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 2018-19

Undergraduate Courses

AUTUMN 2018

WINTER 2019

SPRING 2019

SUMMER 2019

 

Graduate Courses

AUTUMN 2018

WINTER 2019

SPRING 2019

 

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

AUTUMN 2018

GNSE 10310 Theories of Gender and Sexuality
Instructors: Lauren Berlant, Kristen Schilt
This is a one-quarter, seminar-style introductory course for undergraduates. Its aim is triple: to engage scenes and concepts central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality; to provide familiarity with key theoretical anchors for that study; and to provide skills for deriving the theoretical bases of any kind of method. Students will produce descriptive, argumentative, and experimental engagements with theory and its scenes as the quarter progresses. Prior course experience in gender/sexuality studies (by way of the general education civilization studies courses or other course work) is strongly advised.

GNSE 11008 Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality: Gender and Religion
Instructor: Kelli Gardner
In what ways are notions of ideas about religion and the sacred gendered and what are the consequences of this for how we live our lives? This class will be an introduction to the study of the relationships between religion and gender and the way these relationships play out in specific historical situations. Attention will also be paid to the relationships between religions and sexualities. Examples will be drawn from medieval to modern periods, and our attention will primarily be on Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

GNSE 15002 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations
Instructors: Susan Burns, Andrea Ford, Rochona Majumdar, Tien-Tien Jong
The first quarter offers a theoretical framing unit that introduces concepts in feminist, gender, and queer theory, as well as two thematic clusters, “Kinship” and “Creativity and Cultural Knowledge.” The “Kinship” cluster includes readings on such topics as marriage, sex and anti-sex, love and anti-love, and reproduction. The “Creativity and Cultural Knowledge” cluster addresses the themes of authorship and authority, fighting and constructing the canon, and the debates over the influence of “difference” on cultural forms.
This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies.

GNSE 18500 American Horrors
Instructor: Michael Dango
This course is a survey of horror in American literature and film, with a special focus on the genre’s relation to racial and sexual violence. How does horror reflect, contribute to, or intervene into structures of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and queerphobia? How do fictional texts represent or transform non-fictional horrors, from lynching to rape to police brutality? And what is the status of horror as an emotion that structures relations of power and privilege in the United States? Together, we will gain a historical perspective on the genre, for instance tracking the figure of the zombie from its birth in Haitian folklore as a projection of the horrors of slavery, through 20th century works like George Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead, and into present day works including Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One. We will pay special attention to the present moment, interrogating a renaissance of horror tropes in, for instance, feminist fiction (Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado), television (American Horror Story and Stranger Things), and cinema (It and Get Out). 

GNSE 20036 Making Sex and Race on the Renaissance Stage
Instructor: Ellen MacKay
This course examines some of the greatest hits of the non-Shakespearean repertoire to discuss the central role of the raced and sexed body on the Renaissance stage. We will put under special scrutiny the tendency of playwrights to dramatize for display virginity, pregnancy, and venereal disease as they intersect with a wide spectrum racial difference. Social, medical, and ecclesiastical history will be important to our discussions, but the aim of the course is to investigate the theatrical implications of this raced and sexed dramaturgy; in particular, we will consider how the plays of the Tudor-Stuart era that hinge on biological ‘facts’ call for exhibitions of anatomical proof that they would seem to be entirely incapable of mustering.

Students should expect extensive (but lively) weekly reading assignments, preparation for which includes participation in a calendar of class responses; a presentation to the class of a self-selected primary text; and a culminating research essay.

GNSE 20072 Frankenstein at 200: Hideous Progeny
Instructor: Alexis Chema
2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, arguably the most famous horror story ever written. Frankenstein is also a mythopoetic tour de force whose searching moral and ethical questions—at what cost should we pursue scientific advances, or seek knowledge more generally? What are the effects of social marginalization? Where is the boundary between the drive to create and the desire for power?—command more attention today than ever. In this seminar we will examine the novel both as it engaged earlier cultural works (Plutarch’s Lives, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Godwin’s Political Justice, Wollstonecraft’sVindication of the Rights of Woman, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther), and as it morphed over the course of two centuries into a full-blown modern myth. Indeed, its adaptations, scholarly editions, imitations, and parodies are legion, spanning nineteenth-century melodramas, popular songs, numerous blockbuster films (including the prequel to Ridley Scott’s Aliens saga), comic books, a new Netflix miniseries, and even, rather amazingly, at least one children’s book series. We will have the unique opportunity of attending the world premier of the newest stage interpretation of Shelley’s novel at the Court Theatre and discussing the projects of adaptation and remediation with its director and cast. Students will have the option of producing their own creative adaptation as their culminating project for the course.

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

GNSE 21416 Reproduction and Motherhood in Multimedia
Instructor: Margaret Carlyle
What do artificial wombs, monstrous creations, and dystopian medical landscapes have in common? Answers to these questions are the subject of this interdisciplinary course in which we explore the many ways in which human reproduction has entered multimedia from the eighteenth century through present. In our course, the concept of "reproduction" will be problematized through film, advertising, texts, literature, and objects. Through these sources, we will critically explore how popular representations of human reproduction have shaped the status of the female body and notions of motherhood over time. We will also see how the liberating potential of new forms of multimedia have often served to reinforce--rather than resist or re-imagine--longstanding motifs and beliefs surrounding the maternal body and womanhood, from the image of the hysterical woman to that of the monstrous mother. Themes covered include the science of reproduction, hysteria, monstrosities, maternal imagination, artificial life, race, contraception, in/fertility, and sex education.

GNSE 22204 Philosophies of Environmentalism and Sustainability
Instructor: Bart Schultz
Many of the toughest ethical and political challenges confronting the world today are related to environmental issues: for example, climate change, loss of biodiversity, the unsustainable use of natural resources, pollution, and other threats to the well-being of both present and future generations. Using both classic and contemporary works, this course will highlight some of the fundamental and unavoidable philosophical questions presented by such environmental issues. Can a plausible philosophical account of justice for future generations be developed? What counts as the ethical treatment of non-human animals? What do the terms "nature" and "wilderness" mean, and can natural environments as such have moral and/or legal standing? What fundamental ethical and political perspectives inform such positions as ecofeminism, the "Land Ethic," political ecology, ecojustice, and deep ecology? And does the environmental crisis confronting the world today demand new forms of ethical and political philosophizing and practice? Are we in the Anthropocene? Is "adaptation" the best strategy at this historical juncture? Field trips, guest speakers, and special projects will help us philosophize about the fate of the earth by connecting the local and the global. 

GNSE 22110 Excrement and Ecstasy: The Devotional Body in Early Modern Literature
Instructor: Beatrice Bradley
This class asks why writers in the seventeenth century turn to bodily metaphor and erotic language to describe their interactions with the divine. We will investigate the materiality of the body in early modern poetry—where it is frequently depicted as in orgasmic frenzy, failing, and even producing excrement—and its involvement with religious devotional practice. Authors of focus will likely include William Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish. 

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

GNSE 23002 Workshop: Regulation of Family, Sex and Gender
Instructor: Mary Anne Case (note – this is a .50 unit course)
This workshop exposes students to recent academic work in the regulation of family, sex, gender, and sexuality and in feminist theory. Workshop sessions are devoted to the presentation and discussion of papers from outside speakers and University faculty. The substance and methodological orientation of the papers will both be diverse.

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

GNSE 23118 Gender and Sexuality in Jewish Society: Early Modernity through the Present
Instructor: Anna Band
In this course, we will examine how gender and sexuality shaped Jewish historical experience, identity, ideology, and imagination from the mid-seventeenth century until today. Using the tools of gender analysis, we will explore the historical realities of women and men in Jewish society through critical reading of primary sources (in translation), and discussion of modern research. No prior background in Jewish Studies is necessary. Topics include: the construction of gender in modern Jewish society; historical intersections of sexuality and Jewish practice; gender and power relations in the Jewish family; emancipation and assimilation; gender and Jewish literature; Jews and the rise of feminist movements; masculinity and Zionism; sex, gender, and the Holocaust.

