| 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 and Society | Javier Samper Vendrell | CANCELED | 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 0002-402 | Gender and Society | Javier Samper Vendrell | 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. | ENGL0159402 | Society sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 0003-401 | Introduction to Sexuality Studies and Queer Theory | India Halstead | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course will introduce students to the historical and intellectual forces that led to the emergence of queer theory as a distinct field, as well as to recent and ongoing debates about gender, sexuality, embodiment, race, privacy, global power, and social norms. We will begin by tracing queer theory's conceptual heritage and prehistory in psychoanalysis, deconstruction and poststructuralism, the history of sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, woman-of-color feminism, the feminist sex wars, and the AIDS crisis. We will then study the key terms and concepts of the foundational queer work of the 1990s and early 2000s. Finally, we will turn to the new questions and issues that queer theory has addressed in roughly the past decade. Students will write several short papers. | COML0030401, ENGL0160401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 0050-401 | Gender, Sexuality, and Religion | Jeremy Steinberg | MW 10:15 AM-11:14 AM | What does it mean to be a gendered individual in a Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, or Sikh 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. The first 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 emphasizes religious traditions 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 emphasize both historical perspectives and contemporary contexts. 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 0051-401 | Writing the Self: Life-Writing, Fiction, Representation | R 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This course investigates how people try to understand who they are by writing about their lives. It will cover a broad range of forms, including memoirs, novels, essay films, and even celebrity autobiographies. The course will be international and in focus and will ask how the notion of self may shift, not only according to the demands of different genres, but in different literary, linguistic, and social contexts. Questions probed will include the following: How does a writer's language--or languages--shape how they think of themselves? To what extent is a sense of self and identity shaped by exclusion and othering? Is self-writing a form of translation and performance, especially in multilingual contexts? What can memoir teach us about the ways writers navigate global literary institutions that shape our knowledge of World Literature? How do various forms of life-writing enable people on the margins, whether sexual, gendered, or racial, to craft narratives that encapsulate their experience? Can telling one's own story bring joy, affirmation, and greater transcultural or even global understanding? In sum, this course proposes to illuminate the many ways in which writing becomes meaningful for those who take it up. The format of the seminar will require students to offer oral presentations on the readings and invite them to craft their own experiences and memories in inventive narrative forms. | COML0015401, ENGL1745401 | ||||||||||
| GSWS 0092-401 | First-Year Seminar: Italian Film and Media Studies | Julia Heim | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings. | CIMS0092401, ITAL0092401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202330&c=GSWS0092401 | |||||||
| GSWS 0320-401 | Black Queer Traditions | Dagmawi Woubshet | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This first-year seminar provides a critical introduction to Black Queer literature, art, and politics. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | AFRC0320401, ENGL0320401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1100-401 | Women in Jewish Literature | 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, NELC0375401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1101-401 | Sociology of Gender | Jack Thornton | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | Gender is an organizing principle of society, shaping social structures, cultural understandings, processes of interaction, and identities in ways that have profound consequences. It affects every aspect of people's lives, from their intimate relationships to their participation in work, family, government, and other social institutions and their place in the stratification system. Yet gender is such a taken for granted basis for differences among people that it can be hard to see the underlying social structures and cultural forces that reinforce or weaken the social boundaries that define gender. Differences in behavior, power, and experience are often seen as the result of biological imperatives or of individual choice. A sociological view of gender, in contrast, emphasizes how gender is socially constructed and how structural constraints limit choice. This course examines how differences based on gender are created and sustained, with particular attention to how other important bases of personal identity and social inequality--race and class-interact with patterns of gender relations. We will also seek to understand how social change happens and how gender inequality might be reduced. | SOCI1100401 | Society sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1122-401 | Witches, Rebels, and Prophets: People on the Margins in Early America | Kathleen M Brown | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course explores the lost worlds of witches, sexual offenders, rebellious enslaved people, rebellious colonists, and Native American leaders from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Using the life stories of unusual individuals from the past, we try to make sense of their contentious relationships with their societies. By following the careers of the troublemakers, the criminals, the rebels, and other non-conformists, we also learn about the foundations of social order and the impulse to reform that rocked American society during the nineteenth century. The lives of these unique “movers and shakers” help us to understand the issues that Americans debated in the years leading up to the Civil War. | AFRC1122401, HIST1122401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202330&c=GSWS1122401 | ||||||||
