Exterior at night

The Center at night

Side Entrance

The entrance of the CSGS

Heather Love audience

The audience listens as Lauren Berlant introduces Heather Love in 2014

Class discussion

Students participate in a classroom discussion at the Center

Héctor Carrillo

Héctor Carrillo talks with students after his book talk in 2018

Joan Scott

Joan Scott speaking at the Center in 2017

panel

Students listen to panelists present in 2017

Community room

The Community Room at 5733 S University

center door

Center entrance

5733 exterior

The exterior of 5733 S University

Bhanu Kapil

Poet Bhanu Kapil at the Center in 2016

Courses

Undergraduate Courses 

WINTER 2025

SPRING 2025

 

Graduate Courses

WINTER 2025

SPRING 2025

 

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

WINTER 2025 

GNSE 10428 Medieval Desire
Instructor: Kashaf Qureshi
In medieval literature, various modes of desire intersect in surprising ways: spiritual devotion unfolds through sensual longing, and personal pleasure intertwines with sacrificial love, producing structures of desire that are conflicting, disorienting, and not so dissimilar from our own. In this course, we will survey a range of late medieval genres to unpack the richly imaginative and experimental discourses of desire housed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. Readings will include dream-vision poems like Pearl, where we will consider the overlaying of economic, domestic, and apocalyptic fantasies; to the hagiographical Book of Margery Kempe, where we will think through the entanglement of gender, embodied spirituality, and erotic encounter. We will interrogate how medieval texts trouble modernity's construction of "sacred" and "secular" desire as constitutive opposites, coming up with our own terms to better describe the interplay between these categories. How do medieval texts blend seemingly different modes of desire—holy and profane, specific and ambiguous, linear and asynchronic—to construct, obscure, and defamiliarize their objects of desire? What claims to selfhood, language, and knowledge are made by these hybrid models of desire and the multiple meanings they allow? Familiarity with medieval literature or Middle English is neither required nor expected. 

GNSE 12103 Treating Trans-: Practices of Medicine, Practices of Theory
Instructor: Paula Martin
Medical disciplines from psychiatry to surgery have all attempted to identify and to treat gendered misalignment, while queer theory and feminisms have simultaneously tried to understand if and how trans- theories should be integrated into their respective intellectual projects. This course looks at the logics of the medical treatment of transgender (and trans- more broadly) in order to consider the mutual entanglement of clinical processes with theoretical ones. Over the quarter we will read ethnographic accounts and theoretical essays, listen to oral histories, discuss the intersections of race and ability with gender, and interrogate concepts like "material bodies" and "objective science". Primary course questions include: (1) How is “trans-” conceptualized, experienced, and lived? How has trans-studies distinguished itself from feminisms and queer theories? (2) What are the objects, processes, and problematics trans-medicine identifies and treats? How is “trans-” understood and operationalized through medical practices? (3) What meanings of health, power, knowledge, gender, and the body are utilized or defined by our authors? What relations can we draw between them?
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 12106 Women of the Avant-Garde
Instructor: Rivky Mondal
This course provides an introduction to the written materials of women artists who belonged to various twentieth-century avant-garde movements and circles. The institutions of “woman art” and “the avant-garde” will come under scrutiny as we consider the literary and archival miscellany of pan- & non-sexual, cross-generational, inter-aesthetic, multilingual, and transnational works by such makers as Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, Clarice Lispector, Frida Kahlo, and Yoko Ono. How do these artists conceive of their work and process as interventions into social, political, and historical realities? How does their subjective view of those realities provide an account of the identificatory powers of their gender and sexuality? We will examine the ways in which abstraction in writing becomes useful for commenting on issues raised by feminist and queer theory, periodization, canonization, and institution. Taking to the Regenstein’s Special Collections Research Center, we will also open up the criticism, diaries, and letters of these artists to gain a new perspective on their creative processes. In addition to learning how to constellate these materials with the course readings, students will acquire hands-on experience in archival research, annotation, and curation as they make an archival project of their own. Students’ final projects will serve as the basis for a prospective library exhibition in concert with Special Collections.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.  

GNSE 12127 Indigenous Feminisms of Latin America
Instructor: Andrea Reed-Leal
This course examines how early modern visual and textual sources partook in the formation of gender and race differences in the Americas. We will explore colonial documents drawing on the work of contemporary Indigenous Feminist thinkers, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorena Cabnal, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Yásnaya Aguilar, among others. Reading the colonial archive while thinking about contemporary Indigenous perspectives can help us bridge the past to the present and discuss issues concerning the underrepresentation of Indigenous women in the archive, language politics, communal identities, and Indigenous epistemologies while being particularly attentive to the rhetorical strategies deployed by colonial texts. Along the way, we will have in perspective how contemporary indigenous women resist, negotiate, and denounce the state, corporate, and patriarchal establishments. In this course, students will engage with primary sources of the colonial period in Latin America as they engage in debates surrounding gender and race in our present moment. Understanding these debates and the history surrounding them is crucial to participating in informed discussion, research, and activism regarding issues of colonialism, race, and gender discrimination of today. Students will participate in class discussions, write weekly responses, lead, and moderate academic-style presentations, and produce a final research paper. Taught in Spanish.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 12128 (In)Visible Women from Dante to Elena Ferrante: Bodies, Power, Identity
Instructor: Beatrice Fazio
This course introduces students to both historical and current perspectives on gender, with a focus on Italian literature and cinema (14th-21st century). We will examine the representation of women in literature, as discussed in a variety of texts, including Dante’s Divine Comedy, Machiavelli’s comedies, and Elena Ferrante’s novels. We will investigate key issues raised in and by women-authored works, across historical periods as varied as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Fascism. And we will also explore conceptualizations of gender and sexuality in Italian and international films, unpacking concepts such as gaze, desire, and intersectionality. As students study topics such as identity, construction of difference, feminism and antifeminism, they will acquire the critical vocabulary to describe, interpret, and formulate arguments about women’s agency in literature, film, culture, and society. Taught in English.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 12133 Consent in American Life
Instructor: Evelyn Kessler
Consent brims with possibility. It is an ethic, a legal principle, a physical act, and a measuring stick of social capacity and interaction. It can express enthusiasm or ambivalence or a range of other conflicting emotions, and enable human flourishing or suffering. This course explores the history of consent in the United States across these vast terrains, and seeks to understand how gendered and sexual bodies have served as the anchor for consent despite its many meanings, ambiguities, and contradictions. We will examine debates over consent—and consenting or non-consenting bodies­—in various realms of life: sex, marriage, labor, medicine, consumption, visual culture, and the social sciences, among others. We will consider how and why consent differs from its conceptual cousins, such as choice or free will, and discuss the historical, ethical, and political challenges of studying and writing about consent.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors 

GNSE 12134 Geographies of Race and Gender in Medieval and Early Modern Italy
Instructor: Beatrice Fazio
This interdisciplinary course takes you on an engaging journey through literary masterpieces, historical texts, maps, and artistic representations (13th-17th century). Students will explore how early modern ideas on race and gender were constructed, challenged, and redefined by literary texts and other mediums, and within various spatial contexts—encompassing real and imagined geographies, Mediterranean and Atlantic trade routes, and urban social spaces. We will read poetry, essays, travelogues, and analyze the context within which a given literary work is entangled. Drawing on theories from cultural, gender, and critical race studies, this course reveals how early modern texts, art, intellectual debates, and politics shaped notions on gender, cultural identity, and racial categories, and why these ideas intertwine with concepts of “place” and “space.” Understanding the historical construction of race and gender not only empowers students to apply historical knowledge to current issues, but also equips them with the critical thinking skills to question and deconstruct stereotypes and harmful narratives.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors 

GNSE 15003 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations II
Instructor: Various
The second half of the civ sequence will extend our earlier interrogation of bodies, sex, and gender into an examination of sexualities and socialities. Through an encounter with theoretical texts, literature, and art, we will investigate a series of important critiques of biopower, or statist strategies for regulating bodies and controlling populations. These interventions include critiques of nationalism, colonialism, capitalism, and heteronormativity, all of which, as we will see, contribute to our understanding of sexuality. Throughout the course, feminist and queer critique will fundamentally frame our analyses of power, desire, and sexuality. PQ: GNSE 15002. 

GNSE 15134 Body Genres
Instructor: Gabriel Ojeda-Sague
This course explores physical response to aesthetic production, specifically framed by the concept (following Carol Clover, Linda Williams, and Richard Dyer) of the "body genre" in literature and film. We will analyze body genres such as the tearjerker, horror, comedy, pornography, and other affective responses to media such as disgust, shock, and cringe as they are theorized by scholars in literary studies, film studies, affect studies, and audience studies.  

GNSE 20119 Language, Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Fadi Hakim
This course focuses on the relationship, in theory and in practice, between language, gender, and sexuality. We begin with a brief overview of the field and some of its major theoretical developments. Then we expand on themes of desire and identity; binaries and normativities; embodiment; “interstices”; and performativity. The practical component of the course includes critical analysis of language used to construct gender and sexuality (e.g. in drag shows, communities you belong to personally, social media, and current events). We also consider binary language reform, abolition of linguistic gender systems, and emergence of identity categories as practices of everyday relationality that contest hegemonic systems. Readings are interdisciplinary and draw from fields including Linguistics, Anthropology, Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Queer Studies.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20121 Women And Work In Modern East Asia
Instructor: Jacob Eyferth
Worldwide, women do about 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly. Women’s underpaid work at home and in industry subsidized the early stages of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain, early twentieth-century Japan, and contemporary China, and women’s unpaid contributions to their households enable employers worldwide to keep wages low. We know, at least in outline, how women came to carry double burdens in Europe and North America, but little research has been done so far about this process in East Asia. In this course, we will discuss when and how China, Japan, and Korea developed a division of labor in which most wage work was gendered male and reproductive work was marked female. Are current divisions of labor between men and women rooted in local cultures, or are they the result of industrial capitalist development? How do divisions of labor differ between the three East Asian countries, and how did developments in one East Asian country affect others?
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20135 Divas, Idols, Material Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Music Videos
Instructor: Paula Harper
The stark black and white of Madonna’s “Vogue” and the pinks and sparkles of “Material Girl.” The explosive surprise releases of Beyoncé's BEYONCÉ and Lemonade visual albums. The lavish cinematic spectacle of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” and the fanbait intertextuality of SM Entertainment’s Aespa. Since MTV’s advent in 1981, hit music videos have made a number of pop songs inextricable from iconic imagery and choreography; ubiquitous digital devices and the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok have only increased pop music’s audiovisuality. Looking at and listening to female pop icons raises fraught questions of agency, representation, race, sexuality/sexualization, bodies, commodification, and capital. In this course, students will gain a vocabulary for talking about both the audio and visual parameters of music video, and they will use this vocabulary to engage with critical frameworks for examining meaning, circulation, and reception in contemporary music videos. Assignments across the course will allow students to experiment with a range of writing and media genres, including critical close readings, micro-reception histories, think pieces, podcast episodes, and video essays.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.  

GNSE 20139 Midwives, Healers, and "Abortionists"
Instructor: Peggy Heffington
In the 19th and early 20th centuries in the US, most births moved from the home (where they were often attended by midwives) to the hospital (where they were almost always attended by male doctors). In recent decades, demand for midwives has reemerged across the political spectrum. Some see midwives as a bulwark against contracting reproductive rights and autonomy; some see them as protection from government overreach and regulation, or as a return to a lost traditional or religious past; many see them as an answer to a medical system that has failed to meet the needs of mothers and babies. This course will follow the history of midwives, women healers, and abortion providers from antiquity through the Middle Ages and to the present, with a focus on the political, legal, and religious context of midwifery in twentieth and twenty-first century US. Topics include witchcraft accusations of midwives and healers; the importance of Black midwives in the antebellum south; the role of race and gender in laws against practicing midwifery; convergences and divergences between the natural birth movement and the reproductive rights movement; and the prevalence of homebirth among Christian momfluencers.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20142 India on Screen: Marriage and Sexuality from Bollywood to Made in Heaven
Instructor: Rochona Majumdar
From reality shows like Indian Matchmaking and Made in Heaven to the meme of the "Big Fat Indian Wedding" to the preoccupations of Bollywood films like DDLJ and Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahani and crossover ones such as Monsoon Wedding, marriage is an obsession in South Asian culture. Focusing on Hindi cinema, this course will explore the socio-political dynamics of this cultural focus on marriage and couple formation. With examples ranging from classical Hindi films from the 1950s-60s to the star-studded melodramas of 1970s and 1980s and the “new Bollywood” era (post-1991), this cinema exhibited and analyzed the central dynamics of marriage: sexual compatibility, fidelity, reproductive futures, and so on. Debates around class, caste, diaspora, and sexuality are equally anchored in issues of marriage and couple formation. In this course, we ask why it is that marriage—its success and failure—has been so central to Indian on-screen identities. Even as screens multiply—on computers, cell phones, and in the multiplex—marriage continues to dominate. No prior knowledge of Indian languages is required, but you must enjoy watching and talking about movies and popular culture.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20143 Feminisms and Anthropology
Instructors: Julie Chu and Jennifer Cole
This course examines the fraught yet generative relation between various movements of feminism and the discipline of anthropology. Both feminism(s) and anthropology emerged in the 19th century as fields invested in thinking “the human” through questions of alterity or Otherness. As such, feminist and anthropological inquiries often take up shared objects of analysis--including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value, and power--even as they differ in their political and scholarly orientations through the last century and a half. Tracking the emergence of feminisms and anthropology as distinct fields of academic discourse on the one hand and political intervention on the other, we pursue the following lines of inquiry: (1) a genealogical approach to key concepts and problem-spaces forged at the intersection of these two fields, (2) critical analysis of the relation of feminist and postcolonial social movements to the professionalizing fields of knowledge production (including Marxist-inspired writing on women and economy, Third World feminism and intersectionality, and feminist critiques of science studies), and (3) a reflexive contemporary examination of the way these two strands of thought have come together in the subfield of feminist anthropology, and the continual frictions and resonances of feminist and anthropological approaches in academic settings and in the larger world (e.g., #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics). 3rd and 4th year undergraduates only. Graduate students must have consent of one of the instructors.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20147 Gender Archaeology
Instructors: Alice Yao and Katie Kearns
How have archaeologists approached the study of gendered practices, and can their work contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions of gender across the social sciences and humanities? How can we use material objects and things to examine or explain gendered identities, especially in the deep past? In this course, students will engage with a range of research, from different disciplinary perspectives, to explore how gender is situated in archaeological theory and praxis and its political implications. Through multiple case studies, the course will interrogate how archaeologists study, analyze, and interpret material remains to examine gendered ideologies and material practices and their intersections with other social constructs: class, sex, race, ethnicity. Coverage is cross-cultural and aims to expose students to the diversity and variability of gendered and sexual experiences of different people across time and space. Topics include but are not limited to: embodiment and expression, gender roles, sexuality, parenthood and childhood, masculinity, biopolitics, and feminist theory.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20148 Drama Queens: Women Playwrights in the Renaissance
Instructor: Noémie Ndiaye
This course introduces students to early modern female playwrights from England--including Elizabeth Cary, Aphra Behn, and Margaret Cavendish--and from Continental Europe when their work is available in translation--including the French Marguerite de Navarre (Comedy of Mont-de-Marsan), the Italian Margherita Costa (The Buffoons), the Spanish Ana Caro (The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs) and the Mexican Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Narcissus). In this course, we will analyze the complex work and lives of those brilliant playwrights through various critical lenses including intersectional feminism, transnationalism, and premodern critical race studies.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20150 Queer Theories/Queer Practices
Instructor: Jonathan Flatley
An introduction to key texts in queer theory (Foucault, Crimp, Sedgwick, Butler, Wittig, Bersani, Edelman, Muñoz, Roderick Ferguson, Heather Love), with attention to the AIDS crisis as key context for the emergence of queer theory. Alongside these works, we will examine a range of queer aesthetic practices (Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Zoe Leonard, Alison Bechdel) and some of the political practices in and around the Gay Liberation Movement and ACT UP.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20151 Hooking Up, Shacking Up, Breaking Up: Public Policy and Intimate Relationships
Instructor: Karlyn Gorski
Every aspect of our lives is shaped by policy choices, including our most intimate relationships. In this course, we will examine the sociological and policy dimensions of different aspects of intimate relationships, including campus hookup cultures, relationship formation, housing policy, marriage, parenting, breakups and divorce. Each week, students will be responsible for reading an assigned book related to these topics, and class meetings will be dedicated to discussing the texts in depth. Students should be aware that texts will engage with themes of assault, abuse, and intimate partner violence. Together, we will examine how macro-level policy decisions shape pivotal intimate moments throughout the lifecourse.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20408 Health Disparities in Breast Cancer
Instructor: Eileen Dolan
Across the globe, breast cancer is the most common women’s cancer. In the last two decades, there have been significant advances in breast cancer detection and treatment that have resulted in improved survival rates. Yet, not all populations have benefited equally from these improvements, and there continues to be a disproportionate burden of breast cancer felt by different populations. In the U.S., for example, white women have the highest incidence of breast cancer but African-American women have the highest breast cancer mortality overall. The socioeconomic, environmental, biological, and cultural factors that collectively contribute to these disparities are being identified with a growing emphasis on health disparities research efforts. In this 10-week discussion-based course students will meet twice weekly and cover major aspects of breast cancer disparities. 

GNSE 20416 Radical Style: Politics and Writing in the 1960s and 1970s
Instructor: Dana Glaser
From the iconic militant images of the Black Panthers sporting afros and slinging rifles to the street theater of the Yippies, the melodrama of bra-burning, and the parodic extremity of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto, the moment of the 1960s and 1970s is as synonymous with certain kinds of style as it is with radical politics. Often, the former to the detriment of the latter: the more style, the less substance: for example, the counterculture’s tuning in and dropping out depoliticized the student movement and the Black Panthers’ star power is “radical chic” that undermined the seriousness of their willingness to use revolutionary violence. Why did political activists write and perform their politics this way? What made these politics radical – that is, what is it about them that rethought something from its roots or foundations? Does radical style always suggest a radical politics? This class mixes cultural history, political theory, and literary approaches to the moment of the new social movements of the 1960s. We’ll read the serious political texts that invented modern ideas of race, sex, gender, and class politics as having style of their own, and we’ll read them alongside the film, poetry, theater (street and otherwise) that made characterized the 60’s. We’ll also make good use of archives in Chicago, which was one of the primary centers for New Left political activity, and students will have a chance to do firsthand archival research. 

GNSE 21001 Cultural Psychology
Instructor: Richard Shweder
There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of "normal" psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a single or uniform fundamental psychology for all peoples of the world. Research findings in cultural psychology thus raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. In this course we analyze the concept of "culture" and examine ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning. 

GNSE 21090 Spectral Archives: Asian Diasporic Literature in the Americas
Instructor: Yunning Zhang
Are minor lives worth documenting? How do we have access to the lives of the multitude, the dispossessed, the outcasts and the enslaved—the lives that archival documents have little to tell us about? Is it ethical to recreate and recover the unheard lives of peoples historically perceived as illiterate, undesirable, “diseased” and unassimilable? What is the power of imagining and writing about existing otherwise? We will consider these questions throughout the course by turning to the under-explored history of Asian diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean. We will contextualize examples of life writing (broadly-defined) spanning from late seventeenth-century to the twenty-first century, both by members of the Asian diasporas themselves and as they have been re-imagined by contemporary authors. Some examples of primary texts include the spiritual biography of a seventeenth-century Mughal princess-slave who became a mystic in colonial Mexico, queer imagination of a Chinese “coolie” in late nineteenth-century Jamaica, the memoirs of Japanese-Peruvians in the internment camp during WW2, semi-autobiographical poems and short stories by contemporary Asian-Latinx writers. With the help of supplementary critical readings on radical life writing, we will consider throughout the course how imaginative, anti-racist, feminist and queer narratives may expand our current knowledge of the lives of the marginalized and the racialized.  

GNSE 21352 That Age Old Debate: Youth Cultures in Postcolonial India
Instructor: Titas De Sarkar
In this course, we will gain a deeper understanding of how certain key moments in postcolonial India–from student protests to an economic transition to globalization, from rise of Bollywood to the omnipresence of social media–have shaped the youth of the country and how young people in turn have been at the forefront of some of the major events and have created history on their own terms. We will ask-if youth is a construct like gender and caste then how was it constructed over the last seventy years? We will keep two guiding questions in mind–who all are considered to be the youth in postcolonial India? And–what are the lived experiences of young people during this time? The ever changing, seemingly arbitrary, and conflicting definitions of youth in government reports, commercial advertisements, or popular culture demands a thorough analysis of this category inside out. We will take an inter-disciplinary approach and examine how the identity of being young intersects with other identities such as class, ethnicity, linguistic abilities and so on. By identifying the constitutive elements of being part of the young generation in a young nation such as India, we will challenge any homogeneous perception of “the youth” and read young people’s experiences in their own contexts. Focusing on youth culture in South Asia will help us think critically about youth culture studies where the Global South remains underrepresented.  

GNSE 21400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the proliferation of “new social movements” such as feminism and gay liberation, this seminar explores the key debates around which gender and sexuality were articulated as tenacious but open structures of power subject to political critique and social transformation. The relatively stable yet dynamic character of what Gayle Rubin in 1975 famously called “the sex/gender system” raises basic questions of structure and event: (1) how are systemic relations of domination and rule historically constituted and sustained over time?; and (2) how can that which is regularly reproduced be not only momentarily interrupted, but fundamentally altered through both quotidian and extraordinary forms of action and worlding? The unexpected character of the new social movements called for a radical rethinking of structures and their transformation. Haunted by unpredictable forms of resistance, heteropatriarchal structures challenged theorists and activists to forge new frameworks of critique that refigured basic concepts of power, subjectivity, and agency. These frameworks are examined with an eye to how racialized sexuality and gender are created and contested in the context of modern biopolitical capitalism and its constitution of naturalized conceptions of rule. Undergraduates by consent only. 

GNSE 21404 More than Human Ethnography
Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
In this course we explore the fields of more-than-human and ‘multispecies’ ethnography. We examine theoretical antecedents promoting the inclusion of non-human actors in ethnographic analysis and read examples of such work, including foundational texts on interspecies engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Anna Tsing, Eduardo Kohn, Deborah Bird Rose, and Juno Parreñas among many others. We consider the role other species and ‘actants’ played in early social science and contemplate recent studies of “becoming with” animals, plants, fungi, bacteria—encountering complex ecological relationships, examining naturalcultural borders, and querying the role of decolonial thought and queer ecologies in the ‘more-than’ turn. Multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional method; we will couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, physicists, and philosophers. The is a discussion-based seminar with significant time devoted to the logistical aspects of ‘more than’ work—to querying how such studies have been conducted in practice. 

GNSE 21424 Evil Women In Greek Tragedy
Instructor: Christina Filippaki
This course examines the portrayal of female villains in Greek tragedy. We will read plays by the three major tragedians, focusing on their depictions of Clytemnestra, the Furies, Phaedra, Medea, and Helen, as it relates to questions of gender, mythmaking, power, and reception. We will discuss the societal dynamics and generic norms through which those characters emerge and we will explore their intertextual journey through myth and literature, ancient and modern. Key questions of the course include: What makes a woman evil? How is the evil female constructed through the writing, visuals, and performance of tragedy? What does it mean to present an evil female in a genre where all writers and actors are male? To what extent does tragedy shape and reflect the patriarchal structures of the Athenian society? All readings will be in English.

GNSE 21500 Darwinian Health
Instructor: Jill Mateo
This course will use an evolutionary, rather than clinical, approach to understanding why we get sick. In particular, we will consider how health issues such as menstruation, senescence, pregnancy sickness, menopause, and diseases can be considered adaptations rather than pathologies. We will also discuss how our rapidly changing environments can reduce the benefits of these adaptations.  

