UGRD > WGS
Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Courses
WGS 100 Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexualities in the United States +
Description:
This interdisciplinary course examines how social constructions of gender and sexuality shape our day-to-day interactions with a variety of social institutions, such as the family and workplace, and contribute to systems of power and privilege. Through a careful examination of texts, films and other materials, students will explore contemporary feminist challenges to long-standing assumptions about what constitutes diverse gendered identities and will relate these insights to their own lived experiences in productive ways. More Info
Offered in:WGS 110 Gender in Global Context +
Description:
This course is an introduction to studying women's lives and the gender systems that shape them across cultures and countries, as it examines a variety of global processes and approaches, including patriarchy, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Students will consider issues of gender and sexuality by looking at the ways in which people are connected in a network of global flows of capital, ideas, and activism. Topics include: work, poverty, images of the body, violence, faith, and feminism. More Info
Offered in:WGS 120G Women and Men in Families +
Description:
Has feminism destroyed the traditional family? Would marriages last longer if women and men shared family responsibilities equally? Does society still need to make major changes if we want both women's rights and stable families? Participants read, discuss, debate, and make up their own minds on these issues. More Info
Offered in:WGS 150 Women, Culture and Identity +
Description:
This course explores cultural beliefs about women's ''nature'' and role at different times and places, drawing on materials from literature, including fiction and autobiography, and from history and feminist analysis. Using a thematic rather than a chronological approach, the course will focus on the ways in which intersection of race, class and gender affects the lives and self-concepts of women, in the U.S. and in other societies in the world. More Info
Offered in:WGS 179GL Sexuality in Nature and Culture +
Description:
This course explores texts and film in order to expand, complicate, and challenge the way students think about diverse sexualities and genders. The course will ask where ideas about sexuality and gender come from, and question whether those ideas are rooted in nature or culture. Students will examine theories and concepts addressing cultural norms, systems of power, and the performance of the self. Students will become familiar with methods of analysis from a range of disciplines, including literature, women's studies,, cultural studies, biology, psychology, philosophy and law. As the class investigates sexuality and gender, students will engage in self-evaluation, examine methods of reasoning, and ask questions about cultural values and inheritances. More Info
Offered in:WGS 200 Feminist Literature in the US: An Intersectional Approach +
Description:
This course examines the ways American women explore reality in the US through writing. Using a feminist lens, we will study novels, short stories, essays, and memoirs to trace the evolution of women's literature over time, across multicultural backgrounds, and at intersections of social identity. More Info
Offered in:WGS 201 Introduction to Sexuality Studies +
Description:
This introductory course approaches the study of sexuality from a social perspective. Rather than studying sexuality as something that human beings are born with, for example, the course focuses on the ways that issues of desire, pleasure, identity, norms of sexual behavior, and intimate arrangements are deeply shaped by a range of historically specific social forces. Focusing on the U.S., a ''social constructionist'' framework guides the course. Family, religion, and social media will be studied as important social sites where struggles around sexualities and their meanings are played out. More Info
Offered in:WGS 207L Queer Visual Culture: Sexuality, Gender, and Visual Representation +
Description:
This course explores visual representations of gender and sexuality and the socio-historical contexts of their production. Non-heteronormative viewpoints area a specific focus, as are the scholarly frameworks of feminism, LGBT, (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) Studies, and Queer Theory. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 210G Gendered Bodies +
Description:
This critical look at human bodies in social context begins with the premise that embodiment itself is a socially constructed phenomenon rather than a fixed biological reality. Topics such as the beauty ideal, physical disabilities, and intersexuality will illustrate how perceptions of our bodies are shaped by social processes and how, in turn, these perceptions shape human experience. More Info
Offered in:WGS 215L Gender & Communication +
Description:
This course explores a variety of topics and concepts related to gender, sex, and communication using an intersectional, feminist approach. Specifically, this course examines the ways that individuals and society create, reinforce, and challenge the meaning of gender. This course will discuss and examine how we develop gender identities (and how these identities differ from biological sex), how this identity is shaped through the messages we receive from a number of communication systems (family, education, media, etc.), and how our gender identities in turn influence our communication patterns. As we go through the course, we'll examine various masculine and feminine roles and stereotypes, and the impact of gender stereotypes on communication. We will also consider the limitations of gender binaries, and explore a diverse array of gender identification and expression. More Info
Offered in:WGS 220 Women and the Media +
Description:
This course explores how the historical evolution and commercial orientation of mass communications media have helped shape the depiction of women and gender in advertising, entertainment, and news. Students learn to analyze visual imagery for its conceptual and emotional messages; to distinguish stereotypes from more complex characterizations in TV fictions; and to monitor the representations of women and gender in the print and broadcast news. More Info
Offered in:WGS 225L Latinas in the United States +
Description:
This course provides an overview of the experiences of Latina women in the United States, focusing on the three themes of migration, the settlement process, and the question of identity. The course explores the contexts of family, employment, community organizing, and gender roles. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 227GL Gender & Sexuality in South Asia +
Description:
This course critically examines the portrayal of gender and sexuality in South Asian cultural texts. It employs literature and film to focus on culture and society in South Asia. It specifically addresses gender, as a form of social and historical inequality in South Asia, which is home to diverse socio-cultural communities, which are further divided from within by languages, class, religious affiliations, and regional differences. By reading the stories of individuals and groups in these contexts, the course explores how socio-cultural notions of gender and sexuality, often deeply embedded among communities; perpetuate inequalities among South Asian subjects. It utilized life history, the novel, film, political critique and other literary genres to examine cultural and material foundations of inequality in contemporary South Asia, especially among women of particular religions, class, caste, and ethnicities. More Info
Offered in:WGS 229L Latinx Sexualities +
Description:
This interdisciplinary course combines Latinx/o/a Studies and Sexuality Studies with a feminist lens to examine how sexuality both shapes and is shaped by immigration, race, class, gender, gentrification, language, religion, culture, and kinship. In the tradition of critical ethnic studies, the course examines sexuality by centering Latinx knowledges, histories, cultural production, and everyday lives. Although the primary focus is on Latinx sexualities in the United States, our analysis will be grounded in a transnational and diasporic context. Topics may include queer latinidad, sexual health, family formations, sex work, media representation, social movements, and visual and performing arts. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 230G Reproductive Rights and Wrongs +
Description:
Why is abortion such a controversial issue? Should sex-ed teach teens that they should abstain from all sexual activity until marriage? Do surrogacy contracts treat women as wombs-for-hire? Focusing on topics such as abortion, abstinence-only education and surrogate motherhood, this course will explore the complex and highly contested relationship among sex, gender, and reproduction. We will pay particular attention to how these tensions are manifested in the U. S. law. More Info
Offered in:WGS 240 Educating Women +
Description:
This course studies the lives and ideas of women in the U.S. who have been educators and activists in struggles for equality in, and transformation of, education. Central themes include how women learn; education as a means of self-realization and empowerment for women in different ethnic, race, and class contexts; how gender affects experience in educational institutions. More Info
Offered in:WGS 243L Rethinking the Family: Cross-Cultural Perspectives +
Description:
This course analyzes the ways in which culture shapes perceptions of family. It explores narratives about how human family structures evolved, examines the increasing medicalization of reproduction and the body, and takes stock of the ways in which race, class, gender, and sexual orientation affect commonly held and frequently subscribed-to beliefs about what constitutes family. It illustrates the diversity of kinship definitions with ethnographic examples from the Iban of Indonesian Borneo, the Nyakyusa of East Africa, and other societies from the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the pacific Islands. Through an exploration of the pressures to which African American families have been subjected in the United States, it probes the ways in which the legacy of slavery shapes the possibilities and perceptions of contemporary families. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 257L Queer Literature and History in the 20th Century US +
Description:
This course introduces historical approaches to studying queer literature of the 20th century United States. The course highlights the historical work of queer literature through in-depth textual analysis and by studying related historical archives. Units include the Harlem Renaissance, gay literature of the 1960s and 70s, and lesbian pulp. Each unit in the course selects specific archives to pair with literary texts. In addition, students will do independent work on a literary text and archive of their choosing. Through both the required readings and the independent projects, students will engage directly and systematically with the study of creative production and human expression. This is a hands-on interactive course designed with the support of the Mellon Foundation. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 260 Gender, Sexuality, and Health: Feminist Perspectives +
Description:
This course brings public health into conversation with gender, sexuality, and feminist studies. Topics may include the social determinants of health; racial health disparities; HIV/AIDS; reproductive justice; sex education; LGBTQ+ health; access to healthcare; and health activism. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 263G Transgender Studies: Scholarly and Community Perspectives +
Description:
This course provides an introduction to the expanding transdisciplinary field of transgender studies by situating trans identities, experiences, communities and movements in their historical and social contexts. Drawing on literatures from sociology, psychology, cultural studies, and feminist and queer theory, as well as trans community sources, we'll examine how categories like ''trans'' and ''transgender'' have been shaped by political, medical, and community-based discourses. Using a range of theoretical lenses, we'll explore how trans lives and bodies are produced and experienced in and through systems of gender, racism, colonization, ableism, and medicalization. Key to our inquiry will be the implications of trans political movements, increased visibility in media and culture, and the institutionalization of trans studies as a discipline. This course is appropriate for students who are new to trans issues as well as students who have academic and/or personal experience with the topic. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 268 Global Bodies: Sex, Families, and Reproductive Rights in Transnational Perspective +
Description:
Globalization is drawing increasing numbers of women (and men) into cross-border transactions in which the reproductive and sexual body is the desired object of exchange. These global markets raise important questions about what it means for human dignity when body parts and services are treated as commercially available. Do these transactions commodify women (particularly those from the Global South) by treating them as disposable, fragmentary bodies for the benefit of wealthy customers? Or do they offer new pathways out of poverty, by enabling women to assert control over this productive resource? Using a transnational feminist and human rights lens, this course examines these issues, with a particular focus on sex tourism/trafficking and gestational surrogacy. The course also looks at a very different type of cross-border travel - namely, the flight of persons in conflict zones for the purpose of escaping political violence rather than to seek or sell an intimate service. Specifically, we consider the unique challenges that refugees and internally displaced persons confront when seeking to access reproductive health services, including abortion. More Info
Offered in:WGS 270 Native American Women in North America +
Description:
This course focuses on the lives of native North American women, in traditional societies and in contemporary life, as revealed through their life histories, the recounting of tribal history, legends and myths, art, and contemporary poetry and fiction. More Info
Offered in:WGS 280 Special Topics in Women's Studies (Intermediate) +
Description:
Selected special topics in women's studies at the intermediate level, taught by program faculty and visiting instructors. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 290 The Legal Rights of Women +
Description:
Beginning with a historical overview, this course examines women's evolving legal status in the US. Discussions focus on women and work, including sexual harassment; reproductive rights; and women in the family, with an emphasis on domestic violence. Participants also consider whether equality is best achieved by treating men and women identically or by taking into account such differences as women's reproductive capacity. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 291 Family Law +
Description:
Using a feminist lens, this course examines the legal regulation of family relationships, with a primary focus on marriage and divorce in a U.S. context. Grounded in an interdisciplinary historical perspective, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which considerations of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation shape the law's construction and dissolution of intimate partnerships. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 292 Family Law Practice +
Description:
This course is designed to give students a real world understanding of the challenges and complexities of practicing family law. To accomplish this, after covering the fundamentals of Massachusetts divorce law, each student will be assigned a client to represent in a hypothetical divorce case. As ''attorney,'' you will be responsible for drafting the necessary legal documents, arguing before the ''court,'' and negotiating a settlement agreement with the attorney for the other side. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 293L Literature and Human Rights +
Description:
This course focuses on literary expressions and representations of the desire for and the crises of human rights. The various literary genres (poetry, fiction, drama, memoir, and essay) evoke the yearning of peoples to be awarded the right to live in safety and with dignity so that they pursue meaningful lives, and these literary genres record the abuses of the basic rights of people as they seek to lead lives of purpose. This course will examine the ways in which the techniques of literature (e.g., narrative, description, point of view, voice, image) compel readers' attention and bring us nearer to turn to human rights abuses and peoples' capacities to survive and surmount these conditions. More Info
Offered in:WGS 295L Introduction to Human Rights +
Description:
This is a collaboratively taught interdisciplinary course on a variety of issues related to Human Rights as discourse and practice. It covers the emergence and institutionalization of human rights discourse in the 20th century, and examines its transformations and extensions into various social, economic, political and cultural realms globally. Topics include critique of Western and normative human rights, policies of indigenous people and women's rights, and cognitive and practical implementations of human rights. More Info
Offered in:WGS 300L Women in African Cultures +
Description:
This course challenges stereotypical constructions of Africa and African woman in mainstream media by considering internal and external historical relationships that have shaped and redefined the cultures, ideas, institutions, politics, and social relations of several specific groups of African women. Through a multi-disciplinary approach, the course addresses issues and challenges of contemporary Africa, and explores many of the themes and concerns that have run throughout Africa's gendered, complex, and changing history. Popular culture sources, as well as scholarly studies and activist writing, will be employed to help illuminate the lived experiences and perspectives of contemporary women living in various African societies. More Info
Offered in:WGS 302L Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identities +
Description:
This course will address current issues related to psychology of sexual orientation and gender identities. These concerns include research and theory on queer theory, affirmative counseling/therapy, identity development models, heterosexism, family and relationship issues, intersectionality in GLBTQI communities, developmental issues, minority stress, as well as positive psychology, well-being and resiliency found in GLBTQI communities. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 308L Feminist Histories: Renaissance France, Italy and Beyond +
Description:
Students will study one important branch of the history of global feminism: women's writing in medieval and Renaissance France and Italy. In addition to literature, we will also consider the social history of these women. We will also trace the impact of their feminist thinking on the rest of Europe and beyond, through to our contemporary world. Course taught in English; readings available in the original French or Italian, as well as in English. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 310L Love, Sex, and Media Effects +
Description:
This course explores the impact of mass media and technology on romantic and sexual relationships. Drawing on theory and research related to gender, sex, and sexuality, we will examine how these relationships are depicted in traditional media such as television, film, and advertising. We will also critically think about the role of technology and new media in developing and maintaining relationships. More Info
Offered in:WGS 311L American Oral History +
Description:
This course explores oral history interviewing, texts, and films, within the context of efforts to create a fully representative social and cultural history of the US. Students design individual or group oral history projects, to capture the experiences and perspectives of people formerly regarded as ''unhistorical''-in particular, women, working class people, immigrants, people of color, and gays and lesbians. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 317L Women in Medieval and Early Modern Europe +
Description:
This course is designed to introduce students to the study of European women in the medieval and early modern eras and, more generally, to the challenges and rewards of women's and gender history. Through in-class discussions and writing assignments, the course hones students' ability to analyze, critique, and compare primary and secondary sources. Topics include women's work, writing, religious lives, and relationships. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 320 Sexuality Education in the United States +
Description:
This course investigates the theory and practice of sexuality education in the United States. Sexuality and sexual health education occurs through a number of sites, including but not limited to K-12 schools, colleges and universities, community-based organizations, activist groups, clinical settings, and state institutions (group homes, prisons, etc.). Despite a shift away from federal funding of ''abstinence only until marriage'' toward so-called ''evidence-based comprehensive'' content and instruction, scholars illustrate how sex education remains deeply heteronormative, disregards desire and pleasure, constructs sex as risky and dangerous, reproduces gendered and racist ideologies, and neglects the bodies and experiences of trans and gender-nonconforming people. We will investigate these inequalities with an eye toward imagining a liberatory practice of sex education. In addition to utilizing theoretical interventions from critical education studies, queer theory, and feminist public health, we will engage in action-based course projects such as policy analysis or curricula design and implementation. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 325L Sexual Identities in American Culture +
Description:
This course studies the history of sexual identities in the twentieth-century United States, with a particular emphasis upon the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities, through the study of cultural texts such as novels, songs, films, and poems. Topics covered in the course include homosexuality in the turn-of-the-century United States, sex in the Harlem Renaissance, sexual politics in the Depression years, purges of gay women and men in federal employment during the cold war and sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. More Info
Offered in:WGS 333L Sociology of Migration +
Description:
The number of migrants worldwide has increased dramatically in the past forty years. This course will explore ''hot topics'' in migration, paying close attention to the intersections of gender, race, class, and nation. The topics include debates about undocumented (im)migrants, transnational families, and student activism in the immigrant rights movement. This course will draw on documentary films as well as readings that raise difficult and interesting moral, political, and academic questions. More Info
Offered in:WGS 341L Gender and Film: Multidisciplinary Perspectives +
Description:
This course is designed to encourage multidisciplinary analysis of gender, cultural representations, and film in the 20th and early 21st century. Among the topics that students will explore are: ethnographic film and gendered practices in ethnographic filmmaking; how ideologies of gender, ''race,'' and class are constructed, disseminated, and normalized through film (documentary as well as ''popular'' film); Indigenous women and filmmaking in North America; femininities, masculinities, and power in the ''horror film'' genre; human rights film and filmmaking as activism. Students will view films made in diverse locations and reflecting multiple historical, political, and cultural perspectives and will explore the intellectual, political and social significance of film in their own lives. More Info
Offered in:WGS 343L The Cultural Politics of HIV/AIDS +
Description:
This course uses feminist, queer, and critical race frameworks to interrogate the social, political, and cultural aspects of HIV/AIDS. Not merely a virus, HIV is also a set of cultural meanings tied to gender, race, nation, and the body. By focusing on political activism and cultural production (film, art, etc.) we will employ a critical humanistic approach to the epidemic that goes beyond biomedicine or epidemiology. Because a great deal of the popular and scholarly attention to the AIDS crisis has focused on white, gay, cisgender men, the course examines the politics of HIV/AIDS through an intersectional lens that takes into account how race, gender, class, nationality and so on have shaped the crisis and the experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS. Although we will focus on the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS in the United States from the time the crisis emerged in the early 1980s through today, we will also consider the pandemic in terms of US empire. More Info
Offered in:WGS 345 Gender, Religion and Politics in South Asia +
Description:
This course explores the relationship of gender to religious politics in South Asia particularly in the context of liberation movements of the past and current modernization, development and globalization schemes. It examines how ideal images of masculinity, femininity and religious practice are reworked by various actors in the service of anti-colonialist, nationalist, and community struggles. The course highlights the complex ways religious and nationalist politics have created opportunities for women's activism while simultaneously undermining their autonomy. More Info
Offered in:WGS 347 Feminisms, Intersectionality and Social Justice: Histories, Debates, Futures +
Description:
Students critically engage a sampling of key works, some classic and some 'hot off the presses,' that explore feminist thinking about a variety of topics, as well as the ways that feminist theorists construct and complicate analyses of power, privilege, and oppression. The aim is to train students to grapple with a range of concepts and frameworks that inspire and inform feminist research and activism. Throughout the course, we engage the burgeoning critical scholarly discussion of 'intersectionality'-at once a lens, a framework, and a core concept-which has gained increasing prominence in feminist discourse and requires careful consideration. The course is structured around broad themes through which gender is complicated by multiple axes of identity-race, culture, social class, and sexual orientation. More Info
Offered in:WGS 350 Topics in Queer and Transgender Studies +
Description:
This course provides a broad, multidisciplinary survey of topics in Queer and Transgender Studies while also exploring its possibilities and limits as a field of study. After examining foundational issues, texts, and tensions, we will focus on contemporary contributions to the field from disciplines across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The course uses an intersectional analysis that simultaneously considers sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, nation, ability, and other categories of identity and power. Our analyses will be grounded in a focus on the lives, struggles, and cultural production of queer and trans communities primarily in the United States but also across the world. More Info
Offered in:WGS 355L Gender, Development, &Globalization +
Description:
This interdisciplinary course explores women, gender, globalization and development theories, and their relationship to policy and practice. The politics of representation and the relationship between knowledge production and power will be running themes throughout the course. We will also discuss how gender intersects with race, class, nation, sexuality, (dis)ability, regional location, and other aspects of identity. We will answer questions such as: How do we theorize women, gender, masculinity in development discourse''? How has development knowledge defined both women and men from the: Third World/Developing Countries/The Global South? How have local and transnational advocacy organizations and movements resisted this impact? More Info
Offered in:WGS 356L Faiths & Feminisms: Women, Gender, Sexuality & Religion in the U.S. +
Description:
This course explores feminisms and theologies - or varieties of ''God-talk'' - as resources for each other. The course engages key questions raised by students and non-students alike: what does it mean to have feminist politics and belong to a faith community? Can this be done? Is it desirable? What are the consequences?Starting from these personal-political questions, the course attends to the history of women and religion in colonial America and the United States. Selected feminist and womanist engagements with and challenges to aspects of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the contemporary United States are examined. The course explores women's - and transpeople's - experiences of religion and spirituality, both their leadership and their struggles within various faith communities. The professor and students analyze the ways that ideas about gender, racial/ethnic, economic, and sexual hierarchies are deeply entwined in theologies that oppress as well as those that seek to liberate. The course also investigates contemporary queer theologies and current thinking about feminism, secularism, and humanism. Student experiences and questions help guide the study of feminist scholarly research and writing in the fields of history, theology, criticism of sacred texts, politics, and literature. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 357L Women in South Asian Religions: Gender Ideology and Practice in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam +
Description:
This course examines women in South Asian history through the intersections of women's lives with three major faith traditions of the subcontinent - Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. Using historical, literary, and anthropological lenses the course will consider how various institutions of authority - patriarchy, religion, and the state - have shaped and reshaped gender ideology in South Asia, and how women, throughout South Asia's history, have, in turn, interpreted and negotiated their position in society. More Info
Offered in:WGS 359L Women in Modern China +
WGS 360 Gender, Culture, and Power +
Description:
Feminist and other critical approaches in anthropology have challenged prevailing Western assumptions about the categories for woman and man. Such studies reveal that power infuses gender identities and gender relations in profound ways. This course provides an overview of anthropological studies of gender, cultural, and power, with special attention to the construction and contestation of gender in varied cultural contexts. More Info
Offered in:WGS 370 Feminist Research Seminar +
Description:
Through readings, guest lectures, discussions and hands-on projects, students learn to use and to critically evaluate basic research tools in the humanities and social sciences, as they apply to the interdisciplinary and intersectional field of women's, gender and sexuality studies. The course emphasizes the relationship between generating knowledge and organizing for social justice, gender equality and human rights while exploring notions of objectivity, bias and power in the research process. More Info
Offered in:WGS 373 Sex and the City: The Politics of Race, Sexuality, and Mobility +
Description:
How do race, gender, and sexuality inform, enable or prevent people's relationship to different forms of mobility (migration, embodiment, detention) in urban spaces? This course explores concepts, theories, and histories of race, gender, and sexuality through the lens of mobility. Some of the core questions of this class include: How do constructions of race, gender, and sexuality inform, enable, or prevent people's freedom of movement and mobility in the modern world? While mobility between or within nations (immigration, travel, global trade) is romanticized as positive and liberating, what borders, bans, and walls impact the human rights of marginalized communities (ie refugees, migrant workers, queer and trans communities of color) to move freely? While this course investigates forms of structural oppression that limit mobility (including disability access, gender discrimination, and incarceration), we will also witness how self-narratives created by and for LGBTQ, immigrant, Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities work to transform individual and collective mobilities. Course texts include literature, films, and scholarship from interdisciplinary fields including gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, geography, and ethnic studies. This course pays special attention to how formations of gender and sexuality intersect with the social categories of race, ability, and national belonging; it also considers how the universal human right to mobility is experienced differently based on one's intersectional identities of race, sexuality, gender, and class. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 376L Women of Color +
Description:
This course offers interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives on a variety of theories, themes, and issues related to the experiences of women of color in both U.S. and global contexts. It examines the genealogies, practices, and agendas of women of color ''feminisms,'' and promotes a dialogue about the interactive impact of race, class, and gender on women's lives.AMST 376L and WGS 376L are the same course. More Info
Offered in:WGS 392 Feminist Activism +
Description:
This course explores the conceptual foundations, analytical lenses and practical tools from the vast and growing body of interdisciplinary social movements literature to describe, theorize and prescribe feminist activism in diverse sites across the globe. Informed by this literature, students will critique contemporary activist work brought to their attention in the readings, selected films, and several in-class presentation by local activists while construction a team-designed strategic activist plan around a selected issue. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 394L Radical Voices of Resistance: Gender, Race and US Social Movements +
Description:
This class explores activist engagements in several interrelated social movements in the U.S. throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Through reading and discussion of primary documents, biography, and historical research, we analyze the motivations and strategies of women activists in tension with gendered and racialized expectations and practices in historical context. More Info
Offered in:WGS 401 Advanced Topics in Human Rights +
Description:
This seminar aims to provide students with a deeper knowledge of human rights as both an intellectual discourse and a realm of political action. The first part of the course deals with the emergence and institutionalization of human rights in the 20th century. Beginning with an overview of its roots in political theory, moving to the first and second generation of rights, to debates over universality and cultural relativism and ending with exploration of human rights frameworks' applicability and implications across nations and cultures, the course offers an in-depth interdisciplinary understanding of the field and its practices. Topics of study include torture, genocide, race gender and law, visual culture, humanitarian intervention, and protection. More Info
Offered in:WGS 411 Transnational Feminisms: Contexts, Conflicts, and Solidarity +
Description:
Feminism as an analytic lens, identity and movement for social transformation continues to be a hotly contested subject. This course introduces perspectives in feminist theory and practice from domestic U.S. and global contexts in order to ask: how do the contributions of women of color in the U.S. and of feminist movements in the ''Third World'' radically reshape the form and content of feminist politics? The objective of this class is to locate transnational feminism in relation to histories of colonialism and postcolonialism, and theories of nationalism and globalization. Students will examine topics such as gender and development; race, gender, and cultural politics; gendered violence; war, sexuality and orientalism; solidarity and alliance across cultures to examine how feminist struggles are shaped and transformed in diverse circumstances. More Info
Offered in:WGS 412L Gender, Human Rights, and Global Cinema +
Description:
This course examines cinematic narratives of social injustices, across the world, with a special focus on gender and feminism. We study the stylistic, generic, and artistic choices made by filmmakers across geographic regions to understand how, rather than a neutral medium, cinema is often ideologically constructed to reinforce imperialistic and gendered power relations. Further, we study how cinema can be a powerful mode of dissent and advocacy. We engage with the central question, How do we determine a feminist impulse, narration and motivation in cinematic production about human rights struggles, and what difference does that make? Students will examine cinema from critical interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives on human rights, aesthetics and gender. This is a hands-on, interactive course designed with the support of the Mellon Foundation. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 420 Queer of Color Critique +
Description:
This course examines the emergent theoretical field of queer of color critique, a mode of analysis grounded in the struggles and world-making of LGBTQ people of color. Activists, artists, and theorists have mobilized queer of color critique to interrogate the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and diaspora as a response to the inherent whiteness of mainstream queer theory and persistent heterosexism in ethnic studies. Students will gain an understanding of queer of color critique as a humanistic method of inquiry that includes the analysis and interpretation of ideas and symbolic expression. We will examine the development of queer of color critique (primarily in the United States) through both academic and activist domains; consider what queer theory has to say about empire, citizenship, prisons, welfare, neoliberalism, and terrorism; and articulate the role of queer of color analysis in a vision for racial, gender, sexual, and economic justice. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
WGS 478 Independent Study +
WGS 479 Independent Study +
Description:
Study of a particular area of this subject under the supervision of a faculty member. Students wishing to register must do so through the department. More Info
Offered in:WGS 490 Internship in Women's Studies +
Description:
A seminar which must be taken concurrently with WGS 491. Internship students apply their theoretical understandings in women's studies to practical experiences in supervised volunteer work. Topics include theoretical issues relevant to placements in a human service agency or social change organization; evaluation of basic skills learned in field work; and career development exercises. An oral presentation and two papers are required. Topics are integrated with discussions of students' on-site work. More Info
Offered in:WGS 491 Internship Placement +
Description:
For eight to fifteen hours each week, students participate, usually on a volunteer basis, in a supervised field placement with a women's organization, alternative institution, or an agency offering services to women and the family. Students must secure their placement one month prior to the beginning of the semester in which they plan to enroll in the course. More Info
Offered in:WGS 498 Honors Research Tutorial +
WGS 499 Honors Paper Tutorial +
Description:
A continuation of WGS 498. The honors student works on writing the honors paper under the supervision of a faculty advisor. The student receives a grade for each semester of work, but honors in women's studies will be awarded only to those who have written and presented an extended honors paper of high distinction (as evaluated by the honors committee). More Info
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