This discussion course introduces a range of feminist issues, theories, and controversies. It has several aims: to provide critical and analytical tools for thinking about gender; to explore key issues facing women in 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. Above all, the course is intended as an exploration of the tremendous diversity of thought contained under the general rubrics of feminist and gender 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. [ 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, Sedgwick, Warner, Berlant, Stryker, Manalaslan, Hammonds, Crimp, Lorde, Bechdel, McBride, 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 ]

Focusing on first-person accounts of LGBTQ sexualities, this course examines how changing social and political realities have affected sexual desires and identities, and how individuals represent their experiences of these historical and conceptual shifts. How do these representations of sexuality challenge prevailing ideas about desire and identity? How do they navigate the gender limitations imposed by our language? How do other social identifications, such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, shape these experiences of sexuality? We will read memoirs, autobiographies, and personal essays that reflect a range of LGBTQ identities and experiences, including works by Martin Duberman, Audre Lorde, Leslie Feinberg, Alison Bechdel, Reinaldo Arenas, Kate Bornstein, Gloria Anzaldua, Samuel Delany, David Wojnarowicz, and Michelle Tea. These narratives will be accompanied by a variety of queer and feminist theories of sexuality, some of which interrogate the historical and conceptual limitations of "experience" and "identity." This course fulfills the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it investigates institutions of power and privilege as they have impacted LGBTQ communities, emphasizes empathetic understanding of gender and sexual diversity, and focuses on critical theorization of intersecting differences and identities. [ 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? Part of the Gaudino Danger Initiative. [ more ]

In her groundbreaking book, The Tentative Pregnancy, Barbara Katz Rothman writes that "[t]he technological revolution in reproduction is forcing us to confront the very meaning of motherhood, to examine the nature and origins of the mother-child bond, and to replace--or to let us think we can replace--chance with choice." Taking this as our starting point, in this course we will examine a number of conceptual and ethical issues in the use and development of technologies related to human reproduction, drawing out their implications for such core concepts as "motherhood" and "parenthood," family and genetic relatedness, exploitation and commodification, and reproductive rights and society's interests in reproductive activities. Topics will range from consideration of "mundane" technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), prenatal genetic screening and testing, and surrogacy, to the more extraordinary, including pre-implantation diagnosis (PID), post-menopausal reproduction, post-mortem gamete procurement, reproductive cloning and embryo splitting, and in utero medical interventions. Background readings include sources rooted in traditional modes of bioethical analysis as well as those incorporating feminist approaches. [ more ]

From the early twentieth century to the present day, the radical changes in the lives of Spanish women have clearly reflected the tug of war between progress and tradition in recent Spanish history. The dramatic upheavals in Spanish politics have marked and transformed the lives of women to such a great extent that one can often gauge the political and social climate of any given historical moment by considering how the role of women was defined by the law, the Catholic church, education, and other social and political institutions. Using literary and historical texts as well as films and graphic materials, this course will look at the transformations in the public and private lives of Spanish women during the following periods: the turn of the century, the Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War, the Franco years, and the transition to democracy. [ 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 debates in feminist theory about the relationship between science, gender and power in politics. On the one hand, shifting conceptions of gender have strongly influenced the development of the sciences in modernity: for example, feminists have argued that attempts to authorize science above other modes of knowing often implicitly or explicitly cast women as objects, not subjects, of knowledge. On the other hand, shifting conceptions of science have strongly influenced the development of feminist theory and practice: for example, debates about reproductive rights are often couched in terms of a conflict between reliable scientific knowledge of embryos, STDs, etc. and an unscientific, patriarchal worldview. Under what conditions can science and technology serve to transform, and under what conditions to reinforce, power imbalances based on gender, race, and sexuality? Should feminist theory embrace objectivity and model itself upon scientific procedures of knowledge production, or should feminists eschew objectivity as a myth told by the powerful about their own knowledge-claims and develop an alternative approach to knowledge? What is "objectivity" anyway, and how has this norm changed through history? Rather than treating science as a monolith, we will endeavor to understand the implications of various sciences--as enacted and imagined in various historically specific situations--for gender and politics. Readings may include texts by Rene Descartes, Andreas Vesalius, Londa Schiebinger, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Helen Longino, Nancy Harstock, Sandra Harding, bell hooks, Donna Haraway, Mary Hawkesworth, Octavia Butler, and more. [ more ]

The story of the gypsy femme fatale Carmen has endured for over 150 years. In Western culture she exemplifies the seductive, exotic, independent, and forbidden woman who drives an upstanding man to a life of crime and finally murder. This course explores a broad array of treatments of this archetypal narrative, starting with Prosper Merimee's 1845 novella on which Bizet based his beloved 1875 opera Carmen. We will consider various staged and film versions of the opera itself, including Francesco Rosi's stunning 1984 movie, and discuss various other film transformations of the story, from DeMille's 1915 silent film through Hammerstein's 1954 all-black musical Carmen Jones, to the MTV version A Hip Hopera of 2004. Comic approaches will also be assessed, from Charlie Chaplin's Carmen Burlesque of 1915 through Spike Jones' 1952 Carmen Murdered! and The Naked Carmen of 1970. We will explore remarkable dance interpretations ranging from Carlos Saura's 1983 flamenco version through David Bourne's choreography in his 2001 gay reading called The Car Man. This course satisfies the EDI requirement through a critical examination of the way in which the Carmen story has served as a stage on which multifaceted textual and musical constructions and conflicts of individual and group identities, encompassing gender and sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and class are played out. [ more ]

This course examines the relationship between body, gender, and religion or community in South Asia, using three countries--India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh--and three major religions--Induism, Buddhism, and Islam--as its focus. It begins by unpacking the critical theories in which the human body serves as map for society and vice versa. It then examines the South Asian discourses linking body with nation, population, or purity. It explores a South Asian sociology of the body that occasions solidarity as well as social suffering and structural violence. Along the way, it looks at a diverse set of practices that count or control bodies to produce social cohesion including yoga, sex selection, family planning, monasticism, and fundamentalism. The body emerges as a lens through which to view the production of a politics of identity as much as fragmentation or social hierarchy. [ more ]

A social history beginning with art of the pre-Revolutionary period and ending with realism. Major topics include changing definitions of neoclassicism and romanticism, the impact of the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848, the Napoleonic Empire, the shift from history painting to scenes of everyday life, landscape painting as an autonomous art form and attitudes toward race and sexuality. The course stresses French artists such as Greuze, Vigee-Lebrun, David, Ingres, Delacroix, Gericault, Corot, and Courbet, but also includes Goya, Constable, Turner, and Friedrich. [ 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 ]

In this tutorial, we will read four novels written between 1850 and 1900, all of which focus on the figure of the adulteress: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873-77), Leopoldo Alas y Ure?a's La Regenta (1884-85), and Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest (1894). For each week of class, students will read one of these primary texts, as well as a selection of secondary literature that will allow us to understand, over the course of the semester, how and why the adulteress played a key role in the cultural imagination of Europe during this time. All works will be read in English translation. [ more ]

This discussion-based course examines various forms of sexual labor in order to better understand how gendered and sexual performances are used in a variety of cultures and contexts for material benefit. We begin with the 1980s Feminist Sex Wars, a series of debates among feminist activists and scholars about pornography, prostitution, queerness, and issues of sexuality and power. The majority of the course, however, is a global and ethnographic exploration through cross-cultural case studies that includes "traditional" forms of sex work such as street prostitution, pornography, and escorting as well as sexual labor without contact such as stripping and phone sex. Finally, we will explore other examples of people who engage in sexualized gender performances in exchange for material benefit such as runway models, beauty pageant queens, and drag performers. Course readings come from a range of fields, but focus most heavily on cultural anthropology, feminist/queer ethnographies, and feminist theory. (Major authors include: Gayle Rubin, Don Kulick, Denise Brennan, Andrea Dworkin, and Catharine Mackinnon.) This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it focuses on empathetic understanding, power and privilege, and critical theorization, especially in relation class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity in both the US and global comparative contexts. A prominent feature of this course is that it includes opportunities to travel together to New York to attend events and meet with relevant interlocutors (e.g., tour modeling agencies, meet sex worker-rights NGOs). [ more ]

This discussion-based seminar examines diverse forms of sexuality around the world. Because ethnology's historical emphasis has been on heterosexual forms of desire and kinship, in this course we will emphasize queer forms of sexuality, which encompasses a broad range of "non-normative" sexualities in contemporary cultures around the globe. We also examine gender variance in detail, including many different "third gender" categories. Our readings come primarily from cultural anthropology and queer theory, particularly those that emphasize how economic and political changes influence notions of sexual and gender identity. Ethnographic case studies include: transgender sex workers in Brazil; butch lesbian culture in Thailand; Arab men who have sex with men; Black transmen in urban US cities; and rural queer youth. Some of the major authors we will read are: Joseph Massad, Michael Warner, Gayatri Reddy, Don Kulick, Ara Wilson, and Martin Manalansan. The final research paper is comparative in nature, and asks students to contrast two or more related cultural groups selected from within our course readings or independent of them as suits student interests (e.g., butch-femme lesbian relationships in Thailand compared to the US; attitudes toward homosexuality among immigrants in the diaspora vs. a homeland; the social roles played by Hindu vs. Muslim transgendered women India, etc.) This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it focuses on empathetic understanding, power and privilege, and critical theorization, especially in relation class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity in both the US and global comparative contexts. [ more ]

In her essay "Peter's Pans: Eating in the Diaspora," literary critic Hortense Spillers argues that "[b]lack writers, whatever their location and by whatever projects and allegiances they are compelled, must retool the language(s) that they inherit" in order to express their experience of blackness. This course considers how this "retool[ing]" of language occurs in African Diasporic literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, and how new "language(s)" of literary form and genre impact black writers' representations of gender and sexuality. We will focus on writers and filmmakers such as Bessie Head, Zora Neale Hurston, Mariama Ba, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cheryl Dunye, Gwendolyn Brooks, Isaac Julien, Michelle Cliff, Sapphire, Lewis Nkosi, Junot Diaz, and others whose works destabilize conventions of genre, blurring the lines between fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. We will examine these texts alongside theories of genre, gender and sexuality offered by Spillers, Michelle Wright, Cheryl Clarke, Judith Butler, Evie Shockley, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others. Through these texts, we will consider how Afrodiasporic writers address questions of gender and sexual identity that arise at various moments in modern African diaspora history, and how "retool[ed]" languages of literature complicate global ideas about black gender and sexuality. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it increases students' knowledge of the experiences of people disempowered on the bases of race, gender, and sexuality in a multinational context, and allows them to understand creative expression as a means of interrogating disempowering social structures and ideologies. [ more ]

This course explores the constructions of feminine and masculine categories in modern Africa. We will concentrate on the particular history of women's experiences during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In addition, we will examine how the study of history and gender offers perspectives on contemporary women's issues such as female-circumcision, teen pregnancy, wife-beating, and "AIDS." [ more ]

To bring the all too familiar everyday to our attention, artists and writers have made it strange. What happens when we view everyday life from elsewhere? While everyday culture has often been experienced as repressive and alienating in modern Western societies, a new importance assigned to everyday life made it liberating in Japan during the twenties and in contemporary China. The contours of the everyday are delightfully vague, and it always exceeds theorizing. For instance, is its privileged place the street or the home? Is it lived largely in institutions that regulate our daily lives, or is it lived between and outside them? Everyday objects and commodities like the potato, the postcard, the car, clothes, housing, etc., will be analyzed. Fiction by Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Georges Perec, Manil Suri, Ha Jin, and Banana Yoshimoto. Films by Chantal Akerman, Pedro Almodovar, Benoit Jaquot, and Pierre Jeunet. Art projects that transform the everyday will also be discussed, including those of Sophie Calle, Mary Kelley, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Christine Hill. Short theoretical excerpts from Freud, Kracauer, Goffman, Lefebvre, de Beauvoir, Friedan, Debord, Foucault, and Bourdieu. All works not originally in English will be read in English translation. [ 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? Readings include works by Julie Bettie, Rosalinda Fregoso, Tiffany M. Gill, Margaret L. Hunter, Linda Leung, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Ramirez, Felicity Schaefer-Grabiel, and Sandra K. Soto, among others. [ more ]

This course explores developments in recent feminist thought influenced by philosophical currents in France and Germany (poststructuralism and critical theory.) Depending upon the year in which the course is offered, we explore topics such as self and society, sexual difference, embodiment, critiques of reason, the psyche, new materialist theories, queer feminism, and transnational feminism. We will read from works by authors such as the following; Sandra Bartky, Iris Young, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Jessica Benjamin, Gayle Rubin, Rosi Braidotti, Eve Sedgwick, Lynne Huffer, Sara Ahmed, Jasbir Puar, and Wendy Brown. Fiction and film may also be included. [ more ]

How do we experience and represent time, and what factors might account for both our experiences and our representations? What are some of the ways that people experience and ritually mark the passing of time? What are some of the different ways that people have made sense of time and themselves in time? Especially for individuals and peoples who have been denied certain self-representation and narratives of place, how do competing notions of time, history, space, and location get negotiated? In this course, drawing from within the broad corpus of queer theory (including theorists such as Gloria Anzaldua, Elizabeth Freeman, J. Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Mu?oz) we will examine some non-linear, non-normative, and interruptive approaches to making sense of time, space-time, and self within time. On the one hand, we will consider theorists who specifically question and challenge what Jose Esteban Mu?oz dubs the "linearity of straight time," and we will turn to a set of issues with regard to family and sexuality, especially critiques of normative lifecycle events and rituals that have reconfigured experiences and representations of time and place. On the other hand, we will also work with queer theory as it explores alternatives to normative conceptualizations of time and place that have already existed in the past. Hence we will look not only to queer theory as it reads more contemporary negotiations of sexuality, identity, time, and space-time; we will also consider how some contemporary theorists have read previous historical examples. [ more ]

This course begins with a brief introduction to some of Foucault's early writings but focuses on a close reading of a selection of middle and late texts that have become central to debates about the significance of his work: Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality (vols. 1-3), and selected interviews and course lectures. We examine debates in the Foucault literature about freedom, power, ethics, and the nature of critical theory. This course has been designated EDI because it engages questions concerning power, social differences and social and political freedom. [ more ]

At roughly fifty-year intervals, Britain produced three brilliant female novelists-- Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf-- who would each become renowned, in her own way, for her ability to combine minutely detailed social observation with a rich depiction of the inner lives of her characters. This course will examine some of their major fiction-- with an emphasis on Austen and Eliot-- in the context of recent critical debate about the nature and implications of their narrative methods for representing the consciousnesses of characters, and of the authorial narrative voices that mediate among them. Questions to be considered: how is our understanding of novelistic characters and consciousness shaped by our real-life experience in interpreting the thoughts and character of others, and vice versa? Do "omniscient" narrators lay claim to a privileged kind of knowing presumed to be unavailable either to their character or to readers, or are they modelling humanly available interpretive stances toward a world of others? Why does "free indirect discourse"-- which blurs the distinction between the consciousness of narrator and character-- feature so prominently in the work of all three? Possible texts include Austen's Emma and Persuasion, Eliot''s Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and The Lifted Veil, and Woolf's The Waves. [ more ]

Imagine this: a form of art and entertainment that purports to be able to represent everything-intimate, even inaccessible human thoughts and feelings, love, class, the city, shopping, sexuality, bureaucracy, social bonds, industrialization, nationalism, even modernity itself. In this course we will try to understand the scope of the nineteenth-century British novel's jaw-dropping representational aspirations: its claim to comprehend in its pages both the dizzying complexity of new social, political, and economic structures, as well as delineate in finest detail the texture of individual minds and lives. We will pay attention to the fictional modes by which apparently intractable social problems are resolved, through a sleight of hand act we seem never to tire of, in the realm of romantic love. And while we might think of the novel as an Empire of the Little, endlessly occupied with giving significance to the smallest acts of ordinary human life, we will think about the broader historical and social conditions the novel both represents in its pages, and is a crucial not-so-silent partner in promoting and contesting. We will also interest ourselves in the kind of under-the-counter work the Victorian novel does on behalf of British empire, as well as empire's own behind-the-scenes work for the novel. Since so many of these stories of everyday life seem as familiar to us as everyday life, we will work hard to maintain what is strange and specific about the nineteenth century even as we recognize within these works the birth of so much that is modern in our own culture. Likely authors include: Austen, Scott, Bronte,Dickens, Eliot, Braddon, and Forster. [ 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 ]

Psychoanalytic thought offers one of the most subtle and startling accounts we have of the nature of gender and sexuality, one that suggests how inextricably sexuality is bound to language, to the limits of culture, and to the problem of identity as such. We'll be interested in these issues in their own right; we'll be equally interested in the surprising ways psychoanalytic thought opens up literary, cinematic and visual works--psychoanalysis is, in the end, a form of reading. The course will weave together theoretical texts and fictions from As You Like It to Some Like it Hot. We'll explore Antigone, "chick flicks" and "buddy" films, courtly love lyrics and novels (Balzac, Woolf, Duras) in the light of thinkers such as Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacqueline Rose, Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. [ more ]

This course explores costume and fashion as vehicles for the (re)creation and expression of gender, class, and sexual identities in Europe and the United States. We will begin by looking at the relationship between fashion and the political and economic power of the courts of early modern Europe. Revolutionary ideologies will be linked to sartorial politics, consumption of clothing to colonization, and changes in the style of clothing to shifting social norms. As our focus turns to the fashion industry in the twentieth century, when mass-produced clothing increased the possibility for reflexivity and imaginative play in dress, we will relate representations of the dressed body to the formation of diverse cultural communities, beauty ideals, and status hierarchies, examining both the normative and subversive potential of fashion. The course considers work in the fields of art history, cultural history, sociology and anthropology, feminist theory, and fashion journalism to ask questions such as: What are the origins of consumer societies? When, why, and how were fashion and consumption feminized? Is clothing a language? What cultural, political and social meanings do certain forms of dress generate? What is the relationship between prevalent understandings of the body and fashion? How is clothing used to stigmatize or differentiate individuals and communities? Topics include: the origins of uniforms and sportswear, eroticism and androgyny in fashion, the cultural politics of ethnic clothing, and the relationship between the fashion industry and cinema. [ 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 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender 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 sexuality and desire? 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. [ 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. This course is part of the Gaudino Danger Initiative. [ 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 ]

The goal is to think about describing bodies from a variety of disciplinary approaches and genres of writing. Its focus is on living bodies, or bodies that were once alive, with an emphasis on bodies that move i.e., performing bodies--actors, dancers, singers--and what makes them unique. We will also consider objects associated with bodies, and the ways they are animated, including how they are animated when the person who had them dies. The course is meant for juniors, seniors, and graduate students who wish to analyze bodies from different disciplinary formations--art, theatre, literature, anthropology, philosophy--and who have a particular interest in writing. We will read scholarly writing, fiction, New Yorker profiles, as well as memoir/autobiography, and take each as a model through which to write about a person or an object redolent of a person. Possible readings: Roland Barthes on cultural theory and representation; Zine Magubane and Zadie Smith on othered bodies; Tamar Garb on portraiture; Elaine Scary on the body in pain; Joan Acocella, Hilton Als, Judith Thurman and other writers on the arts; Judith Butler and Peggy Phelan on the performative body; Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, and Michael Taussig on the body, memory, and ritual; Marvin Carlson and Terry Castle on haunting; and Bill Brown on things. These will be supplemented by selected tapes of live performances as well as films. [ 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 ]