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

2024-2025 Courses

Undergraduate Courses 

AUTUMN 2024

WINTER 2025

Graduate Courses

AUTUMN 2024 

WINTER 2025

 

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

AUTUMN 2024 

GNSE 12115 Religion And Abortion In American Culture
Instructor: Emily Crews
In American public discourse, it is common to hear abortion referred to as a “religious issue.” But is abortion a religious issue? If so, in what ways, to whom, and why? In this course we will answer these questions by tracing the relationship between religion and abortion in American history. We will examine the kinds of claims religious groups have made about abortion; how religion has shaped the development of medical, legal, economic, and cultural perspectives on the topic; how debates over abortion have led to the rise of a certain kind of religious politics in the United States; and how issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the body are implicated in this conversation. Although the course will cover a range of time periods, religious traditions, and types of data (abortion records from Puritan New England, enslaved people’s use of herbal medicine to induce miscarriage, and Jewish considerations of the personhood of the fetus, among others), we will give particular attention to the significance of Christianity in legal and political debates about abortion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There are no prerequisites for this course and no background in Religious Studies is required. However, this course may be particularly well-suited to students interested in thinking about how certain themes or areas of study—medicine and medical sciences, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, political science—converge with religion and Religious Studies.
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 12131 The Gay Men’s Novel
Instructor: Gabriel Ojeda-Sague
This course focuses on the history, concerns, aesthetics, movements, and culture of the gay men’s novel, without the boundaries of time period, nation, or original language. The goal for students is to think in-depth about the relationship between sexual identity and narrative form, to learn about gay men’s literary lineages and movements, and to think through queer theoretical concepts through fiction authored by gay men.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12135 Reading the Rom-Com: Renaissance and Modern
Instructor: Sarah-Gray Lesley
This course challenges the common assumption that modern romantic comedies are not worthy of academic study by examining early modern iterations of the genre--from William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew (1590) to Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677). In turning to these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, we will consider how this often trivialized genre encodes, theorizes, and problematizes issues of gender, sex, class, race, and desire through its familiar formula of "simply" getting some people to fall in love.
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 17612 The Art of Michelangelo
Instructor: Charles Cohen
The focus of this course will be Michelangelo’s sculpture, painting and architecture while making use of his writings and his extensive body of drawings to understand his artistic personality, creative processes, theories of art, and his intellectual and spiritual biography, including his changing attitudes towards Neoplatonism, Christianity and politics. Our structure will be chronological starting with his juvenilia of the 1490s in Florence at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent through his death in Rome in 1564 as an old man who was simultaneously the deity of art and a lonely, troubled, repentant Christian. Beyond close examination of the works themselves, among the themes that will receive attention for the ways they bear upon his art are Michelangelo’s fraught relationship with patrons; his changing attitude towards religion, especially his engagement with the Catholic Reform; his sexuality and how it might bear on the representation of gender in his art and poetry; his “official” biographies during Michelangelo’s lifetime and complex, ambivalent, reception over the centuries; new ideas about Michelangelo that have emerged from the restoration and scientific imaging of many of his works. At the same time, the course will be an introduction of students with little or no background in art history to some of the major avenues for interpretation in this field, including formal, stylistic, iconographical, psychological, social, feminist, theoretical and reception. 

GNSE 20001 Theories of Sexuality and Gender
Instructor: Red Tremmel
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. Prior course experience in gender/sexuality studies (by way of the general education civilization studies courses or other course work) is strongly advised. Instructor Consent required. 

GNSE 20116 Queering the American Family Drama
Instructor: Leslie Buxbaum
This course will examine what happens to the American Family Drama on stage when the 'family' is queer. Working in dialogue with a current production at Court Theatre, we will move beyond describing surface representations into an exploration of how queering the family implicates narrative, plot, character, formal conventions, aesthetics and production conditions (e.g. casting, venues, audiences, marketing and critical reception). Texts will include theatrical plays and musicals, recorded and live productions, and queer performance theory. This course will be a combined seminar and studio, inviting students to investigate through readings, discussion, staging experiments, and a choice of either a final paper or artistic project.
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 20127 Black Women Work: The labor of Black women in communities, families, and institutions
Instructor: C. Nell Crittenden
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 20136 Generations, Gender, and Genre in Korean Fiction & TV Drama
Instructor: Kyeong-Hee Choi
The seminar analyzes the issues of generations, gender, and genres that arise from a selection of popular literary and television dramas from modern and contemporary Korea. The selection for the course is marked by the creative contributions of Korean women as novelists, scriptwriters, directors, among others. It includes prose fiction by renowned authors such as Park Wan-sŏ (1931-2011), Han Kang (1970- ), and Cho Nam-joo (1978- ), as well as television series like Mr. Sunshine (2018; scripted by Kim Eun-sook), The Red Sleeve (2021; dir. by Chŏng Chi-in; adapted the 2017 novel by from Kang Mi-kang), and My Liberation Notes (2022; written by Park Hae-yeong). Through a blend of close textual analysis and historical contextualization, the course aims to uncover the ways in which the gendered and generational identities of these creators might have helped certain configurations of concerns, needs, and aspirations saliently emerge in response to social, cultural, historical, and political currents of their time. [Consent Required; No prior knowledge of the Korean language is necessary]
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20141 Queerness in the Shadow of Empire: Sexualities in the Modern Middle East
Instructor: Eman Abdelhadi
Critics, from both the Right and the Left, claim that liberal sexual regimes are Western, imperial impositions onto Muslim and Middle Eastern societies. On the other hand, LGBTQ+ advocates claim that the restriction of sexuality is itself a colonial legacy. This class will delve into this debate by examining cutting edge empirical and theoretical work on Queer lives in the modern Middle East. Instructor Consent required.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20149 Gender and Sexuality in Latin America
Instructor: Mary Hicks
Bringing together Latin American social, feminist and queer theory, we will explore four pivotal moments in history—Spanish conquest, independence, industrialization and revolution—in order to interrogate why social conflicts were often mediated through competing definitions of masculinity and femininity as well as how debates about legitimate sexual practice and reproduction ultimately underpinned larger concerns over racial purity, economic inequality, class struggle and the prerogatives of the state. Our readings will span a variety of perspectives and theoretical orientations in order to shed light on the intellectual and social diversity unique to the Latin American context.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20620 Literature, Medicine, and Embodiment
Instructor: Julie Orlemanski
This class explores the connections between imaginative writing and embodiment, especially as bodies have been understood, cared for, and experienced in the framework of medicine. We’ll read texts that address sickness, healing, diagnosis, disability, and expertise. The class also introduces a number of related theoretical approaches, including the medical humanities, disability studies, narrative medicine, the history of the body, and the history of science. 

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 200 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 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 Sara Ahmed, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams. Open to MA and PhD students; 3rd- and 4th-year undergrads 

GNSE 21810 The Werewolf in Literature and Film
Instructor: David Delbar
Human transformation into animals (and into wolves in particular) is a recurring trope in many cultures’ storytelling. Authors have used the story device to explore the nature of humans and animals, human fear and vulnerability, psychological problems and mental illness, gender and sexuality, social/racial hierarchy, marginalization, identity, and our own capacity for violence and savagery. In this course we will examine werewolves in literature and film from several cultures (French, English, German, Finnish, Blackfoot, Japanese) in English translation, primarily from the late 20th century onward. We will focus on how the aforementioned themes are used and developed in each work and the overarching patterns of werewolf stories. Students will write a final analytical paper or produce a creative project. 

GNSE 22604 Race, Justice, and the Assemblage of American Moralities
Instructor: Samah Choudhury
This course explores the racial and moral imperatives that are encapsulated within concepts of “Americanness” and the theoretical notions that define the discursive, historical, and sociopolitical boundaries of American identities. How have claims to American identity relied on created religious or religiously-inflected Others? Together, we will consider how the human phenomena of religion and race have developed across our histories in concert with one another. How do racial and moral imperatives the define discursive, historical, and sociopolitical boundaries of American identities? We will examine how these formations have been deployed, defined, and bent to fit particular historical and cultural contexts while continuing to inform each other in a variety of permutations, especially in the United States. How do race and religion also intersect with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and politics? Our theoretical grounding in migration, encounters, and transnational mobilities will provide insight into how race is imagined on and into differently minoritized people while considering what it means to be participants in the project of racecraft today. Our readings will include historical materials, literary texts, theological reflections, and examples from popular culture that meditate on these topics. 