GNSE 25313 India between Empires: Regions, Remembrance and Representation
Instructor: Andrew Halladay
Many major themes in contemporary South Asia—such as the rise of Hindu nationalism, the relationship between gender and public space, the negotiation between the regions and the center, and the position of religious and other minorities in both India and Pakistan—must be understood with reference to the turbulent years straddling Mughal and British rule (approx. 1700–1850). The Mughal Empire had been the dominant power in South Asia for nearly two hundred years, but over the course of the eighteenth century it splintered into an array of autonomous regional powers that were soon absorbed into the expanding networks of the British East India Company. This perceived decline, widespread regionalization, and eventual colonial subjugation were not only hugely consequential in their own time, but endure in the arts, literature, and film of modern South Asia. Every Monday, we will explore a particular region—Punjab, Maharashtra, Mysore, Bengal, etc.—during its transition from Mughal to British rule. On Wednesday, we will examine the same region and period through plays, television specials, poetry, blogs, Bollywood films, and other art forms. Such sources will help us interrogate two broad questions: First, how do social and political agendas inflect the construction of history in South Asia and beyond? And, second, what role has historical memory played in negotiating the relationship between the nation, its regions, and its citizens? Evaluation will be based primarily on student engagement and a short final paper. No prior study of South Asian history or languages is required or assumed.

GNSE 25600 Gender and Modernity in Colonial Korea
Instructor: Kyeong-Hee Choi
What are the salient forms, manifestations, and performances that can be discussed as aspects found at the intersection between gender experience and Korean colonial modernity? This seminar aims at identifying the characteristics of Japanese or colonially mediated modernization that Koreans experienced in the first half of the twentieth century in order to ultimately generate a broadly meaningful discussion on the texture of colonial cultural experience under its abiding colonial legacy. At the core of the class is a concern with gender. While considering the universal questions of modernized gender, gendered consciousness, and personal/private spaces, discussions will respond to the diverse interests and backgrounds of student participants so as to best facilitate comparative and theoretical discussions on colonial modernity and its postcolonial manifestations.

GNSE 28202 United States Latinos: Origins and Histories
Instructor: Ramon Gutierrez
An examination of the diverse social, economic, political, and cultural histories of those who are now commonly identified as Latinos in the United States. Particular emphasis will be placed on the formative historical experiences of Mexican Americans and mainland Puerto Ricans, although some consideration will also be given to the histories of other Latino groups, i.e., Cubans, Central Americans, and Dominicans. Topics include cultural and geographic origins and ties; imperialism and colonization; the economics of migration and employment; legal status; work, women, and the family; racism and other forms of discrimination; the politics of national identity; language and popular culture; and the place of Latinos in US society. 

GNSE 28401 Gender in the Classroom
Instructor: Emily Lyons
No inherent difference in general intelligence or academic ability have been found between males and females, despite extensive research on the topic. However, gendered patterns of learning and achievement persist. In the US, girls outperform boys on tests of reading and literacy, earn better grades, and are more likely to graduate high school and enroll in college. At the same time, while boys and girls now perform similarly on most tests of math and science achievement, boys are still more likely than girls to take Advanced Placement tests in STEM-related fields during high school, and ultimately to pursue STEM Careers.

This course focuses on the ways in which gender shapes student’s classroom experiences, and how these gendered interactions may contribute to the persistence of gendered patterns of achievement outcomes, within the context of US K-12 classrooms. We will draw on perspectives from several disciplines, including Psychology, Anthropology and Sociology. 

Because this course provides a context for students to explore and critically reflect on the ways in which gender shapes student experiences within the context of US K-12 classrooms, the course may hold particular appeal for undergraduates considering pursuing careers as educators, and for those who desire a space to explore and reflect on the role of gender in shaping their own educational experiences thus far.

WINTER 2019

GNSE 11900 The Literature of Trauma
Instructor: Lauren Berlant
This course will introduce students to advanced trauma theory and survey classics in the field, focusing on relevant psychoanalytic and social scientific theoretical works from Freud onward through critical social theory related to holocausts, genocides, illness, accident, sexual violence, and torture. Special attention will be given to the relation of the "historic" scenes of obliteration to modes of negativity in everyday life. While most primary texts will come from the U.S., theoretical and historical works will derive their arguments from a variety of geopolitical scenes. Some focus on graphic novels about trauma will also help focus the questions of mediation in the course. 

GNSE 15003 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations
Instructors: Andrea Ford, Sue Gal, Sonali Thakkar, TBD
Three thematic clusters make up the second quarter. “Politics” focuses on texts related to activism/movement politics and women’s rights as human rights and the question of universalism. “Religion” contextualizes gender and sexuality through examinations of a variety of religious laws and teachings, religious practices, and religious communities. “Economics” looks at slavery, domestic service, prostitution as labor, consumption, and the gendering of labor in contemporary capitalism.

GNSE 17001 Introduction to Women and Gender in the Ancient World
Instructor: Margaret Andrews
This course provides an introduction to aspects of women's lives in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean: primarily Greece and Rome, but drawing occasionally on examples also from the Near East and Egypt. We will examine not only what women actually did and did not do in these societies, but also how they were perceived by their male contemporaries and what value to society they were believed to have. The course will focus on how women are reflected in the material and visual cultures, but it will also incorporate historical and literary evidence, as well. Through such a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, we will examine the complexities and ambiguities of women's lives in the ancient Mediterranean and begin to understand the roots of modern conceptions and perceptions of women in the Western world today.

GNSE 18700 Sexual Violence in American Literature: Theory, Literature and Activism
Instructor: Michael Dango
This course will consider how a spectrum of sexual violence has been represented, politicized, and theorized in the United States from the 1970s to the present. To get a handle on this vast topic, our archive will be wide-ranging, including legal statutes and court opinions on sexual harassment and pornography; fiction, poetry, and graphic novels that explore the limits of representing sexual trauma; activist discourses in pamphlets and editorials from Take Back the Night to #MeToo; and groundbreaking essays by feminist and queer theorists, especially from critical women of color. How does the meaning of sex and of power shift with different kinds of representation, theory, and activism? How have people developed a language to share experiences of violation and disrupt existing power structures? And how do people begin to imagine and build a different world whether through fiction, law, or institutions?

GNSE 20045 Caribbean Literary and Visual Cultures: Work and “Wuk”
Instructor: Kaneesha Parsard
While tourist boards and hotel companies promote the Caribbean as a paradise of “sun, sex, and gold,” what lies beyond this imaginary? This seminar explores literature and visual arts in the English-speaking Caribbean through the lenses of labor and gender and sexuality. In “Work and ‘Wuk’,” we will begin by examining narratives written by enslaved African women in the Caribbean such as The History of Mary Prince (1831). Then, we will turn to short stories, mixed-media works, and other literary and visual works by Caribbean women and gender and sexual minorities that represent major historical events: labor migration from Asia to the Caribbean, working-class movements, decolonization, and migration of Caribbean peoples to North America and Great Britain. Throughout, we will gain an understanding of how Caribbean writers and artists have developed homegrown ways of seeing the region. Readings include works by Patricia Powell, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, and Ramabai Espinet, and criticism by Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and Selma James. (Fiction, Theory)

GNSE 20242 States, Markets and 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 20430 Gender, Sexuality, Imagination
Instructor: Kara Keeling
This course explores the relationships between theories of the imagination and those of gender and sexuality, with a particular emphasis on the relevance of this exploration to cinema and media studies.

