| Title | Instructor | Location | Time | All taxonomy terms | Description | Section Description | Cross Listings | Fulfills | Registration Notes | Syllabus | Syllabus URL | Course Syllabus URL | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GSWS 0002-401 | Gender & Society | Melissa E Sanchez | TR 12:00 PM-12:59 PM | 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. | ENGL0159401 | Society sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 0011-401 | Jane Austen and Adaptation: From Darcymania to Bridgerton | Michael C Gamer | TR 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | This course introduces students to literary study through the works of a major woman writer Reading an individual author across an entire career offers students the rare opportunity to examine works from several critical perspectives in a single course. How do our author's works help us to understand literary and cultural history? And how might we understand our author's legacy through performance, tributes, adaptations, or sequels? Exposing students to a range of approaches and assignments, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | ENGL0011401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 0023-401 | Study of a Theme | Melissa E Sanchez | CANCELED | This introduction to literary study examines a compelling literary theme related to questions of gender and sexuality. The theme's function within specific historical contexts, within literary history generally, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | ENGL0023401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 0050-401 | Gender, Sexuality & Religion | Megan E Robb | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | What does it mean to be a gendered individual in a Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist religious tradition? How important are gender differences in deciding social roles, ritual activities, and spiritual vocations? This course tackles these questions, showing how gender - how it is taught, performed, and regulated - is central to understanding religion. In this course we will learn about gendered rituals, social roles, and mythologies in a range of religious traditions. We will also look at the central significance of gender to the field of religious studies generally. Part of the course will be focused on building a foundation of knowledge about a range of religious traditions and the role of gender in those traditions. This course focuses on religious traditions with origins outside the West. Although it is beyond the scope of this class to offer comprehensive discussions of any one religious tradition, the aim is to provide entry points into the study of religious traditions through the lens of gender. This course will train you in historical, anthropological, and theoretical methodologies. We will also read religion through feminist and queer lenses - we will explore the key characteristics of diverse feminist and queer studies approaches to religion, as well as limits of those approaches. | RELS0050401 | Hum & Soc Sci Sector (new curriculum only) | ||||||||
| GSWS 0511-401 | Global Inequalities: A Comparative History of Caste and Race. | Ketaki Umesh Jaywant | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | Can we deploy a comparative lens to understand the categories of caste and race better? Does their juxtaposition illuminate new facets of these two structures of ‘global inequalities’? The course seeks to explore these questions by systematically studying how both caste and racial institutions, structures, and identities were historically produced, transformed, and challenged through their global circulation from the nineteenth-century to the present. Caste and race have been old co-travelers, and their various points of intersection can be traced at least to the nineteenth century. And so, in this course we will embark upon a historical adventure, one replete with stories of violence, political intrigue, intense emotions, as also episodes of incandescent resistance. Together, we will trace the genealogy of how modern categories of ‘caste’ and ‘race’ were systematically composed by colonial knowledge production, orientalist writings, and utilitarian discourse, both in Europe and the colonies. While colonialism and the global hegemony of European modernity were crucial to the co-constitution and the circulation of caste and race, anti-caste and anti-race politics too have historically brought a unique comparative lens to these two categories. And so, this course will also include a close analysis of critical works on caste and race by activists and intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the present from all over the world. | AFRC0511401, SAST0511401, SOCI0511401 | Society sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1027-401 | Sex and Representation | Asaf Yossef Roth | CANCELED | 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. | CIMS1027401, COML1027401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1043-401 | Literature Before 1660 | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | This course will introduce students to key works of English literature written before 1660. It will explore the major literary genres of this period, as well as the social and cultural contexts in which they were produced. The course will examine how literature texts articulate changes in language and form, as well as in concepts of family, nation, and community during the medieval and early modern periods. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | ENGL1020401 | ||||||||||
| GSWS 1100-401 | Women In Jewish Lit | Kathryn Hellerstein | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | "Jewish woman, who knows your life? In darkness you have come, in darkness do you go." J. L. Gordon (1890). This course will bring into the light the long tradition of women as readers, writers, and subjects in Jewish literature. All texts will be in translation from Yiddish and Hebrew, or in English. Through a variety of genres -- devotional literature, memoir, fiction, and poetry -- we will study women's roles and selves, the relations of women and men, and the interaction between Jewish texts and women's lives. The legacy of women in Yiddish devotional literature will serve as background for our reading of modern Jewish fiction and poetry from the past century. The course is divided into five segments. The first presents a case study of the Matriarchs Rachel and Leah, as they are portrayed in the Hebrew Bible, in rabbinic commentary, in pre-modern prayers, and in modern poems. We then examine a modern novel that recasts the story of Dinah, Leah's daughter. Next we turn to the seventeenth century Glikl of Hamel, the first Jewish woman memoirist. The third segment focuses on devotional literature for and by women. In the fourth segment, we read modern women poets in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. The course concludes with a fifth segment on fiction written by women in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. | GRMN1100401, JWST1100401, MELC0375401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1200-401 | Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece and Rome | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | What is being a man, being a woman, being masculine, being feminine, being neither, being both? Is sex about pleasure, domination, identity, reproduction, or something else? Are sexual orientation and gender identity innate? How can words, myths and stories inform cultural assumptions about sex and gender? Did people in ancient times have a concept of sexuality? How do gendered English terms (like "girly", "effeminate", or "feisty") compare to gendered ancient Greek and Latin terms, like virtus, which connotes both "virtue" and "masculinity"? Why did the Roman and English speaking worlds have to borrow the word "clitoris" from the ancient Greeks? How did people in antiquity understand consent? Can we ever get access to the perspectives of ancient women? In this introductory undergraduate course, we will learn about sex and gender in ancient Greece and Rome. We will discuss similarities and differences between ancient and modern attitudes, and we will consider how ancient texts, ancient art, ancient ideas and ancient history have informed modern western discussions, assumptions and legislation. Our main readings will be of ancient texts, all in English translation; authors studied will include Ovid, Aristophanes, Plato, Euripides, and Sappho. Class requirements will include participation in discussion as well as quizzes, reading responses, and a final exam. | CLST1200401, COML1200401 | ||||||||||
| GSWS 1242-401 | Love and Loss in Japanese Literary Traditions: In Translation | Linda H. Chance | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | How do people make sense of the multiple experiences that the simple words "love" and "loss" imply? How do they express their thoughts and feelings to one another? In this course, we will explore some means Japanese culture has found to grapple with these events and sensations. We will also see how these culturally sanctioned frameworks have shaped the ways Japanese view love and loss. Our materials will sample the literary tradition of Japan from earliest times to the early modern and even modern periods. Close readings of a diverse group of texts, including poetry, narrative, theater, and the related arts of calligraphy, painting, and music will structure our inquiry. The class will take an expedition to nearby Woodlands Cemetery to experience poetry in nature. By the end of the course, you should be able to appreciate texts that differ slightly in their value systems, linguistic expressions, and aesthetic sensibilities from those that you may already know. Among the available project work that you may select, if you have basic Japanese, is learning to read a literary manga. All shared class material is in English translation. | EALC1242401, EALC5242401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1361-401 | Sex Matters: Politics of Sex | Secil Yilmaz | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | The course concentrates on the history of sexuality as it informed and shaped political and social change in the Middle East, and vice versa, in an engagement with global historical contexts. What does sexuality have to do with power, political rule, and mass movements in the modern Middle East? What can the study of sexuality and body politics teach us about colonialism and state formation over centuries of imperial rules and colonial regimes, as well as in the contemporary context of neoliberal capitalism? What is the relationship between studying LGBTQIA+ movements alongside with feminism and the use of sex and sexuality as an analytical category? This course will investigate selected themes such as modernity, nationalism, and colonization and connect them to harem lives, politics of veiling/unveiling, reproductive rights, race, polygamy, masculinity, and early modern concepts of same-sex desire in connection with modern queer thought and activism to ask questions about the preconceived notions about "Middle Eastern sexualities." The course focuses on discussing on some of the many roles that sex and gender politics have played in social and political change in the Middle East, while thinking about gender, history, and society comparatively and transnationally. | HIST1361401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 1411-401 | Queer Chinas | Teemu Ruskola | W 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | This class examines queer phenomena in and around China, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the queer Sinophone world more generally. Beyond seeking to understand sexual subcultures and sites of queer intimacies on their own terms, the course examines their relationship to political economy and geopolitics. In addition to filmic and literary texts, the course includes readings that are theoretical, anthropological, sociological, and comparative. While the focus is largely on modern China, the class also attends to historical reference points both inside and outside the Sinophone world. From a macro perspective, this course examines China’s place in discourses of development, focusing on the role of desire in constituting the sexual and political subject of modernity. The overall goal of this class is to develop alternative frameworks for understanding the relationship between sexuality and politics. The course does not require specialized knowledge of China. | EALC1411401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 1490-301 | Law Soc Pol Sex Repro | Carol E Tracy | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This course will examine how statutory law, court decisions and other forms of social policy encourage or discourage various forms of sexuality, reproduction and parenting. Such issues as contraception, abortion, gay and lesbian rights, reproductive technology, family violence, and welfare and family policies will be covered. | ||||||||||
| GSWS 1600-301 | Trans Studies |
Austin Svedjan George N Perez |
TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | While mainstream conversations tend to frame “transgender” as a perpetually new phenomenon, this introduction to trans studies will contextualize present-day gender expansiveness within a longer intellectual history. We will be guided by the following questions: What does trans mean and how has its meaning been shaped by regimes of gender, race, colonization, ability, and medical and legal regulation? What are the main concerns of trans studies/activism, particularly in relation to more established academic fields? How have trans artists, activists, and scholars imagined other, more just worlds? By engaging with scholarship from multiple fields as well as a range of creative work, we will consider the emergence of “transgender” as both an object of knowledge and a way of knowing. | ||||||||||
| GSWS 1765-401 | Human, Humanity, Humanitarianism: A Global History from Abolitionism to USAID | Secil Yilmaz | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course examines the formation of the modern notions of human, humanity, and human rights as well as the emergence of institutions of humanitarianism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course begins with a theoretical study of religious and secular implications of human and humanitarianism as well as social relief and charity in diverse historical settings from the pre-modern and modern times around the world. Following the conceptual analysis, it delves into the historical and social circumstances of humanitarian politics and discourses that shaped human (and environmental) stories of conflict and survival in the contexts of modern war-making, displacement, public health and epidemic diseases as well as natural disasters. It moves from the “long” nineteenth century into twentieth-century political, social, medical, and natural events by analyzing the emergence of a new and global vocabulary of humanitarianism such as refugee, asylum, settlement, and trafficking. Students explore the connections and distinctions between national and supra-national, colonial and postcolonial, metropole and colony. The course will cover the humanitarian role of Red Cross/Crescent, League of Nations, missionary networks as well as Cold War initiatives such as USAID, PathFinder Fund, UNHCR, Rockefeller Foundation, as well as post-Cold War initiatives such as Physicians without Borders and their impact on local practices of education, medical assistance, and public health networks, gender dynamics as well as natural resources and refugee settlement architecture. | HIST1765401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2110-401 | Restorative Justice in the City: History, Theory and Practice (SNF Paideia Program Course) | Pablo Cerdera | MW 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | Restorative Justice (RJ) is a new term to describe ancient ways of dealing with harm and being in community which centers our relationships and obligations to one another, as opposed to punishment and retribution. Increasingly popular as a response to a plethora of urban issues, from mass incarceration to gun violence to education inequality, RJ is also sometimes misunderstood or applied without fidelity. This course explores the theory, history, and practice of RJ in the urban environment. The course intersperses practical communication and facilitation skills, visits from local practitioners and advocates, and in-depth discussion of texts and media. Through readings, discussions, activities, and projects we will develop a solid theoretical basis from which to understand RJ and its implementation, including a focus on holistic engagement with self, other, and community. | URBS2110401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2130-401 | Mod Iran & West Thr Fict | Fatemeh Shams Esmaeili | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This undergraduate level course explores key tropes and themes of Iranian modernity through a close reading of Persian novel, short story, travelogue, and memoir. Various literary genres from social realism, to surrealism, magic realism, naturalism, and absurd literature will be introduced with specific reference to Iran's literature and in light of literary theory of novel. This course does not require any prior knowledge of Persian language and literature. Throughout the course, we will be particularly concerned with the relationship between Persian fiction and the West. We will investigate this curious relationship through themes of gender, religion, politics, and war. | COML2017401, COML5720401, MELC1710401, MELC5720401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2315-401 | Saints and Sex Demons | Caroline Batten | MW 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | This course will explore some of the most fascinating uses of gender and sexuality in medieval English literature, from Old English epic poetry to Arthurian romance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | ENGL2315401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2620-401 | Italian Scandals | Julia Heim | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | When you think of the term “scandal,” what comes to mind? Is there something about a society’s national identity that makes particular scandals resonate and shake the culture more than others? By exploring several Italian scandals that have helped define the cultural fabric of generations of Italians, we will learn to understand the social and political roots behind the what and why of these phenomena. Through cross-mediatic and transnational archival research, we will look at the ways that different media and different nations use these phenomena to represent national belonging, social fear, and cultural expectation. Each crime has its own story, but how do they help us understand how Italy makes sense of itself through tragedy, corruption, murder, and mayhem? How bello is this bel paese after all? Did you ever wonder what’s behind Italy’s ever-revolving government? Or why do Italians prefer to use the English word “serial killer”? This course will be taught in English | ITAL2620401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2770-401 | Gender, Sex & Urban Life | Alicia J Meyer | T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | How have women’s and queer communities’ desires for rights and representation and access to basic resources and social services transformed urban space? What makes a space feminist, and how has feminism understood the city? This course offers an introduction to key concepts in gender and sexuality studies and how the field has understood urban space. Throughout the semester, we will examine how feminist, queer, and transgender theory has interpreted the city. We will analyze historical case studies on design and urban planning as they relate to issues like sex work, sexual health, birth control and abortion services, pregnancy, and family and community making. Each week, we will explore these topics through hands-on archival research in Penn’s rare book and manuscript collections. Working with the archives, we will trace how feminist/queer/trans movements have been shaped and been shaped by the city. We will also interrogate the role of archives, repositories, and museums for queer/feminist/trans memory. We will experiment with poetry, creative non-fiction, critical essays, visual essays, sound and film, and more throughout the semester. Students will design creative projects rooted in their theoretical, historical, and archival practice. | URBS2770401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2800-401 | In the Dark We Can All Be Free | Che Gossett | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | If the afterlife of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman argues, is an aesthetic problem, what then is the relationship between abolition and aesthetics? How has the ongoing project of abolition been an aesthetic enterprise, and how does art shape its aims and horizon -- historically, presently and in afro-futuristic imaginary of the to come? How might the analytics of black studies, feminist theory, and trans studies, in their co-implicacy and entanglement, prompt a rethinking of aesthetics -- both its limits and possibilities? In this course we will consider the art(s) of the Black radical tradition, trans art, queer art and feminist art and theory, alongside a grounding in aesthetic theory, and explore the work of a constellation of scholars in Black studies, art history and artists including Saidiya Hartman, Laura Harris, Fred Moten, Huey Copeland, American Artists, fields harrington, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Tourmaline, Juliana Huxtable, Kiyan Williams, Simone Leigh, Alvin Baltrop, Tina Campt, (and more) to consider how abolition is activated in contemporary Black queer, trans and feminist visual art. | AFRC2800401, ARTH3989401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2873-401 | Postmodernism | Jonathan D Katz | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | The establishment of postmodern art as a chronological development is built into the very term postmodern, but unfortunately chronology gets everything about postmodernism wrong. It is not born after modernism but is rather coterminous with it and a product of the same forces. Nor does it succeed modern art, but rather in some fundamental ways instead critiques it, for the postmodern is more concerned with what infects art from outside its frame-including history, society, gender, racial and sexual politics, etc.