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

2023-2024 Courses

Undergraduate Courses

AUTUMN 2023

WINTER 2024

SPRING 2024

 

Graduate Courses

AUTUMN 2023

WINTER 2024

SPRING 2024

 

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

AUTUMN 2023

GNSE 12120 Gender, Sexuality and Sport
Instructor: Zoya Sameen
This course will examine how the categories of gender and sexuality have shaped the contemporary life of sport. We will begin by unpacking the complexity of gender and sex as concepts in the study of sport while also considering the origins of gender-based segregation in sport. Major topics in this course include: Title IX protections; intersectionality and race; sexuality, homophobia, and sport; hyperandrogenism; trans inclusion; and cultural nationalism and sport. This is an interdisciplinary course that will draw on methods in philosophy, history, bioethics, and the study of gender and sexuality. Our texts will comprise of readings as well as visual media across multiple regions, including India, South Africa, and the United States. Students will broadly learn to critically think about sport in relation to concepts of gender, sexual orientation, and race along with the ideals of law, social justice, and inclusivity.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12123 Global Perspectives on Reproductive Justice Theory and Practice
Instructor: Malavika Parthasarathy
The US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has sharpened our awareness of the perils that besiege our reproductive futures. This course offers a deep dive into comparative reproductive justice theory and practice rooted both in unique cultural particularities and in globally resonant issues and challenges. While exposing students to the foundational texts shaping the reproductive justice movement, the course shall engage critically with the possibilities and limitations of a rights based framework and the challenges and liberatory potential of a justice based approach to reproductive decision-making. Drawing from literature and media from across the world, the course shall provide global perspectives on issues as varied as contraception, assisted reproductive technology, mass sterilization, and family leave, along with scholarship and resources from the US. While engaging critically with theory, the course shall also provide practitioners’ perspectives through guest lectures by ethnographers, lawyers, and healthcare professionals working in the field.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12124 Queering God
Instructor: Olivia Bustion
Can God be an ally in queer worldmaking? Is God queer? What does queerness have to do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam? This course introduces students to foundational concepts in queer and trans studies by focusing on queer Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies. We will analyze the ways that contemporary artists, activists, and scholars are using theology to reimagine gender and experiment with new relational forms. Our readings will include a variety of genres: memoir, letters, scriptural interpretation, and a novel. There will be no presumption of previous acquaintance with any of the readings or topics discussed, or indeed with any academic theology or queer theory at all.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12154 Gendered Experiences of the City: London
Instructor: Kim Coleman
A 9-week course in which we will explore gendered experiences of London in the 20th Century. Each week we will explore the context – London – from a different angle. We will consider gender in literature, experimental film, art, nightlife, working life, parenthood, and fashion. We will meet people who tell us their stories of London as a gendered space and visit important sites of activity relevant to our area of study.
This class counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors PQ: Admission to the GNSE Civ Study Abroad Program  

GNSE 12159 Reading as a Writer: The Bad Girls Club
Instructor: Julie Iromuanya
Jezebels, witches, femme fatales, nasty women, sirens, madwomen, and murderesses: the world over, these women of many names—whom we’ll collectively refer to as the Bad Girls Club—have alternately inspired the disdain and delight of multitudes. Whether jailed, expelled, excommunicated, or burned at the stake, their (anti)heroic antics have challenged, critiqued, or, some might say, corrupted the laws, mores, and sensibilities of societies. If it is true that polite, well-behaved women rarely make history, then what do impolite, badly-behaved women teach us about the construction of (his) story? In this course, we’ll examine literature from around the world featuring members of the Bad Girls Club, who in opposing complimentary constructions of femininity, femaleness, and power invite introspection on the gendered nature of story and storytelling. In short critical papers, we’ll analyze the tropes, features, and conventions of literature featuring these bad characters, and in short exercises, you’ll write stories, poems, and essays inspired by them.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 13001 Introduction to Gender Studies
Instructor: Red Tremmel
This course invites students to take an empirical and theoretical approach to understanding gender. Drawing on scholarship from across the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities, we begin the course by learning about the questions, methodologies, foundational concepts, research findings, and theoretical frameworks that comprise the field of gender studies. Next, we delve into the diverse ways that gender emerges and operates in our everyday lives, including our own embodiment. We then identify the historical and socioeconomic forces that animate, construct, regulate, and transform gender from one generation to the next. And we end by analyzing the relationship between gender and systems of power. All of our inquiries will consider the complex ways that gender operates at the intersection of sexuality, race, class, age, ethnicity, religion, ability and other emerging categories of difference.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 15002 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations I
Instructors: Various
The first quarter of the GNSE Civ sequence offers a historical examination of bodies, sex, and gender. Through a series of readings that include historical primary sources and examples of cultural production from antiquity to the present, we will investigate how bodies across a variety of cultures become sexed and gendered. In particular, we will ask how the very categories of sex and gender not only produce social meaning from bodies and their anatomical differences but may also be complicit in acts violence, oppression, and colonization. Thematically we will pay attention to the emergence and critique of the distinction between sex and gender; resistances to the gender binary; the relationship between gender, power, and authority; feminism and critiques of Western feminism; the category of woman as an object of scientific knowledge; and the flourishing of and violence against trans life. Finally, while we will be dealing with historical accounts in this course, the aim is to understand how the regulation of bodies in the past has informed and may challenge our understanding of the diversity of embodied experience in the present.

GNSE 17501 Art and Feminism
Instructor: Maggie Borowitz
How has feminism changed the landscape of artistic practices over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries? What does a history of feminist art look like and how does it relate to a feminist history of art? In this course, students will consider the relationship between art and feminism, focusing upon artwork produced in the Americas over the last century. Through course readings, seminar discussions, and the close analysis of artworks, the course will be structured around a series of thematic investigations across the geographical space of the Americas, focusing especially upon the U.S. and Mexico. We will consider texts by feminist art historians such as Linda Nochlin and Anne Wagner alongside key texts by feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, bell hooks, and Laura Mulvey; we will explore the work of artists who have identified as feminists (e.g., Judy Chicago, Howardena Pindell) as well as those who have complicated or even resisted such identification (e.g., Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, Yayoi Kusama). Key themes will include: representations of bodies, eroticisms, domestic space and labor, the relationship between the personal and the political, and the politicization of materials and making processes.

GNSE 17915 Women’s Work
Instructor: Kindon Mills
As a haptic art, an art experienced through touch as well as the other senses, architecture operates at multiple scales: that of hand, building, city. The scale of the hand gives the most direct access to architecture and its furnishings: think of a handrail, a chair, a textile, a brick pattern, a wood detail. This is the realm of craft in architecture and was, for decades, the realm inhabited and ruled by women practitioners. Women designed furniture, made drawings, wove textiles, produced pottery and glasswork as a means of expression within the male world of architectural practice. As an introduction to the study of architecture, craft entails applying principles of proportion, scale, tactility, precision, materiality and assembly; in this way, craft is a microcosm of architecture. Through a series of projects and readings centered around the craft arts and the women who advanced them, this studio course will introduce students to small-scale making and translate that process to larger scales. Students will undertake three projects: (1) a small work of craft and a set of orthographic drawings describing the making process, (2) a design for a work space for a craft, and (3) a series of analytical drawings linking a work of architecture back to a traditional craft. PQ: Consent Only

GNSE 20001 Theories of Sexuality and Gender
Instructors: Kristen Schilt and Melina Davis
This is a one-quarter, seminar-style 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. This course is required for GNSE majors. Previous coursework in gender/sexuality studies required.

GNSE 20118 Gender, Agency, and Power in 19th C Russian Literature
Instructor: Anne Eakin Moss
When members of Pussy Riot performed their “Punk Prayer” at the Cathedral of Christ Our Savior in Moscow in 2011, heads covered with neon balaclavas, it was as much the scandal of their female bodies in front of the iconostasis as the words of their song that constituted their protest against state and church. This course focuses on similarly scandalous provocations and quieter acts of resistance against normative gender expectations in 19th-century Russian literature. We read narratives of rebellion by individuals and collective actions by groups of women, and consider the surprising agency attributed to women’s cooperative work in Russian literature as well as the heavy burdens placed on women by family, state, and church. Readings include primarily short fiction in a variety of genres (sentimental, romantic, realist, and gothic) by canonized male writers and by women writers of the 19th C who are less often taught and translated, but were widely read in their own day. These works expand our understanding of the narrative possibilities for sexuality and gendered subjectivity in the Russian literary sphere, and of the ways in which possibility itself was made and remade by literary expression. The course also introduces students to methods of literary analysis informed by critical theories of gender, and asks how Russian literary and cultural history may offer new ways of thinking about gendered bodies, performance, and interrelations in the 19th C and today.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20127 Black Women Work: The labor of Black women in communities, families, and institutions
Instructor: Lisa Moore
This multidisciplinary course will explore the labor of Black women in three distinct arenas-communities, families, and institutions. Students will explore these areas through engaging with historical and contemporary narratives, research, and popular media, heavily drawing in a U.S. context, but not exclusively. Through an engagement of Black women in the U.S. labor force, this course will explore three questions. How has the labor of Black women contributed to the sustainability of communities, families, and institutions? What are the choices Black women make to engage and sustain their work? What is the future of the labor of Black women? Is the future one that is liberatory or not? Students will leave this course with an understanding of the ways intersectional experiences of oppression contribute to complex conditions and decision-making, that shape the labor of Black women, the function of certain labor decisions as sites of resistance, as well as the generative resources that support the professional success and well-being of Black women.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20132 Gender, Race, and Horror
Instructor: AE Stevenson
This course will contend with the ways that horror as a film genre constructs and deconstructs notions of gender and race in society. We will attend to texts across decades and subgenres that will illustrate how gender and race are made and regulated through notions of confusion, fear, and repulsion. By attending to these universal human feelings, students will learn how emotions are evoked through the construction of the text, its portrayal of the disruption of gender norms and its construction of racial boundaries. Students will learn the necessary vocabulary and methodologies to be able to critically analyze (audio)visual texts. In order to do this, students will be guided through how to construct argumentative critical papers through proper utilization of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. By the end of the course, students will be well versed in cinematographic terms such that they will be able to critically analyze texts to understand the impact of perspective, interpretation, and judgment. This course is meant to help students navigate and make sense of an increasingly scary world by learning to appreciate fear as a necessary human expression. Finally, and most importantly, students will be able to engage with the age-old notion of terror to be able lead a more ethical and intellectually richer life.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20135 Divas, Idols, Material Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Music Videos
Instructor: Paula Harper
The stark black and white of Madonna’s “Vogue” and the pinks and sparkles of “Material Girl.” The explosive surprise releases of Beyoncé's BEYONCÉ and Lemonade visual albums. The lavish cinematic spectacle of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” and the fanbait intertextuality of SM Entertainment’s Aespa. Since MTV’s advent in 1981, hit music videos have made a number of pop songs inextricable from iconic imagery and choreography; ubiquitous digital devices and the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok have only increased pop music’s audiovisuality. Looking at and listening to female pop icons raises fraught questions of agency, representation, race, sexuality/sexualization, bodies, commodification, and capital. In this course, students will gain a vocabulary for talking about both the audio and visual parameters of music video, and they will use this vocabulary to engage with critical frameworks for examining meaning, circulation, and reception in contemporary music videos. Assignments across the course will allow students to experiment with a range of writing and media genres, including critical close readings, micro-reception histories, thinkpieces, podcast episodes, and video essays.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

