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 2019-20

Undergraduate Courses

AUTUMN 2019

WINTER 2020

SPRING 2020

 

Graduate Courses

AUTUMN 2019

WINTER 2020

SPRING 2020

 

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

AUTUMN 2019

GNSE 12102 Defining The Feminist "Fourth Wave"
Instructor: Lara Janson
Intersectionality, Breaking the Binary, Hashtag Feminism, TERFs, SWERFs, Whimpsters, Woke Misogynists, Commodity Feminists, & Femocracies, Oh My! If contemporary feminism is characterized by its diversity of purpose, then what defines the current, so-called “fourth wave” of feminism? Students in this course will explore precisely that question and – in keeping with one characteristic of contemporary feminists, namely their resurged interest in learning about past feminist efforts – will examine the history of feminist movements in the United States. As an intellectual community, we will work together to consider and analyze contemporary writings about fourth wave feminist movements and build our own timeline and analytical and conceptual terminology for studying defining features of “the fourth wave.” Each student will explore their own independent research project about some facet of the fourth wave that interests them, culminating in a research symposium and final paper that could contribute to the emerging academic literature about this new phase of feminist activism.
This course counts as a Foundations Course for GNSE majors

GNSE 15002 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations
Instructors: various
The first quarter offers a theoretical framing unit that introduces concepts in feminist, gender, and queer theory, as well as two thematic clusters, “Kinship” and “Creativity and Cultural Knowledge.” The “Kinship” cluster includes readings on such topics as marriage, sex and anti-sex, love and anti-love, and reproduction. The “Creativity and Cultural Knowledge” cluster addresses the themes of authorship and authority, fighting and constructing the canon, and the debates over the influence of “difference” on cultural forms.
This course counts as a Core Civ requirement in combination with GNSE 15003.

GNSE 17303 The Body in Ancient Greek Art and Culture
Instructor: Seth Estrin
This course provides an introduction to the role of the human body in ancient Greek art. We will examine, on the one hand, the various ways in which Greek artists represented the body, and consider how forms of bodily identity such as gender and sexuality were constructed and articulated through artistic practice. But we will also consider the ways in which works of art themselves — statues, paintings, vessels — could function like bodies or in place of bodies, expanding the notion of what it means to be a living being. Readings will range from primary texts — ancient literature in translation — to more theoretical writing on embodiment, gender, and sexuality.

GNSE 20001 Theories of Sexuality and Gender
Instructors: Lauren Berlant and Kristen Schilt
This is a one-quarter, seminar-style introductory course for undergraduates. Its aim is triple: to engage scenes and concepts central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality; to provide familiarity with key theoretical anchors for that study; and to provide skills for deriving the theoretical bases of any kind of method. Students will produce descriptive, argumentative, and experimental engagements with theory and its scenes as the quarter progresses.
Prerequisites: Prior course experience in gender/sexuality studies (by way of the general education civilization studies courses or other course work) is strongly advised.

GNSE 20112 From the Harem to Helem: Gender and Sexuality in the Modern Middle East
Instructor: Ghenwa Hayek
This course will provide a historical and theoretical survey of issues pertaining to gender and sexuality in the modern Middle East. First, we will outline the colonial legacies of gender politics and gendered discourses in modern Middle Eastern history. We will discuss orientalist constructions of the harem and the veil (Allouche, Laila Ahmed, Lila Abu-Loghod), and their contested afterlives across the Middle East. We will also explore colonial (homo)sexuality, and attendant critiques (Najmabadi, Massad). We will pay especial attention to local discourses about gender and sexuality, and trouble facile assumptions of “writing back” while attending to the various specificities of local discourses of everyday life across various sites of the Middle East. Eschewing reductive traps for more nuanced explorations of the specifics of life in Beirut, Cairo, Istanbul, or Tehran – as well as to rural areas – we will show how gender and sexuality are constructed and practiced in these locales. In addition to foundational scholarly texts in the field, we will also engage with an array of cultural texts (films, novels, poetry, comics) and – where possible – have conversations with activists who are working in these sites via Skype/ teleconferencing.
This course counts as a Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality course for GNSE majors.

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.
Prerequisites: Undergraduates must be in third or fourth year.

GNSE 21293 Global Family Change
Instructor: William Axinn
This course examines sociological perspectives on changes in marriage and childbearing that have swept the globe from 1850-today.  We will examine changes in arranged marriage, marriage timing, first birth timing, contraception to limit childbearing, family size and divorce.  We will review theories of family change, research designs for studying family change, and empirical data about family change. We will investigate family changes in specific sites in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the European diaspora.  The course will also investigate specific factors likely to produce family change, including industrialization, mass education, mass media, health care, migration, and attitudes and beliefs. Finally, the course will consider some of the important consequences of these changing families around the world. Students will prepare an in-depth study of family change in one specific place and time.  Course examples will highlight family changes in South Asia, but students are welcome to select any region and time period for their own study.

GNSE 21303 Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation
Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the two hundred years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries – not to mention a thriving “Janeite” fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen’s completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include Shoshana Felman, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams.

GNSE 21619 From Lorca to Lin-Manuel Miranda: Staging Latinidad              
Instructor: Isaias Fanlo
In this course, we will delve into ten significant theater plays written in the last century by Spanish, Latin American and Latinx playwrights. We will examine how latinidad, with its multiple definitions and contradictions, emerges in these plays; and also, which questions these works pose regarding the different historic and cultural contexts in which they were written. As a discipline that aims to explore and embody social practices and identities, theater has become a place where these questions articulate themselves in a critical manner. A physical space where bodies and languages explore, sometimes through its mere unfolding on the page and the stage, unforeseen limits of class, identity, and ethnicity. Each week, we will discuss one play and one or two significant critical essays, and the discussion will be conducted through a set of questions and crossed references. To what extent does the domestic exploration and the all-women cast of Lorca’s La casa de Bernarda Alba resonate in Fornés’ Fefu And Her Friends? How does the experience of immigration affect the characters of Marqués’ La carreta, and how do Chiara Alegría Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda echo this foundational fiction in In the Heights? How was the success of plays such as Valdez’s Zoot Suit or Cruz’s Anna in The Tropics received within the Latino community, and how did it affect the general reception of Latino plays? Taught in English. Readings available in both English and Spanish. Spanish majors & minors must do the readings and/or writings in Spanish.

GNSE 22004 Philosophies of Environmentalism and Sustainability
Instructor: Barton Schultz
Many of the toughest ethical and political challenges confronting the world today are related to environmental issues: for example, climate change, loss of biodiversity, the unsustainable use of natural resources, pollution, and other threats to the well-being of both present and future generations. Using both classic and contemporary works, this course will highlight some of the fundamental and unavoidable philosophical questions presented by such environmental issues. What do the terms “nature” and “wilderness” even mean, and can “natural” environments as such have ethical and/or legal standing? Does the environmental crisis demand radically new forms of ethical and political philosophizing and practice? Must an environmental ethic reject anthropocentrism? If so, what are the most plausible non-anthropocentric alternatives? What counts as the proper ethical treatment of non-human animals, living organisms, or ecosystems? What fundamental ethical and political perspectives inform such approaches as the “Land Ethic,” ecofeminism, and deep ecology? Is there a plausible account of justice for future generations? Are we now in the Anthropocene? Is “adaptation” the best strategy at this historical juncture? How can the wild, the rural, and the urban all contribute to a better future for Planet Earth?

GNSE 22320 Critical Videogame Studies
Instructor: Zoe Smith
Since the 1960s, games have arguably blossomed into the world’s most profitable and experimental medium. This course attends specifically to video games, including popular arcade and console games, experimental art games, and educational serious games. Students will analyze both the formal properties and sociopolitical dynamics of video games. Readings by theorists including Ian Bogost, Roger Caillois, Nick Dyer‐Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Lisa Nakamura, and Katie Salen will help us think about the growing field of video game studies. This is a 2019-20 Signature Course in the College.

GNSE 22910 Gender and Sexuality in Late Antiquity: Precursors and Legacies
Instructor: Erin Galgay Walsh
In this course students will trace how gender was theorized and normative behavior was prescribed and enforced in the ancient world. We will begin with materials from the Greco-Roman world, Hebrew Bible, and the Second Temple Period. As the quarter progresses, we will turn our attention to early and late ancient Christian authors, focusing on the way asceticism and emergent ecclesial institutions shaped the lives of women and gender non-conforming individuals. Throughout the course students will learn to navigate the pitfalls and opportunities the study of gender affords for understanding the development of biblical interpretation, the transformation of classical Graeco-Roman culture, and the formation of Christian doctrine. How did Christianity challenge and preserve norms for female behavior? How did Rabbinic and early Christian authors approach questions of sexuality differently? Along the way we will bring 20th-century theorists of sexuality and gender into our conversations to illuminate pre-modern discourses of virginity, sexual experience, and identity. Primarily we will approach texts through a historical lens while paying attention to the theological and ethical issues involved. At the end of the course we will examine the legacy of late ancient debates, tracing how earlier teaching about gender and sexuality co-exists with, challenges, and informs modern secular worldviews. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students. PQ: No languages are required, but there will be ample opportunity for students with skills in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Hebrew to use them.

GNSE 23100 Foucault and the History of Sexuality
Instructor: Arnold Davidson
This course centers on a close reading of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, with some attention to his writings on the history of ancient conceptualizations of sex. How should a history of sexuality take into account scientific theories, social relations of power, and different experiences of the self? We discuss the contrasting descriptions and conceptions of sexual behavior before and after the emergence of a science of sexuality. Other writers influenced by and critical of Foucault are also discussed. 
Prerequisites: One prior philosophy course is strongly recommended.

GNSE 23123 Cybernetics and Trans Identities
Instructor: Alex Wolfson
This course is an examination into the ways in which theorizations of trans identity have been bound to discourses concerning cyborgs and cybernetics. On one hand, we will look into the ways in which medico-technological discourses have inscribed and produced the limits for conceptualizing trans-ness. On the other, we will examine how trans self-narratives have mobilized cybernetic language to parasitically produce autonomous discourses. The over-arching questions of this class will be: how should we engage concepts, such as the cybernetic and the prosthetic, that have been used towards the disenfranchisement of trans identities, while simultaneously have been re-inscribed as emancipatory concepts? How should we tell the histories of these discourses? How do they affect, produce, contain, and enliven contemporary worlds of trans identities and existences? 
This course will, from its onset, be interdisciplinary in nature, both in terms of the academic disciplines from which we choose our texts (trans theory, queer theory, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, new media theory, literary criticism, etc.) and also through an engagement with various genres and media, engaging fiction, film and visual art, as ways to further expand and develop our critical investigations. Readings will include works by figures such as Karen Barad, Jean Baudrillard, Mel Chen, Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway, Beatriz Preciado, Jasbir Puar, Gayle Salamon, Sandy Stone, Alexander Weheliye.
This course will count as a Concepts course for GNSE majors

GNSE 23505 Ethnographic Approaches to Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Cate Fugazzola
This methods course aims to prepare graduate students and advanced undergraduates for ethnographic research on topics focused on gender and sexuality. We will read articles and books showcasing ethnographic methodologies, and we will discuss benefits and limitations of various research designs. Class debates will cover epistemological, ethical, and practical matters in ethnographic research. We will discuss issues of positionality, self-reflexivity, and power. Students will be required to formulate a preliminary research question at the beginning of the course, and will conduct a few weeks of ethnographic research in a field site of their choosing. Each week students will produce field notes to be exchanged and discussed in class, and as a final project they will be asked to produce a research proposal or a short paper based on their observations. 

GNSE 23506 Gender, Sex, and Culture
Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
This introductory graduate course examines the social construction of gendered identities in different times and places. We study culturally-specific gendered experiences, ‘roles,’ rights and rebellions around the world, discussing the individual and social consequences of gender and the interrelationships between gender and other categories for identity including race, class and sexuality. While focusing on the global diversity of gendered experience and expectations, we also examine gender in the US, taking a critical approach to understanding gendered inequality and gender-based and sexual violence both abroad and at home. Finally, we examine the role of gendered expectations in Western science, the relationship between gender and ‘globalization,’ and the contemporary movements affecting change in gendered norms, especially in the arts and media. 

GNSE 24358 Hindu Goddesses and the Deification of Women
Instructor: Sree Padma Holt
This course has two focuses. The first is to examine how and why representations of goddesses in her iconic, aniconic and symbolic forms are embraced by various religious traditions (Buddhist, Saiva, Vaishnava and Jaina) of India. The second focus includes: 1) an examination of the manner in which the power of the feminine has been expressed socially, mythologically, and theologically in Hinduism; 2) how Hindu women have expressed their religiosity in social and psychological ways; 3) how and why women have been deified, a process that implicates the relationship between the goddess and women; and 4) how various categories of goddesses can be seen or not as the forms of the so-called "Great Goddess” (Mahadevi), and how these goddesses reflect varying relationships with human women.

GNSE 24421 Women's Work: Agents of Change in Central and Eastern Europe
Instructor: Cheryl Stephenson
This course explores the role of women in both making and unmaking socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. While we begin with women’s direct engagement in political discourse and government, the scope of the course will expand to engage with women writers, artists, performers, scholars, and dissidents who drove social change through the twentieth century in the Eastern Bloc.

GNSE 24555 Learned Women: Spaces of Knowledge, Self-Actualization, and Power
Instructor: Noel Blanco Mourelle
The hegemonic narrative of knowledge production in the Iberian Peninsula has historically centered on male writers, thus excluding contributions of women. This seminar will explore the intellectual interventions of medieval and early modern Iberian poets, professors, encyclopedists, and theologians who also happened to be women. Did these women present a perspective on knowledge-making different than their male counterparts? More importantly, what were the paths to knowledge that were available to them in a society that offered women limited social and intellectual roles? In this class we will be reading sources by Florencia Pinar, Teresa de Cartagena, Leonor López de Córdoba, Oliva Sabuco, among others; and critical pieces by Judith Butler, Andrea Dworkin, Silvia Federici, Luce Irigaray, and Sophie Lewis. Taught in Spanish.

GNSE 24812 Women Writing Women in Modern Japanese Literature
Instructor: Philomena Mazza-Hilway
This course surveys the literary works by women writers of Japan through the modern period from late Meiji (early 1900s) through mid-Shōwa (1970s). Throughout this period, Japanese writers and critics have been preoccupied with questions related to self-expression: How does one know and represent one’s self in writing? Can a true self be expressed through the artifice of literature? What is the relationship between writing and self-consciousness? Yet literature written by women has largely been left out of this conversation, and often chronically consigned to the margins as mere ‘women’s writing’, a pale imitation of pure (male-authored) literature. Aiming to address this unevenness, this course engages with Furthermore, in order to transcend insubstantial and limiting categories such as “women’s writing”, this course focuses students’ analysis using the dynamic lense of women writing women: that is, women’s self-representation in literature. Readings for the course are grouped by larger themes which are key not only to students’ analysis of literary works, but in relation to the larger social, political and cultural contexts in which the works were produced. All works will be read in English translation.

GNSE 25002 Queer and Trans Mutual Aid for Survival and Mobilization
Instructor: Dean Spade
This course will examine contemporary and historical queer and trans-focused mutual aid projects, including support for migrants, prisoners, psychiatric survivors, people with HIV/AIDS, and violence survivors. We will look at why mutual aid projects are often under-celebrated in contemporary narratives of social change, when compared with media advocacy and law and policy reform work. Using materials created by activists engaged in building mutual aid projects, as well as scholarly analysis of such efforts, we will look at what principles and methods characterize politicized survival work and how it intentionally departs from charity frameworks.

GNSE 25316 Making a Home in the Colonial City: Insights from Literature, Films, and History
Instructor: Sanjukta Poddar
This seminar is an invitation to students to imagine and examine the life-worlds and experiences of South Asian city-dwellers under the aegis of colonialism. Together, we will examine concepts from urban and cultural studies such as spatial politics, domesticity, urban gender dynamics, structure of feelings, life-worlds, public sphere, identity, and sovereignty by addressing the following questions: 
• Who were the city-dwellers of colonial India? What were the ways that they made a home in cities whose space and time had largely been shaped by colonial power? 
• Whom did the city belong to? What were the ways that marginalized actors like women—sex-workers and women in “purdah,” and men and women of the working-classes staked claim to the city?
• Cities also opened up avenue for education, employment, and social mobility for Indians. How did Indians reconcile these different aspects of the city in their everyday lives? 
• There was much internal variation among the different cities. How did cities as different as Calcutta and Delhi, Bombay and Lahore, Banaras and Mysore, look and feel? 
• Cities are also spaces of manifold affect. How are these spaces and lives represented in literary and visual texts? 

GNSE 25601 Gender and Modernity in East Asia
Instructor: Kyeong-Hee Choi
What are the salient forms, manifestations, and performances found at the intersections of gender and modernities in East Asia? This seminar aims at identifying the characteristics of modern gendering that East Asians experienced in the first half of the twentieth. It aims to generating a broad discussion on the form and patterns of "new" cultural experiences that came to shape themselves under the hegemony of Western modernities outside as well as those of “old” counterparts. While considering the shared questions of modernized gender, gendered consciousness, and personal/private spaces, discussions will respond to the diverse interests, backgrounds, and initiatives of student participants so as to best facilitate comparative and theoretical discussions on gender and modernity in East Asia.

GNSE 25602 Feminism, Race, Culture, and Liberation    
Instructor: Tasneem Mandviwala
Beginning in the twentieth century, a popular global discourse amongst some feminists, anthropologists, and human rights activists has become focused on liberating oppressed peoples from tyrannical systems of power, most often non-Western women of color from traditional patriarchies. However, oftentimes these well-intentioned movements toward liberation are incompatible with the lived realities of the oppressed, and, oftentimes, the “oppressed” are actually active agents in their own liberations. This course will explore what we mean when we discuss ideas of liberation and social acceptance through a gendered cultural lens, considering the foundations of contemporary feminism and human rights dialogues within different cultural and racial contexts. What and whom are we purportedly liberating with our liberal Western ideals, and what and whom are we failing to consider? Why are gender, sex, and sexuality emphasized to the degree they are, and how do differing emphases produce different sociocultural results? What moral exercises are necessary to most accurately understand the various central elements of a human cultural experience? Can individuals, including ourselves, ever truly be liberated from cultural contexts?

GNSE 26810 Agnes Varda
Instructor: Dominique Bluher
This course examines the work of one of the most significant directors working in France today. From the 1960s to the present day, Varda's films have been crucial to the development of new film practices: both in the past—as with the birth of the French New Wave Cinema—and in the present by exploring new forms of visual narration and by working with moving images in gallery spaces.

GNSE 28498 Women, Development and Politics
Instructors: Maria Bautista and Maliha Chishti
This course will explore the dominant and emerging trends and debates in the field of women and international development. The major theoretical perspectives responding to global gender inequities will be explored alongside a wide range of themes impacting majority-world women, such as free market globalization, health and sexuality, race and representation, participatory development, human rights, the environment and participation in politics. Course lectures will integrate policy and practitioner accounts and perspectives to reflect the strong influence development practice has in shaping and informing the field. Course materials will also include anti-racist, postcolonial and post-development interruptions to dominant development discourse, specifically to challenge the underlying biases and assumptions of interventions that are predicated on transforming "them" into "us". The material will also explore the challenges of women participating in politics and what are the consequences when they do or do not.

GNSE 29103 Archive [Yellow] Fever
Instructor: Sarah Johnson
This course examines slavery in the 18th and 19th-century Caribbean through the lens of maladies within and of the archive. The course also provides an introduction in methods of working in historical and contemporary archives. We will read fictional, archival, methodological and theoretical texts to examine fears of contagion and disease on the Middle Passage and plantations of the Caribbean, as well as scholarship on the difficulty of working in archives, especially those of slavery. The class will make 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 (relevant to their own research interests) that will provide the topic of their final paper. Texts in this course include the work of Saidiya Hartman, Marisa Fuentes, Jacques Derrida, Carolyn Steedman, Christina Sharpe, Simone Browne, Michel Foucault; Richard Ligon, Mary Seacole, Thomas Thistlewood, William Earle. This course is offered as part of the Migrations Research Sequence. (1650-1830, 1830-1940)


WINTER 2020

GNSE 11002 Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality: Medieval Masculinity
Instructor: Jonathan Lyon
This course will introduce students to concepts of masculinity in the Middle Ages, especially in the period between approximately 1000 and 1500 CE. Special attention will be paid to medieval notions of honor and to the roles that knighthood, chivalry, and monasticism played in promoting (often contradictory) masculine ideals. The course has two main goals. First, to assess and discuss recent scholarly debates and arguments about medieval masculinity. Second, to read closely a variety of medieval sources—including Arthurian literature, chronicles of the Crusades, biographical texts, and monastic histories—in order to develop new perspectives on masculinity during the Middle Ages.
This course counts as a Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12104 Foundations in Masculinity Studies
Instructor: Rebecca Ewert
In recent years, the term “toxic masculinity” has been used in contexts from the #MeToo movement to the rise of Donald Trump, from Gillette advertisements to the behavior of men on the reality show The Bachelorette. Why is the conversation around “toxic masculinity” taking place in the United States at this moment? In this course, we will go beyond banal statements like “toxic masculinity” and “men are trash” to critically ask, What role does masculinity play in social life? How is masculinity produced, and are there different ways to be masculine? This course provides students with an intensive introduction to the foundational theory and research in the field of masculinities studies. We will use an intersectional lens to study the ways in which the concept and lived experience of masculinity are shaped by economic, social, cultural, and political forces. We will examine how the gendered social order influences the way people of all genders perform masculinity as well as the ways men perceive themselves and other men, women, and social situations. Verbally and in writing, students will develop an argument about the way contemporary masculinity is constructed and performed. 
This course counts as a Foundations Course for GNSE majors

GNSE 15003 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations 2
Instructors: Various
Three thematic clusters make up the second quarter. “Politics” focuses on texts related to activism/movement politics and women’s rights as human rights and the question of universalism. “Religion” contextualizes gender and sexuality through examinations of a variety of religious laws and teachings, religious practices, and religious communities. “Economics” looks at slavery, domestic service, prostitution as labor, consumption, and the gendering of labor in contemporary capitalism.
This course counts as a Core Civ requirement in combination with GNSE 15003.

GNSE 19880 Inhabiting The Borderlands: Latinx Embodiment In Literature, Art, And Popular Culture
Instructor: Carmen Marport
How does a Latinx cultural identity become legible? What are the conditions of its recognition? What kinds of embodied practices and performances serve to point to the particular intersections of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender that can be termed “Latinx”? To approach these questions, this course will explore critical texts by Diana Taylor, Gloria Anzaldúa, Julia Alvarez, Coco Fusco, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, among others, as well as performances, artwork, and literature by La Lupe, Walter Mercado, Yalitza Aparicio, Cherríe Moraga, Judith Baca, Carmen Maria Machado, and more.

GNSE 20102 Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality: On “Women’s Writing”
Instructor: Sophie Salvo
This course interrogates “women’s writing” as a historical, theoretical, and literary category. Since the 1970s, feminist scholarship has used the category “women’s writing” to recuperate texts by historically marginalized female authors. This practice has led to a reconsideration of the role of gender in literary production, authorship, and canon formation. Focusing on the context of modern Europe, and the genre of narrative prose, this course aims to reevaluate the classification “women’s writing.” Is “women’s writing,” to borrow a phrase from Joan Scott, a “useful category of analysis” in the 21st century? Can it help us account for how gendered subjects have been constructed through narrative? To what extent do traditional generic and disciplinary divisions limit our understanding of women’s texts? Does the concept “women’s writing” allow for intersectional approaches to the study of gender and sexuality? 
Course readings will include literary texts from the 18th-21st centuries (works by Jane Austen, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Elfriede Jelinek, and Marjane Satrapi, among others), as well as theoretical approaches from feminist, queer, and transgender studies.
This course counts as a Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20120 Introduction to Population
Instructor: Linda Waite
This course provides an introduction to the field of demography, which examines the growth and characteristics of human populations. It also provides an overview of our knowledge of three fundamental population processes: fertility, mortality, and migration. We cover marriage, cohabitation, marital disruption, aging, and population and environment. In each case we examine historical trends. We also discuss causes and consequences of recent trends in population growth, and the current demographic situation in developing and developed countries.

GNSE 20408 Health Disparities in Breast Cancer
Instructors: Eileen Dolan, Suzanne Conzen
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. PQ: BIOS 25108

GNSE 20700 Topics in EALC: Poets/Teachers/Fighters: Writing Women in China and Beyond
Instructor: Paolo Iovene
A survey of essays, poetry, diaries and fiction by women writers from the 12th to the 21th century in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. No previous knowledge of Chinese is required. 

GNSE 21505 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 22103 Feminisms and Anthropology
Instructors: Jennifer Cole and Julie Chu
This seminar examines the somewhat 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 will pursue the following lines of inquiry: 1) a genealogical approach to examine 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, etc.).

GNSE 22835 Migration Trajectories: Ethnographies of Place and the Production of Diasporas
Instructor: David Ansari
Global movements of people have resulted in a substantial number of immigrant communities whose navigation of various facets of everyday life has been complicated by restrictive citizenship regimes and immigration policies, as well as linguistic and cultural differences. The experiences of a wide range of individuals involved in migration raise the following questions: what strategies do immigrants use to negotiate transnational identities and what are the implications of these strategies? How do future generations manage simultaneous and intersectional forms of belonging? To address these questions, we will draw on ethnographic texts that explore various facets of transnational migration, such as diasporas, place, citizenship, mobility, and identities. The term "trajectories," reflects different situations of migration that are not necessarily linear or complete. Moreover, term "place" is meant to capture the continuity between displacement and emplacement, and to critically analyze the durability associated with notions of 'sending' and 'receiving' countries. Lastly, rather than take diasporas as a given, we will explore the ways that they are produced and enacted in a variety of geographic contexts.

GNSE 23003 Introduction: Voix Feminines Dans La Litterature Francaise
Instructor: Daisy Delogu
Ce cours nous permettra de réintégrer au canon de la littérature française des ouvrages parfois négligés, tout en prenant connaissance des principaux mouvements littéraires, culturels, et politiques auxquels ces textes appartiennent.(Taught in French – PQ: FREN 20500 or 20503.

GNSE 23125 The Life and Afterlife of Cleopatra
Instructor: Jordan Johansen
Cleopatra is one of the most notorious women in history. The quintessential femme fatale, she has permeated Western cultural imagination for more than 2,000 years. Born of a bastard king, she rose to power in one of the most turbulent times in human history – Rome was waging bloody civil war, the empires of Alexander the Great’s legacy were falling, and Egypt was in revolt and uprising. Her story is one of political intrigue, sex, power, murder, war, and suicide. But her story was never her story alone. Once the asp took its fatal bite, Cleopatra’s story was co-opted by her enemies and her legacy was built at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race over the last two millennia.
This course has two main objectives: 1. to strip back the Western, male gaze of Cleopatra’s legacy and evaluate Cleopatra’s reign within its own context; and 2. to interrogate Cleopatra’s constructed identities and the role they have played and still play in society. In this course, students will take a critical look at the life and legacy of Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, through a wide-array of primary source materials and a selection of her vast reception, including Roman, Arabic, and Renaissance literature; Shakespeare; Afrocentric art, literature, and pop culture; film; comedy; advertising; and popular music. 
This course will count as a Concepts course for GNSE majors

GNSE 23505 Ethnographic Approaches to Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Cate Fugazzola
This methods course aims to prepare graduate students and advanced undergraduates for ethnographic research on topics focused on gender and sexuality. We will read articles and books showcasing ethnographic methodologies, and we will discuss benefits and limitations of various research designs. Class debates will cover epistemological, ethical, and practical matters in ethnographic research. We will discuss issues of positionality, self-reflexivity, and power. Students will be required to formulate a preliminary research question at the beginning of the course, and will conduct a few weeks of ethnographic research in a field site of their choosing. Each week students will produce field notes to be exchanged and discussed in class, and as a final project they will be asked to produce a research proposal or a short paper based on their observations. 

GNSE 23605 Diets and Other Body Horror: Modifying, Mortifying, and Masticating the Fictional Flesh
Instructor: Nell Pach
Physical bodies remain a cultural preoccupation – their maintenance is debated and obsessed over in every news cycle, food and diet bloggers meticulously photograph everything they put in their mouths, and body-modifying surgeries and “lifestyle” protocols constitute a multibillion-dollar industry. This course examines twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary responses to the persistent, problematic fantasy of remaking human bodies to bring them into alignment with standards of beauty, health – or something else entirely. Readings will take us from speculative fiction to dirty realism, Netflix shows to biopolitical and fat acceptance theory. Authors may include H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, Mary Gordon, and Roxane Gay. What do these narratives make of the gore and violence beneath the peaceful façade of bodily care and feeding, from the banal to the alien?

GNSE 24007 Chernobyl: Bodies and Nature After Disaster
Instructor: Peggy O’Donnell
When reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station exploded, it quickly made headlines around the world. Swedes found radiation in their air, Germans in their milk, Greeks in their grain, and Britons in their sheep. Ukrainians and Belarusians found it in their rain, wind, water sources, homes, and in their children's thyroids. Americans worried about finding it in their bodies, especially in pregnant or fetal bodies. A lot of roads led to the Chernobyl disaster: the Soviet state system, to be sure, but also the Cold War arms race, a faith in scientific progress shared in East and West, and a global disregard for the natural world and the human body. This course will follow those roads to the climax of the explosion and then examine the many paths out of Chernobyl: the disaster's aftereffects on geopolitics, environmentalism, feminism, and body politics. We will draw on a recent outpouring of scholarly and popular works on Chernobyl, including books, podcasts, and television series. We will also read texts on feminism, environmentalism, and other nuclear disasters, Cold War histories, and fiction to provide context and sites for further inquiry. 

GNSE 24440 Lyric Intimacies in the Renaissance
Instructor: Sarah Kunjummen
This course will examine how writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century used lyric verse as a tool for establishing, imagining or faking intimacy, with potential lovers, employers, friends, and God. We’ll begin by reading Thomas Wyatt’s adaptation of the Petrarchan sonnet to describe his doomed romance with Anne Boleyn, the mistress and later wife of King Henry VIII, and use of Italian satire to articulate a discourse of masculine friendship and citizenship. We’ll read the erotic verse of Phillip Sidney alongside his sister Mary Sidney’s adaptations of the Psalms, and examine the overlap between poems of seduction and poems to male and female patrons in two of the most influential seventeenth-century collections of intimate verse: William Shakespeare’s Sonnets and John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. The course then turns to the poetry of devotion, taking up Richard Crashaw’s desire for closeness with the overflowing body of Christ, George Herbert’s poetic staging of conversations between himself and God, and Thomas Traherne’s memories of an ecstatic state of infant innocence and oneness with the world. We’ll conclude with works from the English Civil War and monarchical restoration.

GNSE 24514 Colonial Power in East Asia
Instructor: Jessa Dahl
This course takes a transnational and comparative approach to the study of colonialism in East Asia from the Opium Wars through the end of World War I. Using foundational theories of postcolonial scholarship as a starting template, we will explore the interrelationship of colonial power and ideologies of race and gender across China, Japan, and Korea during the nineteenth century. Critically evaluating both primary and secondary sources will help us contextualize the development of the Japanese empire within a larger narrative of the expansion of Euro-American colonial power into East Asia. In doing so, we will discover that sites of empire in East Asia often destabilize the most common binaries of postcolonial study: Occident/Orient, colonizer/colonized, white/other, and premodern/modern.

GNSE 25025 Gender and Translation
Instructor: Anna Elena Torres
The course will consider translation -- both theory and practice -- in relation to queer studies and gender and women's studies. Authors will include Naomi Seidman, Monique Balbuena, Yevgeniy Fiks, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kate Briggs, and others. For the final essay, students may write a research paper or translation project.

GNSE 25306 Sex and Censorship in South Asia
Instructor: Ahona Panda
Restrictions on speech are a feature of democracies everywhere, from persecuting whistleblowers in the US, to ban on religious symbols in France, to restrictions on Twitter in Turkey. What sets the South Asian experience apart? This introductory course will interrogate how a nexus of concerns about power, religion and sex, originating in the colonial experience, has shaped the particular dynamics of censorship in South Asia. By looking at a long history of banning and prohibition, we will also examine how censorship has molded South Asian cultural and political lives. This course should be of interest to students of gender and sexuality studies, cinema and media studies, literature, history, politics, human rights, anthropology and modern South Asian history and culture. It should also appeal to those interested in the past and present of censorship and democracy in the Non-West.

GNSE 25404 Gender, Politics and Philosophy
Instructor: Tyler Zimmer
In this class we’ll read classic and contemporary texts in the philosophy of gender that examine questions such as the following. What exactly is gender? And what is sex? What does it mean to be a man or a woman? Are these natural or social kinds—that is, do these words refer to phenomena that humans have discovered or to ones they’ve created? Should we continue to group all human beings into just two sex/gender categories—or should we instead expand the number of categories we use? Or should we stop classifying humans by sex and gender altogether? And who should have the authority to make these kinds of decisions? We will frequently ask how these conceptual matters bear on how we should live, how we should relate to others, and how we should organize social and political life. Readings will include works by authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Angela Davis, Nancy Fraser, Sally Haslanger, Sandra Bartky, Patricia Hill Collins, Serene Khader and Katharine Jenkins.

GNSE 26855 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 27530 (Re)Producing Race and Gender through American Material Culture
Instructor: Allison Robinson
This one-quarter course introduces students to the role of the material world in the production and reproduction of ideologies of race, gender, and their intersections. Objects around us are imbued with meaning through their design, construction, use, and disuse. Architecture, art, photography, clothing, quilts, toys, food, and even the body have all been used to define groups of people. Combining secondary literature, theory, documentary evidence, and material culture, this course guides students as they ask questions about how ideologies of race and gender are produced, how they are both historically specific and constantly in flux, and how human interaction with the material world creates, challenges, and changes their construction.

GNSE 27531 Race, New Media, and Youth Movements for Justice
Instructors: Jordie Davies and David Knight
Although racial inequality is an enduring force in American society, new forms of activism--often facilitated by through new media--are changing the terms of political debate around issues of race, gender, power, and justice. From #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo, sites of political struggle have become increasingly decentered and accessible to a broader array of people. And as is often the case, youth from marginalized groups are at the forefront of these struggles, redefining what counts as political and how to conceive of important concepts like equity, community, and dignity. This seminar-style course explores the past and present conditions that give rise to these youth-led movements, drawing from multiple scholarly lenses, including political science, sociology, literature, performance, film, and visual culture. Specifically, the course explores how young activists and cultural workers, who often identify as people of color, women, queer, and/or undocumented, draw on legacies of activism whilst making political claims using media, art, technology, or other nontraditional forms of participation. The course will engage various formats of political and cultural work, considering how intersecting forms of inequity and differing levels of access affect the shape and scope of participation in both institutions and popular culture.

 

SPRING 2020

GNSE 12100 Out of Order: Feminism and Problems of Freedom, Power, and Authority
Instructor: Eilat Maoz
The critique of power stands at the heart of the feminist project. As one of modernity’s preeminent liberation movements, feminism has developed a repertoire of theories and methods to challenge authority, question hierarchy, and upend institutions. The movement also faced internal challenges and critiques, which forced it to grapple with its own blind spots and inherited traditions. Today, feminism is again at a crossroads, as demands to protect women from abuse are cast as ‘feminist policing’ or as moralistic regulation of sexual norms. One of the urgent questions of our time concerns, therefore, the very possibility of feminist authority, both as a potent ideal and as an oxymoron. Out of Order is designed to tackle this problem by thinking through the relationship between power, authority, and freedom in feminist thought. The course examines how feminists addressed these interrelated notions from a variety of standpoints, in philosophy and critical theory, psychoanalysis, social history, and anthropology. What does this diverse body of knowledge teach us about the ways we relate to ourselves and to others, about our desires, our interests, and the ways we become political subjects? What do feminists have to say about ordering and regulating life in common? How do we square our concerns about power with our demands for justice? How might we rethink these problems anew, in light of emergent ways of being, feeling, thinking, and acting in the present historical moment?
This course counts as a Foundations Course for GNSE majors

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 12105 Sex and Gender in the City
Instructor: Sneha Annavarapu
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the key concerns at the intersection of gender studies and urban studies. In this course, we will take gender relations and sexuality as our primary concern and as a constitutive aspect of social relations that vitally shape cities and urban life. We will examine how gender is inscribed in city landscapes, how it is lived and embodied in relation to race, class, and sexuality, and how it is (re)produced through violence, inequality, and resistance. Over the course of the quarter, we will draw on an interdisciplinary scholarship that approaches the central question of how and why thinking about urban life in relation to gender and sex matters.
This course counts as a Foundations Course for GNSE majors

GNSE 17002 Early Modern Love: Eros in British Literature 1500-1700
Instructor: Michal Zechariah
This course examines an age-old problem of erotic love: how can love be a chief component of the well-lived life, when at its most celebrated it departs from reason, even to the point of madness? We will consider the challenges that love presents to human knowledge and ethics through the lens of early modern English literature, where the theme of love was at the center of aesthetic creativity, but our discussion will also draw on the philosophy of love, the history of emotions, Christian theology, and psychology. With these resources at hand, we will explore the phenomenon of erotic love, the relation of Eros to self and identity, and the reasons for love, finally leading up to the question: what does it mean to love well? Readings will include poetry, drama, and prose by prominent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors such as Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Milton, as well as less studied voices in the period, alongside theoretical works by thinkers throughout the ages, from Plato and Augustine to Harry Frankfurt and Lauren Berlant. Students will have an opportunity to approach the topic through analytic and creative assignments.

GNSE 18302 A Still Life: Feminists and Objects in Modernity 
Instructor: Katherine Nolan
Modernity has always been fascinated by the fantasy of objects coming to life. Feminist theory, by contrast, has often been fixated on the reverse: “objectification,” or the process of human beings becoming like objects. This course puts into conversation these two different ways of imagining animate object-ness in order to assemble a critical archive on one of modernity’s foundational binaries: the “subject-object” dichotomy. We will examine a series of genres that prominently feature objects, including it-narratives, narratives about robotic women, and video games, while consider these texts in relation to prominent feminist writings about objectification. (Theory, Fiction)

GNSE 20103 Trans-Bodies in Horror Cinema
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
Films presenting trans bodies or “psyches” have historically often othered these as "monstrous," and compelled a sense of the inevitable tragedy of living in sexual fluidity. To fully contemplate such expressions of horror, tragedy, or pity, the course will screen and discuss films such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Dressed to Kill (Brian DePalma, 1980), Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzick, 1983), Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almadovar, 2011), Predestination (Michael and Peter Spierig, 2014) but also considers films of the trans body made ostensibly more calculable, at least in terms of moral and ethical stability, such as Robocop, the Alien films of Ridley Scott, Ghost in the Shell (Sanders, 2017), and the online choice map game Detroit Become Human. The course is dedicated foremost to rupturing binary thinking (as a form of nonage) and the critical theory that will ballast our readings includes selections from Haraway, Halberstam, Garber, Benschoff, Reese’s The Fourth Age, Schelde’s Androids, Humanoids, and Other Science Fiction Monsters, and Foucault’s Abnormal.
This course counts as a Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 21310 Our Biopolitics, Ourselves: Feminist Science Fiction
Instructor: Hilary Strang
1970s feminist theory made a significant conceptual move in provisionally bracketing off biological sex from the historical/cultural work of gender. Feminist science fiction (in contrast), in its brief flourishing in the 70s and early 80s, finds its utopian moments in the biological, in genetic manipulation, reproductive technology, ecological forms of being and new bodies of a variety of kinds. This class will read science fiction, feminist theory and current critical work that concerns itself with biopolitics in order to ask questions about the divide between nature and culture, what's entailed in imagining the future, what gender and genre might have to do with each other, and just what science fiction is and does anyway. Authors include: Le Guin, Russ, Butler, Piercy, Haraway, Rubin, Firestone.

GNSE 21503 Sarah Baartman through Schitt’$ Creek: an Introduction to Gender and Popular Culture
Instructor: Ella Wilholt
Throughout the twentieth century, scholars from Simone de Beauvoir through Judith Butler have argued that genders are learned, enacted and ascribed identities, worked out through interaction. As such, the production of ‘gender’ is carried out to some extent in relation to cultural models and artifacts that people use to make sense of, model and reject gendered identities, characteristics and roles. This course takes popular culture, including film, television, literature and social media as a starting point for understanding the often taken-for granted characteristics deemed gendered in Western culture and elsewhere. Attending to race, class, sexuality, age and other social categorizations throughout, we will draw on representation and cultural theory as well as ethnographic works, mingling a close reading of theorists such as Erving Goffman and bell hooks with detailed attention to the latest reality show or trending hashtag. While we will focus primarily on the most widely disseminated and economically powerful imagery, we will also attend to alternative, resistant and activist media. This is an introductory graduate-level course; graduate students at all levels are invited to join, advanced undergraduates are admitted with instructor consent

GNSE 22046 Introduction to Caribbean Studies
Instructor: Kaneesha Parsard
Why have critics, writers, and artists described the Caribbean as “ground zero” of Western modernity? Beginning with the period before European settlement, we will study slavery and emancipation, Asian indentureship, labor and social movements, decolonization, debt and tourism, and today’s digital Caribbean. We will survey literary and visual cultures, primary source documents, and thought across the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. All readings will be available in translation.

GNSE 22222 Masculinities in pre-modern Middle Eastern Literature
Instructor: Alexandra Hoffman
Have you ever wondered what men looked like, how they lived and loved in the pre-modern Middle East? In this class, we will encounter cuckolded husbands, muscular heroes, angry kings, mad lovers, and chivalrous bandits – all fictional. We will analyze how masculinities are constructed in selected passages of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literature in translation, and evaluate normative expectations, caricatures, and anxieties about masculinities in the cultural consciousness of the pre-modern Middle East. In this course, you will become familiar with theoretical principles of the study of masculinities as well as acquire tools for literary analysis and close reading. Case studies will be drawn from a variety of literary sources, such as the Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-layla), the Persian Book of Kings (Shāhnāmeh), the love story of Laylā and Majnūn, as well as other texts.

GNSE 22295 Morrissey's America: Contemporary Social Problems
Instructor: Rene Flores
What are the most pressing social problems in the U.S.? What do we know about them and what can we do to address them? We will use the life and music of Morrissey, the controversial former frontman of The Smiths, as a lens through which to explore our country's most critical social issues. An outspoken defender of animal rights and disaffected youth's preeminent lyricist, Morrissey has also increasingly flirted with nationalist policies. As such, he embodies the tensions, complexities, and ambiguities around critical topics that characterize our time. Guided by sociological theory, we will examine the latest social science evidence on race, immigration, gender and sexuality, health, poverty, segregation, crime, and education as they are key sites in which social inequality is produced and reproduced today. Finally, we will discuss potential solutions to these problems.

GNSE 22620 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.

GNSE 23004 The Poetics of Life in Modern Latin America
Instructor: Ali Kulez
Taught in Spanish
How do Latin American authors imagine humans, animals, and other nonhuman lives? In what ways do considerations of race, gender, and species determine their cultural imaginary? This course will explore representations of life in Latin American fiction from the nineteenth century to the present. Paying special attention to subjects that are considered “other” (women, indigenous people, animals, cyborgs), we will reflect on the ways in which bodies are valued, ordered, and discarded in stories and novels. Through this examination of the hierarchies of life, we will gain insights into the major shifts in Latin American politics of the past two centuries. Moreover, we will see how literature, often considered to simply “mirror” contemporary values, may become a locus of resistance against racist, speciesist, and gender-based oppression and violence. Our readings will be complemented by excerpts from major cultural theorists and critics including Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, and Gabriel Giorgi.

GNSE 23124 Prostitution in Global Perspective
Instructor: Zoya Sameen
Prostitution has been a site of multiple regulations—whether institutional, social, or spatial. This course aims to examine various regimes and expressions of prostitution, and their transformations, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in global perspective. We will consider the categories of gender, sex, and race, together with the processes of colonization, nation-building, and migration in order to uncover the norms and regulatory regimes that undergirded the historical life of prostitution. Readings will include area case-studies alongside comparative and transnational histories ranging from East-Asia to Latin America. We will discuss what kinds of evidence can be marshaled in service of writing these histories, and how historians of prostitution have approached archives limited by state-centric and official perspectives. Students in this course will develop the critical tools to interrogate the evolving practices of an everyday activity, and assess the possibilities and limitations of producing a global history of prostitution.
This course will count as a Concepts course for GNSE majors

GNSE 23126 Philosophy and Sexuality
Instructor: Alexander Wolfson
This course is an examination of sexuality within the archives of continental philosophy. It has two fundamental concerns. First, we will look at how sexuality effects and determines the trajectories and foundations of modern and contemporary philosophy. Second, we will examine the ways in which contemporary queer, feminist, and critical race theory employ and engage the “cannon” of modern and contemporary philosophy. The over-arching questions of the class include: what kinds of discourses can be produced through a reliance upon Western philosophical thought? What are the political and conceptual consequences of the use of philosophy as a fundamental source for theories of identity? Can one inhabit a cannon while critiquing its assumptions? While framed from within the discipline of philosophy, this class will be interdisciplinary in nature, both in terms of the academic disciplines from which we choose our texts and also through an engagement with various genres and media. Readings will include works by figures such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Sylvia Wynter, Judith Butler, Fred Moten, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Previous coursework in philosophy is not essential. This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 24104 Muses and Saints: Poetry Within the Christian Traditions
Instructor: Erin Galgay Walsh
This course provides an introduction to the poetic traditions of early Christians and the intersection between poetic literature, theology, and biblical interpretation. Students will gain familiarity with the literary context of the formative centuries of Christianity with a special emphasis on Greek and Syriac Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean from the fourth through the sixth centuries. While theology is often taught through analytical prose, theological reflection in late antiquity and early Byzantium was frequently done in poetic genres. This course introduces students to the major composers and genres of these works as well as the various recurrent themes that occur within this literature. Through reading poetry from liturgical and monastic contexts, students will explore how the biblical imaginations of Christians were formed beyond the confines of canonical scripture. How is poetry a mode of “doing” theology? What habits of biblical interpretation and narration does one encounter in this poetry? This course exposes students to a variety of disciplinary frameworks for studying early Christian texts including history, religious studies, feminist and literary critique, as well as theology. Students will also analyze medieval and modern poetry with religious themes in light of earlier traditions to reflect on the poetry and the religious imagination more broadly. Open to undergraduate and graduate students; Graduate students may choose to attend weekly translation group.

GNSE 24365 Cultural Diversity, Structural Barriers, and Multilingualism in Clinical and Healing Encounters
Instructor: David Ansari
How are illness, disorder, and recovery experienced in different localities and cultural contexts? How do poverty, racism, and gender discrimination translate to individual experiences of disease? Combining anthropological perspectives on health and illness with a social determinants of health framework, this class will examine topics such as local etiologies of disease and healing practices, linguistic interpretation in clinical and healing contexts, and structural factors that hinder healthcare access and instigate disorder. Moreover, by taking clinical and healing encounters as our locus of analysis, we will explore how healers and health professionals recognize and respond to diversity, power imbalances, and the language individuals give to illness and suffering. We will draw on a range of materials, from ethnographies to long form journalism to the perspectives of course visitors, in order to examine case studies in mental illness, sexual health, organ donation and transplantation, and chronic disease in a variety of geographic contexts.

GNSE 24515 Society and Social Outcasts in Late Imperial and Modern China
Instructor: Chao Wang
This course considers the often neglected presence of "social outcasts" in Chinese history as a gateway to understanding ideas and practices of discrimination from the late Qing to modern-day China. It traces changes in the intersection of law, custom, and daily social practices, focusing on attempts aimed at legitimizing discrimination across class, territory, ethnicity, religion, gender and disability. Thus a theoretical objective of the course is to analyze legal and social dimensions of exclusion along the axis of empire and state building. Chronologically, this course begins with the collapse of status order in the late Qing and explores how the Republic and the PRC managed transgressive elements of society, from beggars, prostitutes, and the insane to ethnic and religious minorities. We will use legal documents, police records, and visual materials to explore how sociocultural processes shape the experience of discrimination and its resistance. Another focus of this course will be asking how disenfranchised groups might enhance our understanding of mainstream values. Through discussions, in-class presentations, and written assignments, students will develop skills to analyze historical evidence and critically reflect on its implication for cross-cultural issues.

GNSE 24554 Mysticism and Modernity
Instructor: Kris Trujillo
This course will explore the impact of medieval and early modern mysticism on modern theories of sex, gender, and sexuality. We will begin by examining some of the most highly-cited texts from the Christian mystical tradition and by paying particular attention to the significance of gender, eroticism, and embodiment in these texts. We will then explore the circulation of these texts in modern theoretical projects on sex, gender, and sexuality with particular emphasis on existentialism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. Why does Lacan cite Hadewijch in order to articulate his notion of feminine jouissance? Why does Beauvoir hold up Teresa of Ávila as an exemplar of existential authenticity? Why does Derrida follow Pseudo-Dionysius but not Hadewijch in his meditation on negative theology? And how might these intellectual genealogies give rise to contemporary work in queer, feminist, and queer of color critique? Ultimately, by putting premodern and modern texts into dialogue, this course will enable students not only to develop the skill of diachronic analysis but also to challenge the assumption that mysticism and theory are at all apolitical.

GNSE 25003 Multicultural Development and Gender 
Instructor: Tasneem Mandviwala
This course will focus on gender scripts and performance as they are developed within multicultural contexts. We will focus on the mainstream and sub-cultures of the contemporary U.S. as the nation is both famously and infamously a place where individuals from multiple cultural backgrounds coexist. Traditionally, patriarchal norms have shaped many cultures worldwide, including American, so women’s and non-gender-conforming individuals’ experiences have been relegated to sub-culture status even for culturally mainstream (i.e., White) individuals. The subculture dynamic becomes even more charged when conflicting scripts of gender must be grappled with between cultures an individual is a member of; for example, for immigrants or people of color. In this course, we will take an intersectional approach to examining the lived experiences of individuals from multicultural backgrounds, pulling apart the multiple racial, cultural, and gendered elements that comprise their realities, shape their decision-making and identity development, and ultimately craft their life trajectories 

GNSE 25300 Autobiographical Writing: Gender & Modern Korea
Instructor: Kyeong-Hee Choi
This course explores the intersections between gender, the genre of autobiography, forms of media (written; oral; visual; audiovisual) and historical, cultural, and political contexts of modern Korea. The students read theoretical writings on autobiography and gender as well as selected Korean autobiographical writings while being introduced to Korean historical contexts especially as they relate to practice of publication in a broader sense. The focus of the course is placed on the female gender—on the relationship between Korean women’s life-experience, self-formation, and writing practices in particular while dealing with the gender relationship in general, although some relevant discussions on the male gender proceeds in parallel.

GNSE 25302 Beauvoir: The Second Sex
Instructor: Kristine Culp
In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe took up the old question of sexual difference; it was never the same question again. Her attention to the situation and “situatedness” of women resulted in new ways of thinking about freedom, destiny, reciprocity, and subjectivity; it brought literature, autobiography, and cultural studies into philosophical reflection; and it contributed significantly to twentieth century transformations of women’s social, political, and cultural situations. We will engage a close reading of The Second Sex in English translation and with some reference to the original French.

GNSE 25706 Gender, Sex, And Empire
Instructor: Darcy Heuring
This course examines the complex and contested relationships between gender, sexuality, social organization and power in histories of (primarily British) imperialism and colonialism from the early conquests in the New World through the twentieth century. Employing insights from gender history, postcolonial studies and feminist theory, we look at a broad range of historical case studies to explore themes such as the intersectionality of race, class and gender; the instability of gender ideologies; how power was articulated through the fields of gender and sexuality; the politics of intimacy; and the regulation and 'improvement' of colonial bodies. Our goal is to better understand the ways that gender/sexuality and Western imperialism were co-constitutive in specific imperial and colonial contexts.

GNSE 25990 Stereotype Effects on Cognition
Instructor: Yung-Tsen Chen
This course introduces the concept of stereotypes and how stereotypes about group difference affect members of stigmatized groups in terms of their physical and mental health, self-esteem, memory, and cognitive performance. We also discuss research methods for investigating stereotype effects and recent research findings, as well as consider several different kinds of models and theories of stereotype effect. We will cover different stereotypes, including race, gender, aging, mental illness, disabilities, sexual orientation, and social class.

GNSE 27017 Passing
Instructor: Nicolette Bruner
In this course, we examine how people move within and between categories of identity, with particular attention to boundary crossings of race and gender in U.S. law and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Law provides a venue and a language through which forces of authority police categories of identity that, at Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado observe, “society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient.” Readings will include theoretical texts as well as court rulings, cultural ephemera, and literary texts.

GNSE 27205 Reproductive Rights as Human Rights
Instructor: Amy Krauss
This course examines human rights approaches to reproductive health and justice with critical grounding in ethnographic case studies. We will begin by surveying major debates and tactics of feminist movements in North and South Americas, comparing visions of reproductive rights based on ideals of liberal individualism and private property with traditions of collective claims for social and economic rights. Our case studies include the Zika epidemic in Brazil, immigration and reproductive health care access in the United States, the shackling of pregnant women in U.S. prisons, the politics of sterilization and birth control in Puerto Rico, and the legalization of abortion in Mexico City. Hearing from guest speakers who work as lawyers, healthcare practitioners, activists and community organizers, we will consider reproductive rights as human rights in a field of contestation that involves diverse actors, state interests, and social movement histories. 

GNSE 27307 Schools and Space: A Chicago History
Instructor: Nicholas Kryczka
his course fuses urban and educational history into a two-century case study of Chicago. When the Chicago Public Schools closed fifty schoolhouses in 2013, many stressed the links between public education, uneven neighborhood investment, and racial segregation. But this episode was part of a longer regional history of how metropolitan development, labor markets, and anxieties over migration affected educational policy. The course stresses the relationship between educational policy and the politics of urban development, gender, and race. Schools were sites of gendered work, for the women who operated them and for the children who navigated the moral and vocational paths laid for their futures; meanwhile, the rise of racial ghettoes had an enduring impacts on educational inequity and the shape of African American political life. Over the time span covered by the course, the United States became an indisputably "schooled" society, and Chicago was a leading indicator of national trends. Key historic episodes in American education—the rise of the modern high school, the birth of progressive education, the origins of teachers' unions, the Catholic encounter with race, the fragmentation of suburban school districts, the civil-rights critique of de facto school segregation, the pronounced "failure" of urban education, and the triumph of choice-and-accountability reforms, and the teacher-led resistance that followed—are especially well-illustrated by this course's focus on Chicago.

GNSE 27421 The Body Religious in East Asia
Instructor: Or Porath
The course will explore the multifaceted discourse on the body across East Asian religious traditions as well as investigate precedents from other religions in Asia. Students will discuss multiple analytical categories of the body (cosmic body, divine body, etc.) from the point of view of East Asian religions, and assess their usefulness in making sense of religious experiences and ritualized embodied practices.

GNSE 27709 Soul and The Black Seventies
Instructor: Adam Green
This course considers in what ways soul as cultural genre and style shaped, and was shaped by, the political, social, structural, cultural, and ethical shifts and conditions associated with the 1970s. It will focus on popular music as both symbolic field and system of production, while also taking up other forms of expression—literary, intellectual, institutional, activist—in order to propose an alternate, and compelling, archive for this era. The course intends to deepen understanding of the feel and meaning of soul by relating it to consequential legacies of the 1970s: urban identity and crisis, emerging limitations of racial reformism, the deepening class stratification of Black life, and the radical disruption of social norms through feminism, in particular Black feminism.

GNSE 28003 Can Women Think? The Female Intellectual in South Asia
Instructor: Ahona Panda
How have South Asian women crafted lives for themselves as intellectuals, regardless of their social worlds? This introductory class will examine the figure of the woman-scholar in South Asia from antiquity to the twentieth century. How have South Asian women been seen, or have seen themselves, as intellectuals? We will study how women have provided critical reflections on society, identified normative problems, and argued for their rightful place in public life. This course will think of the specificity of South Asia and the global South in order to understand the relationship between women, authority and authorship, gender and cultural production, the problems of historical memory, and will challenge the notion of a unified collective of women intellectuals by considering caste, class and religious differences. We will study more than just feminist thought and scholarship. By reflecting on the active process and performance of thinking, we will question the historical and cultural conditions in South Asia which make thinking possible for women.

GNSE 28210 Emotion, Reason and Law
Instructor: Martha Nussbaum
Emotions figure in many areas of the law, and many legal doctrines (from reasonable provocation in homicide to mercy in criminal sentencing) invite us to think about emotions and their relationship to reason. In addition, some prominent theories of the limits of law make reference to emotions: thus Lord Devlin and, more recently, Leon Kass have argued that the disgust of the average member of society is a sufficient reason for rendering a practice illegal, even though it does no harm to others. Emotions, however, are all too rarely studied closely, with the result that both theory and doctrine are often confused. The first part of this course will study major theories of emotion, asking about the relationship between emotion and cognition, focusing on philosophical accounts, but also learning from anthropology and psychology. We will ask how far emotions embody cognitions, and of what type, and then we will ask whether there is reason to consider some or all emotions "irrational" in a normative sense. We then turn to the criminal law, asking how specific emotions figure in doctrine and theory: anger, fear, compassion, disgust, guilt, and shame. Legal areas considered will include self-defense, reasonable provocation, mercy, victim impact statements, sodomy laws, sexual harassment, shame-based punishments. Next, we turn to the role played by emotions in constitutional law and in thought about just institutions - a topic that seems initially unpromising, but one that will turn out to be full of interest. Other topics will be included as time permits. Law students and Ph.D. students may register without permission. All others need instructor's permission.

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

 

Graduate Course Descriptions

AUTUMN 2019

GNSE 30112 From the Harem to Helem: Gender and Sexuality in the Modern Middle East
Instructor: Ghenwa Hayek
This course will provide a historical and theoretical survey of issues pertaining to gender and sexuality in the modern Middle East. First, we will outline the colonial legacies of gender politics and gendered discourses in modern Middle Eastern history. We will discuss orientalist constructions of the harem and the veil (Allouche, Laila Ahmed, Lila Abu-Loghod), and their contested afterlives across the Middle East. We will also explore colonial (homo)sexuality, and attendant critiques (Najmabadi, Massad). We will pay especial attention to local discourses about gender and sexuality, and trouble facile assumptions of “writing back” while attending to the various specificities of local discourses of everyday life across various sites of the Middle East. Eschewing reductive traps for more nuanced explorations of the specifics of life in Beirut, Cairo, Istanbul, or Tehran – as well as to rural areas – we will show how gender and sexuality are constructed and practiced in these locales. In addition to foundational scholarly texts in the field, we will also engage with an array of cultural texts (films, novels, poetry, comics) and – where possible – have conversations with activists who are working in these sites via Skype/ teleconferencing.

GNSE 30901 Biopsychology of Sex Differences
Instructor: Jill Mateo
This course will explore the biological basis of mammalian sex differences and reproductive behaviors. We will consider a variety of species, including humans. We will address the physiological, hormonal, ecological and social basis of sex differences. To get the most from this course, students should have some background in biology, preferably from taking an introductory course in biology or biological psychology.

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 31293 Global Family Change
Instructor: William Axinn
This course examines sociological perspectives on changes in marriage and childbearing that have swept the globe from 1850-today.  We will examine changes in arranged marriage, marriage timing, first birth timing, contraception to limit childbearing, family size and divorce.  We will review theories of family change, research designs for studying family change, and empirical data about family change. We will investigate family changes in specific sites in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the European diaspora.  The course will also investigate specific factors likely to produce family change, including industrialization, mass education, mass media, health care, migration, and attitudes and beliefs. Finally, the course will consider some of the important consequences of these changing families around the world. Students will prepare an in-depth study of family change in one specific place and time.  Course examples will highlight family changes in South Asia, but students are welcome to select any region and time period for their own study.

GNSE 33505 Ethnographic Approaches to Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Cate Fugazzola
This methods course aims to prepare graduate students and advanced undergraduates for ethnographic research on topics focused on gender and sexuality. We will read articles and books showcasing ethnographic methodologies, and we will discuss benefits and limitations of various research designs. Class debates will cover epistemological, ethical, and practical matters in ethnographic research. We will discuss issues of positionality, self-reflexivity, and power. Students will be required to formulate a preliminary research question at the beginning of the course, and will conduct a few weeks of ethnographic research in a field site of their choosing. Each week students will produce field notes to be exchanged and discussed in class, and as a final project they will be asked to produce a research proposal or a short paper based on their observations. 

GNSE 33506 Gender, Sex, and Culture
Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
This introductory graduate course examines the social construction of gendered identities in different times and places. We study culturally-specific gendered experiences, ‘roles,’ rights and rebellions around the world, discussing the individual and social consequences of gender and the interrelationships between gender and other categories for identity including race, class and sexuality. While focusing on the global diversity of gendered experience and expectations, we also examine gender in the US, taking a critical approach to understanding gendered inequality and gender-based and sexual violence both abroad and at home. Finally, we examine the role of gendered expectations in Western science, the relationship between gender and ‘globalization,’ and the contemporary movements affecting change in gendered norms, especially in the arts and media. 

GNSE 34358 Hindu Goddesses And The Deification Of Women
Instructor: Sree Padma Holt
This course has two focuses. The first is to examine how and why representations of goddesses in her iconic, aniconic and symbolic forms are embraced by various religious traditions (Buddhist, Saiva, Vaishnava and Jaina) of India. The second focus includes: 1) an examination of the manner in which the power of the feminine has been expressed socially, mythologically, and theologically in Hinduism; 2) how Hindu women have expressed their religiosity in social and psychological ways; 3) how and why women have been deified, a process that implicates the relationship between the goddess and women; and 4) how various categories of goddesses can be seen or not as the forms of the so-called "Great Goddess” (Mahadevi), and how these goddesses reflect varying relationships with human women.

GNSE 34555 Learned Women: Spaces of Knowledge, Self-Actualization, and Power
Instructor: Noel Blanco Mourelle
The hegemonic narrative of knowledge production in the Iberian Peninsula has historically centered on male writers, thus excluding contributions of women. This seminar will explore the intellectual interventions of medieval and early modern Iberian poets, professors, encyclopedists, and theologians who also happened to be women. Did these women present a perspective on knowledge-making different than their male counterparts? More importantly, what were the paths to knowledge that were available to them in a society that offered women limited social and intellectual roles? In this class we will be reading sources by Florencia Pinar, Teresa de Cartagena, Leonor López de Córdoba, Oliva Sabuco, among others; and critical pieces by Judith Butler, Andrea Dworkin, Silvia Federici, Luce Irigaray, and Sophie Lewis. Taught in Spanish.

GNSE 35002 Queer and Trans Mutual Aid for Survival and Mobilization
Instructor: Dean Spade
This course will examine contemporary and historical queer and trans-focused mutual aid projects, including support for migrants, prisoners, psychiatric survivors, people with HIV/AIDS, and violence survivors. We will look at why mutual aid projects are often under-celebrated in contemporary narratives of social change, when compared with media advocacy and law and policy reform work. Using materials created by activists engaged in building mutual aid projects, as well as scholarly analysis of such efforts, we will look at what principles and methods characterize politicized survival work and how it intentionally departs from charity frameworks.

GNSE 41303 Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation
Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the two hundred years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries – not to mention a thriving “Janeite” fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen’s completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include Shoshana Felman, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams.

GNSE 41500 Bodies of Transformation
Instructor: C. Riley Snorton
Drawing on trans studies, disability studies, histories of science, queer and postcolonial theory, this class contends with how bodies and bodies of knowledge change over time. Bodies of Transformation takes a historiographic approach to the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of corporeal meaning, practice and performance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Animating questions include: what is the corporeal real? how is race un/like gender? how does bodily transformation map the complex relationships between coercion and choice?

GNSE 42910 Gender and Sexuality in Late Antiquity: Precursors and Legacies
Instructor: Erin Galgay Walsh
In this course students will trace how gender was theorized and normative behavior was prescribed and enforced in the ancient world. We will begin with materials from the Greco-Roman world, Hebrew Bible, and the Second Temple Period. As the quarter progresses, we will turn our attention to early and late ancient Christian authors, focusing on the way asceticism and emergent ecclesial institutions shaped the lives of women and gender non-conforming individuals. Throughout the course students will learn to navigate the pitfalls and opportunities the study of gender affords for understanding the development of biblical interpretation, the transformation of classical Graeco-Roman culture, and the formation of Christian doctrine. How did Christianity challenge and preserve norms for female behavior? How did Rabbinic and early Christian authors approach questions of sexuality differently? Along the way we will bring 20th-century theorists of sexuality and gender into our conversations to illuminate pre-modern discourses of virginity, sexual experience, and identity. Primarily we will approach texts through a historical lens while paying attention to the theological and ethical issues involved. At the end of the course we will examine the legacy of late ancient debates, tracing how earlier teaching about gender and sexuality co-exists with, challenges, and informs modern secular worldviews. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students. PQ: No languages are required, but there will be ample opportunity for students with skills in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Hebrew to use them.

GNSE 44905 Feminism and the Radical Democratic Imaginary (Part I): Futures Past
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
The political history of Western feminism is typically described as encompassing various “waves” of theory and practice, with each wave building on, but also going beyond, an earlier wave. Thus, the second-wave (1968-1980s) is seen as taking up and radicalizing the first wave (1848-1920) struggle for political rights by expanding the concept of rights and of politics itself beyond the confines of the formal political sphere; the third wave (1991-?) is seen as taking up and radicalizing the second wave’s concept of “women” as the political subject of feminism; and so on. Handy though this periodization may be, it has left many feminists wondering which wave they are in anymore. Some feminists argue that the various waves have given way to “intersectional feminism,” but that description does not address the fundamental question of what kind of critical political work the concept of a “wave” was supposed to do in the first place. It was not until 1968 that people started talking about feminism in terms of different waves, and that feminism came to be understood as having a history at all. This shift allowed feminists to root their political demand for change in a historical democratic struggle for social justice, not least as a way of countering the popular view of the women’s liberation movement as an impossibly utopian project made up by a bunch of crazy man-hating misfits.
In Part I of this two-quarter course we take up this periodization of feminism and 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. Furthermore, 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 eighteenth 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. In what ways has feminism’s radical political imaginary been at once enabled and constrained by a certain practice of historiography? To what extent is the progressivism and presentism that tends to characterize contemporary feminism’s relation to its own past a problem for its future? What are the “futures past” of feminism and how do they speak to us today?

GNSE 50101 Workshop: Law and Philosophy
Instructor: Martha Nussbaum
The theme for 2019-20 is “Migration and Citizenship.” This is a seminar/workshop many of whose participants are faculty from various related disciplines. It admits approximately ten students. Its aim is to study, each year, a topic that arises in both philosophy and the law and to ask how bringing the two fields together may yield mutual illumination. Most sessions are led by visiting speakers, from either outside institutions or our own faculty, who circulate their papers in advance. The session consists of a brief introduction by the speaker, followed by initial questioning by the two faculty coordinators, followed by general discussion, in which students are given priority. Several sessions involve students only, and are led by the instructors. Students write a 20-25 page seminar paper at the end of the year. The course satisfies the Law School Substantial Writing Requirement. 
Prerequisites: Students are admitted by permission of the two instructors. They should submit a c.v. and a statement (reasons for interest in the course, relevant background in law and/or philosophy) to the instructors by e-mail by September 20. Usual participants include graduate students in philosophy, political science, and divinity, and law students. 
Course Description Notes: Students must enroll for all three quarters to receive credit. 

GNSE 60300 Coll: Immigration And Assimilation In American Life
Instructor: Ramon Gutierrez
This course explores the history of immigration in what is now the United States, starting with the colonial origins of Spanish, French, Dutch, and English settlements, the importation of African slaves, and the massive waves of immigrants that arrived in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Additionally, we will study the adaptation of these immigrants, exploring the validity of the concept of assimilation, comparing and contrasting the experiences of the "old" and "new" immigrants based on their race, religion, and class standing.

 

WINTER 2020

GNSE 30102 Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality: On “Women’s Writing”
Instructor: Sophie Salvo
This course interrogates “women’s writing” as a historical, theoretical, and literary category. Since the 1970s, feminist scholarship has used the category “women’s writing” to recuperate texts by historically marginalized female authors. This practice has led to a reconsideration of the role of gender in literary production, authorship, and canon formation. Focusing on the context of modern Europe, and the genre of narrative prose, this course aims to reevaluate the classification “women’s writing.” Is “women’s writing,” to borrow a phrase from Joan Scott, a “useful category of analysis” in the 21st century? Can it help us account for how gendered subjects have been constructed through narrative? To what extent do traditional generic and disciplinary divisions limit our understanding of women’s texts? Does the concept “women’s writing” allow for intersectional approaches to the study of gender and sexuality? 
Course readings will include literary texts from the 18th-21st centuries (works by Jane Austen, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Elfriede Jelinek, and Marjane Satrapi, among others), as well as theoretical approaches from feminist, queer, and transgender studies.

GNSE 30408 Health Disparities in Breast Cancer
Instructors: Eileen Dolan, Suzanne Conzen
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. PQ: BIOS 25108 While the course is listed as having a BIOS prerequisite, the instructor is open to having non-science graduate students in the course. If you have questions, please contact the instructor, Dr. Eileen Dolan.

GNSE 32103 Feminisms and Anthropology
Instructors: Jennifer Cole and Julie Chu
This seminar examines the somewhat 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 will pursue the following lines of inquiry: 1) a genealogical approach to examine 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, etc.).

GNSE 32835 Migration Trajectories: Ethnographies of Place and the Production of Diasporas
Instructor: David Ansari
Global movements of people have resulted in a substantial number of immigrant communities whose navigation of various facets of everyday life has been complicated by restrictive citizenship regimes and immigration policies, as well as linguistic and cultural differences. The experiences of a wide range of individuals involved in migration raise the following questions: what strategies do immigrants use to negotiate transnational identities and what are the implications of these strategies? How do future generations manage simultaneous and intersectional forms of belonging? To address these questions, we will draw on ethnographic texts that explore various facets of transnational migration, such as diasporas, place, citizenship, mobility, and identities. The term "trajectories," reflects different situations of migration that are not necessarily linear or complete. Moreover, term "place" is meant to capture the continuity between displacement and emplacement, and to critically analyze the durability associated with notions of 'sending' and 'receiving' countries. Lastly, rather than take diasporas as a given, we will explore the ways that they are produced and enacted in a variety of geographic contexts.

GNSE 33505 Ethnographic Approaches to Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Cate Fugazzola
This methods course aims to prepare graduate students and advanced undergraduates for ethnographic research on topics focused on gender and sexuality. We will read articles and books showcasing ethnographic methodologies, and we will discuss benefits and limitations of various research designs. Class debates will cover epistemological, ethical, and practical matters in ethnographic research. We will discuss issues of positionality, self-reflexivity, and power. Students will be required to formulate a preliminary research question at the beginning of the course, and will conduct a few weeks of ethnographic research in a field site of their choosing. Each week students will produce field notes to be exchanged and discussed in class, and as a final project they will be asked to produce a research proposal or a short paper based on their observations. 

GNSE 33950 Latin American Women Perform
Instructor: Danielle Roper
This course examines the ways women from Latin America and the Caribbean wield performance art to engage their social realities and to engage questions of race, gender, and sexuality. How do women both produce and disidentify with constructs of womanhood on stage? How do they use performance to explore the ways histories of genocide, dictatorship, and imperialism shape constructs of gender? We examine the works of performance artists Congelada de Uva, Fomma, Regina Galindo, Nao Bustamante among others. Taught in English. Basic knowledge or comprehension of Spanish is strongly recommended.

GNSE 34810 The Body And Embodiment In Ancient Greek Art
Instructor: Seth Estrin
Whether naked or clothed, male or female, mortal or divine, the body takes pride of place in the visual worlds constructed by ancient Greek artists. Yet this emphasis on depicting the body begs the question: What is a body that exists as an image? What, in other words, is a body that is not embodied? This problem, articulated already in our ancient sources, serves as the starting point for this course's investigation of the relationship between images of the body in Greek art and the experiences such images solicited from their viewers. It examines, on the one hand, how Greek art promoted the body as a social construct--through artistic practices that configured the body's appearance, like distinctive techniques, styles, and iconography; through conceptual categories that ascribed identities, like gender, class, and race; and through contexts that integrated depictions of the body into lived experience, like sanctuaries, cemeteries, and domestic settings. But we will give equal attention to the viewer's subjective experience of embodiment, including its sensorial and affective dimensions, and the ways in which that experience is negotiated and articulated as a function of works of art. Finally, we will turn to the legacy of the Greek body in more recent centuries and consider its enduring impact as a visual paradigm today.

GNSE 35025 Gender and Translation
Instructor: Anna Elena Torres
The course will consider translation -- both theory and practice -- in relation to queer studies and gender and women's studies. Authors will include Naomi Seidman, Monique Balbuena, Yevgeniy Fiks, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kate Briggs, and others. For the final essay, students may write a research paper or translation project.

GNSE 36885 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 38000 Disability Studies and the Question of Religion
Instructor: Sarah Pierce Taylor
How are religious and secular understandings of disability different? How do religious and secular medical forms of care diverge? How are crippled bodies made functional or even sacred for a multiplicity of traditions? In contrast, how do people with disabilities challenge or problematize religious theologies of physical and spiritual wholeness? What is the connection between divine possession and madness? These opening questions are among the many that animate the Study of Religion and Disability Studies. Despite the ways in which these fields are in complement, the mainstream of Disability Studies and Crip Theory has moved away from its early and robust engagement with the question of religion (e.g. Garland-Thomson, Watts Belser). This course will provide an introduction to current trajectories within Disability and Crip Theory with an eye towards religion and an invitation to reinvigorate and recenter religion in relation to this body of contemporary scholarship.

GNSE 38750 Philosophizing with a Hammer: Nietzsche, Freud, Kofman 
Instructors: Ryan Coyne and Sarah Hammerschlag 
Jacques Derrida said of Sarah Kofman that she read Nietzsche and Freud inside and out, pitilessly and implacably, like no one else in the century. In this course, Kofman will not only be a guide to our own rigorous reading of Freud and Nietzsche, but we will also explore the version of deconstruction that she both derives from these writers and applies to them. In the process we will consider the means by which all three thinkers attempt to avoid the ruse of mastery in their work and the moments in which they succumb to its lure. We will consider as well the roles of gender and autobiography in their writings. In sum, Kofman will help us examine the relationship between religion, literature, and philosophy in the Twentieth Century, and the status of these discourses after Auschwitz. ​

GNSE 39203 Bad Readers
Instructor: Alexis Chema
By the end of the eighteenth century more women and working class readers existed than ever before, and as the ranks of readers grew, so did cultural fears about the dangerous effects of popular, untrained, promiscuous, escapist, or otherwise bad, reading. This course will investigate the democratization of the “reading public,” the debates about the dangers of reading that it provoked, and the ways that these arguments inflect, underlie, or diverge from contemporary anxieties about what constitutes bad reading, from Eve Sedgwick’s critique of paranoid reading to the now daily warnings about fake news.

GNSE 42911 Gender and Sexuality in South Asian Religions
Instructor: Sarah Pierce Taylor
From Vātsyāyana’s Kāmasūtra to debates around widow remarriage in the colonial period, the nexus of gender and sexuality fundamentally shapes religious practices and beliefs as well as the lives of women and gender non-conforming people. The central questions guiding this course are: How do South Asian religious traditions incorporate sexual practice and/or restraint into a vision of ethical life? When does one’s gender become dangerous or unethical? How do histories of imperialism interfere with and transform the study of gender and sexuality in South Asian religions? In pursuing these questions through a range of methodological approaches to the field, students will gain a deep familiarity with practices of religious asceticism, the place of erotics within religious discourse, new perspectives on queer and trans theory, emic feminisms, and sexual ethics.

GNSE 44202 Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film
Instructor: Maud Ellmann
We will read major works by Freud, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, and Slavoj Žižek, among other psychoanalytic theorists, in conjunction with literary works such as Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and Rudyard Kipling’s “Mary Postgate.” The course will conclude with one or more of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Topics include the unconscious, dreams, childhood, the uncanny, desire, subjects and objects, mourning, and the death drive.

GNSE 44440 Lyric Intimacies in the Renaissance
Instructor: Sarah Kunjummen
This course will examine how writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century used lyric verse as a tool for establishing, imagining or faking intimacy, with potential lovers, employers, friends, and God. We’ll begin by reading Thomas Wyatt’s adaptation of the Petrarchan sonnet to describe his doomed romance with Anne Boleyn, the mistress and later wife of King Henry VIII, and use of Italian satire to articulate a discourse of masculine friendship and citizenship. We’ll read the erotic verse of Phillip Sidney alongside his sister Mary Sidney’s adaptations of the Psalms, and examine the overlap between poems of seduction and poems to male and female patrons in two of the most influential seventeenth-century collections of intimate verse: William Shakespeare’s Sonnets and John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. The course then turns to the poetry of devotion, taking up Richard Crashaw’s desire for closeness with the overflowing body of Christ, George Herbert’s poetic staging of conversations between himself and God, and Thomas Traherne’s memories of an ecstatic state of infant innocence and oneness with the world. We’ll conclude with works from the English Civil War and monarchical restoration.

GNSE 44906 Feminism and the Radical Democratic Imaginary, Part II
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
The political history of Western feminism is typically described as encompassing various “waves” of theory and practice, with each wave building on, but also going beyond, an earlier wave. Thus, the second-wave (1968-1980s) is seen as taking up and radicalizing the first wave (1848-1920) struggle for political rights by expanding the concept of rights and of politics itself beyond the confines of the formal political sphere; the third wave (1991-?) is seen as taking up and radicalizing the second wave’s concept of “women” as the political subject of feminism; and so on. Handy though this periodization may be, it has left many feminists wondering which wave they are in anymore. Some feminists argue that the various waves have given way to “intersectional feminism,” but that description does not address the fundamental question of what kind of critical political work the concept of a “wave” was supposed to do in the first place. It was not until 1968 that people started talking about feminism in terms of different waves, and that feminism came to be understood as having a history at all. This shift allowed feminists to root their political demand for change in a historical democratic struggle for social justice, not least as a way of countering the popular view of the women’s liberation movement as an impossibly utopian project made up by a bunch of crazy man-hating misfits.

GNSE 45327 Politics of Media: From the Culture Industry to Google Brain
Instructors: Patrick Jagoda and Kristen Schilt
Media theory frequently focuses on issues of technology as opposed to, or at the cost of, politics and culture. This course reorients attention to the intersection of media and cultural theory. We begin by reviewing key media theories from the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School. Following a historical introduction, we explore the contemporary field of cultural media theory as it has unfolded in both the humanities and the social sciences. Students will think through how the sites of race, class, gender, and sexuality might frame and always already influence the ways that we think of media — from the broadcast media of Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry that included radio, film, and television to contemporary pointcasting that is made up of digital and networked technologies. Alongside readings in an expanded media theory, we will engage artistic and cultural works, including literature, films, television serials, smart phone apps, video games, social media, and algorithms. We also explore methodological differences in media studies between the humanities and the social sciences.
Before enrolling, MA students should email Professors Jagoda or Schilt on what you bring and hope to get out of the seminar

GNSE 45112 Seminar: Anthropology of the Body
Instructor: Sean Brotherton
Drawing on a wide and interdisciplinary range of texts, both classic and more recent, this seminar will variously examine the theoretical debates of the body as a subject of anthropological, historical, psychological, medical and literary inquiry. The seminar will explore specific themes, for example, the persistence of the mind/body dualism, experiences of embodiment/alienation, phenomenology of the body, Foucauldian notions of bio-politics, biopower, queering the body, and the medicalized, gendered, and racialized body, among other salient themes. This seminar is a collaborative exercise that is only as good as the contribution of each participant. Attendance, preparation, and participation are essential to the quality of everyone’s seminar experience. In this seminar, the assigned readings correspond to the general theme of the week’s seminar. The weekly session is organized as follows: during the first hour, two students will participate in co-leading a critical discussion of the required readings for that day. We will then take a short break, and the remainder of the class will be a general lecture and discussion fleshing out the major debates and significance of the week’s theme. Sean Brotherton. 

GNSE 45600 When Cultures Collide: Multiculturalism in Liberal Democracies
Instructor: Richard A 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 54104 On Man: Sociogenesis And Subjectivation
Instructor: C. Riley Snorton
In this course, students will read and engage with how “Man” has been conceptualized and critiqued in certain areas of philosophy and critical theory. The class begins with Man’s emergence in colonial contexts, with readings from Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and Sylvia Wynter. Students will also contend with Man’s intersubjectivity with the “Subject” with readings from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jose Munoz, and Hortense Spillers. Memoirs, novels, and auto-documentary films supplement this courses’ exploration of the genealogies of “Man.”

 

SPRING 2020

GNSE 31503 Sarah Baartman through Schitt’$ Creek: an Introduction to Gender and Popular Culture
Instructor: Ella Wilholt
Throughout the twentieth century, scholars from Simone de Beauvoir through Judith Butler have argued that genders are learned, enacted and ascribed identities, worked out through interaction. As such, the production of ‘gender’ is carried out to some extent in relation to cultural models and artifacts that people use to make sense of, model and reject gendered identities, characteristics and roles. This course takes popular culture, including film, television, literature and social media as a starting point for understanding the often taken-for granted characteristics deemed gendered in Western culture and elsewhere. Attending to race, class, sexuality, age and other social categorizations throughout, we will draw on representation and cultural theory as well as ethnographic works, mingling a close reading of theorists such as Erving Goffman and bell hooks with detailed attention to the latest reality show or trending hashtag. While we will focus primarily on the most widely disseminated and economically powerful imagery, we will also attend to alternative, resistant and activist media. This is an introductory graduate-level course; graduate students at all levels are invited to join, advanced undergraduates are admitted with instructor consent

GNSE 31562 Third World Women’s Writing
Instructor: Sophia Azeb
Though a term initially coined by French anthropologist Alfred Sauvy to categorized “developing” nations unaligned with major world powers during the Cold War, this course asks how African, Asian, Caribbean, and other Third Worldist women writers reclaimed the “Third World” as a project of people-centered unity, and engineered what political and cultural possibilities Third Worldist literature might realize for women in the anti- and post-colonial eras and today. Students will read critical transnational feminist theory and scholarship alongside novels and short stories by such authors as Maryse Condé, Marie NDiaye, and Salwa Al Neimi.

GNSE 33119 Transnational Queer Politics and Practice
Instructor: Cate Fugazzola
This course aims to examine gender and sexual practices and identities in a transnational perspective. As people and ideas move across national, cultural, and racial borders, how is sexuality negotiated and redefined? How are concepts such as "global queerness" and the globalization of sexualities leveraged for change? How are queer identities and practices translated, both culturally and linguistically? To explore transnational articulations of queerness we will draw on a range of theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial, feminist, queer, and indigenous approaches to the study of sexualities. We will engage with scholarship on the politics of global gay rights discourses, on the sexual politics of migration, and on the effects of colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. By analyzing queer experiences and practices in a transnational context, our goal is to decenter and challenge Western-centric epistemologies and to dive into the complexities of cultural representations of queerness around the globe.

GNSE 33501 Gender, Sex, and Empire
Instructor: Darcy Heuring
This course examines the complex and contested relationships between gender, sexuality, social organization and power in histories of (primarily British) imperialism and colonialism from the early conquests in the New World through the twentieth century. Employing insights from gender history, postcolonial studies and feminist theory, we look at a broad range of historical case studies to explore themes such as the intersectionality of race, class and gender; the instability of gender ideologies; how power was articulated through the fields of gender and sexuality; the politics of intimacy; and the regulation and 'improvement' of colonial bodies. Our goal is to better understand the ways that gender/sexuality and Western imperialism were co-constitutive in specific imperial and colonial contexts.

GNSE 34104 Muses and Saints: Poetry Within the Christian Traditions
Instructor: Erin Galgay Walsh
This course provides an introduction to the poetic traditions of early Christians and the intersection between poetic literature, theology, and biblical interpretation. Students will gain familiarity with the literary context of the formative centuries of Christianity with a special emphasis on Greek and Syriac Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean from the fourth through the sixth centuries. While theology is often taught through analytical prose, theological reflection in late antiquity and early Byzantium was frequently done in poetic genres. This course introduces students to the major composers and genres of these works as well as the various recurrent themes that occur within this literature. Through reading poetry from liturgical and monastic contexts, students will explore how the biblical imaginations of Christians were formed beyond the confines of canonical scripture. How is poetry a mode of “doing” theology? What habits of biblical interpretation and narration does one encounter in this poetry? This course exposes students to a variety of disciplinary frameworks for studying early Christian texts including history, religious studies, feminist and literary critique, as well as theology. Students will also analyze medieval and modern poetry with religious themes in light of earlier traditions to reflect on the poetry and the religious imagination more broadly. Open to undergraduate and graduate students; Graduate students may choose to attend weekly translation group.

GNSE 34554 Mysticism and Modernity
Instructor: Kris Trujillo
This course will explore the impact of medieval and early modern mysticism on modern theories of sex, gender, and sexuality. We will begin by examining some of the most highly-cited texts from the Christian mystical tradition and by paying particular attention to the significance of gender, eroticism, and embodiment in these texts. We will then explore the circulation of these texts in modern theoretical projects on sex, gender, and sexuality with particular emphasis on existentialism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. Why does Lacan cite Hadewijch in order to articulate his notion of feminine jouissance? Why does Beauvoir hold up Teresa of Ávila as an exemplar of existential authenticity? Why does Derrida follow Pseudo-Dionysius but not Hadewijch in his meditation on negative theology? And how might these intellectual genealogies give rise to contemporary work in queer, feminist, and queer of color critique? Ultimately, by putting premodern and modern texts into dialogue, this course will enable students not only to develop the skill of diachronic analysis but also to challenge the assumption that mysticism and theory are at all apolitical.

GNSE 35305 Autobiographical Writing: Gender & Modern Korea
Instructor: Kyeong-Hee Choi
This course explores the intersections between gender, the genre of autobiography, forms of media (written; oral; visual; audiovisual) and historical, cultural, and political contexts of modern Korea. The students read theoretical writings on autobiography and gender as well as selected Korean autobiographical writings while being introduced to Korean historical contexts especially as they relate to practice of publication in a broader sense. The focus of the course is placed on the female gender—on the relationship between Korean women’s life-experience, self-formation, and writing practices in particular while dealing with the gender relationship in general, although some relevant discussions on the male gender proceeds in parallel.

GNSE 35550 Feminist and Queer Literary Criticism
Instructor: Sianne Ngai
An introduction to classic texts in feminist and queer literary criticism. We will also be reading works by Frank O’Hara, Tennessee Williams, Octavia Butler, Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Harryette Mullen, and Maggie Nelson.

GNSE 37205 Reproductive Rights as Human Rights
Instructor: Amy Krauss
This course examines human rights approaches to reproductive health and justice with critical grounding in ethnographic case studies. We will begin by surveying major debates and tactics of feminist movements in North and South Americas, comparing visions of reproductive rights based on ideals of liberal individualism and private property with traditions of collective claims for social and economic rights. Our case studies include the Zika epidemic in Brazil, immigration and reproductive health care access in the United States, the shackling of pregnant women in U.S. prisons, the politics of sterilization and birth control in Puerto Rico, and the legalization of abortion in Mexico City. Hearing from guest speakers who work as lawyers, healthcare practitioners, activists and community organizers, we will consider reproductive rights as human rights in a field of contestation that involves diverse actors, state interests, and social movement histories. 

GNSE 37421 The Body Religious in East Asia
Instructor: Or Porath
The course will explore the multifaceted discourse on the body across East Asian religious traditions as well as investigate precedents from other religions in Asia. Students will discuss multiple analytical categories of the body (cosmic body, divine body, etc.) from the point of view of East Asian religions, and assess their usefulness in making sense of religious experiences and ritualized embodied practices.

GNSE 37709 Soul and The Black Seventies
Instructor: Adam Green
This course considers in what ways soul as cultural genre and style shaped, and was shaped by, the political, social, structural, cultural, and ethical shifts and conditions associated with the 1970s. It will focus on popular music as both symbolic field and system of production, while also taking up other forms of expression—literary, intellectual, institutional, activist—in order to propose an alternate, and compelling, archive for this era. The course intends to deepen understanding of the feel and meaning of soul by relating it to consequential legacies of the 1970s: urban identity and crisis, emerging limitations of racial reformism, the deepening class stratification of Black life, and the radical disruption of social norms through feminism, in particular Black feminism

GNSE 38003 Can Women Think? The Female Intellectual in South Asia
Instructor: Ahona Panda
How have South Asian women crafted lives for themselves as intellectuals, regardless of their social worlds? This introductory class will examine the figure of the woman-scholar in South Asia from antiquity to the twentieth century. How have South Asian women been seen, or have seen themselves, as intellectuals? We will study how women have provided critical reflections on society, identified normative problems, and argued for their rightful place in public life. This course will think of the specificity of South Asia and the global South in order to understand the relationship between women, authority and authorship, gender and cultural production, the problems of historical memory, and will challenge the notion of a unified collective of women intellectuals by considering caste, class and religious differences. We will study more than just feminist thought and scholarship. By reflecting on the active process and performance of thinking, we will question the historical and cultural conditions in South Asia which make thinking possible for women.

GNSE 38300 Emotion, Reason and Law
Instructor: Martha Nussbaum
Emotions figure in many areas of the law, and many legal doctrines (from reasonable provocation in homicide to mercy in criminal sentencing) invite us to think about emotions and their relationship to reason. In addition, some prominent theories of the limits of law make reference to emotions: thus Lord Devlin and, more recently, Leon Kass have argued that the disgust of the average member of society is a sufficient reason for rendering a practice illegal, even though it does no harm to others. Emotions, however, are all too rarely studied closely, with the result that both theory and doctrine are often confused. The first part of this course will study major theories of emotion, asking about the relationship between emotion and cognition, focusing on philosophical accounts, but also learning from anthropology and psychology. We will ask how far emotions embody cognitions, and of what type, and then we will ask whether there is reason to consider some or all emotions "irrational" in a normative sense. We then turn to the criminal law, asking how specific emotions figure in doctrine and theory: anger, fear, compassion, disgust, guilt, and shame. Legal areas considered will include self-defense, reasonable provocation, mercy, victim impact statements, sodomy laws, sexual harassment, shame-based punishments. Next, we turn to the role played by emotions in constitutional law and in thought about just institutions - a topic that seems initially unpromising, but one that will turn out to be full of interest. Other topics will be included as time permits. Law students and Ph.D. students may register without permission. All others need instructor's permission.

GNSE 38990 Muslims in the United State and Western Europe
Instructor: Eman Abdelhadi
Muslim migration to the United States and Western Europe proliferated in the last quarter of the 20th Century, and Islam has been a visible (and controversial) presence in these societies ever since. Though internally varied by race, ethnicity, national origins, sect and class positionality, Muslim communities have faced homogenizing narratives rooted in orientalist frameworks. As Islam continues to be a site of conflict in geopolitical struggles, these frameworks have reproduced themselves into the twenty-first century.
This course will use an intersectional and critical lens to examine the issues facing Muslims in the United States and Western Europe on both macro and micro levels. One third of the course will cover the interactions between Muslim communities and their “host societies” vis-à-vis the state, mass media, and public opinion. Another third of the course will delve into issues of socioeconomic mobility and cultural assimilation, Finally, the last third will show how these macro concepts influence the everyday lived experiences of Muslims in these contexts.
This is a seminar-style, reading-heavy course. Students should be familiar with and capable of deploying the sociological concepts of race, class, gender and intersectionality.

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

GNSE 41300 Our Biopolitics, Ourselves: Feminist Science Fiction
Instructor: Hilary Strang
1970s feminist theory made a significant conceptual move in provisionally bracketing off biological sex from the historical/cultural work of gender. Feminist science fiction (in contrast), in its brief flourishing in the 70s and early 80s, finds its utopian moments in the biological, in genetic manipulation, reproductive technology, ecological forms of being and new bodies of a variety of kinds. This class will read science fiction, feminist theory and current critical work that concerns itself with biopolitics in order to ask questions about the divide between nature and culture, what's entailed in imagining the future, what gender and genre might have to do with each other, and just what science fiction is and does anyway. Authors include: Le Guin, Russ, Butler, Piercy, Haraway, Rubin, Firestone.

GNSE 45020 Errant Voices: Performances Beyond Measure
Instructor: Martha Feldman
Listening to trans*, raced, and castrato voices, “Errant Voices: Gender and Performances beyond Measure” will explore voices that escape their confines perforce or by choice, trying to make sense of resistant, insurgent, and resilient voices. 
Students from various disciplines are invited to join the seminar, thereby helping to advance its themes but working from their own strengths and orientations. Our common goal will be to develop shared theoretical language among differing cases that can lead to new insights into wider paradigmatic shifts across gender and race in our historical moment. The project turns on performances inasmuch as they reveal the workings of bodies, intentions, and interactions. It depends on collective thinking because it is intersectional and thus concerns emergent shared languages developed by encountering questions collaboratively.

GNSE 48700 Colloquium: Social Movements in Chicago, 1950-2010
Instructor: Adam Green
This graduate colloquium considers the constellation of social movements that emerged in Chicago in the late 1960s, using old and new approaches to contentious politics. Chicago comprises an urban context that simultaneously encompasses a robust labor tradition, coherent expressions of situated or identity-oriented advocacy, a sustained radical intellectual tradition, localized community-oriented philosophy of organizing, and one of the fullest concentrations of municipal authority, as a party machine regime and also a law enforcement apparatus. Taken together, these conditions and others mark Chicago as among the most revealing crucibles for movement building in the United States over the past half century. The course seeks to survey emerging scholarship on the constitution, contradictions, and impact of movement building in Chicago, seen largely through four case studies—the Puerto Rican movement, radical feminism, LGBTQ liberation/rights, and African American struggles to achieve police accountability. Additionally, the course will survey classic and emerging models of social-movement theory, in order to offer models of analysis for a mode of politics, power, and social formation especially consequential to recent history and poised, it seems, to continue to exert significant influence. Finally, the course will introduce students to new archives, new source bases, and community-based principles and authorities, in order to suggest innovative and relevant research projects.
Upper-level undergraduates with consent of instructor.

GNSE 51000 Narrative in Crip and Queer Times
Instructor: Sarah Pierce Taylor
This course focuses on Crip and Queer theories of time as ways to get at varied understandings of temporality that destabilize the wobbly formation of “normal” and produce non-linear forms of life as narratable. By focusing on narrative unfolding, circling back, slowing down, and the precarity of the future, the course proceeds by putting two distinct strands of Queer and Crip Theory in conversation. We begin with what theorists have conceptualized as a distinct queer temporality (e.g. Halberstam, Freeman) alongside its complement, crip time (McRuer). We then turn to questions about queer futurity alongside critiques within Crip Theory that fully embrace the future as a way of embracing the present. Following these two strands, we see the productive dynamism and the tension between crip and queer temporalities in envisioning non-normative, non-heterosexual life.

 

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