostitution and fetishism, gay and lesbian identity, cross-dressing and gender representation, exoticism and colonial (s)exploitation. Readings to include novels, shorts stories, and poems by Chateaubriand, Constant, Duras, Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Zola, Maupassant, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Gide, Proust, Colette, Duras, and Guibert. Conducted in French. [ more ]

In this course we'll explore the ways in which feminist approaches to moral thinking have influenced both the methodology and the content of contemporary bioethics. The first portion of the course will address the emergence of the "Ethics of Care," critically assessing its origins in feminist theory, its development within the context of the caring professions, and its potential as a general approach to bioethical reasoning. The second portion of the course will use feminist philosophy to inform our understanding of the ways in which gender structures the individual's interactions with the health care system. To do this we'll explore topics that might traditionally be considered "women's issues" in health care, such as medicine and body image (e.g., cosmetic surgery, eating disorders), reproductive and genetic technologies, and research on women and their health care needs. In addition we'll also look at feminist analyses of topics that traditionally have not been regarded as "gendered," such as resource allocation and end of life issues. As a course offered under the Exploring Diversity Initiative, this class is designed to improve students' ability to recognize both the existence and the effects of gender disparities within the health care context, and in particular, how power and privilege within and beyond medicine contribute to gender inequalities in health and medical treatment. Moreover, students will theorize about ways of conceptualizing and of reforming health care interactions in order to reduce or eliminate those gender inequalities. [ more ]

The global pandemic of HIV/AIDS is now entering into its fourth decade. Throughout this history sexuality, gender and race and inequality have played a central role in the spread of the virus, and its apparent entrenchment in certain communities. This class will use a gendered, interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the pandemic's social, economic and political causes, impact, and conundrums -- the problems it poses for scholarship, activism, public policy, and public health. Issues discussed will include the role of transaction sex and economic structures in both susceptibility to HIV and vulnerability to its impact; stigma and its challenges for HIV prevention, testing and treatment uptake; the role of positive youth in the next stages of the pandemic; and the evolving expressions of biopower in the global AIDS response. The class will look at examples of successful policies and activism as well as the failures, corruption and complacency that have characterized the global pandemic. There will be a particular geographical focus on experiences in the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa. The class is an EDI course because of its focus on diversity and difference, as they shape the different ways that the HI virus plays out on the bodies of people in different global locations, and its discussion of the ways that global and local contexts of colonialism. patriarchy, and heteronormativity have inevitably shaped relationships between policy makers, researchers, activists, and those living with HIV and ultimately the content of their policies and interventions. [ more ]

The celebration of "courtly love" by medieval and Renaissance writers institutionalized the notion of the desiring male subject and the desired female object that continues to reverberate in contemporary culture. But early writers do not always, or even usually, endorse these positions uncritically, and even works that celebrate heterosexual love devote surprisingly large spaces to other kinds of desire. The Lover in the Romance of the Rose seeks to win the Rose, but it is the male God of Love he kisses on the mouth. Shakespeare's As You Like It and Twelfth Night end in multiple marriages, but the plots revolve around cross-dressing and gender confusion. We will supplement literary readings with both medieval and contemporary theoretical texts. The aim of the course is to sharpen critical reading and writing skills across a broad range of literary forms and historical, cultural and aesthetic values. As part of the Exploring Diversity Initiative, this course focuses on varieties of sexual desire in major pre- and early-modern works, and the challenges they offer to our own contemporary values and assumptions. [ more ]

This course examines popular cultural contexts, asking what it means to be a man in contemporary societies. We focus on the manufacture and marketing of masculinity in advertising, fashion, TV/film, theater, popular music, and the shifting contours of masculinity in everyday life, asking: how does political economy change the ideal shape, appearance, and performance of men? How have products - ranging from beer to deodorant to cigarettes -- had their use value articulated in gendered ways? Why must masculinity be the purview of "males" at all; how can we change discourses to better include performances of female masculinities, butch-identified women, and trans* men? We will pay particular attention to racialized, queer, and subaltern masculinities. Some of our case studies include: the short half-life of the boy band in the US and in Asia (e.g., J/K-Pop), hip hop masculinities at home and abroad, changing standards of masculinity in pornography (e.g., thug porn), a backwards glance at 18th c. fads for eunuch opera singers, and the curious blend of chastity and homoeroticism that constitutes masculinity in the contemporary vampire genre. Through these and other examples, we learn to recognize masculinity as a performance shaped by the political economy of a given culture. [ more ]