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

GNSE 21111 History of Death
Instructor: Katie Hickerson
This course introduces students to the historical study of death and the methods and approaches scholars have developed to understand the roles death has played in shaping societies across time and space. Drawing from the rich scholarship on the history of death, it will demonstrate the methodical diversity (textual, visual, and material culture studies) and analytical approaches (history of the body, religious studies, and the study of slavery and colonialism) used to examine the multivalent ways the dead have been sources of meaning-making for individuals, institutions, religious communities, and nations from early Islam to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It examines how ruptures in ways of death through military encounters, epidemics, and colonialism have shaped and transformed societies. While the history of death is strongly situated in narratives of the rise of the West, students will consider case studies from across regional scholarly specializations, including Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

GNSE 21303 Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation
Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the two hundred years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries – not to mention a thriving “Janeite” fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. For example, feminist scholars have long been fascinated by Austen for her treatments of feminine agency, sociality, and desire. Marxists read her novels for the light they shed on an emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of industrialization. And students of the “rise of the novel” in English are often drawn to Austen as a landmark case – an innovator of new styles of narration and a visionary as to the potentials of the form. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen’s completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include pieces by Shoshana Felman, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams. Open to 3rd and 4th years with consent of instructor.

GNSE 21304 Medieval Romance
Instructor: Mark Miller
Medieval romance is one of the main ancestors of fantasy and SF. This course examines the speculative work of fantasy in medieval romance's explorations of aesthetics, desire, and politics.

GNSE 21650 Kafka’s The Trial
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
This very close reading of Kafka's arguably most well known work after The Metamorphosis, means to move away from megalithic glosses of Kafka as a writer of allegory and instead to look deeply at Kafka's considerations of power—the power of women, built space, and language as wound and axe.

GNSE 22035 The Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Pastoral Epistles
Instructor: Margaret Mitchell
In the early second century there were bitter battles over the legacy of Paul and his preserved letters in terms of gender, sexuality, family life, asceticism, church administration, and theological vision. We can see these well by reading the narrative text The Acts of Paul and Thecla alongside the “Pastoral Epistles” (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus), the former championing a female, cross-dressing ascetic Christ-missionary and the latter, in pseudepigraphical epistolary texts written in the dead Paul’s name, insisting on patriarchal family life and women’s adherence to traditional roles. In this course we shall read both sets of texts carefully in Greek, noting points of similarity and contestation, and test various models of how these sources—each of which seeks to “fix” the Pauline legacy in its own way—are related to one another. Time allowing, we shall also look at the later reception of the cult of Saint Thecla and late antique interpretations of “the apostle,” Paul, on these issues of sexuality and gender roles, and their perduring influence in contemporary debates. PQ: At least one year of Greek, or equivalent.

GNSE 22323 The Family in the Greek and Roman World
Instructor: Georgios Tsolakis
This course examines how family was conceptualized and manifested in the Greek and Roman world. In this class, we will begin by examining key terms related to family (household, kinship, ancestors, descendants) and scholarly approaches to familial studies under the light of different theoretical perspectives. Through the examination of written sources (literary texts, inscriptions, and papyri) and archaeological evidence, we will adopt a thematic approach exploring the ways in which family intersected with several fields of public and domestic life, such as law, adoption, heirship, religion, rituals, education, politics, and public honors.

GNSE 22333 Cassandras: Truth-Telling in Times of Crisis
Instructor: Demetra Kasimis
In public life, why and how are some people accepted as truth-tellers while others are not? Is truth simply a problem of and for “correct" reasoning? What assumptions about argumentation and evidence go unexplored in this way of framing the problem? What if truth were a problem of truth-telling instead? When and how do social, racial, and gender hierarchies authorize received understandings of a (credible) truth-teller? What is credible telling usually thought to sound like? What are the conditions for listening and hearing the truth? To think through these questions, we take as a lens the archetype of Cassandra, the babbling prophetess of classical Greek myth and tragedy doomed not to be believed. Cassandra has served as a resource and source of inspiration for a range of critical thinkers, including but not limited to theorists, feminists, poets, and novelists. What is a "Cassandra"? Does her "deranged" way of seeing the world - her prophetic speech - disorient or destabilize? We will consider how, in her different representations, Cassandra places questions of language, patriarchy, and sexual violence at the center of general discussions of credibility and critique. Readings range from ancient Greek thought to 21st century theory.

GNSE 22705 Abortion: Morality, Politics, Philosophy
Instructors: Jason Bridges, Dan Brudney
Abortion is a complex and fraught topic. Morally, a very wide range of individual, familial, and social concerns converge upon it. Politically, longstanding controversies have been given new salience and urgency by the Dobbs decision and the ongoing moves by state legislatures to restrict access to abortion. In terms of moral philosophy, deep issues in ethics merge with equally deep questions about the nature of life, action, and the body. In terms of political philosophy, basic questions are raised about the relationship of religious and moral beliefs to the criminal law of a liberal state. We will seek to understand the topic in all of this complexity. Our approach will be thoroughly intra- and inter-disciplinary, drawing not only on philosophy but also on the contributions of a series of guest instructors in law, history, and medicine.  PQ: Third or fourth-year standing 

GNSE 23145 Queer South Asia
Instructor: Nisha Kommattam
This course explores representations of queerness, same-sex love, sexualities and debates around them by introducing students to a variety of literary texts translated from South Asian languages as well as films, geographically ranging from India and Pakistan to Sri Lanka. We will also read scholarship that will help us place the production and reception of these primary sources in historical, political, cultural and religious contexts. In particular, we will examine questions of history and continuity (recurrent themes and images); form and genre (differences of representation in mythological narratives, poetry, biography, fiction, erotic/legal/medical treatises); the relationship of gender to sexuality (differences and similarities between representations of male-male and female-female relations); queerness as a site for exploring other differences, such as caste or religious difference; and questions of cross-cultural and transnational dialogue and cultural specificity.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23151 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Politics in the United States
Instructor: Andrew Proctor
This course surveys academic research on sexuality and gender in American politics. Drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives, it focuses on key arguments and debates about how politics shapes and is shaped by sexuality and gender relations. We will pay particular attention to the development of sexuality and gender identity as analytic and political concepts; the role of the State and political institutions to the formation of sexuality and gender; the relationship between social movements, counter-movements, and political parties; the political behavior and attitudes of LGBT people; and the ways in which intersectional inequalities structure LGBT politics.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23153 Feminist Film Histories
Instructor: Aurore Spiers
This course explores global film histories by surveying the contributions of women directors and screenwriters, actresses, and movie workers from the silent era to the 1990s. It also addresses historiographical questions about women’s erasure, feminist recovery, and the archive. Films discussed will include works by Chantal Akerman, Dorothy Arzner, Jacqueline Audry, Maya Deren, Alice Guy Blaché, Sarah Maldoror, Esfir Shub, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Mai Zetterling.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23156 Empowering the Solo Voice: A Feminist Exploration of Francophone Theater Performance
Instructor: Khouloud Gargouri
In this course, we will delve into the world of contemporary Francophone theater, focusing on the genre of solo performances, or "seules en scène''. We will examine the lineage, history, and practice of this genre, with a special emphasis on feminist playwrights and performers, such as Typhaine D, Jalila Baccar, Fanny Cabon, and Florence Foresti. We will study the underlying components of solo performances and learn how to integrate them into different modes, including storytelling, one-woman or one-man shows, and standup. The selected plays will illustrate how the art of the solo voice can empower under-represented communities and minorities to share powerful narratives and create a new space for visibility and listening. The class will combine history, practice, and creative writing, and will afford students the opportunity to apply this knowledge in a series of live performances that will allow them to creatively connect to the issues raised in the readings and draw from their own experiences, inspirations, and questions. Students will develop creative and critical tools to fully explore the solo voice as a form of artistic expression, honing their talents in writing, devising, composing, producing, and creating work. Performance recordings will be obtained and shared with the class to further enhance the learning experience. One of the unique opportunities of this course is the opportunity to work with texts obtained directly from the playwrights. PQ: Reading knowledge of French. Class will be conducted in English. Readings will be in French and in English.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23157 Alone in the Mountains: Tales of Freedom and Violence in Contemporary Catalan Literature
Instructor: Bel Olid
From witches to "goges" ("water women"), Catalan folklore shows a tradition of women living on their own in the mountains, liberated from societal conventions. These women are portrayed as fascinating yet threatening figures. This ancient imagery has permeated contemporary literature, manifested in novels that depict women who remove themselves from "civilization" to inhabit rural areas of Catalunya, seeking freedom and having to confront at the same time societal norms, abusive partners or even their own personal demons. The mountains, far from ideal and peaceful, are an untamed and often brutal space in which human lives hold no greater value than those of goats, mushrooms, rivers. In this course we shall engage with four novels authored by women: "Solitude" (1904) by Victor Català, "Stone in a Landslide" (1984) by Maria Barbal, "When I Sing Mountains Dance" (2019) by Irene Solà, and "Alone" (2021) by Carlota Gurt. Through the analysis of these literary works, we aim to delve into Catalan culture and explore its literary archetypes, while establishing significant connections among these texts and their place in modern and contemporary literature. Taught in English, but students seeking credit for the HLBS major/minor must do part of the readings and written work in Catalan or Spanish as necessary for their degree.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23158 “Que otros sean lo Normal”: Pertinencia y otredad en la literatura trans en español
Instructor: Bel Olid
¿Qué nos dicen de una sociedad sus alteridades? Es decir, ¿cómo nos informa de la norma lo que queda fuera de ella? A partir de la lectura y análisis de obras escritas por autores trans, conoceremos más a fondo la actualidad de algunos países hispanohablantes, centrándonos en un elemento básico de cualquier identidad: el género. El curso está organizado a partir de la lectura y visualización de materiales reales y con actividades orales y escritas dirigidas a ampliar el conocimiento de la literatura contemporánea en español (y las sociedades en las que florece), y también a reforzar las habilidades de expresión oral y escrita de les participantes. Taught in Spanish.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23159 Alternative Feminisms: Gender, Agency, and Liberation in the Middle East
Instructor: Sevda Numanbayraktaroglu
This course critically examines gender, agency, and liberation in the Middle East. The course will begin with a discussion of human agency, its relation to sociocultural context, and the feminist literature on the issues of agency, resistance, and liberation. Then, we will explore these relationships in non-Western contexts by drawing examples from Turkey, Iran, and Northern Syria. In the cases of Turkey and Iran, we will focus on the feminist movements and women’s collective actions for the right to wear and take off the headscarf. In the case of Northern Syria, we will explore the agencies of Kurdish female guerrillas and their conceptions of empowerment. In each case, we will focus on the moral and ethical principles that guide women’s choices and trace their sociohistorical foundations.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23645 Body And The Digital
Instructor: Crystal Beiersdorfer
As digital technology advances, the separation between IRL and URL blurs. Participants enrolled in this course will explore techniques that will help them create thought-provoking work, learn how to create a research-based digital artwork, strengthen their ability to give and receive critique, and build an understanding of how the corporeal interacts with the digital. Students will offer and receive constructive feedback during instructor-led critiques on peers' works throughout this course. Students will also explore the intersection of gender and digital spaces through weekly readings and discussions. By the end of this course, students will feel comfortable utilizing different processes of development to create digital artwork and speaking about digital spaces, including how different social identities affect our relationship with them.

GNSE 24103 Nature and the Natural in the Middle Ages
Instructor: Daisy Delogu
In this course we will undertake a study of nature and ideas about what is “natural” centered around three main axes, and will adopt a variety of relevant critical perspectives (e.g., ecocriticism, studies of gender and sexuality, political theory) to support our analyses. First, we will explore nature as the created world of which humans are a part (as one of God’s creations), yet from which they also stand apart (as sovereign caretakers). Second, we will examine how the diffusion of Aristotelian works (notably the Politics) in the later Middle Ages provided a justificatory framework for social and political hierarchies and practices of economic exploitation. Third, we will consider the intersection of nature with gender, sexuality, and reproduction, a topic complicated by the fact that Nature is itself represented, in allegorical terms, as a woman.

GNSE 24903 Religion and Human Rights
Instructor: John Sianghio
Religion played a crucial, but often overlooked, role in the development of post-World War II conceptions of human rights, providing principles and ideas that continue to influence contemporary human rights debates in the fields of law, public policy, and international relations. This no-prior-knowledge-necessary course explores the complex, sometimes fraught, relationship between religion and human rights from World War II to the present. We will begin by juxtaposing the role religious ideas played in the drafting of core post-war human rights documents (e.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, etc.) with the decision by drafters to omit direct references to the divine or the beliefs of specific religious communities. Using case study analysis and close reading of primary religious texts, scholarly commentary, and historical accounts, we will examine the ways in which individuals and groups from multiple religious (and non-religious) traditions both apply and push back against existing human rights norms. Throughout the course we will discuss the role religion might play in debates surrounding emerging, but still contentious, conceptions of human rights. This includes: universal healthcare, gender and LGBTQIA+ rights, ever more complex manifestations of religious freedom, as well as whether human rights as conceived of in the mid-20th Century can be reconciled with decolonial and post-colonial perspectives.

GNSE 26311 Worlding Otherwise: Speculative Fiction, Film, Theory
Instructor: Hoda El Shakry
This course examines literary and cinematic works of speculative fiction in a comparative context. An expansive genre that encompasses science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, as well as utopian and dystopian literature, speculative fiction envisions alternate, parallel, possible, or imagined worlds. These worlds often exhibit characteristics such as: scientific and technological advancements; profound social, environmental, or political transformations; time or space travel; life on other planets; artificial intelligence; and evolved, hybrid, or new species. Speculative works frequently reimagine the past and present in order to offer radical visions of desirable or undesirable futures. We will also consider how this genre interrogates existential questions about what it means to be human, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind/body, thinking/being, and self/other, as well as planetary concerns confronting our species. Fictional works will be paired with theoretical readings that frame speculative and science fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, bio-politics, human rights, as well as environmental and social justice. In addition to studying subgenres—such as Afrofuturism—we will explore speculative fiction as a critical mode of reading that theorizes other ways of being, knowing, and imagining.

GNSE 26313 Judaism, Medicine, and the Body
Instructor: Ranana Dine
For centuries the “Jewish doctor” has existed as an archetype, but is there such a thing as Jewish medicine? Does Judaism teach a distinct approach to the body, illness, and healing? And more significantly, why should religion have anything to do with one’s health today? In this course we will grapple with our assumptions regarding modern Western medicine by discussing topics in Jewish medical thought and ethics. We will study how Judaism – its texts, history, laws, and traditions – intersect with issues of science, medicine, and the body. In particular we will think about how a Jewish approach to medicine, and more broadly a religious approach, might complicate contemporary assumptions about the body and healing. We will also consider how Jewish bodies have been imagined and stereotyped, and think about how that might affect Jewish approaches to disease and medical ethics. This course will thus offer students a way to think about alternatives to assumptions about medicine, the body, and ethics in the secular West, which will be explored both in class materials and in personal projects. No prior work in Jewish studies, medical ethics, or religious studies necessary.

GNSE 27608 Women and Islam
Instructor: Maliha Chishti
This course is an introduction to the field of women, gender and Islam. We will examine the literature on Islamic legal, historical, Quranic and sacred textual constructs of women as well as critically explore the lived realities and experiences of Muslim women living in Muslim-majority societies and in the west. In centering the work of Muslim feminist scholars, students will gain an understanding of the contemporary debates around women’s rights, sexuality, roles, responsibilities and gender relations in the context of Islamic law and the hadith literature. The discursive constructions and social realities of Muslim women are critically examined through historic and literary representations, ethnographic accounts, human rights discourses, sexual politics and secular and Islamic feminism(s). Moreover, this course situates Muslim women as complex, multidimensional actors engaged in knowledge production and political and feminist struggles, as opposed to the oppressed, victim-centered images that have regained currency in the representation of Muslim women in the post 9/11 era.

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

GNSE 29003 Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts
Instructors: Alireza Doostdar and Hoda El Shakry
This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human—from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge. Enrollment by Consent Only (for both grads and undergrads). Students should send the instructors a paragraph explaining their interest and prior preparation or familiarity with the themes in the course.

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.

 

WINTER 2024

GNSE 12103 Treating Trans-: Practices of Medicine, Practices of Theory
Instructor: Paula Martin
Medical disciplines from psychiatry to surgery have all attempted to identify and to treat gendered misalignment, while queer theory and feminisms have simultaneously tried to understand if and how trans- theories should be integrated into their respective intellectual projects. This course looks at the logics of the medical treatment of transgender (and trans- more broadly) in order to consider the mutual entanglement of clinical processes with theoretical ones. Over the quarter we will read ethnographic accounts and theoretical essays, listen to oral histories, discuss the intersections of race and ability with gender, and interrogate concepts like "material bodies" and "objective science". Primary course questions include: (1) How is “trans-” conceptualized, experienced, and lived? How has trans-studies distinguished itself from feminisms and queer theories? (2) What are the objects, processes, and problematics trans-medicine identifies and treats? How is “trans-” understood and operationalized through medical practices? (3) What meanings of health, power, knowledge, gender, and the body are utilized or defined by our authors? What relations can we draw between them?
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12106 Women of the Avant-Garde
Instructor: Rivky Mondal
This course provides an introduction to the written materials of women artists who belonged to various twentieth-century avant-garde movements and circles. The institutions of “woman art” and “the avant-garde” will come under scrutiny as we consider the literary and archival miscellany of pan- & non-sexual, cross-generational, inter-aesthetic, multilingual, and transnational works by such makers as Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, Clarice Lispector, Frida Kahlo, and Yoko Ono. How do these artists conceive of their work and process as interventions into social, political, and historical realities? How does their subjective view of those realities provide an account of the identificatory powers of their gender and sexuality? We will examine the ways in which abstraction in writing becomes useful for commenting on issues raised by feminist and queer theory, periodization, canonization, and institution. Taking to the Regenstein’s Special Collections Research Center, we will also open up the criticism, diaries, and letters of these artists to gain a new perspective on their creative processes. In addition to learning how to constellate these materials with the course readings, students will acquire hands-on experience in archival research, annotation, and curation as they make an archival project of their own. Students’ final projects will serve as the basis for a prospective library exhibition in concert with Special Collections.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 12160 Beyond the Binary: Gender and Sexuality in Modern and Contemporary Art
Instructor: Stephanie Strother
In recent years, cultural understandings of gender and sexuality have undergone seismic shifts around the world, accompanied by new theorizations that emphasize fluid, non-binary, and trans identities. Where did we come from and where are we going? This course proposes to explore issues of gender and sexuality as they have been taken up by artists and art historians from the mid-nineteenth century through the present day, with an emphasis on historiographic and global frameworks. The course will be organized thematically around key topics. We will begin with a week devoted to historiography that introduces foundational theorists such as Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, and Griselda Pollock, followed by weeks on subjects such as craft and decoration, collecting and consumer practices, and exhibition strategies. Examples and readings will span different time periods and geographies. For instance, the week on craft and decoration will investigate gendered uses of African textiles in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil, feminine notions of the “decorative” in late nineteenth-century Europe, and queer textile artists in the late twentieth-century United States. Rather than considering these issues in a vacuum, we will investigate how gender and sexual identities intersect with other identities and will examine practices of making, consuming, and display, including some––such as interior decoration––that fall outside of a typical art historical framework.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 12161 Topics In EALC: Queer Literature And Politics In Contemporary East Asia
Instructor: Nicholas Ogonek
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of queer literature from East Asia in English translation. This course will focus on such contemporary fiction, exploring how “queer” interfaces with issues of identity and subjecthood; desire, embodiment and reproduction; creativity and labor, and more. To this end, beyond issues of fictional representation, we will work to parse the relation between queer as an identity or subject position (queer people/characters) and queer as a set of interpretive strategies and ethical orientations to cultural texts (queer critique). In the first half of the quarter, we will examine some of this recent fiction alongside queer literary criticism and theory, and hold in-class workshops to conceptualize together the “queer” in queer literature and learn about the current situation of queer activism and cultural production in East Asia. In the second half of the quarter, we will read further East Asian literature through several thematic clusters – family, fandom, desire, etc. – while applying the interpretive approaches we learned in the first. The course may include readings by authors such as Wang Xiaobo, Park Sang Young, Murata Sayaka, Li Kotomi and Chi Ta-Wei among others. No prior knowledge is required; all readings will be in English.

GNSE 13002 Introduction to Sexuality Studies
Instructor: Red Tremmel
This course introduces students to foundational concepts and emerging questions that animate the interdisciplinary field of sexuality studies. Using an intersectional and transnational lens, we will examine research, films and artistic practices to better understand the social, historical, and cultural dimensions of sex, sexuality, and the erotic. Zooming in and out, from the personal to the global and back again, students will gain a new understanding of how sexual fantasies, arousals, desires, and relations mutually constitute economic, political and ecological systems.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 15003 Gender and Sexuality in World Civ II
Instructors: Various
The second half of the civ sequence will extend our earlier interrogation of bodies, sex, and gender into an examination of sexualities and socialities. Through an encounter with theoretical texts, literature, and art, we will investigate a series of important critiques of biopower, or statist strategies for regulating bodies and controlling populations. These interventions include critiques of nationalism, colonialism, capitalism, and heteronormativity, all of which, as we will see, contribute to our understanding of sexuality. Throughout the course, feminist and queer critique will fundamentally frame our analyses of power, desire, and sexuality. PQ: GNSE 15002

GNSE 18124 Poverty, Crime, and Character: 18th Century and Now
Instructor: Jacob Biel
From highwaymen and vagrants to thieves and murderers, this course will look at fictional representations of crime and criminology from the 18th century and the present. We will ask how changing concepts of character, literary and legal, shape a society’s understanding of what criminality is and how it should be managed. Looking first at how the early British novel asks us to think about literary and personal character by way of crime and confession, we will then turn to the 20th- and 21st-century afterlives of these 18th-century crime narratives, attending to how configurations of moral constitution and personal identity—especially relating to class, gender, and race—become intertwined in more recent fiction and film. Syllabus may include fiction by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Godwin, James Hogg, Richard Wright, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, and Jordy Rosenberg; films by Steven Spielberg, Bong Joon-ho, Horace Ové, Hirokazu Koreeda, and Richard Linklater; and theoretical texts by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Patrick Colquhoun, and recent criminologists.

GNSE 20007 Africa in the Middle East and the Middle East in Africa
Instructor: Katie Hickerson
From Mansa Musa’s Hajj in 1324 to the contemporary Afrobeats scene in Dubai, African and Middle Eastern societies share long histories of interconnection. This course examines these interconnections from the early modern to the contemporary era through a series of case studies ranging from traditions of exchange on the Swahili Coast, to the Ottoman Scramble for Africa, to the creation of a long-standing Lebanese diaspora in West Africa and a more recent Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Students will examine debates that animate this field of scholarship including conversations about race; histories of slavery and its legacies; conceptions of indigeneity, nativism, and settler colonialism; religious encounters; gender and society; shared and divergent experiences of European colonialism and struggles for independence; and transnational collective-building projects such as Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism. In addition to scholarship based on textual analysis, students will develop skills to investigate cultural sources such as music, photography, film, fashion, literature, and sports. No prior coursework in Middle Eastern or African studies is required. However, a background in African Civ, Islamic History and Society Civ, or Islamic Thought and Literature Civ is recommended.

GNSE 20108 Feminist Political Philosophy
Instructor: Tyler Zimmer
This course is a survey of recent work in feminist political philosophy. We’ll focus on three interrelated themes: objectification; the relation of gender oppression to the economic structure of society; and the problem of “intersectionality,” that is, the problem of how to construct adequate theories of gender injustice given that gender “intersects” with other axes of oppression, e.g. race and class. Authors we’ll read include: Martha Nussbaum, Sandra Bartky, Angela Davis, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Serene Khader.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

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

GNSE 20117 Feminist Theory and Political Economy
Instructor: Sarah Johnson
This course has two related aims: to consider how the regulation of economic life—from the household to the global economy—has figured as an object of analysis within feminist thought; and to examine how this analysis, together with the conceptual resources of political economy, has informed feminist theories of domination, freedom, equality, rights, and justice. Readings may include works by Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Iris Marion Young, Catharine MacKinnon, Nancy Fraser, and Aihwa Ong. The course includes a substantial research requirement, which invites students to draw upon the insights of these theorists as they use archival sources to conduct their own analyses of economic life. Enrollment is limited to undergraduates who have completed their Social Sciences Core requirement.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20133 Trans Genres
Instructor: C. Riley Snorton
This course explores genres of writing and cultural production concerned with transgender life and politics. Students will engage genre's relationship to gender, as they will read across memoir, fiction, poetry, and criticism.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20136 Generations, Gender, and Genre in Korean Fiction & TV Drama
Instructor: Kyeong-Hee Choi
Combining close reading and viewing with historical surveys, this seminar examines an assortment of popular literary and television dramatic texts whose production involved female writers and directors of modern or contemporary Korea. Its aim is to explore the ways in which the gendered and generational identity of the textual producers contribute to generating notable imprints within the chosen genre in question, responding to the social, cultural, and political calls that arise from their own present time. The texts include, among others, prose fictions by Na Hye-sŏk (1897-1948), Park Wan-sŏ (1931-2011), Han Kang (1970- ), and Cho Nam-joo (1978- ) and television drama series such as The Hourglass (1995; written by Song Jina), Mr. Sunshine (2018; written by Kim Eun-sook), The Red Sleeve (2021 dir. by Chŏng Chi-in; original novel by Kang Mi-kang, 2017), and My Liberation Notes (2022; written by Park Hae-yeong). No Korean proficiency is required. 

GNSE 20137 Horror, Abjection and the Monstrous Feminine
Instructor: Hoda El Shakry
This course explores cinematic and literary works of horror (the uncanny, gothic, sci-fi, paranormal, psychological thriller, killer/slasher, gore) from around the world. As a mode of speculative fiction, the genre envisions possible or imagined worlds that amplify curiosities, dreads, fears, terrors, phobias, and paranoias which simultaneously repel and attract. Horror frequently explores the boundaries of what it means to be human by dwelling on imaginaries of the non-human and other. It often exploits the markers of difference that preoccupy our psychic, libidinal, and social lifeworlds—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, but also the fundamental otherness that is other peoples’ minds and bodies. Interrogating the genre’s tension between desire and fear, our course will focus on the centrality of abjection and the monstrous feminine—as both thematic and aesthetic tropes—to works of horror. Films and fiction will be paired with theoretical readings that contextualize the genre of horror while considering its critical implications in relation to biopolitical and geopolitical forms of power. Content Warning: Course materials will feature graphic, violent, and oftentimes disturbing images and subjects. Enrolled students will be expected to watch, read, and discuss all course materials.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20408 Health Disparities in Breast Cancer
Instructor: Eileen Dolan
Across the globe, breast cancer is the most common women's cancer. In the last two decades, there have been significant advances in breast cancer detection and treatment that have resulted in improved survival rates. Yet, not all populations have benefited equally from these improvements, and there continues to be a disproportionate burden of breast cancer felt by different populations. In the U.S., for example, white women have the highest incidence of breast cancer but African-American women have the highest breast cancer mortality overall. The socioeconomic, environmental, biological, and cultural factors that collectively contribute to these disparities are being identified with a growing emphasis on health disparities research efforts. In this 10-week discussion-based course students will meet twice weekly and cover major aspects of breast cancer disparities.  

GNSE 20555 The Sociology of Work
Instructor: Kristen Schilt
From the Great Depression to the Great Resignation, paid work has played a central role in American life. The average American spends 1/3 of their life at work – making it an area of the social world heavily examined by politicians, journalists, and social scientists. In this course, we will look at the structural and interpersonal dynamics of work to consider the questions of what makes a “good job” in America and who gets to decide? Our topics will include low-wage work, the stigma of “dirty jobs,” gender and racial inequality at work, physical and emotional labor on the job, side hustles and the gig economy, and life after retirement. Students will be required to write a 15 page research paper that draws on interview data they will collect over the quarter. No prior background in doing interviews is required!

GNSE 21404 More than Human Ethnography
Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
In this course we explore the growing field of multispecies ethnography. We will focus on examples of multi-species work emerging primarily from anthropology in recent decades, reading foundational texts on interspecies engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Deborah Bird Rose, Eduardo Kohn, Anna Tsing, and Augustin Fuéntes among many others. We will consider the role other species played in early ethnographic and archaeological work, will examine ethnoprimatological studies, and will contemplate recent examinations of “becoming with” other animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, ‘aliens,’ and mutants—encountering complex ecological kin relationships, examining naturalcultural borders, and examining the legacies of decolonial scholarship. The course is a discussion-based seminar, with significant time devoted both to understanding the theoretical potentials of multispecies work and its logistical or methodological aspects—querying how multispecies studies have been conducted in practice. As multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional methodologies, we will also couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, philosophers and at least one novelist.

GNSE 22103 Feminism and Anthropology
Instructor: Julie Chu
This course examines the fraught yet generative relation between various movements of feminism and the discipline of anthropology. Both feminism(s) and anthropology emerged in the 19th century as fields invested in thinking “the human” through questions of alterity or Otherness. As such, feminist and anthropological inquiries often take up shared objects of analysis--including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value, and power--even as they differ in their political and scholarly orientations through the last century and a half. Tracking the emergence of feminisms and anthropology as distinct fields of academic discourse on the one hand and political intervention on the other, we pursue the following lines of inquiry: (1) a genealogical approach to key concepts and problem-spaces forged at the intersection of these two fields, (2) critical analysis of the relation of feminist and postcolonial social movements to the professionalizing fields of knowledge production (including Marxist-inspired writing on women and economy, Third World feminism and intersectionality, and feminist critiques of science studies), and (3) a reflexive contemporary examination of the way these two strands of thought have come together in the subfield of feminist anthropology, and the continual frictions and resonances of feminist and anthropological approaches in academic settings and in the larger world (e.g., #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics).  

GNSE 22148 Intro to Genres: Speculative Women
Instructor: Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
Despite common misconceptions, women have been at the forefront of the speculative genre from its earliest inceptions. They have not merely defied the limitations and restraints of literature as defined by their contemporary society, but invented whole worlds and genres which continue to influence writers and writing as a whole today—from Mary Shelley’s 1818 publication of "Frankenstein" to Virginia Woolf’s 1928 publication of "Orlando," and even Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 novel, “The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World." This course will be a brief foray into the strange and yet familiar worlds of various women across the history of speculative writing, ranging from Mary Shelley to Ursula K. Leguin, from Lady Cavendish to Margaret Atwood, from Alice Walker to Octavia E. Butler.  

GNSE 22182 Early Modern Loss and Longing
Instructor: Sarah Kunjummen
This course examines depictions of early modern desire and loss in genres including the essay, lyric, drama and fiction. The class will also have substantial engagement with affect theory as well as period theorizations (Neoplatonic accounts of desire, humoral accounts of melancholy, etc).

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

GNSE 23138 Queer Modernism
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
This course examines the dramatic revisions in gender and sexuality that characterize Anglo-American modernity. Together, we will read literary texts by queer writers to investigate their role in shaping the period's emergent regimes of sex and gender. We'll consider queer revisions of these concepts for their effect on the broader social and political terrain of the early twentieth century and explore the intimate histories they made possible: What new horizons for kinship, care, affect, and the everyday reproduction of life did modernist ideas about sex and gender enable? At the same time, we will seek to "queer" modernism by shifting our attention away from high literary modernism and towards modernism's less-canonical margins. Our examination will center on queer lives relegated to the social and political margins-lives of exile or those cut short by various forms of dispossession. This class will double as an advanced introduction to queer theory, with a particular emphasis on literary criticism.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23150 “Dark Stairways of Desire”: Lusting beyond the Norm in Contemporary Catalan Literature
Instructor: Bel Olid
Although we can find a significant number of authors exploring queer desire and identities throughout the history of Catalan Literature (from lesbian scenes in Joanot Martorell’s "Tirant lo blanc" to expanding gender identities in Maria Aurèlia Capmany’s "Quim/Quima"), more recent Catalan Literature is blooming with queerness and non-normative lust. This course will give an overview of contemporary Catalan works influenced by feminist and queer debates from the seventies on. Beginning with renowned poet Maria Mercè Marçal’s only novel, "The Passion According to Rennée Vivien," winner of several of the most prestigious literary awards for Catalan Literature, we will go on to discover 21st-century works by Eva Baltasar and Anna Punsoda. We will also read poems, short stories and excerpts from authors such as Maria Sevilla, Mireia Calafell, Raquel Santanera, Sebastià Portell, Sil Bel and Ian Bermúdez, among others.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23161 Ladies Errant: Adventure and Gender in Chivalric Literature
Instructor: Jacqueline Victor
Some of the most enduring stories to come out of medieval literature were undoubtedly knights’ tales: stories of King Arthur, Lancelot, Gawain, the Holy Grail, and a host of other chivalric figures. We commonly think of these stories as centering on a heroic, knightly male protagonist, and now many modern versions work to challenge this gender dynamic by placing women at the center or calling into question the values attributed to a knightly masculinity. But what if female heroism in chivalric literature isn’t a modern invention, but in fact existed from the genre’s very beginning? And what if knightly heroics have always been presented with a degree of complexity, humor, and ambivalence? As it turns out, we can find numerous examples of “adventuring ladies” or “ladies errant” in medieval literature, and the figure of the knight has never been simplistic. This class will read several examples of female protagonism in the French tradition of medieval romance, as Old French was the language of the earliest and most influential chivalric romances, and explore questions of gender, adventure, and conventions both social and literary.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23162 Histories of Women in Science
Instructor: Kristine Palmieri
In the mid-1980s, only two female students – and no men – drew women when asked what a scientist looked like. Only 8% of STEM workers in 1970 were women, and in 2019 that number was still only 27%. This would seem to suggest that the history of women in science is a recent one. Yet historians of science have foregrounded women’s involvement in fields ranging from early modern medicine to twentieth century astrophysics. This class introduces students to these histories, investigates how and why science came to be seen as a male preserve, and asks to what extent gendered values continue to inform modern conceptions scientific achievement or value. In so doing, this course also introduces students to feminist science studies and challenges students to reflect upon their own (gendered) experiences of science.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23163 Queer Performance
Instructor: Elliot Mercer
This seminar examines the field of queer theory and its intersections with performance studies. We will consider the many meanings of queerness and multiple modes of queer performance, analyzing dance, dramatic literature, music, film, digital media, and performance art alongside queer nightlife, activist street protest, public health discourses, and underground culture. Looking at processes of identity formation and expression through the body, we will investigate how queerness interconnects with other axes of social difference, including race, class, citizenship, and ability
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23602 Critical Security Studies
Instructor: Kara Ann Hooser
This graduate-level elective course is designed to introduce students to approaches to global politics beyond the traditional mainstream canon, surveying a range of perspectives that fall under the heading of ‘critical.' The main goal is to develop an understanding of what is at stake, politically, with some of the main concepts, theories, methodological approaches, and empirical objects within the study of international relations (IR) and international security. The course is divided into two sections. First, we begin by considering what makes a critical approach critical—that is, how is it set apart from conventional approaches? In particular, we will explore how critical approaches encourage us to question our assumptions, first, about what security, power, sovereignty, and other core concepts mean in global politics, and second, about who or what (individuals, groups, nonhuman animals, states, the planet) can be agents of global politics. Some examples of approaches we cover are: theories from the Global South, approaches to human security, global feminisms, securitization theories, ontological security, emotions and affect, the visual turn, new materialisms, and post-colonial perspectives. In the second half of the course, we apply these approaches to a range of issues, including nuclear weapons, borders and immigration, drone warfare, terrorism, and climate change.

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

GNSE 24511 Kawaii (Cuteness) Culture In Japan And The World
Instructor: Nisha Kommattam
The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as “cute” or “adorable”) has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today’s conception of kawaiihas become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called “Pink Globalization”. With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

GNSE 24520 Postcolonial Openings: World Literature after 1955
Instructor: Darrel Chia
This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey the trajectories and self-criticisms within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie).

GNSE 24526 Forms of Autobiography in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Instructor: Christine Fouirnaies
This course examines the innovative, creative forms autobiography has taken in the last one hundred years in literature. We will study closely works written between 1933 and 2013 that are exceptional for the way they challenge, subvert and invigorate the autobiographical genre. From unpublished sketches to magazine essays and full-length books, we will see autobiography take many forms and engage with multiple genres and media. These include biography, memoir, fiction, literary criticism, travel literature, the graphic novel and photography. Producing various mutations of the autobiographical genre, these works address some of the same concerns: the self, truth, memory, authenticity, agency and testimony. We will complement discussions of these universal issues with material and historical considerations, examining how the works first appeared and were received. Autobiography will prove a privileged site for probing constructions of family narratives, identity politics and public personas. The main authors studied are Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, Marjane Satrapi and W.G. Sebald.

GNSE 25702 Climate Justice
Instructor: Sarah Fredericks
Climate injustice includes the disproportionate effects of climate change on people who benefit little from the activities that cause it, generally the poor, people of color, and people marginalized in other ways. Given the complex economic, physical, social, and political realities of climate change, what might climate justice entail? This course explores this complex question through an examination of classical and contemporary theories of justice; the gendered, colonial, and racial dimensions of climate change; and climate justice movements.

GNSE 26303 Bodies At Work: Art & Civic Responsibility
Instructor: Denise Sema
Contemporary artists are quickly adapting their practices to be more inclusive, diverse, accessible and physically safe. In particular, the rise of intimacy design and anti-racist work in theatre, film and television has opened up a dialogue about how artists do their work responsibly. Through practice and investigation, this class will dive into the responsibility of artists in contemporary artistic processes. We will explore both how the tools and capacities of artists can transform civic practice and, conversely, how artists are grappling with the civic issues of body safety, anti-racism and accessibility in arts practice. We will explore how centering the body can create respectful engagement in the arts. We will look at the work of Enrich Chicago, Nicole Brewer, Sonya Renee Taylor, Not in Our House and Intimacy Directors & Coordinators among others. 

GNSE 29000 The American Culture Wars
Instructor: William Scultz
Should we tear down statues of Confederate soldiers? Should religious institutions be exempt from public health regulations? How (if at all) should we regulate abortion? These questions are only the latest battlefields in the “culture wars,” the long-running conversation—or, more often, shouting match—about how Americans ought to live. This seminar will explore how Americans have wrestled with questions of morality and national identity since the country’s founding. Two questions will drive our discussion. First, why do certain issues become the subject of fierce cultural conflict? Second, do these conflicts enrich or undermine American democracy?

GNSE 29237 Black Social Thought
Instructor: Brianne Painia
This course will familiarize students with social science academic and lay intellectual theorists who speak to and about the political, economic, and gender ways of being within the African Diaspora. Most of the course will highlight the voices of Western scholars, pan-African international scholars and thought will be discussed as well.

SPRING 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GNSE 20140 Screenings of the Dark: Topics in Black Feminist Film Theory
Instructor: AE Stevenson
This course will address historical and contemporary arcs in the expansive field of Black feminism by centering on representations by and of Black woman on screen. The central pursuit off this course will be to elevate the theories of Black feminism that exist within and outside of film studies to anticipate future ruptures in creative output and emerging epistemologies. The course will center around such topics as performance, refusal, aesthetics, transness, and girlhood.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.  

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

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

GNSE 21400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the proliferation of “new social movements” such as feminism and gay liberation, this seminar explores the key debates around which gender and sexuality were articulated as tenacious but open structures of power subject to political critique and social transformation. The relatively stable yet dynamic character of what Gayle Rubin in 1975 famously called “the sex/gender system” raises basic questions of structure and event: (1) how are systemic relations of domination and rule historically constituted and sustained over time?; and (2) how can that which is regularly reproduced be not only momentarily interrupted, but fundamentally altered through both quotidian and extraordinary forms of action and worlding? The unexpected character of the new social movements called for a radical rethinking of structures and their transformation. Haunted by unpredictable forms of resistance, heteropatriarchal structures challenged theorists and activists to forge new frameworks of critique that refigured basic concepts of power, subjectivity, and agency. These frameworks are examined with an eye to how racialized sexuality and gender are created and contested in the context of modern biopolitical capitalism and its constitution of naturalized conceptions of rule. Undergraduates by Consent Only

GNSE 21720 Science Fiction Against the State
Instructor: Hilary Strang
Ursula Le Guin’s anarchist utopia, The Dispossessed was published 50 years ago, but its complex imagining of a whole way of life without law, police, money or sovereignty, and its investment in thinking that way of living in relation to environment, gender, freedom and work offers a science fictional horizon for what it might be to live communally in our own moment. This course will read The Dispossessed and other science fiction that imagines what it might mean to live against, beyond or without the state, alongside theorizations that may help us formulate our own visions of other possible worlds. We will pay particular attention to questions of environment and ecological relations, race, gender and social reproduction, and feminist utopias. We’ll also spend some time thinking about actually existing forms of living against the state (including blockades, encampments, autonomous zones). SF authors may include Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tade Thompson, Sally Gearhart, Iain Banks, and ME O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Other authors read may include Saidiya Hartman, Monique Wittig, Fredy Perlman, James Scott, Pierre Clastres, and David Graeber.

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

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

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

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

GNSE 23155 Reproductive citizens: sex, work, and embodiment
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we focus on literature, film, history, and theory texts that deal with biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. as the central means of reproducing the biological life and social fabric of American culture. Our readings and viewings are centered in the U.S. and span the early twentieth century through the present—and we approach the above themes and structures in relation to the troubled and uneven histories of race, gender, and class that shape them. dramatically alter or even dismantle the reproductive social order altogether. To this end, we will learn about the history of eugenics and sterilization; the afterlife of slavery and racist (anti-Asian) U.S.; immigration policy; settler colonialism and the Native American reservation system; state policing and kinship structures; developments in reproductive and gender-affirming biotechnology; and the thorny politics of sex work. At the same time, we will be equally interested in the ways that activists, theorists, and other cultural producers have pushed against oppressive policies and structures to imagine and fight for reproductive justice and liberation at the intersection of race, labor, and gender. We spend time, for example, with Black and Native feminists, Marxist social reproduction theorists, family abolitionists, and sex worker’s rights activists. Readings and viewings may include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tillie Olsen, Gayl Jones, Fae Myenne Ng, Louise Erdrich, Lizzie Borden, Barbara Loden, Amy Heckerling, and the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Open enrollment for all graduate students, as well as 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students with majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All others, please email amalinowska@uchicago.edu to request permission to enroll.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

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

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

GNSE 23165 Sexuality in U.S. History
Instructor: Red Tremmel
In this course we will study the history of changing sexual practices, relations, politics, cultures, and social systems in the region of North America now comprising the United States and 574 sovereign tribal nations. We begin in the pre-colonial period and end in the late twentieth century, focusing on how gendered, racial, economic, religious, medical, and commercial discourses shaped and were shaped by sexual ones. Moving through various contexts, such as occupied indigenous territories, the secret parties of enslaved people, scientific societies, urban drag balls, medical schools, liberatory movements, and popular culture, we will use primary and secondary sources to develop a research-based understanding of how sexual discourses are produced, revised, and remixed among and across generations.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23166 Reading Transnational Early Modern Race through Gender
Instructor: Yunning Zhang
Is race an anachronistic expression in Renaissance Europe? What are the stakes for studies of race in premodern periods? How did early modern race operate differently from contemporary racialized epistemologies and in what ways are we continuously influenced by the premodern times? This course tackles these questions by foregrounding two vocabularies in the early modern racial paradigm: gender and transnational constructions. We will read primary texts set and produced both in Renaissance Europe and its colonies in Africa, Americas, and Asia, and ask: how did the structural relationship of race and gender work in tandem with, or against each other? What roles did transnational and transcultural exchanges such as Christian missions, colonization, commerce, and slave trade play in the ideations of race? We will pay close attention to fictionalized female characters and women writers, ranging from the desired white beauties in Shakespeare’s Othello and Cervantes’s The Bagnios of Algiers, to Nahua (Mexico) and Visayan (the Philippines) women in The Florentine Codex and The Boxer Codex, to the spiritual diaries of indigenous and black nuns in the Colonial Spanish America, to Aphra Behn’s depiction of Oroonoko’s execution in Surinam, and finally to the unwritten disposable lives of enslaved black women in the Atlantic slave trade.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

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

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

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

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

GNSE 23171 Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science
Instructor: Molly Brown
The topic of this class is feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. Questions we will consider include: Is rationality gendered? Are scientific conceptions of objectivity 'masculine'? What could it mean to make such claims and how could they be justified? What should a feminist conception of knowledge look like? In addressing those questions we will explore the numerous ways that gender, gender roles, and gender identity influence the construction of knowledge and the representation of objectivity. We will investigate competing views about knowledge construction-specifically, empiricism, standpoint theory, and postmodernism-by considering, among other things, how they have informed empirical research in the social sciences, biology, and medicine. A few of the authors we will read are: Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, Helen Longino, Louise Antony, Sally Haslanger, Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, Catherine MacKinnon, Maria Lugones, and Oshadi Mangena.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GNSE 25777 Aging and the Life Course: An Intersectional Perspective
Instructor: Graham Steffen
Societies across the world are ordered by age. In this course, we will examine how age is imagined and constructed according to biological, historical, and cultural perspectives. Drawing upon a life course model, we will study how different cultures and social groups seek to structure the individual’s life in relation to the wider society by creating socially constructed stages, age cohorts, and generations. We will consider how different social factors including gender, sexuality, race, and socioeconomic status may disrupt an individual’s ability to follow an idealized life course. An examination of the cultural assumptions surrounding aging in the United States will illustrate how ageism and age-stratification affect social relations across society and make certain lives more “successful” than others. The course will focus on older age and later life as a method for exploring how individuals make sense of their life experiences through narrative construction, the accumulation of disadvantage over the life course, and how historical and cultural shifts are disrupting established roles and relationships for the elderly across the world. The course will draw heavily on texts from gender and sexuality studies as a means for illustrating and understanding concepts. Students will have the opportunity to learn basic ethnographic and interviewing research techniques by conducting a life course narrative interview.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graduate Course Descriptions

AUTUMN 2023

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

GNSE 32323 The Family in the Greek and Roman World
Instructor: Georgios Tsolakis
This course examines how family was conceptualized and manifested in the Greek and Roman world. In this class, we will begin by examining key terms related to family (household, kinship, ancestors, descendants) and scholarly approaches to familial studies under the light of different theoretical perspectives. Through the examination of written sources (literary texts, inscriptions, and papyri) and archaeological evidence, we will adopt a thematic approach exploring the ways in which family intersected with several fields of public and domestic life, such as law, adoption, heirship, religion, rituals, education, politics, and public honors.

GNSE 32333 Cassandras: Truth-Telling in Times of Crisis
Instructor: Demetra Kasimis
In public life, why and how are some people accepted as truth-tellers while others are not? Is truth simply a problem of and for “correct" reasoning? What assumptions about argumentation and evidence go unexplored in this way of framing the problem? What if truth were a problem of truth-telling instead? When and how do social, racial, and gender hierarchies authorize received understandings of a (credible) truth-teller? What is credible telling usually thought to sound like? What are the conditions for listening and hearing the truth? To think through these questions, we take as a lens the archetype of Cassandra, the babbling prophetess of classical Greek myth and tragedy doomed not to be believed. Cassandra has served as a resource and source of inspiration for a range of critical thinkers, including but not limited to theorists, feminists, poets, and novelists. What is a "Cassandra"? Does her "deranged" way of seeing the world - her prophetic speech - disorient or destabilize? We will consider how, in her different representations, Cassandra places questions of language, patriarchy, and sexual violence at the center of general discussions of credibility and critique. Readings range from ancient Greek thought to 21st century theory.

GNSE 33805 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Politics in the United States
Instructor: Andrew Proctor
This course surveys academic research on sexuality and gender in American politics. Drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives, it focuses on key arguments and debates about how politics shapes and is shaped by sexuality and gender relations. We will pay particular attention to the development of sexuality and gender identity as analytic and political concepts; the role of the State and political institutions to the formation of sexuality and gender; the relationship between social movements, counter-movements, and political parties; the political behavior and attitudes of LGBT people; and the ways in which intersectional inequalities structure LGBT politics.

GNSE 34103 Nature and the Natural in the Middle Ages
Instructor: Daisy Delogu
In this course we will undertake a study of nature and ideas about what is “natural” centered around three main axes, and will adopt a variety of relevant critical perspectives (e.g., ecocriticism, studies of gender and sexuality, political theory) to support our analyses. First, we will explore nature as the created world of which humans are a part (as one of God’s creations), yet from which they also stand apart (as sovereign caretakers). Second, we will examine how the diffusion of Aristotelian works (notably the Politics) in the later Middle Ages provided a justificatory framework for social and political hierarchies and practices of economic exploitation. Third, we will consider the intersection of nature with gender, sexuality, and reproduction, a topic complicated by the fact that Nature is itself represented, in allegorical terms, as a woman.

GNSE 36080 Technologies Of The Body
Instructor: Melanie Jeske
From models and measures to imaging technologies and genomic sequencing, technologies have profoundly shaped how we know and understand human bodies, health, and disease. Drawing on foundational and contemporary science and technology studies scholarship, this class will interrogate technologies of the body: how they are made, the ways in which they have changed understandings of the human condition, their impact on individual and collective identities, and the interests and values built into their very design. Course readings will examine how technologies render bodies knowable and also construct them in particular ways. We will also focus on how technologies incorporate, and reinforce, ideas about human difference. Students will conduct an independent, quarter-long research project analyzing a biomedical technology of their choice. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and explain the social, political and economic factors that shape the design and production of biomedical technologies, as well as the impact of these technologies on biomedicine and the social world more broadly. This course provides students with an opportunity to conduct a quarter-long research project, using a biomedical technology as a case study. Students will be introduced to foundational and cutting-edge scholarship in science and technology studies, and will use this scholarship to conduct their independent research.

GNSE 37608 Women and Islam
Instructor: Maliha Chishti
This course is an introduction to the field of women, gender and Islam. We will examine the literature on Islamic legal, historical, Quranic and sacred textual constructs of women as well as critically explore the lived realities and experiences of Muslim women living in Muslim-majority societies and in the west. In centering the work of Muslim feminist scholars, students will gain an understanding of the contemporary debates around women’s rights, sexuality, roles, responsibilities and gender relations in the context of Islamic law and the hadith literature. The discursive constructions and social realities of Muslim women are critically examined through historic and literary representations, ethnographic accounts, human rights discourses, sexual politics and secular and Islamic feminism(s). Moreover, this course situates Muslim women as complex, multidimensional actors engaged in knowledge production and political and feminist struggles, as opposed to the oppressed, victim-centered images that have regained currency in the representation of Muslim women in the post 9/11 era.

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.

GNSE 41303 Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation
Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the two hundred years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries – not to mention a thriving “Janeite” fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. For example, feminist scholars have long been fascinated by Austen for her treatments of feminine agency, sociality, and desire. Marxists read her novels for the light they shed on an emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of industrialization. And students of the “rise of the novel” in English are often drawn to Austen as a landmark case – an innovator of new styles of narration and a visionary as to the potentials of the form. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen’s completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include pieces by Shoshana Felman, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams.

GNSE 41304 Medieval Romance
Instructor: Mark Miller
Medieval romance is one of the main ancestors of fantasy and SF. This course examines the speculative work of fantasy in medieval romance's explorations of aesthetics, desire, and politics.

GNSE 42035 The Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Pastoral Epistles
Instructor: Margaret Mitchell
In the early second century there were bitter battles over the legacy of Paul and his preserved letters in terms of gender, sexuality, family life, asceticism, church administration, and theological vision. We can see these well by reading the narrative text The Acts of Paul and Thecla alongside the “Pastoral Epistles” (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus), the former championing a female, cross-dressing ascetic Christ-missionary and the latter, in pseudepigraphical epistolary texts written in the dead Paul’s name, insisting on patriarchal family life and women’s adherence to traditional roles. In this course we shall read both sets of texts carefully in Greek, noting points of similarity and contestation, and test various models of how these sources—each of which seeks to “fix” the Pauline legacy in its own way—are related to one another. Time allowing, we shall also look at the later reception of the cult of Saint Thecla and late antique interpretations of “the apostle,” Paul, on these issues of sexuality and gender roles, and their perduring influence in contemporary debates. PQ: At least one year of Greek, or equivalent.

GNSE 42350 George Eliot's Fiction and Non-Fiction
Instructor: Jo McDonagh
This course will examine the works of George Eliot in their intellectual and print contexts. We will look at selected works from across her oeuvre including some of her translations from German, her journalism, short fiction, poetry and novels, as well as letters and journals. During the course we will emphasize her immersion in contemporary debates by considering her exchanges with friends and associates, people like, for example the writer, George Henry Lewes, the evolutionary philosopher and biologist, Herbert Spencer, feminists such as Barbara Bodichon and Edith Simcox, and legal theorist, Henry Sumner Maine.

GNSE 49003 Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts
Instructors: Alireza Doostdar and Hoda El Shakry
This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human—from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge. Enrollment by Consent Only (for both grads and undergrads). Students should send the instructors a paragraph explaining their interest and prior preparation or familiarity with the themes in the course.

GNSE 50102 The Problem with Theory
Instructor: Leah Feldman
This graduate course offers a critical introduction to comparative theoretical methods by attending to theory’s political and epistemological antagonisms and how they have shaped the ways in which we read literature and art. The seminar begins by tracing critical theory’s historical contours—from the high theory boom of the 70s and 80s and the rise of postcolonial, performance, and queer theory in the 90s and 2000s to contemporary critical theory in a comparative context. The course thus attends to problems in thinking about critical theory’s scope, boundaries, and canons, as not only as a mode of doing thought but as a site for disciplinary and institutional critique. The seminar explores how theory has both emerged from and animates the worldliness of literature and art as textured imprints of historicity, imagination, and experience across social, cultural and political contexts.

GNSE 50112 Seminar: Health and Society
Instructor: Linda Waite
A long and healthy life is a widely sought after human goal.  But not everyone has equal chances of achieving this goal.  This course focuses on the role played by society in differential access to physical, psychological, cognitive health and well-being. We will discuss the role of parental characteristics and childhood circumstances in later-life health, differences in health and well-being for men and women, for racial and ethnic groups, by characteristics of our neighborhoods and communities, and by regions or countries.  Each class meeting we will read and discuss three or four journal articles or sections of a book, with class participants presenting each reading, summarizing it, and then critiquing it.  The class will then discuss.  We will add to and subtract from the readings to match the interests of participants on each topic; the syllabus will list readings as a starting point for this process. PQ: Some Social Science Background

GNSE 62705 Colloquium: Approaches To Atlantic Slavery Studies
Instructor: Raushana Johnson
We are witnessing an outpouring of scholarship on Atlantic slavery even as some historians are increasingly critical of the archival method. This course uses select theoretical readings and recent monographs and articles to examine this conceptual and methodological debate. Topics to be examined include histories of women, gender, and sexuality; dispossession and resistance; urban and migration history; and interdisciplinary and speculative techniques.

WINTER 2024

GNSE 30136 Generations, Gender, and Genre in Korean Fiction & TV Drama
Instructor: Kyeong-Hee Choi
Combining close reading and viewing with historical surveys, this seminar examines an assortment of popular literary and television dramatic texts whose production involved female writers and directors of modern or contemporary Korea. Its aim is to explore the ways in which the gendered and generational identity of the textual producers contribute to generating notable imprints within the chosen genre in question, responding to the social, cultural, and political calls that arise from their own present time. The texts include, among others, prose fictions by Na Hye-sŏk (1897-1948), Park Wan-sŏ (1931-2011), Han Kang (1970- ), and Cho Nam-joo (1978- ) and television drama series such as The Hourglass (1995; written by Song Jina), Mr. Sunshine (2018; written by Kim Eun-sook), The Red Sleeve (2021 dir. by Chŏng Chi-in; original novel by Kang Mi-kang, 2017), and My Liberation Notes (2022; written by Park Hae-yeong). No Korean proficiency is required. 

GNSE 30137 Horror, Abjection and the Monstrous Feminine
Instructor: Hoda El Shakry
This course explores cinematic and literary works of horror (the uncanny, gothic, sci-fi, paranormal, psychological thriller, killer/slasher, gore) from around the world. As a mode of speculative fiction, the genre envisions possible or imagined worlds that amplify curiosities, dreads, fears, terrors, phobias, and paranoias which simultaneously repel and attract. Horror frequently explores the boundaries of what it means to be human by dwelling on imaginaries of the non-human and other. It often exploits the markers of difference that preoccupy our psychic, libidinal, and social lifeworlds—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, but also the fundamental otherness that is other peoples’ minds and bodies. Interrogating the genre’s tension between desire and fear, our course will focus on the centrality of abjection and the monstrous feminine—as both thematic and aesthetic tropes—to works of horror. Films and fiction will be paired with theoretical readings that contextualize the genre of horror while considering its critical implications in relation to biopolitical and geopolitical forms of power. Content Warning: Course materials will feature graphic, violent, and oftentimes disturbing images and subjects. Enrolled students will be expected to watch, read, and discuss all course materials. 

GNSE 30237 Black Social Thought
Instructor: Brianne Painia
This course will familiarize students with social science academic and lay intellectual theorists who speak to and about the political, economic, and gender ways of being within the African Diaspora. Most of the course will highlight the voices of Western scholars, pan-African international scholars and thought will be discussed as well.

GNSE 30408 Health Disparities in Breast Cancer
Instructor: Eileen Dolan
Across the globe, breast cancer is the most common women's cancer. In the last two decades, there have been significant advances in breast cancer detection and treatment that have resulted in improved survival rates. Yet, not all populations have benefited equally from these improvements, and there continues to be a disproportionate burden of breast cancer felt by different populations. In the U.S., for example, white women have the highest incidence of breast cancer but African-American women have the highest breast cancer mortality overall. The socioeconomic, environmental, biological, and cultural factors that collectively contribute to these disparities are being identified with a growing emphasis on health disparities research efforts. In this 10-week discussion-based course students will meet twice weekly and cover major aspects of breast cancer disparities.  

GNSE 31404 More than Human Ethnography
Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
In this course we explore the growing field of multispecies ethnography. We will focus on examples of multi-species work emerging primarily from anthropology in recent decades, reading foundational texts on interspecies engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Deborah Bird Rose, Eduardo Kohn, Anna Tsing, and Augustin Fuéntes among many others. We will consider the role other species played in early ethnographic and archaeological work, will examine ethnoprimatological studies, and will contemplate recent examinations of “becoming with” other animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, ‘aliens,’ and mutants—encountering complex ecological kin relationships, examining naturalcultural borders, and examining the legacies of decolonial scholarship. The course is a discussion-based seminar, with significant time devoted both to understanding the theoretical potentials of multispecies work and its logistical or methodological aspects—querying how multispecies studies have been conducted in practice. As multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional methodologies, we will also couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, philosophers and at least one novelist.

GNSE 32103 Feminism and Anthropology
Instructor: Julie Chu
This course examines the fraught yet generative relation between various movements of feminism and the discipline of anthropology. Both feminism(s) and anthropology emerged in the 19th century as fields invested in thinking “the human” through questions of alterity or Otherness. As such, feminist and anthropological inquiries often take up shared objects of analysis--including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value, and power--even as they differ in their political and scholarly orientations through the last century and a half. Tracking the emergence of feminisms and anthropology as distinct fields of academic discourse on the one hand and political intervention on the other, we pursue the following lines of inquiry: (1) a genealogical approach to key concepts and problem-spaces forged at the intersection of these two fields, (2) critical analysis of the relation of feminist and postcolonial social movements to the professionalizing fields of knowledge production (including Marxist-inspired writing on women and economy, Third World feminism and intersectionality, and feminist critiques of science studies), and (3) a reflexive contemporary examination of the way these two strands of thought have come together in the subfield of feminist anthropology, and the continual frictions and resonances of feminist and anthropological approaches in academic settings and in the larger world (e.g., #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics).

GNSE 32670 Queer Performance
Instructor: Elliot Mercer
This seminar examines the field of queer theory and its intersections with performance studies. We will consider the many meanings of queerness and multiple modes of queer performance, analyzing dance, dramatic literature, music, film, digital media, and performance art alongside queer nightlife, activist street protest, public health discourses, and underground culture. Looking at processes of identity formation and expression through the body, we will investigate how queerness interconnects with other axes of social difference, including race, class, citizenship, and ability.  

GNSE 34520 Postcolonial Openings: World Literature after 1955
Instructor: Darrel Chia
This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey the trajectories and self-criticisms within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie).

GNSE 34526 Forms of Autobiography in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Instructor: Christine Fouirnaies
This course examines the innovative, creative forms autobiography has taken in the last one hundred years in literature. We will study closely works written between 1933 and 2013 that are exceptional for the way they challenge, subvert and invigorate the autobiographical genre. From unpublished sketches to magazine essays and full-length books, we will see autobiography take many forms and engage with multiple genres and media. These include biography, memoir, fiction, literary criticism, travel literature, the graphic novel and photography. Producing various mutations of the autobiographical genre, these works address some of the same concerns: the self, truth, memory, authenticity, agency and testimony. We will complement discussions of these universal issues with material and historical considerations, examining how the works first appeared and were received. Autobiography will prove a privileged site for probing constructions of family narratives, identity politics and public personas. The main authors studied are Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, Marjane Satrapi and W.G. Sebald.

GNSE 37011 Histories of Women in Science
Instructor: Kristine Palmieri
In the mid-1980s, only two female students – and no men – drew women when asked what a scientist looked like. Only 8% of STEM workers in 1970 were women, and in 2019 that number was still only 27%. This would seem to suggest that the history of women in science is a recent one. Yet historians of science have foregrounded women’s involvement in fields ranging from early modern medicine to twentieth century astrophysics. This class introduces students to these histories, investigates how and why science came to be seen as a male preserve, and asks to what extent gendered values continue to inform modern conceptions scientific achievement or value. In so doing, this course also introduces students to feminist science studies and challenges students to reflect upon their own (gendered) experiences of science. 

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

GNSE 41740 Gender And Policy
Instructor: Yana Gallen
For the past 70 years, women have made remarkable advances in the labor market in the US—the experiences of women in past generations are almost unimaginable in today’s labor market. Women are now more educated than men. However, progress has stalled and the lifetime labor market outcomes of women are different from those of men on average. Why? What is the role for policy? In this course we will think about how differences in preferences, norms, and abilities potentially contribute to differences in outcomes by gender. If there are such differences, does policy intervention hurt or help, and whom does policy intervention hurt or help? What should be the aims of policy with respect to gender?

GNSE 42182 Early Modern Loss and Longing
Instructor: Sarah Kunjummen
This course examines depictions of early modern desire and loss in genres including the essay, lyric, drama and fiction. The class will also have substantial engagement with affect theory as well as period theorizations (Neoplatonic accounts of desire, humoral accounts of melancholy, etc).

GNSE 43602 Critical Security Studies
Instructor: Kara Ann Hooser
This graduate-level elective course is designed to introduce students to approaches to global politics beyond the traditional mainstream canon, surveying a range of perspectives that fall under the heading of ‘critical.' The main goal is to develop an understanding of what is at stake, politically, with some of the main concepts, theories, methodological approaches, and empirical objects within the study of international relations (IR) and international security. The course is divided into two sections. First, we begin by considering what makes a critical approach critical—that is, how is it set apart from conventional approaches? In particular, we will explore how critical approaches encourage us to question our assumptions, first, about what security, power, sovereignty, and other core concepts mean in global politics, and second, about who or what (individuals, groups, nonhuman animals, states, the planet) can be agents of global politics. Some examples of approaches we cover are: theories from the Global South, approaches to human security, global feminisms, securitization theories, ontological security, emotions and affect, the visual turn, new materialisms, and post-colonial perspectives. In the second half of the course, we apply these approaches to a range of issues, including nuclear weapons, borders and immigration, drone warfare, terrorism, and climate change. 

GNSE 45600 When Cultures Collide: The Multicultural Challenge In Liberal Democracies
Instructor: Richard Shewder
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 47702 Queer Modernism
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
This course examines the dramatic revisions in gender and sexuality that characterize Anglo-American modernity. Together, we will read literary texts by queer writers to investigate their role in shaping the period's emergent regimes of sex and gender. We'll consider queer revisions of these concepts for their effect on the broader social and political terrain of the early twentieth century and explore the intimate histories they made possible: What new horizons for kinship, care, affect, and the everyday reproduction of life did modernist ideas about sex and gender enable? At the same time, we will seek to "queer" modernism by shifting our attention away from high literary modernism and towards modernism's less-canonical margins. Our examination will center on queer lives relegated to the social and political margins-lives of exile or those cut short by various forms of dispossession. This class will double as an advanced introduction to queer theory, with a particular emphasis on literary criticism.

SPRING 2024

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

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

GNSE 30140 Screenings of the Dark: Topics in Black Feminist Film Theory
Instructor: AE Stevenson
This course will address historical and contemporary arcs in the expansive field of Black feminism by centering on representations by and of Black woman on screen. The central pursuit off this course will be to elevate the theories of Black feminism that exist within and outside of film studies to anticipate future ruptures in creative output and emerging epistemologies. The course will center around such topics as performance, refusal, aesthetics, transness, and girlhood.  

GNSE 31400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the proliferation of “new social movements” such as feminism and gay liberation, this seminar explores the key debates around which gender and sexuality were articulated as tenacious but open structures of power subject to political critique and social transformation. The relatively stable yet dynamic character of what Gayle Rubin in 1975 famously called “the sex/gender system” raises basic questions of structure and event: (1) how are systemic relations of domination and rule historically constituted and sustained over time?; and (2) how can that which is regularly reproduced be not only momentarily interrupted, but fundamentally altered through both quotidian and extraordinary forms of action and worlding? The unexpected character of the new social movements called for a radical rethinking of structures and their transformation. Haunted by unpredictable forms of resistance, heteropatriarchal structures challenged theorists and activists to forge new frameworks of critique that refigured basic concepts of power, subjectivity, and agency. These frameworks are examined with an eye to how racialized sexuality and gender are created and contested in the context of modern biopolitical capitalism and its constitution of naturalized conceptions of rule.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GNSE 41720 Science Fiction Against the State
Instructor: Hilary Strang
Ursula Le Guin’s anarchist utopia, The Dispossessed was published 50 years ago, but its complex imagining of a whole way of life without law, police, money or sovereignty, and its investment in thinking that way of living in relation to environment, gender, freedom and work offers a science fictional horizon for what it might be to live communally in our own moment. This course will read The Dispossessed and other science fiction that imagines what it might mean to live against, beyond or without the state, alongside theorizations that may help us formulate our own visions of other possible worlds. We will pay particular attention to questions of environment and ecological relations, race, gender and social reproduction, and feminist utopias. We’ll also spend some time thinking about actually existing forms of living against the state (including blockades, encampments, autonomous zones). SF authors may include Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tade Thompson, Sally Gearhart, Iain Banks, and ME O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Other authors read may include Saidiya Hartman, Monique Wittig, Fredy Perlman, James Scott, Pierre Clastres, and David Graeber.  

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

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

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

 

 

Return to current courses