| GSWS 1242-401 | Love and Loss in Japanese Literary Traditions: In Translation | Linda H Chance | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | 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 1260-401 | Latinx Literature and Culture | Jennifer Lyn Sternad Ponce De Leon | CANCELED | This course offers a broad introduction to the study of Latinx culture. We will examine literature, theater, visual art, and popular cultural forms, including murals, poster art, graffiti, guerrilla urban interventions, novels, poetry, short stories, and film. In each instance, we will study this work within its historical context and with close attention to the ways it illuminates class formation, racialization, and ideologies of gender and sexuality as they shape Latinx experience in the U.S. Topics addressed in the course will include immigration and border policy, revolutionary nationalism and its critique, anti-imperialist thought, Latinx feminisms, queer latinidades, ideology, identity formation, and social movements. While we will address key texts, historical events, and intellectual currents from the late 19th century and early 20th century, the course will focus primarily on literature and art from the 1960s to the present. All texts will be in English. | ARTH2679401, COML1260401, ENGL1260401, LALS1260401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202330&c=GSWS1260401 | ||||||||
| GSWS 1361-401 | Sex Matters: Politics of Sex in the Modern Middle East | 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 1427-401 | Wild Things: Children’s Literature and the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child | Max C Cavitch | MW 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | This course, framed as a psychoanalytic study of the child, focuses on English-language children’s literature from the 19th Century to the present. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | COML1427401, ENGL1427401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 1490-301 | Law and Social Policy on Sexuality and Reproduction | Carol E Tracy | T 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 1500-301 | Introduction to Disability Studies: Form, Text, and Practices | Mae Eskenazi | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Introduction to Disability Studies: Form, Text, and Practices is a class that fuses disability studies, queer theory, Black feminist theory, visuality studies, film theory, and disabled artistic practices. Centering the praxis of disability justice, this class asks students to think about practice and theory as an intertwined discipline. Students will study, write, and create works that looking towards models of production that center community based and interdependent relationality. Some areas that this course covers includes but is not limited to disability studies vs. crip theory, the history and legacy of AIDS epidemic, disability justice and mutual aid organizing, multi sensorial artistic practice, as well as tending to questions of labor, pain, excess, and debilitation. Disability studies has a long and complicated history of centering whiteness, domesticity, and the West in its models of rights-based advocacy. This class turns away from the white independent disabled superstar and towards the teachings of crip of color critique and disability justice to think beyond the terms and conditions that have been rectified as productive models in uplifting the “good disabled person.” We will use texts and teachings from Sins Invalid, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, Park McArthur, Constantina Zavitsanos, Lochlann Jain, LaMarr Jurelle Bruce, Mel Chen, Kai Cheng Thom, and Sami Schalk to guide us in our efforts. Students will also engage with transformative justice and anti-carceral models of thought through Mia Mingus’s Care Pods Activity and a training from Health Justice Commons. | ||||||||||
| GSWS 2000-401 | Epic Tradition | Rita Copeland | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This advanced seminar will examine the classical backgrounds of western medieval literature, in particular the reception of classical myth and epic in the literature of the Middle Ages. Different versions of the course will have different emphases on Greek or Latin backgrounds and on medieval literary genres. Major authors to be covered include Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet. | CLST3708401, COML2000401, ENGL2000401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2159-401 | The History of Family Separation | R 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This course examines the socio-legal history of family separation in the United States. From the period of slavery to the present-day, the United States has a long history of separating and remaking families. Black, Indigenous, poor, disabled, and immigrant communities have navigated the precarious nature of family separation and the legal regime of local, state, and federal law that substantiated it. In this course, we will trace how families have navigated domains of family separation and the reasoning that compelled such separation in the first place. Through an intersectional focus that embraces race, class, disability, and gender, we will underline who has endured family separation and how such separation has remade the very definition of family in the United States. | ASAM2159401, HIST2159401 | ||||||||||
| GSWS 2272-401 | In/Visible: Asian American Cultural Critique | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This interdisciplinary seminar examines how popular cultural representations frame Asian Americans as either invisible or hypervisible—our explorations will move across race and national origin, language and class, gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | ARTH3749401, ASAM2272401, ENGL2272401 | ||||||||||
| GSWS 2315-401 | Saints and Sex Demons | Caroline Batten | TR 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 2320-401 | Queer Life in U.S. History | Beans Velocci | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Queerness has held a variety of meanings and queer life has looked different over the past several centuries of United States history, but it certainly isn’t new. This course traces queer existence—in terms of both gender and sexuality—from the seventeenth century through the present, and foregrounds lived experience, identity formation, community development, and political consciousness. We will attend closely to how race, class, immigration status, and ability shape and are shaped by queer life, and engage with current topics of concern in the field of queer history, like the rural/urban divide, capitalism and neoliberalism, and queer memory. | HIST0819401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2390-401 | Clarice Lispector | Zita C Nunes | CANCELED | This seminar focuses on the work of Clarice Lispector, the Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer (1920-1977). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | COML2390401, ENGL2390401, LALS2390401, PRTG0090401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2401-401 | Indians, Pirates, Rebels and Runaways: Unofficial Histories of the Colonial Caribbean | Yvonne E Fabella | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This seminar considers the early history of the colonial Caribbean, not from the perspective of European colonizing powers but rather from “below.” Beginning with European-indigenous contact in the fifteenth century, and ending with the massive slave revolt that became the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), we will focus on the different ways in which indigenous, African, European and creole men and women experienced European colonization in the Caribbean, as agents, victims and resistors of imperial projects. Each week or so, we will examine the experiences of a different social group and their treatment by historians, as well as anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and novelists. Along the way, we will pay special attention to the question of primary sources: how can we recover the perspectives of people who rarely left their own accounts? How can we use documents and material objects—many of which were produced by colonial officials and elites—to access the experiences of the indigenous, the enslaved, and the poor? We will have some help approaching these questions from the knowledgeable staff at the Penn Museum, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the Van Pelt Library. | AFRC2401401, HIST2401401, LALS2401401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202330&c=GSWS2401401 | ||||||||
| GSWS 2545-401 | Sex, Love, and Race in African American Life and History | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course discusses the political and social implications of sex, race and personal relationships in U.S. political and social history. In this class, we examine how so-called ‘emotional,’ human experiences such as falling in love, engaging in a sexual relationship, marriage, coming out of the closet, and other deeply personal events over the course of a lifetime are shaped by political, legal and historical forces. This course will examine the history of marriage rights, claims to ethnic and racial identity, activism among multiracial people in the United States, sex education in public schools, and debates about marriage and family rights in the 20th and 21st centuries. | AFRC2545401, HIST0818401 | ||||||||||
| GSWS 2700-001 | Folklore and Sexuality | David Azzolina | T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | Sexuality is usually thought of as being biological or social, divided into categories of natural and unnatural. Often misssed are its creative and communicative aspects. Examining the constructed social elements of sexuality requires attention be paid to folklore in groups, between individuals and on the larger platform of popular technological media. The most interesting locations for exploration are those places where borderlands or margins, occur between genders, orientations and other cultural categories. A field-based paper will be required that must include documentary research. | ||||||||||
| GSWS 2705-401 | Media and Culture in Contemporary Iran | Fatemeh Shams Esmaeili | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This course offers a comprehensive introduction to the culture and media of modern Iran, with a critical perspective on issues such as identity formation, ethnicity, race, and nation-building. It focuses on how these issues relate to various aspects of modern Iranian culture -- such as religion, gender, sexuality, war, and migration -- through the lens of media, cinema, and literature. | CIMS2705401, NELC2705401, NELC6700401, RELS2180401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2978-401 | Just Futures Seminar II: Health and Healing in Abiayala (the Americas) | Lucia Isabel Stavig | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Health and Healing in Abiayala (the Americas) will introduce students to ecosocial notions of health, colonialism’s contributions to ill-health, and decolonial action as healing action. Part one of the course introduces general concepts of body, health, and illness in biomedical models. It then pivots to the relational and ecosocial practices of body, health, and wellbeing among many First Peoples of the Abiayala, highlighting “radical relationality.” For many First Peoples, community includes humans, plants, animals, ancestors, and earth beings (such as the land, mountains, rivers, and lakes) that are materially, socially, and spiritually interdependent. These beings work together to maintain a “shared body” through practices of reciprocal care. Part two of the course examines how the shared body has been and is threatened by the colonization of Indigenous lands and bodies through (e.g.) land dispossession, pollution, extractive industry, lack of access to quality education and medical care, forced sterilization, forced removal of children, exploitative economic relations, and political violence. The third part of the course will follow how First Peoples of Abiayala are healing from the physical, social, and spiritual wounds of colonialism through decolonial action. First Peoples are creating their own healing centers and ecological protection agencies, engaging in Land Back movements, in legal and direct-action processes to protect the shared body from extractive industry, and reproductive justice movements. Healing is future oriented, powering the “radical resurgence” of First Peoples. Some questions addressed in this class include, where does the body begin and end? What constitutes personhood? How does continued colonization affected indigenous peoples’ health—and that of all peoples? How do indigenous peoples use ancestral knowledges, relation ethics, and local ecologies to help heal historic and contemporary wounds to power their futures? Is there a political dimension to healing? How do autonomy and self-determination figure into healing and wellbeing? | ANTH2978401, HSOC2332401, LALS2978401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3020-401 | Queer Cinema | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Queer Cinema, in Theory: This course explores the role of cinema in shaping the history of gender and sexuality, at the same time introducing students to some of the most relevant texts in the field of queer, gender and trans studies. While the last decades have been characterized by increasing acceptance of gays, lesbians and trans people into mainstream society, this process has no doubt reproduced new inequalities and asymmetries – in terms of race, class, and gender presentation. Does “queer” still pose a threat to the mainstream or is it now part of the “normal”? Should one welcome the progressive acceptance or queer lives within the mainstream or should one reject it in the name of an indissoluble difference? How do whiteness and homonormativity participate in the structural marginalization of black and trans people? Some of the topics addressed by this course are the “closet” in classical Hollywood cinema and its critique in 1990s queer films such as Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997); the intersection of sexuality and race in black feminist films such as Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden,1983) and Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996); the treatment of reproductive labor in experimental feminist films such as Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman, 1975); the representation of the AIDS crisis in new queer films such as The Living End (Gregg Araki,1992); sex reassignment politics in 2000s Iranian films such as Sex My Life (Bahman Motemedian). | CIMS3030401, ITAL3030401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202330&c=GSWS3020401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3104-401 | Poetry Lab | Syd Zolf | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | A creative writing workshop in which students will learn to experiment and deepen their writing practice using the tools of poetry. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu. | ENGL3104401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3425-401 | Gender, Religion, and China | Hsiao-Wen Cheng | R 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | This course examines the interrelationship among "gender," "religion," and "China" as conceptual and historical categories. We ask, for example, how gender plays critical and constitutive roles in Chinese religious traditions, how religion can be used both to reinforce and to challenge gender norms, how religious women impact Chinese society and culture, and what the construction of "China" as a cultural identity and as a nation-state has to do with women, gender, and religion. We will also think about what assumptions we have when speaking of gender, religion, and China, and the infinite possibilities when we strive to think beyond. We will read three kinds of materials: (1) scholarship on gender and religion in historical and contemporary China as well as the Chinese-speaking world, (2) scholarship concerning theories and methodology of gender and religious studies not necessarily focused on China, and (3) historical record of religious women in English translation. | EALC3425401, EALC7425401, RELS3425401, RELS7425401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202330&c=GSWS3425401 | ||||||||
| GSWS 3440-401 | Psychology of Personal Growth | Pamela Zamel | T 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | Intellectual, emotional and behavioral development in the college years. Illustrative topics: developing intellectual and social competence; developing personal and career goals; managing interpersonal relationships; values and behavior. Recommended for submatriculation in Psychological Services Master's Degree program. | EDUC3545401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3500-401 | Trans Method | Beans Velocci | T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | What are the subjects of trans studies? What does “trans” as a category afford us in looking at texts, people, systems, and objects? To what extent is trans an identity? What might it mean to think of it as a methodology? How might the tools of trans studies intervene in conversations and practices beyond the field itself? What are the stakes of such an expansive approach? This course introduces students to “trans” as a still-forming analytic that has emerged out of academic spaces, activist movements, and trans cultural production. We will engage with texts and questions that build on trans studies’ connections to (and divergences from) queer and feminist studies, history, critical race studies, disability studies, and science studies, among other fields, and we will also consider how trans knowledge can act beyond the theoretical. | HSOC3889401, STSC3889401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3559-401 | Gender and Sexuality in Japan | Ayako Kano | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | If you have ever wondered about the following questions, then this is the right course for you: Is Japan a hyper-feminine nation of smiling geisha and obedient wives? Is it a hyper-masculine nation of samurai and economic warriors? Is it true that Japanese wives control the household? Is it true that Japanese men suffer from over-dependence on their mothers? What do young Japanese women and young men worry about? What does the government think about the future of Japanese women and men? Assuming that expressions of gender and sexuality are deeply influenced by cultural and social factors, and that they also show profound differences regionally and historically, this course examines a variety of texts--historical, biographical, autobiographical, fictional, non-fictional, visual, cinematic, analytical, theoretical--in order to better understand the complexity of any attempts to answer the above questions. | EALC3559401, EALC7559401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3630-401 | Here I/We Stand: Writing/Performing Self and Community | Ricardo Bracho | R 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This writing for performance workshop will focus on the creation of plays, solo performance, collectively devised work, screenplays and videos. Students can work in both the autobiographical mode common to one person shows, traditional theater and screenplay form as well as avant-garde and experimental techniques. We will write and use theater exercises to develop character and narratives that either directly or obliquely speak to the conditions of subjects who struggle to make art and sense out of self and community, history and society, memory and fantasy. We will read the work of playwrights and solo performers as well as view film and video with an emphasis on the work of leftist, feminist, queer/trans, BIPOC and social justice artists such as Jean Genet, Bertolt Brecht, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Cherríe Moraga, Luis Alfaro, Holly Hughes, Kate Bornstein, Ana Mendieta, Valerie Solanas, Wallace Shawn, Tomata du Plenty, Teatro Campesino and ACT UP. | ENGL3630401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3665-401 | Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist movement and the embodied archive | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Drawing inspiration from Harge’s multiform fable project FLY | DROWN and Audre Lorde’s conception of biomythography, students will trace their interiority to realize and imagine how personal histories, ancestral inheritance, and metaphysics live/move through the body. We will translate and transform stories of the flesh into a series of compositional modalities–which may include text, movement, performance, sound, and installation–to create lexicons that honor subjectivity as form. Informed by surrender, refusal, imagination, and self-sovereignty; we will situate our embodied archives as vessels for fable writing, create and correct myths through movement, and expand our relationship to memory, time, space, and illegibility. Throughout the course, we will turn to Black feminist literary and performance works employing fable, myth, and ancestral legacies including but not limited to: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Aretha Franklin’s gospel music, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Chameleon, and a close reading of Harge’s FLY | DROWN. The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort. | AFRC3665401, AFRC6665401, ANTH3665401, ANTH6665401, GSWS6665401 | ||||||||||
| GSWS 5240-401 | Premodern Monstrosities | Caroline Batten | M 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This course covers topics in Medieval literature. Its emphasis varies with instructor. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings. | COML5240401, ENGL5240401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5850-640 | Fashioning Gender | Jacqueline N Sadashige | 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. | |||||||||||
| GSWS 5933-401 | Cinema and Media Studies Methods | Shannon Mattern | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This proseminar will introduce a range of methodological approaches (and some debates about them) informing the somewhat sprawling interdisciplinary field of Cinema and Media Studies. It aims to equip students with a diverse—though not comprehensive—toolbox with which to begin conducting research in this field; an historical framework for understanding current methods in context; and a space for reflecting on both how to develop rigorous methodologies for emerging questions and how methods interact with disciplines, ideologies, and theories. Students in this class will also engage scholars participating in the Cinema and Media Studies colloquium series in practical discussions about their methodological choices. The course’s assignments will provide students with opportunities to explore a particular methodology in some depth through a variety of lenses that might include pedagogy, the conference presentation, grant applications, the written essay, or an essay in an alternative format, such as the graphic or video essay. Throughout, we will be trying to develop practical skills for the academic profession. Although our readings engage a variety of cinema and media objects, this course will be textually based. No prior experience needed. The course is open to upper-level undergraduates with relevant coursework in the field by permission of instructor only. Course Requirements: Complete assigned readings and actively participate in class discussion: 20%; Reading responses: 10%; Annotated bibliography or course syllabus on a particular methodology: 20%; SCMS methodology-focused conference paper proposal according to SCMS format: 10%; Research paper, grant proposal, or essay in an alternative format using the methodology explored in the syllabus or bibliography: 40%. | ARTH5933401, CIMS5933401, COML5940401, ENGL5933401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202330&c=GSWS5933401 | ||||||||
| GSWS 6665-401 | Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist movement and the embodied archive | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Drawing inspiration from Harge’s multiform fable project FLY | DROWN and Audre Lorde’s conception of biomythography, students will trace their interiority to realize and imagine how personal histories, ancestral inheritance, and metaphysics live/move through the body. We will translate and transform stories of the flesh into a series of compositional modalities–which may include text, movement, performance, sound, and installation–to create lexicons that honor subjectivity as form. Informed by surrender, refusal, imagination, and self-sovereignty; we will situate our embodied archives as vessels for fable writing, create and correct myths through movement, and expand our relationship to memory, time, space, and illegibility. Throughout the course, we will turn to Black feminist literary and performance works employing fable, myth, and ancestral legacies including but not limited to: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Aretha Franklin’s gospel music, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Chameleon, and a close reading of Harge’s FLY | DROWN. The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort. | AFRC3665401, AFRC6665401, ANTH3665401, ANTH6665401, GSWS3665401 | ||||||||||
| 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 Korea? Drawing from critical readings and case studies from history, society, and popular culture, this graduate-level seminar investigates various discussions of womanhood, family, gender, sexuality, and citizenship on the Korean peninsula from the late Chosŏn to the current era. | EALC7471401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 7901-401 | Feminism and Early Modern Studies |
Ania Loomba Melissa E Sanchez |
T 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | This course will provide an overview of critical theory related to the study of gender and/or sexuality. Different instructors will emphasize different topics within these fields. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings. | COML7901401, ENGL7901401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 8841-401 | Current Japanology | Ayako Kano | F 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This is a course designed for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students, primarily those majoring in Japanese and East Asian Studies and related disciplines. The main objective of the course is to survey recent and current scholarship on Japan. Each week we will focus on one monograph or a set of chapters or essays, reading them closely not merely to acquire up-to-date knowledge, but to gain new frameworks for approaching the study of Japanese culture, history, and society. Japanese-reading ability is not assumed and discussions will be in English, but optional readings in Japanese will be available. | EALC8841401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 9013-640 | Memoir Writing | Kathryn Watterson | R 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | This memoir workshop will shine light on the human experience as viewed through your personal lens. We’ll see how memoir can illuminate larger cultural themes - from the inhumanity of war, to racism, misogyny, and economic inequality - as viewed through lived experiences. | ENGL9013640, URBS9013640 |
The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies