INTRO-WOMEN & GENDER STUDIES

An interdisciplinary introduction to key concepts and analytical categories in womens and gender studies. This course grapples with gender in its complex intersection with other systems of power and inequality, including: sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and nation. Topics include: feminisms, feminist and queer theory, commodity culture, violence, science and technology, visual cultures, work, and family.

• MW 6:10 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Shuli Branson
  Info
• 3 points

Global Histories of the Trans Present

Global Hist of Trans Pres

Are trans people new? Is sex binary? Can sex change? These questions and their precedents have monopolized gendered politics and have taken on global significance in recent years.

Following Foucault’s formulation of a history of the present—a genealogy of how we got here—this course is a history of the trans present in that it charts the ways in which sex and gender have been ontologized across borders and contexts, often in ways which regulate and police bodies within borders. It historicises the divisive discourses that animate present day politics, showing that sexual dimorphism’s legitimacy has been continually contested in different ways and from different standpoints for centuries, and that arguing for or against the universality of sex/gender is a move that people across left/right and liberal/illiberal political lines have historically made.

The path towards trans’ contemporary inception is not only uneven, including many discontinuities as well as continuities. It is also global and disturbing, requiring the violence of empire, eugenics, and slavery to cleave sexual dimorphism into two, whose “binary logic” trans then seeks to muddy and muddle—in ways which sometimes yield to ideas of what sex and gender “really are”. Trans people 
do 
have a history. And it is longer than transphobes would like us to believe. But it is not a pleasant or necessarily radical history. It is also not solely the history of people who are trans. Rather, this history is plural and fractious, and is a history of everyone who has ever existed in a world where gender and sex are operating concepts.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Zavier Nunn
  Info
• 3 points

HIST APPROACHES TO FEM QUESTNS

This course will provide students with a comparative perspective on gender, race, and
sexuality by illuminating historically specific and culturally distinct conditions in which
these systems of power have operated. Beginning in the early modern period, the
course seeks to destabilize contemporary notions of gender and sexuality and instead
probe how race, sexuality, and gender have functioned as mechanisms of differentiation
embedded in historically contingent processes. Moving from “Caliban to Comstock,”
students will probe historical methods for investigating and critically evaluating claims
about the past. In making these inquiries, the course will pay attention to the
intersectional nature of race, gender, and sexuality and to strategic performances of
identity by marginalized groups. This semester, we will engage research by historians
of sexuality, gender, and capitalism to critically reflect on the relationship between
critical studies of the past and debates about reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and
gay and lesbian rights in our contemporary moment.

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Sarah Haley
  Info
• 4 points

SENIOR SEMINAR II

Individual research in Womens Studies conducted in consultation with the instructor. The result of each research project is submitted in the form of the senior essay and presented to the seminar.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Elizabeth Povinelli
  CULPA: 14 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Bodies of Transformation

Engaging trans studies, disability studies, histories of science, ecocriticism, posthumanism, queer and postcolonial theory, this class contends with how bodies and bodies of knowledge change over time. Bodies of Transformation takes a historiographic approach to the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of corporeal meaning, practice and performance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Animating questions include: what is the corporeal real? how does bodily transformation map the complex relationships between coercion and choice? how might one approach nonhuman interiority?

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: C. Riley Snorton
  Info
• 4 points

THEORETICAL PARADIGMS

REFRAMING GENDER VIOLENCE GLOB

Theoretical Paradigms in Feminist Scholarship:
 
Course focuses on the current theoretical debates of a particular topic or issue in feminist, queer, and/or WGSS scholarship. Open to graduate students, with preference given to students completing the ISSG graduate certificate. Topics differ by semester offered, and are reflected in the course subtitle. For a description of the current offering, please visit the link in the Class Notes.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Lila Abu-Lughod
  CULPA: 17 Wikipedia h-index: 48 Info
• 4 points

GRAD STUDENT & FACULTY COLLOQ

FEMINIST PEDAGOGY

This is a course is oriented to graduate students who are thinking about issues in teaching in the near and distant future and want to explore forms of pedagogy. The course will ask what it means to teach “as a feminist” and will explore how to create a classroom receptive to feminist and queer methodologies and theories regardless of course theme/content. Topics include: participatory pedagogy, the role of political engagement, the gender dynamics of the classroom, modes of critical thought and disagreement. Discussions will be oriented around student interest. The course will meet 4-5 times per SEMESTER (dates TBD) and the final assignment is to develop and workshop a syllabus for a new gender/sexuality course in your field. Because this course is required for graduate students choosing to fulfill Option 2 for the Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies at IRWGS, priority will be given to graduate students completing the certificate.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Julia Bryan-Wilson
  Wikipedia Info
• 1 points

New Directions in Gender and Sexuality S

New Dir Gender and Sexual

This colloquium will focus on new and developing research in gender and sexuality studies. It is meant for graduate students who are thinking about researching and teaching in this field in the near and distant future. Through a roster of guest speakers and in colloquium discussions, this course poses current questions, issues, methods, modes of study, and practices in the interrelated fields of gender and sexuality studies and critical race studies. The course is best suited to graduate students who have completed at least one year of coursework. Colloquium requirements include attendance at 3-6 guest speaker events over the course of the year, relevant reading in the field as necessary, and participation in discussion.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: C. Riley Snorton
  Info
• 0.5 points