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 

SPRING 2024

 

Graduate Courses

SPRING 2024

 

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

SPRING 2024

GNSE 12118 Sexual and Reproductive Health and Gender
Instructor:
Virginia Rangos This course will cover topics related to medicine, gender, and sexuality, including: the medicalization of sexual desire and performance; medical, sociocultural, and public health responses to sexually transmitted infections; caring for and criminalizing pregnant (and potentially) pregnant bodies; commodification of reproduction and markets in reproductive materials; and the medicalization of gender and the history and sociology of gender confirming treatment. We will primarily focus on medical cultures in the United States, but will draw on counter-examples from other countries. The readings will approach the material through an intersectional lens.
This class counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12121 Contemporary Feminist Politics: From the Sex Wars to Beyonce
Instructor:
Rhiannon Love Auriemma
This course offers a survey of feminist politics and texts on feminist action from the 1980s to now. We look to texts and media from feminist scholars, activists, and scholar-activists in order to tackle questions of what feminism is and should be in theory and practice. This course will focus on key contentions and debates amongst feminists on questions of politics and culture, demonstrating that disagreement is characteristic and generative for feminist politics. With this in mind, we will cover topics such as the Sex Wars, the rise of Third Wave Feminism, #MeToo, and Beyonce in order to trace the contours of disagreement in our feminist present. Readings include works from bell hooks, Susan Faludi, Roxane Gay, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Butler.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12125 Living Queer: Experiences, Encounter, Affinities
Instructor:
Sarah McDaniel
In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore representations and expressions of queer, genderqueer, and trans lives that constellate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will take a capacious approach to the concept of “queer life,” attending to the frictions between individual experience, interpersonal encounters, and communal affinity. Assembling a diverse archive of artistic works, literary forms, and cultural artifacts (fiction, memoir, film, lyric poetry, anthology, activist ephemera) together with foundational works in the study of sexuality and gender, we will ask: How do hegemonic institutions, discourses, and definitions – from medical models of pathology to hostile bureaucratic infrastructure – shape the expressive forms available to queer and trans people? And how does the literary, artistic, and activist work of queer and trans people work in turn to reshape those very expressive possibilities? How can individual experiences of isolation and marginalization form the basis of a community or subculture? How are erotic creativity, imaginative life, and political action linked? To address these questions, we will consider “queer life” through six anchors of experience: childhood, community, creativity, politics, nightlife, and afterlives. Along the way, our readings will introduce a range of critical and creative methods – such as oral history, ethnography, autobiography, performance – that scholars and artists have used to theorize and represent queer life. Through short “micro-assignments” and a self-designed final project, we will try out these methods for ourselves, bringing findings from our own interests (and lifeworlds) into our shared archive. By interweaving the creative work of queer and trans people and communities with practical experiments in research and making, we will aim to broaden our collective understanding of what it might mean to “live queer.” (Previous experience in gender and sexuality studies is not required for this course.)
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 12126 "She'll Never Be Human Again!": Superheroes And Bodily Transformation
Instructor:
Heather Glenny
This course looks at the mutated, rearranged, supplemented, and hyper-able bodies of superheroes and supervillains. Drawing on disabilities studies, critical race theory, gender studies, and trans and queer studies, we’ll examine 20th- and 21st-century representations of super-anatomies and their place in American culture. Within superhero media—a genre full of spectacular bodily transformation, biological difference, and physical violence—where do ideologies around race, gender, sexuality, ability, and definitions of “human” get reproduced or destabilized? How can these biodivergent figures who stretch, incinerate, and bubble with muscle be resources for envisioning new possibilities for queer and racialized living, or for reading outside of traditional fantasies of white male power? What is the role of Western science and medicine, of accidents, experiments, and evolutions? Looking at film, graphic novels, and literary texts, we’ll ask how materiality—what the body’s made of—can (re)produce ideology. Finally, we’ll consider these narratives in relation to how bodily transformation is policed today, from bans on gender-affirming care to non-consensual “mutations” caused by environmental racism. Students of all majors are welcome.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.  

GNSE 12162 Queer Singing, Queer Spaces
Instructor:
Devon Borowski
Queer practice and identity have long been expressed through/as song. According to Ovid, it was the great singer Orpheus who first introduced same-sex relationships to the people of Thrace; in early modern Europe, men performing the role of Orpheus on the operatic stage were often eunuchs with non-normative bodies singing in a vocal range traditionally associated with the feminine. Beyond fabled musicians, though, carnal technologies of the voice have continually been implicated in historically and geographically situated paradigms of queerness. Likewise, many of the spaces in which queer peoples have found community or refuge have been associated with music or singing. What might it suggest that in the twentieth century, generations of queer communities formed around listening to and ventriloquizing the voices of Judy Garland, Maria Callas, and Madonna? How might exclusively queer spaces, like the hijra communities of the Indian subcontinent, effect the production of voice and performance of music for its inhabitants and outside observers? For which audiences are young trans* people on YouTube documenting their vocal progressions over the course of their transitions? Why have both European and Chinese operatic traditions abounded with cross-dressing for most of their histories? In this course we will investigate the broad relationship between practices of the voice and the body and consider why so many of our cultural understandings of queerness are accompanied by singing.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.  

GNSE 15005 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations III: South Asia Instructor: Zoya Sameen This course will explore major themes in the history of women, gender, and sexuality in modern South Asia. We will address reform, legislation, nationalism, and rights discourses across periods of colonialism and independence in the nineteenth and twentieth century. This includes examining how colonial reforms and criminal codes impacted women with respect to education, marriage, abortion, infanticide, and prostitution, as well as how laws targeted gender expression and criminalized forms of queerness. In independent South Asia, we will consider the development of gender and queer rights discourses and how these have been shaped by the politics of patriarchy, religion, caste, and class. We will also examine instances of gendered and sexual violence during moments of rupture such as the Partition of India and the Bangladesh Liberation War. Students in this course will draw on a range of primary and secondary texts across written and visual mediums to critically think about the place of women and gender/sexual minorities and their expressions of resilience and defiance in modern South Asia.
PQ: GNSE 15002/15003. This is an optional 3rd quarter of GNSE Civ. Students must have taken the first two quarters to be eligible to enroll in this course. 

GNSE 15006 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations III: Queens in a Global Context
Instructor:
Jordan Johansen
What is a queen? How have the roles and perceptions of queens changed over time and space? Are there any common threads we can see in the study of queens from vastly different contexts? What can these questions tell us about female power and the construction of gender and sexuality in global societies? In this class, we will draw on the knowledge gained in the first two quarters of the Gender and Sexuality in World Civilization sequence to explore queens, queenship, and the long history of people’s fascination with queens and royal women. While most of the academic work on queens have been in the European context, we will be expanding our exploration of queens and queenship into a global context by considering the experiences of queens and the construction of queenship in different cultures, places, and periods, such as ancient Egypt and Nubia, medieval China, early modern Madagascar, Aotearoa New Zealand, imperial Russia, and many more. We will be examining the biographies of individual queens, their patronage, their political agency, their reputation and representation, and their diplomatic activity within the lens of gender and sexuality. This class will include a mixture of primary source readings and object study, secondary source readings from the new field of global queenship studies, and visits to museum collections.
PQ: GNSE 15002/15003. This is an optional 3rd quarter of GNSE Civ. Students must have taken the first two quarters to be eligible to enroll in this course.  

GNSE 16004 Jewish Civilization III - Mothers and Motherhood in Modern Jewish Culture
Instructor:
Jessica Kirzane
Jewish Civilization is a three-quarter sequence that explores the development of Jewish culture and tradition from its ancient beginnings through its rabbinic and medieval transformations to its modern manifestations. Through investigation of primary texts—biblical, Talmudic, philosophical, mystical, historical, documentary, and literary—students will acquire a broad overview of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness while reflecting in greater depth on major themes, ideas, and events in Jewish history. The Spring course in 2022 will focus on mothers and motherhood in modern Jewish culture. From sentimentalized keepers of Jewish tradition to objects of ridicule burdened by stereotypes of overbearing, guilt-inducing behavior, Jewish mothers hold a prominent role in Jewish self-representations. Writing alongside or against these stereotypes, Jewish mothers themselves have struggled with the obligations and expectations of Jewish motherhood. Engaging with a variety of literary, theological, historical, and pop culture texts, this class explores Jewish feminisms in relation to motherhood, Jewish fictions of motherhood, and the role of motherhood in Jewish religious life and thought. This course includes material from a variety of different contexts for modern Jewish life, but places particular emphasis on American Jewish history and culture.

GNSE 16404 Criminal, Police, and Citizen in Latin America
Instructor:
Keegan Boyer
Crime and policing are intensely debated today around the world, but perhaps nowhere are these debates felt more sharply than in Latin America, the site of both high rates of crime and violence and widespread distrust of the police and criminal justice institutions. This course delves into the history of these issues in the region. In the process, it sheds light on broader themes of Latin American history from the late colonial period to the present day. As the course shows through topics ranging from crimes against honor, to the policing of street vending, to the drug war, crime and policing in Latin America have been crucial spaces for the construction and contestation of social and legal hierarchies, the voicing of political protest and social critique, and the making and unmaking of citizenship. Through the use of diverse readings, including primary sources such as court records, satirical poems, and blockbuster films, students will trace how ideas of crime, and of the role of the state in attempting to define it and respond to it, changed over time with broader social, economic, and political developments. In doing so, they will examine how crime and policing have intersected with class, race, and gender, and how debates over crime and the practices of policing have shaped the boundaries of citizenship.

GNSE 18120 Contemporary Fiction
Instructor:
Lily Scherlis
How do we approach literature that’s being made at the same time we’re studying it? Keeping an eye on how factors including race, gender, class, prestige, corporate structures, and social media inflect how books get made, read, and acclaimed, we will read “mainstream” “literary” hits and cult darlings of the past five years, likely including Sally Rooney, Brandon Taylor, Torrey Peters, Otessa Moshfegh, Ling Ma, and Helen DeWitt; as well as experimental/small-press fiction. This course explores how literary fiction is embedded in a complex economic ecosystem; we will analyze how recent literature reflects, dissents from, or dodges the politics of the publishing industry. In doing so, we cover theories of cultural production from the Frankfurt School through the present, and recent popular literary criticism. Throughout, we aim to develop strategies for keeping up to date with the landscape of literature. Course assignments will include the chance to develop a review essay for a popular audience.

GNSE 18128 Enigmas of the Novel: Fiction after 1900
Instructor:
Rivky Mondal
This course examines the centrality of enigmatic figures, happenings, and details to the workings of the 20th- and 21st-century novel. To what degree are obscure elements in a work of fiction methodical in their appearance? Are enigmas necessarily code for something else? Where does the figure of the narrator live, exactly? Are characters more easily visualized, or less, when markers of race, class, and/or gender are invoked? Our first aim will be to identify the formal strategies and styles of opacity in modern and contemporary novels; our second will be to craft literary-critical arguments about the political and historical attitudes that seem to underlie these decisions. We’ll examine the assumptions and paradoxes of novel form brought to the fore by its blurry parts, and consider how these parts offer frameworks for analyzing the wayward activities of perception, belonging, and power. Through discussion and writing assignments, students will hone their skills of close reading, argumentation with concepts, and critical practice. Prospective reading list includes Ford Madox Ford, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, and recent novels by Raven Leilani and Weike Wang.  

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 and other signs that are used to enact gender and sexuality (e.g., in drag shows, communities you belong to personally, online communities, and current events). We also consider binary language reform and the emergence of identity categories as practices of everyday relationality that contest normative assumptions. Readings are interdisciplinary and draw from Linguistics, Anthropology, Area Studies, Performance Studies, and Queer Studies.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors 

GNSE 20129 Writing Gender
Instructor:
Sophie Salvo
In German, even if you are not writing about gender, you are always writing gender: the grammatical categories “masculine,” “feminine,” and “neuter” are implicated in every noun declension and personal pronoun. How have writers negotiated this in their constructions of gender identity? In this course, we will examine how gender has been thought within and beyond the masculine/feminine binary in German intellectual history. We will study historical conceptions of grammatical gender as well as recent attempts to make German more inclusive for genderfluid and trans people (e.g., neopronouns). Finally, we will consider how authors use literature as a space for gender exploration, such as in Kim de L’Horizon’s recent award-winning novel Blutbuch. Readings and discussions in English.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20130 Queer Theory
Instructor:
Kris Trujillo
This course aims to offer a foundation in queer theoretical texts. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term “queer” and explore the contours of the field’s major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory’s emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis. Reading texts by key figures like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lorde, Bersani, Crimp, Warner, Halperin, Dinshaw, Edelman, Anzaldúa, Ferguson, and Muñoz in addition to prominent issues of journals like GLQ, differences, and Signs, we will approach these pieces as historical artifacts and place these theorists within the communities of intellectuals, activists, and artists out of which their work emerged. We will, thus, imagine queer theory as a literary practice of mournful and militant devotion, trace queer theory’s relationship to feminism and critical race theory, critique the hagiographic tendency of the academic star system, and interrogate the assumptions of queer theory’s secularity.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20131 Gendering Slavery
Instructor:
Mary Hicks
This reading seminar will introduce students to the key questions, methods, and theories of the burgeoning field of gendered histories of slavery. Global in scope, but with a focus on the early modern Atlantic world, we will explore a range of primary and secondary texts from various slave societies. Assigned monographs will cover a multitude of topics including women and law, sexualities, kinship, and reproduction, and the intersection of race, labor, and market economies. In addition to examining historical narratives, students will discuss the ethical and methodological implications of reading and writing histories of violence, erasure, and domination. Learning to work within and against the limits imposed by hegemonic forms of representation, the fragmentary nature of the archive, and the afterlives of slavery, this course will examine how masculinity and femininity remade and were remade by bondage.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20134 Special Topics in Criticism and Theory: Gender and Sexuality
Instructor:
Sianne Ngai
An introduction to classic texts in feminist and queer literary criticism.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20138 Gender Before Gender: Constructing Bodies In Ancient American Art
Instructor:
Claudia Brittenham In this course, we will seek to test the possibilities and limits of understanding gender and sex in premodernity through an inquiry into the artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Works of art constitute a primary means by which we can access ideas about what we call gender and sex. Based on what we can reconstruct from visual, textual, and archaeological sources, these cultures conceptualized and represented gender in ways that might seem unfamiliar, in the process putting into question our own preconceptions. Indeed, pre-modern works of art might not have served to simply record conventions of gender but also helped construct the very idea of a sexed body within a given cultural context. As we discover commonalities and divergences between these Indigenous American traditions, we will learn to think across cultural contexts and disciplinary divides, putting into question some of our own assumptions. We will see that gender is not an immutable construct but something actively brought into being in different ways in different times and places. Consent of instructor required; email Professor Brittenham a paragraph-long description about what you bring and what you hope to get out of this seminar.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.  

GNSE 20580 Health and Society
Instructor:
Linda Waite
A long and healthy life is a widely sought after human goal.  But not everyone has equal chances of achieving this goal.  This course focuses on the role played by society in differential access to physical, psychological, cognitive health and well-being. We will discuss the role of parental characteristics and childhood circumstances in later-life health, differences in health and well-being for men and women, for racial and ethnic groups, by sexual minority status, by characteristics of our neighborhoods and communities, and by regions or countries.  We will examine the role of social policies.  The format will be lectures and a series of short exercises.

GNSE 20620 Literature, Medicine and Embodiment
Instructor
: Lee Jasperse
This class explores the relations between imaginative writing, embodiment, and medical care. We will take up literary texts that grapple with culturally charged illnesses from the 1800s-present (e.g. TB, hysteria, cancer, AIDS), as well as theoretical texts that will help us think through the importance and problems with mediating the body in language.  

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 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 22207 Caste, Reproduction, and Citizenship in India
Instructor:
Sanghamitra Das
This undergraduate and graduate level seminar will center on caste and reproduction in understanding notions of citizenship in India. The course will systematically engage with ideas of belonging to the post-colonial nation-state, particularly as experienced from following standpoints—gender, caste, indigeneity, and class. Understanding how citizenship is constituted, performed and negotiated in India, especially in relation to the biological and political reproduction of “good citizens”, reveals the scopes and limits of citizenship as governance. The course is premised on the centrality of reproduction to governance in the largest democracy of the world. Drawing on a set of interdisciplinary literature, the readings are organized around feminist theorizations of the State, governance, and citizenship to locate the body within the body politic. The aim is to develop critical thinking on how the politics of reproduction is deeply imbricated with the reproduction of democratic politics; a politics that is entangled with knowledge, expertise and constructed human difference. In so doing, the course brings together reproductive governance with articulations of social justice in India. 

GNSE 22266 Coming Of Age: Autobiography, Bildungsroman, And Memoir In Victorian Britain And Its Empire
Instructor:
Elaine Hadley
In this course, we will consider the broad generic category of “coming of age” stories that characterized the literary writing of the nineteenth century. Across several different kinds of writing, a focus on the growth and development of the child into adulthood became an obsessive focus. We will read autobiographies by Mill and Martineau, Bildungsroman by Bronte and Eliot, memoirs by Dickens but also lesser known figures: working class autodidacts, women in childbirth, colonial subjects. We will, along the way, learn more about Victorian childhood, the emergence of developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, and the socio-psychological “invention” of adolescence.  

GNSE 22520 Economics of Gender in International Contexts
Instructor:
Alessandra González
In this class, students will engage basic issues, conflicts, and innovative field research in economics of gender in international contexts. In particular, we will review theoretical foundations, data and methods of research, and a review of recent work in international research related to economics of gender. At the end of the course, you will have a suite of research approaches, topics, and methods, to investigate gender differences in a variety of economic outcomes and contexts. ECON 10000 or PBPL 22200. STAT 22000 also recommended  

GNSE 23154 Is It Ethical To Have Children In The Climate Crisis?
Instructor:
Kristi Del Vecchio
Climate change is not just an urgent environmental crisis for scientists, engineers, and policy makers: it is a moral problem that also informs individual and intimate aspects of human life, including choices about reproduction and parenting. For example, a 2018 survey published in the New York Times found that young adults in the U.S. are having fewer children than they would otherwise prefer, in part due to concerns about climate change and overpopulation. In this course, we examine the moral dimensions of having and raising children in an era shaped by climate change, looking closely at two main questions: 1) Is it ethical to have children in light of the world that the next generation will inherit, which may include more extreme weather events, unvoluntary human migrations, diminished access to resources, and heightened insecurity? 2) Is it ethical to have children in the context of the affluent West, where consumptive human populations disproportionately contribute to the effects of climate change that impact the world’s most vulnerable? We will examine various points of view on these questions, engaging material from the disciplines of environmental studies and ethics, science and technology studies, and religious and philosophical ethics. Responses from feminist, queer, Indigenous, Black, and religiously diverse authors (and intersections therein) will shape our course readings and discussions.
This class counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23155 Reproductive citizens: sex, work, and embodiment
Instructor:
Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we focus on literature, film, history, and theory texts that deal with biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. as the central means of reproducing the biological life and social fabric of American culture. 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. dramatically alter or even dismantle the reproductive social order altogether. 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 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. Open enrollment for all graduate students, as well as 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students with majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All others, please email amalinowska@uchicago.edu to request permission to enroll.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23160 Contemporary Women Writers in Latin America
Instructor:
Laura Colaneri
Latin America has recently seen an explosion of internationally lauded literature by women writers: as one article stated, “The new Latin American Boom is here, and it is being led by women.” This course focuses on Latin American women’s writing from 1960 to the present, addressing both this recent boom and their literary predecessors. Students will contend with changing trends and historically and culturally specific ideas of representation, womanhood, and feminine sexuality in Latin America, analyze the roles of race, class, and ability in women’s writing, and engage with legacies of authoritarianism, political violence, and femicide throughout the region. Texts traverse the region and period, ranging from the 1970s crónicas of Elena Poniatowska (Mexico, 1932-) and the short stories of Isabel Allende (Chile, 1942-) to the concept albums of Rita Indiana (Dominican Republic, 1977-) and the 2017 novel "Temporada de huracanes" by Fernanda Melchor (Mexico, 1982-). Taught in Spanish.
This class counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors 

GNSE 23164 Feminist Documentary Filmmaking
Instructor:
Cinta Peleja
This course examines the ways that women-identifying documentary makers have given cinematic form to feminist thought. Drawing from film and media theory and history, we will focus on the formal and narrative techniques that have been employed by filmmakers to reflect on questions pertaining to gender and sexuality, with an emphasis on the specific ways that documentary filmmaking expanded feminist theoretical frameworks and research methodologies. We will watch films with a critical eye and engage closely with academic and popular writings to survey the aesthetic, social, and political genealogies operating in the history of feminist documentary production. In this discussion-based course, we will cover a variety of non-fiction film and media forms: film diaries, docu-fictions, home-movies, video essays, auto-ethnographies, ethno-fictions, collage, and found-footage films. These will be works from different historical periods and geographical contexts by filmmakers such as Laura Huertas Millán, T. Minh-ha Trinh, Yang Ming Ming, Aarin Burch, Jocelyne Saab, Hito Steyerl, and Mati Diop.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.  

GNSE 23165 Sexuality in U.S. History
Instructor:
Red Tremmel
In this course we will study the history of changing sexual practices, relations, politics, cultures, and social systems in the region of North America now comprising the United States and 574 sovereign tribal nations. We begin in the pre-colonial period and end in the late twentieth century, focusing on how gendered, racial, economic, religious, medical, and commercial discourses shaped and were shaped by sexual ones. Moving through various contexts, such as occupied indigenous territories, the secret parties of enslaved people, scientific societies, urban drag balls, medical schools, liberatory movements, and 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 23166 Reading Transnational Early Modern Race through Gender
Instructor:
Yunning Zhang
Is race an anachronistic expression in Renaissance Europe? What are the stakes for studies of race in premodern periods? How did early modern race operate differently from contemporary racialized epistemologies and in what ways are we continuously influenced by the premodern times? This course tackles these questions by foregrounding two vocabularies in the early modern racial paradigm: gender and transnational constructions. We will read primary texts set and produced both in Renaissance Europe and its colonies in Africa, Americas, and Asia, and ask: how did the structural relationship of race and gender work in tandem with, or against each other? What roles did transnational and transcultural exchanges such as Christian missions, colonization, commerce, and slave trade play in the ideations of race? We will pay close attention to fictionalized female characters and women writers, ranging from the desired white beauties in Shakespeare’s Othello and Cervantes’s The Bagnios of Algiers, to Nahua (Mexico) and Visayan (the Philippines) women in The Florentine Codex and The Boxer Codex, to the spiritual diaries of indigenous and black nuns in the Colonial Spanish America, to Aphra Behn’s depiction of Oroonoko’s execution in Surinam, and finally to the unwritten disposable lives of enslaved black women in the Atlantic slave trade.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23167 Black Girlhood
Instructor:
Danielle Jones
First popularized on social media in 2013, the phrase “Black Girl Magic” has expanded far beyond its initial use as a twitter hashtag. It can be seen on (a bunch of different objects and the cover of many children’s books and poetry anthologies). However, the visibility of the phrase did not come without controversy. Some critics argued that rather than being an uplifting rallying cry for positive depictions of black girlhood, it instead reinforced dehumanizing stereotypes of the “strong black woman”. This debate leads us to question: How do black girls tend to be depicted both popular media and in literature? How might these depictions differ depending on author, type of media, or social context? What do they say about the ways that black girls experience childhood, gender, and friendship? To engage with these questions, this course will explore literary works including The Bluest Eye, Betsey Brown, and Abeng, along with television shows such as Lovecraft Country to examine 20th and 21st century depictions of black girlhood. We will also think with theoretical works of black feminism and black girlhood studies.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23168 Sex and the Ethnographic Tradition
Instructor:
Ella Wilhoit
Considerable ethnographic work has focused on sex, not only as categorization of erotic and reproductive experience but as specific, intra-personal encounter. This course examines the role of the latter in the formation of ethnographic knowledge, with particular attention to how studies of sex have challenged static notions of identity and illuminated the complex relationship between social behavior and gendered sense of self. We will consider interest in sex as a motivating factor in the ethnographic enterprise and will read ethnographic work that posits sexual behavior as directly constitutive of gendered and racialized identities. Focusing primarily on work carried out since the early twentieth century, we will examine how ethnographic study has enabled scholars to contest the ubiquitous salience of a male/female dichotomy, the global importance of patriarchal social relations, and the cross-cultural, trans-historical applicability of concepts like ‘third gender.’ Lastly, we will take a methodological eye, querying how sex has moved from a supposedly ‘taboo’ category of social inquiry to a focal topic in ethnographic work of all kinds, and debating limits to participant observation in the study of sexual encounters. This is an introductory graduate level course with select spots for undergraduates.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23169 Queer/Trans/Media
Instructor:
Basil Dababneh
This seminar stages a sustained dialogue between theories of queer, trans, and media, exploring how each of these disciplines animate and challenge one another. This course explores the possibilities of an expanded understanding of queerness, following queer scholar Eve Sedgwick's claim that “work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all.” More recently, queer scholars like David Eng have read “queerness as a critical methodology based not on content but rather on form and style” while trans scholars like Toby Beauchamp similarly engage “the transgender of transgender studies as a mode of critique” and “not as a predetermined category into which identities or bodies are slotted.” What might it mean to consider “queer” and “trans” not as a field with a delimited object of study (sexuality or gender), but as an analytic, a methodology, a critical sensibility, a conceptual strategy, a reading practice, a politics, an aesthetic, etc. Throughout the course, we explore often-unconventional pairings of media objects and scholarly readings to work through these challenging questions. Ultimately, this course is designed to help students read for the similarities within the aesthetic forms of film/media and queer/trans theories to understand their force of expression.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23170 Cultural History Of Women, Family, And Economy In Modern Korea
Instructor:
Eunhee Park
This course explores modern Korean history through the lens of gender as a critical analytical tool. In studying social, historical, and cultural changes shaping gender relations, we will extend our understanding of gender dynamics and its relationship to the family, the state, civil society, class, and the economy. By reading and discussing significant scholarly works, this course will help students understand Korean women’s history in both local and global contexts. The course will be divided into two parts. The first section will address women’s issues and identities, such as women as mothers, wives, and citizens in the framework of family and social institutions, by looking at postcolonialism, patriarchy, and nationalism. Next, the latter half will examine various aspects of women and the economy, including labor, consumption, market economy, governmentality, and class and status.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23509 Eurovision
Instructor:
Philip Bohlman
Each May since 1956 popular musicians and fans from Europe gather in a European metropolis to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), a competitive spectacle in which musicians from one nation compete against one another. Organized, funded, and broadcast by the European Broadcasting Union, the largest conglomerate of national radio and television networks in the world, the ESC is extensively participatory, creating its own communities of fans, musicians, musical producers, and ordinary citizens, who join together at all levels of society to interact with the politics and historical narratives of Europe. From the moment of heightened Cold War conflict at the birth of ESC to the refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing nationalism in the present, ESC has generated public discourse that not only reflects European and global politics, but provides a conduit for local and national citizenries to respond and shape such public discourse about gender and sexuality. The weekly work for the course draws students from across the College into the counterpoint of history and politics with aesthetics and popular culture. Each week will be divided into two parts, the first dedicated to reading and discussion of texts about European history and politics from World War II to the present, the second to interaction with music. Students will experience the ESC through close readings of individual songs and growing familiarity with individual nations with a participatory final project.  

GNSE 23702 Sexual Health: Identity, Behavior, and Outcomes
Instructor:
David Moskowitz
Sexual health is a growing component of public health outreach. The goal of this course is to provide students with a foundational understanding of sexual health from a public health perspective. Through participation in this course, students will increase their knowledge about the history of sexual health promotion in the public health sphere. They will delve into sexual and gender identity construction and explore identity-behavioral expressions. They will critically examine and discuss common sexual health issues addressed by public health practitioners, their epidemiology, and their underlying social determinants; a global health lens will be applied to such examinations. Additionally, recognition of the key methodological considerations in the measurement of sexual behavior and sexual health outcomes will be elucidated (including strengths and limitations of various methodological approaches –quantitative, qualitative, clinical, and biomedical). By the completion of the course, students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and application of key theoretical foundations of sexual health promotion and sexual health behavior change and be able to promote sexual health messages through marketing and dissemination. From a policy perspective, students can expect an increased knowledge about issues related to social and legislative policy analyses, their applications, and implications.

GNSE 23750 Race, Gender and Religion in Medieval and Early Modern France
Instructor:
Pauline Goul
From the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, France sees the development of several genres and literary movements that are foundational to the French literary tradition: the epic, the fable, the narrative genre, the essay, poetry, tragedy, comedy, and the fable are the various genres of premodern France that we will study. What was France at the time? Most of these texts are not originally written in a version of French you would recognize easily. How to build a nation, and how to live together, were also key questions for medieval and early modern writers. Some of the concepts developed in those texts undeniably led to a version of France that made Versailles but also the Code Noir – which defined the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire – possible. In addition to race, gender, and class, we will discuss the themes that were important to premodern French authors and cultures, not least of them medievalism, Renaissance, and classicism. What makes these texts classics, and what do they still have to say for our time?

GNSE 24299 Topics in Medical Anthropology: Troubling Adolescence
Instructor:
Paula Martin
Many theories of “adolescence” have often emphasized it as a development period of rapid change, risk taking, and experimentation. This course will take on some of key health-related concerns of adolescence, such as mental health (e.g. depression, anxiety) and risk behaviors (e.g. substance use, sexuality) asking after the phenomenological experience of such concerns as well as exploring their cultural specify. Furthermore, this course will review key historical and development frameworks for understanding “adolescence,” reading them alongside anthropological and queer theories of temporality. Ultimately, the course asks, how do the troubles of adolescence play out in different contexts? And what happens if we trouble the concept of adolescence itself?

GNSE 24950 International Disability Rights and Justice
Instructor:
Zhiying Ma
The rights of persons with disabilities have become a new frontier of human rights across the world. This course introduces recent developments in concepts, tools, and practices of disability rights both internationally and in different regions/countries. We will pay specific attention to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, including its principles, provisions on key topics (e.g., institutionalization, education, employment, and political participation), and the role of state and non-state actors in its implementation. We will also consider the implications of disability rights on global social development and humanitarian work. Moreover, we will critically examine barriers and concerns in realizing disability rights, areas where dominant understandings of disability rights fall short, and alternative approaches to conceptualizing and promoting justice for persons with disabilities. The course will consist of reading and critique of literature, large and small group discussions, guest lectures by practitioners, case studies, and student presentations. Students will develop skills to analyze disability policies or design/evaluate disability inclusive development projects in international settings.  

GNSE 25020 Opera Across Media
Instructor:
Martha Feldman
Over the course of the last 120 years, opera and cinema have been sounded and seen together again and again. Where opera is commonly associated with extravagant performance and production, cinema is popularly associated with realism. Yet their encounter not only proves these assumptions wrong but produces some extraordinary third kinds--media hybrids. It also produces some extraordinary love affairs. Thomas Edison wanted a film of his to be “a grand opera,” and Federico Fellini and Woody Allen wanted opera to saturate their films. Thinking about these mutual attractions, “Opera across Media” explores different operatic and cinematic repertories as well as other media forms. Among films to be studied are Pabst’s Threepenny Opera (1931), Visconti’s Senso (1954), Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Zeffirelli’s La traviata (1981), DeMille’s Carmen (1915), Losey’s Don Giovanni (1979), Bergman’s The Magic Flute (1975), and Fellini’s E la nave va (1983). No prior background in music performance, theory, or notation is needed. Students may write papers based on their own skills and interests relevant to the course. Required work includes attendance at all screenings and classes; weekly postings on Canvas about readings and viewings; attendances at a Met HD broadcast and a Lyric Opera live opera; a short “think piece” midway through the course; and a final term paper of 8-10 pages.

GNSE 25132 Debate, Dissent, Deviate: Literary Modernities in South Asia
Instructor:
Supurna Dasgupta
Spring Undergrad RemovalsThis class introduces students to the modernist movement in 20th century South Asia. Modernism will be understood here as a radical experimental movement in literature, film, photography and other arts, primarily aimed at critiquing mainstream narratives of history and culture, especially with reference to identity categories such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and caste. The texts reveal the ways in which structures of knowledge and aesthetics circulated between the various parts of the globe, especially under the conditions of colonialism and decolonization. We will analyze a variety of texts over the ten-week duration of the class, including novels, short stories, manifestos, essays, photographs, and films from the 1930s to 1970s. Our aim will be to understand the diverse meanings of modernism as we go through our weekly readings. Was it a global phenomenon that was adopted blindly by postcolonial artists? Or were there specifically South Asian innovations that enable us to think about the local story as formative of a global consciousness? What bearings do such speculations have on genre, gender, and medium, as well as on politics? What effect does sexual politics have on aesthetic innovations? How do these non-mainstream aesthetic traditions contribute towards the formation of knowledge in modern South Asia? No prior knowledge of any South Asian language or history is necessary.  

GNSE 25403 The Bible in U.S. Politics: The Use and Abuse of Sacred Texts in the Public Sphere
Instructor:
Doug Hoffer
People across the political spectrum continue to cite the Bible to justify their viewpoints. Black Lives Matter protestors carried signs citing scriptural support for the rights of African Americans to life and justice, while some of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th first marched around their state capitols in recreation of biblical Israel’s circling of the doomed city Jericho. How can the same book serve the political ends of such ideologically distinct movements? In this course, we will explore the variety of ways in which the Bible, especially the Christian New Testament, informs contemporary political discourse. We will discuss what the Bible is and where it comes from, and how an interpreter’s social location and culturally and historical-bound assumptions shape their interpretation. We will build upon this foundation by examining several contentious political issues in which the Bible is commonly invoked, including abortion, immigration, gender and sexuality, and gun rights. We will analyze the key passages used by supporters of various policy positions to support their claims, situating these texts in their original contexts and highlighting the historical distance that problematizes their use today. Prior familiarity with biblical literature is not required.

GNSE 25407 Pregnancy and Motherhood
Instructor:
Claudia Hogg-Blake
Pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood have been relatively neglected as topics for philosophical exploration, and yet they are ripe for philosophical inquiry from multiple angles, including metaphysics, epistemology, normative ethics, medical ethics, and social and political philosophy. Throughout our inquiry we will pay particular attention to the first-hand, embodied experiences of women. For example: What is it like to be pregnant? How can we make metaphysical sense of this experience? And how is it informed by the socio-political landscape? Moreover, what is the moral significance of giving birth, and what are the ethical and political requirements for a good birth? And finally, what does it mean to be a good mother, and how might this conception of motherhood play into women’s oppression? These are just a few of the questions we will explore, placing philosophical texts alongside memoir and film. 

GNSE 25724 “Yes, but make it fashion!” Fashion, Culture, and Identity
Instructor:
Anindita Chatterjee
In this course, we will explore the role of fashion in socio-cultural life, and the ways in which fashion simultaneously expresses and is shaped by identity. How do communities on the margins challenge dominant ideas of beauty, modesty, freedom, desire, and fashion? Conversely, how does fashion on the margins become mainstream? Drawing on studies across disciplines and the world, we will use fashion as a lens to examine among other things, blackness, queerness, masculinities, caste, Islam, and occupation.  

GNSE 25997 Three Comedies of Sexual Revolution
Instructors:
Nathan Tarcov and Glenn Most
This seminar will discuss three comedies of sexual revolution from three different times and places. Aristophanes’s Assemblywomen recounts how under the leadership of the able Praxagora the women of Athens take over the Assembly and legislate a new regime in which private property is replaced by communism and sexual equity is achieved in favor of the old and unattractive at the expense of the young and attractive. Machiavelli’s Mandragola dramatizes the tricks by which young Callimaco manages with the aid of the trickster parasite Ligurio to have sex with Lucrezia, the beautiful young wife of the elderly lawyer Nicomaco, with the consent of both her and her husband, ushering in a new regime in which all are satisfied. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure Angelo the interim duke of Vienna institutes a repressive sexual regime in which the brothels are closed and extramarital sex is a capital crime. What might we learn about sexual relations from these diverse plays? Why are they comedies? Undergraduates by consent of instructor.

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

GNSE 26624 Repression, Resilience, and Gender Politics in Basque Cultural Memory
Instructor:
Amaia Elizalde Estenaga
This course aims to explore the resilient character of contemporary Basque artistic and cultural production, with a particular focus on the increasing presence of strong female voices. One of the goals will be to explore forms of Basque cultural resistance that question the silencing and homogenizing tendencies of political institutions and their cultural hegemony, thus shedding light on both the dialectic between culture and counterculture and the mechanisms and agents of artistic censorship that come into play. Significant attention will also be given to the narrative poetics of the post-ETA period, during which works by female authors have played a leading role in examining the gender policies that have governed the so-called Basque conflict. The link established between the female figure and the transmission of a "dangerous" memory must be interpreted in the light of the current historical moment characterized by the struggle for the telling of the past and the interrogation of gender. Thus, with a focus on memory and gender, and drawing upon a diverse range of materials —including literary texts, sculptural works, music, and films— the course will provide students with a broad overview of contemporary culture in the Basque Country. Classes will be conducted in Spanish, and prior knowledge of the Basque language or culture is not necessary.  

GNSE 26703 Interiority, Modernity, Domesticity, Decoration
Instructor:
Alexandra Fraser
The domestic interior emerged with modernity itself. “Interiorization,” Walter Benjamin claimed, was a defining characteristic of nineteenth-century culture, and the interior came to be understood as the physical space of the home in addition to an image of mental life. While often figured as refuge from modernity’s more spectacular developments, this seminar establishes the interior as a complex historical construct, a tool with which to read the shifting texture of the world outside its walls. At the same time, we will examine how artists, writers, and designers employed the interior as a platform upon which to experiment with new tactics of representation, often borrowing from one another’s toolbox, in attempts to represent that world and imagine possible futures. Case studies will consider paintings, decorative schemes, prints, décor samples, and architectural media—many from local collections and environments—alongside literary and critical writings. We will interrogate these objects to pursue the interior’s entanglement with the following themes: subjectivity, the senses, and the built environment; privacy, publicity, and revolution; space, text, and image; art, decoration, and fashion; craft, race, and globalization; modernism, gender, and domesticity. Students need not be specialists to register but should be invested in working together to activate the overlooked interface between intimate, “feminine,” or private aesthetic experience and broad historical change. Consent of the instructor is required for registration.This course will include two museum/collections visits in the Chicago area.

GNSE 28602 Cinema In Africa
Instructor:
Loren Kruger
This course examines Africa in film as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in Sub Saharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV, and includes films that reflect on the impact of global trends in Africa and local responses, as well as changing racial and gender identifications. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), by the “father” of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, African Jim (1960) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti-apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga, Sembene’s Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno’s Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine 20th and 21st century films such as I am a not a Witch and The wound (both 2017), which show tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the implications of these tensions for women and men, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and fiction film. Prerequisite: One or more of the following: Intro to Film/ International Cinema AND/OR Intro to African Studies or equivalent

GNSE 29610 Pale Fire
Instructor:
Malynne Sternstein
This course is an intensive reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov.

GNSE 29647 Tutorial: Mathematical Knowledge: Race, Politics and Materiality
Instructor:
Abigail Taylor-Roth
Mathematical knowledge is commonly treated as objective and neutral, even though it is produced through specific societal contexts and in turn impacts those same contexts. In this course we will take a thematic approach to studying how mathematical and quantitative knowledges are produced and used through political processes from which they cannot be separated. We will look at examples such as the connections between plantation slavery and the precise measurement of molasses barrels in the 18th century, the gendered nature of the prestigious Tripos exam in the 19th century, 20th century attempts to quantify and manage reproduction, and 21st century issues of algorithmic policing. We will consider multiple angles for approaching the study of mathematics by connecting mathematical knowledge to topics such as labor, racial sciences, pedagogy, material tools, masculinity, nation-building, and embodiment. This will allow us to move beyond simply considering representation (of women in STEM, for example) to think about how gender and race are part of the construction of mathematical knowledge. In particular, this course will encourage students to think creatively about other possibilities for how we could justly and effectively use mathematics in our lives. There are no mathematical pre-requisites; students with a variety of experiences with mathematics will be able to participate fully in this course.  

 

Graduate Course Descriptions

SPRING 2024

GNSE 30129 Writing Gender
Instructor:
Sophie Salvo
In German, even if you are not writing about gender, you are always writing gender: the grammatical categories “masculine,” “feminine,” and “neuter” are implicated in every noun declension and personal pronoun. How have writers negotiated this in their constructions of gender identity? In this course, we will examine how gender has been thought within and beyond the masculine/feminine binary in German intellectual history. We will study historical conceptions of grammatical gender as well as recent attempts to make German more inclusive for genderfluid and trans people (e.g., neopronouns). Finally, we will consider how authors use literature as a space for gender exploration, such as in Kim de L’Horizon’s recent award-winning novel Blutbuch. Readings and discussions in English. 

GNSE 30138 Gender Before Gender: Constructing Bodies In Ancient American Art
Instructor:
Claudia Brittenham In this course, we will seek to test the possibilities and limits of understanding gender and sex in premodernity through an inquiry into the artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Works of art constitute a primary means by which we can access ideas about what we call gender and sex. Based on what we can reconstruct from visual, textual, and archaeological sources, these cultures conceptualized and represented gender in ways that might seem unfamiliar, in the process putting into question our own preconceptions. Indeed, pre-modern works of art might not have served to simply record conventions of gender but also helped construct the very idea of a sexed body within a given cultural context. As we discover commonalities and divergences between these Indigenous American traditions, we will learn to think across cultural contexts and disciplinary divides, putting into question some of our own assumptions. We will see that gender is not an immutable construct but something actively brought into being in different ways in different times and places. Consent of instructor required; email Professor Brittenham a paragraph-long description about what you bring and what you hope to get out of this seminar.

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 32207 Caste, Reproduction, and Citizenship in India
Instructor:
Sanghamitra Das
This undergraduate and graduate level seminar will center on caste and reproduction in understanding notions of citizenship in India. The course will systematically engage with ideas of belonging to the post-colonial nation-state, particularly as experienced from following standpoints—gender, caste, indigeneity, and class. Understanding how citizenship is constituted, performed and negotiated in India, especially in relation to the biological and political reproduction of “good citizens”, reveals the scopes and limits of citizenship as governance. The course is premised on the centrality of reproduction to governance in the largest democracy of the world. Drawing on a set of interdisciplinary literature, the readings are organized around feminist theorizations of the State, governance, and citizenship to locate the body within the body politic. The aim is to develop critical thinking on how the politics of reproduction is deeply imbricated with the reproduction of democratic politics; a politics that is entangled with knowledge, expertise and constructed human difference. In so doing, the course brings together reproductive governance with articulations of social justice in India. 

GNSE 33167 Black Girlhood
Instructor:
Danielle Jones
First popularized on social media in 2013, the phrase “Black Girl Magic” has expanded far beyond its initial use as a twitter hashtag. It can be seen on (a bunch of different objects and the cover of many children’s books and poetry anthologies). However, the visibility of the phrase did not come without controversy. Some critics argued that rather than being an uplifting rallying cry for positive depictions of black girlhood, it instead reinforced dehumanizing stereotypes of the “strong black woman”. This debate leads us to question: How do black girls tend to be depicted both popular media and in literature? How might these depictions differ depending on author, type of media, or social context? What do they say about the ways that black girls experience childhood, gender, and friendship? To engage with these questions, this course will explore literary works including The Bluest Eye, Betsey Brown, and Abeng, along with television shows such as Lovecraft Country to examine 20th and 21st century depictions of black girlhood. We will also think with theoretical works of black feminism and black girlhood studies. 

GNSE 33168 Sex and the Ethnographic Tradition
Instructor:
Ella Wilhoit
Considerable ethnographic work has focused on sex, not only as categorization of erotic and reproductive experience but as specific, intra-personal encounter. This course examines the role of the latter in the formation of ethnographic knowledge, with particular attention to how studies of sex have challenged static notions of identity and illuminated the complex relationship between social behavior and gendered sense of self. We will consider interest in sex as a motivating factor in the ethnographic enterprise and will read ethnographic work that posits sexual behavior as directly constitutive of gendered and racialized identities. Focusing primarily on work carried out since the early twentieth century, we will examine how ethnographic study has enabled scholars to contest the ubiquitous salience of a male/female dichotomy, the global importance of patriarchal social relations, and the cross-cultural, trans-historical applicability of concepts like ‘third gender.’ Lastly, we will take a methodological eye, querying how sex has moved from a supposedly ‘taboo’ category of social inquiry to a focal topic in ethnographic work of all kinds, and debating limits to participant observation in the study of sexual encounters. This is an introductory graduate level course with select spots for undergraduates. 

GNSE 34950 International Disability Rights and Justice
Instructor:
Zhiying Ma
The rights of persons with disabilities have become a new frontier of human rights across the world. This course introduces recent developments in concepts, tools, and practices of disability rights both internationally and in different regions/countries. We will pay specific attention to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, including its principles, provisions on key topics (e.g., institutionalization, education, employment, and political participation), and the role of state and non-state actors in its implementation. We will also consider the implications of disability rights on global social development and humanitarian work. Moreover, we will critically examine barriers and concerns in realizing disability rights, areas where dominant understandings of disability rights fall short, and alternative approaches to conceptualizing and promoting justice for persons with disabilities. The course will consist of reading and critique of literature, large and small group discussions, guest lectures by practitioners, case studies, and student presentations. Students will develop skills to analyze disability policies or design/evaluate disability inclusive development projects in international settings.  

GNSE 35132 Debate, Dissent, Deviate: Literary Modernities in South Asia
Instructor:
Supurna Dasgupta
This class introduces students to the modernist movement in 20th century South Asia. Modernism will be understood here as a radical experimental movement in literature, film, photography and other arts, primarily aimed at critiquing mainstream narratives of history and culture, especially with reference to identity categories such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and caste. The texts reveal the ways in which structures of knowledge and aesthetics circulated between the various parts of the globe, especially under the conditions of colonialism and decolonization. We will analyze a variety of texts over the ten-week duration of the class, including novels, short stories, manifestos, essays, photographs, and films from the 1930s to 1970s. Our aim will be to understand the diverse meanings of modernism as we go through our weekly readings. Was it a global phenomenon that was adopted blindly by postcolonial artists? Or were there specifically South Asian innovations that enable us to think about the local story as formative of a global consciousness? What bearings do such speculations have on genre, gender, and medium, as well as on politics? What effect does sexual politics have on aesthetic innovations? How do these non-mainstream aesthetic traditions contribute towards the formation of knowledge in modern South Asia? No prior knowledge of any South Asian language or history is necessary.  

GNSE 35997 Three Comedies of Sexual Revolution
Instructor:
Nathan Tarcov
This seminar will discuss three comedies of sexual revolution from three different times and places. Aristophanes’s Assemblywomen recounts how under the leadership of the able Praxagora the women of Athens take over the Assembly and legislate a new regime in which private property is replaced by communism and sexual equity is achieved in favor of the old and unattractive at the expense of the young and attractive. Machiavelli’s Mandragola dramatizes the tricks by which young Callimaco manages with the aid of the trickster parasite Ligurio to have sex with Lucrezia, the beautiful young wife of the elderly lawyer Nicomaco, with the consent of both her and her husband, ushering in a new regime in which all are satisfied. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure Angelo the interim duke of Vienna institutes a repressive sexual regime in which the brothels are closed and extramarital sex is a capital crime. What might we learn about sexual relations from these diverse plays? Why are they comedies? Undergraduates by consent of instructor.

GNSE 36703 Interiority, Modernity, Domesticity, Decoration
Instructor:
Alexandra Fraser
The domestic interior emerged with modernity itself. “Interiorization,” Walter Benjamin claimed, was a defining characteristic of nineteenth-century culture, and the interior came to be understood as the physical space of the home in addition to an image of mental life. While often figured as refuge from modernity’s more spectacular developments, this seminar establishes the interior as a complex historical construct, a tool, with which to read the shifting texture of the world outside its walls. At the same time, we will examine how artists, writers, and designers employed the interior as a platform upon which to experiment with new tactics of representation, often borrowing from one another’s toolbox, in attempts to represent that world and imagine possible futures. Case studies will consider paintings, decorative schemes, prints, décor samples, and architectural media—many from local collections and environments—alongside literary and critical writings. We will interrogate these objects to pursue the interior’s entanglement with the following themes: subjectivity, the senses, and the built environment; privacy, publicity, and revolution; space, text, and image; art, decoration, and fashion; craft, race, and globalization; modernism, gender, and domesticity. Students need not be specialists to register but should be invested in working together to activate the overlooked interface between intimate, “feminine,” or private aesthetic experience and broad historical change. Consent of the instructor is required for registration.This course will include two museum/collections visits in the Chicago area  

GNSE 36855 Queer Theory
Instructor:
Kris Trujillo
This course aims to offer a foundation in queer theoretical texts. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term “queer” and explore the contours of the field’s major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory’s emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis. Reading texts by key figures like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lorde, Bersani, Crimp, Warner, Halperin, Dinshaw, Edelman, Anzaldúa, Ferguson, and Muñoz in addition to prominent issues of journals like GLQ, differences, and Signs, we will approach these pieces as historical artifacts and place these theorists within the communities of intellectuals, activists, and artists out of which their work emerged. We will, thus, imagine queer theory as a literary practice of mournful and militant devotion, trace queer theory’s relationship to feminism and critical race theory, critique the hagiographic tendency of the academic star system, and interrogate the assumptions of queer theory’s secularity.  

GNSE 39105 Gendering Slavery
Instructor:
Mary Hicks
This reading seminar will introduce students to the key questions, methods, and theories of the burgeoning field of gendered histories of slavery. Global in scope, but with a focus on the early modern Atlantic world, we will explore a range of primary and secondary texts from various slave societies. Assigned monographs will cover a multitude of topics including women and law, sexualities, kinship, and reproduction, and the intersection of race, labor, and market economies. In addition to examining historical narratives, students will discuss the ethical and methodological implications of reading and writing histories of violence, erasure, and domination. Learning to work within and against the limits imposed by hegemonic forms of representation, the fragmentary nature of the archive, and the afterlives of slavery, this course will examine how masculinity and femininity remade and were remade by bondage.

GNSE 39610 Pale Fire
Instructor:
Malynne Sternstein
This course is an intensive reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov.

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 43501 Contemporary Models of Theology
Instructor:
Dwight Hopkins
This course compares various systems and methods in contemporary theologies. By contemporary, we mean theological developments in the USA from the late 1960s to the present. Specifically, we reflect critically on the following models: progressive liberal, post liberal, black theology, feminist theology, womanist theology, and postcolonial theology. In the process, we lay out the political, economic, and cultural factors that gave rise to these models.

GNSE 47714 Reproductive citizens: sex, work, and embodiment
Instructor:
Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we focus on literature, film, history, and theory texts that deal with biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. as the central means of reproducing the biological life and social fabric of American culture. 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. dramatically alter or even dismantle the reproductive social order altogether. 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 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.

GNSE 48602 Cinema In Africa
Instructor:
Loren Kruger
This course examines Africa in film as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in Sub Saharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV, and includes films that reflect on the impact of global trends in Africa and local responses, as well as changing racial and gender identifications. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), by the “father” of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, African Jim (1960) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti-apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga, Sembene’s Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno’s Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine 20th and 21st century films such as I am a not a Witch and The wound (both 2017), which show tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the implications of these tensions for women and men, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and fiction film. Prerequisite: One or more of the following: Intro to Film/ International Cinema AND/OR Intro to African Studies or equivalent 

 

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