GNSE 20640 Introduction to Victorian Literature: Men and Women
Instructor: Josephine McDonagh
This course will introduce the major genres of fiction and poetry produced in Victorian Britain. I have chosen texts that highlight the period’s central preoccupations: gender and sexuality. A time during which the so-called Woman Question vexed politicians, commentators and activists, when marriage and motherhood were under review, and styles of masculinity contested, literature of the period presented dynamic discussions about the roles of men and women, how they might interact, and what they can do. These texts are also some of the most formally innovative of the period. Texts are likely to include Robert Browning’s Men and Women (which gives us our title), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, M E Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, and short stories by the New Woman writer, George Egerton, and Oscar Wilde. (1830-1940)

GNSE 21400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
This course examines contemporary theories of sexuality, culture, and society. We then situate these theories in global and historical perspectives. Topics and issues are explored through theoretical, ethnographic, and popular film and video texts. Our itinerary in this coursewill be interdisciplinary, ranging from political theory to science studies. Topics for discussion will likely include: the gendering of reason and passion in the history of philosophy; the power, persistence, and flexibility of norms; the relationship between eros and other forms of desire; the division of labor and other economic tributaries to gendered experience; openings for and challenges to the political aspirations of sexual (and other) minorities; and the pressures exerted by technology on erotic life. Students will engage key concepts in the field, and will be encouraged to experiment with new ones.

GNSE 22235 Revolutionary Romance in Socialist China
Instructor: Paola Iovene
One of the goals of the socialist revolution was to transform social relations, not only those between classes but also family and romantic relations. One of the first laws that the Chinese Communist Party issued after the founding of the People's Republic was the New Marriage Law, which banned arranged marriages, concubinage, and arrangements involving minors. 1950s cinema and literature advertised romantic love as an important achievement of the new society. At the same time, loyalty to the Party and to the collectivity were also core values that the media emphasized. In this class, we will look at how literature and cinema instructed viewers on how to select one's object of love in Revolutionary China, and how love for a romantic partner, for the party, and for the people were differently foregrounded at specific historical moments. How did ideas of romantic love change from the 1940s to the 1980s, and how did cinema contribute to promoting them? What forms of intimacy and models of attachment characterized revolutionary romance? Which kind of person constituted an ideal romantic partner? Who was to be loved, how, and why? Should one orient one's passion toward one person, many, or none? 

GNSE 22507 Womanist Theology
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. However, all scholars agree to the "womanist theology" nomenclature because they claim womanist theology doing the following work: (1) expanding the theory and method of the academy; (2) broadening the intellectual conversation; (3) welcoming new voices, and some old, into theological explorations; and (4) challenging the very notion of assumed epistemology. In 1979, Jacquelyn Grant wrote what has now been recognized as the first womanist article. In that piece, "Black Theology and the Black Woman", she astutely pointed out certain blindspots in black theology and in the larger discussions about both the academic study of religion and the relation between theology and faith communities.

GNSE 23122 Taboo and Transgression
Instructor: Alexander Wolfson
This course circulates around five questions: 1) what does it mean to conceive of the foundations of society as forming through structures of prohibition, 2) why is it that these prohibitions primarily take the form of sexual regulation, 3) what are the gendered dynamics of these prohibitions, 4) why are these conceptions always formulated through studies of cultural otherness, 5) what dangers and potentialities reside within the concept of transgression? As is clear from these fundamental questions,this class is not primarily a study of taboo as a theoretical concept, but rather of the ways in which the concept of taboo is used in specific discourses internal to 20th and 21st-century social sciences, cultural theory and psychoanalysis.

GNSE 23400 Virginia Woolf
Instructor: Lisa Ruddick
Along with a number of Woolf’s major works, students read theoretical and critical texts that give a sense of the range of contemporary approaches to Woolf. 

GNSE 24810 The Body and Embodiment in Greek Art
Instructor: Seth Estrin
Whether naked or clothed, male or female, mortal or divine, the body takes pride of place in the visual worlds constructed by ancient Greek artists. Yet this emphasis on depicting the body begs the question: What is a body that exists as an image? What, in other words, is a body that is not embodied? This problem, articulated already in our ancient sources, serves as the starting point for this course’ investigation of the relationship between images of the body in Greek art and the experiences such images solicited from their viewers. It examines, on the one hand, how Greek art promoted the body as a social construct—through artistic practices that configured the body’s appearance, like distinctive techniques, styles, and iconography; through conceptual categories that ascribed gender and sexual identity to images; and through contexts that integrated depictions of the body into lived experience, like sanctuaries, cemeteries, and domestic settings. But we will give equal attention to the viewer’s subjective experience of embodiment, including its sensorial and affective dimensions, and the ways in which that experience is negotiated and articulated as a function of works of art. 

GNSE 24905 Performance Lab: Women in American Plays
Instructor: Devon de Mayo
Working with professional female-identifying playwright, actor and dramaturg, director Devon de Mayo will lead this course centered on how male playwrights have portrayed women over the course of American history, and create an imagined space in which these characters can be in dialogue with one another. This course commits to developing a fully realized performance piece within the ten weeks of the quarter. Immersive in intent and demand, writing and performance skills will be developed by participants for participants. ATTENDANCE AT THE FIRST CLASS SESSION IS MANDATORY. CONSENT ONLY via REQUEST FORM. 

GNSE 25202 Grammatical Gender
Instructor: Cherry Meyer
Grammatical gender is the assignment of nouns into categories and agreement between a noun's category and certain associated elements in the clause. This course serves as an introduction to gender as it occurs across the world's languages. While many are familiar with grammatical gender from the use of pronouns in English or studies of Indo-European languages such as French or German, students in this course work with language data from a wide variety of language families to better grasp both the variety and regularity of this linguistic phenomenon. Topics include but are not limited to determination of the number of gender categories, semantic and formal assignment, the treatment of epicene nouns, as well as psycholinguistic and cultural considerations.

GNSE 25218 Reading Nonhuman Animals: A Challenge to Anthropocentrism
Instructor: Elizabeth Tavella
How can we “read” a literary nonhuman animal? In what ways does literature deal with ethical and political issues concerning nonhuman animals? What does it mean to live in a multicultural and multispecies world? What does it mean to be “human”? In this course we will ask these and other related questions as they are presented and represented in Italian 20th-century literary texts, read alongside philosophical writings, scholarly essays, and visual materials. While maintaining a focus on Italian literature, a comparative approach involving literary works of non-Italian authors will be key in understanding the pervasiveness of the problems that have caused our detachment from nature and our broken relationship with nonhuman animals. We will closely analyze and critically evaluate the works of several authors, including those by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Anna Maria Ortese, Elsa Morante, Italo Svevo, Alice Walker, and Franz Kafka, giving particular attention to techniques of close reading. A thematic approach will enable us to explore a large number of critical discourses, from the moral status of nonhuman animals to the long-held assumptions regarding the anthropocentric set of values that have defined (Western) culture. We will also take into consideration different theoretical frameworks such as posthumanist theory and gender studies in order to discuss and evaluate the selected texts from different perspectives and entry points. Taught in English. No prior knowledge of Italian is required..

GNSE 25519 Gender and Language
Instructor: Sophie Salvo
The idea that men and women use language differently is a common trope today, yet this was not always understood to be the case. In this course, we will investigate the origins of modern assumptions about the relationship between sex, gender, and language by tracing their conceptualization in a wide range of literary, theoretical, and scientific discourses. In particular, the course will focus on two topics as case studies: the notion of a separate “women’s language” (or Weibersprache) and theories of the origin of grammatical gender. What political, theoretical, and aesthetic programs do claims about “gendered language” serve, and what anxieties do they reveal? Readings include texts from seventeenth-century ethnography, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy and philology, and twentieth-century literature, linguistics, and feminist theory.

GNSE 26419 Latin American Social Movements
Instructor: Stefanie Graeter
This course introduces students to the historical and contemporary significance of social movements in the Latin American and Caribbean region, including migrant and other latinx politics across the US border. Through anthropological, historical, and theoretical texts, students will gain a strong foundation on topics of social movements, collective action, unions, human rights, environmentalism, and theories of “the political.”  

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 27013 Woman/Native
Instructor: Sonali Thakkar
This course reads works of postcolonial literature and theory in order to consider the entanglements of the figures of “women” and “natives” in colonial as well as postcolonial discourse. We will discuss topics such as the persistent feminization of the profane, degraded, and contagious bodies of colonized natives; representations of women as both the keepers and the victims of “authentic” native culture; the status (symbolic and otherwise) of women in anti-colonial resistance and insurgency; and the psychic pathologies (particularly nervous conditions of anxiety, hysteria, and madness) that appear repeatedly in these works as states to which women and/as natives are especially susceptible. Authors may include Ama Ata Aidoo, Hélène Cixous J.M Coetzee, Maryse Condé, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Mahasweta Devi, Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, Silvia Federici, Nuruddin Farah, Bessie Head, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Tayeb Salih, Ousmane Sembène, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 

GNSE 27611 Language and Gender in Premodern Japanese Literature
Instructor: Marjorie Burge
This course will look at the intersection of vernacular literature and women’s spaces in premodern Japan, focusing particularly on the Heian (794-1185) and Kamakura (1185-1333) periods. Elite women’s literature has become central to modern narratives of premodern Japanese literary history, but in the Heian period, women's writing was a distinct and "lower" mode relative to men's writing, which was primarily composed in Classical Chinese. Women were usually denied access to education in Classical Chinese, and therefore found recourse in the creation of their own inscriptive spaces in the vernacular language (Japanese). We will consider how women used the vernacular language for self expression and self-representation, and focus on particular moments where vernacular language and texts are specifically coded as female. In the process, we will touch upon issues of women’s education, marriage practices, female friendship/animosity, sexuality, gender identity, and sexual violence. Readings will be in English translation. Students wishing to do some readings in original texts may meet separately with instructor.

GNSE 28110 Queer Jewish Literature
Instructor: Anna Elena Torres
Spanning medieval Hebrew to contemporary Yiddish, this course will explore the intersections of Jewish literature and queer theory, homophobia and antisemitism. While centered on literary studies, the syllabus will also include film, visual art, and music. Literary authors will include Bashevis Singer, Qalonymus ben Qalonymus, Irena Klepfisz, and others. Theorists will include Eve Sedgwick, Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Sander Gilman, and others. Readings will be in English translation. 

GNSE 28600 Pasolini
Instructor: Armando Maggi
This course examines each aspect of Pasolini's artistic production according to the most recent literary and cultural theories, including Gender Studies. We shall analyze his poetry (in particular "Le Ceneri di Gramsci" and "Poesie informa di rosa"), some of his novels ("Ragazzi di vita," "Una vita violenta," "Teorema," "Petrolio"), and his numerous essays on the relationship between standard Italian and dialects, semiotics and cinema, and the role of intellectuals in contemporary Western culture. We shall also discuss the following films: "Accattone," "La ricotta," "Edipo Re," "Teorema," and "Salo".

GNSE 28602 Cinema in Africa
Instructor: Loren Kruger
This course examines Africa in film as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in Sub Saharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), ground-breaking film by the "father" of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, African Jim (1959) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin's Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga, Ousmane Sembenes Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno'ss Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine cinematic representations of tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the different implications of these tensions for men and women, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and ethnographic film, including 21st century work where available.

GNSE 29117 Theater and Performance in Latin America
Instructor: Danielle Roper
What is performance? How has it been used in Latin America and the Caribbean? This course is an introduction to theatre and performance in Latin America and the Caribbean that will examine the intersection of performance and social life. While we will place particular emphasis on performance art, we will examine some theatrical works. We ask: how have embodied practice, theatre and visual art been used to negotiate ideologies of race, gender and sexuality? What is the role of performance in relation to systems of power? How has it negotiated dictatorship, military rule, and social memory? Ultimately, the aim of this course is to give students an overview of Latin American performance including blackface performance, indigenous performance, as well as performance and activism. Undergraduates must be in their 3rd or 4th year.

SPRING 2019

GNSE 11005 Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality: Media Wars
Instructors: Jennifer Wild, Lara Janson
In our contemporary moment, we have become accustomed to terms such as 'counter-terrorism' that signal an effort to resist internal and external threats, and those suggesting that we live in an age of 'post-truth' dominated by 'corporate-media,' 'fake news,' and 'fact-challenged' journalism. Taking this platform as our starting place, this class explores how these terms and their use have been gendered; have situated both gender and sexuality as either weapons of resistance or objects of destruction. This class will be historically organized insofar as we will begin our discussion with ways that media - broadly conceived to include cinema, print and visual-cultural forms, television, and the internet - have aimed to 'counter' patriarchal, heteronormative, and hegemonic systems of representation of gender and sexuality. 

GNSE 20111 History of Death
Instructor: Katie Hickerson
From the treatment of mortal remains to the built environment of cemeteries, tombs, and memorials, the dead have always played a role in the lives of the living. This course examines how beliefs and practices surrounding death have been a source of meaning making for individuals, institutions, religious communities, and modern nations. It will ask students to consider how examining death makes it possible to better understand the values and concerns of societies across time and space. This course will consider case studies from Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and Asia, from the Middle Ages to the Vietnam War. It introduces students to the methods and debates that animate the historical study of death-coming from histories of the body, social history, and the study of slavery-and ends by asking the question: "Is it possible to have a global history of death?"

GNSE 21112 Nudes, Princess, and Cyborges: Gender, Violence, and Biblical Fiction
Instructor: Chloe Blackshear
To many, Bathsheba is simply the nude who seduced David. The connotations of being a Jezebel are strong enough that a popular feminist website re-appropriates the insult. Yet the biblical texts themselves make it difficult to imagine female characters as types, or the violence with which they are often associated as comprehensible. Furthermore, Hebrew Bible figures have often been taken up as sites to explore contemporary questions relating to gender and violence. Did Dinah 'ask for it'? Does Ruth's story celebrate the refugee and mother or justify a colonial politics of assimilation? In this course, students will examine literary works that reuse difficult portions of biblical narrative and challenge readers to reassess biblical violence and its legacies. By engaging with both more popular extended rewritings like The Red Tent and world-literary political works like A Grain of Wheat, this course will reconsider biblical women and the variety of problematic and productive ways they may be appropriated in fiction and in popular culture.

GNSE 21212 Virgins, Victims, and Vixens: Biblical Bodies and Their Reimaginings
Instructor: Kelli Gardner
The Bible, although an ancient collection of texts, continues to share and even shape our gender categories, assumptions, and policies. We cannot understand or work to change today’s gender politics without first understanding its biblical roots and cultural echoes. This course thinks with and around problems of gender, sexuality, bodies, and interpretive power in the Hebrew Bible and its interpreters, from the New Testament and early Jewish and Christian exegetes to modern scholarly and artistic reimaginations. Despite the commonly cut-and-dry claims of preachers, politicians, and parents that “the Bible says X,” the Bible is a complex of texts from different moments, places, authors, and agendas, rarely saying only one thing on any topic. In this course, we will explore the multiplicity of biblical presentations of gender, sexuality, and bodies, both within their historical contexts as well as in their rich and diverse histories of retelling and reinterpretation, while developing and deploying our own tools and methods of biblical and cultural exegesis.

GNSE 21301 Global Mental Health
Instructor: Zhiying Ma
Global mental health has emerged as a priority for multilateral institutions like the World Health Organization and World Bank, for international non-governmental organizations, and for academic researchers alike. This course examines the foundations, practices, and critiques of this field. We will explore how sociocultural processes shape the experience of distress and mental illness; various cultures of healing, including Western psychiatry; gaps and inequalities in service provision; as well as approaches to and challenges of cross-cultural diagnosis/treatment/epidemiology. Specific attention will be paid to how mental health concerns and interventions affect women, racial/ethnic minorities, and other disadvantaged groups in different societies. Building on these explorations, we will then turn to the tools, programs, and practices that constitute the somewhat amorphous movement called “Global Mental Health.” Ongoing debates of this movement will also be examined. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach, with readings drawn from psychiatry, public policy, anthropology, history, sociology, and so on. Through discussions and assignments, students will develop skills to design, evaluate, and critically reflect upon global mental health interventions.

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

GNSE 21601 Introduction to Political Philosophy
Instructor: Ben Laurence
In this course we will investigate what it is for a society to be just. In what sense are the members of a just society equal? What freedoms does a just society protect? Must a just society be a democracy? What economic arrangements are compatible with justice? In the second portion of the class we will consider one pressing injustice in our society in light of our previous philosophical conclusions. Possible candidates include, but are not limited to, racial inequality, economic inequality, and gender hierarchy. Here our goal will be to combine our philosophical theories with empirical evidence in order to identify, diagnose, and effectively respond to actual injustice.

GNSE 21725 Black in Colonial America: Three Women
Instructor: Sarah Johnson
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 22213 The Legal Tender of Gender: Paradigms of Equality & Realities of Inequality in Gender & the Law
Instructor: Lara Janson
This course will provide an introduction to the concrete legal contexts in which issues of gender and sexuality have been articulated and contested. Students will be asked to think critically about the intersections of law, society, and gender while considering both the potential and the limitations of our legal system. Students will explore how gender constructs law, and how law constructs gender. Through engaging with readings that span law and society, feminist legal theory, constitutional scholarship, and case law, students will be able to identify, situate, and debate some of the basic premises of what constitutes justice and equality in a liberal democracy. Readings will draw from primary and secondary resources related to gender & law in the US. While some court cases/case law will be read, our focus is on the broader relationship between law and society (no technical legal knowledge is required). We will study the evolution of our legal system’s stance on topics including marriage/divorce, violence, discrimination, contraception/abortion, sexual orientation, privacy, Title IX, and more. Students will be invited to bring to bear a variety of feminist, queer, critical race, and intersectional tools on our discussions of the historical evolution of these issues and their current trends. Students will develop an original research paper, which will be workshopped throughout the quarter and will culminate in a symposium of students’ original research on gender & law.

GNSE 23119 Transnational Queer Politics and Practices
Instructor: Caterina Fugazzola
This course aims to examine gender and sexual practices and identities in a transnational perspective. As people and ideas move across national, cultural, and racial borders, how is sexuality negotiated and redefined? How are concepts such as “global queerness” and the globalization of sexualities leveraged for change? How are queer identities and practices translated, both culturally and linguistically? To explore transnational articulations of queerness we will draw on a range of theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial, feminist, queer, and indigenous approaches to the study of sexualities. We will engage with scholarship on the politics of global gay rights discourses, on the sexual politics of migration, and on the effects of colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. By analyzing queer experiences and practices in a transnational context, our goal is to decenter and challenge Western-centric epistemologies and to dive into the complexities of cultural representations of queerness around the globe.

GNSE 23120 Topics in Feminism and Psychoanalysis
Instructors: Uday Jain, Agatha Slupek
Questions of the personal, narrative, and fantastical elements of human life are fundamental to both feminism and psychoanalysis. Each tradition has stressed the importance of embodied experience to understanding, as well as the relation of that experience to large-scale social and political structures. How do structures of domination and oppression affect the way we experience desire, or who we desire in the first place? How do our dreams and fantasies block us from, or propel us toward, the imagination and enactment of feminist futures? How does loss circumscribe gender and racial identity? What’s with mothers? And if it hurts me, why do I keep doing it? These and other questions of practical and political import will guide our trajectory in this interdisciplinary advanced undergraduate course.

In Part I, we will “work through” the analytic categories developed by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in their psychoanalytic practice. Particular attention will be paid to specific case studies. In Part II, we will turn to topics in feminist, gender and sexuality studies that have taken inspiration from, or developed as critiques of, psychoanalysis. We will think feminism expansively, drawing from critical race theory, queer theory, political theory, philosophy, literature, and cultural studies to explore psychoanalytic topics.

GNSE 23121 The Politics of Life Itself
Instructor: Vinh Cam
This is an introductory course on biopolitics. The class will approach this Foucauldian category as both a “style of thought” and as a mode of governmentality. Key questions we will return to throughout the quarter include: What forms of knowledge-power are mobilized to conceive of life statistically and/or at the level of population? How might biopolitics transform our understanding of sexuality, race, and class, as well as their disciplinary systems? And, finally, what does it mean to politicize “life itself”? In order to get a better handle on Michel Foucault’s foundational formulation of biopolitics in the final chapter of The History of Sexuality, we will spend the first two weeks tracing the concept’s prehistory in the work of Charles Darwin and the life philosophers of the Nineteenth Century before turning to contemporary theorizations of biopolitics by feminist, critical race, disability, and queer scholars. These recent interventions alert us to the different instantiations or modalities of biopolitics in relation to one’s geo-political location and/or subject-position. For some, biopolitics has the potential to foster new forms of life and capacities; for others, this politics of life is more likely to be encountered as a necropolitics. We will therefore spend the final few weeks of the quarter thinking about the relation between life and death under biopolitics. How might the biopolitical revision of life alter our understanding of death itself?

GNSE 23419 Leyes del deseo: miradas queer en España y Latinoamérica
Instructor: Isaías Fanlo
(Please note that this class will be taught in Spanish)
This course will follow the traces of queer voices throughout different textual and artistic manifestations - from poetry to scenic arts, from narrative to cinema - with the aim to draw an intersectional, unstable and transnational map of rebel textualities and visualities in both the Latin American countries and Spain. As a lateral way of looking, queerness brings together, not without conflict, activism and academia, theory, action and creation. During the course, we will address how these Hispanic queer works problematize notions such as the canon, the tradition, the sociopolitical structures or the idea of family and lineage. By questioning them, we will see how not only these works challenge the fundamental basis of social, political and literary order, but also unfold a fluid, productive alternative to neoliberalism. PQ: Span 20300 or equivalent.

GNSE 24308 Reproductive Worlds
Instructor: Andrea Ford
This course explores how human reproduction is compelled, constrained, enabled, and narrated across the globe. The “natural” aspects of reproduction intersect in increasingly fraught and often surprising ways with its technological/scientific, institutional/professional, and political/ideological aspects. The starting point for the course is that reproduction is differently understood and politically contested among and for various groups of people. We will pay particular attention to the ways bodies, ideas, and technologies flow throughout global contexts, while exploring how inequalities at various levels (race, class, geographic region, nationality, gender, sexuality, disability) impact the “nature” of the reproductive body, and how reproductive practices “reproduce” such inequalities. We will also explore how knowledge about social reproduction and the reproductive body is produced and contested through biomedicine, law, and media, with particular attention to naturalizing discourse about gender. Finally, we will look at how ecology and reproduction are intertwined via concern about the environment, culminating our exploration of how reproduction is always situated in its social and material contexts, and never simply an individual matter.

GNSE 24811 China and Global Capitalism since 1911
Instructor: Jake Werner
This course examines China’s violent encounter with capitalism over the last century. How are we to explain the “failure” of China to follow the classical free-market path of development? Why did Marxism become such a powerful ideology in a country that was so incompletely capitalist, and what is the relation of the Mao era’s “socialism” to capitalism? Is contemporary China a case of free market excess or of state domination? How does today’s US–China trade war rise from this history? In addition to seeking answers to these questions, this course will develop “capitalism” as a category that goes beyond a narrow focus on economic issues. We will apply and evaluate several competing frameworks that allow us to conceptualize capitalism as simultaneously a global structure and an everyday practice of social life relevant not just to commodities and class divisions but to issues like gender and nationalism as well. Through these discussions we aim to understand how capitalism has shaped China while using China’s experience to enrich our understanding of capitalism.

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

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

GNSE 26302 The Literature of Disgust, Rabelais to Nausea
Instructor: Zachary Samalin
This course will survey a range of literary works which take the disgusting as their principle aesthetic focus, while also providing students with an introduction to core issues and concepts in the history of aesthetic theory, such as the beautiful and the sublime, disinterested judgment and purposive purposelessness, taste and distaste. At the same time, our readings will allow us to explore the ways in which the disgusting has historically been utilized as a way of producing socially critical literature, by representing that which a culture categorically attempts to marginalize, exclude and expel. Readings will engage with the variety of aesthetic functions that the disgusting has been afforded throughout modern literary history, including the carnivalesque and grotesque in Rabelais and the bawdy and satirical in Swift; Zola’s gruesome naturalism, Sartre’s existential nausea and Clarice Lispector’s narrative of spiritual abjection; as well as Thomas Bernhard’s experiments with contempt and Dennis Cooper’s pseudo‐pornographic genre explorations. We will read widely in literary and cultural theories of disgust, as well as in the psychological and biological literature of the emotion. Prerequisite: Strong stomach.

GNSE 26418 Race, Gender, and Indigeneity in Latin America and the Caribbean
Instructor: Stefanie Graeter
This entry level course will introduce students to the cultural and scientific politics of difference in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Through historical and ethnographic texts, this course will survey the biological and ideological formation of race, gender/sex, and indigeneity in the colonial period, how these intersectional concepts transformed during state formation, and how theories of human difference  impact people in the region today. 

GNSE 27100 Sociology of Human Sexuality
Instructor: Edward Laumann
After briefly reviewing several biological and psychological approaches to human sexuality as points of comparison, this course explores the sociological perspective on sexual conduct and its associated beliefs and consequences for individuals and society. Substantive topics include gender relations; life-course perspectives on sexual conduct in youth, adolescence, and adulthood; social epidemiology of sexually transmitted infections (including AIDS); sexual partner choice and turnover; and the incidence/prevalence of selected sexual practices. Network analytic approaches will be introduced.

GNSE 27508 Women and the Mafia in Contemporary Italian Cinema      
Instructor: Veronica Vegna 
This course will examine how gender dynamics within mafia contexts have been represented in a selection of Italian films. Students will engage in cinematic analysis by drawing from sociological and psychological studies on female roles in relation to organized crime. Both these fields, sociology and psychology, have underscored the important part that women play in relation to the mafia, notwithstanding the rigid patriarchal structure that allows only male affiliation. Although focusing primarily on Sicilian mafia, this course will include information on other types of Italian mafia, namely Camorra, ’Ndrangheta and Sacra Corona Unita. Vocabulary in Italian to identify formal elements of the films will be provided throughout the course. PQ: ITAL 20300 or consent of instructor. Taught in Italian.  

GNSE 27523 Black Americans, Gender and the Politics of Group Threat
Instructor: Jenn Jackson
In 2017, a march to preserve a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia included Tiki torches, chants, mobs, and days of terror for counter-protestors, including the death of Heather Heyer, a white woman who attended the counter-protest. The display was one of many demonstrations that has erupted over recent years in cities like Berkeley, California Boston, Massachusetts, and Knoxville, Tennessee to preserve white supremacist ideological tenets in the United States. These rallies and demonstrations are part of a larger political landscape wherein Black Americans’ political concerns and commitments are often tethered to experiences of racial group threat and the necessity to engage in political actions that reduce or eliminate the perceived harms that might result. This course explores the ways that Black Americans in the United States have navigated the racial terrain in an effort to respond to multiple forms of racial threat, threats that originate both within Black communities and without. In particular, the course focuses on (re)defining threat in the social science context, embedding that definition within a larger historical framework of interracial terror and confrontation, and tracing those histories to contemporary manifestations of racial group threat.

GNSE 27526 Race and Gender in the Making of the Modern Atlantic World(s), c. 1700-1990s
Instructor: Deirdre Lyons
This colloquium-style course proposes that the development of race, racial ideologies, and gender in the Atlantic is central to understanding the formation of the modern world. The course mobilizes race and gender as analytic categories that shaped encounters with and relations between colonized and colonizer. By adopting this approach, we will use the lens of race and gender to explore how they shaped various historical experiences: such the circulation of peoples and goods in transatlantic contexts; the formation and establishment of slavery, the slave trade, and the plantation complex; antislavery, abolitionism, and emancipation; immigration and post-slavery labor; citizenship and nationhood; reproduction; post-colonial LGBTQ rights, and twentieth-century racial politics. We will also problematize race and gender as flexible categories that historical actors formulated and implemented to establish, maintain, and contest hierarchies of political, economic, and social power. We will use a combination of primary texts, novels, and secondary sources to explore the comparative and intersecting historical experiences of African, Amerindian, Chinese, Creole, European, and Indian experiences in the Atlantic world from early encounters and exploration to twentieth-century decolonization and postcolonialism— thereby challenging traditional racial binaries that have previously informed our understanding of transatlantic empires. 

GNSE 27570 Bodies, Gifts, and Commodities
Instructror: Elham Mireshghi
This course presents a survey of anthropological theories of gifts and commodities and how they have been used to explain exchanges involving the human body. We will consider various forms of labor, including sex work and paid surrogacy, exchanges enabled by modern biotechnologies, such as organ and tissue donation, as well as other contexts where the body is objectified and fragmented, such as in the discovery and marketing of genetic materials and processes.

GNSE 28002 Women, Children, Gender and Human Rights
Instructor: TBD
This course will explore the dynamic, intersecting, and sometimes conflicting worlds of human rights law and practice in both the U.S. and internationally. From life expectancy and morbidity, economic equality, freedom from rape and sexual violence, personhood, sexual identity and practice, and the expanding definitions of family, the seminar will read and debate literature, law, research and remedies. 

GNSE 29419 Writing Women: Feminist History and Feminist Historiography 
Instructor: Peggy O'Donnell
This course is an introduction to both the lived experience of feminist history and feminist historiography—the ways in which that lived experience has been written and remembered. Although this course specifically focuses on US feminism in the late twentieth century, it aims to place this history in a broader, transnational context, while paying close attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. We will think critically about how the waves of feminism swelled and crested across the twentieth century's latter decades and about how narratives about those waves were, and are, constructed. We will examine a wide range of material, including archival documents, historical analyses, theoretical texts, memoirs, and films. Students in this course will develop the critical tools to engage with a variety of historical documents, while sharpening their understanding of the contexts out of which these texts emerged. Students will also be challenged to (re)examine their approach to their own historical writing: why and how they choose to tell the stories they do.

GNSE 29600 Feminist Philosophy
Instructor: Martha Nussbaum
The course is an introduction to the major varieties of philosophical feminism. After studying some key historical texts in the Western tradition (Wollstonecraft, Rousseau, J. S. Mill), we examine four types of contemporary philosophical feminism: Liberal Feminism (Susan Moller Okin, Martha Nussbaum), Radical Feminism (Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin), Difference Feminism (Carol Gilligan, Annette Baier, Nel Noddings), and Postmodern "Queer" Gender Theory and trans feminism (Judith Butler, Michael Warner and others). After studying each of these approaches, we will focus on political and ethical problems of contemporary international feminism, asking how well each of the approaches addresses these problems. Prerequisites: Undergraduates may enroll only with the permission of the instructor. 

SUMMER 2019

GNSE 18601 Reframing Women: Female Portraiture from the Mona Lisa to RuPaul
Instructor: Christine Zappella
As soon as portraiture was reinvented in the early 1400s, male patrons commissioned male artists to record the likenesses of their wives, mothers, daughters and lovers. With little sociopolitical agency of their own, the women depicted in these paintings also had little control over how they were portrayed. As such, their visual identities were constructed and framed by “the male gaze”—that is, the visual point-of-view of a cis-gendered, European, heterosexual male. Because art academies remained closed to women for centuries, male artists continued not only to create society’s images of ideal female beauty but also to help define the ways in which women could participate in the public sphere. With few exceptions, portraits show women as passive muses, the foci of the adoration of their male family members, or as sex objects, dangerous bodies engendering lust and temptation. As women gained increased autonomy in western society and, with that, the ability to study art, they began, for the first time, to claim their feminine identities and to construct a version of femininity that existed outside of—or at least reacted against—the male gaze. In contemporary times, an expanded idea of what it means to be “female” and a cultural move towards intersectionality have continued to challenge our notions of femininity, showing that the concept of ideal female beauty is inextricably caught up not only in concerns about gender and sexuality but also of class and race.

 

Graduate Course Descriptions

AUTUMN 2018

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

GNSE 32313 Digital Media Theory
Instructor: Patrick Jagoda
This course introduces students to the critical study of digital media and participatory cultures, focusing on the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Sub-fields and topics may include history of technology, software studies, platform studies, video-game studies, electronic literature, social media, mobile media, network aesthetics, hacktivism, and digital public. We will also discuss ways that digital media theory intersects with and complicates work coming from critical theory, especially feminist, Marxist, queer, and transnational theories. Readings may include work by theorists such as Ian Bogost, Wendy Chun, Mary Flanagan, Alexander Galloway, Mark Hansen, Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, Alan Liu, Lev Manovich, Franco Moretti, Lisa Nakamura, Rita Raley, and McKenzie Wark. Through a study of contemporary media theory, we will also think carefully about emerging methods of inquiry that accompany this area of study, including multimodal and practice-based research. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in new media culture will make for a more exciting quarter.

GNSE 33022 Workshop: Regulation of Family, Sex and Gender
Instructor: Mary Ann Case
This workshop exposes students to recent academic work in the regulation of family, sex, gender, and sexuality and in feminist theory. Workshop sessions are devoted to the presentation and discussion of papers from outside speakers and University faculty. The substance and methodological orientation of the papers will both be diverse.

GNSE 35600 Gender and Modernity in Colonial Korea
Instructor: Kyeong-Hee Choi
What are the salient forms, manifestations, and performances that can be discussed as aspects found at the intersection between gender experience and Korean colonial modernity? This seminar aims at identifying the characteristics of Japanese or colonially mediated modernization that Koreans experienced in the first half of the twentieth century in order to ultimately generate a broadly meaningful discussion on the texture of colonial cultural experience under its abiding colonial legacy. At the core of the class is a concern with gender. While considering the universal questions of modernized gender, gendered consciousness, and personal/private spaces, discussions will respond to the diverse interests and backgrounds of student participants so as to best facilitate comparative and theoretical discussions on colonial modernity and its postcolonial manifestations.

GNSE 38202 United States Latinos: Origins and Histories
Instructor: Ramon Gutierrez
An examination of the diverse social, economic, political, and cultural histories of those who are now commonly identified as Latinos in the United States. Particular emphasis will be placed on the formative historical experiences of Mexican Americans and mainland Puerto Ricans, although some consideration will also be given to the histories of other Latino groups, i.e., Cubans, Central Americans, and Dominicans. Topics include cultural and geographic origins and ties; imperialism and colonization; the economics of migration and employment; legal status; work, women, and the family; racism and other forms of discrimination; the politics of national identity; language and popular culture; and the place of Latinos in US society. 

GNSE 44202 Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film
Instructor: Maud Ellman
We will read major works by Freud, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, and Slavoj Žižek, among other psychoanalytic theorists, in conjunction with literary works such as Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and Rudyard Kipling's "Mary Postgate." The course will conclude with one or more of Alfred Hitchcock's films. Topics include the unconscious, dreams, childhood, the uncanny, desire, subjects and objects, mourning, and the death drive. Requirements: one paper 10-12 pages, joint presentations in class, and regular postings to the online discussion board.

GNSE 44214 Gender, Health and Medicine
Instructor: Anna Mueller
From the day we are born til the day we die, we experience a gendered world that shapes our opportunities, our social interactions, and even our physical health and wellbeing. This course will provide an introduction to sociological perspectives on gender, physical and mental health, and medicine while also providing a deep interrogation of the social, institutional, and biological links between gender and health. We will discuss inequalities in morbidity, mortality, and health behaviors of women, men, and transgendered individuals from different race, ethnic, and class backgrounds, and we will use sociological concepts, theories, and methods to understand why these differences appear. Finally, we will examine how medicine as an institution and medical practices as organizations sometimes contribute to and combat gender inequality in health. By the end of the course, you will be familiar with social scientific perspectives on (1) gender, (2) mental and physical health, and (3) the practice of medicine, as well as some of the fundamental debates in current medical sociology and sociology of gender.

GNSE 50002 Colloquium: Africa in the Era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Instructor: Emily Osborn
This graduate course explores the history of the slave trade and the making of the Atlantic World using a range of secondary and primary sources, from oral traditions to digital datasets to diaries and ship records. We will start by examining African social and political systems prior to European contact and then investigate the emergence of the slave trade as a major force of change across the oceanic basin. Themes of study include oral, archaeological, and textual sources of history; definitions and practices of slavery; the dynamics of trade, gender, warfare, and enslavement; and the making of the Atlantic World.

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

WINTER 2019

GNSE 30430 Gender, Sexuality, Imagination
Instructor: Kara Keeling
This course explores the relationships between theories of the imagination and those of gender and sexuality, with a particular emphasis on the relevance of this exploration to cinema and media studies.

GNSE 31400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
This course examines contemporary theories of sexuality, culture, and society. We then situate these theories in global and historical perspectives. Topics and issues are explored through theoretical, ethnographic, and popular film and video texts. Our itinerary in this coursewill be interdisciplinary, ranging from political theory to science studies. Topics for discussion will likely include: the gendering of reason and passion in the history of philosophy; the power, persistence, and flexibility of norms; the relationship between eros and other forms of desire; the division of labor and other economic tributaries to gendered experience; openings for and challenges to the political aspirations of sexual (and other) minorities; and the pressures exerted by technology on erotic life. Students will engage key concepts in the field, and will be encouraged to experiment with new ones.

GNSE 32235 Revolutionary Romance in Socialist China
Instructor: Paola Iovene
One of the goals of the socialist revolution was to transform social relations, not only those between classes but also family and romantic relations. One of the first laws that the Chinese Communist Party issued after the founding of the People's Republic was the New Marriage Law, which banned arranged marriages, concubinage, and arrangements involving minors. 1950s cinema and literature advertised romantic love as an important achievement of the new society. At the same time, loyalty to the Party and to the collectivity were also core values that the media emphasized. In this class, we will look at how literature and cinema instructed viewers on how to select one's object of love in Revolutionary China, and how love for a romantic partner, for the party, and for the people were differently foregrounded at specific historical moments. How did ideas of romantic love change from the 1940s to the 1980s, and how did cinema contribute to promoting them? What forms of intimacy and models of attachment characterized revolutionary romance? Which kind of person constituted an ideal romantic partner? Who was to be loved, how, and why? Should one orient one's passion toward one person, many, or none? 

GNSE 32350 Sex Differences in the Human Brain from DNA to Human Culture
Instructor: Jean Decety
This graduate seminar provides a foundation and a critical overview of theories and empirical research in neuroscience and psychology on sex differences, as well as their implications for medicine, health, education and public policy. 

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

GNSE 34905 Performance Lab: Women in American Plays
Instructor: Devon de Mayo
Working with professional female-identifying playwright, actor and dramaturg, director Devon de Mayo will lead this course centered on how male playwrights have portrayed women over the course of American history, and create an imagined space in which these characters can be in dialogue with one another. This course commits to developing a fully realized performance piece within the ten weeks of the quarter. Immersive in intent and demand, writing and performance skills will be developed by participants for participants. ATTENDANCE AT THE FIRST CLASS SESSION IS MANDATORY. CONSENT ONLY via REQUEST FORM. 

GNSE 35519 Gender and Language
Instructor: Sophie Salvo
The idea that men and women use language differently is a common trope today, yet this was not always understood to be the case. In this course, we will investigate the origins of modern assumptions about the relationship between sex, gender, and language by tracing their conceptualization in a wide range of literary, theoretical, and scientific discourses. In particular, the course will focus on two topics as case studies: the notion of a separate “women’s language” (or Weibersprache) and theories of the origin of grammatical gender. What political, theoretical, and aesthetic programs do claims about “gendered language” serve, and what anxieties do they reveal? Readings include texts from seventeenth-century ethnography, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy and philology, and twentieth-century literature, linguistics, and feminist theory.

GNSE 36450 Marriage and Family
Instructor: Muh-Chung Lin
Marriage and the family are two important building blocks in many societies. Marriage and the family not only constitute essential parts of an individual's inner world, shape his or her perspectives towards life and the outside world, they also have far reaching effects on an individual's well-being, ranging from physical and mental health, income and wealth, to his or her integration to the social network and community. This course aims to introduce students to the sociological literature on marriage and the family. We will cover stages through which a romantic relationship evolves over time, from dating and courtship, sexual relationship to cohabitation and marriage, as well as divorce and widowhood. We will also discuss socioeconomic differences in childrearing practices, kinship, and social stratification and the family. This course focuses largely on patterns in the contemporary U.S. society, and yet we will also explore their historical roots and international differences.

GNSE 38110 Queer Jewish Literature
Instructor: Anna Elena Torres
Spanning medieval Hebrew to contemporary Yiddish, this course will explore the intersections of Jewish literature and queer theory, homophobia and antisemitism. While centered on literary studies, the syllabus will also include film, visual art, and music. Literary authors will include Bashevis Singer, Qalonymus ben Qalonymus, Irena Klepfisz, and others. Theorists will include Eve Sedgwick, Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Sander Gilman, and others. Readings will be in English translation. 

GNSE 39117 Theater And Performance in Latin America
Instructor: Danielle Roper
What is performance? How has it been used in Latin America and the Caribbean? This course is an introduction to theatre and performance in Latin America and the Caribbean that will examine the intersection of performance and social life. While we will place particular emphasis on performance art, we will examine some theatrical works. We ask: how have embodied practice, theatre and visual art been used to negotiate ideologies of race, gender and sexuality? What is the role of performance in relation to systems of power? How has it negotiated dictatorship, military rule, and social memory? Ultimately, the aim of this course is to give students an overview of Latin American performance including blackface performance, indigenous performance, as well as performance and activism. Undergraduates must be in their 3rd or 4th year.

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

GNSE 42619 Gender Theory in Ethnomusicology
Instructor: Anna Schultz
This graduate seminar introduces students to the history, development, and current status of gender and feminist theory in ethnomusicology. Issues we will discuss include: gender in ethnomusicological fieldwork; early feminist critiques in ethnomusicology; gender, body, and performance; sexuality in music; musical masculinities; music technology and gender; gender and labor; and intersectional feminist ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology is deeply interdisciplinary, so our readings will include relevant texts from anthropology, performance studies, and historical musicology.

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

GNSE 48602 Cinema in Africa
Instructor: Loren Kruger
This course examines Africa in film as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in Sub Saharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), ground-breaking film by the "father" of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, African Jim (1959) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin's Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga, Ousmane Sembenes Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno'ss Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine cinematic representations of tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the different implications of these tensions for men and women, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and ethnographic film, including 21st century work where available.

GNSE 65203 The Literature of Trauma
Instructor: Lauren Berlant
This graduate seminar focuses on the conventions of trauma theory but mainly focuses on components: the incident, the event, the archive, witnessing, the personal and the impersonal; reparation, the subordinated population. Theorists include Puar, Moten, Mbembe, Caruth, Freud, Fanon, Fonagy, Hartman, Luckshurst; artworks include material by Rankine, Wojnarowicz, Guzman, Kapil, Kane, and Pink. Students will have wide latitude for the kinds of teaching they choose to do in the class. A final project, creative with an essay or an essay is expected. 

SPRING 2019

GNSE 31005 Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality: Media Wars
Instructors: Jennifer Wild, Lara Janson
In our contemporary moment, we have become accustomed to terms such as 'counter-terrorism' that signal an effort to resist internal and external threats, and those suggesting that we live in an age of 'post-truth' dominated by 'corporate-media,' 'fake news,' and 'fact-challenged' journalism. Taking this platform as our starting place, this class explores how these terms and their use have been gendered; have situated both gender and sexuality as either weapons of resistance or objects of destruction. This class will be historically organized insofar as we will begin our discussion with ways that media - broadly conceived to include cinema, print and visual-cultural forms, television, and the internet - have aimed to 'counter' patriarchal, heteronormative, and hegemonic systems of representation of gender and sexuality.

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

GNSE 34308 Reproductive Worlds
Instructor: Andrea Ford
This course explores how human reproduction is compelled, constrained, enabled, and narrated across the globe. The “natural” aspects of reproduction intersect in increasingly fraught and often surprising ways with its technological/scientific, institutional/professional, and political/ideological aspects. The starting point for the course is that reproduction is differently understood and politically contested among and for various groups of people. We will pay particular attention to the ways bodies, ideas, and technologies flow throughout global contexts, while exploring how inequalities at various levels (race, class, geographic region, nationality, gender, sexuality, disability) impact the “nature” of the reproductive body, and how reproductive practices “reproduce” such inequalities. We will also explore how knowledge about social reproduction and the reproductive body is produced and contested through biomedicine, law, and media, with particular attention to naturalizing discourse about gender. Finally, we will look at how ecology and reproduction are intertwined via concern about the environment, culminating our exploration of how reproduction is always situated in its social and material contexts, and never simply an individual matter.

GNSE 37570 Bodies, Gifts, and Commodities
Instructror: Elham Mireshghi
This course presents a survey of anthropological theories of gifts and commodities and how they have been used to explain exchanges involving the human body. We will consider various forms of labor, including sex work and paid surrogacy, exchanges enabled by modern biotechnologies, such as organ and tissue donation, as well as other contexts where the body is objectified and fragmented, such as in the discovery and marketing of genetic materials and processes.

GNSE 38002 Women, Children, Gender and Human Rights
Instructor: TBD
This course will explore the dynamic, intersecting, and sometimes conflicting worlds of human rights law and practice in both the U.S. and internationally. From life expectancy and morbidity, economic equality, freedom from rape and sexual violence, personhood, sexual identity and practice, and the expanding definitions of family, the seminar will read and debate literature, law, research and remedies. 

GNSE 39600 Feminist Philosophy
Instructor: Martha Nussbaum
The course is an introduction to the major varieties of philosophical feminism. After studying some key historical texts in the Western tradition (Wollstonecraft, Rousseau, J. S. Mill), we examine four types of contemporary philosophical feminism: Liberal Feminism (Susan Moller Okin, Martha Nussbaum), Radical Feminism (Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin), Difference Feminism (Carol Gilligan, Annette Baier, Nel Noddings), and Postmodern "Queer" Gender Theory and trans feminism (Judith Butler, Michael Warner and others). After studying each of these approaches, we will focus on political and ethical problems of contemporary international feminism, asking how well each of the approaches addresses these problems. Prerequisites: Undergraduates may enroll only with the permission of the instructor. 

GNSE 40304 Between Nature and Artifice: The Formation of Scientific Knowledge
Instructors: Margaret Carlyle, Eduardo Escobar, Jennifer P. Daly
This course critically examines concepts of "nature" and "artifice" in the formation of scientific knowledge, from the Babylonians to the Romantics, and the ways that this history has been written and problematized by both canonical and less canonical works in the history of science from the twentieth century to the present. Our course is guided by three overarching questions, approached with historical texts and historiography, that correspond to three modules of investigation: 1) Nature, 2) Artifice, and 3) Liminal: Neither Natural nor Artificial.

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

GNSE 42410 The Age of Obscenity: Sex, Speech and Censorship in the Long 19th Century
Instructor: Zach Samalin
Straddling the line between art and non‐art, protected speech and prohibited conduct, moral pollution and expressive liberty, the obscene is notoriously difficult to define coherently. Yet at the present moment, when the concept of free expression and the critique of censorship have largely been coopted by reactionary politics and deployed as ideological bludgeons, it has become more urgent than ever to confront that definitional difficulty, and to reexamine the modern formation of the obscenity concept in the context of the 19th and early 20th century literary works which first put it to the test as a legal, moral, sexual, and aesthetic category, among them: Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure; Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary; Henry Vizetelly's English translation of Zola's La Terre; D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover; Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs de Mal; Algernon Charles Swinburne's Poems and Ballades; and Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights. Additionally, we will read in legal history as well as the archive of parliamentary and court transcripts, in order to become conversant with the development of modern obscenity law. At the same time, our investigation will engage with more recent accounts of the obscene within cultural, legal and especially feminist theory, such as Catharine MacKinnon's polemical anti‐pornographic writings, Bruno Latour's writings on iconoclasm, and Foucault's work in the history of sexuality.