India is a nation based on difference whose multiple and fragmenting identities are often framed as unified oppositions: Hindu/Muslim, Rich/Poor, Secular/Religious, Male/Female. This course will deconstruct the media's popular representations of these and other identities in order to complicate the notion of a diverse Indian nation. It will highlight the range of identities and social practices among India's booming population that have produced critical axes of differentiation such as gender, caste, ethnicity, and religious sect. It begins by considering how the colonial principle of 'divide and rule' provides an object lesson in the ways that difference can be used to sustain both social hierarchy and political rule. It describes how this logic of difference produced the tragedy of Partition and its legacy for the operation of gender and religion on the subcontinent. We critically examine the class and religious divisions that led to the birth of three nations--India, Pakistan, and subsequently Bangladesh--and the particular logic of communalism and religious violence in modern India. Throughout, the course attends to the subjective experience of being Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh, untouchable or upper caste, as well as male or female as a way of understanding the way that difference shapes individual agency and lives across India. It seeks to empathize or at least understand the perspective of both victims and perpetrators of communal and gendered forms of violence in India today. This course fulfills the Exploring Diversity Initiative by theorizing the ways in which difference has been used to effect profound historical, social, and individual changes in the Indian subcontinent. [ more ]

This interdisciplinary tutorial explores aspects of gender sexuality, performativity, and representations of the body in modern theatre and art. Close analysis of plays by dramatists -such as Sophie Treadwell, Lillian Hellman, Caryl Churchill, Milcha Sanchez-Scott, Ntozake Shange, Tony Kushner, Tim Miller, Naomi Iizuka, Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Tarell McCraney, and Sarah Kane - will occur alongside consideration of works by both artists and celebrities, such as Cindy Sherman, Karen Finley and Lady Gaga. Our approach to this varied material will be comparative and will be enriched by readings of select work by contemporary theorists, such as Judith Butler, bell hooks, Cherrie Moraga, Eve K. Sedgwick, and Donna Haraway. This course meets the criteria of the Exploring Diversity Initiative as it draws focus towards the diversity of race, class and ethnicity represented by the subjects of our study as well as towards the political power of theatre and performance. [ more ]

Ambivalence has always been a vital part of literary responses to city life. Whether they praise the city or blame it, women writers react to the urban environment in a significantly different way from men. While male writers have often emphasized alienation and strangeness, women writers have celebrated the mobility and public life of the city as liberating. We will look at issues of women's work, class politics, sexual freedom or restriction, rituals of consumption, the conservation of memory by architecture, and community-building in cities like London, New York, Berlin, Paris. We will examine novels and short stories about the modern city by writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Anzia Yezierska, Ann Petry, Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, Margaret Drabble Ntozake Shange, Verena Stefan and Jhumpa Lahiri and Edwidge Danticat. We will consider theoretical approaches to urban spaces by feminists (Beatriz Colomina, Elizabeth Wilson), architectural historians (Christine Boyer) and anthropologists and sociologists (Janet Abu-Lughod, David Sibley, Michael Sorkin). Several contemporary films will be discussed. All readings in English. [ more ]

A social history of French painting from 1860 to 1900, beginning with the origins of modernism in the work of Courbet and Manet. Among the topics to be discussed are the rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III; changing attitudes toward city and country in Impressionist and Symbolist art; the impact of imperialism and international trade; the gendering of public spaces, and the prominent place of women in representations of modern life. The course addresses vanguard movements such as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and the styles of individual artists associated with them, as well as the work of academic painters. [ more ]

For complex reasons, Shakespeare has always revealed as much about those who speculate on him as the speculators have revealed about him. In this course, we will engage a few plays in considerable depth: Merchant of Venice, King Lear or Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. But we will also use these works as a means to engage some of the most compelling trends in recent critical thought, including cultural theory and post-Marxist analysis, political theology, deconstruction and rhetorical theory, psychoanalytic thought and theories of gender and sexuality. In some instances, we will look at applied criticism, in others we will simply place a theoretical work along side a play and see what they have to say to each other--what, for instance, would a Shakespearean reading of Jacques Lacan look like? [ more ]

This lecture and discussion course focuses on the politics of personal style among U.S. women of color in an era of viral video clips, the 24-hour news cycle, and e-commerce sites dedicated to the dermatological concerns of "minority" females. With a comparative, transnational emphasis on the ways in which gender, sexuality, ethno-racial identity, and class inform standards of beauty, we will examine a variety of materials ranging from documentary films, commercial websites, poetry and sociological case studies to feminist theory. Departing from the assumption that personal aesthetics are intimately tied to issues of power and privilege, we will engage the following questions: What are the everyday functions of personal style among women of color? Is it feasible to assert that an easily identifiable "African-American," "Latina," or "Asian-American" female aesthetic exists? What role do transnational media play in the development and circulation of popular aesthetic forms? How might the belief in personal style as a tactic of resistance challenge traditional understandings of what it means to be a "feminist" in the first place? [ more ]

Although sometimes claimed as part of a set of immutable "Asian values," the Chinese family has not remained fixed or stable over time. In this course, we will use the framework of "family" to gain insight into gender, generational, and sexual roles in different historical periods. Beginning in the late imperial period (16th-18th Centuries), we will examine the religious, marital, sexual, and childrearing practices associated with the "orthodox" Confucian family. We will then explore the wide variety of "heterodox" practices in imperial China, debates over and critiques of the family system in the twentieth century, and configurations of gender and family in contemporary China. As an EDI course, this class makes use of anthropological and gender studies methods to analyze both the specificities of Chinese ideas and practices regarding family, gender and sexuality as well as the considerable variety among these ideas and practices at different points in time. [ more ]

Whether presented as maternal saints, divas, video vixens, or bitches, black female celebrities navigate a tumultuous terrain in popular culture. This course considers the ways that black female celebrities such as Oprah, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Janet Jackson, and Michelle Obama negotiate womanhood and sexuality, and the popular landscapes through which we witness that negotiation. It also engages contemporary black feminist scholarship, which most frequently presents the presentation of black female bodies in popular media forms as exploitive. We will review historical stereotypes of black women in popular media forms, discuss the history of the "politics of respectability" within black culture, engage black feminist responses to these types, and examine theoretical approaches to assess social constructions of womanhood and sexuality. We will also consider provocative questions relevant to discussions of contemporary black sexual politics: Should we view these women as feminists? Are they merely representatives of cultural commodification and control of black women's bodies? Do these women best exemplify the reiteration of problematic characterizations? Are they positive models for demonstrating female empowerment, agency, or "fierceness?" This course explores the histories of representation of black female figures in popular culture, and in so doing, troubles contemporary considerations of black womanhood and sexuality. [ more ]

"Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason-that is the motto of Enlightenment." Thus the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant exhorts his contemporaries to muster the courage to cultivate their capacity for reason. Modern faith in the prospects of universal human dignity, rational autonomy, the rights of man, individual liberty, democracy, open scientific inquiry and social and political progress depend upon it. Yet in 19th and 20th centuries we find the promise of Enlightenment tempered by the rise of nationalism and the persistence of racism, sexism, genocide, terrorism, and religious extremism as well as the emergence of wars of mass destruction, environmental degradation, and the potential for manipulation of populations by consumerist mass media. Can the promise of Enlightenment be redeemed? In this tutorial we begin with short readings by Kant, Hegel and Marx, key sources for critical social theory in the 20th century. Possible other figures read may include: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Amy Allen, Noelle McAfee, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze, Georgio Agamben, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Achille Mbembe, as well as current critiques of neoliberal capitalism. Although we will not directly address diversity issues except insofar as cultural, racial, class, sexual and other differences are bound up within power or domination relations, insofar as the course examines social and political power, oppression and domination, and the possibility or viability of the idea of human emancipation it meets the EDI requirement. This tutorial will be adapted for WGSS students seeking to meet a theory requirement. [ more ]

Austen and Eliot profoundly influenced the course of the novel by making internal consciousness crucial to narrative form. In this course we will explore Austen's innovative aesthetic strategies and the ways in which Eliot assimilated and transformed them. By placing each writer's work in its political and philosophical context--in Austen's case, reactions to the aftermath of the French Revolution, in Eliot's, to the failed mid-century European revolutions and the pressures of British imperialism--we will consider how each writer conceives social and historical exigencies to shape dramas of consciousness. Readings will include Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion; Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. The Lifted Veil; , and Daniel Deronda; selected letters and prose; essays by Burke and Marx; and recent criticism. [ more ]

A major theme in British historiography is the enormous social change that has taken place in Britain since the end of the Second World War. In the 1950s, sociologists argued about the extent to which postwar affluence was leading to the "embourgeoisement" of the working class; in the 1960s, the advent of the so-called "Permissive Society" witnessed the flourishing of a new culture of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll; in the 1970s, the feminist and gay movements challenged gender roles that earlier had seemed so secure; in the 1980s, Thatcherism sought to halt the nation's apparent terminal decline, repudiating much of the progressive legislation of earlier decades; finally, throughout this period successive ways of immigration challenged the cultural homogeneity of white Britain. This course will explore these themes, addressing the question of what it meant to be "postwar" in Britain, charting the gradual emergence of a new politics of class, gender, race, and sexuality in Britain that the made the nation in 1990, at the end of the postwar period, a radically different place from what it had been in 1945. In attempting to make sense of these complex changes, we will consider a variety of documents and works by recent historians, along with a dozen films, which students will be required to view outside of class. [ more ]

This course will introduce students to some of the most significant and exciting social, artistic, intellectual, and political developments in fin-de- siecle Europe (1870 to 1914). "Fin-de-siecle" is a concept that denotes not only a historical period--the end of a century--but refers to a consciousness of living in a time of accelerated change and crisis. Intellectuals and artists of the decades we will be examining were preoccupied with "degeneration," loss of innocence, meaning, morality, and the inner self. They were simultaneously fascinated and horrified by technological innovation, emergent political and ideological currents, and the challenges to traditional values and identities posed by them. After a survey of political upheavals during the European fin-de- siecle, the course will focus on three metropolises consecutively: Vienna, Paris, and St. Petersburg. Through analyses of historical literature, novels, music, visual art, and the seminal texts of psychoanalysis we will explore how the self, public life, gender relations, sexuality, and aesthetics were conceived and re-imagined in each city, and bring to light the sensibilities and culture they shared. [ more ]

In this class we will investigate Latina/o popular musical and dance forms, with particular emphasis on questions of gender, sexuality, and ethno-racial identity. We will focus on the following questions, among others: How are the various facets of Latina/o identity expressed through the "popular" or the everyday? In what ways do categories of difference such as gender, sexuality, and ethno-racial identity inform the performance as well as the interpretation of Latina/o musical forms? How are we to understand cultural phenomenon such as the most recent Latin music "boom"? Employing cultural studies concepts and methods, students will conduct an original semester-long research project in stages and complete one ethnographic exercise. [ more ]

This course will examine social psychological theories and research that are relevant to the understanding of stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. We will take a variety of social psychological perspectives, emphasizing sociocultural, cognitive, personality, or motivational explanations. We will examine the impact that stereotypes and prejudice have on people's perceptions of and behaviors toward particular groups or group members and will explore a variety of factors that tend to exacerbate or weaken this impact. We also will consider some of the sources of stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination and some of the processes through which they are maintained, strengthened, or revised. In addition, we will examine some of the effects that stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination can have on members of stereotyped groups, as well as some implications of the social psychological research findings for issues such as education and business and government policies. A major component of this course will be the examination of classic and ongoing empirical research. [ more ]

This tutorial examines representations of and resistance to racial-sexual violence from enslavement to post-emancipation and contemporary culture in the United States. Texts include: legal articles; historical analyses such as D'Emilio et al., Intimate Matters; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Smith, Killers of the Dream; McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street; and films such as Griffith, Birth of a Nation; Micheaux, Within Our Gates; Gerima, Bush Mama. The primary focus is on black life, vulnerability to violence and mobilization for freedom during antebellum, postbellum/Reconstruction years of the 19th century; and 20th century convict prison lease system, Jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration. [ more ]

This course will address a range of topics related to the intersection of gender and psychopathology. We will begin the class by discussing the meaning of "gender" and the various mechanisms by which biological sex, gender identity, gender roles and sexual orientation may relate to our understanding of the development, presentation and treatment of psychological disorders. We will also discuss historical and current controversies regarding the classification of psychological disorders concerning sexual orientation and gender identity. The rest of the course will address gender differences in specific psychological disorders and the biological, psychological and social mechanisms contributing to these differences. All students will design and conduct an empirical research project based on the readings and concepts discussed in class. [ more ]

As slaves and free women, activists, domestics, artists and writers, African Americans have played exciting and often unexpected roles in U.S. political, social, and cultural history. In this course we will examine black women's lives from the earliest importation of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean through to the expansion of slavery, the Civil War, freedom, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movements, and up to the present day. Consistent themes we will explore are the significance of gender in African American history and the changing roles and public perceptions of black women both inside and outside the black community. We will read and discuss a combination of primary and secondary sources; we will also consider music, art, and literature, as well as more standard "historical" texts. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it focuses on empathetic understanding, power and privilege, especially in relation to class, gender, and race within a U.S. context. [ more ]

If race is socially and historically constructed, then the study of race relations in the U.S. extends to the topic of whiteness. And if we are never without the past, then "whiteness" must be a part of current discussions about politics, citizenship, and social issues. Focusing on how historians have written about whiteness in American history, this course uses the prism of race to explore social, political, and economic development in U.S. history. The class follows the development of "whiteness" through a chronology that begins in colonial Virginia, travels through immigration in the nineteenth century, examines racial politics and popular culture in the twentieth century, and ends with a look at the current election season. This course is framed by several questions: What is whiteness, and what has it meant in the history of the United States? Who is (and is not) white? What about other analytical categories, like gender and class (or region or ethnicity or sexuality): how have these experiences shaped and been shaped by the racial category of whiteness? Because historically whiteness has carried overtones of power, privilege, and wealth in the United States, the course necessarily critiques the roots of racial disparities. This class is not for the faint-hearted. Informed participation is necessary to its success. The course fulfills the requirements for the Exploring Diversity Initiative because it examines the differences and similarities between white Americans and other American cultures, and because it explores whiteness as a prism for understanding the operations of power and privilege in American society. [ more ]

This course investigates the modernist imagination of pleasure, both sensual and aesthetic, with a particular focus on the ways that modernism's formal strategies facilitate the representation of queer pleasures, affections, intimacies, and desires. We will read some texts that seek explicitly to represent queer sexualities; we will look at others that radically re-imagine the feeling and expression of pleasure. We will approach these texts through the questions: What constitutes "modern" pleasure? What makes pleasure (or a representation of it) queer? And do queer textual expressions of pleasure differ from representations of LGBT sexualities and desires? In tandem with our discussion of literary form, we will consider the crucial role that subcultural sites of intimacy, like Harlem's cabarets and Natalie Barney's sapphic salon, played in the collaborative production and transatlantic circulation of modernism. Authors likely to be studied include Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, Radclyffe Hall, Willa Cather, and James Baldwin. We will also consider visual and aural texts, including photographs of the Barney salon, cubist portraits and landscapes, and the music of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey. We will read the work of sexologists and situate modernist literature in relation to early 20th--century scientific and cultural conversations about the nature of pleasure. Some contemporary scholarship on modernist sexual culture and much queer and feminist theory will accompany these texts and provide a framework for our analysis of modernism's queer pleasures. This course satisfies the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it emphasizes critical theorization of sexual difference and pleasure as constructed, contested, and historically contingent categories, and considers the effects of power and privilege in the social construction of gender and sexuality. [ more ]

This course reveals how different cultures construct sexual identities, and what happens when dominant paradigms (i.e. the Euro-American LGBT model) become enmeshed in globalization, capitalism, and consumerism. Why do we find gay bears and drag queens trafficking in North American iconography flourishing in countries like Brazil and South Africa? Why does Madonna still turn out gay crowds in Indonesia and Russia? As global gay culture spreads, what happens to people with their own local conceptions of gender/sexuality (e.g., "Two Spirit" Native Americans?) How have free trade and the internet transformed queer lives, queer sex, and people's understandings of their sexual selves? We begin with a focus on alternative gender/sexual formations around the world. Next we ask what happens when it`s not only identities that are on the move, but actual bodies. Here, we focus on queer diasporas, refugees, and migrants. Our final unit brings us into the global flows of capitalism itself to interrogate the role of consumerism in sexual culture, tackling thorny issues of gay gentrification, tourism, pinkwashing/homonationalism, global gay cinematic representations, and the neocolonial potential of NGOs. Ultimately, this class reveals that sexuality is infused in global economic and political affairs in ways that are often overlooked. [ more ]

