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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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GNDR_ST 390: Viruses and Viral Media
What are viruses? Are they living or dead? How does news media affect their influence on the world? And why do we say news “goes viral?” Designed for Medill and non-Medill students alike, Viruses and Viral Media will study how viruses intersect with race, sexuality, disability, economics and the news media. Historically and contemporarily, the course will look at how actual viruses and infectious diseases (such as HIV/AIDS, SARS-CoV-2, polio and monkeypox) have been covered in the global press. We will consider how certain groups of humans have been depicted as viruses themselves, such as how Jewish/disabled/queer/Roma people were described by the German and US press circa WW II; how African Americans were described in the US press circa Jim Crow; how viruses like HIV and MPX are queer(ed), and how Muslim, Mexican and migrant people are described in press and social media now. We will also consider why popular news "goes viral.” Students will work in research groups to study viruses and virality in the news throughout the term.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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