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

GNSE 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.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23174 Sex, Gender, and Kinship: Colonial Perspectives
Instructor: Deirdre Lyons
This course analyzes the contested relationships between gender, sexuality, kinship, and European systems of colonialism from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Drawing on historical case studies, feminist theory and postcolonial studies, this course will cover a broad range of empires and regions to explore topics such as the construction of gender ideologies and how colonial systems of rule were established through changing concepts of gender, sex, and kinship—and their connections to race, colonial power, and neo/post/colonial legacies. Our primary aim is to account for how complex and fraught notions of “gender,” “family,” and “sexuality” mutually emerged alongside transformative shifts in systems of western colonialism.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23177 Gender, Violence and Carcerality
Instructor: Anna Fox
What is the relationship between gender-based violence and the carceral state? This course will explore the role of gendered violence in the formation, expansion, and legitimation of the carceral state. It will look at how state institutions, like policing, criminal courts, and prisons react to, utilize, and, in some cases, perpetrate gendered violence. This course is organized thematically, using theoretical texts, empirical sociological work, and on-the-ground communiques to illuminate the gendered facets of carceral institutions. Ultimately, we will consider how normative gender regimes may shape the carceral state, and vice versa.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23180 Global Maternal and Child Health
Instructor: Erick Amick
This course provides a foundation in global perspectives on maternal and child health research, practice, and policy. The course will cover a range of maternal and child health topics to examine critical challenges facing women, children, providers, and policymakers in some of the world's most vulnerable communities. Students in this course will: 1) understand the status of maternal and child health in a variety of communities and contexts, using key health and development indicators; 2) critically analyze past and present public health programs and policies utilized to address maternal and child health needs in diverse communities; 3) assess the economic, political, social, and cultural factors that affect maternal and child health programs and outcomes.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23602 Critical Security Studies
Instructor: Kara 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 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 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, student can expect an increased knowledge about issues related to social and legislative policy analyses, their applications, and implications. 

GNSE 24125 Oral Performance And Gender From The Middle Ages To Slam Poetry
Instructor: Alessandro Minnucci
Italian culture has been continuously enriched by oral artistic practices that transcend the written page through the bodies and voices of performers. The content of this course will analyze various oral traditions from the Italian context, ranging from courtly lyric poetry of the Middle Ages to the vibrant contemporary performance poetry scene. Additionally, the course will examine the interplay between oral traditions and marginalized communities, with a particular focus on the exploration of female voices—from Renaissance mystical performances to feminist oral history practices in the 1970s—while also considering the polyvocal influence of immigration and the use of regional dialects. The course will integrate artistic content with theoretical material on the topic of voice (Agamben, Bologna, Cavarero, Frasca), as well as insights from media studies, feminist and queer studies, critical race studies, and performance theory. By the conclusion of this course, students will be able to deconstruct the traditional dichotomy between written text and oral practices by recognizing the mutual exchange between the two and incorporate Italian oral traditions into the traditional literary canon. Reading knowledge of Italian required. Class will be conducted in English with a separate discussion section available for students seeking credit for the Italian major/minor. Readings will be in Italian and in English. 

GNSE 24426 The Witch Craze in 17th-Century Europe: Scotland, Poland-Lithuania, Russia, and Moravia
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
In this course, we look carefully at the reasons for and repercussions of the “witch craze” in the long 17th-century, focussing on primary texts such as trial reports, legal literature, pamphlets, woodcuts, scholarly dissent, and other paraphernalia. The course follows a sweep of the craze from Lancashire in Scotland, where trials began in the 1590s, to Poznań in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to the Russian village of Lukh on the outskirts of Moscow, where between 1656 and 1660 over twenty-five individuals, most of them male, were tried and several executed, and finally to Northern Moravia under Habsburg rule where inquisitor Hetman Boblig presided over the burning of almost 100 "witches." In each region, trials followed different customs—Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic—and answered to different legislative discourse—ecclesiastical, laic, secular—yet all can be said to be the product of a common desire and collective fear. To supplement our understanding of the multifaceted anxieties that are expressed in works such as King James’ Daemonologie (1597), and to ask more questions of the intersectional phobias around gender, sexuality, religion, and class (rural-urban; colony-metropole), we take up theory from Foucault, Federici, and Mbembe, and others. 

GNSE 24706 Japanese Art in the Sinosphere
Instructor: Chelsea Foxwell
From the earliest centuries of the common era until the 1870s, Japanese writers, artists, and scholars considered themselves to be living in the Sinosphere: the realm of China’s cultural and political centrality. Starting with a consideration of Chinese material culture in the Tale of Genji, we will proceed to address topics such as the relation between Chinese and Japanese handscroll paintings, the spread of Chinese-style ink monochrome painting in Japan, the rise of the Kano school as official painters and Chinese-style painting experts, and the immense popularity of literati painting and calligraphy. Korean painting’s intersection with Chinese and Japanese art in the medieval and early modern periods will also factor into the discussion. We will evaluate the changing dynamics around political power and gender embodied in the Chinese/Japanese oppositional duality and reassess the prevailing narratives concerning how the Sinosphere faded from view in the Meiji era. 

GNSE 24770 Sex, Crime and Horror in Argentine Literature
Instructor: Carlos Halaburda
This course examines a historical trajectory of Argentine literature, cinema, and the visual arts through the study of three thematic currents that significantly influenced Argentina’s cultural and socio-political experience with nation-building, modernization, and democracy: sex, crime, and horror. The primary objective of the course is to foster a critical exploration of how foundational works of Romanticism and Realism in the Río de la Plata, the Noir genre, and the Gothic tradition accounted for decisive changes in the social fabric of the country. Students will assess the role of sexuality, crime, and horror stories in the representation of momentous events in Argentine history, spanning from the revolutionary era in the nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Topics include the Wars of Independence, gaucho literature, indigenous resistance, the great transatlantic migratory flows, the rise of the middle classes, Peronismo, youth culture, military dictatorships, human rights violations, LGBT movements, and economic precarity in neoliberal times. Works by Esteban Echeverría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juana Manuela Gorriti, José Hernández, Lucio V. and Eduarda Mansilla, Leopoldo Lugones, Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan José Saer, Alejandra Pizarnik, Juan Gelman, Silvina Ocampo, Rodolfo Walsh, Manuel Puig, Ricardo Piglia, Mariana Enríquez, María Luisa Bemberg, Luis Puenzo, Albertina Carri, Santiago Mitre, among others.

GNSE 26994 Anticolonial Worlding: Literature, Film, Thought
Instructor: Leah Feldman
This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the role of the cultural Cold War in shaping anticolonial aesthetics and politics during the twentieth century as well as its impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was characterized by an expansion of anticolonial festivals, exchanges, and congresses and marked by political crises and coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, Soviet and US imperial expansion, and the May 1968 student protests. We will explore how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, gender, and language politics. Exploring anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance. 

GNSE 27300 Le Roman de la Rose
Instructor: Daisy Delogu
The ""Roman de la Rose"" (mid-13th century), a sprawling, encyclopedic summa composed by two separate authors, was arguably the single most influential vernacular text of the Middle Ages. Whether they hated or admired it, subsequent writers could not escape the long shadow cast by this magisterial œuvre. And, as Kate Soper’s recent opera adaptation of the ""Rose"" demonstrates, this labyrinthine work remains a source of creative inspiration. In this course we will read the ""Rose"" together. Each student will choose a critical lens (e.g. gender and sexuality, animal and/or ecocritical studies, ethics and philosophy, reception studies, manuscript studies, text & image, etc.) to structure their engagement with the text, and together we will collaborate to chart a rich and diverse set of interpretive paths through this complex work. All registered students will attend the cours magistral (taught in English). In addition, all registered students will select and attend either the French discussion section, or the critical theory section. Students are welcome to attend both. 

GNSE 27301 Harm Reduction and HIV Prevention in the Overdose Era
Instructors: Harold Pollack, John A. Schneider
We will discuss some of the debates around harm reduction, some of the cutting-edge harm reduction strategies, HIV prevention and the communities and populations most impacted by overdose and other related health conditions. Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third and fourth-year standing. 

GNSE 28802 United States Labor History
Instructor: Amy Dru Stanley
This course will explore the history of labor and laboring people in the United States. The significance of work will be considered from the vantage points of political economy, culture, and law. Key topics will include working-class life, industrialization and corporate capitalism, slavery and emancipation, the role of the state and trade unions, and race and sex difference in the workplace. 

GNSE 29427 Fashion, Empire, Capitalism
Instructor: Katie Hickerson
Clothing, famously termed the “social skin”, mediates the space between individuals and societies. Whether articulating personal taste or reflecting a collective identity, dress can be a powerful symbol—both historically and in the contemporary world. Worn against the skin, clothing is both intimate and connects us to a global, multi-billion-dollar system that employs roughly one in every ten people worldwide. This course addresses the multivalent history of dress from early modern imperial encounters in the Atlantic World, to anti-colonial movements in South Asia, to the nineteen-forties American Zoot Suit Riots—demonstrating the ways that clothes are connected to gendered and racial categories, political projects, and the shape of global capitalism. Students will analyze case studies from Malabar to Manchester, colonial Lima to revolutionary France, nineteenth-century Zanzibar to nineteen-eighties New York. Examining the history of dress and its global interconnections necessitates an interdisciplinary approach; therefore, students will combine historical scholarship with theoretical frameworks from the anthropology of dress and methodologies from material culture studies to analyze sources ranging from museum objects to films, haute couture fashion to flip-flops. Finally, this course sheds light on historic interconnections and the development of fashion systems, asks what ways these continue to animate our contemporary world, and imagines new possibilities for the future. 

The following class can count as a GNSE course in the major only in Autumn 2024: 

REES 20001 Tolstoy's War and Peace
Instructor: Anne Eakin-Moss
Leo Tolstoy’s monumental novel War and Peace, which the author Henry James called “a loose baggy monster,” is a sui generis work of modern literature that offered a response and challenge to the European Realist novel and founded a Russian national myth. We will read the novel in translation, alongside its adaptations into opera, film, and Broadway musical. We will also read literary theoretical works inspired by the novel and consider the novel in relation to theories of narrative, critical theory of gender, and philosophies of community and everyday experience.  

WINTER 2025 

GNSE 10428 Medieval Desire
Instructor: Kashaf Qureshi
In medieval literature, various modes of desire intersect in surprising ways: spiritual devotion unfolds through sensual longing, and personal pleasure intertwines with sacrificial love, producing structures of desire that are conflicting, disorienting, and not so dissimilar from our own. In this course, we will survey a range of late medieval genres to unpack the richly imaginative and experimental discourses of desire housed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. Readings will include dream-vision poems like Pearl, where we will consider the overlaying of economic, domestic, and apocalyptic fantasies; to the hagiographical Book of Margery Kempe, where we will think through the entanglement of gender, embodied spirituality, and erotic encounter. We will interrogate how medieval texts trouble modernity's construction of "sacred" and "secular" desire as constitutive opposites, coming up with our own terms to better describe the interplay between these categories. How do medieval texts blend seemingly different modes of desire—holy and profane, specific and ambiguous, linear and asynchronic—to construct, obscure, and defamiliarize their objects of desire? What claims to selfhood, language, and knowledge are made by these hybrid models of desire and the multiple meanings they allow? Familiarity with medieval literature or Middle English is neither required nor expected. 

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 12127 Indigenous Feminisms of Latin America
Instructor: Andrea Reed-Leal
This course examines how early modern visual and textual sources partook in the formation of gender and race differences in the Americas. We will explore colonial documents drawing on the work of contemporary Indigenous Feminist thinkers, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorena Cabnal, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Yásnaya Aguilar, among others. Reading the colonial archive while thinking about contemporary Indigenous perspectives can help us bridge the past to the present and discuss issues concerning the underrepresentation of Indigenous women in the archive, language politics, communal identities, and Indigenous epistemologies while being particularly attentive to the rhetorical strategies deployed by colonial texts. Along the way, we will have in perspective how contemporary indigenous women resist, negotiate, and denounce the state, corporate, and patriarchal establishments. In this course, students will engage with primary sources of the colonial period in Latin America as they engage in debates surrounding gender and race in our present moment. Understanding these debates and the history surrounding them is crucial to participating in informed discussion, research, and activism regarding issues of colonialism, race, and gender discrimination of today. Students will participate in class discussions, write weekly responses, lead, and moderate academic-style presentations, and produce a final research paper. Taught in Spanish.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 12128 (In)Visible Women from Dante to Elena Ferrante: Bodies, Power, Identity
Instructor: Beatrice Fazio
This course introduces students to both historical and current perspectives on gender, with a focus on Italian literature and cinema (14th-21st century). We will examine the representation of women in literature, as discussed in a variety of texts, including Dante’s Divine Comedy, Machiavelli’s comedies, and Elena Ferrante’s novels. We will investigate key issues raised in and by women-authored works, across historical periods as varied as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Fascism. And we will also explore conceptualizations of gender and sexuality in Italian and international films, unpacking concepts such as gaze, desire, and intersectionality. As students study topics such as identity, construction of difference, feminism and antifeminism, they will acquire the critical vocabulary to describe, interpret, and formulate arguments about women’s agency in literature, film, culture, and society. Taught in English.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 12133 Consent in American Life
Instructor: Evelyn Kessler
Consent brims with possibility. It is an ethic, a legal principle, a physical act, and a measuring stick of social capacity and interaction. It can express enthusiasm or ambivalence or a range of other conflicting emotions, and enable human flourishing or suffering. This course explores the history of consent in the United States across these vast terrains, and seeks to understand how gendered and sexual bodies have served as the anchor for consent despite its many meanings, ambiguities, and contradictions. We will examine debates over consent—and consenting or non-consenting bodies­—in various realms of life: sex, marriage, labor, medicine, consumption, visual culture, and the social sciences, among others. We will consider how and why consent differs from its conceptual cousins, such as choice or free will, and discuss the historical, ethical, and political challenges of studying and writing about consent.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors 

GNSE 12134 Geographies of Race and Gender in Medieval and Early Modern Italy
Instructor: Beatrice Fazio
This interdisciplinary course takes you on an engaging journey through literary masterpieces, historical texts, maps, and artistic representations (13th-17th century). Students will explore how early modern ideas on race and gender were constructed, challenged, and redefined by literary texts and other mediums, and within various spatial contexts—encompassing real and imagined geographies, Mediterranean and Atlantic trade routes, and urban social spaces. We will read poetry, essays, travelogues, and analyze the context within which a given literary work is entangled. Drawing on theories from cultural, gender, and critical race studies, this course reveals how early modern texts, art, intellectual debates, and politics shaped notions on gender, cultural identity, and racial categories, and why these ideas intertwine with concepts of “place” and “space.” Understanding the historical construction of race and gender not only empowers students to apply historical knowledge to current issues, but also equips them with the critical thinking skills to question and deconstruct stereotypes and harmful narratives.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors 

GNSE 15003 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations II
Instructor: 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 15134 Body Genres
Instructor: Gabriel Ojeda-Sague
This course explores physical response to aesthetic production, specifically framed by the concept (following Carol Clover, Linda Williams, and Richard Dyer) of the "body genre" in literature and film. We will analyze body genres such as the tearjerker, horror, comedy, pornography, and other affective responses to media such as disgust, shock, and cringe as they are theorized by scholars in literary studies, film studies, affect studies, and audience studies.  

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 used to construct gender and sexuality (e.g. in drag shows, communities you belong to personally, social media, and current events). We also consider binary language reform, abolition of linguistic gender systems, and emergence of identity categories as practices of everyday relationality that contest hegemonic systems. Readings are interdisciplinary and draw from fields including Linguistics, Anthropology, Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Queer Studies.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20121 Women And Work In Modern East Asia
Instructor: Jacob Eyferth
Worldwide, women do about 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly. Women’s underpaid work at home and in industry subsidized the early stages of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain, early twentieth-century Japan, and contemporary China, and women’s unpaid contributions to their households enable employers worldwide to keep wages low. We know, at least in outline, how women came to carry double burdens in Europe and North America, but little research has been done so far about this process in East Asia. In this course, we will discuss when and how China, Japan, and Korea developed a division of labor in which most wage work was gendered male and reproductive work was marked female. Are current divisions of labor between men and women rooted in local cultures, or are they the result of industrial capitalist development? How do divisions of labor differ between the three East Asian countries, and how did developments in one East Asian country affect others?
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, think pieces, podcast episodes, and video essays.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.  

GNSE 20139 Midwives, Healers, and "Abortionists"
Instructor: Peggy Heffington
In the 19th and early 20th centuries in the US, most births moved from the home (where they were often attended by midwives) to the hospital (where they were almost always attended by male doctors). In recent decades, demand for midwives has reemerged across the political spectrum. Some see midwives as a bulwark against contracting reproductive rights and autonomy; some see them as protection from government overreach and regulation, or as a return to a lost traditional or religious past; many see them as an answer to a medical system that has failed to meet the needs of mothers and babies. This course will follow the history of midwives, women healers, and abortion providers from antiquity through the Middle Ages and to the present, with a focus on the political, legal, and religious context of midwifery in twentieth and twenty-first century US. Topics include witchcraft accusations of midwives and healers; the importance of Black midwives in the antebellum south; the role of race and gender in laws against practicing midwifery; convergences and divergences between the natural birth movement and the reproductive rights movement; and the prevalence of homebirth among Christian momfluencers.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20142 India on Screen: Marriage and Sexuality from Bollywood to Made in Heaven
Instructor: Rochona Majumdar
From reality shows like Indian Matchmaking and Made in Heaven to the meme of the "Big Fat Indian Wedding" to the preoccupations of Bollywood films like DDLJ and Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahani and crossover ones such as Monsoon Wedding, marriage is an obsession in South Asian culture. Focusing on Hindi cinema, this course will explore the socio-political dynamics of this cultural focus on marriage and couple formation. With examples ranging from classical Hindi films from the 1950s-60s to the star-studded melodramas of 1970s and 1980s and the “new Bollywood” era (post-1991), this cinema exhibited and analyzed the central dynamics of marriage: sexual compatibility, fidelity, reproductive futures, and so on. Debates around class, caste, diaspora, and sexuality are equally anchored in issues of marriage and couple formation. In this course, we ask why it is that marriage—its success and failure—has been so central to Indian on-screen identities. Even as screens multiply—on computers, cell phones, and in the multiplex—marriage continues to dominate. No prior knowledge of Indian languages is required, but you must enjoy watching and talking about movies and popular culture.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20143 Feminisms and Anthropology
Instructors: Julie Chu and Jennifer Cole
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). 3rd and 4th year undergraduates only. Graduate students must have consent of one of the instructors.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20147 Gender Archaeology
Instructors: Alice Yao and Katie Kearns
How have archaeologists approached the study of gendered practices, and can their work contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions of gender across the social sciences and humanities? How can we use material objects and things to examine or explain gendered identities, especially in the deep past? In this course, students will engage with a range of research, from different disciplinary perspectives, to explore how gender is situated in archaeological theory and praxis and its political implications. Through multiple case studies, the course will interrogate how archaeologists study, analyze, and interpret material remains to examine gendered ideologies and material practices and their intersections with other social constructs: class, sex, race, ethnicity. Coverage is cross-cultural and aims to expose students to the diversity and variability of gendered and sexual experiences of different people across time and space. Topics include but are not limited to: embodiment and expression, gender roles, sexuality, parenthood and childhood, masculinity, biopolitics, and feminist theory.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20148 Drama Queens: Women Playwrights in the Renaissance
Instructor: Noémie Ndiaye
This course introduces students to early modern female playwrights from England--including Elizabeth Cary, Aphra Behn, and Margaret Cavendish--and from Continental Europe when their work is available in translation--including the French Marguerite de Navarre (Comedy of Mont-de-Marsan), the Italian Margherita Costa (The Buffoons), the Spanish Ana Caro (The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs) and the Mexican Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Narcissus). In this course, we will analyze the complex work and lives of those brilliant playwrights through various critical lenses including intersectional feminism, transnationalism, and premodern critical race studies.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20150 Queer Theories/Queer Practices
Instructor: Jonathan Flatley
An introduction to key texts in queer theory (Foucault, Crimp, Sedgwick, Butler, Wittig, Bersani, Edelman, Muñoz, Roderick Ferguson, Heather Love), with attention to the AIDS crisis as key context for the emergence of queer theory. Alongside these works, we will examine a range of queer aesthetic practices (Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Zoe Leonard, Alison Bechdel) and some of the political practices in and around the Gay Liberation Movement and ACT UP.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20151 Hooking Up, Shacking Up, Breaking Up: Public Policy and Intimate Relationships
Instructor: Karlyn Gorski
Every aspect of our lives is shaped by policy choices, including our most intimate relationships. In this course, we will examine the sociological and policy dimensions of different aspects of intimate relationships, including campus hookup cultures, relationship formation, housing policy, marriage, parenting, breakups and divorce. Each week, students will be responsible for reading an assigned book related to these topics, and class meetings will be dedicated to discussing the texts in depth. Students should be aware that texts will engage with themes of assault, abuse, and intimate partner violence. Together, we will examine how macro-level policy decisions shape pivotal intimate moments throughout the lifecourse.
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 20416 Radical Style: Politics and Writing in the 1960s and 1970s
Instructor: Dana Glaser
From the iconic militant images of the Black Panthers sporting afros and slinging rifles to the street theater of the Yippies, the melodrama of bra-burning, and the parodic extremity of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto, the moment of the 1960s and 1970s is as synonymous with certain kinds of style as it is with radical politics. Often, the former to the detriment of the latter: the more style, the less substance: for example, the counterculture’s tuning in and dropping out depoliticized the student movement and the Black Panthers’ star power is “radical chic” that undermined the seriousness of their willingness to use revolutionary violence. Why did political activists write and perform their politics this way? What made these politics radical – that is, what is it about them that rethought something from its roots or foundations? Does radical style always suggest a radical politics? This class mixes cultural history, political theory, and literary approaches to the moment of the new social movements of the 1960s. We’ll read the serious political texts that invented modern ideas of race, sex, gender, and class politics as having style of their own, and we’ll read them alongside the film, poetry, theater (street and otherwise) that made characterized the 60’s. We’ll also make good use of archives in Chicago, which was one of the primary centers for New Left political activity, and students will have a chance to do firsthand archival research. 

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

GNSE 21090 Spectral Archives: Asian Diasporic Literature in the Americas
Instructor: Yunning Zhang
Are minor lives worth documenting? How do we have access to the lives of the multitude, the dispossessed, the outcasts and the enslaved—the lives that archival documents have little to tell us about? Is it ethical to recreate and recover the unheard lives of peoples historically perceived as illiterate, undesirable, “diseased” and unassimilable? What is the power of imagining and writing about existing otherwise? We will consider these questions throughout the course by turning to the under-explored history of Asian diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean. We will contextualize examples of life writing (broadly-defined) spanning from late seventeenth-century to the twenty-first century, both by members of the Asian diasporas themselves and as they have been re-imagined by contemporary authors. Some examples of primary texts include the spiritual biography of a seventeenth-century Mughal princess-slave who became a mystic in colonial Mexico, queer imagination of a Chinese “coolie” in late nineteenth-century Jamaica, the memoirs of Japanese-Peruvians in the internment camp during WW2, semi-autobiographical poems and short stories by contemporary Asian-Latinx writers. With the help of supplementary critical readings on radical life writing, we will consider throughout the course how imaginative, anti-racist, feminist and queer narratives may expand our current knowledge of the lives of the marginalized and the racialized.  

GNSE 21352 That Age Old Debate: Youth Cultures in Postcolonial India
Instructor: Titas De Sarkar
In this course, we will gain a deeper understanding of how certain key moments in postcolonial India–from student protests to an economic transition to globalization, from rise of Bollywood to the omnipresence of social media–have shaped the youth of the country and how young people in turn have been at the forefront of some of the major events and have created history on their own terms. We will ask-if youth is a construct like gender and caste then how was it constructed over the last seventy years? We will keep two guiding questions in mind–who all are considered to be the youth in postcolonial India? And–what are the lived experiences of young people during this time? The ever changing, seemingly arbitrary, and conflicting definitions of youth in government reports, commercial advertisements, or popular culture demands a thorough analysis of this category inside out. We will take an inter-disciplinary approach and examine how the identity of being young intersects with other identities such as class, ethnicity, linguistic abilities and so on. By identifying the constitutive elements of being part of the young generation in a young nation such as India, we will challenge any homogeneous perception of “the youth” and read young people’s experiences in their own contexts. Focusing on youth culture in South Asia will help us think critically about youth culture studies where the Global South remains underrepresented.  

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 21404 More than Human Ethnography
Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
In this course we explore the fields of more-than-human and ‘multispecies’ ethnography. We examine theoretical antecedents promoting the inclusion of non-human actors in ethnographic analysis and read examples of such work, including foundational texts on interspecies engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Anna Tsing, Eduardo Kohn, Deborah Bird Rose, and Juno Parreñas among many others. We consider the role other species and ‘actants’ played in early social science and contemplate recent studies of “becoming with” animals, plants, fungi, bacteria—encountering complex ecological relationships, examining naturalcultural borders, and querying the role of decolonial thought and queer ecologies in the ‘more-than’ turn. Multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional method; we will couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, physicists, and philosophers. The is a discussion-based seminar with significant time devoted to the logistical aspects of ‘more than’ work—to querying how such studies have been conducted in practice. 

GNSE 21424 Evil Women In Greek Tragedy
Instructor: Christina Filippaki
This course examines the portrayal of female villains in Greek tragedy. We will read plays by the three major tragedians, focusing on their depictions of Clytemnestra, the Furies, Phaedra, Medea, and Helen, as it relates to questions of gender, mythmaking, power, and reception. We will discuss the societal dynamics and generic norms through which those characters emerge and we will explore their intertextual journey through myth and literature, ancient and modern. Key questions of the course include: What makes a woman evil? How is the evil female constructed through the writing, visuals, and performance of tragedy? What does it mean to present an evil female in a genre where all writers and actors are male? To what extent does tragedy shape and reflect the patriarchal structures of the Athenian society? All readings will be in English.

GNSE 21500 Darwinian Health
Instructor: Jill Mateo
This course will use an evolutionary, rather than clinical, approach to understanding why we get sick. In particular, we will consider how health issues such as menstruation, senescence, pregnancy sickness, menopause, and diseases can be considered adaptations rather than pathologies. We will also discuss how our rapidly changing environments can reduce the benefits of these adaptations.  

GNSE 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 22000 Intro to Black Studies
Instructor: Kevin Irakoze
This course introduces students to the study of Blackness from multiple perspectives: racial, political, cultural, and intellectual. We will adopt a global perspective to our study that highlights differential histories and experiences of Black people in various areas of the world. Attentive to the origin of the discipline in political struggle, we will constantly question the ties of Black studies scholarship to the communities whose struggle it is founded on. With a consideration of the adjacent histories of racialization and other forms of oppression, this course invites students to consider the relation between Blackness and other social categories such as gender and class. We will ask questions such as: What are the methods and approaches to the study of Blackness? How has the history of African and African diasporic people shaped the contemporary world? How can we build a world founded on freedom for all? Assigned materials include academic texts, fiction, and other media such as film & music. Select topics include the histories of enslavement and colonization, revolution, Black feminism, and Afrofuturism. Students will work on weekly reflections, a mid-term paper and a final team project. For the sake of a collaborative pedagogy anchored in the work of social movements, students are encouraged to imagine together the best form this course can take and to enact course practices and changes that keep us all true to the radical vocation of Black Studies as a discipline. 

GNSE 22123 Sociology of the Family
Instructor: Linda Waite
The family is a key social institution in all human societies, although its structure and functions vary over time and place. Families are responsible for producing, raising and socializing children into social roles. Families are often the site of religious practice, responsible for much of what is produced and consumed, provide shelter, transmit resources across generations and within them, inculcate members, especially the young, with values and beliefs, provide companionship and entertainment, and the location for much of the sexual activity that takes place. Changes in the structure of the economy, social policies, and social organization all affect the family, with demographic forces also playing a key role. We will discuss these issues through the lens of the classic and recent literature on the family as seen from a sociological perspective.  

GNSE 22148 Intro To Genres: Speculative Women
Instructor: Lina 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 22163 Reading as a Writer: Obscenities
Instructor: Chicu Reddy
“Obscenity” is a term for what is repulsive, abhorrent, excessive, or taboo in a society; and yet many artworks once considered to be obscene are now celebrated as landmarks of world literature, from the ancient poetry of Sappho to modern novels like Ulysses. In this course, we will study literary works that have been banned or censored as “obscene” to examine our own perspectives, attitudes, and assumptions as literary artists. How does obscenity shape our understanding of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, or public and private speech? What are the uses of obscenity in constructing new possibilities for literary expression? Authors studied will include Toni Morrison, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Vladimir Nabokov, Hilda Hilst, and Allen Ginsburg; and we will supplement these readings with works of literary theory, psychoanalysis, and case law. Students will produce their own original poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to reimagine what is permissible—and possible—in language and society for contemporary literary artists. 

GNSE 22225 Race In African History
Instructor: Katie Hickerson
This course examines the category of race in African history from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era. It references the legacies of earlier identity constructions in the creation of these categories, as well as analyzing its transnational and trans-imperial dimensions. The class combines intellectual, cultural, and social history to illuminate the actors, encounters, and debates animating this dynamic field of study—moving beyond assumptions of African societies as spaces of ethnic—and not racialized—identities to examine the construction of difference through transnational history of science, gender and sexuality studies, histories of slavery, Middle Eastern colonial projects, as well as the invention of the category of “native” in European colonial discourse. Are categories of differences primarily due to European colonialism, as many claim? Or are they embedded in a more complex configuration coming from settler colonial projects, national liberation struggles, and postcolonial nativist discourses? Students examine case studies from across the continent—from Ghana to Sudan to South Africa—paying close attention to experiences of Asian, Arab, and mixed-race peoples navigating colonial and postcolonial African states; while keeping an eye on how debates about difference, diaspora, and nationalism in North America and Europe inform discussions of race in Africa, and how Africans shape discourses of race in colonial metropoles and the United States. Students who have not take African Civilizations I, II, and III are asked to read African History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007) in preparation for this course.  

GNSE 22288 Witchcraft And The Cultural Imagination
Instructors: Tamara Golan & Noel Blanco Mourelle
This seminar takes as its focal point the vast range of conceptual, material, and visual artifacts that are produced by, and indeed help to construct, this enduring fascination with the figure of the witch, from the medieval past to the present. We will examine case studies from premodern Europe to Colonial North America to Indonesia, scrutinizing texts, films, and works of art. Rather than offering a standard history of witchcraft, we will explore the intersections of gender, labor, and representation that the figure of the witch makes specially available for study. Witchcraft constitutes a multifaceted phenomenon that aims to alter reality and the self through the use of various techniques, transmitted both orally and in writing. These techniques have often appeared culturally marked in terms of gender and belief. Witchcraft has for centuries been the business of women in societies where very few avenues existed for women to develop any sort of business.  

GNSE 22360 Working 9 to 5
Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
This course will examine representations of labor and labor struggle in literature, film, and music spanning the 18th through 21st centuries. Theoretical and critical readings will bring Marxist and feminist lenses to the primary texts at hand, in addition to examinations of race, labor, and capital. Primary texts might include Robinson Crusoe, Bartleby the Scrivener, Mary Barton, Blood on the Forge, Sister Carrie, Lucy, 9 to 5, Harlan County USA, and Office Space. 

GNSE 22440 Women in Italian Organized Crime Through Cinema
Instructor: Veronica Vegna
In this course, we will study filmic representations of women in Italian organized crime, and the implications these portrayals have on the understanding of gender and the mafias through Italian cinema. Sociological and psychological studies have underscored the importance of female roles in relation to mafia organizations, notwithstanding the rigid patriarchal structure that allows only male affiliation. One of the main goals of this class is for students to gain an understanding of different Italian mafias and to get a deeper comprehension of the construction of gender in a selection of films centered around these organizations. We will also discuss how movies contribute to the perception of organized crime. This class will draw on a variety of fields, including sociology, gender studies, and film studies. Taught in English. Students seeking credit for the Italian major/minor must complete a substantial part of the course work (e.g., readings, writing) in Italian. 

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 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 class counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23172 Transatlantic Feminism. French, Francophone, and North American perspectives (20th-21st c.)
Instructor: Léon Pradeau
This course explores modern and contemporary feminism through a transatlantic lens. We will consider three major moments and sites of a multi-centered conversation. First, we will explore the modernist desire for cosmopolitanism which drew writers across the Atlantic (Simone de Beauvoir’s adventures in the US; Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein’s lives in Paris). In the central part of the quarter, we will focus on the period between 1960 and 1990 which witnessed intense conversation and contestation between a French paradigm of “écriture féminine” (Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig), and the rivalling practices and theories in America (from Adrienne Rich and Mary Daly to Judith Butler). Finally, we will explore the ways in which feminist thought has endeavored to account for race, class, rurality, and disability (from Maryse Condé to Aurélie Olivier and Roseline Lambert). The course will explore various media (novels, poetry, theater and performance, film), and various ways to engage critically and creatively with this history of transatlantic feminism. Taught in English but reading knowledge of French is required. Students taking this class for French credit must have taken FREN 20500, 20503 or a literature course taught in French, and will complete assignments in French.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23178 The Queer Enemy and the Politics of Homophobia
Instructor: Omar Safadi
How is the queer enemy politically constructed? And what are the uses and effects of this enemy in contemporary politics? This course investigates queer sexuality as a specific kind of threat and homophobia as a specific mode of political antagonism. Key to understanding this specificity is the examination of other kinds of political enemies. Across categories of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and empire, the course theorizes the queer enemy in a comparative perspective. We begin with Monique Wittig and Donald Cory to conceptualize structural heterosexuality and the political problem that homosexuality poses to society. We then move to Simone de Beauvoir. Here, we consider how the signification of “woman” bears on homophobia’s work in upholding the normative gender order. Next, we turn to critical race theory. Reading Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Dubois, we take concepts like “black phobo-genesis” and “double consciousness” to think about the intersections and divergences between sexual and racial subjugation. And we conclude the first half of the course by exploring the queer aspects of structural anti-Semitism in the writings of Jean Paul Sartre and Karl Marx. Having explored enmity across categories of political difference, we are now in a better position to delve into the specificities of homophobic antagonism. Not merely a scapegoat, the queer enemy is a political threat that, in turn, indexes deeper and diachronic problem-spaces. We begin the second half of the course by exploring how this threat is framed: through metaphors of civilizational destruction but also through anti-sodomy and anti-disclosure laws. The queer threat, however, is dynamic and shape-shifting. Reading Joel Fishel and Jasbir Puar, we trace how homosexual de-criminalization produced new enemies: an internal enemy- the pedophile - and an external enemy - the “monster terrorist fag.” Mediating transitions in national and imperial power, we examine how the queer transmutes into a colonizing enemy. Through notions of “pinkwashing” and the “Gay International,” we investigate how queer emancipation is made to stand in for colonial domination. But we also read critiques of the gay = colonialism equation, asking how homophobia mediates anti-colonial politics. Finally, we conclude the course with Michel Foucault’s seminal essay, and relate the question of the queer enemy to the threat of radically new and origin-less relationality.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23179 In a Queer Time and Place
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s boldest interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and its governing logics; they question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, the times and spaces of sex and intimacy, and the past/present/future divide. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freccero, Halberstam, Keeling, Love, Muñoz, Freeman, Snorton, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Sadie Benning, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Essex Hemphill, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others. Consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23403 Cybernetic Futures in Digital Media
Instructor: Crystal Beiersdorfer
"Cybernetic Futures in Digital Media" explores the intersection of cyberpunk aesthetics, feminist theory, and digital media. Cyberpunk, characterized by its high-tech, dystopian visions and advanced cybernetics, serves as the course's foundation. We will examine its impact on fine art, moving images, creative writing, and video games. The course will focus on evolving gendered embodiments in cyberpunk, from "masculine" identities centered on military strength to androgynous portrayals exploring emotional depth and resilience. We will analyze these themes and explore how cyberpunk and digital feminisms shape contemporary digital and artistic thought. 

GNSE 24220 Anxious Spaces
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
This course explores built (architectural), filmic, and narrative spaces that disturb our bearings, un-situate us, and defy neurotypical cognition. In the sense that "angst" is a mode that can be understood as both stalling and generative, we analyze spaces and representations of spaces such as corridors, attics, basements, canals, viaducts, labyrinths, forests, ruins, etc., spaces that are 'felt' as estranging, foreboding, in short, anxiety-provoking, in order to understand why-despite or because these topoi are hostile-they are produced, reproduced, and craved. We will pay special attention to abject spaces of racial and sexual exclusivity, sites of spoliation, and of memory and erasure. Among our primary texts are films by Kubrick, Tarkovksy, and Antonioni, and Chytilová, short fiction by Borges, Kafka, Nabokov, and selections from the philosophical/theoretical writings of Bachelard, Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Foucault, Kracauer, and the edited volume, Mapping Desire, Geographies of Sexuality. 

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 kawaii has 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 24602 Ghosts & the Fantastic in Literature and Film
Instructor: Judith Zeitlin
What is a ghost? How and why are ghosts represented in particular forms in a particular culture at particular historical moments and how do these change as stories travel between cultures? This course will explore the complex meanings, both literal and figurative, of ghosts and the fantastic in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tales and films. Issues to be explored include: 1) the relationship between the supernatural, gender, and sexuality; 2) the confrontation of death and mortality; 3) collective anxieties over the loss of the historical past; 4) the visualization (and exorcism) of ghosts through performance; and 5) responses to ecological and political trauma. 

GNSE 24700 Introduction à la littérature féminine au Maroc
Instructor: Khalid Lyamlahy
Depuis les années 1980, la littérature féminine au Maroc connaît un essor remarquable qui se traduit dans le renouvellement du paysage littéraire et la diversité des thèmes abordés. En mettant la femme marocaine et ses expériences au centre de l’acte littéraire, les écrivaines marocaines ont brisé les tabous et insufflé une dynamique sociale et politique à l’échelle du pays. Ce cours introductif donnera un aperçu des écritures féminines au Maroc à partir de questions majeures telles que la représentation du corps et de la sexualité, le rapport à la maternité et à la transmission, le poids des traditions et des injonctions sociales, les combats politiques, les droits des femmes ainsi que les luttes contre la discrimination et la violence. Parmi les autrices étudiées figurent Fatima Mernissi, Fatna El Bouih, Leila Abouzeid, Siham Benchekroun et Yasmina Chami. This is an introductory-level course. Taught in French.

GNSE 26034 Russian Poetry
Instructor: Ania Aizman
What should poetry do—should it have any tasks (personal, literary, political)? In this course, we read short texts that stun, adore, inspire, grieve, mobilize, berate, forgive or forget their addressees and subjects, that reach (or fail to reach) us, their almost-certainly unintended, contemporary readers. Meeting both canonical and forgotten authors across three centuries and many countries of Russophone writing, this course *has* a task: to find what the poems conceal and reveal about their worlds––and ours. If you love poetry, or you have some knowledge of Russian, or you have taken the Russia and Eurasia Civ Core sequence, this class is a good fit for you. The syllabus is finalized with students’ preferences and curiosities in mind. Assignment options include creative projects, independent research, journaling or essays. Discussion of texts will focus on gender, religion, race, imperial subjectivity, and dissent.  

GNSE 27702 Music and Love in South Asia
Instructors: Anna Schultz & Anand Venkatkrishnan
This course explores the relationship between the musical arts and forms of love in South Asian history. We will trace the complex and ambivalent contours of love in several genres including premodern poetry, stage performance, and Bollywood movies. We will examine issues such as poetics and theology, opposition to orthodox social conventions, the intensity of emotion expressed through multiple senses, the social sites of forbidden love, women and gender as poets and performers, and the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.  

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.  

Graduate Course Descriptions

AUTUMN 2024

GNSE 30136 Generations, Gender, And Genre in Korean Fiction & TV Drama
Instructor: Kyeong-Hee Choi
The seminar analyzes the issues of generations, gender, and genres that arise from a selection of popular literary and television dramas from modern and contemporary Korea. The selection for the course is marked by the creative contributions of Korean women as novelists, scriptwriters, directors, among others. It includes prose fiction by renowned authors such as Park Wan-sŏ (1931-2011), Han Kang (1970- ), and Cho Nam-joo (1978- ), as well as television series like Mr. Sunshine (2018; scripted by Kim Eun-sook), The Red Sleeve (2021; dir. by Chŏng Chi-in; adapted the 2017 novel by from Kang Mi-kang), and My Liberation Notes (2022; written by Park Hae-yeong). Through a blend of close textual analysis and historical contextualization, the course aims to uncover the ways in which the gendered and generational identities of these creators might have helped certain configurations of concerns, needs, and aspirations saliently emerge in response to social, cultural, historical, and political currents of their time. [Consent Required; No prior knowledge of the Korean language is necessary] 

GNSE 30141 Queerness in the Shadow of Empire: Sexualities in the Modern Middle East
Instructor: Eman Abdelhadi
Critics, from both the Right and the Left, claim that liberal sexual regimes are Western, imperial impositions onto Muslim and Middle Eastern societies. On the other hand, LGBTQ+ advocates claim that the restriction of sexuality is itself a colonial legacy. This class will delve into this debate by examining cutting edge empirical and theoretical work on Queer lives in the modern Middle East. Instructor Consent required. 

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

GNSE 32604 Race, Justice, and the Assemblage of American Moralities
Instructor: Samah Choudhury
This course explores the racial and moral imperatives that are encapsulated within concepts of “Americanness” and the theoretical notions that define the discursive, historical, and sociopolitical boundaries of American identities. How have claims to American identity relied on created religious or religiously-inflected Others? Together, we will consider how the human phenomena of religion and race have developed across our histories in concert with one another. How do racial and moral imperatives the define discursive, historical, and sociopolitical boundaries of American identities? We will examine how these formations have been deployed, defined, and bent to fit particular historical and cultural contexts while continuing to inform each other in a variety of permutations, especially in the United States. How do race and religion also intersect with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and politics? Our theoretical grounding in migration, encounters, and transnational mobilities will provide insight into how race is imagined on and into differently minoritized people while considering what it means to be participants in the project of racecraft today. Our readings will include historical materials, literary texts, theological reflections, and examples from popular culture that meditate on these topics. 

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

GNSE 33800 Global Maternal and Child Health
Instructor: Erick Amick
This course provides a foundation in global perspectives on maternal and child health research, practice, and policy. The course will cover a range of maternal and child health topics to examine critical challenges facing women, children, providers, and policymakers in some of the world's most vulnerable communities. Students in this course will: 1) understand the status of maternal and child health in a variety of communities and contexts, using key health and development indicators; 2) critically analyze past and present public health programs and policies utilized to address maternal and child health needs in diverse communities; 3) assess the economic, political, social, and cultural factors that affect maternal and child health programs and outcomes. 

GNSE 34426 The Witch Craze in 17th-Century Europe: Scotland, Poland-Lithuania, Russia, and Moravia
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
In this course, we look carefully at the reasons for and repercussions of the “witch craze” in the long 17th-century, focussing on primary texts such as trial reports, legal literature, pamphlets, woodcuts, scholarly dissent, and other paraphernalia. The course follows a sweep of the craze from Lancashire in Scotland, where trials began in the 1590s, to Poznań in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to the Russian village of Lukh on the outskirts of Moscow, where between 1656 and 1660 over twenty-five individuals, most of them male, were tried and several executed, and finally to Northern Moravia under Habsburg rule where inquisitor Hetman Boblig presided over the burning of almost 100 "witches." In each region, trials followed different customs—Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic—and answered to different legislative discourse—ecclesiastical, laic, secular—yet all can be said to be the product of a common desire and collective fear. To supplement our understanding of the multifaceted anxieties that are expressed in works such as King James’ Daemonologie (1597), and to ask more questions of the intersectional phobias around gender, sexuality, religion, and class (rural-urban; colony-metropole), we take up theory from Foucault, Federici, and Mbembe, and others. 

GNSE 34706 Japanese Art in the Sinosphere
Instructor: Chelsea Foxwell
From the earliest centuries of the common era until the 1870s, Japanese writers, artists, and scholars considered themselves to be living in the Sinosphere: the realm of China’s cultural and political centrality. Starting with a consideration of Chinese material culture in the Tale of Genji, we will proceed to address topics such as the relation between Chinese and Japanese handscroll paintings, the spread of Chinese-style ink monochrome painting in Japan, the rise of the Kano school as official painters and Chinese-style painting experts, and the immense popularity of literati painting and calligraphy. Korean painting’s intersection with Chinese and Japanese art in the medieval and early modern periods will also factor into the discussion. We will evaluate the changing dynamics around political power and gender embodied in the Chinese/Japanese oppositional duality and reassess the prevailing narratives concerning how the Sinosphere faded from view in the Meiji era. 

GNSE 34771 Sex, Crime and Horror in Argentine Literature
Instructor: Carlos Halaburda
This course examines a historical trajectory of Argentine literature, cinema, and the visual arts through the study of three thematic currents that significantly influenced Argentina’s cultural and socio-political experience with nation-building, modernization, and democracy: sex, crime, and horror. The primary objective of the course is to foster a critical exploration of how foundational works of Romanticism and Realism in the Río de la Plata, the Noir genre, and the Gothic tradition accounted for decisive changes in the social fabric of the country. Students will assess the role of sexuality, crime, and horror stories in the representation of momentous events in Argentine history, spanning from the revolutionary era in the nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Topics include the Wars of Independence, gaucho literature, indigenous resistance, the great transatlantic migratory flows, the rise of the middle classes, Peronismo, youth culture, military dictatorships, human rights violations, LGBT movements, and economic precarity in neoliberal times. Works by Esteban Echeverría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juana Manuela Gorriti, José Hernández, Lucio V. and Eduarda Mansilla, Leopoldo Lugones, Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan José Saer, Alejandra Pizarnik, Juan Gelman, Silvina Ocampo, Rodolfo Walsh, Manuel Puig, Ricardo Piglia, Mariana Enríquez, María Luisa Bemberg, Luis Puenzo, Albertina Carri, Santiago Mitre, among others. 

GNSE 36994 Anticolonial Worlding: Literature, Film, Thought
Instructor: Leah Feldman
This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the role of the cultural Cold War in shaping anticolonial aesthetics and politics during the twentieth century as well as its impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was characterized by an expansion of anticolonial festivals, exchanges, and congresses and marked by political crises and coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, Soviet and US imperial expansion, and the May 1968 student protests. We will explore how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, gender, and language politics. Exploring anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance. 

GNSE 37300 Le Roman de la Rose
Instructor: Daisy Delogu
The ""Roman de la Rose"" (mid-13th century), a sprawling, encyclopedic summa composed by two separate authors, was arguably the single most influential vernacular text of the Middle Ages. Whether they hated or admired it, subsequent writers could not escape the long shadow cast by this magisterial œuvre. And, as Kate Soper’s recent opera adaptation of the ""Rose"" demonstrates, this labyrinthine work remains a source of creative inspiration. In this course we will read the ""Rose"" together. Each student will choose a critical lens (e.g. gender and sexuality, animal and/or ecocritical studies, ethics and philosophy, reception studies, manuscript studies, text & image, etc.) to structure their engagement with the text, and together we will collaborate to chart a rich and diverse set of interpretive paths through this complex work. All registered students will attend the cours magistral (taught in English). In addition, all registered students will select and attend either the French discussion section, or the critical theory section. Students are welcome to attend both. 

GNSE 38802 United States Labor History
Instructor: Amy Dru Stanley
This course will explore the history of labor and laboring people in the United States. The significance of work will be considered from the vantage points of political economy, culture, and law. Key topics will include working-class life, industrialization and corporate capitalism, slavery and emancipation, the role of the state and trade unions, and race and sex difference in the workplace. Graduate students by consent of instructor. 

GNSE 39109 Sex, Gender, and Kinship: Colonial Perspectives
Instructor: Deirdre Lyons
This course analyzes the contested relationships between gender, sexuality, kinship, and European systems of colonialism from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Drawing on historical case studies, feminist theory and postcolonial studies, this course will cover a broad range of empires and regions to explore topics such as the construction of gender ideologies and how colonial systems of rule were established through changing concepts of gender, sex, and kinship—and their connections to race, colonial power, and neo/post/colonial legacies. Our primary aim is to account for how complex and fraught notions of “gender,” “family,” and “sexuality” mutually emerged alongside transformative shifts in systems of western colonialism. 

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 200 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 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 Sara Ahmed, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams. Open to MA and PhD students; 3rd- and 4th-year undergrads

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

GNSE 43602 Critical Security Studies
Instructor: Kara 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 43901 Queerness and Disability in Latin American Literature and Culture, 1880-1930
Instructor: Carlos Halaburda
With the rise of Latin American modernity, LGBTQ and crip populations were portrayed in literature, medical science, and visual culture as deviant. The discursive mechanisms to produce truths about bodies as normative or perverse, real or unreal, fit or disabled not only achieved authority in medicine, but also in numerous platforms where ableist heteronormativity was sedimented as a hegemonic way of life. Literature, theater, museums, the modern press, and the visual arts became semiotic territories for the production of racial, gender, sex, and psychophysical difference. But queer/crip/trans* and critical race theory have offered tools to critique the sexual hegemony and ableism of such patriarchal-colonial mindset. This graduate course introduces students to such debates in new Latin American critical studies, with a global perspective. Focusing on the cultural production of modern Latin America and the Caribbean, students will investigate and critique the somatic constructions of the so-called “deviant” in excerpts from novels, plays, chronicles, early films, and clinical studies. Texts by José Tomás de Cuéllar, Luis Montané Dardé, Leonidio Ribeiro, Eduardo Castrejón, Adolfo Caminha, Augusto D’Halmar, Rómulo Gallegos, José González Castillo, Elías Castelnuovo, Teresa de La Parra, Bernardo Arias Trujillo, Francisco de Veyga, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, among others. The course will be taught in Spanish and English. 

GNSE 46905 Performance Theory
Instructor: Leah Feldman This course offers a critical introduction to theories of performance and performativity across a transnational scope. We will read theories of performance that explore the relationship between text, body and audience alongside the history of performative theory and its afterlives in queer and affect theory. Drawing on comparative literary method, this course presents texts both within and beyond the Euro-American canon, across languages, and across disciplines to consider how empire and post-coloniality, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality shape performances and the publics that they address. We will think about the relationship between performance and politics and how performance as both an aesthetic genre and theoretical concept shapes the relationship between text, language, and embodied experience and explore the role of the spectator and their participatory function in the making of performances. 

The following class can count as a GNSE course for the Certificate only in Autumn 2024:

REES 30001 Tolstoy's War and Peace
Instructor: Anne Eakin-Moss Leo
Tolstoy’s monumental novel War and Peace, which the author Henry James called “a loose baggy monster,” is a sui generis work of modern literature that offered a response and challenge to the European Realist novel and founded a Russian national myth. We will read the novel in translation, alongside its adaptations into opera, film, and Broadway musical. We will also read literary theoretical works inspired by the novel and consider the novel in relation to theories of narrative, critical theory of gender, and philosophies of community and everyday experience.

WINTER 2025

GNSE 30121 Women And Work In Modern East Asia
Instructor: Jacob Eyferth
Worldwide, women do about 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly. Women’s underpaid work at home and in industry subsidized the early stages of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain, early twentieth-century Japan, and contemporary China, and women’s unpaid contributions to their households enable employers worldwide to keep wages low. We know, at least in outline, how women came to carry double burdens in Europe and North America, but little research has been done so far about this process in East Asia. In this course, we will discuss when and how China, Japan, and Korea developed a division of labor in which most wage work was gendered male and reproductive work was marked female. Are current divisions of labor between men and women rooted in local cultures, or are they the result of industrial capitalist development? How do divisions of labor differ between the three East Asian countries, and how did developments in one East Asian country affect others?

GNSE 30142 India on Screen: Marriage and Sexuality from Bollywood to Made in Heaven
Instructor: Rochona Majumdar
From reality shows like Indian Matchmaking and Made in Heaven to the meme of the "Big Fat Indian Wedding" to the preoccupations of Bollywood films like DDLJ and Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahani and crossover ones such as Monsoon Wedding, marriage is an obsession in South Asian culture. Focusing on Hindi cinema, this course will explore the socio-political dynamics of this cultural focus on marriage and couple formation. With examples ranging from classical Hindi films from the 1950s-60s to the star-studded melodramas of 1970s and 1980s and the “new Bollywood” era (post-1991), this cinema exhibited and analyzed the central dynamics of marriage: sexual compatibility, fidelity, reproductive futures, and so on. Debates around class, caste, diaspora, and sexuality are equally anchored in issues of marriage and couple formation. In this course, we ask why it is that marriage—its success and failure—has been so central to Indian on-screen identities. Even as screens multiply—on computers, cell phones, and in the multiplex—marriage continues to dominate. No prior knowledge of Indian languages is required, but you must enjoy watching and talking about movies and popular culture.

GNSE 30147 Archaeology of Gender and Sexuality
Instructors: Alice Yao and Katie Kearns
How have archaeologists approached the study of gendered practices, and can their work contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions of gender across the social sciences and humanities? How can we use material objects and things to examine or explain gendered identities, especially in the deep past? In this course, students will engage with a range of research, from different disciplinary perspectives, to explore how gender is situated in archaeological theory and praxis and its political implications. Through multiple case studies, the course will interrogate how archaeologists study, analyze, and interpret material remains to examine gendered ideologies and material practices and their intersections with other social constructs: class, sex, race, ethnicity. Coverage is cross-cultural and aims to expose students to the diversity and variability of gendered and sexual experiences of different people across time and space. Topics include but are not limited to: embodiment and expression, gender roles, sexuality, parenthood and childhood, masculinity, biopolitics, and feminist theory.

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: M. 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 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 31352 That Age-old Debate: Youth Cultures in Modern India
Instructor: Titas De Sarkar
In this course, we will gain a deeper understanding of how certain key moments in postcolonial India–from student protests to an economic transition to globalization, from rise of Bollywood to the omnipresence of social media–have shaped the youth of the country and how young people in turn have been at the forefront of some of the major events and have created history on their own terms. We will ask-if youth is a construct like gender and caste then how was it constructed over the last seventy years? We will keep two guiding questions in mind–who all are considered to be the youth in postcolonial India? And–what are the lived experiences of young people during this time? The ever changing, seemingly arbitrary, and conflicting definitions of youth in government reports, commercial advertisements, or popular culture demands a thorough analysis of this category inside out. We will take an inter-disciplinary approach and examine how the identity of being young intersects with other identities such as class, ethnicity, linguistic abilities and so on. By identifying the constitutive elements of being part of the young generation in a young nation such as India, we will challenge any homogeneous perception of “the youth” and read young people’s experiences in their own contexts. Focusing on youth culture in South Asia will help us think critically about youth culture studies where the Global South remains underrepresented.

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 31404 More than Human Ethnography
Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
In this course we explore the fields of more-than-human and ‘multispecies’ ethnography. We examine theoretical antecedents promoting the inclusion of non-human actors in ethnographic analysis and read examples of such work, including foundational texts on interspecies engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Anna Tsing, Eduardo Kohn, Deborah Bird Rose, and Juno Parreñas among many others. We consider the role other species and ‘actants’ played in early social science and contemplate recent studies of “becoming with” animals, plants, fungi, bacteria—encountering complex ecological relationships, examining naturalcultural borders, and querying the role of decolonial thought and queer ecologies in the ‘more-than’ turn. Multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional method; we will couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, physicists, and philosophers. The is a discussion-based seminar with significant time devoted to the logistical aspects of ‘more than’ work—to querying how such studies have been conducted in practice.

GNSE 31424 Evil Women In Greek Tragedy
Instructor: Christina Filippaki
This course examines the portrayal of female villains in Greek tragedy. We will read plays by the three major tragedians, focusing on their depictions of Clytemnestra, the Furies, Phaedra, Medea, and Helen, as it relates to questions of gender, mythmaking, power, and reception. We will discuss the societal dynamics and generic norms through which those characters emerge and we will explore their intertextual journey through myth and literature, ancient and modern. Key questions of the course include: What makes a woman evil? How is the evil female constructed through the writing, visuals, and performance of tragedy? What does it mean to present an evil female in a genre where all writers and actors are male? To what extent does tragedy shape and reflect the patriarchal structures of the Athenian society? All readings will be in English.  

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 32103 Feminisms and Anthropology
Instructors: Julie Chu and Jennifer Cole
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). Graduate students must have consent of one of the instructors

GNSE 32288 Witchcraft And The Cultural Imagination
Instructors: Tamara Golan & Noel Blanco Mourelle
This seminar takes as its focal point the vast range of conceptual, material, and visual artifacts that are produced by, and indeed help to construct, this enduring fascination with the figure of the witch, from the medieval past to the present. We will examine case studies from premodern Europe to Colonial North America to Indonesia, scrutinizing texts, films, and works of art. Rather than offering a standard history of witchcraft, we will explore the intersections of gender, labor, and representation that the figure of the witch makes specially available for study. Witchcraft constitutes a multifaceted phenomenon that aims to alter reality and the self through the use of various techniques, transmitted both orally and in writing. These techniques have often appeared culturally marked in terms of gender and belief. Witchcraft has for centuries been the business of women in societies where very few avenues existed for women to develop any sort of business.  

GNSE 34220 Anxious Spaces
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
This course explores built (architectural), filmic, and narrative spaces that disturb our bearings, un-situate us, and defy neurotypical cognition. In the sense that "angst" is a mode that can be understood as both stalling and generative, we analyze spaces and representations of spaces such as corridors, attics, basements, canals, viaducts, labyrinths, forests, ruins, etc., spaces that are 'felt' as estranging, foreboding, in short, anxiety-provoking, in order to understand why-despite or because these topoi are hostile-they are produced, reproduced, and craved. We will pay special attention to abject spaces of racial and sexual exclusivity, sites of spoliation, and of memory and erasure. Among our primary texts are films by Kubrick, Tarkovksy, and Antonioni, and Chytilová, short fiction by Borges, Kafka, Nabokov, and selections from the philosophical/theoretical writings of Bachelard, Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Foucault, Kracauer, and the edited volume, Mapping Desire, Geographies of Sexuality.  

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 36034 Russian Poetry
Instructor: Ania Aizman
What should poetry do—should it have any tasks (personal, literary, political)? In this course, we read short texts that stun, adore, inspire, grieve, mobilize, berate, forgive or forget their addressees and subjects, that reach (or fail to reach) us, their almost-certainly unintended, contemporary readers. Meeting both canonical and forgotten authors across three centuries and many countries of Russophone writing, this course *has* a task: to find what the poems conceal and reveal about their worlds––and ours. If you love poetry, or you have some knowledge of Russian, or you have taken the Russia and Eurasia Civ Core sequence, this class is a good fit for you. The syllabus is finalized with students’ preferences and curiosities in mind. Assignment options include creative projects, independent research, journaling or essays. Discussion of texts will focus on gender, religion, race, imperial subjectivity, and dissent.  

GNSE 37702 Music and Love in South Asia
Instructors: Anna Schultz & Anand Venkatkrishnan
This course explores the relationship between the musical arts and forms of love in South Asian history. We will trace the complex and ambivalent contours of love in several genres including premodern poetry, stage performance, and Bollywood movies. We will examine issues such as poetics and theology, opposition to orthodox social conventions, the intensity of emotion expressed through multiple senses, the social sites of forbidden love, women and gender as poets and performers, and the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.  

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

GNSE 40450 In a Queer Time and Place
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s boldest interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and its governing logics; they question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, the times and spaces of sex and intimacy, and the past/present/future divide. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freccero, Halberstam, Keeling, Love, Muñoz, Freeman, Snorton, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Sadie Benning, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Essex Hemphill, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others.

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 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 42360 Working 9 to 5
Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
This course will examine representations of labor and labor struggle in literature, film, and music spanning the 18th through 21st centuries. Theoretical and critical readings will bring Marxist and feminist lenses to the primary texts at hand, in addition to examinations of race, labor, and capital. Primary texts might include Robinson Crusoe, Bartleby the Scrivener, Mary Barton, Blood on the Forge, Sister Carrie, Lucy, 9 to 5, Harlan County USA, and Office Space.

GNSE 44905 Feminism And The Radical Democratic Imaginary: Futures Past
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
In Part I of this course we explore how conceptualizations of the past shape imaginative visions of possible futures. How we understand the past has a direct bearing on what can count as a “realistic” course of social, political, and economic action. Our conception of the past is itself shaped by a projected future and different societies have different ways of imagining the relations between their own future and past. Originating in the revolutionary 18th century, Western feminism’s conceptualization of this relation, its own “futures past” (to speak with Reinhard Koselleck), is characterized by an anticipatory and distinctively modern temporality that assumes the novelty and openness of the future. If the history of feminism calls at times for rewriting, that is less because new facts are discovered than that the ever-changing present opens new perspectives on the past and makes new demands on what it can mean. The past is figured more in terms of projected futures than fidelity to how things really were. For this reason, feminist historiography is rife with debates about whose story is told, and the idea of a “wave” itself has with good reason been criticized as overly generalizing in ways that blind us to the far more fraught and complex histories not captured in its conceptual net. 

GNSE 45027 Between ‘New Woman’ and ‘Sex Worker’: Polish Women’s Writings in the 1930s
Instructor: Bozena Shallcross
During the interwar period a constellation of Polish women writers defined through their novels politically and socially progressive positions; although not deeply influenced by Marxism, they were critical of the class society, state, ruling elite, and Catholic mentality. The seminar will investigate these writers' attempts to represent the unrepresented such as the proletariat, the jobless, the disabled, as well as other socially marginalized members of the society including sex workers. The course will discuss an emergence of the "new woman" against the backdrop of a deeply ingrained patriarchalism, and as an epitome of creative, sexual, and social independence. We will view these phenomena with its roots in 19th century Polish and French naturalism in context of the visual art of Neue Sachlichkeit and the emergence of reportage. Inspired by the social critique offered by writings of Boguszewska, Krzywicka, Melcer, Nałkowska, and others, the seminar will consider the way in which genres such as a novel, short story, and reportage can become tools for reform. All readings in this seminar are in Polish.  

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

GNSE 48701 Late Medieval Women: Sanctity, Gender, Authorship And Authority
Instructor: Willemien Otten
The position of women in the late Middle Ages is often found connected to the problem of female authorship. Initially, female authorship was treated emphatically if not exclusively in the context of vernacular theology, which was seen as complementing and complicating the more traditional division of medieval intellectual texts into monastic and scholastic theology. Furthermore, the consistent focus on the emancipatory power of female authorship led to a situation whereby texts written by women were put in stark opposition to texts written by male authors on women; as a result, gender became the dominant category of interpreting texts written by late medieval women. This course will focus on the position of late medieval women especially, most if not all of them authors, while some others are known to have been in conversation with male confessors. The seminar aims to analyze the remarkable religious and theological texts written by them and about them. In the process we will also analyze some paradigmatic titles related to modern historiographical and theoretical scholarship both to draw on them and to show how the approach to late medieval women authors and women saints has changed over the last decades, most recently because of the interest in nonbinary gender. Latin is helpful but not needed. Undergraduates may petition to enroll. This course meets the HS or CS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.  

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