"Wit! Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness and peculiarity of thought," Samuel Coleridge wrote, "this is the wit of Donne!" There are no greater, wittier, or more daringly original lyric poems in the English language than Donne's Songs and Sonnets, Shakespeare's Sonnets, or Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilathus, the first collection of secular poems written and published by an Englishwoman. This intensive, discussion-oriented seminar will explore the following questions. What are these writers' stylistic characteristics? How peculiar or unconventional are these poems, and what innovations do they seek? What is the impact of their coterie audience? How do questions of sexuality and gender animate these poems? To what extent are biography and history pertinent or helpful in understanding this poetry? Why have these poems inspired such provocative critical responses from modernists, and more recently, post-modernists? [ more ]

How do we recognize or see diversity in the works of canonical artists? If modernist painting has often been understood to put pressure on existing power relations, the stylistic innovation that defines it has just as often been used to veil its controversial subject matter. The aim of this course is two-fold: 1) to call attention to difference through comparative analysis and to consider how and why identifying it is meaningful; 2) to detail the changes in historiography since the 1970s that have enabled discussions of difference (sex, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality) and the challenges they present. The course demonstrates that the Second Empire (1851-1870) in France was an especially fertile period for innovations in style and subject matter that generated both outrage and incomprehension. In the wake of the revolution of 1848, realism and its rallying cry ("il faut etre de son temps") brought home subjects that heretofore had been safely displaced to the classical or exotic worlds as they were imagined by the West. The Second Empire coincided with the birth of mass culture so that artists had access to new types of imagery and increasing contact with racy and controversial subjects. This course will investigate polemical works by Gustave Courbet (i.e. Burial at Ornans, Origin of the World) and Edouard Manet (i.e. Olympia, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian) through the lens of critical writings of the 1850s and 1860s (i.e. Baudelaire, Proudhon, Zola) as well as revisionist writings from the 1970s to the present (Homi Bhahba, T.J. Clark, Richard Dyer, Michael Fried, Tamar Garb, Sander Gilman, Zine Magubane, Linda Nochlin, and Gayatri Spivak). We will consider the relationship of Manet's and Courbet's works to academic ones, including orientalist paintings by Ingres and Gerome, and to vanguard pictures of the next generation (i.e. the homoerotic work of Caillebotte and Bazille, the "sex workers" of Degas's toilette scenes). Finally, we will examine the legacy of Courbet and Manet during the period when difference began to be represented in the work of artists such as Judy Chicago, Yasumasa Morimura, Cindy Sherman, Samuel Fosso, and Carrie Mae Weems. [ more ]

Art of the 1600s represents a highpoint in artists' ability and interest in conveying "the passions of the soul" through the actions of the body. The range of feelings represented had never been broader than at this time. In the seminar we will distinguish unusual from conventional poses (e.g, melancholy, wonder, musing),track how long the conventional poses had been in use, and differentiate poses and gestures that had unisex use from those that remained gender-specific or preferred. We will also examine which poses, if any, individual artists (e.g., Caravaggio, Artimesia Gentileschi, Rubens, Rembrandt, Leyster, Bernini, and Poussin) favored. [ more ]

The nineteenth century is so dominated by the female nude that the very term "nude" has come to stand for the female body. And yet, the history of the nude during this period is not devoid of male bodies. This course looks at both male and female nudes in order to understand how the nude became gendered female. Required readings include Kenneth Clark's classic study The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956) and Lynda Nead's The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (1992), with special attention to texts which show how the nude and the discourse of the ideal function to obscure social issues. We will explore the ways in which certain types of bodies have been defined in opposition to the white western ideal, and thereby exoticized or marginalized. Our prime focus is the work of David, Ingres, Gericault, Courbet, Manet, Morisot and Renoir but more popular nineteenth-century images as well as selected works by artists working today will be discussed. [ more ]

This course will explore the diversity of American women's experiences from the colonial era through the Civil War. We will pay particular attention to the roles women filled--as slaves, nuns, housewives, mothers, and workers, as well as depictions of women as witches, paragons of virtue, and urban consumers. In our reading of historiography and primary texts we will analyze the ways in which literacy and artistic culture as well as geopolitical events shaped women's lives. As we study works of history, we will also read modern works of feminist and race theory to further our understanding of connections between ideology and practice, between narrative and argument. [ more ]

Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies honors project. [ more ]

Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies honors project. [ more ]

Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies senior thesis. [ more ]

Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies senior thesis. [ more ]

Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies independent study. [ more ]

Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies independent study. [ more ]