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 2023

 

Graduate Courses

SPRING 2023

 

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

SPRING 2023

GNSE 12114 The Past, Present and Future of Feminist Ethics
Instructor: Kat Myers
Many injustices in the world are related to gender oppression and inequality. In this introductory course, we will examine the ways that feminist ethics aims to identify, assess, and correct gender biases that cause this harm. We will begin by situating feminist ethics within its historical context to understand how and why it developed. We will then consider different methods that feminists use to identify and critique oppressive social structures. With these tools in hand, we will assess several acute sources of gender oppression and inequality, including the global labor market, reproductive mores, and climate change. In doing so, we will also consider proposals to remedy these harms. Throughout the course, we will ponder the intersection of gender with religion, race, class, and global location. We will be attentive to the role that Western feminism has had in shaping global views on oppression and inequality. We will also evaluate the influence of religion on feminist ethics. As we read, we will explore the normative commitments that are expressed in the texts, as well as the bases for these commitments and the sources of authority to which the authors appeal as they claim to advance gender justice. This course is an undergraduate course that assumes no prior knowledge in ethics, feminist studies, or religious studies. It will include some lectures but will be primarily seminar based. Students will be expected to participate in class discussion and will also be asked to write summaries of readings, create a social media post, and complete a final paper or TED-style talk.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

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

GNSE 12122 Disability and Sexuality
Instructor: Shruti Vaidya
How have academics, activists, and policymakers across the world addressed the intersection of disability and sexuality? What are the different perspectives and issues of concern for stakeholders regarding the sexuality of disabled people? What are the social, ethical, and political stakes of talking about, representing, and analysing the nexus of disability and sexuality from a foundation in the social sciences? This class addresses these questions by engaging with a wide variety of sources, such as, ethnographic, gender studies, and disability studies writings, memoirs, blog posts, and documentaries. We begin by learning about the foundational social science concepts of disability and sexuality separately. We next move to examining key frameworks, perspectives, and debates regarding the sexual lives of disabled people. Through the class, we analyze how disability, age, gender, race, class, geographic location, and queerness shape sexual experiences of disabled people. We will consider themes of bodily pleasure and control, romantic love and marriage, reproductive choice and constraints, and the role of kinship and family. In the latter half of the class, we move to memoirs, ethnographic accounts, and documentaries that highlight the lived experiences and perspectives of disabled people. These texts and our discussions will bring up questions of ethics of representation (who gets to talk about whose sexuality), sexual autonomy, care, and personhood more broadly.
This course counts as a Foundations class for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 15504 Bad Taste—Cultivation and Modern Society from Kitsch to Camp
Instructor: Alice Goff
"To understand bad taste one must have very good taste," the filmmaker and "Pope of Trash" John Waters wrote in 1981. This course will put this claim to the test in a journey through the material, cultural, and intellectual history of bad taste and its pillar concepts, such as schlock, kitsch, and camp, from the mid-eighteenth century through the present day. Our focus will be primarily on Europe, where shifting notions of bad taste powerfully shaped the modern social order, both underwriting and undermining categories of race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion. Readings will be drawn from primary and secondary sources from the history of art, aesthetics, sociology, political theory, media studies, and the history of the senses. How was taste connected to morality in European society? What did it reveal about individual and collective identities, and about people’s understanding of their position in the world? How did the emergence of consumer culture, empire, urbanization, or technology influence normative standards of taste? How was bad taste mobilized in order to resist or uphold these standards? In answering these questions, we will be concerned not only with theories of bad taste, but also with its material cultural manifestations, using everything from fashion to food to visual art to music to become ourselves connoisseurs of this historically potent genre. Open to 1st- and 2nd-yr students who are interested in history.

GNSE 15600 Medieval English Literature
Instructor: Mark Miller
A course on experimental poetry of the late 14th century, with special attention to how formal techniques of disorientation and discontinuity are related to the philosophical, ethical, and political ambitions of poetry.  

GNSE 19500 Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley
Instructor: Alexis Chema
This course examines the major works—novels, political treatises, letters, travel essays—of two of Romanticism’s most influential women writers. We will attend to historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts as well as matters of literary concern, such as their pioneering development of modes like gothic and science/speculative fiction, Wollstonecraft’s stylistic theories, and Shelley’s scenes of imaginative sympathy.

GNSE 19960 Comedy from the Margins
Instructor: Shirl Yang
This course examines the centrality of normativity to our conceptions of funniness, reading theories of comedy alongside stand-up, sitcoms, dramedy, and romantic comedy. We will ask: in what ways do comedic formulas establish ideas of the “normal” in order to subvert (or perhaps reinforce) them? How, does comedy about the “strange”—as the foreign, the queer, the excessive or the abject—reframe structures of sociality often taken for granted, forcing us to grapple with questions of citizenship and belonging, gendered and sexual norms, racialization and power? In addition to theories of comedy and joke theory, students will analyze theoretical works on race, gender and sexuality alongside popular television series, talk shows, and comedy specials. Possible texts and comics include: Chewing Gum, Fleabag, Insecure, Reservation Dogs, Ramy, Atlanta, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, Julio Torres, Hasan Minhaj, Ali Wong, Jacqueline Novak, Dave Chappelle, Hannah Gadsby, and Ronny Chieng.  

GNSE 20108 Feminist Political Philosophy
Instructor: Emily Dupree
Feminist political philosophy has a two-fold history: both as a persistent critique of canonical political philosophy, as well as generative of new models of justice altogether. This course will be an exploration of the two sides of the history of feminist political philosophy. We will begin with a survey of feminist critiques of the canon, including from liberal feminism, Black feminist philosophy, and Marxist feminist philosophy. We will then move on to the positive accounts that have come out of this tradition, asking whether new models of the state, of the person, and of gender are required in order to construct theories that adequately represent what justice requires in a world with gender-based oppression. We will read philosophers such as Rousseau, Marx, Engels, John Rawls, Susan Okin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine Mackinnon, and Christine Delphy.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20115 Women, Peace and Security
Instructor: Maliha Chishti
This course focuses on critical feminist theorizing and scholarship on militarization, war and masculinities, and on feminist articulations of peace and (demilitarized) security. Students will learn about the transnational feminist research, policy and advocacy network known as the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and the important inroads this network has made in establishing international and national policies in the fields of gender, conflict, peace and development. The course highlights the background, history and policy significance of the historic Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, as well as subsequent and related UN resolutions. Students will also learn about alternative feminist approaches and visions for international peace and security, through powerful case study examples of feminist activism, solidarity and diplomacy.
This course counts as a Problems Course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20119 Language, Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Joshua Babcock
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, 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 class counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20122 Medieval Masculinity 
Instructor: Jonathan Lyon and Alexa Herland
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 course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20124 Fictions of Patriarchy in German Literature and Thought
Instructor: Sophie Salvo
In his 1861 study Mother Right, J. J. Bachofen argues that patriarchy is, at is most basic level, fictive. While the mother’s connection to the child is materially perceptible—she gestates, births, and nurses her offspring—the father is a “remoter potency” whose relationship to his progeny, because it is always mediated through the mother, can never be known for sure. Paternity, Bachofen suggests, is a juridical invention rather than a naturally evident fact.
Taking its cue from Bachofen, this course will investigate the relationship between notions of patriarchy and fictionality in German literature and thought. We will consider how philosophical texts use the figure of the father to ground their speculative claims, how literary narratives adapt changing ideas about the family and the state, and how concepts of patriarchy have structured thinking about fiction’s function and effects. Readings from: Herder, Schiller, Fichte, Kleist, Bachofen, Hauptmann, Freud, Werfel, Heiner Müller, and Jelinek, among others.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20242 States Markets Bodies
Instructor: Kimberly Hoang
An introduction to political economy, this course will introduce students to theories, concepts, and tools for studying relations between states and markets that affect the structure of power relationships. Taking a global approach, we will examine the different forms of state repression, the consequences of a neoliberal and decentralized global market, and its affects on individual people/workers. This course is motivated by three interrelated questions: (1) What is the appropriate role of the government in the economy? (2) How should states govern their citizens? (3) What is the role of the individuals who make up civil society?

GNSE 20601 Women in Hittite Society
Instructor: Petra Goedegebuure
In this advanced Hittite course we will explore the roles and functions of women in Hittite society by comparing the image created by kings with the image that flows from their own writings and actions. Queens that will be discussed are the 'evil' Tawanannas and Queen Puduhepa, who had her own independent correspondence with the Great Kings and royals of other countries. We will also investigate the 'Wise Women', a class of diviners that seems to have operated as an advisory council to the king in matters of danger to the state. No knowledge of Hittite required.  

GNSE 20700 Topics in EALC: Poets/Teacher/Fighters: Writing Women in China and Beyond
Instructor: Paola Iovene This course offers a survey of women's writing in late Imperial and modern China, exploring the ways in which women (and men) reimagined the collectivity of women and the concept of “women’s literature” in order to stake out a position in the cultural sphere. How did Chinese women use literature to redefine what it meant to be a woman, and what was their role (both of women and of literature) in the major social and political upheavals and in the revolutionary movements of their day? Readings include essays, poetry, diaries and fiction by women writers from the 12th to the 21th century in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. All assigned readings are in English translation, but students who read Chinese are encouraged to read the original texts. 

GNSE 21522 Leggere Al Femminile Nella Letteratura Italiana
Instructor: Fara Taddei
Il corso ha l’obiettivo di esplorare la figura della lettrice attraverso l’analisi di testi in lingua italiana di diverse epoche, includendo testi di Giovanni Boccaccio, Ludovico Ariosto, Tullia d’Aragona, ma anche testi più moderni di autori come Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg. Alcuni temi che tratteremo sono la riscrittura di testi classici, le dinamiche della committenza nel Rinascimento, l’evoluzione delle pratiche di lettura. Per approfondire questi temi, useremo testi critici in italiano o inglese, con contributi di Elena Lombardi, Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Barbara Johnson e altri. Taught in Italian 

GNSE 21705 Ectogenes and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism, Reproduction
Instructor: Hilary Strang
Recent work in feminist theory and feminist studies of science and technology has reopened and reconfigured questions around reproduction, embodiment, and social relations. Sophie Lewis’s account of “uterine geographies” and Michelle Murphy’s work on chemical latency and “distributed reproduction” stand as examples of this kind of work, which asks us to think about embodied life beyond the individual (and the human) and to see ‘biological reproduction’ in expansive and utopian ways. Social reproduction theory might be an example in a different key, as might recent Marxist and communist accounts of the gendering of labor under capital. Such investigations have a long (though sometimes quickly passed over) history in feminist thought (Shulamith Firestone’s call for ectogenic reproduction is a famous example), and in the radical reimaginings of personhood, human/nature relations, and sexing and gendering of feminist science fiction. Indeed, the work of science fiction around these questions may be a whole other story than the one told by theory. This class will ask students to think between feminist science and technology studies, theoretical approaches to questions around social and biological reproduction, and the opening up of reproductive possibility found in feminist science fiction.  

GNSE 21725 Black in Colonial America: Three Women
Instructor: SJ Zhang
Through a survey of texts by and about Sally Hemings, Phillis Wheatley and Tituba, “the Indian,” we will consider the lives of three black women in colonial America. In this period of expansion and contraction of the concepts of race and bondage, what kind of “tellings” were possible for these women? By reading texts written as early as 1692 and as late as 2008, we will also consider how representations of these women have changed over time. Simplified by history as a witch, a poet and a mistress, the details of the lives of Tituba, Phillis and Sally resists these epithets. This course will ask why and how they remain present in the written record today, and what this teaches us about the formation of literary and historical canons.

GNSE 22151 Pacific Worlds: Race, Gender, Health and the Environment
Instructor: Christopher Kindell
This discussion-based course will introduce students to both classical and recent scholarship in Pacific World historiography. By adopting micro-historical, comparative, and transnational methods, students will examine the formation of three overlapping “worlds”: The Antipodes, Polynesia, and the northeastern Pacific. Analyzing the myriad intersections of race, gender, health, and the environment, we will explore a range of large-scale historical processes that shaped and reshaped the Pacific between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. These processes include European exploration, settler colonialism, and indigenous sovereignty; sex, depopulation, and race science; labor, migration, and urbanization; industrialization and environmental exploitation; and imperial expansion and citizenship. The course is intended for students with an interest in the Pacific Islands, Australasia, and the North American West, as well as those interested in race, gender, health, or the environment within indigenous, immigrant, or settler colonial contexts. Required readings — which will consist of book chapters and academic articles — will be used to contextualize and critically analyze a variety of primary sources during each class session.  

GNSE 22295 Morrissey's America: Contemporary Social Problems
Instructor: René 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 22520 Economics of Gender in an International Context
Instructor: Alessandra Gonzalez
In this class, students will engage basic issues, conflicts, and innovative field research in economics of gender in international contexts. In particular, we will review theoretical foundations, data and methods of research, and a review of recent work in international research related to economics of gender. At the end of the course, you will have a suite of research approaches, topics, and methods, to investigate gender differences in a variety of economic outcomes and contexts. ECON 10000 or PBPL 22200. STAT 22000 also recommended.

GNSE 22690 (re)Queering the American Musical
Instructors: Leslie Buxbaum, David Levin and Erin McKeown
In this combined studio and seminar course, we explore a selection of musicals (tentatively including Fun Home, Falsettos, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, A Strange Loop, and Indecent) considering their dramatic structure, character construction, performance norms, and musical conventions. In what sense(s) are these works “queer”? Students will investigate course materials through readings, discussions, staging experiments, and a choice of either a final paper or an artistic project. Open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Previous experience in theater, music, and/or film analysis or production is preferred but not required; an interest in detailed textual analysis, rigorous discussion, and focused creative engagement is essential. Team-taught by Leslie Buxbaum (Professor of Practice in TAPS), Erin McKeown (Visiting Gray Center Fellow and composer of the musical Miss You Like Hell), and David Levin (Professor in TAPS, CMS, Germanics, and Sr Advisor to the Provost for Arts) as part of their collaborative Gray Center fellowship “An Un-dosical” which seeks to explore the norms of the American musical.  

GNSE 23143 Intro to Porn Studies
Instructor: Gabriel Ojeda-Sague
This course is a multi-media introduction to the Western history and study of the mode/label/genre of aesthetic production called pornography and its other appearances as “obscenity,” “erotica,” “porn,” “filth,” “art,” “adult,” “hardcore,” “softcore,” “trash,” and “extremity.” We will study how others have approached this form, how they have sought to control it, uplift it, analyze it, destroy it, take it seriously, or learn to live with it. This course is both an introduction to the academic field of “porn studies” and to its equal and opposite: the endless repository of historical and current attempts to get pornography out of the way, to keep it somewhere else out of sight, to destroy it, or to deem it unworthy of study. We begin with a conversation about what the stakes are and have been in studying porn and how we might go about doing it, and then move through history and media technologies beginning with the category of pornography’s invention with regards to drawings from Pompeii. The course is meant to introduce students to various forms pornography has taken, various historical moments in its sociocultural existence, and various themes that have continued to trouble or enchant looking at pornography. The goal of this course is not to make an argument for or against porn wholesale, but to give students the ability to take this contentious form and its continued life seriously, intelligently, and ethically.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23144 Reading Nineteenth Century Feminisms
Instructor: Emily Coit
Disputes about sexual difference set feminist factions against each other during the nineteenth century, as in the present; and, like the feminisms of our own moment, nineteenth-century feminisms diverged sharply on questions about race and racism. This course reads US and British prose from 1850-1915 in order to study the debates that shaped feminist thought during that period. Considering a range of varied feminisms (among them: liberal feminism, difference feminism, eugenic feminism, white feminism, etc.), we'll encounter conflicting arguments about the right to vote, access to education, marriage, mothering, and sex. Authors may include: Anna Julia Cooper, George Eliot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, Frances E.W. Harper, John Stuart Mill, Lucy Parsons, John Ruskin, Mary Arnold Ward, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23152 History of Sexuality and Sin
Instructor: Maureen Kelly
Since Foucault’s groundbreaking work on the History of Sexuality, we have become attuned to the effects of power and the political implications of the science of sexuality. While Foucault’s text has offered a critical avenue to examine the secular state’s administrations of sexuality, it begins with Christianity’s techniques of power based on the confession of one’s sex. The Christian formulation of the relationship between ‘sex’ and ‘sin’ is essential to understanding the techniques of power that connect sexuality, legality, criminality, normality, and transgression in modern secular contexts. In this class, we will begin with the critical questions of the History of Sexuality, then turn to primary texts in order to examine the way ‘sex’ and ‘sin’ became conceptually connected in Christianity, and finally interrogate the effects of this relation for medieval and modern politics. Over the course of these readings, we will trace the relation between the concepts and their effects to discern the histories of sexuality that lie at the root of contemporary debates on freedom, power, resistance, and desire. No prerequisites.
This class counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

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

GNSE 24003 Mind, Brain, and Mental Health
Instructor: Virginia Rangos
This course will approach the medicalization of mental healthcare, through an intersectional lens, with particular attention to how diagnosis and treatment are gendered and racialized. Topics will include: the construction of diagnostic categories and the process of medicalization and de-medicalization (e.g. of addiction, sexual behavior and identity, etc.); stigma and disability activism; and experiencing and conceptualizing an injured or ill brain/mind. Course material will focus on the United States, with international case comparisons.

GNSE 24026 Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Feminist Biography
Instructor: Avi Steinberg
The personal is political – that slogan of Women’s Liberation – has long been understood, among other things, as a call for new forms of storytelling. One of those forms, feminist biography, has flourished in publishing since the 1970s, and it continues to evolve today, even as the terms of feminism and of biography are continually re-negotiated by writers and critics. In this workshop, we read some of those writers and critics. And we read illustrative examples of contemporary feminist biography (and anti-biography) in various nonfiction genres, including magazine profile, trade book, Wiki article, audio performance, personal essay, cult pamphlet, avant-garde art piece. Mostly, we try out the form for ourselves, in our own writing. Each workshop writer will choose a biographical subject (single, collective, or otherwise), and work up a series of sketches around that subject. By the end of the quarter, workshop writers will build these sketches into a single piece of longform life-writing. The workshop will focus equally on story-craft and method (e.g. interview and research techniques, cultivating sources); indeed we consider the ways that method and story are inevitably connected. This workshop might also include a week with an invited guest, a practicing critic or biographer. Instructor consent required. Apply via www.creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.  

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

GNSE 26240 Black Experimentation in Dance
Instructor: Tara Aisha Willis
In this course, experimentation is explored as a choreographic approach to dancing and making dances. Grounded in process, practice, inquiry, and improvisation, experimentation has a long history in Black expressive culture. This class pairs readings at the intersection of Black performance theory, feminist and queer of color theory, and Black dance studies with examples of dance performances and artists interrogating topics such as the problem of aesthetic categorization, navigating racial visibility/invisibility onstage, and the politics of Black dancing bodies. The class focuses on concert dance in the United States, but may cover examples from social dance, popular entertainment, performance art, and global contexts.  

GNSE 26700 Jeanne d’Arc, histoire et légende
Instructor: Daisy Delogu
S’appuyant sur l’exemple de Jeanne d’Arc, ce cours s’intéressera à la manière dont nous transformons le passé à la lumière des besoins et des soucis du présent. Nous situerons Jeanne d’Arc dans son contexte historique à l’aide des documents légaux, littéraires, et ecclésiastiques. Nous considérerons ensuite les représentations multiples et variées de Jeanne au cours des siècles suivants, examinant par exemple des textes de Voltaire, de Michelet, d’Anouilh, et d’autres, ainsi que des films qui présentent la vie de Jeanne d’Arc. Taught in French.
PQ: FREN FREN 20500, 20503 or a literature course taught in French.

GNSE 27714 Reproductive Modernism
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we focus on the centrality of debates around women's reproductive capacity in shaping the culture of modernity in the U.S. around 1900. We look at the way that feminist politics, in conjunction with broader developments in industrial capitalist society, disrupted traditional pathways of reproduction, as these have revolved around woman's crucial role in sustaining the biological family and the home. We will read fiction, essays, and political tracts around the birth control movement, free love, sex work, the figure of the "new woman," the politics of the home, the rise of consumer culture, and the demands placed on both Black and white women during this period in reproducing "the race." Most generally, we will focus on texts that both trouble and shore up bourgeois motherhood as the central means of reproducing the biological life and social fabric of American culture. And we will likewise be interested in writers and political figures that imagine and advocate for non-reproductive intimacies that would dismantle this social reproductive order altogether.

GNSE 28230 Fashion and Change: Theory of Fashion
Instructor: Tim Campbell
This course will offer a representative view of foundational and recent fashion theory and fashion history, with a historical focus on the long modern era extending from the eighteenth century to the present. While engaging the general aesthetic and commercial phenomenon of fashion, we will devote special attention to fashion as a discourse preoccupied with the problem of cultural change—the surprisingly difficult question of how and why change does or does not happen. We will aim for a broader appreciation of fashion’s inner workings, but we will also confront the long tradition of thinking culture through fashion, to ask how we might also do the same.

GNSE 29162 Masquerade as Critique
Instructor: Leah Pires
Critique is most often figured as an act that reveals a reality that was previously hidden, as though one were pulling back a curtain or lifting a veil. But, as the critic Craig Owens points out, "in a culture in which visibility is always on the side of the male, invisibility on the side of the female…are not the activities of unveiling, stripping, laying bare…unmistakably male prerogatives"? This interdisciplinary seminar develops an alternate genealogy of critique informed by feminist, queer, and Black studies perspectives. It eschews the modernist drive toward transparency, instead examining tactics of resistance such as masquerade, disidentification, appropriation, drag, fugitivity, and critical fabulation. This course pairs readings by authors including Eve Sedgwick, bell hooks, José Muñoz, and Saidiya Hartman with art, performance, and films by figures like Claude Cahun, Carrie Mae Weems, Jack Smith, the Karrabing Film Collective, Cheryl Dunye, David Hammons, and Jennie Livingston. Together, we will ask: What is critique, and how does it relate to power? How have artists engaged strategically with visibility and invisibility, and what can their work teach us today? This course will incorporate guest lectures and fieldwork in museums and archives. Culminating in a creative final project, it aims to develop a toolkit for critique that thinks past the timeworn imperative to render the invisible visible.

 

Graduate Course Descriptions

SPRING 2023

GNSE 30124 Fictions of Patriarchy in German Literature and Thought
Instructor: Sophie Salvo
In his 1861 study Mother Right, J. J. Bachofen argues that patriarchy is, at is most basic level, fictive. While the mother’s connection to the child is materially perceptible—she gestates, births, and nurses her offspring—the father is a “remoter potency” whose relationship to his progeny, because it is always mediated through the mother, can never be known for sure. Paternity, Bachofen suggests, is a juridical invention rather than a naturally evident fact.
Taking its cue from Bachofen, this course will investigate the relationship between notions of patriarchy and fictionality in German literature and thought. We will consider how philosophical texts use the figure of the father to ground their speculative claims, how literary narratives adapt changing ideas about the family and the state, and how concepts of patriarchy have structured thinking about fiction’s function and effects. Readings from: Herder, Schiller, Fichte, Kleist, Bachofen, Hauptmann, Freud, Werfel, Heiner Müller, and Jelinek, among others.

GNSE 30601 Women in Hittite Society
Instructor: Petra Goedegebuure
In this advanced Hittite course we will explore the roles and functions of women in Hittite society by comparing the image created by kings with the image that flows from their own writings and actions. Queens that will be discussed are the 'evil' Tawanannas and Queen Puduhepa, who had her own independent correspondence with the Great Kings and royals of other countries. We will also investigate the 'Wise Women', a class of diviners that seems to have operated as an advisory council to the king in matters of danger to the state. No knowledge of Hittite required.

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

GNSE 32205 Technologies of Care
Instructor: Katherine Buse
This seminar will draw on media technology studies, science fiction, and feminist science studies to think about care as an operative theoretical concept that can help reframe our understandings of contemporary technology. We will be concerned with media representations of caring technologies—technologies that give care and technologies we care for and about. We will also be concerned with how care itself is mediated by technology—on whose behalf do technologies care? What does technology care about? What does it mean to care in a technogenic world? Readings and assignments will draw on video games, prose fiction, film and television, but also treat technoscientific objects as media objects: machine learning algorithms, infrastructures, sensors and medical implants are designed and calibrated to mediate flows of information and material, producing ways of seeing, knowing, and relating. We will address three primary axes of technological care: (1) imaginaries of caring and being cared for by artificial intelligence, (2) the care and maintenance of techno-social infrastructures, and (3) technologies that mediate care-giving relationships. 

GNSE 32690 (re)Queering the American Musical
Instructors: Leslie Buxbaum, David Levin and Erin McKeown
In this combined studio and seminar course, we explore a selection of musicals (tentatively including Fun Home, Falsettos, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, A Strange Loop, and Indecent) considering their dramatic structure, character construction, performance norms, and musical conventions. In what sense(s) are these works “queer”? Students will investigate course materials through readings, discussions, staging experiments, and a choice of either a final paper or an artistic project. Open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Previous experience in theater, music, and/or film analysis or production is preferred but not required; an interest in detailed textual analysis, rigorous discussion, and focused creative engagement is essential. Team-taught by Leslie Buxbaum (Professor of Practice in TAPS), Erin McKeown (Visiting Gray Center Fellow and composer of the musical Miss You Like Hell), and David Levin (Professor in TAPS, CMS, Germanics, and Sr Advisor to the Provost for Arts) as part of their collaborative Gray Center fellowship “An Un-dosical” which seeks to explore the norms of the American musical.  

GNSE 33702 Sexual Health: Identity, Behavior, and Outcomes
Instructor: David Moskowitz
Sexual health is a growing component of public health outreach. The goal of this course is to provide students with a foundational understanding of sexual health from a public health perspective. Through participation in this course, students will increase their knowledge about the history of sexual health promotion in the public health sphere. They will delve into sexual and gender identity construction and explore identity-behavioral expressions. They will critically examine and discuss common sexual health issues addressed by public health practitioners, their epidemiology, and their underlying social determinants; a global health lens will be applied to such examinations. Additionally, recognition of the key methodological considerations in the measurement of sexual behavior and sexual health outcomes will be elucidated (including strengths and limitations of various methodological approaches -quantitative, qualitative, clinical, and biomedical). By the completion of the course, students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and application of key theoretical foundations of sexual health promotion and sexual health behavior change and be able to promote sexual health messages through marketing and dissemination. From a policy perspective, student can expect an increased knowledge about issues related to social and legislative policy analyses, their applications, and implications.

GNSE 35700 Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle Ages
Instructor: Mark Miller
The field of gender and sexuality in medieval Western Europe is both familiar and exotic. Medieval poetry is fascinated by the paradoxical inner workings of desire, and poetic, theological, and philosophical texts develop sophisticated terms for analyzing it. Feminine agency is at once essential to figurations of sexual difference and a scandal to them. Ethical self-realization gets associated both with abstinence and with orgasmic rapture. This course will examine these and other topics in medieval gender and sexuality through reading a range of materials including poetry, theology, gynecological treatises, hagiography, and mystical writing.

GNSE 36240 Black Experimentation in Dance
Instructor: Tara Aisha Willis
In this course, experimentation is explored as a choreographic approach to dancing and making dances. Grounded in process, practice, inquiry, and improvisation, experimentation has a long history in Black expressive culture. This class pairs readings at the intersection of Black performance theory, feminist and queer of color theory, and Black dance studies with examples of dance performances and artists interrogating topics such as the problem of aesthetic categorization, navigating racial visibility/invisibility onstage, and the politics of Black dancing bodies. The class focuses on concert dance in the United States, but may cover examples from social dance, popular entertainment, performance art, and global contexts.

GNSE 38100 Gender and Salvation in Jainism and Buddhism
Instructor: Sarah Pierce Taylor
In 1991, Padmanbh Jaini published Gender and Salvation, a monograph that tracks the unfolding of debates within Jainism about the spiritual liberation of women. The book persuasively demonstrates how Jainism and, by extension, Buddhism began to question and subsequently answer questions about women and gender non-conforming people’s bodies, specific paths of women’s religiosity, and the (im)possibility of women’s liberation. This course takes Jaini’s book as its starting point, to explore secondary scholarship on Jainism and Buddhism published in its wake alongside primary source materials.

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

GNSE 39162 Masquerade as Critique
Instructor: Leah Pires
Critique is most often figured as an act that reveals a reality that was previously hidden, as though one were pulling back a curtain or lifting a veil. But, as the critic Craig Owens points out, "in a culture in which visibility is always on the side of the male, invisibility on the side of the female…are not the activities of unveiling, stripping, laying bare…unmistakably male prerogatives"? This interdisciplinary seminar develops an alternate genealogy of critique informed by feminist, queer, and Black studies perspectives. It eschews the modernist drive toward transparency, instead examining tactics of resistance such as masquerade, disidentification, appropriation, drag, fugitivity, and critical fabulation. This course pairs readings by authors including Eve Sedgwick, bell hooks, José Muñoz, and Saidiya Hartman with art, performance, and films by figures like Claude Cahun, Carrie Mae Weems, Jack Smith, the Karrabing Film Collective, Cheryl Dunye, David Hammons, and Jennie Livingston. Together, we will ask: What is critique, and how does it relate to power? How have artists engaged strategically with visibility and invisibility, and what can their work teach us today? This course will incorporate guest lectures and fieldwork in museums and archives. Culminating in a creative final project, it aims to develop a toolkit for critique that thinks past the timeworn imperative to render the invisible visible.

GNSE 40102 Womanist Theology: 1st Generation
Instructor: Dwight Hopkins
Womanist Theology is a contemporary theological discipline in the American academy. It emerged in 1979 and has differentiated into various other disciplines, foci, and methodologies All scholars agree that womanist theology does the following work: (1) expands the theory and method of the academy; (2) broadens the intellectual conversation; (3) welcomes new voices into theological explorations; and (4) challenges the very notion of assumed epistemology. In 1979 Jacquelyn Grant wrote what has now been recognized as the first "womanist" article, "Black Theology and the Black Woman". In that essay, Grant astutely pointed out certain blind spots in black theology of liberation, the larger discussions about the academic study of religion, and the relation between theology and faith communities. 

GNSE 40115 Women, Peace and Security
Instructor: Maliha Chishti
This course focuses on critical feminist theorizing and scholarship on militarization, war and masculinities, and on feminist articulations of peace and (demilitarized) security. Students will learn about the transnational feminist research, policy and advocacy network known as the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and the important inroads this network has made in establishing international and national policies in the fields of gender, conflict, peace and development. The course highlights the background, history and policy significance of the historic Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, as well as subsequent and related UN resolutions. Students will also learn about alternative feminist approaches and visions for international peace and security, through powerful case study examples of feminist activism, solidarity and diplomacy. 

GNSE 41700 Ectogenes and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism, Reproduction
Instructor: Hilary Strang
Recent work in feminist theory and feminist studies of science and technology has reopened and reconfigured questions around reproduction, embodiment, and social relations. Sophie Lewis’s account of “uterine geographies” and Michelle Murphy’s work on chemical latency and “distributed reproduction” stand as examples of this kind of work, which asks us to think about embodied life beyond the individual (and the human) and to see ‘biological reproduction’ in expansive and utopian ways. Social reproduction theory might be an example in a different key, as might recent Marxist and communist accounts of the gendering of labor under capital. Such investigations have a long (though sometimes quickly passed over) history in feminist thought (Shulamith Firestone’s call for ectogenic reproduction is a famous example), and in the radical reimaginings of personhood, human/nature relations, and sexing and gendering of feminist science fiction. Indeed, the work of science fiction around these questions may be a whole other story than the one told by theory. This class will ask students to think between feminist science and technology studies, theoretical approaches to questions around social and biological reproduction, and the opening up of reproductive possibility found in feminist science fiction.  

GNSE 44026 Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Feminist Biography
Instructor: Avi Steinberg
The personal is political – that slogan of Women’s Liberation – has long been understood, among other things, as a call for new forms of storytelling. One of those forms, feminist biography, has flourished in publishing since the 1970s, and it continues to evolve today, even as the terms of feminism and of biography are continually re-negotiated by writers and critics. In this workshop, we read some of those writers and critics. And we read illustrative examples of contemporary feminist biography (and anti-biography) in various nonfiction genres, including magazine profile, trade book, Wiki article, audio performance, personal essay, cult pamphlet, avant-garde art piece. Mostly, we try out the form for ourselves, in our own writing. Each workshop writer will choose a biographical subject (single, collective, or otherwise), and work up a series of sketches around that subject. By the end of the quarter, workshop writers will build these sketches into a single piece of longform life-writing. The workshop will focus equally on story-craft and method (e.g. interview and research techniques, cultivating sources); indeed we consider the ways that method and story are inevitably connected. This workshop might also include a week with an invited guest, a practicing critic or biographer. Instructor consent required. Apply via www.creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.  

GNSE 47714 Reproductive Modernism
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we focus on the centrality of debates around women's reproductive capacity in shaping the culture of modernity in the U.S. around 1900. We look at the way that feminist politics, in conjunction with broader developments in industrial capitalist society, disrupted traditional pathways of reproduction, as these have revolved around woman's crucial role in sustaining the biological family and the home. We will read fiction, essays, and political tracts around the birth control movement, free love, sex work, the figure of the "new woman," the politics of the home, the rise of consumer culture, and the demands placed on both Black and white women during this period in reproducing "the race." Most generally, we will focus on texts that both trouble and shore up bourgeois motherhood as the central means of reproducing the biological life and social fabric of American culture. And we will likewise be interested in writers and political figures that imagine and advocate for non-reproductive intimacies that would dismantle this social reproductive order altogether.

GNSE 53590 Colonialism, Slavery, Race & Gender: Archival Theory and Method
Instructor: SJ Zhang
This class offers an in-depth introduction to archival theory and research methodologies that attend to colonialism and slavery between 1650 and 1865. With a focus on how scholars have used the analytics of race and gender to examine this history, our class will examine foundational primary materials and the bodies of scholarship that have grown up around them. We will read the work of Olaudah Equiano, Matthew Lewis, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Prince, Samuel Occom, Venture Smith, Black Hawk, Harriet Jacobs, as well as Salem Witch Trial transcripts. In addition, the class will visit UChicago’s Special Collections and the Newberry Library. Students will write on an archival object of their choosing from the period that is relevant to their individual research interests.

 

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