Exterior at night

The Center at night

Side Entrance

The entrance of the CSGS

Heather Love audience

The audience listens as Lauren Berlant introduces Heather Love in 2014

Class discussion

Students participate in a classroom discussion at the Center

Héctor Carrillo

Héctor Carrillo talks with students after his book talk in 2018

Joan Scott

Joan Scott speaking at the Center in 2017

panel

Students listen to panelists present in 2017

Community room

The Community Room at 5733 S University

center door

Center entrance

5733 exterior

The exterior of 5733 S University

Bhanu Kapil

Poet Bhanu Kapil at the Center in 2016

Courses

Undergraduate Courses 

SPRING 2025

 

Graduate Courses

SPRING 2025

 

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

SPRING 2025 

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

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

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

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

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

GNSE 12138 Tutorial - Feminist Science and Technology Studies
Instructor: Abigail Taylor-Roth
Feminist science and technology studies (STS) is a rich body of literature that grapples with essential questions about the gendered and political nature of scientific knowledge. This course engages deeply with a range of literature that explores different possibilities for studying the co-construction of race and gender in and through science. We will discuss, among other topics, feminist epistemologies of science, racializing technologies, uses of DNA science, analyses of reproduction, various approaches to new materialisms, and speculative thinking about how science can be practiced differently. In this course, we take an expansive view of the field of feminist STS to consider what does, or does not, cohere about feminist STS as a field of study. We will read work from a wide range of scholars, from foundational scholars such as Donna Haraway and Londa Schiebinger to critiques of the field from Katherine McKittrick and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and others in between.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors 

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

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

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

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

GNSE 15500 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Instructor: Mark Miller
Close reading of the Canterbury Tales, with particular attention to the ways Chaucer’s experiments in literary form open onto problems in ethics, politics, gender and sexuality. 

GNSE 18128 Enigmas Of The Novel: Fiction After 1900
Instructor: Rivky Mondal
This course explores how unresolved experiences and vague states of feeling constitute the modern novel as we know it. We'll analyze the interplay between enigmatic devices of narration (i.e. the unreliable narrator; minor characters; impersonal style, etc.) and social enigmas related to identity and belonging in a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels. Authors include Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Toni Morrison, Rachel Cusk, Han Kang, and Raven Leilani.  

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

GNSE 20112 From The Harem To Helem: Gender And Sexuality In The Modern Middle East
Instructor: Stephanie Kraver
This course counts as a Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality course for GNSE majors. 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 special 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 course for GNSE majors. 

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

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

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

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

GNSE 20153 Practicum: Women and Society
Instructor: Maria Angelica Bautista
Although the inequities between men and women have diminished during the last decades, large gaps are still evident and resistant to change. Throughout this course, we will explore the origins of these disparities which are all fundamentally rooted in the patriarchal nature of society. Understanding how patriarchy came to be the dominant order requires a multidisciplinary and historical approach. The first lectures will cover debates in biology, human evolution, history and archeology that explain the deep roots and the spread of this order throughout the centuries. The next set of lectures will cover how current cultural practices and social norms facilitate the reproduction of the patriarchy and will also examine alternative ways in which societies have organized themselves where women have powerful roles or live in matriarchies. The class will also capture how women from the Global South contest this order within their societies and on their own terms. Finally, we will evaluate policies that have aimed to close the gap between men and women around the world. A central theme of the course is that to understand how to craft effective policies one needs to understand the mechanisms which created patriarchy and led it to persist. The students will offer presentations that will revise these policies from a critical perspective based on the material we covered throughout the quarter. This is a practicum course and can satisfy the Windows requirement in the public policy major.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors 

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

GNSE 21706 The Power and Politics of Description: Ethnography, Documentary and Modernist Literature
Instructor: Bellamy Mitchell
The work of description—the way that writers convey the characteristic features and significant details of people and places in language—can contain and confirm biases and anchor stale tropes of identity, but can also refuse, exceed, play with, and subverting readerly expectations. Descriptions made for the purposes of political consciousness-raising, journalistic documenting, or narrative storytelling bring into sharp relief senses of ourselves in relation to perceptions of “otherness” along lines of place, race, class, and gender. In this class, we will read literary and photographic works by authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, James Agee and Walker Evans and focus on how they experiment with methodologies of description and representation of people borrowed from anthropology, photography, and documentary journalism, as well as literary techniques like stream-of-consciousness narration and first-personal disclosure—to productively account for the limitations of their individual perspectives and authorial voices as a narrative and poetic tool. Particular attention will be paid to how gender and sexuality, race and racialization, and embodiment impact these accounts of social worlds, relations, and cultures, and person.  

GNSE 22295 Morrissey's America: Contemporary Social Problems
Instructor: Renè 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 22806 An Indigenous People’s History of Hawaiʻi
Instructor: Uahikea Maile
What you know about Hawai‘i is most likely untrue. An archipelago in Oceania’s sea of islands, Hawai‘i has been locally constructed and globally consumed as a tropical paradise for pleasure and play, attracting tourists, settlers, corporations, and military forces to its shores. It is a fantasized paradise produced through the dispossession, elimination, appropriation, and exploitation of Indigenous people, institutions, worldviews, and practices. This course tells a truer story about Hawai‘i. Because ideas and narratives crafted about the history, politics, economics, law, ecology, and society of Hawai‘i are dominated and often distorted by non-Indigenous writers, we turn to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholars to learn from their subjugated knowledge. The course examines interdisciplinary research, from the 19th century to the present, and excavates the truths advanced through it: the development of the Hawaiian Kingdom and its government, political order, economy, and society; the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian government and US military occupation and annexation of its territory; legal constructions of race and techniques of gender and sexuality in the territorial period; the creation of the State of Hawaii amid World War II and the Cold War; the birth and evolution of the modern Hawaiian sovereignty movement; and contemporary Kanaka Maoli struggles with federal recognition, militourism, and technoscientific development.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GNSE 23183 Labor and Resistance at the Margins: Race, Gender, and “Dirty” Work
Instructor: Resha Swanson-Varner
Over 100 years ago, Black feminist scholar Anna Julia Cooper challenged narrow definitions of work---which excluded much of the household labor relegated to women---and argued for work to be more broadly defined as “all human exertion." In this class, we put gender in conversation with race, ethnicity, class, power, and labor to answer the following questions: 1) What is labor? What types of labor do we deem “dirty” work? 2) Who does the dirty work and the care work that keeps society going? What social, economic, and political constraints influence the type of work we do? 3) How do we practice resistance in our work? While global perspectives on labor are welcome and incredibly useful, this course and its readings mainly discuss labor and work within the U.S. context.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors 

GNSE 23185 Exploring Gender Biases from Social, Developmental, and Cognitive Perspectives
Instructor: Molly Tallberg
Women are underrepresented across political leadership, business, and certain STEM domains. While these gender gaps have improved over the last 50 years, they remain persistent, particularly in positions of power and those that grant high socioeconomic status. This course will explore how these gender biases come to be, and how they influence the world around us. Where do these gender biases come from? When in life do their consequences emerge? What impact do these biases have on individuals, communities, and institutions? What can be done to prevent gender biases from developing? How do they intersect with race, and how do they operate outside of the gender binary? This course will address these timely questions, integrating literature from across the psychological sciences to explain the cognitive biases, social landscapes, and developmental trajectories that give rise to gender inequality.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

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

GNSE 23725 La Querelle Des Femmes
Instructor: Peadar Kavanagh
La condition des femmes dans une société centrée sur l'homme est remise en cause en France au XVIIe siècle : naissent les premiers salons présidés par des femmes, qui défendent leur éducation intellectuelle et remettent en question le mariage ; la séparation cartésienne entre corps et esprit permet de prôner l’égalité des sexes. Ce proto-féminisme affronte aussitôt une forte réaction, qui s’exprime notamment par la satire, comme ses adhérentes sont traitées de « précieuses » et de « femmes savantes », dans le théâtre de Molière comme ailleurs. Dans un premier temps, nous écouterons les voix majeures de ce mouvement (telles que Madeleine de Scudéry, la salonnière dite Sapho), et examinerons ses diverses interprétations (notamment en longeant ensemble La Galerie des femmes fortes en Special Collections). Ensuite, nous ferons l’analyse des stratégies anti-féministes pour le miner. Enfin, la querelle de 1694 autour d’une satire misogyne de Boileau nous servira de conclusion pour un chapitre dans la longue histoire du féminisme et de sa réaction. Taught in French. 

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

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

GNSE 25031 The Writing I
Instructor: Darya Tsymbalyuk
How do personal and lived experiences shape our understanding of social and cultural phenomena? What is the role of the self in the practice of academic writing? In this course, we will examine the self as a lens through which we interpret the world and as a repository of knowledge. We will study different academic genres which actively engage personal and lived experiences as integral components of knowledge-making, such as autoethnography and autotheory, and discuss their relation to feminist thought. We will also practice academic writing that engages the self and its embodied knowledge as a method to understand, interpret and theorize the world around us. The readings will include Lauren Fournier, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Shushan Avagyan, Stephanie D. Clare, Donna Haraway, and there will also be workshops/talks by young practitioners of autoethnography and autotheory.  

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

GNSE 25695 Workplace And Family Policy
Instructor: Yukiko Asai
The topics covered in the course will include: the demographic transition, human capital accumulation, gender wage and employment gaps, discrimination in the workplace, family leave and childcare policies, tax policies including subsidies like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and related welfare policies. We will draw on the theory of static and dynamic labor supply, theories of labor demand, and labor market equilibrium to guide its investigation, and use empirical tools to answer research questions. For each topic covered in this course, I will introduce an elementary treatment of the canonical theoretical model and give examples of its empirical application. In studying empirical applications, we will often draw on analysis from international experience.  

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

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

GNSE 27332 Themes In The Anthropology Of Islam: Debates, Tradition, Critiques
Instructor: Alexis Chavez
The course begins by examining principal themes and debates the anthropology of Islam has engaged with in its attempt to undo Western universalist concepts such as secularism and the anthropological categories of culture and religion. We will learn to historicize these concepts and explore alternative frameworks anthropologists have offered for studying Muslim societies. We will turn an ethnographic lens towards studies on the Islamic Revival in Egypt, Turkey, Europe, and East Asia in order to study how Muslims cultivate piety, relate to the unseen, and retain cultural ties alongside their religious identities. In the process, we will learn the ways they trouble conventional notions around women’s agency, ideas around modernity’s “disenchantment,” and secular conceptions of belief. We will then explore texts that indirectly problematize the anthropology of Islam’s coordinates around orthopraxy, authority, and ritual. As we do so, we will interrogate the relationship between U.S. Blackness and Islam, religious piety and consumer capitalism, as well as transnationalism and incarceration. We will situate our readings and discussions within the broader political context of the Global War on Terror and secular governmentality, with a particular attention to questions of race, gender, and political struggle.  

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

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

 

Graduate Course Descriptions

SPRING 2025

GNSE 30112 From The Harem To Helem: Gender And Sexuality In The Modern Middle East
Instructor: Stephanie Kraver
This course counts as a Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality course for GNSE majors. 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 special 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 30152 Indigenous Feminisms
Instructor: Jodi Byrd
Indigenous women, queers, trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit people have been at the forefront of Indigenous resistance struggles, most recently at Standing Rock, at Mauna Kea, and in protests against Line 3 and Line 6 pipelines in the upper midwest and Canada. Their voices, along with Indigenous queer and feminist scholars in academia, have been working to understand the interrelatedness of gendered violences, land dispossession, and cultural appropriation. This class will consider how Indigenous feminist, queer, and Two Spirit scholars have theorized gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism alongside queer and feminist of color critiques toward accountable visions of resistance. We will read works by Indigenous feminist scholars, writers, poets, and activists from the nineteenth-century to the twenty-first to consider how Indigeneity challenges how gender and sexuality are experienced in the context of ongoing settler colonialism.  

GNSE 31285 Toni Morrison, beloved and a mercy
Instructor: SJ Zhang
“How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together." Beginning with Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture, this class will read (for many reread) two of Toni Morrison’s novels that pose the house and household as a “site of memory” in which to dramatize gendered histories of race in North America. Our class will annotate together Beloved and A Mercy with the essays, films, poetry of various scholars, in addition to some of Morrison’s literary critical and historical writings. Our in-depth reading of these two works will provide a foundation for engaging in ongoing debates about race and writing in literary studies, black feminists critiques of the classroom, and histories of race-based slavery in North America. If, as Morrison contends, “language” teaches us “how to see without pictures” and that “language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names,” we will aim to hold language close as we consider “what moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”  

GNSE 31706 The Power and Politics of Description: Ethnography, Documentary and Modernist Literature
Instructor: Bellamy Mitchell
The work of description—the way that writers convey the characteristic features and significant details of people and places in language—can contain and confirm biases and anchor stale tropes of identity, but can also refuse, exceed, play with, and subverting readerly expectations. Descriptions made for the purposes of political consciousness-raising, journalistic documenting, or narrative storytelling bring into sharp relief senses of ourselves in relation to perceptions of “otherness” along lines of place, race, class, and gender. In this class, we will read literary and photographic works by authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, James Agee and Walker Evans and focus on how they experiment with methodologies of description and representation of people borrowed from anthropology, photography, and documentary journalism, as well as literary techniques like stream-of-consciousness narration and first-personal disclosure—to productively account for the limitations of their individual perspectives and authorial voices as a narrative and poetic tool. Particular attention will be paid to how gender and sexuality, race and racialization, and embodiment impact these accounts of social worlds, relations, and cultures, and person.  

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

GNSE 33175 Sexuality in U.S. History Post 1900
Instructor: Red Tremmel
In this course we will study the history of changing sexual practices, relations, politics, and cultures in the region of North America now comprising the United States and 574 sovereign tribal nations. Moving through various contexts, such as urban drag balls, medical schools, federal agencies, strip clubs, military projects, homophile and other liberatory movements, as well as popular culture, we will use primary and secondary sources to develop a research-based understanding of how sexual discourses are produced, revised, and remixed among and across generations.  

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

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

GNSE 33183 Labor and Resistance at the Margins: Race, Gender, and “Dirty” Work
Instructor: Resha Swanson-Varner
Over 100 years ago, Black feminist scholar Anna Julia Cooper challenged narrow definitions of work---which excluded much of the household labor relegated to women---and argued for work to be more broadly defined as “all human exertion." In this class, we put gender in conversation with race, ethnicity, class, power, and labor to answer the following questions: 1) What is labor? What types of labor do we deem “dirty” work? 2) Who does the dirty work and the care work that keeps society going? What social, economic, and political constraints influence the type of work we do? 3) How do we practice resistance in our work? While global perspectives on labor are welcome and incredibly useful, this course and its readings mainly discuss labor and work within the U.S. context. 

GNSE 35031 The Writing I
Instructor: Darya Tsymbalyuk
How do personal and lived experiences shape our understanding of social and cultural phenomena? What is the role of the self in the practice of academic writing? In this course, we will examine the self as a lens through which we interpret the world and as a repository of knowledge. We will study different academic genres which actively engage personal and lived experiences as integral components of knowledge-making, such as autoethnography and autotheory, and discuss their relation to feminist thought. We will also practice academic writing that engages the self and its embodied knowledge as a method to understand, interpret and theorize the world around us. The readings will include Lauren Fournier, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Shushan Avagyan, Stephanie D. Clare, Donna Haraway, and there will also be workshops/talks by young practitioners of autoethnography and autotheory.  

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

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

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

GNSE 42001 Feminist Theory and Theology
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. This seminar will engage a close reading of The Second Sex in English translation, considering Beauvoir’s picture of freedom, desire, and subjectivity as situated, and attending to her interpretation of mysticism, "vocation," and transcendence. We will consider the reception of Beauvoir’s work by selected feminist, womanist, and queer thinkers, and critically assess that legacy.  

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

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

GNSE 47400 Women, Development, And Politics
Instructor: Maria Bautista
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 47714 Reproductive Citizens: Sex, Work, And Embodiment
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we focus on literature, film, history, and theory that deal with biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. Our readings and viewings are centered in the U.S. and span the early twentieth century through the present—and we approach the above themes and structures in relation to the troubled and uneven histories of race, gender, and class that shape them. To this end, we will learn about the history of eugenics and sterilization; the afterlife of slavery and racist (anti-Asian) U.S. immigration policy; settler colonialism and the Native American reservation system; state policing of family and kinship structures; developments in reproductive and gender-affirming biotechnology; and the thorny politics of sex work. At the same time, we will be equally interested in the ways that activists, theorists, and other cultural producers have pushed against oppressive policies and structures to imagine and fight for reproductive justice and liberation at the intersection of race, labor, and gender. We spend time, for example, with Black and Native feminists, Marxist social reproduction theorists, family abolitionists, and sex worker’s rights activists. Readings and viewings may include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tillie Olsen, Gayl Jones, Fae Myenne Ng, Louise Erdrich, Lizzie Borden, Barbara Loden, Amy Heckerling, and the International Wages for Housework Campaign.  

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

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

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

Course Archive