| 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 | Austin Svedjan | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 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 0003-401 | Intro to Queer Studies | George N Perez | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | 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. | COML0030402, ENGL0160401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 0786-401 | Provocateurs: Feminists Onstage | Rosemary Malague | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | What is feminist theatre? How do artists use live performance to provoke social, political, and personal change? This course will examine a wide array of feminist plays and performances from the late twentieth century to the present moment, and will include viewing of both live and recorded productions, as well as the opportunity for students to create their own artistic provocations. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | ENGL0786401, THAR0786401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 1027-402 | Sex and Representation: Desire and Death after Psychoanalysis | Jack Weizhe Cao | F 12:00 PM-2:49 PM | 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. | CIMS1027402, COML1027402 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1042-401 | Population & Society | Iliana V Kohler | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | The course serves as an introduction to the study of population and demography, including issues pertaining to fertility, mortality, migration, and family formation and structure. Within these broad areas we consider the social, economic, and political implications of current trends, including: population explosion, baby bust, the impact of international migration on receiving societies, population aging, racial classification, growing diversity in household composition and family structure, population and environmental degradation, and the link between population and development/poverty. | SOCI1040401 | Society sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1101-401 | Sociology of Gender | Emily Curran | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 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 1123-401 | Wives, Workers, Widows and Wenches: Women in the Law of Early America | Jennifer Reiss | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | 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. | HIST1123401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 1201-401 | Introduction to African American Literature | Dagmawi Woubshet | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | An introduction to African-American literature, ranging across a wide spectrum of moments, methodologies, and ideological postures, from Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | AFRC1200401, ENGL1200401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1242-401 | Love and Loss in Japanese Literary Traditions: In Translation | Linda H. Chance | MW 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 1351-401 | Contempor Fiction/Film-Japan | Ayako Kano | M 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This course will explore fiction and film in contemporary Japan, from 1945 to the present. Topics will include literary and cinematic representation of Japan s war experience and post-war reconstruction, negotiation with Japanese classics, confrontation with the state, and changing ideas of gender and sexuality. We will explore these and other questions by analyzing texts of various genres, including film and film scripts, novels, short stories, manga, and academic essays. Class sessions will combine lectures, discussion, audio-visual materials, and creative as well as analytical writing exercises. The course is taught in English, although Japanese materials will be made available upon request. No prior coursework in Japanese literature, culture, or film is required or expected; additional secondary materials will be available for students taking the course at the 600 level. Writers and film directors examined may include: Kawabata Yasunari, Hayashi Fumiko, Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Yoshimoto Banana, Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, Kurosawa Akira, Imamura Shohei, Koreeda Hirokazu, and Beat Takeshi. | CIMS1351401, COML1351401, EALC1351401, EALC5351401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1400-401 | Asian Am Gendersexuality | Rupa Pillai | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course explores the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race in Asian America. Through interdisciplinary and cultural texts, students will consider how Asian American gender and sexualities are constructed in relation to racism while learning theories on and methods to study gender, sex, and race. We will discuss masculinities, femininities, race-conscious feminisms, LGBTQ+ identities, interracial and intraracial relationships, and kinship structures. | ASAM1400401, SAST1400401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 1800-401 | The Sexuality of Modern Art | Jonathan D Katz | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | It's no exaggeration to note that queers have long been at the forefront of innovation in the arts, and that the arts, generally, have been a comfortable home for queers, even at moments when society at large was distinctly hostile. In fact the concepts of modern art and homosexuality that we use today are twins, for they were both founded in the third quarter of the 19th century and grew up together. Introduction to Queer Art thus begins with the coining of the word "homosexual" in 1869, and surveys how a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and film shifted in response to new definitions of sexuality. Along the way, we will work towards answering two related questions: 1) Why were queer creators largely responsible for the introduction of modernity in the arts, and 2) why do we find so often that queer social and political dissent found form in, and as, aesthetic dissent as well? In creating new forms for art that often seem far removed from any traditional definition of sexuality, including non-objective and abstract art, queer artists pushed the boundaries of normativity, leading to new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking that often dared to encode queer meanings as part of their formal innovation. We will look into the politics of queer art, and how and why in the US, even amidst often dangerous homophobia, it was queer artists who represented America to itself. Thus, we will cover such key cultural figures such as Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frank O'Hara, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Agnes Martin. Throughout, new methods informed by queer, gender, and critical race theory will be utilized. | ARTH1800401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2092-401 | Kelly Writers House Fellows |
Alan J Filreis Simone White |
This seminar features visits by eminent writers as "Fellows" of the Kelly Writers House, the student-conceived writing arts collaborative at 3805 Locust Walk. Throughout the semester we will study the work of these writers—and some of the materials "around" them that make the particular contemporary context in which each operates so compelling. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | ENGL2092401 | ||||||||||
| GSWS 2100-301 | Trauma Porn to Title IX: Gender Based Violence at Penn |
Julie Millisky Reema Malhotra Phillips |
MW 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | 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. | ||||||||||
| GSWS 2200-401 | Journeys in Black Feminism | Rose Akua-Domfeh Poku | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | 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. | AFRC2201401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2220-401 | African Women Lives Past/Pres | Pamela Blakely | T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | Restoring women to African history is a worthy goal, but easier said than done.The course examines scholarship over the past forty years that brings to light previously overlooked contributions African women have made to political struggle, religious change, culture preservation, and economic development from pre-colonial times to present. The course addresses basic questions about changing women's roles and human rights controversies associated with African women within the wider cultural and historical contexts in which their lives are lived. It also raises fundamental questions about sources, methodology, and representation, including the value of African women's oral and written narrative and cinema production as avenues to insider perspectives on African women's lives. | AFRC2220401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2240-401 | Italian Feminisms | Julia Heim | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | 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. | ITAL2240401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202610&c=GSWS2240401 | ||||||||
| GSWS 2610-401 | The Asian Caribbean | Rupa Pillai | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | Although Asians have lived in the Americas for centuries, the Asian American community and experience tends to be defined by the post-1965 wave of immigration to the United States. In an effort to correct this narrative this course will explore the histories, experiences, and contributions of some of the forgotten Asians of the Americas. In particular, we will focus on the earlier labor migrations of Chinese and South Asian individuals to the Caribbean and the United States. The experiences of these individuals, who built railroads, cut sugarcane, and replaced African slave labor, complicate our understandings of race today. By examining the legal and social debates surrounding their labor in the 19th century and exploring how their experiences are forgotten and their descendants are rendered invisible today, we will complicate what is Asian America and consider how this history shapes immigration policies today. | ASAM2610401, LALS2601401, SAST2610401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2770-401 | Gender, Sex & Urban Life | Alicia J Meyer | 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 3120-401 | Grammars of Pop: Cross-Racial and Cross-Gender Performance across the Americas | Eva Pensis | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Long before the internet discourse of transfluencers (a la Nikita Dragun) and celebrities (a la Ariana Grande), popular genres of expressive culture and mass entertainment have long been sites of raced and sexed performance. This course explores the persistence of appropriation as convention and charge of popular performance. Taking one genre of vernacular/lowbrow performance as its focus—drag performance—this course will engage an array of disciplines to approach a racial history of cross-gender performance, from Harvard’s Hasty Puddings Club to contemporary Halloween parties and the early 2000s camp classic, White Chicks. Grounded in Hortense Spillers’s concept of grammar as the symbolic organization of social institutions, this course will track cross-racial and cross-gender performance across two centuries of popular/lowbrow performance and mass entertainment, to blackface minstrelsy and what Danielle Roper calls “hemispheric blackface” across Latin America. What grammars underlie performances of racial and sexual impersonation, historically? And how does that relate to contemporary performances of (dis)identity? Coursework will consist of several short writing opportunities and a creative piece. | THAR2530401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3350-401 | Feminism and Surveillance | Jenny Lee | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | 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. | COMM3350401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3411-401 | Mediterranean Studies | Arianna Fognani | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses | CIMS3411401, ITAL3411401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3680-401 | Surrealism in the Americas | Ricardo Bracho | R 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | Surrealism in the Americas is a workshop focused around the reading, writing and production of surrealist manifestos, plays, performances, poems and fiction. Taking the stance that surrealist literary production is at its base a left aesthetic engagement with form and politics, the course will survey North American, South American, and Caribbean engagements with what is largely misunderstood as a European aesthetic and movement. The works of Aime Cesaire, Adrienne Kennedy, Leonora Carrington, Martin Ramirez, and Grupo Etcetera, among many others, will be studied and used as models for students' own writing and performance. Work will be both individually and collectively generated and the opportunity to work on public performances of surrealist plays will be part of the workshop. | ENGL3680401, LALS3680401, THAR3680401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5160-401 | Public Interest Workshop | Gretchen E L Suess | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This is a Public Interest Ethnography workshop (originally created by Peggy Reeves Sanday - Department of Anthropology) that incorporates an interdisciplinary approach to exploring social issues. Open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students, the workshop is a response to Amy Gutmann's call for interdisciplinary cooperation across the University and to the Department of Anthropology's commitment to developing public interest research and practice as a disciplinary theme. Rooted in the rubric of public interest social science, the course focuses on: 1) merging problem solving with theory and analysis in the interest of change motivated by a commitment to social justice, racial harmony, equality, and human rights; and 2) engaging in public debate on human issues to make research results accessible to a broader audience. The workshop brings in guest speakers and will incorporate original ethnographic research to merge theory with action. Students are encouraged to apply the framing model to a public interest research and action topic of their choice. This is an academically-based-community-service (ABCS) course that partners directly with Penn's Netter Center for Community Partnerships. | ANTH5160401, URBS5160401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5200-401 | Art, Sex and the Sixties | Jonathan D Katz | M 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | 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. | ARTH5830401, CIMS5830401, LALS5830401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5330-401 | Religion, Race, and Sexuality |
Abdulhamit Arvas Melissa E Sanchez |
R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This seminar examines the entangled histories of religion, race, sexuality through literature. Rather than treating devotion and desire, faith and embodiment, or theology and politics as separate domains, we will examine how their intersections have historically produced categories of identity, difference, and community. How are spiritual and secular discourses of desire mutually constitutive? Is the experience of religious devotion— with its gender-fluid identifications, erotic raptures, and bodily disciplines —ever anything but queer? To what extent do monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) depend on, and even construct, racialized hierarchies? By situating these questions within early modern theology as well as modern and contemporary contexts, the seminar challenges the presumed stability of selfhood, morality, and monogamy that are often taken as normative in definitions of faith. Our approach will interrogate how theological discourse not only regulated but also destabilized emergent formations of race, sexuality, and gender. Bringing together literary texts, theological writings, ethnographies, and critical theory, the course advances a comparative and transhistorical framework. In doing so, the seminar positions religion as a generative archive for rethinking how categories of race and sexuality take shape. It also underscores the methodological stakes of reading devotion and desire together: attending to their entanglement unsettles the boundaries of periodization, resituates canonical works in broader transnational contexts, and opens the study of literature to comparative religious and queer frameworks. | COML5301401, ENGL5300401, RELS5300401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5520-401 | Affect Theory and Power | Donovan O. Schaefer | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | 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. | COML5520401, COMM5520401, RELS5520401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5680-401 | Gender, Power & Feminist Theory | Nancy J. Hirschmann | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This seminar will examine the theme of power as it engages questions of sex andgender. Subsidiary themes that will be developed over the course of the semester include: the modernism/ postmodernism debate as it particularly relates to feminism; the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and class and how feminists can and do talk about "women"; the relevance of feminist theory to policy issues, and which theoretical approaches are the most appropriate or have the most powerful potential. The readings will start with "foundational" texts in feminist theory-- texts that anyone who wants to work in or teach feminist theory needs to have in their repertoire, they set out the background and history of contemporary feminist theory, and they operate from a variety of disciplinary frameworks. We then will move onto some newer scholarship and some more specific political issues and topics, depending on what students in the course are interested in studying. This course is open to undergraduates who have had some prior course work in feminist theory, gender and sexuality studies, and/or political theory, in consultation with the professor. | PSCI5680401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5850-640 | Fashioning Gender | Jacqueline N Sadashige | M 7:00 PM-8:59 PM | 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 7900-401 | New Directions in Queer and Trans Studies | Heather Love | M 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | In this course, we will read recent work in queer and trans studies addrressing a number of topics that have been central over the last several decades. We will address the ongoing expansion of the field in historical and geographical directions, overlaps and tensions between queer and trans studies, AIDS historiography, social class in trans life writing, queer environmental studies, the persistence of gay and lesbian studies, black feminism and disciplinary history, uses of the first person in criticism, and a queer critiques of liberalism in the present. In addition to new theoretical and critical writing, we will also consider recent queer and trans cultural production, considering the relation between politics, theory, and experience. Although this is designed as an advanced graduate seminar, we will ground our discussions in canonical readings in the field, which will make it accessible to students with different levels of preparation. | COML7900401, ENGL7900401 |
The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies