Living with surveillance has become a predictable feature of contemporary life. From work to school to online dating, surveillance shapes many facets of our daily behaviors and activities. What can feminist theory bring to questions of surveillance? How have feminist tactics been used to resist surveillance? And can surveillance ever be a form of feminist caregiving? In the first part of this course, we analyze different forms of feminist thinking, including Black feminism, indigenous feminism, crip feminism and more. From there, we turn to legal, political, cultural and activist case studies related to surveillance. Putting them together, we consider how feminist frameworks can help us to analyze practices and technologies of surveillance. This is an interdisciplinary course that brings together internet studies, queer theory, science and technology studies, human computing interaction, surveillance studies and cultural studies in order to understand the social and historical dimensions of feminism and surveillance.

This course will introduce students to the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, organize families and work like, delimit opportunities for individuals and groups of people, as well as impact the terms of local and transnational economic exchange. We will explore the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality work with other markers of difference and social status such as race, age, nationality, and ability to further demarcate possibilities, freedoms, choices, and opportunities available to people.

This course, Journeys in Black Feminism, is a survey of Black feminist thought and theory, both in the United States and transnationally. The course considers what constitutes Black feminism and womanism, and it allows students to learn about the expansiveness of Black feminist theory. Journeys in Black Feminism is divided into three sections: 1) Black Feminism: What Is It?, 2) Transnational Black Feminism, and 3) New Horizons in Black Feminism. In the first section, we will read fundamentals in Black feminist theory such as the Combahee River Collective’s “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977), selections from Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), chapters from bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), essays from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984), and selections from Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990). In section 2, the transnational section, we will read from Carol Boyce Davies Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008), Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (translated from French) (1986), the introduction and chapter about I, Tituba from Kaiama Glover’s A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (2020), and selections from Lorraine Leu and Christen Smith’s Black Feminist Constellations: Dialogue and Translation Across the Americas (2023). Finally, in the third section, we will read contemporary Black feminist theory such as the introduction and preface to C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017), selections from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019), and the introduction to Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’ Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022). Ultimately, students should leave this course feeling knowledgeable in the fundamentals of Black feminist theory and thought.

With a distinct emphasis on performance, film, installation art, video and painting, this course explores the explosion of body-based, nude and erotic work from the 1950 to the 1970s, with particular focus on the 1960s. And it seeks to explore this dynamic not only within the familiar confines of North America and Europe but within Latin America and Asia, too, in what was a nearly simultaneous international emergence of the erotic as a political force in the art world. Reading a range of key voices from Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to performance artists Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono, Neo-Freudian theorist Norman O. Brown and Brazilian theorist and poet Oswald de Andrade, we will examine how and why sexuality became a privileged form of politics at this historical juncture in a range of different contexts across the globe. We will pay particular attention to how and why an art about sex became a camouflaged form of political dissidence in the confines of repressive political dictatorships, as were then rising in Brazil, Argentina. and ultimately Chile. Students interested in feminist, gender or queer theory, Latin American Studies, social revolution, performance studies, post war art and Frankfurt School thought should find the course particularly appealing, but it assumes no background in any of these fields.

This seminar provides students with an understanding of how legal doctrines shape everyday life on the ground with special attention to the legal condition of women. It offers an overview of the different ways gender (and secondarily, identifiers like race, class and disability) intersected with the law and legal culture in colonial North America and the early Republic. Students will gain a basic understanding of the mechanics of Anglo-American common law but then also, an understanding of how law helps organize society beyond “black letter” (formal) rules. Students will also be asked to think about how gender, as a legal category, has been understood and how that understanding—and its impact on individual lives—has varied depending on context. Finally, the course will encourage students to reflect on how this early history of gender and the law reverberates today in debates over reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, pay equity, and other social and economic rights in modern American society.
This Communication within the Curriculum seminar is open to all regardless of ability.

What does it mean to center survivors? Do safe spaces exist? How do institutions like Penn perpetuate gender based violence? How do we encounter and *counter* violence inside and outside the academic space? This course will explore these questions through the various lenses of academic research, literature, art, popular culture, and media, allowing for a nuanced and historically contextualized understanding of the challenging and enduring issue of gender based violence on college campuses, its prevalence, its causes, and its potential solutions. Students will participate in weekly guided discussions and the course will feature regular guest speakers who are involved in anti-violence work at Penn and in the broader community. Creative practices will be encouraged and centered each week, and course assignments will reflect this priority. Previous experience with Gender Studies is welcome but not required.

In 1901 the average American family spent 14% of their annual income on clothing. By 1929, the average middle-class woman owned a total of nine outfits. Fast forward to the early twenty-first century, where the relative price of clothing has dropped, clothing has become virtually disposable, and individuals post videos of their shopping hauls online. This course will examine how we got here, why fashion matters, and the far-reaching implications of our love affair with clothes. Readings and topics will include foundational theory about fashion; how clothes shape class, gender, and identity; the significance of revolutionary designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo; and the evolution of the clothing industry and its place in the global economy.

This seminar will examine contemporary affect theory and its relationship with Michel Foucault's theory of power. We will begin by mapping out Foucault's "analytics of power," from his early work on power knowledge to his late work on embodiment, desire, and the care of the self. We will then turn to affect theory, an approach which centralizes the non-rational, emotive force of power. No previous knowledge of theory is required.

This course explores literature that resists normative categories of gender and sexuality. By focusing on figures writing from the margins, we will explore how radical approaches to narrative form and subject-matter invite us to think in new ways about desire and identity. We will read texts that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, hybridizing the genres of poetry, drama, and autobiography to produce new forms of expression, such as the graphic novel, auto-fiction, and prose poetry. From Viriginia Woolf's gender-bending epic, Orlando, to Tony Kushner's Angels in America, this course traces how non-normative desire is produced and policed by social and literary contexts - and how those contexts can be re-imagined and transformed.

Western notions of feminism are often dominated by anglophone cultures and experiences, but the fight for rights and equity for women is intrinsically tied to their lived experiences and the socio-political-economic factors that contribute to their position within a society. In this course students will research and reflect on many of the topics at the heart of feminist debate in Italy throughout the decades. From voting, to procreation laws, to abortion rights, to IVF, to sex work, to transfeminist debates, to anti-femicide actions, to intersectional feminist experience, to neofascist feminist moralism, to transnational feminist activism, this class will seek to explore various feminist movements of the 20th and 21st century in Italy and the contexts from which they stemmed as well as the moments of conflict between various factions of national feminism and transnational feminist discourse.