-- than anything that develops within it. This course is thus concerned with the heyday of postmodern art from roughly the 1950 through the 1980s, although we begin in the early 20th century with the work of Marcel Duchamp. We will look at artists as different as Cindy Sherman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John Cage, Andy Warhol, and Kara Walker, and pay particular attention to art about AIDS. Roughly evenly divided between art and theory, the course presumes no prior knowledge of either. Still, as Jacques Derrida explained, binaries such as modernism and postmodernism remain extremely useful to power, because they uphold the status quo, circumscribing the field of contestation to either one pole or the other, and thus eliminating other possibilities. This course is concerned with these other possibilities. | ARTH2873401, ARTH6873401, GSWS6873401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3045-401 | Screening Fascism | Filippo Trentin | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | When and why did fascism first emerge? What social and political problems did it claim to address? Where did its ideas come from? And how did cinema help transform those ideas into powerful images that shaped both the Italian fascist regime and its political afterlives? To address these questions, this course explores how Italian fascism has been imagined and contested through cinema from its inception in 1920s Italy to the present. Italy was the political laboratory in which fascism was first invented—both as a term and as a political experiment—before becoming a global model of authoritarian power. Moving from the historical emergence of fascism in the wake of World War I to its cinematic articulation in propaganda films and newsreels of the 1920s, the course analyzes how cinema functioned as a laboratory in which fascism was aestheticized and rendered politically legible across the twentieth century. The films studied range from fascist-era propaganda films such as Scipio The African (Gallone, 1937) and neorealist classics such as Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945) to the provocative art cinema of the 1970s, including works by Bertolucci, Cavani, and Pasolini, as well as contemporary films that revisit and reconfigure the legacy of fascism. The course approaches these films through multiple critical lenses, including gender and sexuality, race, class and nationalism, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Through close analysis of films, political manifestos, and historical documents, students will investigate how images produce consent and why the visual language of fascism remains a potent tool of political imaginaries in the digital age. | CIMS3045401, ITAL3045401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3121-401 | Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern South Asia | Emma Kalb | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | This course will serve as an introduction to frameworks for studying gender and sexuality through the lens of early modern South Asian history, literature, and art, covering what are today the countries of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Taking the fundamental questions of “what is gender?” and “what is sexuality?” as our starting point, we will examine the diversity of social practices and beliefs related to these concepts expressed in early modern South Asian writings and visual art, as well as how this past relates to contemporary debates, in contexts including Hindu mystical traditions, Islamic courtly culture, and early colonial society. The course will emphasize direct engagement with primary sources ranging from memoirs, legal documents and advice manuals to mystical tales, satirical poetry, and paintings. Topics covered include formulations of masculinity and femininity, notions of the home and the family, representations of queer sex and desire, and conceptualizations of the categories of intersex and transgender. Students will complete the course with an understanding of comparative lenses for thinking about gender and sexuality in addition to proficiency in applying and interpreting those lenses in relation to a variety of sources, from literature to technical prose to visual culture. No prior knowledge of South Asian history, languages or literature is required. | GSWS5121401, SAST3121401, SAST5121401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3200-401 | Making Latinidades: Culture, Community, and Consciousness | Krista Cortes | TR 8:30 AM-9:59 AM | What does it mean to be Latinx in the United States? This introductory course examines how Latinx communities have developed critical consciousness about their histories, identities, and experiences from the sixteenth century to the present, with particular attention to the often-erased perspectives and knowledge production of Afro-Latinx peoples. Students will explore how communities, including Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, Mexican Americans, Central Americans, and others have theorized their experiences of colonialism, migration, racialization, and belonging in the US context. Grounded in a scholar-practitioner approach that bridges academic research with community-based cultural work, this course centers the ways Latinx communities have generated their own frameworks for understanding their realities. We will examine how Afro-Latinx communities have developed consciousness about anti-Black racism within Latinidad while articulating solidarities across difference and how this critical awareness has shaped both scholarly inquiry and grassroots organizing. The course investigates how consciousness emerges through cultural practices—from spiritual traditions that encode historical memory and resistance, to contemporary music, literature, and digital media that articulate new political possibilities. Key themes include the development of racial consciousness and the theorization of Blackness within latinidad, feminist and queer consciousness, language as a site of critical awareness, transnational political consciousness, and the role of cultural spaces in cultivating collective understanding. We will explore how Latinx communities have created knowledge about themselves through testimonios, cultural production, and community practice, and how this consciousness has fueled movements for labor rights, citizenship, reproductive justice, and educational access. Students will engage diverse materials, including historical documents, ethnographic research, testimonios, film, and creative expressions, to develop their own critical frameworks for analyzing the heterogeneity of Latinx experiences and the ongoing work of building liberatory consciousness. | AFRC3200401, LALS3200401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3409-401 | Documentary Forms | Syd Zolf | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | A creative writing workshop devoted to the art of documentary forms. Assignments may include working with found materials; research, observation and reportage; documentary work in literary and art genres; and learning from documentary film. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu. | COML3409401, ENGL3409401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3451-401 | Black Popular Culture | Jasmine Johnson | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course explores theories, debates, and frameworks in African American popular culture. Drawing on Africana, Gender and Sexuality, Communications and Performance Studies, it examines histories of Black representation across a number of performance forms. Television, film, dance, theater, music and more will be explored to interrogate the ways blackness has been defined, framed, and disseminated. What are the micro-politics through which racial difference is produced? How have Black people redefined and wrestled with questions of authenticity and "the real"? What are the capacities and the limits of popular culture to both render and shape Black life? In examining blackness through a number of performance mediums, we will consider the creative labor that Black people produce, and the processes of racialization produced through Black bodies. | AFRC3451401, COMM3451401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 4000-001 | GSWS Honors Thesis Seminar | Gwendolyn A Beetham | This course is for senior undergraduate GSWS majors who will be completing an honors thesis. The seminar helps students decide on the most appropriate methodologies to use and topics to include in their thesis. Other topics include thesis organization and drawing conclusions from primary and secondary sources of data. | |||||||||||
| GSWS 5121-401 | Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern South Asia | Emma Kalb | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | This course will serve as an introduction to frameworks for studying gender and sexuality through the lens of early modern South Asian history, literature, and art, covering what are today the countries of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Taking the fundamental questions of “what is gender?” and “what is sexuality?” as our starting point, we will examine the diversity of social practices and beliefs related to these concepts expressed in early modern South Asian writings and visual art, as well as how this past relates to contemporary debates, in contexts including Hindu mystical traditions, Islamic courtly culture, and early colonial society. The course will emphasize direct engagement with primary sources ranging from memoirs, legal documents and advice manuals to mystical tales, satirical poetry, and paintings. Topics covered include formulations of masculinity and femininity, notions of the home and the family, representations of queer sex and desire, and conceptualizations of the categories of intersex and transgender. Students will complete the course with an understanding of comparative lenses for thinking about gender and sexuality in addition to proficiency in applying and interpreting those lenses in relation to a variety of sources, from literature to technical prose to visual culture. No prior knowledge of South Asian history, languages or literature is required. | GSWS3121401, SAST3121401, SAST5121401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5272-401 | Graduate Seminar in Black Women's History | Marcia Chatelain | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This graduate seminar is an examination of the scholarship on Black women in the United States, as well as the development of the field of Black women’s history, in order to interrogate canon formation, shifts in academic and public history, and changes in source material and research tools. | AFRC5272401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 6873-401 | Postmodernism | Jonathan D Katz | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | The establishment of postmodern art as a chronological development is built into the very term postmodern, but unfortunately chronology gets everything about postmodernism wrong. It is not born after modernism but is rather coterminous with it and a product of the same forces. Nor does it succeed modern art, but rather in some fundamental ways instead critiques it, for the postmodern is more concerned with what infects art from outside its frame-including history, society, gender, racial and sexual politics, etc.