Examines various monsters and creatures that emerge from the pages of Victorian narratives. What do these strange beings tell us about literary form, cultural fantasies, and anxieties; or about conceptions of selfhood and the body? How do they embody (or disembody) identities that subvert sexual, racial, and gendered norms? Authors may include Lewis Carroll, Richard Marsh, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and H.G. Wells. (Same as: ENGL 1005)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021.

Draws from case studies around the world to understand the contemporary conditions under which queer and trans people live, identify themselves, make community (or not), and (sometimes) mobilize for change. We consider the distinct cultural dimensions of queer and trans life in different locations as well as global forces that make LGBTQ identity appear at times so uniform across different settings. Most readings are ethnographic reporting on queer or trans communities, and consider how gender and sexuality are conditioned by a variety of institutions (e.g. medicine, religion, activism). There are additional readings on theories of globalization and sexuality as well as occasional film viewings. Students will have weekly short writing prompts, culminating in a term paper that researches a particular queer or trans community outside of the U.S.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020.

Explores the significant roles that women of color have played in American politics and around the world. Begins with the US context, starting in the antebellum era and moving forward by reading biographies/autobiographies that provide voice to the experiences faced by women of color in both traditional and non-traditional political spaces. These include women of color as close confidants to male political figures (first ladies, wives, and mistresses) and as politicians, judges, activists, and revolutionaries. Then shifts to a more global context considering the perspectives of women of color in countries where they have championed gender equality and feminism, and where they have become powerful political actors. (Same as: GOV 1005, AFRS 1005)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2019.

Examines examples of overwhelming love in eighteenth and nineteenth century novels from England, France, and Germany. Through close reading and intensive writing, considers the intersection of love with the difficulties created by class and gender difference; the power of desire to challenge social convention and the terms of ordinary reality; the confrontations between love, egotism, and seduction; and the implications of love’s attempt to dare all, even at the risk of death. Discusses the political overtones of these narratives of love and their place within the construction of gender, sexuality and subjectivity in Western culture. Authors may include Prevost, Goethe, Laclos, Hays, Austen, Bronte, and Flaubert. (Same as: ENGL 1009)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2019.

Studies the lives and labors of sex workers in the US through study of historical and contemporary contexts. Explores the sex industry through the lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. Uses memoirs, poetry, scholarly essays, film, music, zines, and fiction to center the voices of sex workers. Focuses on the conditions of sex work, health and safety, labor organizing, worker justice, mutual aid, and abolitionist feminism. Uses feminist and queer theory to examine pleasure, consent, and critiques of capitalism, policing, and incarceration.

Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel, “Jane Eyre,” had a profound impact not only on subsequent nineteenth-century fiction, but also on twentieth- and twenty-first century literary representations of female experience. Begins with a close reading of Brontë's novel and then moves on to exploring modern literary rewritings of this narrative. Considers both how Brontë's themes are carried out through these various texts and why her narrative has been such a rich source of reinterpretation. In addition to Brontë, authors may include Du Maurier, James, Messud, Park, and Rhys. (Same as: ENGL 1018)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020.

Explores the representation and life experiences of women who did not fit the cultural norm of suburban motherhood in 1950s America. Focuses on issues of class, race, sexuality, and gender in a decade shaped by fears about nuclear war and communism, and by social and political conformity. Topics include teenage pregnancy, women’s grassroots political leadership, single womanhood, civil rights, emergent feminism, and, finally, the enduring cultural resonance of the apron-clad 1950s mom. Engages a variety of primary and secondary sources. Note: This course is part of the following field(s) of study: United States. (Same as: AFRS 1021, HIST 1001)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2019.

A study of Jane Austen’s major works, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. (Same as: ENGL 1012)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2019.

Explores the myriad ways that prostitutes have been represented in modern Western culture from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. By analyzing literary texts, visual artworks, and films from Europe and the United States, examines prostitution as a complex urban phenomenon and a vehicle through which artists and writers grapple with issues of labor, morality, sexuality, and gender roles. Introduces students to a variety of literary, artistic, musical, and filmic genres, as well as to different disciplinary approaches to the study of prostitution. Authors, artists, and film directors may include Baudelaire, Toulouse-Lautrec, Kirchner, Wedekind, Pabst, Marshall, Scorsese, Spielmann, and Sting. (Same as: GER 1027, CINE 1027)

How is queerness central to the creation, reception, and engagement with video games designed with different audiences in mind? How can video games push us to think more queerly about ourselves, other people, the world we live in, and the media we consume? This seminar explores the ideological tensions, issues, and concerns present in video games with LGBTQ+ themes and characters, and even more so, the value of approaching video games from a queer perspective even when they are void of overt LGBTQ+ content. Drawing from discourse in queer studies, gender studies, media studies, and game design, students will consider the value of using queer perspectives to rethink the practices of crafting, playing with, researching, and writing about video games. By crafting assignments such as close reading, theoretical application, and critical review essays, students will develop their academic writing skills while also learning how to engage in broader conversations about queerness, video game studies, and popular culture.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021.

Unhappiness has been pivotal in shaping queer cultural productions and in mobilizing the visibility of queer life in literature and media. In representing the difficulties of coming out, the social ramifications of HIV and AIDS, or the institutional, personal, and systemic violence imposed on queer bodies and communities—queer texts became an archive that rendered queer practices legible through feelings of sadness and despair. This seminar examines contemporary queer literature and media to critically examine the role that sadness plays in this archive, and to think deeply about the role of emotion in representing queer lives and experiences. What is the role of happiness, hope, and joy in an archive so focused on negative emotions and outcomes? How is the concept of happiness reliant on normative attitudes and ideologies, and how do queer texts disrupt this equation by highlighting alternative ways of succeeding, thriving, and existing in the world? How do sad queer texts push us to acknowledge the insufficiency of progress-driven narratives that are circulated today? Through writing, reading, and examining a variety of queer fiction and media, students will develop their own answers to these questions (Same as: ENGL 1008)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022.

What is social justice? What are human rights? Where did they begin and why? How do literature, art, history, and other methods of cultural production in North and South America engage with social justice and human rights discourses? How do different genres of cultural production document social justice, power, and inequity in the Americas? This course explores the concepts of social justice and human rights within the Americas. In this course we will read historical accounts, novels, poems, short stories, and critical race and gender scholarly articles, as well as view visual performances, photographs, and films. Students will learn how struggles of culture, gender, and race work to shape human rights discourse in the Americas, from colonialism to present-day immigration issues. The major goals for this seminar are to improve students’ skills in close reading, critical thinking, communication, and analytical writing and to explore the relationships between the four skills. (Same as: LACL 1045)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022.

Introduces key concepts, questions, and methods that have developed within the interdisciplinary fields of gender, sexuality, and women's studies. Explores how gender norms differ across cultures and change over time. Examines how gender and sexuality are inseparable from other forms of identification--race, class, ability, and nationality. And considers the role that gender, sexuality, and other identity knowledges play in resisting sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2020, Fall 2019.

Dancing is a fundamental human activity, a mode of communication, and a basic force in social life. Investigates dance and movement in the studio and classroom as aesthetic and cultural phenomena. Explores how dance and movement activities reveal information about cultural norms and values and affect perspectives in our own and other societies. Using ethnographic methods, focuses on how dancing maintains and creates conceptions of one’s own body, gender relationships, and personal and community identities. Experiments with dance and movement forms from different cultures and epochs -- for example, the hula, New England contradance, classical Indian dance, Balkan kolos, ballet, contact improvisation, and African American dance forms from swing to hip-hop -- through readings, performances, workshops in the studio, and field work. (Same as: DANC 1102)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022.

Using an intersectional reading approach, students closely analyze both classic and more contemporary lesbigay, trans, and queer fictional texts of the last one hundred years. Students consider the historically and culturally changing ways that sexuality has been understood within popular, medical, as well as religious discourses. And because gender conflict and the tendency to analogize the struggles of sexual and racial minorities are key features of this literary tradition, students are expected to engage this subject matter sensitively and critically. Possible texts include The Well of Loneliness, Giovanni’s Room, Rubyfruit Jungle, A Single Man, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and The Limits of Pleasure. (Same as: ENGL 1111)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022.

In conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of Africana studies at Bowdoin, this course will address debates and issues of Africana studies through the lives of black women. Students will focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reading works by and about Zora Neale Hurston, Pauli Murray, Nina Simone, Josephine Baker, Angela Davis, and Condoleezza Rice. We will take up differences and continuities between these thinkers to understand the politics of respectability, work, representation, sexuality, and family across multiple historical contexts. Though this course continues the themes of AFRS 1109, students need not take Part I to take Part II. (Same as: AFRS 1111, ENGL 1302)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2020.

In conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of Africana studies at Bowdoin, this yearlong, two-part course will address debates and issues of Africana studies through the lives of black women. In Part I, students will focus on early Africana studies texts, reading works by and about Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper. We will take up differences and continuities between these thinkers to understand the politics of respectability, work, representation, sexuality, and family across multiple historical contexts. (Same as: AFRS 1109, ENGL 1301)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2019.

Explores contemporary issues of gender and race. Possible topics include the social construction of race and gender, implicit bias, racial profiling, pornography, the gender wage gap, affirmative action, race and incarceration, transgender issues, and reparations for past harms. Readings drawn from philosophy, legal studies, and the social sciences. (Same as: PHIL 1321)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022.

This course introduces students to major theoretical debates that have shaped the interdisciplinary field of queer studies. Through readings and media that interrogate LGBTQ+ lived experiences, artistic expression, and activism, this class interrogates the many possible connections between our desires, senses of self, and relationship to the world. In doing so, we deconstruct common sense definitions of identity, performance, fantasy, normalcy, kinship and affect. We use core concepts of queer theory to understand and resist social inequality produced by cis-heteronormativity and its intersections with racism, patriarchy, ableism and nationalism. Finally, queer theory helps us ‘think otherwise,’ envisioning alternative sets of social relations and community practices for more just worlds.

Prerequisites: GSWS 1000 - 2969 or GSWS 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020.

Explores the body as a source of knowledge and experience in prose, drama, and poetry of the English Renaissance (c.1500—1650). Topics include the body as an expression of gendered identity and as an object of racial, religious, sexual, and scientific discourse. We also consider the “humoral” theory of the body, the cult of virginity in Elizabethan England, and material practices of marking the body (e.g., tattoos). This writing-intensive seminar culminates in a student-designed research project drawing on readings and materials from Special Collections & Archives. Authors may include William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Aemilia Lanyer, Katharine Philips, John Donne, and Margaret Cavendish. Note: Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for English majors. (Same as: ENGL 2024)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021.

Intermediate Seminar. Parul Sehgal has described Muriel Spark’s genius as a writer “cruelty mixed with camp, the lightness of touch, the flick of the wrist that lands the lash.” Spark herself said that she “loves her characters like a cat loves a bird.” This course will study a variety of modern women writers, whose writing has been variously called “mean,” “cruel,” “indifferent,” “cold.” We will examine a number of genres (including the graphic novel) in a style that is “scrupulously mean,” to borrow from James Joyce’s characterization of his early writing, which has been famously praised for producing the very same effects that are seen as harsh or harmful in women writers of the same era, until today. We will consider both gendered theories of writing along with primary texts; authors may include such writers as Maggie Nelson Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, bell hooks, Muriel Spark, Patricia Highsmith, Elfriede Jelinek, Dorothy Parker, Octavia E. Butler, Cathy Park Hong, and Emil Ferris. (Same as: ENGL 2028)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022.

Intermediate Seminar. Explores how women are represented in eighteenth-century fiction, and the impact of women writers and readers on the development of the novel. Readings may include Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Henry Fielding's Shamela, and Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman, and Jane Austen's Lady Susan and Pride and Prejudice. Note: Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for English majors. (Same as: ENGL 2029)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Examines how the dress women wear and the fashion consumers pursuit reflect social-cultural identities and generate gender politics. Readings and discussions span historical periods, geographical locations, social-cultural groups, and identity categories. From bound feet to the Mao suit, and from qipao to wedding gowns, fashion styles and consumer trends inform a critical understanding of the nation, gender, body, class, and transnational flows. Topics include the intersections between foot-binding and femininity, qipao and the modern woman, the Mao suit and the invisible body, beauty and sexuality, oriental chic and re-oriental spectacle. With visual materials as primary source, and fashion theory the secondary, offers an opportunity to gain knowledge of visual literacy and to enhance analytical skills. (Same as: ASNS 2076)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2020.

This course introduces students to the writings of medieval women, cis and trans—queens and princesses, heretics and saints, scientists and philosophers—who lived in the four centuries between the years 1000 and 1400 CE. We will read their autobiographies, manifestos, secret letters, visions of paradise, love poems, and fairy tales. Although this course focuses on women who wrote in the English language, it also explores the wider world in which these women lived and traveled, from Paris to Timbuktu and Shiraz to Iceland. We will put the medieval texts we read into conversation with the work of contemporary women writers like Michaela Coel, Sally Rooney, and Jia Tolentino. Note: This class fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. (Same as: ENGL 2109)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2021.

An examination of modern European history centered on women’s voices, experiences, perspectives, subjectivity, and agency. Drawing largely on primary sources (including memoirs, letters, art, literature, photography, and film), lectures and discussions will explore how women from across Europe navigated and challenged the gendered norms of their societies to shape unique and diverse identities; examine and acknowledge women’s accomplishments in different spheres of society and culture; and consider the major debates, obstacles, and achievements related to women’s political, economic, and cultural liberation. Lectures will also emphasize ways in which a gendered lens enhances our understanding of European history, including the experience of industrialization, secularization, imperialism, socialism, fascism, and the two world wars. Note: This course is part of the following field(s) of study: Europe. (Same as: HIST 2110)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2020.

Introduces students to the struggle for environmental justice in various cultural arenas, with a focus on gender, race, and their intersections. Through readings, films, lectures, and discussions, the course addresses topics such as migration, resource extraction, and food and climate justice. Provides tools for cross-cultural understanding by examining the dynamic interplay among people, places, and non-human species within multiple regions of the world. Explores concepts such as racial capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism and their relationship to environmental change. Evaluates the potential of different feminist and decolonial approaches to achieve environmental justice. (Same as: ANTH 2155, ENVS 2155)

The history of women’s studies and its transformation into gender studies and feminist theory has always included a tension between creating “woman,” and political and theoretical challenges to that unity. Examines that tension in two dimensions: the development of critical perspectives on gender and power relations both within existing fields of knowledge, and within the continuous evolution of feminist discourse itself.

Prerequisites: GSWS 1000 - 2969 or GSWS 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020, Fall 2019.

How do Renaissance authors represent sexual desires and dilemmas? What strategies do authors use to represent, for instance, drives that have not been codified and labeled according to modern epistemologies? Topics include the inarticulacy of homoeroticism and other forms of attachment as they shape Shakespearean comedy, minor epic, and tragicomic romance, with special attention to the poetics of same-sex desire and the erotics of theatrical performance by boy actors on the London stage. Authors include Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, Thomas Crashaw, and Margaret Cavendish, with secondary readings by Eve Sedgwick, Jonathan Goldberg, and Laurie Shannon, among others. Note: Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for English majors. (Same as: ENGL 2202)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2020.

What are feminisms? Is there more than one feminism? What is the relationship between feminisms and constructions of race, gender and ethnicity in Latin America? How has feminist discourse shaped human rights discourses in the region? This course explores the complex network of feminisms in 20th-21st century Latin America. It covers feminist movements, theories, and scholars/artists from a variety of Latin American countries and regions, including Guatemala, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil. Students will learn how intersections between constructions of race and ethnicity, as well as gender, impact feminisms in the region. Students will also explore how early and more recent contributions of indigenous and women of color, continue impacting ideas, discussions, and recent debates concerning feminisms and women's social mobilizations in Latin America. Note: This course fulfills the GSWS requirement for either Queer Theory or Feminist Theory. (Same as: LACL 2374)

Prerequisites: GSWS 1000 - 2969 or GSWS 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2021.

Seminar. Examines the convergence of politics and spirituality in the musical work of contemporary black women singer-songwriters in the United States. Analyzes material that interrogates and articulates the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality generated across a range of religious and spiritual terrains with African diasporic/black Atlantic spiritual moorings, including Christianity, Islam, and Yoruba. Focuses on material that reveals a womanist (black feminist) perspective by considering the ways resistant identities shape and are shaped by artistic production. Employs an interdisciplinary approach by incorporating ethnomusicology, anthropology, literature, history, and performance and social theory. Explores the work of Shirley Caesar, the Clark Sisters, Meshell Ndegeocello, Abby Lincoln, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Dianne Reeves, among others. (Same as: AFRS 2201, MUS 2291, REL 2201)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2021.

When we perform music on stage, what are we performing? Is it only the “music” or is there something more? When we watch a live musical performance, what are we taking into our bodies? Are we learning lessons about which bodies go with which music or who is allowed on a particular stage and who is “different” in that context? This course investigates lineages of performance practice for what these lineages teach about bodies and genre. For example, how did jazz music created in African American communities and initially replete with women artists in the 1920s turn into a musical community dominated by white middle-class boys and men? We will examine how musical lineages are constructed with particular attention to the history of segregation in post-secondary education in the United States. The course includes a final performance of a musical and/or theatrical nature. Previous music experience is not necessary but is welcomed. (Same as: MUS 2606, AFRS 2606)

Explores categories for interpreting female symbolism in Islamic thought and practice, and women’s religious, legal, and political status in Islam. Attention is given to statements about women in the Qur’an, as well as other traditional and current Islamic texts. Emphasis on analysis of gender in public versus private spheres, individual vs. society, Islamization vs. modernization/Westernization, and the placement/displacement of women in the traditionally male-dominated Islamic power structures. Students may find it helpful to have taken Religion 2208 (Islam), but it is not a prerequisite. (Same as: REL 2209)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2020.

Examines the theoretical and methodological approaches used in the sociological study of sex and sexuality. Explores how people construct meanings around sex, how people use and question notions of sexuality, and why sexuality is socially and politically regulated. Links sexuality to broader sociological questions pertaining to culture and morality, social interaction, social and economic stratification, social movements, urbanization and community, science, health, and public policy. Topics also include the historical and legal construction of heterosexuality, sexual fluidity, gay identity, masculinities and femininities, the queer dilemma, and the “post-gay” phenomenon. (Same as: SOC 2212)

Prerequisites: SOC 1101.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2020.

Introduces students to two giants of Russian literature, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and explores their significance to Russian cultural history and European thought. The course surveys the aesthetic contributions, literary styles, and artistic innovation of both authors through the close reading of their early and mature works. Themes of religion, philosophy, modernity, and art are examined through the complex lens of gender dynamics in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Special emphasis is placed on each novelist’s approach to questions of gender roles, masculinity, femininity, sexuality, prostitution, motherhood, free will, and social and familial duty. Sexual violence, suffering, spirituality, and redemption are further topics of interest. Studied texts include Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground, as well as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, The Cossacks, and “The Kreutzer Sonata,” among others. Class is conducted in English. . (Same as: RUS 2117)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2021.

An introduction to the sociological study of men and masculinities. Investigates debates about the historical, structural, cultural, and personal meanings constructed around masculinity. Explores how masculinity varies historically and across the life span; how it intersects with race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and ability; and how these constructions map onto male and female bodies. Examines how masculinities construct and reproduce power and inequality among men and between men and women. Topics also include, but are not limited to, the production and maintenance of masculinity, the male body, masculine cultures of sports, technology, violence and incarceration, female and queer masculinities. (Same as: SOC 2219)

Prerequisites: SOC 1101 or GSWS 1101 or GWS 1101.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2021.

Focuses on the processes of population change—fertility/reproduction, mortality/death, and migration—with attention to the causes of and consequences of those changes. Also examines the politics around population change, discourse, and policies, and the ways those have been connected to global inequality, gender inequalities, and race and ethnicity. (Same as: SOC 2222, ENVS 2332)

Prerequisites: SOC 1101 or GSWS 1000 - 2969 or GSWS 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020.

How can queer frameworks push us to develop more complex understandings of young people and their roles in culture and society? How do children’s picture books, young adult novels, youth television, and video games reinforce or disrupt normative understandings of youth, sexuality, queerness, and growth? Explores the connections between queer and critical youth studies and applies them toward the examination of youth literature and media with LGBTQ+ characters and themes. Examines how queer youths are imagined and constructed in different texts and media, and how are these texts can reconfigure—and potentially challenge—simplistic understandings of children, teens, and their cultures. Through critical, intersectional engagement with fictional works crafted for younger audiences and scholarship in queer youth studies, students will challenge ideas used to conceptualize Western understandings of childhood and adolescence, such as innocence, knowledge, growth, and experience.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021.

Investigates the ways in which gender and sexuality can serve as interpretive lenses for the study of early Christian history, ideas, and practices. Can the history of early Christianity--from the apostle Paul to Augustine of Hippo--be rewritten as a history of gender and sexuality? In answer to that question, addresses a range of topics, including prophecy, sainthood, militarism, mysticism, asceticism, and martyrdom. In addition, by oscillating between close readings and contemporary scholarship about gender, feminism, masculinity, sexuality, and the body, looks beyond the world of antiquity. Aims to show how theories of and about sexuality and gender can fundamentally reorient understandings of Christian history. (Same as: REL 2235)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2020.

From possessing spirits and serpentine creatures to hungry ghosts and spectral visions, Japanese literary history is alive with supernatural beings. Our study will range from the earliest times to modernity, examining these motifs in both historical and theoretical contexts. The readings will pose the following broad questions: How do representations of the supernatural function differently in myths of the ancient past and narratives of the modern nation? Are monstrous figures cast as miscreants, or do these transgressive figures challenge societal orthodoxy? How do Buddhist ideas influence the construction of demonic female sexuality in medieval Japan, and how is this motif redrawn in modern Japan? How are sociopolitical anxieties articulated in horror films like Godzilla? This course will draw on various genres of representation, from legends and novels to art and cinema. Students will gain an understanding of the cultural history of the monstrous in Japan and develop a broad appreciation of the hold that these creatures from the “other” side maintain over our cultural and social imagination. (Same as: ASNS 2270)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2020.

Focuses on family, gender, and sexuality as windows onto political, economic, social, and cultural issues in Latin America. Topics include indigenous and natural gender ideologies, marriage, race, and class; machismo and masculinity; state and domestic violence; religion and reproductive control; compulsory heterosexuality; AIDS; and cross-cultural conceptions of homosexuality. Takes a comparative perspective and draws on a wide array of sources including ethnography, film, fiction, and historical narrative. (Same as: ANTH 2737, LACL 2737)

Prerequisites: ANTH 1100 or ANTH 1101 or SOC 1101.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2019.

Examines the rise of and reactions to radical literature in the wake of the French Revolution. Focuses on such topics as extravagant lyricism, anarchism, non-violent revolution, and the critique of marriage, family, male privilege, and patriarchal religious belief, as well as the defense of tradition and the depiction of revolution as monstrosity. Discusses radical rewritings of classical myth, the uses of fiction for political critique, and the intersections between sharp historical change and the emergence of the Gothic. Authors may include Burke, Blake, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley. (Same as: ENGL 2350)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020.

The truism that the women of classical antiquity are silent plays out all too literally in the historical record: the women of ancient Greece and Rome have left only scarce and fragmentary remains of texts in their own voices. This erasure has provoked a remarkable response in contemporary literature, as writers have taken up the challenge to restore the missing voices of ancient women. In this course, several recent works of fiction will be read against their ancient models in epic and drama, and the cultural and political forces influencing both ancient and modern texts will be examined. Readings may include Madeline Miller, Circe; Margaret Atwood, Penelopiad; Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls; Colm Toibin, House of Names; Christa Wolf, Medea; and Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy; other readings may be included to reflect student interest. All readings are in English, and no prior familiarity with classical antiquity is required. (Same as: CLAS 2243)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Care shapes the relationships of children, adults, and elders within families, but care also extends far beyond the boundaries of households, incorporating domestic workers, medical professionals, missionaries, volunteers, NGOs, and governments. This course explores care as a form of intimate labor and an array of social practices that are embedded in local cultural contexts and shaped by global political economic relationships. Gender, race and ethnicity, class, nationality, (dis)ability, and age shape the configurations of caring by and caring for others. Incorporates attention to feminist, decolonial, and poststructuralist theories of power as operating on bodies, selves, and intimate relationships. Course texts include ethnographies, scholarly articles, and other materials. Draws on a wide array of contemporary contexts around the world for ethnographic case studies and challenges students to critically reflect on hierarchies of care in their own lives. (Same as: ANTH 2246)

Prerequisites: ANTH 1000 - 2969 or ANTH 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2020.

Examines the cruxes of the “modern,” and the term’s shift into a conceptual category rather than a temporal designation. Although not confined to a particular national or generic rubric, takes British and transatlantic works as a focus and includes fiction, poetry and visual art. Organized by movements or critical formations of the modern, i.e., modernisms, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, cultural critique, transnationalism. Readings of critical literature in conjunction with primary texts. Authors/directors/artists may include T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Langston Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, Roberto Bolaño, Man Ray, Stanley Kubrick. (Same as: ENGL 2451)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2020.

Examines the social, economic, and cultural history of American families —across socio-economic classes, and among multiple racial, ethnic, and cultural groups—from 1600 to 1900, and the continuities, changes, and variations in the relationships between families and their kinship networks, communities, and the larger society. Topics include gender relationships; racial, ethnic, cultural, and class variations in family and community ideals, structures, and functions; the purpose and expectations of marriage; philosophies of child-rearing; organization of work and leisure time; and the effects of slavery and racial discrimination, industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and social and geographic mobility on patterns of family life and community organization. This course is part of the following field(s) of study: United States. (Same as: HIST 2128)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020.

A social history of American women from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. Examines women’s changing roles in both public and private spheres; the circumstances of women’s lives as these were shaped by class, ethnic, and racial differences; the recurring conflict between the ideals of womanhood and the realities of women’s experience; and focuses on family responsibilities, paid and unpaid work, religion, education, reform, women’s rights, and feminism. Note:This course is part of the following field(s) of study: United States. (Same as: HIST 2126)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2021.

Intermediate seminar. Close readings of literary and filmic texts that interrogate widespread beliefs in the fixity of racial categories and the broad assumptions these beliefs often engender. Investigates whiteness and blackness as unstable and fractured ideological constructs that become most visible in narratives of racial passing. These are constructs that, while socially and historically produced, are no less real in their tangible effects, whether internal or external. May include works by Nella Larsen, Norman Mailer, John Howard Griffin, Mat Johnson, Toi Derricotte, and Mohsin Hamid. Beginning with the Class of 2025, this class will fulfill the African American, Asian American, Indigenous, Latinx, multiethnic American, or global literature requirement for English majors. (Same as: ENGL 2004, AFRS 2654)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

This course will provide an introduction to the history of women as creators, subjects, and audiences of art in Western Europe and the United States from the Renaissance to the present. How do we (can we?) tell the stories of the forgotten people and identities of the past? What archives and artifacts are available, and how do we account for the gaps? How do we think historically about the variable categories of gender and sexuality? As we grapple with these questions, we will explore a wide range of methods and approaches to visual art that focus on questions of gender and sexuality in an intersectional context, and identify key concepts such as “bodies,” “ideologies,” and “identities.” No previous work in art history required. (Same as: ARTH 2560,GER 2251)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020.

In 1845, Frederick Douglass told his white readers: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” This simple statement effectively describes the enduring paradox of African American male identity: although black and white males share a genital sameness, until the nation elected its first African American president the former has inhabited a culturally subjugated gender identity in a society premised on both white supremacy and patriarchy. But Douglass’s statement also suggests that black maleness is a discursive construction, i.e. that it changes over time. If this is so, how does it change? What are the modes of its production and how have black men over time operated as agents in reshaping their own masculinities? Reading a range of literary and cultural texts, both past and present, students examine the myriad ramifications of, and creative responses to, this ongoing challenge. Beginning with the Class of 2025, this class will fulfill the African American, Asian American, Indigenous, Latinx, multiethnic American, or global literature requirement for English majors. (Same as: ENGL 2650, AFRS 2650)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021.

How do we spend money, and why? Examines the relationship between gender and consumer culture over the course of the twentieth century. Explores women’s and men’s relationships to consumer culture in a variety of contexts: the heterosexual household, the bachelor pad, the gay-friendly urban cafeteria, the advertising agency, and the department store. Also explores the ways in which Hollywood films, from the 1930s to the present, have both furthered and complicated gendered notions about the consumption of goods. (Same as: CINE 2261)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2020.

Examines the ways religion, race, and gender shape people’s lives from the nineteenth century into contemporary times in America, with particular focus on black communities. Explores issues of self-representation, memory, material culture, embodiment, and civic and political engagement through autobiographical, historical, literary, anthropological, cinematic, and musical texts. (Same as: AFRS 2271, REL 2271)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2021.

This course explores U.S. film history by surveying the contributions of women directors, actresses, and behind-the-scenes workers from the silent era to the 1990s. The course investigates a range of questions: What types of work have women performed? How have political, cultural, and industrial factors shaped opportunities available to women? How have women produced and experienced racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities on screen and in the workplace? How has difference affected opportunities available to women and the stories that get to be told? Are there distinctive stylistic or narrative preoccupations that characterize made by women? What does it mean to practice feminist filmmaking, criticism, and history? How might highlighting the experiences of women in the film world empower us to rewrite dominant film histories? To address these questions, the course surveys a range of feature films, documentaries, and experimental works created by both the renowned and the unsung. (Same as: CINE 2272)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Concentrating in large part on the classical Hollywood period, we will explore films that center on women's experiences and that are (or seem to be) intended for a female audience. We will examine the genres of melodrama, film noir, gothic, and comedy in relation to the performance of female identity; representations of gender, class, race, and sexuality; and theories of spectatorial identification. The last part of the class will consider ways in which contemporary women’s films draw on and reconfigure the themes brought up by earlier narratives. Directors might include Arzner, Cukor, Haynes, Hitchcock, Mankiewicz, Varda, and Vidor. (Same as: CINE 2270)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2021.

Uses historical and contemporary case studies to explore the intersections of sexuality, gender, class, and race in the lives and labors of people African descent. Addresses how the construction of Black identity has been informed by understandings and expressions of transness, masculinity, femininity, and queerness. Examines how Black people mobilize and practice sex and gender to create community, mutual aid, leisure, joy, sexual agency, self-expression, and political struggle. Analyzes the topic through the interdisciplinary study of film, music, art, literature, historical and sociological scholarship, queer-of-color critique, critical race theory, and Black feminist thought. (Same as: AFRS 2655)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Violence and interracial sex have long been conjoined in U.S. literary, televisual, and filmic work. The enduring nature of this conjoining suggests there is some symbolic logic at work in these narratives, such that black/white intimacy functions as a figural stand-in for negative (and sometimes positive) commentary on black/white social conflict. When this happens, what becomes of “sex” as a historically changing phenomenon when it is yoked to the historically unchanging phenomenon of the “interracial”? Although counter-narratives have recently emerged to compete with such symbolic portrayals, i.e. romance novels, popular films and television shows, not all of these works have displaced this earlier figural logic; in some cases, this logic has merely been updated. Explores the broader cultural implications of both types of narratives. Possible authors/texts: Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, Lillian Smith, Jack Kerouac, Frantz Fanon, Kara Walker, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, John R. Gordon, Kim McLarin, Monster’s Ball, Far From Heaven, and Sex and the City. Note: beginning with the Class of 2025, this class will fulfill the African American, Asian American, Indigenous, Latinx, and multiethnic American or global literature requirement for English majors. (Same as: ENGL 2653, AFRS 2653)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2019.

Provides a historical perspective on how gender and power have intertwined in the diverse religious traditions of India. Explores ideas about femininities, masculinities, and genderqueer identities in religious texts and premodern religious communities, analyzing the influence of monastic ideals, economic patronage, and gendered notions of divine authority. Readings examine mythology, rituals, and ideas about gender and social power in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Muslim traditions; including gender roles in family and culture; transgender identity and religion; and, in the latter part of the course, the impacts of colonialism, nationalist politics, and migration on gender and religion. (Same as: REL 2280, ASNS 2740)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020.

Russian culture is rich with depictions of the fundamental human experiences of love, sex, and desire. And while these depictions have often been subject to various forms of censorship, they have just as often served as expressions of dissent against rigid social, political, and artistic norms. This course explores the ideological and aesthetic significance of such themes as romance, lust, yearning, sexual violence, adultery, prostitution, religious passion, poetic inspiration, unrequited love, celibacy, gender identity, sexuality, masturbation, pornography, body image, sexual frustration, castration, and witchcraft in Russian literature and the arts from medieval times to the present day. Not only do the works studied inscribe “difference” on the bodies of their subjects, but Russia also functions as a social “other” against which students examine their own cultural assumptions. Authors may include Avvakum, Bulgakov, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Nabokov, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tsvetaeva, Turgenev, and Zamyatin. Taught in English. (Same as: RUS 2315)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2019.

How does the figure of the teen mobilize different ideologies of gender, sexuality, and queerness in various genres of film? How do contemporary sociocultural circumstances affect the creation, reception, and interpretation of teen films produced throughout the decades? In this course, students will examine how different films frame, approach, and at times misrepresent adolescent experience. Students will explore how understandings of adolescence, gender, and sexuality have shifted over the decades, how teen sexuality is visually aestheticized, and how representations of gender and teen sexuality are inflected by other domains of identity such as race and class. In addition to learning how to “close read” these films, taking notions such as editing, sound, form, and style into consideration, students will explore and apply queer and feminist frameworks to unlock innovative and politically viable ways of critiquing these so-called vapid and uncritical cultural productions. Attendance at weekly evening screenings is mandatory. (Same as: CINE 2141)

Prerequisites: GSWS 1000 - 2969 or GSWS 3000 or higher or CINE 1000 - 2969 or CINE 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2020.

This course examines how hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality structure everyday life in Latin America's largest nation, Brazil. Twentieth century elites described Brazil as a racial democracy and a sexual paradise, but this vision is increasingly contested in the twenty-first century by Black, feminist, and LGBT social movements. Reading ethnographic accounts and watching film portrayals of daily life in Brazil across a number of case studies, we will examine how Brazilians encounter social inequality in a variety of intimate settings. Potential topics include: domestic labor, sex work, queer activism, plastic surgery and reproductive rights. Students will complete short response papers during the semester and complete a final research project on a self-selected topic that includes primary or secondary sources on Brazil. (Same as: ANTH 2345, LACL 2345)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2021, Fall 2020.

Examines the genre of the horror film in a range of cultural, theoretical, and literary contexts. Considers the ways in which horror films represent violence, fear, and paranoia; their creation of identity categories; their intersection with contemporary politics; and their participation in such major literary and cinematic genres as the gothic, comedy, and family drama. Texts may include works by Craven, Cronenberg, De Palma, Freud, Hitchcock, Kristeva, Kubrick, Poe, Romero, and Shelley. Note: Fulfills the film theory requirement for Cinema Studies minors. (Same as: ENGL 2426, CINE 2426)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2019.

An introduction to Latin American history between 1400 and the present, using the lens of gender to reinterpret the region's history. Some key events include the arrival of Europeans, mestizaje, honor and race, independence, civil wars, liberalism, populism, dictatorship, and issues of memory and redemocratization. This course works on two registers. The first is that of “women’s history.” Here, we will survey the experiences and impact of women in Latin America from the pre-conquest period to the present, through the lenses of cultural, social, and political history. In other words, we will tell the stories of Latin American women and investigate how changes small and large affected their everyday lives. The second register is “gender history.” In other words, we will not just discuss women’s experiences, but also the ways that gender ideologies have influenced Latin American history. Note: This course is part of the following field(s) of study: Latin America. It fulfills the non euro/us requirement for history majors and minors. (Same as: HIST 2430, LACL 2420)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2020.

Seminar. Uses major scandals and cults of celebrity to illuminate the cultural history of early modern Europe. Questions include: What behaviors were acceptable in private but inexcusable in public? Why are people fascinated by scandals and celebrities, and how have those categories evolved over time? How have the politics of personal reputation changed with the rise of new media and new political cultures? Topics include gossip, urban spaces, gender, sex, crime, and religion. Uses a variety of materials, such as cartoons, newspaper articles, trial transcripts, memoirs, and novels, to explore the many meanings of scandal in early modern Europe, especially France and England. Note: This course is part of the following field(s) of study: Europe. It also fulfills the pre-modern requirement for history majors and minors. (Same as: HIST 2540)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Fall 2020.

This course considers the storied nature of ideas about Ireland through the consideration of a variety of Irish artists. Part of the aim of the course is to register the changes in the ways Irish letters have been reimagined by writers and critics in the last fifty years. In this iteration, we will be focusing on Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre, which includes prose, drama (famously and notoriously, Waiting for Godot), essays, radio, and film (e.g., Film with Buster Keaton in 1964). He has been designated a modernist, a postmodernist and not Irish at all, having lived in France for most of his writing life: “exile was a condition of Being.” Beckett’s reach has been enormous: his work has been the subject of numerous critical thinkers in the last century, including Theodor Adorno and Jacques Lacan, whom we will read. We will look at his Irish contemporaries, including James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, Edna O’Brien, and his outside impact on others, e.g., J.M. Coetzee, Maggie Nelson, and painters such as Jasper Johns. (Same as: ENGL 2453, THTR 2869)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021.

An abiding description of the dramatically carnivalesque Circe chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses is as the “unconscious” of the novel. This is provocative in a number of ways, not least of which is through its suggestion that the novel, rather than a character or narrator per se, has a mind, which can both think and suppress thought. Such an idea represents a turn on the classic modernist technique of “stream of consciousness” or the postmodern concept of “metafiction.” Another staple comment about Joyce’s novel suggests that the novel reads its readers, as well as, or better than, the other way around. This course will examine these ideas of novelistic knowingness through several modern and contemporary novels, drawing on a variety of narrative theories, cognitive and affect theories, and psychoanalysis. Possible authors include Ian McEwen, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, J.M Coetzee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Muriel Spark, Roberto Bolaño, Franco Moretti, and Roland Barthes. (Same as: ENGL 2454)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Dance—an art form whose medium is the body—and ethnography—the study of people and their cultures—are great tools for addressing some of the ways different dancing bodies have been historically policed for “dancing sex(y).” Other tools, such as critical dance and black theories, in addition to queer and feminist approaches, will also be utilized to comprehend the uneven ways these bodies are further racialized, sexualized, and gendered within the Americas. In particular, students will learn about various dances (such as the Brazilian samba to the Cuban rumba, Jamaican Dancehall, and the Trinidadian wine) through readings, lectures, and actual in-studio dancing. Ultimately, the intention here is to understand dancing as both a meaning-making activity and a way of understanding the world. In turn, it is an important lens for critically thinking, talking, researching, and writing about politics of identity (especially regarding nationality, gender, race, and sexuality). (Same as: DANC 2505, AFRS 2292, LACL 2392)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2021.

Examines how ideas of wildness and wilderness have been used to generate different gender and sexual identities and politics through literature and other cultural forms in the United States. Considers wilderness and wildness in relation to rugged individualism; transgressive sexualities; representations of health, disease, and disability; the extension of and resistance to state control of the body; and the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Students will learn how the idea of wilderness has been associated with and adopted by different bodies and identities over time, from the early European colonists’ first encounter with Indigenous peoples and the American continent to the twenty-first century, which scientists have characterized as the era of the sixth mass extinction. Readings include canonical works of wilderness writing and lesser-known texts, including queer pastorals, feminist travelogues, and HIV/AIDS memoirs. (Same as: ENGL 2548, ENVS 2548)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2020.

Analyzes some of the most enduring, and in some cases infamous, lesbigay and transgendered cultural texts of the twentieth century. Whether authored by avowed LGBT authors of by non-LGBT cultural producers, such works reflect some of the specific challenges that U.S. and European writers and others have continued to face in depicting portrayals of same-sex identities and desires that seek to reject totalizing narratives of pathology and criminalization. Possible texts include: The Well of Loneliness, Death in Venice, Giovanni's Room, The Boys in the Band, The Front Runner, Stone Butch Blues, Hitchcock's Rope, The Children's Hour, Will and Grace, and Six Feet Under. (Same as: ENGL 2554)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2020.

Intermediate seminar. This course examines past and present social movements through the lens of global Black feminist writing and media. By reading and engaging key texts of activist groups and leaders (such as the Combahee River Collective, The Black Panther Party, and the Movement for Black Lives), students will learn about the principles, philosophies, and organizing praxis of Black feminist activists. (Same as: AFRS 2566, ANTH 2566)

Seminar. Examines women’s voices in America from 1650 to the early twenty-first century, as these were written and saved in private letters, journals, and autobiographies; poetry, short stories, and novels; essays, addresses, prescriptive literature, and journalism. In celebration of 50 years of Women at Bowdoin, the course will culminate with an examination of women’s voices at Bowdoin, using the "Forty Years: The History of Women at Bowdoin" website as both a source and a guide to further readings. Articles and monographs from the secondary literature provide a historical framework for examining women’s writings. Research projects focus on the form and content of women’s writing and the ways that these accounts illuminate women’s understandings, reactions, and responses to their historical situation. Note: This course is part of the following field(s) of study: United States. (Same as: HIST 2609)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2020.

Intermediate seminar. Explores the way in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific uses of the photograph (e.g., by scientism, eugenics) to configure sexuality and gender were adjusted by modern visual arts and literary photographs. We will consider a variety of early scientific studies, contemporary theories of sexuality and biopolitics (Foucault), and of photography (Benjamin, Barthes, Sontag ); photographs by Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Gordon Parks (with Ralph Ellison), Catherine Opie; film by Michelangelo Antonioni (“Blow-up”); prose works by Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald, Claudia Rankine. (Same as: ENGL 2011)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020.

Seminar. Examines sexual politics of the law, policing, public health, and state surveillance as they intersect with race, gender, class and disability. Explores feminist and queer responses to the relationship between sex and power from a variety of disciplines and traditions. Focuses on two major trends in the regulation of sex in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: (1) how policy making has shifted from defining sexual morality to managing populations, and (2) the reinvigorated politics of the family as governments scale back their social welfare programs. Additional topics may include reproductive rights, sex work, marriage, hate crimes, surveillance, militarism, and prisons. Students learn main trends in the politics of sexuality and conduct guided research on the topic of their choice. (Same as: ANTH 2610)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022.

How does the concept of queerness signify in cultural texts that are ostensibly about the struggle for racial equality? And vice versa, how does the concept of racialization signify in cultural texts that are ostensibly about the struggle for LGBT recognition and justice? While some of this work tends to reduce queer to traditional sexual minorities like lesbigay and trans folk while downplaying racial considerations, others tend to limit the category race to people of color like blacks while downplaying questions about sexuality. Such critical and creative gestures often place queer and race in opposition rather than as intersecting phenomena. Students examine the theoretical and cultural assumptions of such gestures, and their implications, through close readings of selected works in both the LGBT and African American literary traditions. Beginning with the Class of 2025, this class will fulfill the African American, Asian American, Indigenous, Latinx, multiethnic American, or global literature requirement for English majors. (Same as: ENGL 2651, AFRS 2651)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Intermediate seminar. Investigates constructions of sexuality in English romantic writing, especially tales of seduction by supernatural or demonic figures; the sexualized world of the Gothic; the Byronic hero; lyrical depictions of incest; the yearning for an eroticized muse or goddess; and same-sex desire in travel writing, diaries, and realist fiction. Discusses the place of such writing in the history of normative and non-normative sexual identities, repression, the unconscious, and the sublime. Authors may include Burke, Lewis, Mary Shelley, Byron, Wollstonecraft, Lister, Austen, Coleridge, and Keats, with further readings in queer theory and the history of sexuality. (Same as: ENGL 2014)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021.

Seminar. America is an urban nation today, yet Americans have had deeply ambivalent feelings toward the city over time. Explores the historical origins of that ambivalence by tracing several overarching themes in American urban history from the seventeenth century to the present. Topics include race and class relations, labor, design and planning, gender and sexual identity, immigration, politics and policy, scientific and technological systems, violence and crime, religion and sectarian disputes, and environmental protection. Discussions revolve around these broad themes, as well as regional distinctions between American cities. Students are required to write several short papers and one longer paper based upon primary and secondary sources. Note:This course is part of the following field(s) of study: United States. (Same as: HIST 2660, URBS 2660)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

The era of industrial chemistry, beginning in the late nineteenth century, has altered sexuality and gender expression in profound ways. Pharmaceutics now promise consumers better sex lives, manageable reproductive health, and a fuller range of gender expression. But they also entrench some of the most intimate aspects of modern life deeper into market logics and biomedicine. In this class, we draw on social studies of science, technology, and medicine as well as from feminist and queer studies. We read and discuss ethnographic and qualitative case studies on contraceptive access, gender affirming therapies, and recreational drug use. Students are invited to consider the material from empirical perspectives (what can chemicals permit bodies to do?) and political perspectives (what separates ‘medicines’ and ‘patients’ from ‘drugs’ and ‘criminals’?). Coursework includes mid-length reflection papers and an archival research project using the College’s digital collections.

Prerequisites: GSWS 1000 - 2969 or GSWS 3000 - 3300.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Explores contemporary debates on gender and sexuality in Islam. Begins with an examination of gender and sexuality in the Quran to understand how these ideas have been taken up in the past and present to produce and maintain gender hierarchies. At the same time, it also centers contemporary challenges posed to these hierarchies. To do so, we pay particular attention to Muslim women’s activism by centering ethnographic studies from Muslim-majority as well as diasporic contexts. A major thrust of the course is studying the lifeworlds of Shia Muslim women (a minority interpretive community within Islam). Seminar-style course.

Prerequisites: GSWS 1000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020, Spring 2020.

This seminar examines representations of queer Latinx identities and experiences through intersectional and interdisciplinary lenses, focusing on texts crafted by US-based Latinx authors. Students develop an understanding of the aesthetic and ideological elements that inform the narrativization of queer Latinx experience and the tensions that arise through the intersection of sexuality, gender, race, and ethnicity in a variety of texts and genres. In addition to highlighting the value of reading literature written by authors who belong to the marginalized groups that they write about, this course is meant to disrupt monolithic and homogenizing understandings of what it means to be queer and Latinx. Potential topics include futurism, la familia, borderlands, machismo and patriarchy, the coming-out narrative, and memory. This course satisfies the African American, Asian American, Indigenous, Latinx, Multiethnic American, or global literature requirement for English majors. (Same as: ENGL 2904, LACL 2304)

Prerequisites: GSWS 1000 - 2969 or GSWS 3000 or higher or ENGL 1000 - 2969 or ENGL 3000 (same as GSWS 3000) or higher.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022.

What is the relationship between activism and human rights in Latin America? How have the battling constructions of race, gender, and ethnicity sparked social justice movements in the region? This course offers a general introduction to the development of contemporary discourses and activism on human rights in Latin America. It covers activist and justice movements in a variety of Latin American countries and regions including Brazil, Guatemala, the Southern Cone, and Mexico. Students will analyze how cultural production, in the form of film, literature, testimony, and art, by Afro-Latinx and indigenous subjects, women, and members of the LQBTQI+ community led to the “making,” of human rights in the region. As an IRBW course, students in this course will also develop and practice their critical writing and research skills throughout the semester with plenty of research development writing workshops, one-on-one writing mentoring, and feedback. (IRBW) (Same as: LACL 2375)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021.

This course engages in an academic study of the gender, religion, and politics in Pakistan to deepen students’ understanding of the world’s sixth-most populous country. We begin with accounts of the British colonization of South Asia and the nationalist movements that led to the creation of Pakistan. We then consider the myriad issues the nation has faced since 1947, focusing in particular on the debates surrounding sovereignty, gender and Islam. In addition to historical and ethnographic accounts, the course will center a number of primary texts (with English translations) including political autobiographies, novels, and terrorist propaganda materials. (Same as: ASNS 2611)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2021.

What motivates political battles over sexuality and gender? Often described as disputes over culture, morality, family, or lifestyle, these struggles more often have to do with concerns over national belonging, distributions of care labor, and enforcement of race, class, and gender norms. In this course, we first learn about feminist and queer frameworks for studying gender and sexuality politics: culture wars, backlashes, and moral panics. We draw on case studies that outline the histories of anti-reproductive and anti-LGBT movements in Brazil and in the United States. And we will consider the social dynamics of recent “anti-gender” movements in Latin America. Over the semester, students will research a particular case study of a culture war, backlash, or moral panic, where they use journalist and NGO reporting, and write a term paper that applies the frameworks learned in class. (Same as: LACL 2347)

Prerequisites: GSWS 1101 or ANTH 1101 or SOC 1101.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021.

This course explores the range of issues inspiring Latinx activism and its diverse expressions across the United States from the turn of the 20th century to the present. It introduces students to the intellectual traditions and analytical approaches that inform both Latinx and Afro-Latinx activism in the US During the course of the semester students will ‘travel’ to U.S. cities (and regions) such as San Antonio and the Texas Borderlands, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Chicago, and the Central Valley in California. As we ‘travel’ to these locations, we will explore diverse expressions of Latinx activism, including labor activism, cultural activism, political activism surrounding citizenship rights, and the struggles for gender and sexuality rights. Students will also learn about the many similarities and differences among Latinx communities in the United States, including Afo-Latinx communities, specifically Afro-Cuban in Miami, and Afro-Puerto Ricans and Afro-Domincans in New York. We will explore how these communities have used and continue to use activist practices ranging from labor strikes to literary texts, to gain visibility and negotiate their rights within the country. This course will also draw connections between Latinx and Afro-Latinx and other activist movements in the US, from civil rights to labor rights and the formation of worker’s unions. Drawing from various disciplines including history, law, literature, sociology, and cultural studies, students will explore how Latinx activism has shaped understandings of race and inclusion, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the United States. (Same as: LACL 2421, AFRS 2721)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022.

Rage is a political act. Feminists have turned to rage politics to fight against gender violence, misogyny, and institutionalized patriarchy for decades. This seminar explores when, why, and how women-identifying subjects in the Americas organize collectively to challenge political, economic, and social injustice. During the semester, students will learn how decolonialism, civil rights and labor movements in the United States, the rise and fall of dictatorships in Latin America, and hemispheric neoliberalism continues impacting contemporary feminist cultural production and activism in the hemisphere. By exploring contemporary women-led activist movements, a wide range of contemporary feminist artistic practices, and contemporary feminist literature and film, this course asks students to consider the relationships between feminism and political activism, rage as a political act, and cultural production as a method of healing and revising history. Students who have taken this course at the 3000-level (LAS 3900 / GSWS 3900) are not eligible to take this course.

There is no dearth of stories regarding the dangers of women and sexuality for Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Nath yogis and ascetics. Texts after texts written on ancient, classical, and early modern Asian monasticism point to the evil of women and the dangers they pose to those attempting to live monastic lives. Women, however, have historically been and continue to be involved in these religious traditions. This class will examine the highly gendered worldview found within South and Southeast Asian yogic and monastic texts. Primarily reading Hindu, Nath yogi, Jain, and Buddhist canonical teachings, the class will discuss the manner in which women have historically been viewed within these religious traditions. It will then shift to look at the manner in which women have been and continue to take part in these communities in their everyday life. Through the use of both academic readings and multimedia texts, the class will examine how women navigate their roles within these male-dominated communities, their reasons for joining these communities, and the differences that exist for women within the different monastic and yogic communities. (Same as: ASNS 2745, REL 2745)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2020.

Video games share a complicated history with oppressive forces such as hypermasculinity, violence, misogyny, and homophobia—one that often overshadows the queer, playful, and radical legacy associated with video game design, play, and culture. Video games present us with opportunities to think beyond the injustices prevalent in our current moment and to recognize how interactive digital play can disrupt normative thinking and practices. Drawing from video game studies and queer frameworks, we will rethink the history of video games through a gendered lens and examine games overtly focused on queer lives and practices. We will also think more broadly about how all video games function as an interactive archive that disrupts normative conceptions of gender, sexuality, kinship, identity, space, time, and the body. Some familiarity with video game play is recommended for this course and assignments will involve podcast recording, video recording, and basic video game programing.

Prerequisites: GSWS 1000 - 2969 or GSWS 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Examines the major postwar writings of the controversial African American author and the role his fiction and nonfiction played in challenging that era’s static understandings of racial, gender, and sexual politics. Although Baldwin lived abroad for much of his life, many critics associate the author narrowly with the United States black civil rights and sexual liberation struggles. In recent years, however, Baldwin has increasingly been recognized as a transnational figure and for his invaluable contributions to the discourse of globalization. Indeed, Baldwin’s “geographical imagination,” one informed by critical racial literacy, led him to anticipate many of the central insights of contemporary Queer Studies, Whiteness Studies, as well as Africana philosophical thought. Note: Beginning with the Class of 2025, this class will fulfill the African American, Asian American, Indigenous, Latinx, multiethnic American, or global literature requirement for English majors. (Same as: ENGL 3015, AFRS 3015)

Prerequisites: ENGL 2000 - 2969 or AFRS 2000 - 2969 or GLS 2000 - 2969 or GSWS 2000 - 2969.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022.

Advanced seminar on African women’s studies and peace studies. Given their various stakes, women in African societies have always been peacemakers. In exploring these stakes, this seminar focuses on the lives and writings of six African women intellectuals (Yvonne Vera, Bessie Head, Mariama Bâ, Wangari Maathai, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Leymah Gbowee), three of whom have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Students will investigate how these women and the stories they tell reconceptualize feminism and peaceful interactions among themselves and others (women, men, and the environment) in order to bring about individual transformation. By perceptively reading challenging texts, engaging in probing class discussions, keeping a weekly written “Peace Journal,” and working collaboratively on a final group research with oral presentation, students will gain experiential insight into ideals and realities of the African women to reimagine feminism, peace, and relationships amid violence. (Same as: AFRS 3210)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2021.

In her memoir, In the Dream House, author Carmen Maria Machado defines the female gothic as consisting of "woman plus habitation." In this class, we will examine literary and cinematic texts that represent the endangerments faced by women in architectural and social spaces. We will explore the affects of fear and paranoia and their relationship to domesticity, as well as the ways in which more recent modes of the gothic have shifted their concerns to intersectional identities. Authors and directors may include Ari Aster, Alfred Hitchcock, Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, Jordan Peele, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Fulfills the advanced seminar requirement for English majors and Cinema Studies minors and the theory requirement for Cinema Studies minors. (Same as: ENGL 3037, CINE 3037)

Prerequisites: ENGL 1000 - 2969 or ENGL 3000 (same as GSWS 3000) or higher or CINE 1000 - 2969 or CINE 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022.

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. The call for political change implicit in the title of Audre Lorde’s iconic essay put at stake something more profound than the result of change itself: that radical critique is only possible through tools unfamiliar to the master. As a Black lesbian woman, Lorde denounced white feminism for being complicit with patriarchy by not acknowledging marginal women’s experiences as a source of strength and creativity. Inspired by the title and impetus of Lorde’s essay, this course seeks to ask what happens when we start seeing the world through unfamiliar, alternative, tools or sensibilities? The main objective of this course is to expose us to alternative sensibilities and ways of thinking offered by voices that experience gender and sexuality beyond Western norms and counter-norms. Topics may include: Gender and colonial legacies, global feminisms, imperialism and LGBTQ activism, freedom and agency from a comparative perspective, intersectionality, and queer of color critique. (Same as: GOV 3605)

Employs gender as a theoretical tool to investigate the production, consumption, and representation of popular music in the United States and around the world. Examines how gender and racial codes have been used historically, for example to describe music as “authentic” (rap, rock) or “commercial” (pop, new wave), and at how these codes may have traveled, changed, or re-appeared in new guises over the decades. Considers how gender and sexuality are inscribed at every level of popular music as well as how music-makers and consumers have manipulated these representations to transgress normative codes and open up new spaces in popular culture for a range of sexual and gender expressions. Juniors and seniors only; sophomores admitted with consent of the instructor during the add/drop period. (Same as: MUS 3103)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

History has retained the names of great male Caribbean heroes and freedom fighters during slavery such as the Haitians, Mackandal or Toussaint Louverture, the Jamaican, Cudjoe or the Cuban Coba. Enslaved Africans who rebelled against oppression and fled from the plantation system are called maroons and their act, marronage. Except for Queen Nanny of the Jamaican Blue Mountains, only male names have been consecrated as maroons. Yet, enslaved women did fight against slavery and practice marronage. Caribbean writers have made a point of bringing to memory forgotten acts of marronage by women during slavery or shortly thereafter. Proposes to examine the fictional treatment French-speaking Caribbean authors grant to African or Afro-descent women who historically rebelled against slavery and colonization. Literary works studied against the backdrop of douboutism, a conceptual framework derived from the common perception about women in the French Caribbeanwhich means strong woman. Authors studied may include Suzanne Dracius (Martinique), Fabienne Kanor (Martinique), André Schwart-Bart (Guadeloupe), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Evelyn Trouillot (Haiti). Conducted in French. (Same as: FRS 3211, AFRS 3211, LACL 3211)

Prerequisites: Two of: either FRS 2409 (same as AFRS 2409 and LAS 2209) or FRS 2410 (same as AFRS 2412 and LAS 2210) or FRS 3000 or higher and either FRS 2409 (same as AFRS 2409 and LAS 2209) or FRS 2410 (same as AFRS 2412 and LAS 2210) or FRS 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021.

What kind of stories do bodies tell or conceal? How does living in a gendered and racialized body effects the stories told by women? How do bodies and their stories converge with History or complicate historical “truths”? These are some of the questions addressed in this study of contemporary writing by women from the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States Latinx/Chicana communities. Feminists of color frame the analysis of literature, popular culture and film to guide an examination of the relation of bodies and sexuality to social power, and the role of this relation in the shaping of both personal and national identities. Theorists include Alexander, Barriteau, Curiel, Mendez and Segato. Novelists include Álvarez, Buitrago, García, Indiana Hernández, and Santos-Febres. Taught in Spanish with readings in Spanish and English. (Same as: HISP 3226, AFRS 3226, LACL 3226)

Prerequisites: Two of: either HISP 2409 (same as LAS 2409) or HISP 2410 (same as LAS 2410) or HISP 3200 or higher and either HISP 2409 (same as LAS 2409) or HISP 2410 (same as LAS 2410) or HISP 3200 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020.

Did feminism exist in the early modern period? Examines key women authors from the early Hispanic World, considering the representation of gender, sexuality, race, and identity in distinct political and social contexts. Focuses on Mexican author Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695) and Spanish author María de Zayas (1590-1661), alongside other prominent women writers from the period. Students read short stories, essays, poems, and personal letters. Conducted in Spanish. (Same as: HISP 3231, LACL 3231)

Prerequisites: HISP 2409 (same as LACL 2409 and THTR 2409) or HISP 2410 (same as LACL 2410).

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022.

Capstone Seminar. This course examines how consumer objects shape our senses of self, gender norms, bodily practices and erotic desires. We consider how gender and sexuality are shaped by material culture in an age of mass production. We consider pharmaceuticals, beauty products, sex toys, homemaking, and dating apps. Students take turns leading class discussions around readings, and organize an end-of-year conference on intimacy and consumer objects.

Prerequisites: GSWS 1000 - 2969 or GSWS 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020.

Seminar. Microeconomic analysis of the family, gender roles, and related institutions. Topics include marriage, fertility, married women’s labor supply, divorce, and the family as an economic organization. (Same as: ECON 3531)

Prerequisites: Two of: ECON 2555 and either ECON 2557 or ECON 3516.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022, Fall 2019.

Considers both mainstream and independent films made by or about gay men and lesbians. Four intensive special topics each semester, which may include classic Hollywood stereotypes and euphemisms; the power of the box office; coming of age and coming out; the social problem film; key figures; writing history through film; queer theory and queer aesthetics; revelation and revaluations of film over time; autobiography and documentary; the AIDS imperative. Writing intensive; attendance at evening film screenings is required. Note: Fulfills the film theory requirement for cinema studies minors. (Same as: CINE 3310)

Prerequisites: CINE 1000 or higher or GSWS 1000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2019.

Capstone seminar. How have spaces such as bathrooms and public restrooms been central for the advancement of feminist, queer, and trans visibility and mobility? In what ways can video games push us to think more imaginatively and critically about how bodies dwell in space? How do films and television shows use space to stage different intersections of identity and oppression? Drawing from diverse and interdisciplinary fields, this seminar examines the different ways in which spaces and identities are mutually configured. Through engagement in a series of case studies, we will explore the value of gendered, spatial inquiry and its potential to complicate normative understandings of being, dwelling, mobility, and place. Throughout the semester, students will develop independent research focused on gender and space, which will be shared in a narrativized end-of-year-presentation.

Prerequisites: GSWS 1000 - 2969 or GSWS 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Studies how work and capitalism organize time, bodies, relationships, identity, and desire through feminist intersectional, queer, and decolonial critiques. Explores topics such as care labor, social reproduction, production, class formation, time, rest, leisure, and disability. Considers workers’ collective organizing and the ways that they refuse or resist on an everyday basis, in ways that are often unrecognized or overlooked. Over the course of the semester, students will develop independent research projects and deliver an end-of-year presentation.

Gender, sexuality, race, and other aspects of identity have come to play a huge role in our public and private lives, and these same issues can be key to understanding how people lived and understood their lives in the past. Through in-class discussion and individual research projects, students in this seminar examine intersections of these concerns with the visual arts produced in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean region (c. 500 --c. 1500), gaining a deeper and richer understanding of how people in the past imagined and depicted themselves and their lives, and negotiated their senses of identity. Specific topics covered will include representations of women and minoritized groups, the roles played by women as makers and patrons of art, and the relevance of modern categories of sexuality, gender, and race in the context of medieval studies. (Same as: ARTH 3350)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021.