GNSE 21720 Science Fiction Against the State
Instructor: Hilary Strang
Ursula Le Guin’s anarchist utopia, The Dispossessed was published 50 years ago, but its complex imagining of a whole way of life without law, police, money or sovereignty, and its investment in thinking that way of living in relation to environment, gender, freedom and work offers a science fictional horizon for what it might be to live communally in our own moment. This course will read The Dispossessed and other science fiction that imagines what it might mean to live against, beyond or without the state, alongside theorizations that may help us formulate our own visions of other possible worlds. We will pay particular attention to questions of environment and ecological relations, race, gender and social reproduction, and feminist utopias. We’ll also spend some time thinking about actually existing forms of living against the state (including blockades, encampments, autonomous zones). SF authors may include Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tade Thompson, Sally Gearhart, Iain Banks, and ME O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Other authors read may include Saidiya Hartman, Monique Wittig, Fredy Perlman, James Scott, Pierre Clastres, and David Graeber.

GNSE 22000 Intro to Black Studies
Instructor: Kevin Irakoze
This course introduces students to the study of Blackness from multiple perspectives: racial, political, cultural, and intellectual. We will adopt a global perspective to our study that highlights differential histories and experiences of Black people in various areas of the world. Attentive to the origin of the discipline in political struggle, we will constantly question the ties of Black studies scholarship to the communities whose struggle it is founded on. With a consideration of the adjacent histories of racialization and other forms of oppression, this course invites students to consider the relation between Blackness and other social categories such as gender and class. We will ask questions such as: What are the methods and approaches to the study of Blackness? How has the history of African and African diasporic people shaped the contemporary world? How can we build a world founded on freedom for all? Assigned materials include academic texts, fiction, and other media such as film & music. Select topics include the histories of enslavement and colonization, revolution, Black feminism, and Afrofuturism. Students will work on weekly reflections, a mid-term paper and a final team project. For the sake of a collaborative pedagogy anchored in the work of social movements, students are encouraged to imagine together the best form this course can take and to enact course practices and changes that keep us all true to the radical vocation of Black Studies as a discipline. 

GNSE 22123 Sociology of the Family
Instructor: Linda Waite
The family is a key social institution in all human societies, although its structure and functions vary over time and place. Families are responsible for producing, raising and socializing children into social roles. Families are often the site of religious practice, responsible for much of what is produced and consumed, provide shelter, transmit resources across generations and within them, inculcate members, especially the young, with values and beliefs, provide companionship and entertainment, and the location for much of the sexual activity that takes place. Changes in the structure of the economy, social policies, and social organization all affect the family, with demographic forces also playing a key role. We will discuss these issues through the lens of the classic and recent literature on the family as seen from a sociological perspective.  

GNSE 22148 Intro To Genres: Speculative Women
Instructor: Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
Despite common misconceptions, women have been at the forefront of the speculative genre from its earliest inceptions. They have not merely defied the limitations and restraints of literature as defined by their contemporary society, but invented whole worlds and genres which continue to influence writers and writing as a whole today—from Mary Shelley’s 1818 publication of "Frankenstein" to Virginia Woolf’s 1928 publication of "Orlando," and even Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 novel, “The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World." This course will be a brief foray into the strange and yet familiar worlds of various women across the history of speculative writing, ranging from Mary Shelley to Ursula K. Leguin, from Lady Cavendish to Margaret Atwood, from Alice Walker to Octavia E. Butler. 

GNSE 22163 Reading as a Writer: Obscenities
Instructor: Chicu Reddy
“Obscenity” is a term for what is repulsive, abhorrent, excessive, or taboo in a society; and yet many artworks once considered to be obscene are now celebrated as landmarks of world literature, from the ancient poetry of Sappho to modern novels like Ulysses. In this course, we will study literary works that have been banned or censored as “obscene” to examine our own perspectives, attitudes, and assumptions as literary artists. How does obscenity shape our understanding of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, or public and private speech? What are the uses of obscenity in constructing new possibilities for literary expression? Authors studied will include Toni Morrison, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Vladimir Nabokov, Hilda Hilst, and Allen Ginsburg; and we will supplement these readings with works of literary theory, psychoanalysis, and case law. Students will produce their own original poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to reimagine what is permissible—and possible—in language and society for contemporary literary artists. 

GNSE 22225 Race In African History
Instructor: Katie Hickerson
This course examines the category of race in African history from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era. It references the legacies of earlier identity constructions in the creation of these categories, as well as analyzing its transnational and trans-imperial dimensions. The class combines intellectual, cultural, and social history to illuminate the actors, encounters, and debates animating this dynamic field of study—moving beyond assumptions of African societies as spaces of ethnic—and not racialized—identities to examine the construction of difference through transnational history of science, gender and sexuality studies, histories of slavery, Middle Eastern colonial projects, as well as the invention of the category of “native” in European colonial discourse. Are categories of differences primarily due to European colonialism, as many claim? Or are they embedded in a more complex configuration coming from settler colonial projects, national liberation struggles, and postcolonial nativist discourses? Students examine case studies from across the continent—from Ghana to Sudan to South Africa—paying close attention to experiences of Asian, Arab, and mixed-race peoples navigating colonial and postcolonial African states; while keeping an eye on how debates about difference, diaspora, and nationalism in North America and Europe inform discussions of race in Africa, and how Africans shape discourses of race in colonial metropoles and the United States. Students who have not take African Civilizations I, II, and III are asked to read African History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007) in preparation for this course.  

GNSE 22288 Witchcraft And The Cultural Imagination
Instructors: Tamara Golan & Noel Blanco Mourelle
This seminar takes as its focal point the vast range of conceptual, material, and visual artifacts that are produced by, and indeed help to construct, this enduring fascination with the figure of the witch, from the medieval past to the present. We will examine case studies from premodern Europe to Colonial North America to Indonesia, scrutinizing texts, films, and works of art. Rather than offering a standard history of witchcraft, we will explore the intersections of gender, labor, and representation that the figure of the witch makes specially available for study. Witchcraft constitutes a multifaceted phenomenon that aims to alter reality and the self through the use of various techniques, transmitted both orally and in writing. These techniques have often appeared culturally marked in terms of gender and belief. Witchcraft has for centuries been the business of women in societies where very few avenues existed for women to develop any sort of business.  

GNSE 22360 Working 9 to 5
Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
This course will examine representations of labor and labor struggle in literature, film, and music spanning the 18th through 21st centuries. Theoretical and critical readings will bring Marxist and feminist lenses to the primary texts at hand, in addition to examinations of race, labor, and capital. Primary texts might include Robinson Crusoe, Bartleby the Scrivener, Mary Barton, Blood on the Forge, Sister Carrie, Lucy, 9 to 5, Harlan County USA, and Office Space. 

GNSE 22440 Women in Italian Organized Crime Through Cinema
Instructor: Veronica Vegna
In this course, we will study filmic representations of women in Italian organized crime, and the implications these portrayals have on the understanding of gender and the mafias through Italian cinema. Sociological and psychological studies have underscored the importance of female roles in relation to mafia organizations, notwithstanding the rigid patriarchal structure that allows only male affiliation. One of the main goals of this class is for students to gain an understanding of different Italian mafias and to get a deeper comprehension of the construction of gender in a selection of films centered around these organizations. We will also discuss how movies contribute to the perception of organized crime. This class will draw on a variety of fields, including sociology, gender studies, and film studies. Taught in English. Students seeking credit for the Italian major/minor must complete a substantial part of the course work (e.g., readings, writing) in Italian. 

GNSE 23150 Dark Stairways of Desire: Lusting beyond the Norm in Contemporary Catalan Literature
Instructor: Bel Olid
Although we can find a significant number of authors exploring queer desire and identities throughout the history of Catalan Literature (from lesbian scenes in Joanot Martorell's "Tirant lo blanc" to expanding gender identities in Maria Aurèlia Capmany's "Quim/Quima"), more recent Catalan Literature is blooming with queerness and non-normative lust. This course will give an overview of contemporary Catalan works influenced by feminist and queer debates from the seventies on. Beginning with renowned poet Maria Mercè Marçal's only novel, "The Passion According to Rennée Vivien," winner of several of the most prestigious literary awards for Catalan Literature, we will go on to discover 21st-century works by Eva Baltasar and Anna Punsoda. We will also read poems, short stories and excerpts from authors such as Maria Sevilla, Mireia Calafell, Raquel Santanera, Sebastià Portell, Sil Bel and Ian Bermúdez, among others.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23159 Alternative Feminisms: Gender, Agency, and Liberation in the Middle East
Instructor: Sevda Numanbayraktaroglu
This course critically examines gender, agency, and liberation in the Middle East. The course will begin with a discussion of human agency, its relation to sociocultural context, and the feminist literature on the issues of agency, resistance, and liberation. Then, we will explore these relationships in non-Western contexts by drawing examples from Turkey, Iran, and Northern Syria. In the cases of Turkey and Iran, we will focus on the feminist movements and women’s collective actions for the right to wear and take off the headscarf. In the case of Northern Syria, we will explore the agencies of Kurdish female guerrillas and their conceptions of empowerment. In each case, we will focus on the moral and ethical principles that guide women’s choices and trace their sociohistorical foundations.
This class counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23172 Transatlantic Feminism. French, Francophone, and North American perspectives (20th-21st c.)
Instructor: Léon Pradeau
This course explores modern and contemporary feminism through a transatlantic lens. We will consider three major moments and sites of a multi-centered conversation. First, we will explore the modernist desire for cosmopolitanism which drew writers across the Atlantic (Simone de Beauvoir’s adventures in the US; Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein’s lives in Paris). In the central part of the quarter, we will focus on the period between 1960 and 1990 which witnessed intense conversation and contestation between a French paradigm of “écriture féminine” (Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig), and the rivalling practices and theories in America (from Adrienne Rich and Mary Daly to Judith Butler). Finally, we will explore the ways in which feminist thought has endeavored to account for race, class, rurality, and disability (from Maryse Condé to Aurélie Olivier and Roseline Lambert). The course will explore various media (novels, poetry, theater and performance, film), and various ways to engage critically and creatively with this history of transatlantic feminism. Taught in English but reading knowledge of French is required. Students taking this class for French credit must have taken FREN 20500, 20503 or a literature course taught in French, and will complete assignments in French.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23178 The Queer Enemy and the Politics of Homophobia
Instructor: Omar Safadi
How is the queer enemy politically constructed? And what are the uses and effects of this enemy in contemporary politics? This course investigates queer sexuality as a specific kind of threat and homophobia as a specific mode of political antagonism. Key to understanding this specificity is the examination of other kinds of political enemies. Across categories of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and empire, the course theorizes the queer enemy in a comparative perspective. We begin with Monique Wittig and Donald Cory to conceptualize structural heterosexuality and the political problem that homosexuality poses to society. We then move to Simone de Beauvoir. Here, we consider how the signification of “woman” bears on homophobia’s work in upholding the normative gender order. Next, we turn to critical race theory. Reading Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Dubois, we take concepts like “black phobo-genesis” and “double consciousness” to think about the intersections and divergences between sexual and racial subjugation. And we conclude the first half of the course by exploring the queer aspects of structural anti-Semitism in the writings of Jean Paul Sartre and Karl Marx. Having explored enmity across categories of political difference, we are now in a better position to delve into the specificities of homophobic antagonism. Not merely a scapegoat, the queer enemy is a political threat that, in turn, indexes deeper and diachronic problem-spaces. We begin the second half of the course by exploring how this threat is framed: through metaphors of civilizational destruction but also through anti-sodomy and anti-disclosure laws. The queer threat, however, is dynamic and shape-shifting. Reading Joel Fishel and Jasbir Puar, we trace how homosexual de-criminalization produced new enemies: an internal enemy- the pedophile - and an external enemy - the “monster terrorist fag.” Mediating transitions in national and imperial power, we examine how the queer transmutes into a colonizing enemy. Through notions of “pinkwashing” and the “Gay International,” we investigate how queer emancipation is made to stand in for colonial domination. But we also read critiques of the gay = colonialism equation, asking how homophobia mediates anti-colonial politics. Finally, we conclude the course with Michel Foucault’s seminal essay, and relate the question of the queer enemy to the threat of radically new and origin-less relationality.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23179 In a Queer Time and Place
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s boldest interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and its governing logics; they question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, the times and spaces of sex and intimacy, and the past/present/future divide. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freccero, Halberstam, Keeling, Love, Muñoz, Freeman, Snorton, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Sadie Benning, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Essex Hemphill, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others. Consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23403 Cybernetic Futures in Digital Media
Instructor: Crystal Beiersdorfer
"Cybernetic Futures in Digital Media" explores the intersection of cyberpunk aesthetics, feminist theory, and digital media. Cyberpunk, characterized by its high-tech, dystopian visions and advanced cybernetics, serves as the course's foundation. We will examine its impact on fine art, moving images, creative writing, and video games. The course will focus on evolving gendered embodiments in cyberpunk, from "masculine" identities centered on military strength to androgynous portrayals exploring emotional depth and resilience. We will analyze these themes and explore how cyberpunk and digital feminisms shape contemporary digital and artistic thought. 

GNSE 24220 Anxious Spaces
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
This course explores built (architectural), filmic, and narrative spaces that disturb our bearings, un-situate us, and defy neurotypical cognition. In the sense that "angst" is a mode that can be understood as both stalling and generative, we analyze spaces and representations of spaces such as corridors, attics, basements, canals, viaducts, labyrinths, forests, ruins, etc., spaces that are 'felt' as estranging, foreboding, in short, anxiety-provoking, in order to understand why-despite or because these topoi are hostile-they are produced, reproduced, and craved. We will pay special attention to abject spaces of racial and sexual exclusivity, sites of spoliation, and of memory and erasure. Among our primary texts are films by Kubrick, Tarkovksy, and Antonioni, and Chytilová, short fiction by Borges, Kafka, Nabokov, and selections from the philosophical/theoretical writings of Bachelard, Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Foucault, Kracauer, and the edited volume, Mapping Desire, Geographies of Sexuality. 

GNSE 24511 Kawaii (Cuteness) Culture In Japan And The World
Instructor: Nisha Kommattam
The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as “cute” or “adorable”) has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today’s conception of kawaii has become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called “Pink Globalization”. With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.  

GNSE 24520 Postcolonial Openings: World Literature after 1955
Instructor: Darrel Chia
This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey the trajectories and self-criticisms within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie). 

GNSE 24602 Ghosts & the Fantastic in Literature and Film
Instructor: Judith Zeitlin
What is a ghost? How and why are ghosts represented in particular forms in a particular culture at particular historical moments and how do these change as stories travel between cultures? This course will explore the complex meanings, both literal and figurative, of ghosts and the fantastic in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tales and films. Issues to be explored include: 1) the relationship between the supernatural, gender, and sexuality; 2) the confrontation of death and mortality; 3) collective anxieties over the loss of the historical past; 4) the visualization (and exorcism) of ghosts through performance; and 5) responses to ecological and political trauma. 

GNSE 24700 Introduction à la littérature féminine au Maroc
Instructor: Khalid Lyamlahy
Depuis les années 1980, la littérature féminine au Maroc connaît un essor remarquable qui se traduit dans le renouvellement du paysage littéraire et la diversité des thèmes abordés. En mettant la femme marocaine et ses expériences au centre de l’acte littéraire, les écrivaines marocaines ont brisé les tabous et insufflé une dynamique sociale et politique à l’échelle du pays. Ce cours introductif donnera un aperçu des écritures féminines au Maroc à partir de questions majeures telles que la représentation du corps et de la sexualité, le rapport à la maternité et à la transmission, le poids des traditions et des injonctions sociales, les combats politiques, les droits des femmes ainsi que les luttes contre la discrimination et la violence. Parmi les autrices étudiées figurent Fatima Mernissi, Fatna El Bouih, Leila Abouzeid, Siham Benchekroun et Yasmina Chami. This is an introductory-level course. Taught in French.

GNSE 26034 Russian Poetry
Instructor: Ania Aizman
What should poetry do—should it have any tasks (personal, literary, political)? In this course, we read short texts that stun, adore, inspire, grieve, mobilize, berate, forgive or forget their addressees and subjects, that reach (or fail to reach) us, their almost-certainly unintended, contemporary readers. Meeting both canonical and forgotten authors across three centuries and many countries of Russophone writing, this course *has* a task: to find what the poems conceal and reveal about their worlds––and ours. If you love poetry, or you have some knowledge of Russian, or you have taken the Russia and Eurasia Civ Core sequence, this class is a good fit for you. The syllabus is finalized with students’ preferences and curiosities in mind. Assignment options include creative projects, independent research, journaling or essays. Discussion of texts will focus on gender, religion, race, imperial subjectivity, and dissent.  

GNSE 27702 Music and Love in South Asia
Instructors: Anna Schultz & Anand Venkatkrishnan
This course explores the relationship between the musical arts and forms of love in South Asian history. We will trace the complex and ambivalent contours of love in several genres including premodern poetry, stage performance, and Bollywood movies. We will examine issues such as poetics and theology, opposition to orthodox social conventions, the intensity of emotion expressed through multiple senses, the social sites of forbidden love, women and gender as poets and performers, and the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.  

GNSE 29237 Black Social Thought
Instructor: Brianne Painia
This course will familiarize students with social science academic and lay intellectual theorists who speak to and about the political, economic, and gender ways of being within the African Diaspora. Most of the course will highlight the voices of Western scholars, pan-African international scholars and thought will be discussed as well.  

SPRING 2025 

GNSE 12129 Production and Reproduction: Women in Modern China, Japan, and Korea
Instructor: Yuanxie Shi
The course introduces both women’s history and theories concerning production and reproduction in modern China, Japan, and Korea. By bringing both production and reproduction into the discussion, the course extends the definition of “work” from workplaces to households, from formal work settings to informalities. We will read and analyze women’s economic engagements in different contexts and localities (e.g. factories, households, political mobilizations, global trade, and sex work) together with scholarships from socio-economic historians, anthropologists, and feminist scholars. Historians have provided a broad chronological framework and empirical studies, such as the birth of feminist movements in twentieth-century East Asia, the pattern of gendered and highly specialized economic development, and women’s work as handicraft makers, factory employers, and sex workers. Anthropologists have established such analytical categories as “skill,” “practical knowledge,” and “gynotechnics” that were largely overlooked when discussing women’s work. Recent Marxist feminist scholars have extended Marxist examination of value to female labor, and contributed to our understanding of social reproduction by theorizing capitalism and its supporting system. With different concepts and frameworks, students are encouraged to reassess the complex meanings of differences outside of contemporary Western feminist theories. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 12130 Is Religion Bad for Women?
Instructor: Hannah Jones
Some scholars working in the study of gender and sexuality view religion as the conservative enemy of progress, irreconcilably antagonistic to the flourishing of any non-normative gender or sexuality. At the same time, some religious practitioners view feminism as a Western or liberal invention, an imposition that attempts to manage the lives of religious subjects. Still others find feminism and religious commitment mutually reinforcing, and have developed feminist, womanist, and queer rituals and theologies. This course examines contemporary texts, ethnographies, memoirs, and films that grapple with these tensions. In so doing, the course also helps students develop familiarity with foundational categories both in religious studies and in the study of gender and sexuality. Further questions to be explored include: Does religion facilitate or oppose the flourishing of women, queers, and people of color? Is religion a guardian of tradition that resists politically progressive aims, or do religions offer resources for interrogating secular liberalism? The course primarily considers Islamic, Christian, and Jewish traditions. Prior coursework in religious studies or gender and sexuality studies is helpful but not necessary.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 12132 Gender, Sexuality, and Medicine
Instructor: Theo Hurley
How do gender and sexuality shape experiences of medicine? How does medicine shape experiences of gender and sexuality? This course critically examines gender, sexuality, and medicine as intertwined entities whose intersections teach us much about identities, institutions, and inequalities both historical and contemporary. Doubling as an introduction to medical sociology, this course considers medicine as an institution that produces knowledge, regulates bodies, shapes identities, and distributes access to health resources in ways that are uneven across, and significant for, categories of gender, sexuality, and other forms of social difference. We analyze these functions of medicine through some of its most prominent intersections with gender and sexuality in the United States, including the medicalization of homosexuality and gender variance, the medical regulation of reproduction from forced sterilizations to the rise of hospital births, the feminist health movement, intersex and gender-affirming medical practices, and the role of gender and sexual difference in medical research. Course materials consist primarily of ethnographic and popular sources. A major focus of the course is connecting personal experiences and popular sources to scholarly perspectives.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 12136 Eating in Early Modern England: Gender, Race, Food
Instructor: Sarah-Gray Lesley
The relationship between the construct of idealized femininity and food consumption has a long and troubled history; this course looks at this relationship through premodern Anglophone Literature. From Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, this course situates discourses about "proper" gender performance and "proper" eating habits alongside those of race, religion, sexuality, commodity trade, and colonization to reveal the messy and complicated sociopolitical history of the dinner table.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 13003 Sex Power Culture
Instructor: Red Tremmel
Taking a historical and interdisciplinary approach that focuses primarily on the US context, this course invites students to identify and analyze the cultural, socioeconomic, and political forces that shape and are shaped by sex, sexuality, and the erotic. We will zoom in on a diverse array of topics, including hook-up culture, porn, the feminist sex wars, reproductive justice, liberatory sexual political movements, and an array of relationship formations such as monogamy and relationship anarchy to ask, what might we know about power by studying sex? And what might we know about sex, by studying power?
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 15007 Gender and Sexuality in World Civ III: Sex and Mysticism Instructor: Kris Trujillo
Can you have sex with God? And, if so, what then does sex mean? What, as a matter of fact, might spiritual sex mean for the cultivation of virtues like celibacy or virginity? While early Christianity and the Christian Middle Ages are often characterized by a disciplined asceticism, erotic desire was just as central to cultivating mystical love for God. In fact, the significance of the language of love, passion, loss, nuptial bliss, jubilation, and the body has rendered the Christian mystical tradition a useful resource for contemporary—and especially psychoanalytic—theories of sex, gender, and sexuality. This course will look both to the past and the present in order to explore the workings of pre- and postmodern desire and to draw connections between Christian mysticism and theories and practices of sex. Working across historical periods, we will read exemplary pieces of Christian mystical literature, psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary literature that draws from the medieval past. This course counts as the third quarter of Civ for students who have completed the first two quarters of the sequence (GNSE 15002 and 15003). Preregistration priority will be given to students who enrolled in GNSE 15002 and 15003. If there is space, the course will be open to any student during add/drop. 

GNSE 15008 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations III: Feminism in Korea
Instructor: Angie Heo
This course will explore contending strands of feminist thought and practice in modern Korea. Building on previous coursework on feminism and the postcolonial critique of Western feminism, we will consider how various Korean expressions of women’s equality developed in historically contiguous and critical relation to other global feminist ideals and movements (e.g., “The New Woman”, “revolutionary motherhood”, Women of Asia, #MeToo, radical militant feminism, transfeminism, etc…). We will engage a diverse range of historical, literary, and ethnographic sources that probe feminist, proto-feminist, and anti-feminist ideas throughout different periods from Japanese colonialism to the North-South division to the neoliberal South Korean present. This course counts as the third quarter of Civ for students who have completed the first two quarters of the sequence (GNSE 15002 and 15003). Preregistration priority will be given to students who enrolled in GNSE 15002 and 15003. If there is space, the course will be open to any student during add/drop. 

GNSE 15009 Gender and Sexuality in World Civ III - Queer Capitals: Cities, Literature, Performance Arts
Instructor: Carlos Halaburda
This course explores the vibrant queer cultures of major global cities from the 19th century to the present. Each week we will delve into the distinctive histories and cultural dynamics of a different city, including Berlin, Madrid, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, New York, Chicago, and Manila. Our study will encompass a range of topics such as drag culture, cruising, the history of medicine and forensic science, queer spaces, police power, homophobia, racism, multiculturalism, and the politics of same-sex desire. We will examine how these themes are depicted and interrogated through literature and cinema and other performance arts, offering insights into the lived experiences and social challenges of queer communities in these urban settings. Through readings from authors like Christopher Isherwood, Klaus Mann, Jean Genet, Hervé Guibert, Adolfo Caminha, Mikhail Kuzmin, Patricia Highsmith, and Otto Miguel Cione, among others, alongside screenings of relevant films such as The Ball of 41 (Mexico) and Paris is Burning (United States), students will gain a deeper understanding of the intersections between urban environments and queer identities. By the end of the course, students will be equipped with a comprehensive knowledge of global queer urban histories, an appreciation for the cultural contributions of queer communities to these cities, and a critical perspective on the representation of queer lives in literature, film, and the performance arts.
This course counts as the third quarter of Civ for students who have completed the first two quarters of the sequence (GNSE 15002 and 15003). Preregistration priority will be given to students who enrolled in GNSE 15002 and 15003. If there is space, the course will be open to any student during add/drop.

GNSE 19205 Poetry in the Land of Childhood
Instructor: Alexis Chema
Cupboards and attics, nests and shells, the inside of a bush, the bottom of a rowboat: for the 20th century philosopher Gaston Bachelard, intimate “fibred” spaces like these have a special relation to childhood—both as it is experienced and as it is remembered. Taking the lead from Bachelard this course investigates the construction, beginning in the eighteenth century, of childhood as a particular kind of place, one that might be imaginatively accessed through poetic images, rhythm, and rhyme. Our readings will come from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—that is, from the birth of children’s literature to its “golden age”—and will take us from the nursery rhymes and cradle songs of early children’s poetry collections, through William Blake’s “forests of the night,” and to the wonderland of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. 

GNSE 20144 Wives, widows, and prostitutes: Indian Literature and the "Women's Question"
Instructor: Ulrike Stark
From the early 19th century onward, the debate on the status of Indian women was an integral part of the discourse on the state of civilization, Hindu tradition, and social reform in colonial India. This course will explore how Indian authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries engaged with the so-called "women's question." Caught between middle-class conservatism and the urge for social reform, Hindi and Urdu writers addressed controversial issues such as female education, child marriage, widow remarriage, and prostitution in their fictional and discursive writings. We will explore the tensions of a literary and social agenda that advocated the 'uplift' of women as a necessary precondition for the progress of the nation, while also expressing patriarchal fears about women's rights and freedom. The course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Basic knowledge of Hindi and/or Urdu is preferable, but not required. We will read works by Nazir Ahmad, Premcand, Jainendra Kumar, Mirza Hadi Ruswa, and Mahadevi Varma in English translation, and also look at texts used in Indian female education at the time.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 


GNSE 20145 Women in 20th-Century Architecture
Instructor: Jacobé Huet
From the emergence of the discipline in the Renaissance to the present day, architecture has been a blatantly male-centric field. This course invites students to consider women who overcame systemic barriers to become figures of agency in 20th-century architecture. We will examine the lives and works of women who have managed to attend architecture schools, despite historical gender-based exclusion or restriction on enrollment, as well as those who found impactful ways to play architectural roles without academic training. We will pay particular attention to how these figures add necessary complexity to the modernist canon. The course will start with a first module on positionality (women as architects, women as clients, and women as residents) followed by a second module with a biographical scope (Minnette De Silva, Eileen Gray, bell hooks, and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy).
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20152 Indigenous Feminisms
Instructor: Jodi Byrd
Indigenous women, queers, trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit people have been at the forefront of Indigenous resistance struggles, most recently at Standing Rock, at Mauna Kea, and in protests against Line 3 and Line 6 pipelines in the upper midwest and Canada. Their voices, along with Indigenous queer and feminist scholars in academia, have been working to understand the interrelatedness of gendered violences, land dispossession, and cultural appropriation. This class will consider how Indigenous feminist, queer, and Two Spirit scholars have theorized gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism alongside queer and feminist of color critiques toward accountable visions of resistance. We will read works by Indigenous feminist scholars, writers, poets, and activists from the nineteenth-century to the twenty-first to consider how Indigeneity challenges how gender and sexuality are experienced in the context of ongoing settler colonialism.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 21285 Toni Morrison, beloved and a mercy
Instructor: SJ Zhang
“How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together." Beginning with Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture, this class will read (for many reread) two of Toni Morrison’s novels that pose the house and household as a “site of memory” in which to dramatize gendered histories of race in North America. Our class will annotate together Beloved and A Mercy with the essays, films, poetry of various scholars, in addition to some of Morrison’s literary critical and historical writings. Our in-depth reading of these two works will provide a foundation for engaging in ongoing debates about race and writing in literary studies, black feminists critiques of the classroom, and histories of race-based slavery in North America. If, as Morrison contends, “language” teaches us “how to see without pictures” and that “language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names,” we will aim to hold language close as we consider “what moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.” 

GNSE 22806 An Indigenous People’s History of Hawaiʻi
Instructor: Uahikea Maile
What you know about Hawai‘i is most likely untrue. An archipelago in Oceania’s sea of islands, Hawai‘i has been locally constructed and globally consumed as a tropical paradise for pleasure and play, attracting tourists, settlers, corporations, and military forces to its shores. It is a fantasized paradise produced through the dispossession, elimination, appropriation, and exploitation of Indigenous people, institutions, worldviews, and practices. This course tells a truer story about Hawai‘i. Because ideas and narratives crafted about the history, politics, economics, law, ecology, and society of Hawai‘i are dominated and often distorted by non-Indigenous writers, we turn to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholars to learn from their subjugated knowledge. The course examines interdisciplinary research, from the 19th century to the present, and excavates the truths advanced through it: the development of the Hawaiian Kingdom and its government, political order, economy, and society; the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian government and US military occupation and annexation of its territory; legal constructions of race and techniques of gender and sexuality in the territorial period; the creation of the State of Hawaii amid World War II and the Cold War; the birth and evolution of the modern Hawaiian sovereignty movement; and contemporary Kanaka Maoli struggles with federal recognition, militourism, and technoscientific development.  

GNSE 23003 Introduction: Voix féminines dans la littérature française
Instructor: Daisy Delogu
Ce cours nous permettra de réintégrer au canon de la littérature française des ouvrages parfois négligés ou relégués au rang de « mineur », tout en prenant connaissance des principaux mouvements littéraires auxquels ces textes appartiennent et contribuent. Nous lirons des textes de genre divers (lais, poèmes, romans, nouvelles, etc.) du Moyen Âge jusqu’au 21e siècle. Taught in French. This is an introductory-level course. 

GNSE 23155 Reproductive citizens: sex, work, and embodiment
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we focus on literature, film, history, and theory that deal with biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. Our readings and viewings are centered in the U.S. and span the early twentieth century through the present—and we approach the above themes and structures in relation to the troubled and uneven histories of race, gender, and class that shape them. To this end, we will learn about the history of eugenics and sterilization; the afterlife of slavery and racist (anti-Asian) U.S. immigration policy; settler colonialism and the Native American reservation system; state policing of family and kinship structures; developments in reproductive and gender-affirming biotechnology; and the thorny politics of sex work. At the same time, we will be equally interested in the ways that activists, theorists, and other cultural producers have pushed against oppressive policies and structures to imagine and fight for reproductive justice and liberation at the intersection of race, labor, and gender. We spend time, for example, with Black and Native feminists, Marxist social reproduction theorists, family abolitionists, and sex worker’s rights activists. Readings and viewings may include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tillie Olsen, Gayl Jones, Fae Myenne Ng, Louise Erdrich, Lizzie Borden, Barbara Loden, Amy Heckerling, and the International Wages for Housework Campaign.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23173 Discourses of Femicide in Contemporary Latin America
Instructor: Laura Colaneri
Femicide, or the gender-motivated killing of women and girls, has garnered increasing attention in twenty-first century Latin America, which has some of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world. Latin American activists, performers, writers, and filmmakers have attempted to reckon with the impacts of femicide in the cultural sphere, seeking to not only identify the social, historical, and political roots of gender violence, but also advocate for justice and mourn those they have lost. This course will discuss prevailing discourses of femicide in the region, addressing the roles of activism, journalism, literature, and film in both shaping and responding to these discourses. Texts will include memoirs like Cristina Rivera Garza’s El invencible verano de Liliana (2021), documentaries like Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita extraviada (2001), as well as fiction, such as Roberto Bolaño’s “La parte de los crímenes” from the novel 2666 (2004). Taught in Spanish.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23175 Sexuality in U.S. History Post 1900
Instructor: Red Tremmel
In this course we will study the history of changing sexual practices, relations, politics, and cultures in the region of North America now comprising the United States and 574 sovereign tribal nations. Moving through various contexts, such as urban drag balls, medical schools, federal agencies, strip clubs, military projects, homophile and other liberatory movements, as well as popular culture, we will use primary and secondary sources to develop a research-based understanding of how sexual discourses are produced, revised, and remixed among and across generations.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23176 Philosophy of Sex
Instructor: Kévin Irakóze
What is good sex? Is sexual objectification harmful? Do we have a right to sex? What is sexual consent? This course invites students to engage with these questions and many others within the literature on the philosophy of sex. The centrality of sex and sexuality in human life makes it an apt, albeit complex object of philosophical inquiry. And, whereas many thinkers advance that our sexual lives hold a major influence on most other domains on our existence, we spend little time with intellectual inquiry about sex. In this course, we will engage with some classic texts alongside some of the most exciting recent writings in the philosophy of sex. We will explore such themes and topics as the erotic, sexual desire, perversion, consent, sexual orientation, pornography, prostitution, and sex equality. We will explore these themes through various perspectives, including metaphysics, ethics, and politics. Some of the authors we will read include Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Martha Nussbaum, Timo Airaksinen, Jean-Luc Marion, Raja Halwani, Amia Srinivasan and Manon Garcia among others. This course is discussion based and is open to undergraduate students of all levels.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23181 Histories of Abortion and Forced Sterilization in the United States
Instructor: Caine Jordan
In the United States, the politics of pregnancy and reproductive autonomy have historically been and continue to be categories of significance, meaning, and contention. In this course, we will explore a subsection of these broader categories, examining the relation between abortion and forced sterilization, the state, and women of color. The course will zero in on the experiences of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women, African American women, Puerto Rican women, and Native American women, considering their struggles against the state and for reproductive justice.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23182 Creative Forces: Cultural Feminisms in Postcolonial India
Instructor: Titas De Sarkar
In this course, we will study some of the most significant feminist interventions that were made through a range of cultural practices in postcolonial India, and in the Indian diaspora. Struggles for women’s rights, demanding political empowerment and economic equality, or carrying out demonstrations for better access to health and education have a long history in South Asia. We will focus particularly on the cultural practices that have constituted waves of feminist thoughts over the last seven decades. We will explore how concerns around justice, social responsibility, and freedom of expression are mediated through literature, cinema, music, and self-fashioning. Keeping cultural productions as our archive, we will ask – what are the various meanings of feminism in postcolonial India? What were the political, economic, and social concerns that the artists and activists chose to highlight while addressing gendered inequalities? What are the intersections of caste, class, and sexual orientation that complicate our understanding of feminist representations? How were inequities sought to be negotiated creatively at different historical contexts? Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will often find ourselves moving between genres, themes, and disciplines to locate marginal voices responding to contemporary anxieties. By working at the intersection of cultural history, anthropological and sociological scholarships, and media studies we will gain an understanding.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 24900 Lolita
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate, to tap at three on the teeth.” Popular as Nabokov’s “all-American” novel is, it is rarely discussed beyond its psychosexual profile. This intensive text-centered and discussion-based course attempts to supersede the univocal obsession with the novel’s pedophiliac plot as such by concerning itself above all with the novel’s language: language as failure, as mania, and as conjuration. 

GNSE 25055 Uncertain Futures: A Sociology of Times to Come
Instructor: Eman Abdelhadi
Between global militarism, intensive inequality, and climate catastrophe, the future looks uncertain. This class engages lay, scholarly and fictional futurisms—particularly emerging from Queer, Indigenous and Black traditions. We will read sociological and anthropological texts that consider how different communities envision the decades and centuries to come alongside speculative fiction that theorizes where earth and humanity are heading. Does humanity have a future? How does that future look? How do differing answers to these questions shape individuals’ and communities’ lives and decisions? 

GNSE 25474 Crossing Boundaries: Virtual Reality, Embodiment, and the Reimagining of Social Space
Instructor: Cate Fugazzola
In this course, we explore the potential for Virtual Reality (VR) experiences to push multiple boundaries: redefining bodies, crossing borders, and reimagining social spaces. In the first weeks of the course, as we think about bodies in the virtual space, we will be asking questions related to embodiment and representation: how does the process of avatar creation reinforce or dismantle assumptions about gender readability and performance? How do immersive experiences induce feelings of gender euphoria and dysphoria? The following weeks we will explore and discuss the way VR experiences can engage with the concept of physical borders—calling their existence into questions in some cases, making them particularly salient in others. We will discuss virtual travel, digital border-crossing, and explore art installations that reflect on migration experiences. The final weeks will build on our previous conversations, and together we will reflect on the fluid meaning of space in a virtual setting and on the creative possibilities that such fluidity entails: What does it mean to reimagine space beyond physical limitations? How do we understand the political salience of taking up space in digitally built social environments? The course combines readings and theoretical conversations with hands-on experiences in VR and explorations of virtual worlds. Previous experience with VR is not required. We will share a limited number of headsets that will be available for use in class. 

GNSE 26225 Get Cultured in Nine Weeks: Historical Perspectives on Art and Education
Instructors: Alice Goff and Sophie Salvo
What does it mean to ‘get cultured’? Why—and how—do we do it? Does an education in the arts and letters make us more moral, more intelligent, more resistant to authority—or perhaps more submissive? These questions are at the center of debates about the place of cultural learning in the contemporary world, but our century was not the first to think critically about the social and political functions of this form of education. This course investigates how students, educators, writers, and artists conceptualized the aims and means of becoming cultured from the 1700s forward, focusing on European history and connecting it to the concerns of the present. We will pay particularly close attention to both formal and informal means of cultural education, and to the ways in which these practices have been understood to produce social structures of class, gender, and race. Readings will draw from the fields of history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and art history. At the end of the quarter, students will be asked to design their own fantasy syllabus for “getting cultured in nine weeks.” 

GNSE 26504 Renaissance Demonology
Instructor: Armando Maggi
In this course we analyze the complex concept of demonology according to early modern European culture from a theological, historical, philosophical, and literary point of view. The term 'demon' in the Renaissance encompasses a vast variety of meanings. Demons are hybrids. They are both the Christian devils, but also synonyms for classical deities, and Neo-platonic spiritual beings. As far as Christian theology is concerned, we read selections from Augustine's and Thomas Aquinas's treatises, some complex exorcisms written in Italy, and a recent translation of the infamous "Malleus maleficarum," the most important treatise on witch-hunt. We pay close attention to the historical evolution of the so-called witch-craze in Europe through a selection of the best secondary literature on this subject, with special emphasis on Michel de Certeau's "The Possession at Loudun." We also study how major Italian and Spanish women mystics, such as Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi and Teresa of Avila, approach the issue of demonic temptation and possession. As far as Renaissance Neoplatonic philosophy is concerned, we read selections from Marsilio Ficino's "Platonic Theology" and Girolamo Cardano's mesmerizing autobiography. We also investigate the connection between demonology and melancholy through a close reading of the initial section of Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" and Cervantes's short story "The Glass Graduate" ("El licenciado Vidriera").  

GNSE 28775 Racial Melancholia
Instructor: Kris Trujillo
This course provides students with an opportunity to think race both within a psychoanalytic framework and alongside rituals of loss, grief, and mourning. In particular, we will interrogate how psychoanalytic formulations of mourning and melancholia have shaped theories of racial melancholia that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. Turning to Asian American, African American, and Latinx theoretical and literary archives, we will interrogate the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality and ask: How do literatures of loss enable us to understand the relationship between histories of racial trauma, injury, and grief, on the one hand, and the formation of racial identity, on the other? What might it mean to imagine literary histories of race as grounded fundamentally in the experience of loss? What forms of reparations, redress, and resistance are called for by such literatures of racial grief, mourning, and melancholia? And, finally, how, if understood as themselves rituals of grief, might psychoanalysis and the writing of literature assume the role of religious devotion in the face of loss and trauma? 

GNSE 29303 Asceticism: Forming the Self
Instructors: Sarah Pierce Taylor & Erin Walsh
In recent decades scholars of the pre-modern period have turned to the body as a site of renewed historical inquiry. Within the study of religion, this shift has reanimated discussions around asceticism as a particularly potent technē for self-fashioning. Nevertheless, scholars have struggled to theorize asceticism across religious traditions. This signature course, taught by two scholars working in disparate historical periods and religious traditions (early Christianity and medieval Indian religious literature), explores how gender theory has engaged ascetic practices for understanding the body and human potential. Students will engage asceticism as a series of techniques or forms of life that envision the sexed and gendered human body as the horizon of corporeal expression and personal imagination. Asceticism serves as a neat conceptual device, allowing us to toggle between the mind and body while tackling questions that fall within the liminal space between them, including debates around gender, sexuality, sovereignty, and biopower. Students along with the instructors will contend with the challenges and opportunities of transnational and transhistorical feminist and queer inquiry as we traverse across the boundaries of tradition, language, and culture. While drawing on rich historical and religious archives, we will anchor our discussions around the interplay of two principal authors: Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. No prior knowledge of the religious traditions or critical theory discussed is expected.  

 

Graduate Course Descriptions

WINTER 2025

GNSE 30121 Women And Work In Modern East Asia
Instructor: Jacob Eyferth
Worldwide, women do about 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly. Women’s underpaid work at home and in industry subsidized the early stages of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain, early twentieth-century Japan, and contemporary China, and women’s unpaid contributions to their households enable employers worldwide to keep wages low. We know, at least in outline, how women came to carry double burdens in Europe and North America, but little research has been done so far about this process in East Asia. In this course, we will discuss when and how China, Japan, and Korea developed a division of labor in which most wage work was gendered male and reproductive work was marked female. Are current divisions of labor between men and women rooted in local cultures, or are they the result of industrial capitalist development? How do divisions of labor differ between the three East Asian countries, and how did developments in one East Asian country affect others?

GNSE 30142 India on Screen: Marriage and Sexuality from Bollywood to Made in Heaven
Instructor: Rochona Majumdar
From reality shows like Indian Matchmaking and Made in Heaven to the meme of the "Big Fat Indian Wedding" to the preoccupations of Bollywood films like DDLJ and Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahani and crossover ones such as Monsoon Wedding, marriage is an obsession in South Asian culture. Focusing on Hindi cinema, this course will explore the socio-political dynamics of this cultural focus on marriage and couple formation. With examples ranging from classical Hindi films from the 1950s-60s to the star-studded melodramas of 1970s and 1980s and the “new Bollywood” era (post-1991), this cinema exhibited and analyzed the central dynamics of marriage: sexual compatibility, fidelity, reproductive futures, and so on. Debates around class, caste, diaspora, and sexuality are equally anchored in issues of marriage and couple formation. In this course, we ask why it is that marriage—its success and failure—has been so central to Indian on-screen identities. Even as screens multiply—on computers, cell phones, and in the multiplex—marriage continues to dominate. No prior knowledge of Indian languages is required, but you must enjoy watching and talking about movies and popular culture.

GNSE 30147 Archaeology of Gender and Sexuality
Instructors: Alice Yao and Katie Kearns
How have archaeologists approached the study of gendered practices, and can their work contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions of gender across the social sciences and humanities? How can we use material objects and things to examine or explain gendered identities, especially in the deep past? In this course, students will engage with a range of research, from different disciplinary perspectives, to explore how gender is situated in archaeological theory and praxis and its political implications. Through multiple case studies, the course will interrogate how archaeologists study, analyze, and interpret material remains to examine gendered ideologies and material practices and their intersections with other social constructs: class, sex, race, ethnicity. Coverage is cross-cultural and aims to expose students to the diversity and variability of gendered and sexual experiences of different people across time and space. Topics include but are not limited to: embodiment and expression, gender roles, sexuality, parenthood and childhood, masculinity, biopolitics, and feminist theory.

GNSE 30237 Black Social Thought
Instructor: Brianne Painia
This course will familiarize students with social science academic and lay intellectual theorists who speak to and about the political, economic, and gender ways of being within the African Diaspora. Most of the course will highlight the voices of Western scholars, pan-African international scholars and thought will be discussed as well.

GNSE 30408 Health Disparities in Breast Cancer
Instructor: M. Eileen Dolan
Across the globe, breast cancer is the most common women’s cancer. In the last two decades, there have been significant advances in breast cancer detection and treatment that have resulted in improved survival rates. Yet, not all populations have benefited equally from these improvements, and there continues to be a disproportionate burden of breast cancer felt by different populations. In the U.S., for example, white women have the highest incidence of breast cancer but African-American women have the highest breast cancer mortality overall. The socioeconomic, environmental, biological, and cultural factors that collectively contribute to these disparities are being identified with a growing emphasis on health disparities research efforts. In this 10-week discussion-based course students will meet twice weekly and cover major aspects of breast cancer disparities.  

GNSE 31000 Cultural Psychology
Instructor: Richard Shweder
There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of "normal" psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a single or uniform fundamental psychology for all peoples of the world. Research findings in cultural psychology thus raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. In this course we analyze the concept of "culture" and examine ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.  

GNSE 31352 That Age-old Debate: Youth Cultures in Modern India
Instructor: Titas De Sarkar
In this course, we will gain a deeper understanding of how certain key moments in postcolonial India–from student protests to an economic transition to globalization, from rise of Bollywood to the omnipresence of social media–have shaped the youth of the country and how young people in turn have been at the forefront of some of the major events and have created history on their own terms. We will ask-if youth is a construct like gender and caste then how was it constructed over the last seventy years? We will keep two guiding questions in mind–who all are considered to be the youth in postcolonial India? And–what are the lived experiences of young people during this time? The ever changing, seemingly arbitrary, and conflicting definitions of youth in government reports, commercial advertisements, or popular culture demands a thorough analysis of this category inside out. We will take an inter-disciplinary approach and examine how the identity of being young intersects with other identities such as class, ethnicity, linguistic abilities and so on. By identifying the constitutive elements of being part of the young generation in a young nation such as India, we will challenge any homogeneous perception of “the youth” and read young people’s experiences in their own contexts. Focusing on youth culture in South Asia will help us think critically about youth culture studies where the Global South remains underrepresented.

GNSE 31400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the proliferation of “new social movements” such as feminism and gay liberation, this seminar explores the key debates around which gender and sexuality were articulated as tenacious but open structures of power subject to political critique and social transformation. The relatively stable yet dynamic character of what Gayle Rubin in 1975 famously called “the sex/gender system” raises basic questions of structure and event: (1) how are systemic relations of domination and rule historically constituted and sustained over time?; and (2) how can that which is regularly reproduced be not only momentarily interrupted, but fundamentally altered through both quotidian and extraordinary forms of action and worlding? The unexpected character of the new social movements called for a radical rethinking of structures and their transformation. Haunted by unpredictable forms of resistance, heteropatriarchal structures challenged theorists and activists to forge new frameworks of critique that refigured basic concepts of power, subjectivity, and agency. These frameworks are examined with an eye to how racialized sexuality and gender are created and contested in the context of modern biopolitical capitalism and its constitution of naturalized conceptions of rule.

GNSE 31404 More than Human Ethnography
Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
In this course we explore the fields of more-than-human and ‘multispecies’ ethnography. We examine theoretical antecedents promoting the inclusion of non-human actors in ethnographic analysis and read examples of such work, including foundational texts on interspecies engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Anna Tsing, Eduardo Kohn, Deborah Bird Rose, and Juno Parreñas among many others. We consider the role other species and ‘actants’ played in early social science and contemplate recent studies of “becoming with” animals, plants, fungi, bacteria—encountering complex ecological relationships, examining naturalcultural borders, and querying the role of decolonial thought and queer ecologies in the ‘more-than’ turn. Multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional method; we will couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, physicists, and philosophers. The is a discussion-based seminar with significant time devoted to the logistical aspects of ‘more than’ work—to querying how such studies have been conducted in practice.

GNSE 31424 Evil Women In Greek Tragedy
Instructor: Christina Filippaki
This course examines the portrayal of female villains in Greek tragedy. We will read plays by the three major tragedians, focusing on their depictions of Clytemnestra, the Furies, Phaedra, Medea, and Helen, as it relates to questions of gender, mythmaking, power, and reception. We will discuss the societal dynamics and generic norms through which those characters emerge and we will explore their intertextual journey through myth and literature, ancient and modern. Key questions of the course include: What makes a woman evil? How is the evil female constructed through the writing, visuals, and performance of tragedy? What does it mean to present an evil female in a genre where all writers and actors are male? To what extent does tragedy shape and reflect the patriarchal structures of the Athenian society? All readings will be in English.  

GNSE 32020 Alternative Feminisms: Gender, Agency, and Liberation in the Middle East
Instructor: Sevda Numanbayraktaroglu
This course critically examines gender, agency, and liberation in the Middle East. The course will begin with a discussion of human agency, its relation to sociocultural context, and the feminist literature on the issues of agency, resistance, and liberation. Then, we will explore these relationships in non-Western contexts by drawing examples from Turkey, Iran, and Northern Syria. In the cases of Turkey and Iran, we will focus on the feminist movements and women’s collective actions for the right to wear and take off the headscarf. In the case of Northern Syria, we will explore the agencies of Kurdish female guerrillas and their conceptions of empowerment. In each case, we will focus on the moral and ethical principles that guide women’s choices and trace their sociohistorical foundations.  

GNSE 32103 Feminisms and Anthropology
Instructors: Julie Chu and Jennifer Cole
This course examines the fraught yet generative relation between various movements of feminism and the discipline of anthropology. Both feminism(s) and anthropology emerged in the 19th century as fields invested in thinking “the human” through questions of alterity or Otherness. As such, feminist and anthropological inquiries often take up shared objects of analysis--including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value, and power--even as they differ in their political and scholarly orientations through the last century and a half. Tracking the emergence of feminisms and anthropology as distinct fields of academic discourse on the one hand and political intervention on the other, we pursue the following lines of inquiry: (1) a genealogical approach to key concepts and problem-spaces forged at the intersection of these two fields, (2) critical analysis of the relation of feminist and postcolonial social movements to the professionalizing fields of knowledge production (including Marxist-inspired writing on women and economy, Third World feminism and intersectionality, and feminist critiques of science studies), and (3) a reflexive contemporary examination of the way these two strands of thought have come together in the subfield of feminist anthropology, and the continual frictions and resonances of feminist and anthropological approaches in academic settings and in the larger world (e.g., #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics). Graduate students must have consent of one of the instructors

GNSE 32288 Witchcraft And The Cultural Imagination
Instructors: Tamara Golan & Noel Blanco Mourelle
This seminar takes as its focal point the vast range of conceptual, material, and visual artifacts that are produced by, and indeed help to construct, this enduring fascination with the figure of the witch, from the medieval past to the present. We will examine case studies from premodern Europe to Colonial North America to Indonesia, scrutinizing texts, films, and works of art. Rather than offering a standard history of witchcraft, we will explore the intersections of gender, labor, and representation that the figure of the witch makes specially available for study. Witchcraft constitutes a multifaceted phenomenon that aims to alter reality and the self through the use of various techniques, transmitted both orally and in writing. These techniques have often appeared culturally marked in terms of gender and belief. Witchcraft has for centuries been the business of women in societies where very few avenues existed for women to develop any sort of business.  

GNSE 34220 Anxious Spaces
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
This course explores built (architectural), filmic, and narrative spaces that disturb our bearings, un-situate us, and defy neurotypical cognition. In the sense that "angst" is a mode that can be understood as both stalling and generative, we analyze spaces and representations of spaces such as corridors, attics, basements, canals, viaducts, labyrinths, forests, ruins, etc., spaces that are 'felt' as estranging, foreboding, in short, anxiety-provoking, in order to understand why-despite or because these topoi are hostile-they are produced, reproduced, and craved. We will pay special attention to abject spaces of racial and sexual exclusivity, sites of spoliation, and of memory and erasure. Among our primary texts are films by Kubrick, Tarkovksy, and Antonioni, and Chytilová, short fiction by Borges, Kafka, Nabokov, and selections from the philosophical/theoretical writings of Bachelard, Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Foucault, Kracauer, and the edited volume, Mapping Desire, Geographies of Sexuality.  

GNSE 34520 Postcolonial Openings: World Literature after 1955
Instructor: Darrel Chia
This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey the trajectories and self-criticisms within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie).

GNSE 36034 Russian Poetry
Instructor: Ania Aizman
What should poetry do—should it have any tasks (personal, literary, political)? In this course, we read short texts that stun, adore, inspire, grieve, mobilize, berate, forgive or forget their addressees and subjects, that reach (or fail to reach) us, their almost-certainly unintended, contemporary readers. Meeting both canonical and forgotten authors across three centuries and many countries of Russophone writing, this course *has* a task: to find what the poems conceal and reveal about their worlds––and ours. If you love poetry, or you have some knowledge of Russian, or you have taken the Russia and Eurasia Civ Core sequence, this class is a good fit for you. The syllabus is finalized with students’ preferences and curiosities in mind. Assignment options include creative projects, independent research, journaling or essays. Discussion of texts will focus on gender, religion, race, imperial subjectivity, and dissent.  

GNSE 37702 Music and Love in South Asia
Instructors: Anna Schultz & Anand Venkatkrishnan
This course explores the relationship between the musical arts and forms of love in South Asian history. We will trace the complex and ambivalent contours of love in several genres including premodern poetry, stage performance, and Bollywood movies. We will examine issues such as poetics and theology, opposition to orthodox social conventions, the intensity of emotion expressed through multiple senses, the social sites of forbidden love, women and gender as poets and performers, and the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.  

GNSE 38230 Fashion and Change: The Theory of Fashion
Instructor: Timothy Campbell
This course offers a representative view of foundational and recent fashion theory and history, with a historical focus on the long modern era extending from the eighteenth century to the present. While engaging the general aesthetic and commercial phenomenon of fashion, we will also devote special attention to fashion as a discourse preoccupied with the problem of cultural change—the surprisingly difficult question of how and why change does or does not happen. We will aim for a broader appreciation of fashion’s inner workings, but we will also confront the long tradition of thinking culture itself through fashion, to ask whether and how we might also do the same.

GNSE 40450 In a Queer Time and Place
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s boldest interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and its governing logics; they question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, the times and spaces of sex and intimacy, and the past/present/future divide. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freccero, Halberstam, Keeling, Love, Muñoz, Freeman, Snorton, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Sadie Benning, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Essex Hemphill, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others.

GNSE 41720 Science Fiction Against the State
Instructor: Hilary Strang
Ursula Le Guin’s anarchist utopia, The Dispossessed was published 50 years ago, but its complex imagining of a whole way of life without law, police, money or sovereignty, and its investment in thinking that way of living in relation to environment, gender, freedom and work offers a science fictional horizon for what it might be to live communally in our own moment. This course will read The Dispossessed and other science fiction that imagines what it might mean to live against, beyond or without the state, alongside theorizations that may help us formulate our own visions of other possible worlds. We will pay particular attention to questions of environment and ecological relations, race, gender and social reproduction, and feminist utopias. We’ll also spend some time thinking about actually existing forms of living against the state (including blockades, encampments, autonomous zones). SF authors may include Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tade Thompson, Sally Gearhart, Iain Banks, and ME O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Other authors read may include Saidiya Hartman, Monique Wittig, Fredy Perlman, James Scott, Pierre Clastres, and David Graeber.

GNSE 41740 Gender and Policy
Instructor: Yana Gallen
For the past 70 years, women have made remarkable advances in the labor market in the US—the experiences of women in past generations are almost unimaginable in today’s labor market. Women are now more educated than men. However, progress has stalled and the lifetime labor market outcomes of women are different from those of men on average. Why? What is the role for policy? In this course we will think about how differences in preferences, norms, and abilities potentially contribute to differences in outcomes by gender. If there are such differences, does policy intervention hurt or help, and whom does policy intervention hurt or help? What should be the aims of policy with respect to gender?  

GNSE 42360 Working 9 to 5
Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
This course will examine representations of labor and labor struggle in literature, film, and music spanning the 18th through 21st centuries. Theoretical and critical readings will bring Marxist and feminist lenses to the primary texts at hand, in addition to examinations of race, labor, and capital. Primary texts might include Robinson Crusoe, Bartleby the Scrivener, Mary Barton, Blood on the Forge, Sister Carrie, Lucy, 9 to 5, Harlan County USA, and Office Space.

GNSE 44905 Feminism And The Radical Democratic Imaginary: Futures Past
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
In Part I of this course we explore how conceptualizations of the past shape imaginative visions of possible futures. How we understand the past has a direct bearing on what can count as a “realistic” course of social, political, and economic action. Our conception of the past is itself shaped by a projected future and different societies have different ways of imagining the relations between their own future and past. Originating in the revolutionary 18th century, Western feminism’s conceptualization of this relation, its own “futures past” (to speak with Reinhard Koselleck), is characterized by an anticipatory and distinctively modern temporality that assumes the novelty and openness of the future. If the history of feminism calls at times for rewriting, that is less because new facts are discovered than that the ever-changing present opens new perspectives on the past and makes new demands on what it can mean. The past is figured more in terms of projected futures than fidelity to how things really were. For this reason, feminist historiography is rife with debates about whose story is told, and the idea of a “wave” itself has with good reason been criticized as overly generalizing in ways that blind us to the far more fraught and complex histories not captured in its conceptual net. 

GNSE 45027 Between ‘New Woman’ and ‘Sex Worker’: Polish Women’s Writings in the 1930s
Instructor: Bozena Shallcross
During the interwar period a constellation of Polish women writers defined through their novels politically and socially progressive positions; although not deeply influenced by Marxism, they were critical of the class society, state, ruling elite, and Catholic mentality. The seminar will investigate these writers' attempts to represent the unrepresented such as the proletariat, the jobless, the disabled, as well as other socially marginalized members of the society including sex workers. The course will discuss an emergence of the "new woman" against the backdrop of a deeply ingrained patriarchalism, and as an epitome of creative, sexual, and social independence. We will view these phenomena with its roots in 19th century Polish and French naturalism in context of the visual art of Neue Sachlichkeit and the emergence of reportage. Inspired by the social critique offered by writings of Boguszewska, Krzywicka, Melcer, Nałkowska, and others, the seminar will consider the way in which genres such as a novel, short story, and reportage can become tools for reform. All readings in this seminar are in Polish.  

GNSE 45600 When Cultures Collide: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies
Instructor: Richard Shweder
Coming to terms with diversity in an increasingly multicultural world has become one of the most pressing public policy projects for liberal democracies in the early 21st century. One way to come to terms with diversity is to try to understand the scope and limits of toleration for variety at different national sites where immigration from foreign lands has complicated the cultural landscape. This seminar examines a series of legal and moral questions about the proper response to norm conflict between mainstream populations and cultural minority groups (including old and new immigrants), with special reference to court cases that have arisen in the recent history of the United States. 

GNSE 48701 Late Medieval Women: Sanctity, Gender, Authorship And Authority
Instructor: Willemien Otten
The position of women in the late Middle Ages is often found connected to the problem of female authorship. Initially, female authorship was treated emphatically if not exclusively in the context of vernacular theology, which was seen as complementing and complicating the more traditional division of medieval intellectual texts into monastic and scholastic theology. Furthermore, the consistent focus on the emancipatory power of female authorship led to a situation whereby texts written by women were put in stark opposition to texts written by male authors on women; as a result, gender became the dominant category of interpreting texts written by late medieval women. This course will focus on the position of late medieval women especially, most if not all of them authors, while some others are known to have been in conversation with male confessors. The seminar aims to analyze the remarkable religious and theological texts written by them and about them. In the process we will also analyze some paradigmatic titles related to modern historiographical and theoretical scholarship both to draw on them and to show how the approach to late medieval women authors and women saints has changed over the last decades, most recently because of the interest in nonbinary gender. Latin is helpful but not needed. Undergraduates may petition to enroll. This course meets the HS or CS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.  

SPRING 2025

GNSE 30152 Indigenous Feminisms
Instructor: Jodi Byrd
Indigenous women, queers, trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit people have been at the forefront of Indigenous resistance struggles, most recently at Standing Rock, at Mauna Kea, and in protests against Line 3 and Line 6 pipelines in the upper midwest and Canada. Their voices, along with Indigenous queer and feminist scholars in academia, have been working to understand the interrelatedness of gendered violences, land dispossession, and cultural appropriation. This class will consider how Indigenous feminist, queer, and Two Spirit scholars have theorized gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism alongside queer and feminist of color critiques toward accountable visions of resistance. We will read works by Indigenous feminist scholars, writers, poets, and activists from the nineteenth-century to the twenty-first to consider how Indigeneity challenges how gender and sexuality are experienced in the context of ongoing settler colonialism.  

GNSE 30905 The Print Revolution and New Readers: Women, Workers, Children
Instructor: Alexis Chema
In this course we will examine the explosive proliferation of print—books, newspapers, journals, magazines, pamphlets, illustrations—during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the most striking effects of this “Print Revolution” was the extension of reading material to new groups of readers. We will pay particular attention to the changing ways in which women, workers, and children accessed and interacted with printed texts. With the help of literary, historical, and sociological scholarship, we will aim to understand the Print Revolution in relation to the political revolutions, intellectual paradigms, and social upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

GNSE 32806 An Indigenous People’s History of Hawaiʻi
Instructor: Uahikea Maile
What you know about Hawai‘i is most likely untrue. An archipelago in Oceania’s sea of islands, Hawai‘i has been locally constructed and globally consumed as a tropical paradise for pleasure and play, attracting tourists, settlers, corporations, and military forces to its shores. It is a fantasized paradise produced through the dispossession, elimination, appropriation, and exploitation of Indigenous people, institutions, worldviews, and practices. This course tells a truer story about Hawai‘i. Because ideas and narratives crafted about the history, politics, economics, law, ecology, and society of Hawai‘i are dominated and often distorted by non-Indigenous writers, we turn to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholars to learn from their subjugated knowledge. The course examines interdisciplinary research, from the 19th century to the present, and excavates the truths advanced through it: the development of the Hawaiian Kingdom and its government, political order, economy, and society; the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian government and US military occupation and annexation of its territory; legal constructions of race and techniques of gender and sexuality in the territorial period; the creation of the State of Hawaii amid World War II and the Cold War; the birth and evolution of the modern Hawaiian sovereignty movement; and contemporary Kanaka Maoli struggles with federal recognition, militourism, and technoscientific development.  

GNSE 33181 Histories of Abortion and Forced Sterilization in the United States
Instructor: Caine Jordan
In the United States, the politics of pregnancy and reproductive autonomy have historically been and continue to be categories of significance, meaning, and contention. In this course, we will explore a subsection of these broader categories, examining the relation between abortion and forced sterilization, the state, and women of color. The course will zero in on the experiences of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women, African American women, Puerto Rican women, and Native American women, considering their struggles against the state and for reproductive justice.  

GNSE 33182 Creative Forces: Cultural Feminisms in Postcolonial India
Instructor: Titas De Sarkar
In this course, we will study some of the most significant feminist interventions that were made through a range of cultural practices in postcolonial India, and in the Indian diaspora. Struggles for women’s rights, demanding political empowerment and economic equality, or carrying out demonstrations for better access to health and education have a long history in South Asia. We will focus particularly on the cultural practices that have constituted waves of feminist thoughts over the last seven decades. We will explore how concerns around justice, social responsibility, and freedom of expression are mediated through literature, cinema, music, and self-fashioning. Keeping cultural productions as our archive, we will ask – what are the various meanings of feminism in postcolonial India? What were the political, economic, and social concerns that the artists and activists chose to highlight while addressing gendered inequalities? What are the intersections of caste, class, and sexual orientation that complicate our understanding of feminist representations? How were inequities sought to be negotiated creatively at different historical contexts? Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will often find ourselves moving between genres, themes, and disciplines to locate marginal voices responding to contemporary anxieties. By working at the intersection of cultural history, anthropological and sociological scholarships, and media studies we will gain an understanding…  

GNSE 35055 Uncertain Futures: A Sociology of Times to Come
Instructor: Eman Abdelhadi
Between global militarism, intensive inequality, and climate catastrophe, the future looks uncertain. This class engages lay, scholarly and fictional futurisms—particularly emerging from Queer, Indigenous and Black traditions. We will read sociological and anthropological texts that consider how different communities envision the decades and centuries to come alongside speculative fiction that theorizes where earth and humanity are heading. Does humanity have a future? How does that future look? How do differing answers to these questions shape individuals’ and communities’ lives and decisions?

GNSE 36225 Get Cultured in Nine Weeks: Historical Perspectives on Art and Education
Instructors: Alice Goff and Sophie Salvo
What does it mean to ‘get cultured’? Why—and how—do we do it? Does an education in the arts and letters make us more moral, more intelligent, more resistant to authority—or perhaps more submissive? These questions are at the center of debates about the place of cultural learning in the contemporary world, but our century was not the first to think critically about the social and political functions of this form of education. This course investigates how students, educators, writers, and artists conceptualized the aims and means of becoming cultured from the 1700s forward, focusing on European history and connecting it to the concerns of the present. We will pay particularly close attention to both formal and informal means of cultural education, and to the ways in which these practices have been understood to produce social structures of class, gender, and race. Readings will draw from the fields of history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and art history. At the end of the quarter, students will be asked to design their own fantasy syllabus for “getting cultured in nine weeks.”

GNSE 38775 Racial Melancholia
Instructor: Kris Trujillo
This course provides students with an opportunity to think race both within a psychoanalytic framework and alongside rituals of loss, grief, and mourning. In particular, we will interrogate how psychoanalytic formulations of mourning and melancholia have shaped theories of racial melancholia that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. Turning to Asian American, African American, and Latinx theoretical and literary archives, we will interrogate the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality and ask: How do literatures of loss enable us to understand the relationship between histories of racial trauma, injury, and grief, on the one hand, and the formation of racial identity, on the other? What might it mean to imagine literary histories of race as grounded fundamentally in the experience of loss? What forms of reparations, redress, and resistance are called for by such literatures of racial grief, mourning, and melancholia? And, finally, how, if understood as themselves rituals of grief, might psychoanalysis and the writing of literature assume the role of religious devotion in the face of loss and trauma?

GNSE 39303 Asceticism: Forming the Self
Instructors: Sarah Pierce Taylor & Erin Walsh
In recent decades scholars of the pre-modern period have turned to the body as a site of renewed historical inquiry. Within the study of religion, this shift has reanimated discussions around asceticism as a particularly potent technē for self-fashioning. Nevertheless, scholars have struggled to theorize asceticism across religious traditions. This signature course, taught by two scholars working in disparate historical periods and religious traditions (early Christianity and medieval Indian religious literature), explores how gender theory has engaged ascetic practices for understanding the body and human potential. Students will engage asceticism as a series of techniques or forms of life that envision the sexed and gendered human body as the horizon of corporeal expression and personal imagination. Asceticism serves as a neat conceptual device, allowing us to toggle between the mind and body while tackling questions that fall within the liminal space between them, including debates around gender, sexuality, sovereignty, and biopower. Students along with the instructors will contend with the challenges and opportunities of transnational and transhistorical feminist and queer inquiry as we traverse across the boundaries of tradition, language, and culture. While drawing on rich historical and religious archives, we will anchor our discussions around the interplay of two principal authors: Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. No prior knowledge of the religious traditions or critical theory discussed is expected.

GNSE 43500 Archives of Slavery and Gender in the Americas
Instructor: SJ Zhang
This class offers an in-depth introduction to archival research methodologies with a focus on gender and slavery in the Americas. Students will apply their knowledge by working in historical and contemporary archives via two trips to special collections: one to view archival texts from the period and another to find an archival object of the student’s choosing that will provide the topic of their final research paper.

GNSE 46001 Beyond the Blanks of History: When Women of Color Reclaim the Narrative
Instructor: Nikhita Obeegadoo
“History” is skewed and incomplete. It leaves out as much as it reveals. As they relegate past suffering to oblivion, historical omissions perpetuate the violence that they seek to hide. And this violence is often felt on multiple levels by women of color who find themselves imbricated within (neo)colonial, patriarchal, heteronormative, classist and ableist societal structures. In this course, we will situate ourselves at the intersection of literature, history and gender studies. We will explore the following questions together: Faced with the blind spots of history, how can literature function as an alternative archive that draws attention to the invisibilized stories of women of color? Simultaneously, how does literature sensitize us to the impossibility of fully knowing the past, no matter how hard we try? Course material may include theoretical texts, fiction, poetry, songs, podcasts, film, graphic novels and social media material. Potential examples include Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King (2022), Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013), Nathacha Appanah’s La Mémoire Délavée (2023), Lia Brozgal’s Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961 (2022), Marie Clements’ Bones of Crows (2022), and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s poetry. Advanced undergraduates with appropriate experience in the subject may petition for admission. Taught in English. All course material will be available in English, though students are encouraged to engage with original materials. Work may be submitted in English, French or Spanish.

GNSE 47900 Wives, widows, and prostitutes: Indian Literature and the "Women's Question"
Instructor: Ulrike Stark
From the early 19th century onward, the debate on the status of Indian women was an integral part of the discourse on the state of civilization, Hindu tradition, and social reform in colonial India. This course will explore how Indian authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries engaged with the so-called "women's question." Caught between middle-class conservatism and the urge for social reform, Hindi and Urdu writers addressed controversial issues such as female education, child marriage, widow remarriage, and prostitution in their fictional and discursive writings. We will explore the tensions of a literary and social agenda that advocated the 'uplift' of women as a necessary precondition for the progress of the nation, while also expressing patriarchal fears about women's rights and freedom. The course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Basic knowledge of Hindi and/or Urdu is preferable, but not required. We will read works by Nazir Ahmad, Premcand, Jainendra Kumar, Mirza Hadi Ruswa, and Mahadevi Varma in English translation, and also look at texts used in Indian female education at the time.

GNSE 54777 The Print Revolution and New Readers: Women, Workers, Children
Instructor: Alexis Chema
In this course we will examine the expansion of print during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its relationship to the social history of reading. One of the most striking features of this so-called “Print Revolution” was the extension of reading material to new groups of readers: by the end of the nineteenth century, more women, working-class, and child readers existed than ever before. In what distinctive ways did these groups participate in print and manuscript culture? What did they read and to what ends? How did literary texts represent, herald, instruct, or proscribe new readers, and how did new readers comply with, subvert, misunderstand, adapt, or otherwise interact with the texts they read? How did the extension of the “reading habit” to new groups of readers impact the political revolutions, intellectual paradigms, and social upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? And finally, what kinds of evidence can literary scholars draw upon to make what kinds of claims about reading and readers in the past? We will approach these questions through the lenses of popular literature (especially ballads, chapbooks, satire, and romance) and with the help of literary, historical, and sociological scholarship.

GNSE 55403 Transfeminism
Instructor: Ray Briggs
Trans experience raises interesting philosophical questions about how people understand and misunderstand each other as gendered beings, how our internal senses of ourselves relate to the way society perceives us, and how to re-imagine our ideas of a good or normal body. This graduate seminar explores some of these questions through readings in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy that center trans and feminist perspectives.  

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