Examines the ghosts and monsters 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, social, and gendered norms? Authors may include Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 1005)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2024 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Government and Legal Studies and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: GOV 1005, AFRS 1005)

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.

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester; 2024 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 1018)

A study of Jane Austen’s major works, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 1012)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in German and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: GER 1027, CINE 1027)

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester

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.

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

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 This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: English. (Same as: ENGL 1008)

Terms offered: 2022 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: LACL 1045)

Terms offered: 2022 Fall Semester; 2023 Fall Semester; 2024 Fall Semester

This introductory course assumes no prior knowledge about the study of gender, sex, and sexuality. 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. Not open to students who have taken or are enrolled in GSWS 1103.

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2022 Spring Semester; 2022 Fall Semester; 2023 Spring Semester; 2023 Fall Semester; 2024 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in Theater and Dance and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: DANC 1102)

Terms offered: 2022 Fall Semester

Prepares students for future course work in gender, sexuality, and feminist studies through exposure to the major areas of concern for feminist and queer scholars. Students will read foundational texts that have led to the way scholars now understand sex, gender, and sexuality, along with its intersections with race, class, and disability. Students will understand the historic context in which foundational texts and theories emerged and ask how these ideas can be applied to contemporary anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homo-transphobic, and anti-ablist practice. Intended for students with prior exposure, interest, or activism in gender and sexuality studies. Not open to students who have taken or are enrolled in GSWS 1101.

Terms offered: 2024 Fall Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

Examines the twin themes of love and sex as they relate to poems, stories, novels, and plays written by African American women from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era. Explores such issues as Reconstruction, the Great Migration, motherhood, sexism, group loyalty, racial authenticity, intra- and interracial desire, homosexuality, the intertextual unfolding of a literary tradition of black female writing, and how these writings relate to canonical African American male-authored texts and European American literary traditions. Students are expected to read texts closely, critically, and appreciatively. Possible authors: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Nella Larsen, Jessie Faucet, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Suzan-Lori Parks, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Terry McMillan, Sapphire, Lizzette Carter. 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. This course is U.S.-based. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 1108, AFRS 1108)

Terms offered: 2025 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 1111)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in Africana Studies and is crosslisted with: English; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: AFRS 1111, ENGL 1302)

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. This course originates in Africana Studies and is crosslisted with: English; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: AFRS 1109, ENGL 1301)

Terms offered: 2025 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Philosophy and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: PHIL 1321)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester; 2024 Spring Semester

Traces the history of hip-hop culture (with a focus on rap music) from its beginnings in the Caribbean to its transformation into a global phenomenon by the early 1990s. Explores constructions of race, gender, class, and sexuality in hip-hop’s production, promotion, and consumption, as well as the ways in which changing media technology and corporate consolidation influenced the music. Artists/bands investigated include Grandmaster Flash, Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, De La Soul, Queen Latifah, N.W.A., MC Lyte, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and Dr. Dre. This course originates in Music and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: MUS 1292, AFRS 1592)

Engages students in the critical study of intersectional and anticolonial feminist perspectives of the late twentieth and twenty-first century. Focuses on the ways that feminist theory is grounded in everyday life and highlights resistance, refusal, and the creation of alternative ways of being in the world. Develops an understanding of the social and political contexts out of which feminist ideas emerged. Topics include reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, abolition, intimacy, care, political economy, and solidarity. Involves the construction of one's own feminist theory and perspective.

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. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: English. (Same as: ENGL 2908)

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. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Ltn Am, Caribbean & Latinx St. (Same as: LACL 2310)

This class investigates the central feminist concept of difference—in sex, gender, race, class, ability, and nation—centrally through the history of women of color and Third World feminist coalitional organizing from the 1970s to the present. Taking as its spine central anthologies of feminist writing including The Black Woman Anthology (Bambara, 1970), This Bridge Called My Back (Anzaldúa & Moraga, 1981), and Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Mohanty 1991), the course considers theoretical approaches to feminist formations of difference alongside the difficult and crucial work of relational feminist praxes. Proceeding thematically through questions of sex, gender, race, and colonial/civilizational difference among other formations, we will draw on the works of thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Cherri Moraga, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rita Segato, Adrienne Rich, Iris Marion-Young, Wendy Brown, Suzanne Césaire, Angela Davis, and Mariame Kaba in order to develop a historically and theoretically grounded conception of our own feminist praxes and liberatory political responses and responsibilities in context. The course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies, Government and Legal Studies, and Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies. (Same as: GOV 2930, LACL 2314, AFRS 2314)

Terms offered: 2025 Fall Semester

This course follows Asian and Asian American feminist thinkers and artists in their interdisciplinary social, cultural, and political interventions. In this moment of seeming “Cold War returns,” the course historically contextualizes the development of social movements in which Asian and Asian American women were involved contemporaneous and co-constitutive with the global imperial “hot” wars that shaped many of their lives through the works of scholars and artists such as Rey Chow, Larissa Lai, Lisa Lowe, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chandra Mohanty, and Mitsuye Yamada. Framed around the idea of telling the history of the world through the lives and concerns of Asian and Asian American women and femmes, the class thus asks after the resources of Asian/American feminist visions of history, power, and liberation in/for our struggles in the present. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Asian Studies; English.  (Same as: ASNS 2022, ENGL 2761)

Terms offered: 2025 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2024)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2023 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2028)

Terms offered: 2022 Fall Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2029)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester; 2024 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Asian Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ASNS 2076)

Terms offered: 2022 Fall Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

Studies sex workers' lives and labors and the sex work trade through centering the voices, intellectual work, and organizing labors of sex workers themselves. Considers the creation of and public access to sex work archives as a feminist and queer method of inquiry in GSWS. Examines methods such as archival recovery, institutional holdings, digitization, collection, curation, and collectivity. Students will collaboratively curate their own archives and develop their own set of methodological perspectives and techniques. Final projects will examine care, mutual aid, carcerality, work, labor, stigma, social change, pleasure, or consent through an intersectional and anticolonial lens.

Terms offered: 2025 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2109)

Terms offered: 2024 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in History and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: HIST 2110)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

In the thirty-plus years since its emergence, HIV/AIDS has dramatically altered the world’s social, political, economic, scientific, and cultural landscape. From the early 1980s through the present, people living with HIV and AIDS, activists, artists, policymakers, and researchers have sought to understand the ways that HIV/AIDS is transforming how we live and die, how we think and create, and what we value. Brings students together to work across disciplines to address the complexities of HIV/AIDS on global, national, local, and individual scales. Students examine various aspects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic: activism, epidemiology, cultural history, medical treatment; the business, economics, and industry of disease, HIV and global health, law and public policy; and representations of HIV/AIDS in literature, archives, media, and the arts. Throughout, the intersections of HIV/AIDS with sexuality, gender, race, ability, culture, religion, nation, poverty, and other factors that crucially shape the lives and life chances of those living with HIV/AIDS are addressed. Critically engaging diverse materials and topics illuminates how contemporary societies have and continue to witness, frame, and make meaning of the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Examines how gender intersects with the understanding of crime and the criminal justice system. Gender is a salient issue in examining who commits what types of crimes, who is most often victimized, and how the criminal justice system responds to these victims and offenders. Students explore the social context of crime, as well as how gender affects the correctional system and social policy. This course originates in Sociology and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: SOC 2112)

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. This course originates in Anthropology and is crosslisted with: Environmental Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ANTH 2155, ENVS 2155)

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester

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.

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. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Anthropology; Latin American Studies. (Same as: ANTH 2200, LACL 2340)

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.

Seminar. An exploration of London as space and character in Victorian literary narratives. Contemplates such topics as the intersections between identity and urban setting, the relationship between genre and literary space, and the overlaps in mappings of cities and narrative. Consideration of literary and cultural theory and criticism is central. Authors may include Conrad, Dickens, Dixon, Doyle, Gissing, Marsh, and Wilde. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2002)

Examines families in different societies. Issues addressed include definition and concept of the “family”; different types of family systems; the interaction of family change and other social, economic, and political change; the relationships between families and other social institutions; the role of gender and age in family relationships; and sources and outcomes of stability, conflict, and dissolution within families. This course originates in Sociology and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: SOC 2204)

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. This course originates in Africana Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St; Music; Religion. (Same as: AFRS 2201, MUS 2291, REL 2201)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2022 Fall Semester; 2024 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Music and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: MUS 2606, AFRS 2606)

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester

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.

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. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Anthropology. (Same as: ANTH 2211)

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. This course originates in Sociology and is crosslisted with: Gay and Lesbian Studies. (Same as: SOC 2212)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Ltn Am, Caribbean & Latinx St. (Same as: LACL 2315)

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. . This course originates in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: REEES 2117)

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. This course originates in Sociology and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: SOC 2219)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

Explores male and female sexuality and gender roles in the ancient Greek and Roman world. What did it mean to be male or female? To what extent were gender roles negotiable? How did gender and expectations based on gender shape behavior? How did sexuality influence public life and culture? Using literary, documentary, and artistic evidence, examines the biological, social, religious, legal, and political principles that shaped the construction of male and female identities and considers the extent to which gender served as a fundamental organizational principle of ancient society. Also considers how Greek and Roman concepts of sexuality and gender have influenced contemporary views of male and female roles. All readings are done in translation. Note: Offered as part of the curriculum in Gay and Lesbian Studies. This course originates in Classics and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: CLAS 2229)

Examines Fyodor Dostoevsky’s later novels. Studies the author’s unique brand of realism (fantastic realism, realism of a higher order), which explores the depths of human psychology and spirituality. Emphasis on the anti-Western, anti-materialist bias of Dostoevsky’s quest for meaning in a world growing increasingly unstable, violent, and cynical. Special attention given to the author’s treatment of urban poverty and the place of women in Russian society. This course originates in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: REEES 2223)

For several decades, journalists, media artists, activists, and scholars have sought to articulate the ways the Internet and digital culture have transformed how we live, how we think, how we communicate, and what we value. By examining materials as diverse as scholarly and popular articles, contemporary events, fiction, film, blogs, and other digital media, considers how the digital age complicates, diversifies, deconstructs, and recreates cultural and social understandings of media, gender, and sexuality. Approaches these issues from a multidisciplinary perspective, looking at insights on digital culture from such disciplines as media and communication studies, gender and sexuality studies, information studies, science and technology studies, and sociology. Topics include globalized consumption and digital labor, sexuality and intimate communications in digital culture, and the political affordances of digital spaces. Critically evaluates how digital interactions and media challenge ideas about sex, gender, sexuality, and other intersectional forms of identity. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Digital and Computational St. (Same as: DCS 2223)

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. This course originates in Sociology and is crosslisted with: Environmental Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: SOC 2222, ENVS 2332)

Investigates how Arab-majority societies today grapple with gender and sexual difference in the pursuit of more just futures. Examines contentious areas of scholarly, activist, and humanitarian intervention, including honor crimes, LGBTQ rights, linguistic self-determination, and gender/sexuality-based forced migration. Problematizes how gender and sexuality reinforce dominant representations of the Arab world and other power-laden constructs of social difference. Features ethnographic and theoretical texts, covering key concepts in MENA gender/sexuality studies, like homo-nationalism and pinkwashing. May include virtual discussions with Arab queer activists working in the region or diaspora. (Same as: MENA 2625)

Terms offered: 2025 Fall Semester

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.

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. This course originates in Religion and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: REL 2235)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

Explores the rich and diverse landscape of early American families from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic exchanges through the early Republican era. Over the course of the semester, we will survey contested claims to family by people of European, African, and Indigenous backgrounds as they shaped diplomacy, cultural exchange, and nation building in what came to be the United States. There is no textbook on the history of families in early America—instead, we will bring these stories together ourselves, working with primary and secondary readings from diverse individuals. Some class periods will be spent on “history labs”: opportunities to learn about and practice skills of transcribing, analyzing, and making arguments about primary sources. Course topics will include the relationship between family and the state, family economies, gender and sexuality, and race and citizenship. This course originates in History and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: HIST 2232)

Terms offered: 2024 Fall Semester

This course examines global perspectives on queer politics, exploring how gender and sexuality shape everyday life, labor, family, and political imaginaries. The course draws on transdisciplinary scholarship and various genres, including essays, stories, letters, interviews, poetry, music, and memoir. Students connect with queer collectives in the Global South through virtual conversations and discussion groups. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Middle Eastern and North African Studies. (Same as: MENA 2233)

Terms offered: 2025 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Asian Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ASNS 2270)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester

Explores the multifarious ways that families are created, maintained, and reconfigured in cultures throughout the diverse region of Latin America. Drawing on anthropological perspectives on kinship, gender, and relatedness, the course reframes how intimacy, affect, and inequity are produced and performed by individuals in their everyday social lives. Incorporates the broader social, political, and economic contexts and contemporary issues circulating in the region. Using a comparative perspective, asks how kinship practices and discourses--from companionate marriage to compadrazgo ('spiritual kinship') to sumaq kawsay ('living well')--may shape power hierarchies in local cultural worlds, and offer possibilities for transformation. Incorporates attention to the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, nationality, and age through a variety of sources including ethnography, film, fiction, essay, and narrative. Topics may include indigenous and Hispanic family forms; state and intimate violence; sexual and reproductive justice; new reproductive technologies; machismo and masculinity; religion and spirituality; LGBTQ+ and chosen families; migration, labor, and transnational families; marriage. This course originates in Anthropology and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St; Latin American Studies. (Same as: ANTH 2737, LACL 2737)

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. This course originates in Classics and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: CLAS 2243)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester

Investigates the construction of girlhood through the lens of global feminist resistance, centering the writings and struggles of young women and femmes in the experience and practice of colonized, transnational, and refugee girlhood. With groundings in race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality, the course will engage with not only academic writing but also media and cultural production by and concerning girls. The work of this course is to interrogate (neo)colonial histories by centering not only what empire wants and takes from girls (how their images are deployed, how their reproductive labor is extracted), but also what girls want and do in the course of their living with, under, and against colonial power(s). This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Asian Studies; Ltn Am, Caribbean & Latinx St. (Same as: AFRS 2322, LACL 2322, ASNS 2322)

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. This course originates in Anthropology and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ANTH 2246)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester; 2024 Spring Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2451)

Terms offered: 2022 Fall Semester

Although the Russian cultural tradition has long been male-dominated, this paradigm began to shift with the advent of brilliant women writers and artists prior to the Russian Revolution. Since the collapse of the USSR, women have again emerged as leaders in the tumultuous post-Soviet cultural scene, even overshadowing their male counterparts. Explores the work of female Russian writers, artists, and filmmakers against a backdrop of revolutionary change, from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Themes include representations of masculinity and femininity in extremis; artistic responses to social, political, and moral questions; and women’s artistry as cultural subversion. This course originates in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: REEES 2245)

An examination of the historical development, denominational variety (e.g. Catholic, Evangelical, Mormon), and contemporary relevance of Christian teachings and practices regarding sex and sexuality. The course is designed to acquaint students with the centrality of sex to Christian notions of sin and virtue as well as with the broader cultural impact of Christian sexual ethics on the understanding and regulation of gender, the rise of secularization and “family values,” and public policy regarding marriage, contraception, reproductive technologies, sex work, and welfare. In addition, students will have opportunities to construct and test moral frameworks that address sexual intimacy and assault, the stigmatization of bodies (with regard to race, class, size, sexuality and disability), and the commoditization of sex and persons. Materials are drawn from the Bible, Church dogmatics, legal cases, contemporary ethicists and documentary film. This course originates in Religion and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: REL 2257)

Terms offered: 2024 Fall Semester

A significant portion of religious texts and practices is devoted to the disciplining and gendering of bodies. Examines these disciplines including ascetic practices, dietary restrictions, sexual and purity regulations, and boundary maintenance between human and divine, public and private, and clergy and lay. Topics include desire and hunger, abortion, women-led religious movements, the power of submission, and the related intersections of race and class. Materials are drawn from Christianity, Judaism, Neopaganism, Voudou, and Buddhism. This course originates in Religion and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: REL 2253)

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. This course is U.S.-based. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2004, AFRS 2654)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester

Traces the development of sexual science, or sexology, from its roots in late nineteenth-century Austria and Germany to its manifestations in twentieth-century Great Britain and the United States. Examines ideas of key figures within sexual science and the myriad ways they sought to define, categorize, and explain non-normative sexual behaviors and desires. Explores how claims of scientific authority and empirical knowledge were used to shape social attitudes toward sexual difference. Analyzes cultural works that either influenced or were influenced by these thinkers. Includes works by the sexologists Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld, Ellis, and Kinsey, as well as cultural texts by Boyle, Praunheim, and Sacher-Masoch. This course originates in German and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: GER 2251)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester

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. This course is U.S.-based. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2650, AFRS 2650)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2024 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Cinema Studies. (Same as: CINE 2261)

The course considers the theories and legacies of modern drama, including foundational figures such as Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian, 1828-1906), Bertolt Brecht (German, 1898-1956), Jean Genet (French, 1910-1986) and Samuel Beckett (Irish, 1906-1989). Beckett wrote mostly in French, so with all the question of translation arises. Their plays present challenges to scholars and theater artists alike. The first half of the course is committed to these foundational figures, and the second to later playwrights we may trace from them, up to 2020, where online platforms are producing dramatic works in ways that reach back to their absurdist and epic ancestors. Authors will include Lorraine Hansberry, Suzann- Lori Parks, Martin McDonagh, Winsome Pinnock, and others. There will be a performance aspect to the course. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St; Theater. (Same as: ENGL 2452, THTR 2846)

Approaches the subject of women and writing in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century China from perspectives of gender studies, literary analysis, and visual representations. Considers women writers, filmmakers, and their works in the context of China’s social-political history, as well as its literary and visual traditions. Focuses on how women writers and directors negotiate gender identity against social-cultural norms. Also constructs a dialogue between Chinese women’s works and Western feminist assumptions. Note: Fulfills the non-US cinema requirement for cinema studies minors. This course originates in Asian Studies and is crosslisted with: Cinema Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ASNS 2073, CINE 2266)

In recent decades, girls’ education and empowerment has emerged as a key site for investment and advocacy. Girls are often represented as having the potential to solve wide-ranging societal issues, from poverty to terrorism. Interrogates the current focus on girls in international development by examining its cultural politics. What kinds of knowledges about people in the global south are produced in/through girl-focused campaigns? What is highlighted and what is erased? What are the consequences of such representations? Examinations lead to an exploration of the different theories of ‘girl,’ ‘culture,’ ‘empowerment,’ ‘rights,’ and ‘citizenship’ that are operative in this discourse. Situates girl-focused campaigns within the broader politics of humanitarianism and asks critical questions about conceptualizations of ‘freedom’ and the constitution of the ‘human’. To provide a more nuanced understanding of the lives of girls in the global south, brings to bear ethnographic studies from Pakistan, Egypt, India, and Nepal. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Asian Studies. (Same as: ASNS 2610)

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. This course originates in Africana Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St; Religion. (Same as: AFRS 2271, REL 2271)

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. This course originates in Cinema Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: CINE 2272)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in Cinema Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: CINE 2270)

Schools are sites where young people learn to do gender and sexuality through direct instruction, the hidden curriculum, and peer-to-peer learning. In schools, gender and sexuality are challenged, constrained, constructed, normalized, and performed. Explores instructional and curricular reforms that have attempted to address students and teachers sexual identities and behavior. Examines the effects of gender and sexual identity on students’ experience of school, their academic achievement, and the work of teaching. Topics may include compulsory heterosexuality in the curriculum, the gender of the good student and good teacher, sex ed in an age of abstinence. This course originates in Education and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: EDUC 2212)

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. This course is U.S.-based. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2653, AFRS 2653)

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester

Examines the co-constitution of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class through the lens of transnational feminist theory. Investigates how these categories are shaped by and resist structures such as patriarchy, queer/transphobia, settler colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and right-wing populism. Analyzes the commodification of feminism and the appropriation of identity politics within progressive and reactionary movements. Explores historical and contemporary forms of resistance across global contexts. Engages art, storytelling, and performance as sites of social change, examining how creative practices cultivate radical imaginaries and social justice. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Middle Eastern and North African Studies. (Same as: MENA 2290)

Terms offered: 2025 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Religion and is crosslisted with: Asian Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: REL 2280, ASNS 2740)

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester

Traces the history of hip-hop culture (with a focus on rap music) from the 1990s to the present day. Explores how ideas of race, gender, class, and sexuality are constructed and maintained in hip-hop’s production, promotion, and consumption, and how these constructions have changed and/or coalesced over time. Investigates hip-hop as a global phenomenon and the strategies and practices of hip-hop artists outside of the United States. Artists investigated range from Iggy Azalea to Jay-Z, Miz Korona to Ibn Thabit. This course originates in Music and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: MUS 2294, AFRS 2294)

This seminar examines contemporary (post-2000) representations of queer Latinidades and experiences in US fiction and film, focusing on matters of nation, age, kinship, assimilation, and healing. Considers the cultural, aesthetic, historical, and ideological elements that inform the representation of queer Latinx experience across different genres and contexts. Explores emerging themes, tropes, and imagery used to represent the intersection of gender, queerness, and Latinidad. Using course readings and media, students disrupt normative understandings of what it means to be queer and Latine in a nation with rapidly evolving sociocultural circumstances. They will develop presentations, actively participate in class discussions/workshops, and develop a substantial research-based project. Content warning: the texts and films in this class represent sensitive topics such as death, suicide, physical violence, sexual assault, child and domestic abuse, and illness. This seminar satisfies the African American, Asian American, Indigenous, Latine, Multiethnic American or global literature requirement for English majors. This course is U.S.-based. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: English and Ltn Am, Caribbean & Latinx St. (Same as: LACL 2303, ENGL 2907)

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. This course originates in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: REEES 2315)

Terms offered: 2025 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Cinema Studies. (Same as: CINE 2141)

Terms offered: 2022 Fall Semester

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 de-colonialism, civil rights and labor movements in the United States, the rise and fall of dictatorships in Latin America, and hemispheric neoliberalism continue 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. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Ltn Am, Caribbean & Latinx St. (Same as: LACL 2323)

With a focus on contemporary films directed by women working in diverse national, regional, and industrial contexts, this course considers questions that exist at the intersection of women-centered storytelling, gendered authorship, and feminist aesthetics. What types of narratives, perspectives, and visual styles have contemporary women filmmakers brought to the screen? How have recent political, cultural, social, and industrial factors shaped works produced by women? What types of counter-cinematic techniques have women directors deployed to critique repressive ideologies? How have modes of difference among women informed self-representation? What roles do funding agencies, global film festivals, awards, curators, and specialty distributors serve in gatekeeping definitions of women’s cinema? What influence do women filmmakers have on contemporary cinephile culture and as political activists? Students will complete a final independent research project. Weekly evening film screenings required. This course originates in Cinema Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. (Same as: CINE 2273)

Terms offered: 2025 Spring Semester

Intermediate Seminar. Since the emergence in the 1970s of a field dedicated to women’s history, early American historians have made strides to “Remember the Ladies.” The field has in recent years been re-energized by questions about the violence of an archival record and scholarly tradition that allows us to tell some women’s stories but not others. In this course, we will explore the lives and experiences of diverse women in colonial and Revolutionary America. As we do so, we will pay close attention to primary sources, methods for critically approaching these sources, and narrative strategies for centering women in the stories we tell of early America. We will ask how we might balance our responsibilities to both the past and present as we consider topics—from sexual violence to reproductive healthcare—that have continuing resonance in our daily lives. This course originates in History and is crosslisted with: Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. (Same as: HIST 2725)

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.

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.

Cyborg, robot, and AI technologies have become permanent fixtures in contemporary global life, though these figures’ evolving senses and human-like behaviors have caused great debate internationally regarding their ethical status alongside their human counterparts. As technologies develop, the boundaries of humanity appear to fluctuate, and questions of nonhuman agency emerge. This course examines the historical rise of the technological figure in literature, cinema, and visual art. This course provides insight into the imagined futures of nonhumans as well as their positionality to other oppressed figures, such as animals and marginalized human groups. Works in this course include Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927), E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story The Sandman, Rebecca Horn's visual art exhibits, and Dada poetry. Using a wide range of historical and theoretical approaches, this course asks students to engage with representations and questions of nonhuman agency from the modern to the contemporary period. The language of instruction is English. This course originates in German and is crosslisted with: Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. (Same as: GER 2258)

Terms offered: 2025 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in Art History and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ARTH 2860)

Terms offered: 2025 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies (Same as: AFRS 2656)

Examines Victorian constructions of racial difference and imperial relationships in literary texts ranging from the 1830s to the fin de siècle. Of central concern are issues of representation and racialized identity; fantasies about nationhood and colonialism; narratives of adventure at home and abroad; and images of gender and sexuality. Literary criticism central to discussions. Authors may include C. Brontë, Conrad, Doyle, Du Maurier, Haggard, Kipling, Marsh, and F. A. Steel. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2402)

Newly freed from censorship, Russian filmmakers in the quarter-century between 1990 and 2015 created compelling portraits of a society in transition. Their films reassess traumatic periods in Soviet history; grapple with formerly taboo social problems such as alcoholism, anti-Semitism, and sexual violence; explore the breakdown of the Soviet system; and critique the darker aspects of today’s Russia, often through the lens of gender or sexuality—specifically addressing subjects such as machismo, absent fathers, rape, cross-dressing, and birthing. Central are the rapid evolution of post-Soviet Russian society, the emergence of new types of social differences and disparities and the reinvention of old ones, and the changing nature of social roles within the post-Soviet social fabric. Taught in English. This course originates in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and is crosslisted with: Cinema Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: CINE 2602, REEES 2410)

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Cinema Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2426, CINE 2426)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2024 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in History and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St; Latin American Studies. (Same as: HIST 2430, LACL 2420)

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in History and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: HIST 2540)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Cinema Studies. (Same as: ENGL 2453, THTR 2869)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2454)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester

Explores the intersection of queer subcultures and contemporary artistic production. Also considers what constitutes drag culture, including cross-dressing, hyper-stylized language (guuuuuuurl), and performative gestures (e.g., snapping, teeth-sucking, and eye-cutting). Emphasizes how drag links different kinds of explorations of self in a range of artistic mediums, alternately evoking gendered violence, humor, and transformative possibility. This course originates in Theater and Dance and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: THTR 2504)

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Environmental Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2548, ENVS 2548)

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2554)

Terms offered: 2025 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Africana Studies and is crosslisted with: Anthropology; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: AFRS 2566, ANTH 2566)

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester

Seminar. Examines the current scholarship on gender and sexuality in modern Eastern Europe: the countries of the former Soviet Union, the successor states of Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Albania. Focusing on research produced by academics based in the region, examines the dialogue and interchange of ideas between East and West, and how knowledge about the region is dialectically produced by both Western feminists and East European gender studies scholars. Topics include the women question before 1989; nationalism, fertility, and population decline; patterns and expectations for family formation; the politics of EU gender mainstreaming; visual representations in television and film; social movements; work; romance and intimacy; spirituality; and the status of academic gender studies in the region.

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2011)

Introduces students to an emerging subject that has yet to receive much attention from art critics or from scholars. Taking the body, especially the female body, as a discursive subject and visual medium, examines how women artists, through their artistic innovations and visual representations, search for forms of self-expression characterized by female aesthetics and perspectives. Included among topics covered are personal experience and history, sexuality and the gaze, pain and memory, and landscape aesthetics and the body. Examines how different visual media—such as painting, photography, installation, performance art, and video work—play a role in the development of women’s art in contemporary China. This course originates in Asian Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ASNS 2074)

Seminar. Women's emancipation and sexual freedom were common themes among utopian socialists, anarchists, and other radical left communities in the United States and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sexual equality was also a bedrock principle of “scientific socialist” and communist societies throughout the twentieth century. Explores how a variety of communalist ideologies re-imagined the shape of the family and the gender relations between men and women. Examines the theoretical foundations and practical implications of sexual equality through a detailed history of a wide variety of ideological movements, including Owenism, anarchism, utopian socialism, scientific socialism, and “really-existing” socialism in the twentieth century. Special attention paid to the ongoing tensions between theory and practice.

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. This course is U.S.-based. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 2651, AFRS 2651)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in History and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: HIST 2660, URBS 2660)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

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) This course originates in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: LACL 2375)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and is crosslisted with: Asian Studies. (Same as: ASNS 2611)

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. This course originates in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: LACL 2421, AFRS 2721)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

From debates over the value of indigenous life, slavery, emancipation, and citizenship, to the extrajudicial executions under the dictatorships of the 1960’s and 70’s, Latin America has been a battleground for the definition of human rights, and “humanity” as the condition to claim such rights. This course traces the discourses, laws, and practices of Human Rights emerging in Latin America, with special focus on Central America, the Southern Cone, and the Caribbean. Readings and discussions will address how human rights have evolved in Latin American history, from the abolition of slavery and the founding of the nation-states in the 19th century, and through the establishment of both military and democratic regimes in the 20th-century. Students read historical monographs and first-person testimonies, while also exploring cultural production across the region, including art, literature and film, and studies from a variety of disciplines, including critical race and gender theory. This course originates in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: LACL 2521)

Capstone seminar. What does it mean to be a critic and thinker in gender studies? What historical and sociocultural elements inform how we relate to ourselves and others and how we interpret certain ideas, discourses, texts, and practices? Considers the factors that influence what and how we critique in the field of GSWS, and how our identities, histories, and critical moods affect the political and transformative potential of our work. Examines different forms of reading and interpretation used to critique texts, media, spaces, and social phenomena connected to gender, sexuality, relationality, and embodiment. Potential topics may include suspicious versus reparative reading, critical mood, disidentification, queer of color critique, digital embodiment, aesthetics, and affect. Throughout the semester, students deeply examine a text of their choosing (book, film, space, event, institution, video game, etc.) using the queer and feminist reading practices examined in class. Culminative capstone projects will be exhibited to the public at a research poster session.

Terms offered: 2025 Spring Semester

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. This course is U.S.-based. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 3015, AFRS 3015)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

Seminar. Examines Austen’s major works, from “Northanger Abbey” to “Persuasion,” by pairing each novel either with a work by one of her major literary influences (such as Frances Burney’s “Evelina” and Ann Radcliffe’s “The Romance of the Forest”), or with a later work (such as Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”) that responds to and challenges Austen’s own novelistic practice. Also examines major currents in Austen criticism. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 3020)

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. This course originates in English and is crosslisted with: Cinema Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ENGL 3037, CINE 3037)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester

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.

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. Students will develop independent research projects and deliver an end-of-year presentation.

Explores the variety of practices, performances, and ideologies of sexuality through a cross-cultural perspective. Focusing on contemporary anthropological scholarship on sexuality and gender, asks how Western conceptions of sexuality, sex, and gender help (or hinder) understanding of the lives and desires of people in other social and cultural contexts. Topics may include third gendered individuals; intersexuality and the naturalization of sex; language and the performance of sexuality; drag; global media and the construction of identity; lesbian and gay families; sex work; AIDS and HIV and health policy; migration, asylum, and human rights issues; ethical issues and activism. Ethnographic examples are drawn from United States, Latin America (Brazil, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba); Asia (India, Japan, Indonesia) and Oceania (Papua New Guinea); and Africa (Nigeria, South Africa). Presents issues of contemporary significance along with key theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches used by anthropologists. Integrates perspectives on globalization and the intersection of multiple social differences (including class, race, and ethnicity) with discussion of sexuality and gender. This course originates in Anthropology and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St; Latin American Studies. (Same as: ANTH 3100, LACL 3711)

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. This course originates in Government and Legal Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: GOV 3605)

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester; 2024 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Music and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: MUS 3103)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester

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 throughout the Americas. In particular, students will learn about various dances (such as the Argentine tango, the Martinican bélè, US vogueing, and the Trinidadian wine) through readings, lectures, and actual in-studio dancing/embodiment. 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 3505, AFRS 2293, LACL 3310)

Terms offered: 2025 Spring Semester

An examination of the central role that images of the female nude played in the development of modernist art between 1860 and the 1920s. Topics include the tradition of the female nude in art; the gendered dynamics of modernism; and the social, cultural, and artistic meaning of nudity. Artists considered include Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Picasso, and Valadon. This course originates in Art History and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ARTH 3810)

Enslaved Africans who fought against oppression through escaping the European plantation system in the Caribbean for freedom in the mountains are called maroons, and their act, marronnage. Except for Queen Nanny of the Jamaican Blue Mountains, only male names have been consecrated as maroons and freedom fighters (the Haitians Makandal or Toussaint Louverture, the Martinican Louis Delgrès, the Jamaican Cudjoe or the Cuban Coba). The course examines the fictitious treatment French-speaking Caribbean authors grant to forgotten African or Afro-descended women who historically fought against enslavement and colonization. The literary works are studied against the backdrop of “Douboutism,” a conceptual framework derived from the common perception about women in the French Caribbean as expressed in the Creole say “fanm doubout,” which means “strong woman.” Authors studied may include Evelyne Trouillot, Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, André Schwarz-Bart, Suzanne Dracius, and Fabienne Kanor. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St; Latin American Studies. (Same as: FRS 3211, AFRS 3211, LACL 3211)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester

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. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St; Latin American Studies. (Same as: HISP 3226, AFRS 3226, LACL 3226)

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. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St; Latin American Studies. (Same as: HISP 3231, LACL 3231)

Terms offered: 2022 Fall Semester; 2024 Fall Semester

The 1960s Latin American Boom changed world literature, opening global book markets to writers of the postcolonial world and their distinctive styles. Yet it centered on male writers. “A New Boom?” explores the conditions favoring the last decade’s apparent “explosion” of Latin American women writers in world literature. Discussions focus on key authors and the context of their works, their themes, and aesthetic innovations, and the market forces affecting the dissemination of women’s cultural production. Topics include the ambitions of twenty-first-century women in Latin American cities, and the obstacles they face (i.e., violence and marginalization); the role of editors and other stakeholders in featuring women’s voices; the place of readers in advancing new tastes and sensitivities; and the intersection of gender with race, ethnicity, sexuality, education, and other factors fostering the inclusion of some writers over others. Readings include Melchor, Ojeda, Quintana, Reyes, and Shweblin. Course will be taught in Spanish. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St; Ltn Am, Caribbean & Latinx St. (Same as: HISP 3257, LACL 3257)

Terms offered: 2024 Spring Semester

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.

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in Economics and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: ECON 3531)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester; 2024 Spring Semester

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. This course originates in Cinema Studies and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: CINE 3310)

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester

Focuses on the literal and metaphorical practices of dressing and undressing as depicted in the literature of Early Modern Spain. Considers how these practices relate to the (de)construction of gender and empire throughout the period. What does dress have to do with identity and power? What might nakedness reveal about ideal and defective bodies? These questions are enriched through exploration of a series of images in collaboration with the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Authors considered during the semester include Ana Caro, Miguel de Cervantes, Teresa de Jesús, Tirso de Molina, Fernando de Rojas, and María de Zayas. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Gender Sexuality and Women St. (Same as: HISP 3246)

Seminar. An analysis of cultural traditions in Britain and Europe. Explores the impact of immigration on Britain and the Continent, notions of cultural pluralism, and the changing definitions and implications of gender in Britain and Europe from the late eighteenth century to the present. Students undertake a major research project utilizing primary sources. This course originates in History and is crosslisted with: Gender and Women's Studies. (Same as: HIST 3081)

Focuses on literary texts written by women from French-speaking West African, Central African, and Caribbean countries in the 20th and 21st centuries. Themes treated—women and/in colonization and enslavement, madness, memory, alienation, womanhood, individual and collective identity, war, democracy, gender dynamics, women and tradition, women and modernism, social, cultural, racial and ethnic hierarchies—are approached from a critical discourse analysis and comparative prism contextualized by historical, cultural, political, sociological, and gender frameworks. Works studied may be by Mariama Bâ, Aminata Sow Fall, Ken Bugul, Fatou Diome (Senegal), Tanella Boni (Côte d’Ivoire), Calixthe Beyala, Léonora Miano (Cameroun); Marie Chauvet, Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Célie Agnant (Haïti); Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe); Suzanne Lacascade, Françoise Éga, and Fabienne Kanor (Martinique). This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St; Latin American Studies. (Same as: FRS 3201, AFRS 3201, LACL 3222)