GENDER & SEXUALITY STUDIES PROGRAM

GNDR_ST 101-6-20: Imagining the Internet: Fiction, Film & Theory

GNDR_ST 231-0-20: Contemporary Women Filmmakers

This course comprises a survey of 21st-century films directed, written, and/or produced by female- and femme-identified creators in and beyond the US, including case studies of distinguished artists who have sustained rich and varied bodies of work. Refusing such monolithic ideas as a “female gaze,” we will consider the narrative, aesthetic, and thematic specificities of each film we study and how these nuances enrich conversations about gender, race, class, power, and point of view that unfold within and around each text. As a necessary foundation for watching, discussing, and writing persuasively about film, course participants will learn and practice important terms and techniques related to images, edits, and sounds in cinema and how they crucially shape and complicate story—sometimes even opposing what the dialogue and plot points appear to suggest. Assigned films are likely to include Atlantics (Senegal, 2019), Ava (Iran, 2017), The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Canada, 2019), Hustlers (USA, 2019), Middle of Nowhere (USA, 2012), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (France, 2019), The Power of the Dog (New Zealand, 2021), and Zola (USA, 2020).

GNDR_ST 234-0-20: Language & 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" and "slut"), gender vs. sex vs. sexuality, the contested notion of ‘political correctness’, sexist/misogynist language, and the role of linguistic prescriptivism.

GNDR_ST 321-0-20: Pleasure in the Archives

I find myself increasingly insisting on the importance of history, not because things were better (or worse) in an earlier time but because, as cocreators of collective memory, we’re all doing it one way and another, and it matters how we tell the story.—Finn Enke, “Collective Memory and the Transfeminist 1970s” TSQ (2018) 

In a recent article, historian Finn Enke points out that “1970s feminism has entered collective memory as an exclusionary thing, distinct from the experiences, labor, and critiques by feminists of color, trans and queer people of the same era” but challenges us to reconsider “feminism’s deeply questioning, queer, coalitional and anti-imperialist past,” or risk 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.” Much recent scholarship on this period has taken up Enke’s challenge including histories that document the anti-imperialist and coalitional politics of the “gay and lesbian left” (Lavender and Red, 2016), explore “the long history of transfeminist activism” (TSQ Special Issue: Trans/Feminisms, 2016), recuperate the critical contributions of Black feminist organizations in “broadening the scope of the women’s movement” (Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980, 2005), and chronicle “activism by, for, and about incarcerated domestic violence survivors, criminalized rape resisters, and dissident women prisoners in 1970s and early 1980s” (All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing and the Feminist Fight to End Violence, 2018).  

Our goal in this seminar is to engage and contribute to this larger project through our own collective archival research. Our seminar, co-taught by NU archivist Jason Nargis, will be held in Special Collections and a portion of each class will be devoted to working with archival materials. Course readings will include selections from these recent dissident histories of 1970s feminism. Together we will examine how they make use of new archives, reading strategies and research methods to offer a more nuanced account of second-wave feminism and practice using these research strategies through in-class assignments with (pre-selected) archival materials. Our final class project will be to collectively curate our findings in two forms—an exhibition in the Main Library and as a StoryMap. This seminar will introduce students to the practice of archival research as well as to the remarkable range of archival materials from this period housed in Special Collections at NU and will also include two lab sessions in the Media and Design Studio. 

GNDR_ST 321-0-21: Medieval Sexuality

Christian theorists were convinced that human sexuality underwent an irreversible debasement as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve. Their negative assessment has remained with us until the present day. This course will grapple with the both the origins of this negative bequest as well as some of the anomalies of the medieval tradition. For example, despite the insistence that heterosexuality was ordained by God, the disparagement of physicality and women led to the institutionalization of clerical celibacy in the West. This, in turn, fostered a gay subculture. Likewise, despite the theoretical insistence on a separation between the sexes that was even present in the afterlife, these same theorists not only praised "virile women," but occasionally celebrated cross-dressing in female saints! This course will examine the institutions and ideas that dominated the construction of gender in the Middle Ages. It will also lend insight into not one, but many "sexualities."

GNDR_ST 332-0-20: Black Feminist Health Science Studies

Black feminist health science studies is a critical intervention into a number of intersecting arenas of scholarship and activism, including feminist health studies, contemporary medical curriculum reform conversations and feminist technoscience studies. We argue towards a theory of Black feminist health science studies that builds on social justice science, which has as its focus the health and well-being of marginalized groups. Students will engage feminist science theories that range from explorations of the linguistic metaphors of the immune system, the medicalization of race, to critiques of the sexual binary. We will use contemporary as well as historical moments to investigate the evolution of “scientific truth” and its impact on the U.S. cultural landscape.

GNDR_ST 332-0-22: Beyond Porn: Sexuality, Health, and Pleasure

Threesomes. Vibrators. Butt plugs. Multiple orgasms. You may have seen them in pornography, but have you ever wanted to study and talk about sex, and specifically, how to have a satisfying sex life? Many people look to pornography not just for entertainment, but also for education about what satisfying sexual encounters look like. Unfortunately, much of what people learn from pornography doesn’t lead them to healthy and satisfying sexual encounters and relationships. This lecture class seeks to go beyond many presumptions about sex and pleasure from pornography and popular culture, in order to equip students with information that can lead to more satisfying and healthy sexual experiences. Topics covered will include: physiological and biological sex; gender; sexual orientation; sexual variety; sexual pleasure; sexual dysfunctions; intimacy and effective communication; sexually transmitted infections; contraception, pregnancy, and childbirth; sexuality through the lifespan; sexual violence and coercion; as well as content driven specifically by students’ specific interests and questions as relates to sexuality, health and pleasure. The course also takes a cross-cultural and historical perspective, exploring how past and present perceptions about sex and gender affect prominent attitudes and presumptions about human sexuality and health in different contexts.

GNDR_ST 341-0-20: A Writing of Their Own: Chinese Woman Writers Between Empire and Modernity

This course focuses on women writers from the end of the Qing dynasty through the Republican period, to conclude with the late twentieth century. We will read the work of authors like Xiao Hong, Zhang Ailing, Ding Ling, Wang Anyi, Can Xue, Guo Xiaoluo, Hong Ying, among others, and, drawing from a variety of disciplinary approaches, we will explore the fraught relationship between gender, sexuality, literature, and identity.

We will first engage the rise of female professional authors between the fall of the Qing and the Republican period, to then turn to the political turn in authors during the rise of the CCP; lastly, we will move on to late twentieth and early twenty-first century female-authored fiction in the Sinophone and beyond. In addition to primary sources, we will integrate theoretical work in the field of gender and sexuality studies, feminist studies, and queer theory, as well as Chinese cinema and culture. Previous knowledge of Chinese literature and culture, though helpful, is not required. We will spend a great deal of time reading primary sources (in English translation, and in Chinese, for those who are able to), so the only real requisite for this is to love reading fiction.

GNDR_ST 353-0-20: Queer Criminality & Political Transgression

This course addresses the political potentials of criminality within queer life by considering historical and contemporary acts of queer transgression as “criminal.” We will draw from literature that underscores the criminalization of queer life, particularly the hyper-criminalization of queer communities of color, but this course will also move beyond mechanisms of criminalization by asking critical questions about queer illegalism and its capacity to destabilize an existing political world. Reading within historical studies of criminality in the social sciences, specifically anthropology and political science, we will consider queer criminality as a departure from other interpretations of crime as - for instance - pathological, symptomatic, opportunistic, reactionary, constructed, or in collusion with “legitimate” political and economic orders. While still attending to these themes through keys texts in the study of crime, this course reflects on how conceptualizations of political transgression and crime have been historically transformed and renewed through queer thought and approaches, particularly through figures such as the deviant, the outlaw, or the rebel. We will discuss these figures within theorizations of broader political transgression, such as social movements, uprisings, and revolutions.

GNDR_ST 361-0-20: Early Modern Sexualities

This course explores the history of sex and sexualities -- in all their variety -- in English Renaissance literature and culture. Before the homo/hetero divide, before what Michel Foucault calls as "the implantation of the perverse," before genders in their modern forms, what were the routes, locations, effects, and politics of sex and desire? To what extent can we discuss "sexuality" in relation to "identity" in the pre-modern era? To address these complex questions, and to begin to ask new ones, we will concentrate on a range of exemplary literary and historical texts from around 1600 in England. We will be interested to explore both the multiple forms and functions of desire, eroticism, sex, asexuality, gender, gender-identification, etc. in this culture, as well as the terms, methods, and theories we now use to read the sexual past. We will gain fluency in the seemingly familiar but simultaneously foreign languages of early modern identities and desires: sodomy, tribadism, friendship, marriage; bodies, their parts, and their pleasures. We will interrogate sex/gender's intersections with such categories as race, religion, social class, and nation, and we will think through some new scholarship on trans* identities in early modern culture.

GNDR_ST 361-0-21: Illness and Femininity: Fictions and Facts

Ill women are scattered across the pages of literature, from swooning ladies in sentimental novels to cancer patients in popular fiction. Illness acts as narrative momentum, as a metaphor for social “ills,” and as a signifier of tragic virtue in an individual character. From the 19th century to the present, this class will examine how the tropes of illness in popular literature pertains to our broader cultural assumptions about illness and gender. How do traits associated with femininity resemble literary representations of illness, and vice-versa? How have these associations changed over time? How has the construction of ill femininity been bound up in whiteness, and how has this contributed to systemic and medical racism? What is the relationship between the representation of ill femininity and contemporary “wellness culture”? How might we locate or analyze femininity in representations of ill men? What about mental illness? Our readings will be split between popular representations of illness in novels and writings by ill authors, and we will consider how literary tropes are or are not reappropriated by the latter. -- Readings Include: Anonymous, The Woman of Colour (1808); Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813); Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939); Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993); David Chariandy, Soucouyant (2007). We will also read personal essays, poetry, portions of memoirs, or short stories by authors including Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Eula Biss, Anne Anlin Cheng, Suleika Jaouad, Audre Lorde, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michelle Zauner.

GNDR_ST 372-0-21: Composer Topics: John Cage

This course explores the music, writing, and collaborations of John Cage (1912-1992) through archival materials held in Northwestern University Library's Special Collections. It will introduce students to the rich historical documentation held on site as well as develop students' skills using archival material. The course will focus largely on John Cage's collaborations with other musicians and artists including Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Morton Feldman, and Charlotte Moorman. The class will meet in Deering Library 200 and is limited to 15 students. All students must be familiar with music notation.

GNDR_ST 373-0-20: Women in Chinese Cinema, 1922-2022

The focus of this course is mainland Chinese films about women and by women in twentieth and twenty-first century cinematic horizons. We will address the issue of women as actresses, as celebrities, and as objects, as well as subjects of representations through the intersectional lenses of gender, sexuality, politics, status, and material culture. Our course will be chronologically arranged, and we will screen well-known and lesser-known films, directed by male and female auteurs, in order to explore the dynamics and potentials for representations of women and female figures, such as goddesses, downtrodden proletarians, sex-workers, actresses, heroines, iconoclastic revolutionaries, and filial daughters. In addition to primary sources, we will integrate theoretical work in the field of gender and sexuality studies, feminist studies, and queer theory, as well as Chinese cinema and culture. Previous knowledge of Chinese culture and/or gender and sexuality studies, though helpful, is not required.

GNDR_ST 374-0-20: Imagining the Internet: Fiction, Film & Theory

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. 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? We will focus on social networking, gaming, artificial intelligence, and literary and filmic representations of these. 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 382-0-20: Sex Work in Asian America

From karaoke bars to military bases, from local dungeons to worldwide webcams, from sites of grassroots organization to spaces of neoliberal legislation, between international borders and across electronically mediated networks, how are these institutions, spaces, subjects, and normalized practices interconnected through a web of power, control, and profit and how have Asian Americans navigated and negotiated these terrains?

Students will read an array of texts written by and/or relating to Asian/American sex workers, including: historical and contemporary legislation, selections from ethnographic studies of sex work in Asia and the United States, as well as first-hand accounts of Asian/American sex workers who make a living by teaching/practicing BDSM, shooting mainstream and internet pornography, supplying consensual sexual services, organizing for sex worker rights and the decriminalization of sex work, and more. Students should be prepared to engage with texts, films, and speakers covering a spectrum of experiences/intensities emerging from this course’s capacious approach to the concept of “sex work.”

GNDR_ST 397-0-20: Feminist Theory

Feminists theorize a changing world as we seek to reshape it. If, as Arundhati Roy has written, the pandemic is a portal between one world and the next, what do we carry with us to fight for the world to come? This class examines the “classic” works of feminist theory and their political interventions in light of our solidarity with the social justice vision of #BlackLivesMatter, a movement named and launched by Black women. We will reconsider foundational questions of feminist theorizing: 1. How has intersectionality challenged who and what is a woman? 2. Who makes knowledge and for whom? 3. Futurism and utopias. 4. In creating a queer affirming, trans uplifting community, welcoming to all gender expressions and all sexual identities, regardless of economic status, age, ability or disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location, #BLM philosophy affirms that protest is expansive and loving. Importantly, what do we learn from restorative justice as a healing practice in the struggles against anti-Black state-sanctioned and vigilante violence? How do we re-center feminisms within the long genealogy of freedom, abolitionism(s), and world-making?

GNDR_ST 401-0-20: Graduate Colloquium

The Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Colloquium is an interactive, participatory forum for graduate students in the GSS cluster and certificate programs. Activities include the circulation and discussion of work-in-progress and a workshop for pre-professional activities, meetings with faculty in the program, presentations by recent fellowship recipients, and review of important publications by visiting scholars.

The colloquium meets every other week on 1/3, 1/17, 1/31, 2/14, and 2/28.

GNDR_ST 490-0-20: Early Modern Sexualities

How can we practice the history and analysis of sexuality in early modern Europe? Is sexuality best described by a continuity of models, or alterity and historical difference? To what extent can we discuss “sexuality” in relation to “identity” in the pre-modern era? To address these complex questions, and to begin to ask new ones, we will concentrate on a range of exemplary literary and historical texts from around 1600 in England. We will be interested to explore both the multiple forms and functions of desire, eroticism, sex, gender, etc., in this culture, as well as the terms, methods, and theories we now use to read the sexual past. We will be particularly interested in gaining fluency in the languages of early modern identities and desires: sodomy, tribadism, friendship, marriage; bodies, their parts, and their pleasures. We will centrally engage recent critical controversies in the field over the utility of historicism in sexuality studies. We will interrogate sex/gender's intersections with categories such as race, religion, social class, and nation, and we will engage the emerging scholarship in early modern trans* studies.

GNDR_ST 490-0-21: Political Theories of Membership

GNDR_ST 101-6-20: Coalitional Politics: Case studies from Chicago and beyond: archiving the past for the present

In this seminar, we explore several 1970s-era projects in Chicago and beyond that exemplify a coalitional feminist politics and consider the usefulness of this history in an increasingly polarized present. We will read histories of this period and memoirs by movement participants, but our focus will be on engaging in collective archival research and, ultimately curating collections of (8-10) documents that aid us in recuperating these instances of successful coalition building across anti-war, women’s and gay liberation, and black power/ethnic nationalist movements, as well as the intersectional politics that informed these collaborative projects. The seminar will meet in Special Collections and will introduce students to the practice of archival research as well as the remarkable range of archival materials housed in Special Collections, which might form the basis for research projects during your four years at Northwestern. Our final class project will be to collectively curate an exhibition of our findings that will be exhibited in the Main Library at the end of Spring Quarter. Over the course of the quarter, we will also host a class visitor and, if covid protocols allow, go on a field trip to the Chicago Women’s Health Center (established in 1975 and still going strong!) to explore current coalitions and projects that build on this legacy.

Cases: Anti-Vietnam war movement; Gay and lesbian/feminist liberation movements in Chicago and at Northwestern; Chicago’s first “Rainbow Coalition” (which included the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and Young Patriots and Rising Up Angry); Chicago’s free clinic movement; and reproductive rights/justice projects in Chicago.

GNDR_ST 321-0-21: Gender, War, and Revolution in the 20th Century

"War is men's business, not ladies'," so we are told in "Gone with the Wind." Catastrophic events in the twentieth century (two world wars, the Russian Revolution, world economic depression, the Nazi counter-revolution and Holocaust, and threat of nuclear war) demolished long standing myths that men go forth and fight in order to protect their women and children, who remain passive and secure at home. In the twentieth century, military strategy and technology blurred the boundaries between war zones and home fronts. Not only did civilian populations become military targets, but the strains of war also exposed them to food shortages, fuel rationing, forced evacuations, and violent death. At the same time, disillusioned soldiers and veterans saw their war experiences through the threat of gender inversions. During the war, women had been mobilized to do men's work. In the 1920s and ‘30s, the "new woman" of the century - building on the beginnings of legal equality and the vote - enjoyed greater economic, political, intellectual, and sexual freedoms than their nineteenth century grandmothers and great-grandmothers. If conventional warfare was defined by (and reinforced) traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, did the disruption of those norms mean emancipation for women? Did the war open up utopian hopes for all forms of alternate gender and sexual alignments? Ultimately, was a traditional gendered social order restored after the half century of total war and revolutions? Despite the much touted return to happy domesticity, could the genie of sexual malcontent be ever fully re-contained?

GNDR_ST 324-0-20: US Gay and Lesbian History

This course explores the history of homosexuality as a legible social and cultural category; of lgbt individuals and communities as self-aware social and political actors; and of lgbt/anti-lgbt politics as arenas in which modern Americans have debated fundamental questions about human rights, personal autonomy, and citizenship. We will map the frameworks within which individuals have sought out, enjoyed, and understood sexual activity with others of the same sex; trace the growth of gay and lesbian communities over the course of the twentieth century; and survey the dramatic shifts and turns from the emergence of an organized gay and lesbian political movement to the traumas of the AIDS epidemic and the increasingly bitter fights over lgbtq citizenship and personhood of the last few decades.

GNDR_ST 331-0-20: Heterosexualities: Past, Present & Future

How and when did the identities that we know today as “straight” or “heterosexual” come into existence? And how have those identities differed across time and space? Drawing on the academic literature and representations in film and other popular media, we will examine the “invention of heterosexuality” and its transformation and diversification over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. By paying attention to multiple definitions of heterosexuality—including those that coexist within a single historical moment and location—we will problematize the notion that heterosexuality can be simply conceived as a single, unitary sexual identity. Among other topics, we will discuss the increasingly blurring boundaries between heterosexuality and other sexual identities; heteroflexibility, sexual fluidity, and other challenges to conventional definitions of heterosexuality; the power associated with heterosexuality, masculinity, and femininity; the effects of sexual inequality; contemporary problems and issues, including hookup culture and definitions of sexual consent; and imagined futures of the notions of sexual identity and sexual orientation.

GNDR_ST 332-0-20: Feminism and Social Change: Disability Justice

Why should we consider disability justice as a central principle of contemporary feminist thought? As disability studies increasingly ground feminist work, new depths of understanding around embodiment, freedom, and human dignity develop from and return to social justice action globally, nationally, and here in the Chicago region. Students in this course will study disability justice as feminist practice in conversation with Chicago-based thinkers and organizers.

GNDR_ST 332-0-21: Reproductive Health/Politics/Justice

As feminist scholar Michelle Murphy points out, “reproduction is not self-evidently a capacity located in sexed bodies”; it is instead a site (or formation) that joins, “cells, protocols, bodies, nations, capital, economics, freedom, and affect as much as sex and women into its sprawl.” Thus, she reminds us, “how we constitute reproduction shapes how it can be imagined, altered and politicized.” In this seminar we will explore the changing contours of reproductive politics in the U.S. from the 1960s to the present by examining a range of projects and organizations that conceptually reimagine what we mean by “reproduction,” the scope and content of “reproductive politics,” and the kinds of demands that can be made in the name of reproductive health, rights, freedom and justice. We begin with the ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s and the emergence of a reproductive politics (newly) figured in terms of “pro-life vs. pro-choice” and interrogate the extent to which this rendering continues to shape how we think about “reproduction” in the present. We then turn to the pre-history of this moment to explore the very different terms, demands and imaginaries that shaped the reproductive politics of 1970s-era liberation projects committed to “reproductive freedom” (e.g. feminist “self-help clinics”; Black Panther Party “community survival programs”; the free clinic movement; etc.). In the final unit, we investigate how the analyses and demands of a resurgent Reproductive Justice Movement led by women of color reconceptualizes and expands the terrain of reproductive politics to include demands for racial, economic and environmental justice as prerequisites for exercising the right to have or not to have children and to parent the children we do have. In addition to course materials, our collective research into this topic will include 1-2 weeks of (guided) archival research in Deering Library’s Special Collections &/or University Archives.

GNDR_ST 332-0-24: Race/Gender/Sex & Science: Making Identities and Differences

How do scientific claims and technological developments help transform cultural understandings of race, gender, and sexuality? Conversely, how do cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice? This class will take up a series of controversies from the recent past and present to explore the dynamic interplay between expert findings, social identities, and political arguments.

GNDR_ST 341-0-20: Feminist, Queer, Crip: South Korea and Its Discontents

This course examines gender, sexuality, and disability in contemporary South Korea. The past decade has seen an explosion of popular interest in feminism in South Korea. Along with this were competing debates on social and economic inequalities and legislations, as well as debates on gender identity, everyday experiences of discrimination, and overlooked sites of intersectional violence. From the Gangnam station murder to the #Me Too movement, South Korean cultural industry’s rise into the global stage through K-Pop has coincided with intense debates at home and abroad about the experience of gendered citizenship and various forms of marginalization. As the scholar Alison Kafer has poignantly shown, thinking through the entanglement of feminist, queer, and disability concerns is important to rethinking exclusionary claims and their attendant problems. Students will look at some of the major points of debate and events that have ignited the increased interest, engaging literary and popular cultural texts, news articles, and scholarship on feminist, queer, and crip theories. At the same time, these recent debates are not necessarily unique or new. To address such, the course will also consider the broader historical context of militarization, colonialism, and the Korean diaspora that have shaped these debates. No prerequisite knowledge of the Korean language or culture is necessary. As a discussion-based seminar with papers, the course encourages students to hone their critical thinking, speaking, and writing skills.

GNDR_ST 371-0-20: Girlhood in Public Culture

Why girls have figured so centrally in 20th century popular culture; why the concept of girlhood itself has been so widely debated within public culture more generally; how girls themselves have responded to public representations of girlhood.

GNDR_ST 371-0-21: Cultural History of New Media, Gender, and Race

This seminar course examines the ways that gender and race repeatedly inform the design, marketing, and use of new media and technology in an Anglo American (US and Canada) context. Although we often think of new media as synonymous with the internet and digital technology, this course will navigate the emergence of various new media from the late 19th century through our current era with an emphasis on gender and race. Working chronologically, this course will highlight key technological innovations including the rise of early cinema, television, and computers. From Black owned ‘picture palaces’ in the 1910s to Indigenous women creating VR in the 2010s, this course centers an understanding of women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC as consistent designers and users of emerging technology. Each week will center around scholarly and primary source materials that illuminate perspectives on how gender and race informed the dynamic relationship between users and technology. This approach will attune students to the lengthy history of new media and technology and the unique and recurrent debates that emerge. It will also offer students the opportunity to study and apply critical gender and racial theory approaches in a media studies context. Class assessment will draw from current approaches in digital humanities. Students will gain practice navigating web based archives for their research and using web based platforms including Slack, Medium, Canva, Soundcloud, and video sharing platforms to present their ideas and research.

GNDR_ST 372-0-20: Composer Topics: Julius Eastman

This course introduces students to the life and work of composer-performer-improvisor Julius Eastman (1940–1990). Eastman's musical practices encompassed a range of styles and genres—classical music, experimentalism, disco, punk, and jazz—and was grounded in the Black radical tradition. The course explores not only Eastman's radical Black aesthetics but explores its intersection with his militant homosexual sensibility. The course will explore his collaborations and confrontations with a range of artists: John Cage, Meredith Monk, Arthur Russell, Kathy Acker, Richard Foreman, Petr Kotik, Bill T. Jones, Jeff Lohn, Tania Leon, Talib Hakim, and others. Some familiarity with music notation would be helpful, but not required.

GNDR_ST 381-0-20: 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. Seminar discussions require synchronous participation. They 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 the class annotates, comments, and replies to each other on both daily readings, midterm essay, and seminar paper.

GNDR_ST 382-0-20: Gender, Race & the Holocaust

The aim of this seminar is to introduce students to the history and historiography of race and gender during the Holocaust. As in many historical contexts, race and gender interacted dynamically and created the particular context of Nazi-occupied Europe, which was a place where Jewish men and women suffered in particular ways, German men and women participated in particular ways, and other racial groups - men and women alike - were targeted, collaborated, resisted and rescued. We will read a variety of texts that explore the influences that shaped the behavior and response of an array of people during the Holocaust. Racism sat directly in the center of the Nazi world view. Once the Nazis got into power, they sought to translate ideology into policy. Still, their racial policies evolved over time, spurred by opportunism, innovation, and war. And too, Jewish men and women responded in ways similar and divergent to the Nazi onslaught. Sexism was also seemingly an important aspect of the Nazi perspective. While they indeed embraced an anti-feminist stance, the Nazis nevertheless sought to incorporate "German" women into the national community and women participated actively in the implementation of Nazi racism.

GNDR_ST 382-0-22: Women of Color Feminist Legacies

This course combines key texts in women of color feminist theory with contemporary literature, film, art, and activism inspired by this field. Course participants will investigate how a coalitional feminist movement that began in the 1980s is relevant to multiracial feminist analysis, artmaking, and activism today. We will ask how women of color feminists in the 1980s challenged existing concepts of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and identity. We will distinguish women of color feminism from Black feminisms and Latinx feminisms, identifying the key solidarities, intimacies, and alliances that undergird the writings in this field. Course participants will also be asked to challenge their understandings of “theory,” examining the rigorous feminist thought at work in contemporary poetry, short stories, film, media, and visual art. Key texts will likely include This Bridge Called My Back, Dictée, Sister Outsider, and Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, as well as essays from Barbara Smith, Barbara Christian, E. Patrick Johnson, Hortense Spillers, Grace Kyungwon Hong, and Treva Ellison. Course media may include poetry by Tiana Clark, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Layli Long Soldier, the short film Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2016), an episode of the television show Vida (2020), and guest lecture by a visiting artist, activist, or writer.

GNDR_ST 382-0-23: Race, Sexuality, and Religion in the Americas

This course examines the co-constructed histories of religion, sexuality, and race in the Americas. Drawing upon foundational and newer works in the field, we will explore how the construction of these categories, rooted in biological essentialism, has had immense consequences for the enslaved and her descendants, indigenous peoples, other people of color, and women, queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming individuals. The historical record shows that individuals born cisgender male and socialized as men, namely white heterosexual men, have historically and contemporaneously dominated and controlled the North Americas and the globe. They have upheld their hegemonic and institutional power by wielding the social constructions of “gender” and “sexuality” to their benefit, often using religion, and specifically white Christianities, biblical fundamentalism, and “religio-racial race making” to regulate sexual bodies gendered and understood as non-white and non-man. This course examines the interconnected histories of race, sexuality and religion in the Americas through the vantage point of African American Studies, and specifically Black Queer Studies, and charts the construction of these categories and how racialized people—both within and beyond religious institutions—have resisted and challenged their centrality.

GNDR_ST 390-0-20: Latinx Feminism

This course examines the diverse layers and heterogenous experiences of Latinas in the United States across space and time. Epistemologically we will question and discuss central concepts of what constitutes Latinidad in its multiple forms. We will interrogate the complex identities of Latina lives amidst intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and other social dimensions (age, education, language, and citizenship). We will trace the dynamic historical transformations, legacies of colonialism/imperialism and ongoing oppressions that shape Latina life, as well as investigate how these women define, understand and critique their respective struggles/ activism from their specific cultural and social locations. This course will provide an overview of the intellectual/theoretical interventions of Latina/Chicana feminist thought to highlight how it breaks from, links, and intersects with mainstream modes of feminism, civil rights movements and other social mobilizations. It will offer a nuanced analysis of empowerment and self-determination, to consider how Latina feminists have made important historical, academic, cultural, and political contributions to inspire change and activism in innovative ways. Working within an interdisciplinary framework deeply rooted in Latina lived experiences, we will examine various themes such as work, masculinity, family, migration, violence, representation etc, via nonfiction, fiction, poetry, film, art, theatre, music, and personal/collective testimonios.

GNDR_ST 390-0-22: Environmental Justice: Feminism, Rhetoric and Policy

To quote activist group, “Extinction Rebellion,” the fire alarm on global warming has been pulled and is ringing at full volume. All scientific data points to the conclusion that decisive and immediate action will be necessary to avoid significant damage to global ecosystems and communities by 2030. This course starts from this sense of urgency and the risk it runs of cuing interventions that, while efficient and effective, entrench existing inequalities. Instead, how can we be mindful of environmental solutions forwarded by marginalized communities? How might changes in global environmental policy also usher in changes in global social justice? In this course, we examine these foundational questions of environmental justice (EJ). While our reading list is catered to feminist environmentalist (FE) thought, the activists, artists, writers, and researchers we discuss tackle their work with varied critical identities. Through class discussions and presentations, students will build skills in understanding and evaluating public policy from EJ and FE lenses. Our close analysis of environmental policies and movements is complemented by foundational readings in EJ and FE history. This culminates in a final project of rhetorical analysis on an environmental policy or movement of the student’s choosing. No expertise is required to succeed in this course; strong participation is essential.

GNDR_ST 390-0-23: Queer Ghosts

Haunted houses, haunting memories, vengeful specters. Often used as metaphors for memory, history, and trauma, ghosts and haunting remain prevalent in works both in and outside the academy. Drawing a wide interdisciplinary net from media and cultural studies, performance studies, queer and trans studies, and sociology, this seminar approaches the issue of “queer ghosts” through these three themes: the ghosts of queer people, the “spirit’ of queerness, and the queerness of spirits. We will be working primarily between 1850 and the present, and focusing on the Anglophone world. In this seminar students will develop an independent research paper or creative project related to course themes. Either individually or in small groups, students will also be responsible for facilitating discussions for one meeting of the course.

GNDR_ST 390-0-24: Critical Trans Studies

What is 'critical' about Critical Trans Studies? In this seminar class, we will explore gender not simply as an aspect of individual identity, but also as a deeply embedded social structure that regulates and criminalizes expansive possibilities of gender identity and expression. Throughout the course, we will explore issues such as knowledge production, in/visibility, police and prison abolition, gender-expansive schooling, and transformative justice. We will engage with and critically discuss texts from the fields of legal studies, K-12 and higher education, sociology, philosophy, race/ethnic studies, and disability studies, with a commitment to centering the experiences and perspectives of trans and non-binary people both inside and outside of the academy. The questions we ask in this course include the following: How is the gender binary deeply woven into the policies and practices of social institutions such as education? How does genderism overlap and interact with other forms of oppression such as racism and ableism? For whom does the new visibility of trans identity benefit, and who does it harm? How can we transform educational contexts to be attuned to gender diversity, particularly as it intersects with issues of race/ethnicity, disability, citizenship, and social class? Seminar discussions will depend upon students who are engaged with the course material and are actively participating.

GNDR_ST 390-0-25: Queer Belonging

In this seminar, we will explore queer forms of belonging, particularly through differing understandings of kinship, intimacy, and what it means to be together. Moving within and beyond queer as a form of selfhood, this course will explicitly consider what queer means in relation to others and as embedded in social worlds. Together, we will engage texts and materials that push back on normative understandings of belonging, especially through contemporary conversations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Drawing from the literature of anthropology, psychoanalysis, queer theory, critical race theory, feminist studies, and the broader social sciences, we will question and reenvision themes such as the family, reproduction, friendship, monogamy, community, and home. We will consider “queer” in different formations such as self, dyads/other, groups, communities, worlds, and absences; and we will consider queer beloning with different endurances and temporalities such as fleeting intimacies, long-term attachments, and digital encounters.

GNDR_ST 490-0-20: Gender, Power, Politics

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, indigeneity, 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. The course draws on gender and sexuality studies, political science, sociology, history, and anthropology to understand gender, power and politics.

Click here for the syllabus.

GNDR_ST 490-0-21: Theorizing Black Genders and Sexualities

In this course, we will not be talking, simply or exclusively, about black women, or black queer (often meaning “gay or lesbian”) people, or black transgender people; we will not be talking, simply or exclusively, about “masculinity” and “femininity” or “sex” as a regime of reproductive coercion sutured to certain anatomical interpretations. This course will be one that concerns, indeed, black genders and sexualities; black genders, which might be to say gender’s fracture and interrogation; black sexualities, which might be to say a questioning of where sexuality is and cannot be located. This course is, in short, the onset—a continued onset—of a reckoning with what genders and sexualities are and mean, in the context of blackness and outside of or adjacent to that context, and how we might undermine, critique, interrogate, depart from, move within, or imagine outside of entirely these categorizations that are ultimately, as this course will show, regimes of whiteness, normativity, and hegemony.

GNDR_ST 490-0-22: 19th C. Black Women Writers

This course will explore the autobiographical fictions, slave narratives, serialized tales, memoirs, novels, and poems produced by African American women from the antebellum period through the turn of the twentieth century, and ending with Zora Neale Hurston’s 1927 reflection on the life of the last former slave brought to the United States from Africa in 1862. We will begin the course and introduce these literary accounts with recordings and written transcripts of selected WPA interviews of former slaves by largely white interlocutors working for the Roosevelt Administration. By exploring the variety of writing, from travel and slave narrative and to fiction, this course will consider the forms and content produced by Black women during the nineteenth century and raise questions concerning at least: shifting political and social identities, authorship, proto-Black feminism, and the possibilities and limitations of the Black woman “archive” versus a “canon.”

Course materials will include Mary Prince, The Slave Narrative of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (1831); Hannah Crafts, The Bondswoman’s Narrative (n.d. 1850s); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); Julia Collins, The Curse of Caste; or, The Slave Bride (1865); Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes; 30 Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868); Alice Dunbar Nelson, Confessions of a Lazy Woman (~1903); Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood (1902-1903); and Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (unpub. 1927/2018). Professors Spigner and Stern will also distribute poems written by Black women across the course of the quarter to supplement our discussion of 19th-century Black women’s prose works.

Each seminar participant will be required to give a presentation and lead the class for the first hour of the seminar. Participants will also produce several short, argument-based reflection papers. Final projects will enable students to feature their own research interests in creative installations involving literary texts, historical documents, cinematic or televisual materials and artifacts from the popular culture of the 19th century. Professors Spigner and Stern will consult with all seminar participants on their topics for the final project.

GNDR_ST 490-0-23: Toni Morrison

TBD

GNDR_ST 332-0-1: Contemporary Gender and Medicine

In America, the National Institute of Health (NIH) did not require women to be included in biomedical research until the 1990s. This means that until just thirty years ago, doctors and researchers in the United States knew little about holistic health in non-cisgender male bodies. This course charts the following thirty years of gender-conscious interventions and their effect on the American concept of “health” itself. How has the push to treat chronic pain disorders prevalent in women changed the definition of “pain” in medicine? How has trans* and nonbinary activism for gender-affirming care reshaped doctor-patient relations? These questions and others will be addressed in two ways: First, by studying the history of recent institutional medical culture through a gender studies lens, and second, by tracing the ways that key terms in the field have evolved in these years.