-- than anything that develops within it. This course is thus concerned with the heyday of postmodern art from roughly the 1950 through the 1980s, although we begin in the early 20th century with the work of Marcel Duchamp. We will look at artists as different as Cindy Sherman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John Cage, Andy Warhol, and Kara Walker, and pay particular attention to art about AIDS. Roughly evenly divided between art and theory, the course presumes no prior knowledge of either. Still, as Jacques Derrida explained, binaries such as modernism and postmodernism remain extremely useful to power, because they uphold the status quo, circumscribing the field of contestation to either one pole or the other, and thus eliminating other possibilities. This course is concerned with these other possibilities. | ARTH2873401, ARTH6873401, GSWS2873401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 6910-401 | Transatlantic Black Feminisms in Francophone Literatures | Corine Labridy | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This course explores the evolution of representations of the Black femme body in French and francophone imaginaries, tracing a chronological arc that begins with early colonial imagery and ends with the rise of a 2018 movement spearheaded by a collective of Black comediennes, denouncing exclusionary practices in the French entertainment industry. We will first focus on the male gaze — European, Caribbean and African — and the way it constructed the Black femme body, to better understand how Black female authors undermine, resist, parody, or continue to bear the weight of these early images when they take control of their own representation. While our primary readings will be authored by French-writing women, including Mayotte Capecia (Martinique), Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Mariama Bâ (Senegal) and Marie Ndiaye (France), our theoretical foundation will include anglophone thinkers, such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and others. Readings and discussions will be in English. | AFRC6910401, COML6910401, FREN6910401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 7471-401 | Gender and Sexuality in Korea | So-Rim Lee | T 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | How have gender and sexuality been historically constructed and shifted in modern and contemporary Korea? How did terms like “new woman,” “t'ibu,” or “soybean paste girl” enter the popular discourse at different points of its capitalist modernity? This graduate seminar investigates gender/sexuality at large in relation to heteropatriarchal kinship system, ableist national biopolitics, and normative citizenship on the Korean peninsula from late Chosŏn to current times. Moving through the eras of Japanese occupation, the Korean War and division, developmental dictatorships, to the current millennia, we focus on the critical role that gender and sexuality played—and continue to play—in the political, social, cultural, and economic dimensions of nation-building, democratization, and neoliberalization that shaped the contemporary Korean societies. In this discussion-based seminar, we will read a broad range of secondary sources and explore different methods in interdisciplinary Korean studies including historiography, feminist cultural anthropology, queer and crip theories, among others. | EALC7471401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 7906-401 | Queer and Trans Concepts | Sarah P. Brilmyer | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This course takes the shifting nature of sexual and gender concepts as an opportunity to reflect on the history of sexuality. Focusing on the period that forged many of the sexual concepts we have with us today (1870-1930), we will reflect on the historically determined nature of the sexual concept and the philosophical problem of whether the experiences they describe are equally changeful. We will pay special attention to literary form throughout, asking how the confessional mode, naturalist description, poetic address, and the character sketch, among other literary modes and genres, not only describe, but determine knowledge of gender and sexuality. | ENGL7906401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 9006-640 | Learning from James Baldwin | Kathryn Watterson | W 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | This class will examine the intellectual legacy that James Baldwin left to present-day writers such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thulani Davis, Caryl Phillips, and others. We will spend time reading and discussing Baldwin's novels, short stories, plays and essays, and students will research subjects of their own choosing about Baldwin's life and art. | AFRC9006640, ENGL9006640, MLA5006640, URBS9006640 |
The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies