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2024-25 Course Descriptions

FALL 2024 | WINTER 2025 | SPRING 2025 | SUMMER 2025

Fall 2024

GNDR_ST 101-7: Love as a Lens for Social Justice: Why and How We Care

Can love be a force for social transformation? What would a queer or feminist ethic of care look like? In this college seminar, we will enact the concepts of love and care as a way of thinking, being, and relating to others. We will draw from queer, trans, feminist, disabled, neurodivergent, and anti-racist approaches to explore the potential of love, critical hope, and solidarity in our everyday lives. Our classroom will be a space to understand love’s powerful potential in education, interpersonal relationships, social change, and more. Together we will develop strategies to help us care for ourselves (emotionally, physically, and mentally) and build meaningful connections with others, which will create a strong foundation for thriving as a college student and beyond.

GNDR_ST 220: Sexual Subjects: Intro to Sexuality Studies

This interdisciplinary introductory lecture/discussion course surveys the sprawling topics of sex, sexuality, and sexuality studies. It is one of two courses intended as introductions to the Gender Studies major. In addition to considering the multiple ways in which sexuality is simultaneously a somatic fact, a locus of identity; a site of regulation, contestation, and sociability—and, of course, an arena of pleasure—explicit attention will be paid to the ways scholars in different disciplines (history, sociology, anthropology, literature…) have formulated and attempted to answer questions about sexuality.

GNDR_ST 231: Sinophone Feminisms

The aim of this course is to introduce the histories of feminisms and feminist consciousness in the Sinosphere, and to thus provide students with exposure to non-Western-centered cases of feminist struggles for human rights and social justice from the late nineteenth century to the present. To achieve this goal, we will analyze a variety of sources, including literature, films, and other media by authors and activists concerned with the lives and realities of Chinese women. In the course of our discussions, we will map our respective positionalities vis-à-vis the study of feminist engagements, histories, and actors in the Sinophone. Throughout the quarter we will combine our engagement with primary and secondary sources to navigate questions like: How do we study feminisms within the remit of Chinese studies? What biases, legacies, and challenges do we need to contend with as scholars working (mostly) in the Anglophone outside of the Sinosphere? Who determines when and where Sinophone feminist engagements emerged? What disciplinary methodologies and tools do we have in our interdisciplinary toolbox that we can deploy as researchers and as teachers?

We will be joined in this enterprise by two exciting and distinct cohorts both virtually and in person. A series of guest speakers based in the USA, Europe, mainland China, and Taiwan who, in their roles as scholars and activists, will help us probe the contested claims about the births and birthplaces of Chinese feminisms, to engage, critique, and discuss both conventional and alter/native approaches to studying and teaching Sinophone feminisms in the Anglophone. We will thus have the opportunity, to engage in a dialogue with scholars like Barbara Mittler, Wang Zheng, Jia Tan, and others. For each of these lectures, we will share a virtual synchronous classroom with fellow classmates in Heidelberg University, who will attend an intensive version of this course over Summer 2024, also taught by Professor Zamperini. Our learning will thus help us build a collective, transcultural, and global community of thinkers and researchers, one that helpfully will continue long after the end of our course at the end of the Fall quarter.

Knowledge of Chinese and previous exposure to the course’s topics, while helpful, is not required.

GNDR_ST 233: Gender, Politics and Philosophy

This course is an introduction to philosophical problems concerning gender and politics. What is gender and what is its relation to sex and sexuality? What is gender injustice and why is it wrong? What are the causes of gender injustice and how could we overcome it? And what is the relation of feminist theory to lived experience and to political action? We will read and critically discuss both historical and contemporary texts addressing these questions.

GNDR_ST 235: Black Life. Trans Life.

This course will introduce students to the parameters and textures of black life, trans life, and black trans life. Popular discourse has either depicted black trans people as glamorous superstars or always and already predisposed to death. This course, then, seeks to usefully complicate these narratives and focus on black and trans life. To that end, the course will task students with gaining an understanding of the nuances of black life via its entanglement with the afterlife of slavery and contemporary radicalism; with trans life via its troubling of the gender binary; and black trans life via the ways that blackness and transness interact and converge. This is, in short, a course on black life, full stop; trans life, full stop; and black trans life, full stop.

GNDR_ST 260: Critical Fat Studies

This course explores fat studies as a corpus of theory and research that critically examines the medical, social, and cultural pathologization of weight and size. In the first half of the course, we will examine cultural flashpoints that inform anti-fat biases, including the emergence of the body mass index scale, the invention of “diet” foods, and the shortcomings of studying fatness in empirical studies. Scholarly readings will be organized around Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes award-winning podcast “Maintenance Phase.” In the second half of the course, we will consider multiple responses to anti-fatness that attempt to reimagine health and wellness by reducing weight stigma. These include the queer fat liberation movement, the “body positivity” movement and the “Health at Every Size” paradigm. We ask, what logics do these paradigms mobilize to fight against fatness, or against anti-fat bias? We emphasize gender, ability, class, race and whiteness throughout this course.

GNDR_ST 321/350: Pleasure in the Archives I

In this research seminar we make extensive use of online archival collections and of materials housed in Northwestern’s Special Collections to collectively explore distinct conceptions of “pleasure/love” and the (sexual) politics to which they are hitched in the United States from the progressive era through the 1990s, with an with an emphasis on the Chicago scene. The course is organized around several key terms central to social movements in the United States across this historical period including: “free love”, “sexual freedom”, “sexual liberation”, “revolutionary love”, and “safe(r) sex.” Our goal in this course is to explore each term in its historical moment, including the social movements that rallied around these formulations, and the theories of sex/gender/sexuality being forged, recuperated &/or revised as part of this process. This course is also intended to introduce students to the practice of archival research and assignments will focus on collective research projects using pre-selected materials & curated collections. Students have the option of submitting a final research proposal that builds on course themes or completing a final research paper.

GNDR_ST 331: Sociology of Gender

This course is an opportunity for students to critically examine what is often a taken-for-granted aspect of social life: gender. This course will involve learning about gender as well as applying gender theory. We will study a variety of theoretical approaches to the study of gender, with particular focus on how problems are identified and theories are developed. We will examine several emergent cases of gender theorization -- childhood gender and sexuality panics, bathroom surveillance, and the intersex experience, among others. By the end of the term, students will be able to 1) describe and compare theoretical anchors for the sociological study of gender and 2) in writing, apply gender theory to original ethnographic data. This is a reading-heavy upper division course and prior course experience in gender/sexuality studies (by way of taking Gender & Society or other course work) is strongly advised.

GNDR_ST 340: Gender, Sexuality and the Law

This course is intended as a survey of how law has reflected and created distinctions on the basis of gender and sexuality throughout American history. We'll look at legal categories of gender and sexuality that have governed (and, often, continue to govern) the household (including marriage, divorce, and custody), the economy (including employment, property, and credit), and the political sphere (including voting, jury service, and citizenship). Throughout the course, we will examine the relationship between legal rules and social conditions, and discuss how various groups have challenged these legal categories.

GNDR_ST 341: Gender Expansivity in Latin America

In this course, we will be guided by the following question: can the term “trans” inflect a global trans culture? We will frame our discussions of within historical, political, and economic contexts throughout Latin America to examine how hemispheric flows of global capital, culture, and knowledge impact gender expansive identities and world building. Readings will reflect diverse forms of scholarship, from traditional sources produced in academic settings to memoirs, manifestos, graffiti, film, art, poetry, novels, social media and other forms of virtual content creation. As we explore, we will also consider more specific questions, including: what are travesti politics? What does it mean to have the right to be a monster? What happens to gender when one crosses a border? In what ways do transness and gender expansivity relate to institutionalized structures of power? What indigenous subjectivities might be understood as gender expansive? Reading knowledge of Spanish is recommended, but not required.

GNDR_ST 341/350: Universal Trans Rights and Medical Procedures

This course is situated at the intersection of theoretical, cultural, and medical discourses concerning trans* rights and bodies in several national contexts. Of particular interest will be the notion of universal trans rights, as recently articulated in UN Documents arguing that trans rights are human rights, against the backdrop of Gender Affirmation Surgeries (GAS) and Gender Affirming Care as it is presented in medical literature, advertised on the world wide web, and practiced both domestically and via the international medical travel industry. Using “Trans” theories: transgender, transnational, translation, spatio/temporal transitions, we will discuss the intersections, dialogues, refusals, and adoptions when thinking about the language of human rights and medical/surgical interventions. We will examine cultural/historical conceptions of sex and genders as well as debates concerning bodies and diagnoses that took place during the drafting of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) and International WPATH Standards of Care, among others. Comparative cultural studies, medical discourses, and an archive of web images offering trans-related surgeries in, specifically US and Thai contexts will serve as axes for investigating this topic. The central focus of your writing requirements will be your own research paper, on a topic of your choice related to themes of the course. You will work on this step by step throughout the quarter, with consistent feedback and support to enable a sustained and successful seminar paper. The support and sustained attention will enable you to produce a thoughtful and rigorous essay, developing skills essential to the practices of academic scholarship.

GNDR_ST 361: Queering the Crown: Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Their Afterlives

How can we think about the transhistorical nature of queerness in English culture? Moving from the Renaissance to the present, the course follows the literary careers of two influential tragedies – Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s adaptation and rewriting of it in Richard II – to think about the representation of queer kingship over time. Together we’ll analyze theatrical revolutionary Bertolt Brecht’s landmark early twentieth-century adaptation of Marlowe’s play and its “alienation effect,” twentieth-century productions and films of Marlowe tied to the early gay-liberation movement (Ian McKellen) and the early AIDS crisis (Derek Jarman’s), and twenty-first century rewritings, including a companion play that incorporates figures in/against queer culture from Gertrude Stein, Harvey Milk, and Julie Andrews to Margaret Thatcher (Tom Stuart’s play After Edward). We’ll conclude with the recent gay rom-com “Red, White, and Royal Blue.” Critical readings will delve into the history of sexuality, queer readership and book history, and theories of dramatic adaptation and performance.

GNDR_ST 362: Desire, Drama and Sorcery in 17th-Century Music

This course considers musical-dramatic works from ca. 1580-1725 that feature desire, madness and other extreme affective states in the presence of malevolent or disruptive forces. Such depictions and works additionally reflect on the era’s changing ideas about masculinity, femininity, and Western encounters with global peoples as well as retelling stories from an older literary heritage.

GNDR_ST 374: Imagining the Internet

Much recent fiction, film and theory are concerned with representing the internet and the World Wide Web. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema or telephone, but often it is envisioned as a new frontier. This course will examine the ways in which virtual media appears in cultural discourses. We consider how technological objects and tools participate in shaping elements of our culture that may appear natural, logical, or timeless. We will look examine films predicting the internet, cyberpunk fiction predating the www, and early websites from many sources. In addition, this quarter we will consider various generative AI programs, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are these narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, community and identity? Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be project-based and experiential. Your attendance and participation are mandatory. No experience needed, only a willingness to take risks and share work.

GNDR_ST 381: Queer Theory

This course will introduce you to Queer Theory and theories of sexuality, emphasizing the practice of reading theory from a variety of textual sources as well as conceiving of sexualities US, medical, international, and transnational contexts. We will trace the development of both the term queer and the history of queer theory, beginning with foundational essays by queer theorists by Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant. We will then read both canonical essays by a variety of queer theorists and essays questioning the politics of a Queer Theory canon and how that might politically occlude relevant voices and non-binary participants such as trans and BIPOC populations. These theoretical texts are placed in dialogue analyzing several contemporary fiction and film.

GNDR_ST 396: Senior Capstone Seminar

As Patricia Hill Collins acknowledges in Intersectionality as Critical Praxis (2019), “During times of such visible and contentious change, it’s reasonable to question the worth of intellectual work, especially when everyday problems seem so pressing” but argues that “resistant knowledge projects” that engage in “critical praxis,” or that conjoin critical analysis and social action, “are needed more now than ever” (290). Our goal in this seminar is to examine and explore the relationship between theory-building and social change and what Collins describes as the “recursive relationship” between theory and action in recent and foundational Black feminist, trans, and queer interdisciplinary knowledge projects central to the field of Gender & Sexuality Studies. We examine the new ways of knowing (methodologies) and forms of knowledge (epistemologies) that critical theories of intersectionality, trans liberation, and queer becoming enact, the social justice movements in which these knowledge projects were forged, and the activist projects they have inspired. Throughout, we also engage in “critical praxis” by experimenting with practices of archiving & archival research, oral history collection, (auto)ethnography, and popular education to explore the analytical and methodological tools each offers and work towards designing a final (capstone) project that contributes to these resistant knowledge projects.

GNDR_ST 397: Black Feminist Theory

This course begins not from the premise, necessarily, of an intellectual and political genealogy of black women. Though also not to the exclusion of this. But rather, this course is one that thinks black feminist—not black “women’s”—theory and theorizing; this course chronicles the ways that the political, intellectual, ethical, and social resound radically and progressively and names that resonance—and all its vibrations and textures—black feminist theory. Thus, we will, of course, be reading a variety of black women along the jagged gendered spectrum between and beyond “cis” and “trans,” but more specifically we will, in this course, be tracing the ways radical politics and ethics arise in such a way as to interrogate the established parameters of race and gender normativity, of our social world. To do this, we will be reading the work of people like bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara, Jennifer Nash and Hortense Spillers, and more.

GNDR_ST 401: Graduate Colloquium

Facilitated discussion of topics relevant to students in the course regarding the job market, academia, the field, and the like.

GNDR_ST 490-0-25: Queering the Crown: Marlowe and Shakespeare, Pre-texts and Afterlives

This course will simultaneously engage a set of methods within/around literary/performance studies and interrogate the transhistoricity of queerness. It follows the long representational career of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (c. 1592): from Holinshed’s Tudor-era chronicle history and other “pre-texts” through Shakespeare’s adaptation/revision/rewriting in Richard II, to the emergence of the theatrical-alienation effect in Bertolt Brecht’s early twentieth-century translation/adaptation Leben Eduards des Zweiten, twentieth-century productions and films tied to the early gay-liberation movement (Ian McKellen in repertory as both kings) and the early AIDS crisis (Derek Jarman and “New Queer Cinema”), to contemporary re-writings -- Tom Stuart’s play After Edward; a German opera that weaves together antisemitism and homophobia; the recent rom-com “Red, White, and Royal Blue.” Critical readings in the history of sexuality, queer theory, “source” study, history of the book, adaptation theory, theory of tragedy, critical race studies and casting, and performance studies.

GNDR_ST 490-0-26: Graduate Topics in Sociological Analysis

This seminar will investigate how gender shapes politics, and how politics in turn shapes gender, with gender conceptualized as a set of relations, identities and cultural schema, co-constituted with other dimensions of power, difference and inequality (e.g., race, class, sexuality, religion, citizenship status). We aim to understand gendered politics and policy from both "top down" and "bottom up" perspectives. What do states do, via institutions of political participation and representation, citizenship rights and policies, and official categorization to shape gender relations? How do gender relations influence the nature of policy, classification systems, and citizenship? How have movements and counter-movements around the transformation of gender developed, and how have gendered divides influenced politics of all sorts? We expand on conventional conceptions of political participation and citizenship rights to include grassroots democratic activism, the creation of alternative visions of democracy, social provision and economic participation, as well as examining formal politics and policies. We will read and discuss scholars drawing on diverse theoretical and methodological traditions, and we engage with analyses of a variety of contexts across the world (the US, other rich capitalist democracies, postcolonial states and beyond), striving to situate states and political mobilization in global contexts. Because this course is interdisciplinary, students will gain greater understanding of the diverse disciplinary approaches to gendered politics of political science, sociology, history and gender and sexuality studies.

GNDR_ST 490-0-27: Embodiment/Materiality/Affect

This seminar explores theoretical approaches to the problems of embodiment/materiality/affect. One aim of the course is to examine various methodological approaches to embodiment, materiality and affect, making use of sociology and philosophy (Pierre Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza, Massumi). The second and closely related aim is to situate bodies in time and place, that is, in history. Here we look to the particular circumstances that shaped the manner in which historical actors experienced their bodies in the Christian west (Peter Brown, Caroline Bynum, Mary Carruthers, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault). Ultimately, we will be examining theoretical tools while we put them to work. The goal: how to use these thinkers to write more dynamic, creative, interesting scholarship?

 

Winter 2025

GNDR_ST 101-8: Millennial Gender

For good reason, we often discuss or internally experience our genders and sexualities within the terms, frames, and knowledges available to us now. When we admit that genders and sexualities are not just “inborn” or unchanging over time, many of the histories we excavate stretch back for centuries. Resisting both impulses, this course uses popular cinema in the US and around the world to assess just how much changes in our notions of gender identity and sexual desire even over short spans of time—25 years, to be exact, which is lengthy for those not yet born in 1999-2000 but just yesterday for those of us who were engaged in these conversations and self-discoveries as a new millennium started.

Students will learn that all kinds of films, from studio blockbusters to tiny independents, took unusually overt interest in changing categories and expansive experiences of gender and sexuality around the Y2K moment: the era of All About My Mother, Fight Club, Ghost Dog, Boys Don’t Cry, But I’m a Cheerleader, Election, and many other enduring touchstones. We will also investigate how evolving fields like feminism and queer theory plus burgeoning scholarship in trans studies and masculinity studies were generating vocabularies, challenging assumptions, and entering into spirited debates in the same moment. Through a combination of discussions and writing assignments, some collective and some self-determined, students will gain valuable skills (how to close-read a movie, how to engage a scholarly article) and also engage in a quarter-long, inquisitive, respectful, and hopefully surprising conversation about the recent past, fluid present, and possible futures of gender and sexuality, on and off screen.

GNDR_ST 230: Traditions in Feminist Thought

This course is a rigorous introduction to feminisms’ multiple intellectual and political traditions and genealogies within and outside the US and the Western world, at different historical junctures. The course emphasizes the rich debates that have been staged within feminisms as feminists have labored to imagine other worlds in a variety of media and contexts. Our task will be to understand how these varied feminist traditions have interrogated the same sites – marriage and family, sexuality, reproduction, the nation and the state, work, liberation, and feminism itself – in radically different ways, depending on the context and society. Why are these themes or problems the key areas that feminist theorists have focused on across time and cultural divides? How have feminists around the world imagined these spaces as both sites of oppression and potential venues for freedom and emancipation? How can you encounter, think with, and live with feminist expressions and engagements outside the classroom?

GNDR_ST 231: Fashion Matters

This course will focus on the anthropological, cultural, historical, and social development of F/fashion, clothing, textiles, and their consumption in East Asia, past and present. Using a variety of sources, from fiction to art, from bodily modification to textile production, from legal codes to advertisements, we will study both actual garments created and worn throughout history, as well as the ways in which they inform identity markers such as class, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. Among the topics we will analyze in this sense will be hairstyles, foot-binding, plastic surgery, and, in a deeper sense, bodily practices that inform most fashion-related discourses in East Asia. We will also think through the issue of fashion design, production, and consumption as an often-contested site of modernity, especially in relationship to the issue of globalization and world-market. Thus, we will also include a discussion of international fashion designers, along with analysis of phenomena such as sweatshops.

GNDR_ST 232-0-20: Masculinities & Society

Gender studies have traditionally focused on women. Yet critical work on men and masculinities show us how people of all genders are constrained by gender expectations and assumptions. Furthermore, studies of masculinities shed light on practical questions like, why do men die earlier than women? And, why are men more likely to commit mass shootings? In recent years, the public spotlight has cast light on savory and unsavory aspects of masculinity; think about the rise of the term “toxic masculinity,” the #MeToo movement, advertisements aimed at men, and blogs commenting on the behavior of men on the reality show The Bachelorette.

In this course, we will go beyond banal statements like “men are trash” to critically ask, what role does masculinity play in social life? How is masculinity produced, and are there different ways to be masculine? This course provides students with an intensive introduction to the foundational theory and research in the field of masculinities studies. We will use an intersectional lens to study the ways in which the concept and lived experience of masculinity are shaped by economic, social, cultural, and political forces. As we study the institutions that socialize people into gender, we will examine how the gendered social order influences the way people of all genders perform masculinity as well as the ways men perceive themselves, people of other genders, and social situations. Verbally and in writing, students will develop an argument about the way contemporary masculinity is constructed and performed.

GNDR_ST 232-0-21: Sex, Gender, Sexuality

What is sex? What is gender? What is sexuality? How are they related? Are they social constructs or biological realities? Can we have one without the others? In this upper division undergraduate seminar, we will explore the interconnected nexus of sex, gender, and sexuality. The course will expose students to a range of theoretical approaches to sex, gender, and sexuality from sociology as well as other disciplines. The course will also provide students with practice applying these theories to real-life cases. Additionally, students will develop the skills to perform qualitative coding—a key method of analysis of sociological data. By the end of the course, students will have explored a research question of their choice related to sex, gender, and/or sexuality by qualitatively coding data in NVivo.

GNDR_ST 234: Language and Gender

An exploration of the role that gender plays in the language of and about men and women, focusing on gendered speech as part of social practice in local communities. Topics include identity categories and labels, gender-based slurs and ‘reclaimed epithets’ (e.g. "bitch", "slut". "brat"), gender vs. sex vs. sexuality, the contested notion of ‘political correctness’, sexist/misogynist language, and linguistic prescriptivism.

GNDR_ST 321: Capitalism and Desire: Mapping Sexualities in 19th Century Paris

“By transforming love into romance, capitalist society allows us to continue desiring.” By structuring satisfaction as ever incomplete, capitalism propels us to seek “the new, the better, and the more,” writes film scholar Todd McGowan. Testing this contention on the “psychic costs of free markets,” this class will take students to mid-nineteenth century Paris, when the modern iconic city of romance, with its elegant bridges, wide boulevards, endless fashion displays, and vibrant café life, was created in the capitalist transformation of its physical space and social relationships. Based on readings from feminist and queer theory, urban geography, sociology, art history, literature, and social history, we will use these various perspectives to study our main laboratory: the massive urban renewal projects under Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire of Napoleon III that demolished the twisted winding streets of old Paris to build a modern capital city of commerce and leisure.

Using three of Emile Zola’s novels on the “Haussmannization” of Paris, we will examine how changes in the physical structure altered the old connections between illicit sexualities and nonconforming gender practices. We will investigate how the new department stores, apartment buildings, the café-concerts, open-air promenades, and parks promoted bourgeois gender norms and sexual identities. In turn, we will ask how, with its new opportunities and deep losses, the moral economy of capitalism (its logic of production, profit taking, and social transactions) encouraged new subjectivities that ultimately reshaped both public and intimate spaces, as well as notions of pleasure and criminality. Most importantly, we will ask: what happened to love? The class combines lectures, in-class discussions, with short weekly assignments. With the guidance of the instructor, students will design and write a research paper (7 to 10 pages) reflecting on these topics.

GNDR_ST 321/350: Making Sense of the "Second Wave" of Feminism in/for the Present

As we grapple with the urgencies of the present, what are the politics (and promise) of telling more complex and nuanced stories of activism and social change? In recent years, the "second wave" of feminism (1968-1980) has increasingly been conflated with "white, middle-class feminism" and critiqued as an exclusionary form of feminist politics in contrast to the more intersectional feminist politics of the "third" and "fourth" waves of feminism. Numerous historians of the period have challenged us to reconsider this claim, which elides "feminism's deeply questioning, queer, coalitional and anti-imperialist past" and risks missing "some ways that feminist, lesbian, and queer of color and trans activists grappled hard to develop critical insights and knowledges that move us today" (Enke 2018). In this course, we will begin by exploring which projects, groups, and concerns have come to define the "second wave" (and subsequent “waves”) of feminism in the United States in our collective memory. We then turn to recent histories of the "second wave,” coupled with oral histories from movement participants, that challenge us to reconsider what counts as "feminist politics" during this period. For example, histories that focus on the formation of broad-based coalitions across and between liberation movements around issues of economic justice, reproductive rights, and the right to "self-defense" against both interpersonal and state violence during this period, challenge us to expand our conception of feminist activism. In the process, they require us to incorporate the "critical insights and knowledges" of labor and welfare rights activists, sex workers and gay liberationists, Black, Chicana, Puerto Rican and Indigenous liberation movement members as central to the feminist politics of the period. Guided student research into ongoing/current feminist projects (e.g. SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, Chicago Abortion Fund, Survived&Punished, Critical Resistance, Sylvia Rivera Law Project) aid us in identifying the legacies of this historical period in feminist activism in 2025.

GNDR_ST 331: Sociology of Gender

This class will investigate how gender shapes politics and policy, and how these in turn shape gender, in the United States and other countries, situated in global context. Gender is conceptualized as a set of relations, identities and cultural schema, always constituted with other dimensions of power, difference and inequality (e.g., race, class, sexuality, religion, citizenship status). We will analyze the gendered character of citizenship, political participation and representation, social rights and economic rights. We aim to understand gendered politics and policy from both "top down" and "bottom up" perspectives. What do states do, via institutions of political participation and representation, citizenship rights and policies, to shape gender relations? How do gender relations influence the nature of policy and citizenship? How has feminism emerged as a radical challenge to the androcentrism and restricted character of the democratic public sphere? And how has anti-feminism come to be a significant dimension of politics? We expand on conventional conceptions of political participation and citizenship rights to include the grassroots democratic activism that gave birth to modern women's movements. We explore how women's political efforts have given rise to the creation of alternative visions of democracy, social provision and economic participation, as well as reshaping formal politics and policies. And, finally, we will take advantage of the fact that we are in the middle of an election to examine some of the gendered aspects of the political landscape in the contemporary United States.

GNDR_ST 332: Heath Activism

How do conceptions of "health" relate to ideological assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality? In this course, we will explore this question through a close examination of a range of activist movements that have attempted to challenge contemporaneous conceptions of health and models of disease. Case studies will include the 19th century birth control and eugenics movements, 1970s-era women's health movement(s) and Black Panther Party "survival (pending revolution) programs", ACT UP and AIDS activism, reproductive rights/justice movement activism, breast cancer and environmental activism, mental health activism in the era of psychopharmacology, and recent/ongoing "mutual aid" projects. In each case, we will consider how activists frame the problem, the tactics they use to mobilize a diverse group of social actors around the problem, and their success in creating a social movement that challenges contemporary medical models and the ideological assumptions that inform them. The course also introduces students to recent interdisciplinary scholarship on social movements.

GNDR_ST 361: Abolitionist Feminisms at the Border

Abolitionist politics demand sustained and nuanced critiques of world systems and an end to the ways they enact violence. To this end, to engage in abolitionist feminism is to consider assumptions around criminal punishment and carcerality, with an explicit attention to Black, Latinx, Indigenous, queer, and trans perspectives. From this vantage, this course will examine borders, both national and intimate, as one of the most violent and carceral spaces of our time. We ask, for example: What does it mean to abolish borders? What is the difference between this and open borders? Is the abolishment of ICE and other forms of border policing sufficient? Similarly, how has the social sphere adopted border logics? What do Indigenous “land back” initiatives look like under abolition? How might we “rehearse life” under current oppressive regimes as we work toward abolitionist futures?

GNDR_ST 372: Masculinities in 16th C. Opera

This course considers ways in which changing understanding of manhood, manliness, masculinity and male sexuality were reflected in music created, performed, and consumed in a variety of spaces and for a range of purposes among contrasting Western European cultures and sub-cultures during the 1500s.

GNDR_ST 380: Black Feminisms in a Francophone Context. From the Second World War to Global Anti-Blackness

What is the meaning of “Black Feminism” out of its US experience and initial theorization in the United States? How did women of African descent in Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland), the Caribbean (Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique), the Indian Ocean (La Réunion, Mayotte, and the Comoros) and Africa (Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo), whose cultures and political experiences were – at least partly – impacted by French and Belgium colonial legacy, forge their critiques of patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism, racism? How did they also develop their own imagination of social justice, autonomy, and emancipation? Based on a wide range of materials and references driven by the social sciences, literature, and cinema, this course aims to introduce undergraduate students to a non-US-centered and transnational perspective on Black feminisms. The historical period will span from the early 20th century to the contemporary era. According to specific topics addressed in the class, comparative insights with the English-speaking Caribbean and Africa and women’s experiences in the Global South will also be included in the conversation and materials.

GNDR_ST 381: Queer Theory

This course will introduce you to Queer Theory and theories of sexuality, emphasizing the practice of reading theory from a variety of textual sources as well as conceiving of sexualities in local and transnational contexts. We will query the development of queer theory, beginning with work by Michel Foucault and foundational queer theorists by Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michael Warner, and Lauren Berlant. We will from standard canonical essays by a variety of queer theorists to essays questioning the politics of a Queer Theory canon and how that might politically occlude relevant voices such as trans and BIPOC contributions. Analysis focuses on textual critiques and cultural studies methodology, including several fictional texts and films. Seminar discussions require attendance and active participation. We will query how queer theory formulates racial, class, and national identities in relation to sexuality, and how it might offer politics beyond those based on identity. Most readings are done on a shared platform (Hypothesis) so students annotate, comment, and reply to each other on all assignments including class readings, midterm essay, and seminar paper.

GNDR_ST 397: Feminist Theory

Trans and Non-Binary Feminisms: A Deep Dive

Recent years have seen a resurgence of transantagonism in feminist spaces. Although popular figures like J.K. Rowling and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have taken stances against trans people, and the increasing popularity of “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism” and “Gender Critical Feminism,” “trans” and “feminism” are in fact historically co-constitutive. In this course, we will trace that history to answer the questions: should feminism intervene in trans rights? And, should trans and non-binary people be considered the proper subject of feminism? We will explore text, documentary, and film that provide insights into trans feminism’s roots in lesbian and gay liberation movements of the 1970s and in woman of color feminisms; we will also consider the early feminist debates of Trans Studies as an emergent academic discipline in the 1990s and 2000s. In the second half of the course, we will expand trans and feminism beyond the US context to consider decolonial trans* feminisms globally, with special emphasis on trans* discourses in Latin America. Students will leave this course with a better understanding of the complexity and importance of trans feminisms as a world-building framework, as well as their legacies and futures; students will also have ample opportunities to explore their own trans feminist praxis. 

GNDR_ST 401: Graduate Colloquium

 

GNDR_ST 490-0-20: Queer Theory

The central concerns of this graduate seminar are to familiarize students with critical issues, methods, and practices of Queer Theory. Our readings include foundational/early texts naming and/or refusing the topic/discipline itself as well as the way in which the practices of “reading queerly” occur in not only what we recognize as theory, but also fiction and film. We will examine and discuss critiques of the Queer Theory canons and work together to create a more relevant, inclusive lineage that considers BIPOC voices, trans theory, critical race theory, diasporic, and transnational texts that supplement the too often white, US-centric field of inquiry. Students will be expected to read carefully and critically, interrogate and analyze the complex intersections of sexualities through cultural and sociopolitical analysis that incorporate gender, race, economic and access disparities and other dimensions reflecting contemporary queer concerns broadly conceived. Close reading will be the primary methodology practiced through class readings and writing, and by the quarter’s conclusion, students will create reading lists or possible syllabi they might consider teaching in the future. In addition to this discipline-specific reading list, students will be expected to actively participate in class discussions including leading, singly or in groups, a section of a course meeting. Writing requirements consist of one short close-reading paper and a quarter-long project culminating in a 12–15-page seminar paper on a topic of their choice that demonstrates the production of queer theory from a first-person perspective.

GNDR_ST 490-0-22: Knowledge & Politics

This course will explore how scholars represent states reproducing, maintaining, or destroying a particular body politic. In doing so we will engage theories of "biopolitics" and "biopower," broadly conceived. The objective is to understand the uses and disadvantages of Michel Foucault's critiques of discourses of sovereignty for analyzing current political conflicts situated in practices of the nation, race, class, and the family, as well as the subject positions associated with these, e.g., citizens, immigrants, Whites, Asians, rich, poor the 1%, dependents, women, men, LGBT, queer, and many more. The course will attend to the intellectual and political history informing Foucault's critiques of, and elaborations on, the discourse of sovereignty, including legal discourses. During class meetings we will discuss Foucault's historical periodizations of changing discourses of power/knowledge relations associated with biopolitics and evaluate the metanarrative that informs his heuristics. Lectures will discuss the readings in the context of Foucault's own intellectual history. The class will read extensively from works by Foucault as well as texts by Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Bruno Perreau, Jacques Rancière, Ann Stoler, and others. Students are encouraged to reflect on how the readings are in conversation with their own research interests and highlight these in class

GNDR_ST 490-0-23: Masculinities in 16th C. Opera

This course considers ways in which changing understanding of manhood, manliness, masculinity and male sexuality were reflected in music created, performed, and consumed in a variety of spaces and for a range of purposes among contrasting Western European cultures and sub-cultures during the 1500s.

Spring 2025

GNDR_ST 101-8-1: Coalition Politics from Chicago and Beyond

TBD 

GNDR_ST 221: Beyond Porn: Sexuality, Health and Pleasure

TBD 

GNDR_ST 231: Contemporary Women Authors of South Korea and Feminist Criticism

TBD 

GNDR_ST 2XX: Sociology of Gender

TBD 

GNDR_ST 321: Gender, Race and the Holocaust

TBD 

GNDR_ST 332: Gender, Health and Medicine

TBD

GNDR_ST 332/350: Sex, Gender, Sexuality, Race and Technoscience

TBD

GNDR_ST 350: Who is Afraid of Black Sexuality?

TBD

GNDR_ST 382: Gender, Race and the Politics of Beauty

TBD

GNDR_ST 397: Latinx Feminisms

TBD

GNDR_ST 490-0-20: Reading Gender Otherwise: Indigenous Movements and Literature in Latin America

TBD

GNDR_ST 490-0-22: Afrofeminists. Black Women Challenging Colorblindness in Europe

TBD 

SUMMER 2025

GNDR_ST 390: TBD

TBD