| 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 | Melissa E Sanchez | 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 | Introduction to Sexuality Studies and Queer Theory | Eva Pensis | 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 0070-401 | Masculinities and Politics in Global Perspective | Paniz Musawi Natanzi | TR 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | This survey course introduces students to scholarship on men, masculinities, and their politics in global context. Combining academic readings with film, visual artwork and other media, the course will put the politics of masculinities in South Asia-- with particularly attention to Afghanistan and Pakistan--into conversation with scholarship from Africana Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and American Studies to compare experiences and contexts across the globe. The course will engage readings from feminist political geography; trans, queer, and sexuality studies; cultural studies; sociology; history; and anthropology. | AFRC0070401, SAST0070401, SOCI0070401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 0097-401 | First-Year Seminar: Italian Foods and Cultures | CANCELED | Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings. | CIMS0097401, ITAL0097401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | |||||||||
| GSWS 0700-401 | Iranian Cinema: Gender, Politics and Religion | Mahyar Entezari | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | This seminar explores Iranian culture, society, history and politics through the medium of film. We will examine a variety of cinematic works that represent the social, political, economic and cultural circumstances of contemporary Iran, as well as the diaspora. Along the way, we will discuss issues pertaining to gender, religion, nationalism, ethnicity, and the role of cinema in Iranian society and beyond. Discussions topics will also include the place of the Iranian diaspora in cinema, as well as the transnational production, distribution, and consumption of Iranian cinema. Films will include those by internationally acclaimed filmmakers, such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Asghar Farhadi, Bahman Ghobadi, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Dariush Mehrjui, Tahmineh Milani, Jafar Panahi, Marjane Satrapi and others. All films will be subtitled in English. No prior knowledge is required. | COML0700401, MELC0700401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 1027-401 | Sex and Representation | Rose Akua-Domfeh Poku | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | 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 1042-401 | Population and Society | Emilio Alberto Parrado | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | 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 1201-401 | Introduction to African American Literature | Dagmawi Woubshet | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | 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 1300-401 | Queer Politics, Queer Communities |
Sarah P. Brilmyer Heather Love |
MW 12:00 PM-12:59 PM | What makes men and women different? What is the nature of desire? This course introduces students to a long history of speculation about the meaning and nature of gender and sexuality -- a history fundamental to literary representation and the business of making meaning. We will consider theories from Aristophane's speech in Plato's Symposium to recent feminist and queer theory. Authors treated might include: Plato, Shakespeare, J. S. Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Catherine MacKinnon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Leo Bersani, Gloria Anzaldua, David Halperin, Cherrie Moraga, Donna Haraway, Gayatri Spivak, Diana Fuss, Rosemary Hennesy, Chandra Tadpole Mohanty, and Susan Stryker. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | ENGL1300401 | Hum & Soc Sci Sector (new curriculum only) | ||||||||
| GSWS 1351-401 | Contemporary Fiction & Film in Japan | Ayako Kano | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 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 1361-401 | Sex Matters: Politics of Sex in the Modern Middle East | Secil Yilmaz | CANCELED | 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 1400-401 | Asian American Gender and Sexualities | 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 1411-401 | Queer Chinas: Sexuality and Politics in the Sinophone World | Teemu Ruskola | T 3:30 PM-6:29 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 1761-401 | Sex and Empire | Secil Yilmaz | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This course explores the historical narratives surrounding modern empires and colonialism, with a specific focus on the role of sex and gender. Modern empires as complex political and social structures built upon and operated on the basis of difference—racial, religious, sexual. Colonial encounters not only produced unequal and uneven conditions for the colonized, but also in the construction of racialized and gendered structures in the formation of modern capitalism, market economies, political regimes, citizenship, everyday violence and so on. This course examines the historical literature on the intersections of power and historical experience in the framework of a variety of themes including modern family, marriage, slavery, property, labor, incarceration, sex trafficking, science of sex, displacement, and reproduction as they relate to sexuality, race, and religion categories in imperial contexts. The course spans the early nineteenth century to the present and is framed around global and cross-cultural perspective to analyze how scholars have engaged with sexuality and gender to explore broader themes pertaining to formation of modern empires and colonialism. | HIST1761401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2092-401 | Kelly Writers House Fellows Seminar | Alan J Filreis | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | 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 2159-401 | The History of Family Separation | Hardeep Dhillon | M 1:45 PM-4:44 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. | AFRC2159401, ASAM2159401, HIST2159401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2219-401 | ‘Global Inequalities’: A Comparative History of Caste and Race. | Ketaki Umesh Jaywant | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 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. Taking our key question about the comparative study of caste and race as out point of departure, the course will interrogate this juxtaposition by closely studying some crucial analytical grounds commonly shared by the two structures in question. We will explore the intersections, exchanges, and divergences between caste and race by approaching them from the perspective of violence, colonialism, Slavery and Abolition, mid-twentieth century writings in American and South Asian politics, experience and testimonios, and subaltern international solidarities. | AFRC2219401, SAST2219401, SOCI2970401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2220-401 | African Women's Lives: Past and Present | 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 2272-401 | In/Visible: Asian American Cultural Critique | Bakirathi Mani | 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 2300-401 | Queer Poetry from Homer to Hughes | Melissa E Sanchez | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This course explores theories of gender and sexuality intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | COML2301401, ENGL2300401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2320-401 | Queer Life in U.S. History | Beans Velocci | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 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 2330-301 | Disabled Artistic Practices | Mae Eskenazi | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | In the last decade, the field of disability arts has expanded within the public eye exploring themes of identity politics, disability as a verb, queer crip methodologies across dance labs, curated shows, collectives, and individual practice. This rise in attention is an echo of the sentiments given to artists during the AIDS epidemic nearly 30 years prior while engaging with contemporary arguments of individual versus collective action, memory, pain, sexuality, loss, amnesia, archival pursuits and more. Questions of institutional inclusion versus institutional protest, censoring, bodily autonomy, and mutual aid organizing, however, have begun to complicate this act of inclusion. Disabled Artistic Practice(s) is a class that will explore these nuances while supporting students in the development of their own artistic practices in relationship to these surrounding themes. This class will study the theoretical impulses and methodological questions of Black visuality studies, queer theory, crip theory, film theory, visuality studies, and affect theory to guide our exercises in artistic practice and development. We will use texts and teachings from Sins Invalid, Jasbir Puar, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha, Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, Constantina Zavitsanos, Kayla Hamilton, Joselia Rebekah Hughes, agustine zegers, alx velozo, Alcide Breaux, Nat Decker, Cielo Saucedo, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Paneteha Abareshi, Kamra Sadia-Hakim, Elle L’Sur, Amalle Dublon, Johanna Hedva, and Bob Flanagan. Students will also have the opportunity to have workshops with curators and artists whose contemporary practices are pushing the fields of artistic practice, film studies, critical studies, and curation. Reading is both in depth and attends to a broad survey of the field. There is one required text. All other texts have been uploaded in PDF form on Canvas. | ||||||||||
| GSWS 2350-401 | Growing Up Queer: Coming of Age in Contemporary Literature | Javier Samper Vendrell | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | We typically describe youth, puberty, or adolescence as the period of transformation from childhood to adulthood. This process doesn’t come without its challenges. Young people famously argue with their parents and have been in constant generational conflict with their elders. More importantly, youth is the period when we develop our own sense of identity and personality, feel deeply misunderstood, make our first friends, wonder about the meaning of life for the first time, and when we discover love and sex. Youth has not always been the same, of course. In fact, adolescence as such did not exist until the early nineteenth century. Since then, authors have been trying to describe the intense emotions as well as the intellectual and moral growth experienced by people during this period of life. Needless to say, the Bildungsroman, as this literary genre came to be known, focused on the experiences of young, white male protagonists and was deeply normative. In the end, the main character in these stories is supposed to find comfort in fitting in and accepting the world around them as it is. What does it mean to grow up queer, then? In this course, we’ll consider how contemporary queer authors have turned this genre upside down to include the lived experiences of people who don’t “fit in.” We’ll focus on coming out as the moment of self-recognition, self-acceptance, and disclosure of one’s sexuality or gender identity, but also as a deeply political act that promotes new ways of being in the world beyond binaries and norms. All along, we’ll consider how class, race, ethnicity, and religion shape these experiences. Novels, a graphic novel, as well as examples from films and television series will help us generate ideas about this topic and consider how authors are developing original narrative and aesthetic strategies to describe what growing up queer is like. You will keep a guided reading journal, write several short essays, and give a presentation. This collaborative course will help you reflect on queerness and youth as you develop sophisticated writing and analytical skills. | ENGL2380401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2537-401 | Gender and Health | Angelica Barbara Clayton | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | Women's health is a constant refrain of modern life, prompting impassioned debates that speak to the fundamental nature of our society. Women's bodies are the tableaux across which politicians, physicians, healthcare professional, activists, and women themselves dispute issues as wide-ranging as individual versus collective rights, the legitimacy of scientific and medical knowledge, the role of the government in healthcare, inequalities of care, and the value of experiential knowledge, among many others. Understanding the history of these questions is crucial for informed engagement with contemporary issues. | HSOC2537401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 2770-401 | Gender, Sex & Urban Life: The City as a Feminist/Queer/Trans Archive | Alicia J Meyer | M 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | How does the city shape our experience of gender and sexuality? How do women, non-binary, queer, and trans subjects inhabit and transform urban space? In this course, we will think about the city as an archive of feminist, queer, and trans communities, activism, and intimate life. Course sessions will be divided into two types – the first, in-class discussions of key theoretical and historical texts exploring how gender and sexuality inform, and are informed by, the design of cities around the globe. Second, we will engage Philadelphia itself as a repository of queer/feminist/trans life through experiential learning activities – from walking tours to archive and institution visits. During the experiential part of the course, we will experiment with embodied methods for interpreting the city, including autoethnography, poetry, critical essay writing, visual representation (collage, photography, design proposals, zine-making), oral history, sound capturing/production, and more. Interdisciplinary in nature, the course will draw from urban history, feminist, queer, and trans theory, architectural and planning theory, and geography, as well as from fiction, poetry, art and film. | URBS2770401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3102-401 | Attention Poetics | Julia A Bloch | R 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This is a poetry workshop about paying close attention: to the ordinary and the ephemeral, as well as to the extraordinary and the large, often inexorable systems around us. Experienced poets and students new to poetry are all welcome. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu. | ENGL3102401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3136-401 | Queer Science | Beans Velocci | T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This course gives students a background in the development of sex science, from evolutionary arguments that racialized sexual dimorphism to the contemporary technologies that claim to be able to get at bodily truths that are supposedly more real than identity. Then, it introduces several scholarly and political interventions that have attempted to short-circuit the idea that sex is stable and knowable by science, highlighting ways that queer and queering thinkers have challenged the stability of sexual categories. It concludes by asking how to put those interventions into practice when so much of the fight for queer rights, autonomy, and survival has been rooted in categorical recognition by the state, and by considering whether science can be made queer. Along the way, students will engage with the tools, methods, and theories of both STS and queer studies that emphasize the constructed and political underpinnings of scientific thought and practice. | STSC3136401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3160-401 | Black Magic: Transnational Feminist Perspectives of AfroLatinidad | Krista Cortes | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Blackness and brujería are taboo topics within Latinx communities; both typically connote negative imagery and are actively avoided. Recently, the bruja identity has been reclaimed by many AfroLatinx women who see it as an outward expression of their AfroLatinidad and source of personal empowerment. Lara (2005) describes this as a bruja positionality – “the re-membering, revising, and constructing of knowledge as well as participation in other forms of social change...built on healing the internalized desconocimientos that demonize la Bruja and the transgressive spirituality and sexuality that she represents” (p 13). Latinx spiritual practices such as espiritismo, Santeria, Palo Monte, among others, will become avenues through which will explore key themes in Black/Latina/Chicana feminisms, including the politics of representation, stigmatization, multiple forms of state and interpersonal violence, intersecting forms of oppression, economic justice, reproductive justice, queerness/sexuality/lesbianism, and strategies of empowerment and resistance. Through a variety of course materials – academic articles, personal reflections, performance, and art – we will critically examine the construction of Afro-indigenous feminist identities within the contexts of Latin America and the diaspora. | LALS3160401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3300-401 | Global Film Theory | Karen E Redrobe | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as "cinema," to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. There will be an asynchronous weekly film screening for this course. No knowledge of film theory is presumed. | ARTH2952401, ARTH6952401, CIMS3300401, CIMS6300401, COML3303401, COML6592401, ENGL2902401, GSWS6300401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3350-401 | Feminism and Surveillance | Jessica Florence Lingel | 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 3447-401 | From Puberty to Parenting: The Evolutionary Context of Reproduction | Caroline E Jones | R 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This course explores the processes that influence reproduction in human populations. We adopt an evolutionary perspective to examine the factors that have shaped human reproductive physiology and contribute to variation in reproductive parameters between populations. To place human reproduction in a broad evolutionary context, we will consider similarities and differences between humans and other apes in how ecology shapes reproduction. The biology of puberty, pregnancy, hormonal changes across the lifespan, the cessation of reproduction, the impact of parenting behavior on the biology of offspring and parents themselves, and the influence of sex and gender diversity on reproduction will be discussed. Both the ecological and sociocultural factors that influence the steps in the reproductive process will be considered. | ANTH3447401, ANTH5447401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3670-401 | What's Love Got To Do With It?: Art and Desire | Ricardo Bracho | R 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | Within this course, students will have the opportunity to make work in a variety of mediums that address desire, love, lust, romance, friendship, kinship, heartbreak and loss. We will look at work from visual artists, writers of all genres, film and performance that question and center matters of the heart and the libidinal. While placing sexual and relational dynamics at the core of our artistic endeavors we will address through readings of queer, feminist and left scholarship the social and political implications of acts of love and art. Students can make work in all artistic genres: video, writing, sculpture, performance, painting, photography, collage, drawing and mixed media. In class we will do a variety of writing and some drawing exercises; look at film, video and visual art; and discuss work read and viewed outside of class. Artists, writers, and filmmakers we will study will include Jean Genet, Juan Goytisolo, tatiana de la tierra, Zadie Smith, Miranda July, Honey Lee Cottrell, Mel Odom, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lorraine O’Grady, Ai, Eileen Myles, Ana Maria Simo and many others. Work developed can be based in autobiography or history and as much about the desire for social justice as they are about the erotic. While work developed can be about the parent-child bond, lifelong friendships or sibling rivalry/solidarity, students should have ease in viewing, reading, discussing and critiquing art works that are sexually explicit. | CIMS3670401, ENGL3670401, LALS3670401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 3780-401 | Sexuality of Postmodernism | Jonathan D Katz | M 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This course is fundamentally concerned with why so many of the defining artists and theorists of postmodernism were queer, indeed such that one could plausibly claim that postmodernism itself was a queer innovation. Centrally, most of these queer figures raise the problem of the authorial as a defining issue. Deploying a combination of social-historical and theoretical texts, we will approach the problem of how and why so much post-war American art problematized the idea of the author, focusing on the works of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Leon Polk Smith and not least Andy Warhol. Central to this course will be the continuing relevance of the "death of the author" discourse, pioneered in literature by Barthes and Foucault, and in art by every one of the artists we will be examining. Why, at the very moment that questions of authorial difference, sexual and otherwise, emerged as important in American art did so much criticism deny the authorial role, and why did so many queer artists use that denial to camouflage their authorial voices? In other words, why does a closeted queer artist like John Cage make the performance of silence one of his calling cards? In asking this question, we are of course self-consciously violating the very premise of one key strand of postmodernist critique--and in so doing attempting to historicize a theoretical frame that is strikingly resistant to historical analysis. | ARTH3800401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 4680-401 | Feminist Political Theory | Katerina Traut | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | In what ways has Western Political Theory constructed, excluded, and denigrated gendered and sexualized political subjects? In what ways have these subjects resisted these politics, and organized for their freedom and sovereignty? This course will explore feminist political theories of the body, reproduction, and empire through a variety of theoretical styles and methodological approaches, including historical, textual, interpretative, ethnographic, and literary. Liberalism, Marxist feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, Black feminism, Chicana feminism, and Indigenous feminism will be explored throughout the semester. The course will be taught as a seminar and will be discussion-based. Students can expect to read 75-150 pages a week. | PSCI4680401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5087-401 | Race, Nation, Empire | Deborah A Thomas | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This graduate seminar examines the dynamic relationships among empires, nations and states; colonial and post-colonial policies; and anti-colonial strategies within a changing global context. Using the rubrics of anthropology, history, cultural studies, and social theory, we will explore the intimacies of subject formation within imperial contexts- past and present- especially in relation to ideas about race and belonging. We will focus on how belonging and participation have been defined in particular locales, as well as how these notions have been socialized through a variety of institutional contexts. Finally, we will consider the relationships between popular culture and state formation, examining these as dialectical struggles for hegemony. | AFRC5087401, ANTH5087401, LALS5087401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5260-401 | The Trouble with Freud: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture | Liliane Weissberg | T 1:45 PM-3:44 PM | For professionals in the field of mental care, Freud's work is often regarded as outmoded, if not problematic psychologists view his work as non-scientific, dependent on theses that cannot be confirmed by experiments. In the realm of literary and cultural theory, however, Freud's work seems to have relevance still, and is cited often. How do we understand the gap between a medical/scientific reading of Freud's work, and a humanist one? Where do we locate Freud's relevance today? The graduate course will concentrate on Freud's descriptions of psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as his writings on literature and culture. | COML5260401, GRMN5260401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5290-640 | History of Sexuality | Kristine Lynn Rabberman | M 7:00 PM-8:59 PM | In this online course, we will consider the impact of social, economic, and political conditions on social constructions of sexuality, from the classical world of Greece and Rome, to the early modern West, to the streets of Victorian London and 1920s New York. Topics of interest include: the prostitutes of New Orleans' Storyville district; Jack the Ripper and sensational media accounts of crimes of passion; the taverns and bawdy houses of colonial Philadelphia; cases of sexual misconduct in premodern Europe, Latin America; and colonial America; the history of sexual harassment in the American workplace; the history of hermaphrodites and transgendered people; JFK and representations of 20th-century masculinity. We will pay special attention to the ways that race, class, religion, and gender come together to shape power dynamics through the development, change, and continuity in sexual roles, norms, and relationships. | ||||||||||
| GSWS 5320-401 | Advanced Topics in Sociology of Gender | Pilar Gonalons-Pons | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This advanced seminar on the sociology of gender critically examines ideas about gender (women, men, masculinity, femininity), how those ideas shape our social world, and the subsequent power and impact of gender ideologies. | DEMG5410401, SOCI5410401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5555-401 | Queer European Cinema |
Ian Fleishman Filippo Trentin |
M 1:45 PM-3:44 PM | This graduate seminar will explore the intertwined histories of queer European cinemas, focusing on French, German, and Italian films. From the inherent queerness of early cinema's attractions (e.g., Meliès, the Lumière brothers, the Skladanowsky brothers) to the gender-bending comedies of the Weimar Republic; from the queer auteurism of new wave cinema (Visconti, Fassbinder, Pasolini, Démy) to the fluid, boundary-pushing sensibilities of more recent works by filmmakers like Akerman, Ozon, Guadagnino and Rohrwacher, this course will examine how representations of gender and sexuality emerge and evolve across different national contexts. In doing so, we will also take a transnational perspective, tracing connections and influences those cross borders and complicate traditional cinematic narratives. The seminar provides an introduction to both film history and queer studies, open to graduate students and qualified undergraduates by permission of the instructors. No prior knowledge of film or queer theory is required. | CIMS5555401, FIGS5550401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 5680-401 | Gender, Power & Feminist Theory | Nancy J. Hirschmann | CANCELED | 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 6300-401 | Global Film Theory | Karen E Redrobe | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as "cinema," to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. There will be an asynchronous weekly film screening for this course. No knowledge of film theory is presumed. | ARTH2952401, ARTH6952401, CIMS3300401, CIMS6300401, COML3303401, COML6592401, ENGL2902401, GSWS3300401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 7350-401 | Premodern Trans Studies |
Abdulhamit Arvas Caroline Batten |
T 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | This seminar revisits the question of gender before modernity in light of new expansions and developments within gender and sexuality studies, particularly trans studies. Different instructors may emphasize different aspects of the topic. Please see English.upenn.edu for a full list of course offerings. | COML7350401, ENGL7350401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 7904-401 | New Directions in Twenty-First Century Black Studies |
Margo N. Crawford Dagmawi Woubshet |
W 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | This course explores contemporary Black thought through a set of literary, visual, and theoretical texts. Our theoretical repertoire will include concepts like love, quiet, fabulation, and gaze to explore Black interiority in relation to political movements, aesthetic experimentation, gender and sexual identity, and African continental and diasporic practices. The course will draw on a range of genres (including films, photo portraits, personal essays, and criticism) and also take a comparative approach (including works from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings. | AFRC7904401, COML7904401, ENGL7904401 | |||||||||
| GSWS 9013-640 | Memoir Writing | Kathryn Watterson | W 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, MLA5013640, URBS9013640 |
The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies