Fairy Tales and Girlhood: Stories of Transformation
GSF 120CNS/LIT 106CNS/ENGLISH 145CNS
Monday/Wednesday, 3:05-4:20 PM
HI
Kimberly Lamm
The focus in "Fairy Tales and Girlhood" will be on the work of writers, artists, filmmakers, scholars, and designers who have been revising fairy tales since the 1970s to draw out their liberatory potential and have used their familiar themes to reveal and negotiate how girls (and their bodies) can appear in the world as political beings with their own stories, voices, desires, and aspirations.
This course is part of the "What Makes a Body Political?" Constellation.
Introduction to LGBTQ Studies
GSF 202S
Tuesday/Thursday, 11:45 AM-1:00 PM
IJ, CZ
Anna Storti
Topics include homosexuality and theory, history, law, religion, education, the arts and literature, the military, and the health sciences.
Race, Gender, Class, and Computing
GSF 242/COMPSCI 240
Monday/Wednesday, 3:05-4:20 PMCCI, STS, W, IJ, SS
Nicki Washington
This course examines how identity impacts and is impacted by computing. Through an introduction to identity as a social construct, we will explore the societal factors that have influenced present-day technology development and use, historical contexts, and the resulting impact on various communities.
Digital Feminism
GSF 265S/CMAC 265S/COMPSCI 265S/I&E 265S/ISS 265S/SOCIOL 217S/VMS 286S
Monday/Wednesday, 1:25-2:40 PM
R, STS, IJ, SS
Nicki Washington
The aim of this course is to critically analyze digital culture from a feminist and gender studies perspective. We will address topics regarding digital innovation and its history, unpacking and critically questioning them using analytical tools drawn from feminist, queer, and gender studies. Topics will include the rise of Silicon Valley, gaming culture, social media, data mining, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, extraction of data applied to biotechnology, the macro-economics of IT platforms, and the impact of technology on ecology.
Gender and Media
GSF 273S/DOCST 275S/SOCIOL273S/VMS 189S
Wednesdays, 10:05 AM-12:35 PM
CCI, HI, SS
Lauren Henschel
The aim of this course is to critically analyze media culture and communication landscapes from a feminist and gender studies perspective. We will address a wide range of media innovations and their histories, unpacking and critically questioning them through the insights offered by feminist, queer, and intersectional analytical tools. To each, we will examine historical, ethical, sociological, theoretical, literary and film perspectives. What roles do media spaces play in our everyday lives and how do our politics and self-understandings inform and reflect burgeoning platforms? This course will consider these questions in terms of US media cultures and its interconnected global frameworks.
Sex/Gender - Nature/Nurture: Intersections of Biology and Society
GSF 278/CULANTH 278/NEUROSCI 278/PSY 226
Tuesday/Thursday, 8:30-9:45 AM
STS, IJ, NS
Catherine Clune-Taylor
Debates about sexuality, sex, and gender hinge on radically different ideas about the relative effects of biological forces vs. social forces, or nature vs. nurture. This course explores how nature vs. nurture emerged as scientific and popular debate, evaluates new developments in science and cultural fields that are now reconsidering how biology and environments interact, and showcases debates about how sex and sexuality are formed through the interplay of genetic information, hormones, material bodies, and social environments.
Black Feminism and Fashion
GSF 355S/AAAS 355S/ARTSVIS 353S/ENGLISH 353S/LIT 355S
Monday/Wednesday, 4:40-5:55 PM
CCI, W, HI, ALP
Kimberly Lamm
Black feminist perspectives on clothing and fashion. Explores traditions in which Black artists and writers make clothing a primary theme. Presenting photographic, painted, and literary portrayals by and of Black people across the diaspora, and bringing together the study of visual culture, material culture, and literary studies, reveals fashion and clothing as aesthetic practices of everyday life that defy the objectifying effects of racism and sexism. Engages with scholarship that explores slavery's and colonialism's impact on gender and sexuality and examines how artists and writers work within and against those impacts to document the self-fashioning in Black cultural life.
Money, Sex, Power
GSF 361/RIGHTS 361
Monday/Wednesday, 1:25 PM - 2:40 PM
CCI, IJ, CZ, SS
Ara Wilson
Feminist research on gender dynamics in markets, economies, and capitalism. Includes empirical studies (e.g., historical, cross-cultural, and sociological research) and theoretical approaches to political-economic critique. Covered topics may include the gender, racial and transnational divisions of labor, the relation between work and family, waged household labor, sex work, and sweatshop labor, among others.
Queer Theory
GSF 370S/LIT 475S
Monday/Wednesday, 1:25 PM - 2:40 PM
CCI, HI, ALP, SS
Nikki Lane
A seminar designed specifically for advanced study in sexuality and gender. Contextualizes queer theory as a distinct analytic tradition by paying attention to poststructuralist approaches to subjectivity, sociality, power, and knowledge. This course also serves as the capstone required for the Certificate in the program in the study of sexualities.
Feminist Disability Studies
GSF 380S/GLHLTH 380/AAAS 317
Tuesday/Thursday, 10:05 AM-11:20 AM
HI, CZ
This introduction to feminist disability studies draws together the work of feminist (and non-feminist) disability scholars, as well as that of queer theorists, with the work of historians and clinicians in order to explore the field's major theoretical claims. This course will pay special attention to the historical evolution and politics of biomedical definitions of pathology or impairment and their relationship to disability, while paying special attention to intersections between (dis)ability, race, gender, and sexuality.
Intimacies: Sexuality, Nation, and the State
GSF 382S/AADS 382S
Tuesday/Thursday, 10:05 AM-11:20 AM
CCI, EI, W, HI, CZ
A deep dive into the theoretical concept of intimacy, this seminar touches upon the racial, sensorial, and sexual life of nations and the state. Through discussions about citizenship, religion, migration, political economy, belonging, community, and activism, we consider what it means for bodies to exist in relation not only to other bodies, but also within the larger body of the nation-state. We examine theoretical writing alongside film, performance and installation art, law, and pop culture, bringing sexuality to bear on indigenous genocide, the Antebellum South, anti-immigration and miscegenation law, US militarism in Asia and the Pacific, LGBTQ rights, and political scandal.
Black Women and Hip Hop
GSF 390/AAAS 390
Monday/Wednesday, 3:05-4:20 PM
Using the body of work created by black women in hip-hop--music, lyrics, images, and video as a set of “texts,” students are challenged to critically engage with issues that these texts present including representations of black femininity/masculinity in hip-hop, black sexual politics, and the racialized and gendered experiences of life in the US with a special emphasis on issues of sexuality in the American south. Students will learn and apply key theories in cultural studies related to race, gender, and sexuality as well as their intersections. Further, students will examine black women’s representations since hip-hop’s founding the mid-20th century, placing contemporary Black women rappers like Doechii, Flo Milli, Megan Thee Stallion, Sexxy Red, Nicki Minaj, and Cardi B within a broader frame of American popular culture and its expectations of black women.
Senior Capstone Seminar in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies
GSF 499S
Thursday, 1:25-3:55 PM
CCI, R, W, IJ
Advanced research course for majors in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. Topics vary by semester. Students produce a significant research paper. Consent of instructor required.
Enroll Consent
Instructor Consent Required
Prerequisite: GSF 199S
Queering Curation
GSF 590S/HIST 390/DOCST 390
Wednesday, 3:05-5:35 PM
Lauren Henschel and Peter Sigal
This course introduces students to the theory and practice of curation through a queer, feminist, and experimental lens. Drawing on the archive and intellectual life of the Feminist Theory Workshop, students engage feminist, queer, trans, and critical race scholarship while learning how exhibitions are researched, conceptualized, and presented.
Curation is framed as a form of feminist knowledge production rather than a neutral or purely logistical practice. Students use scholarship by Feminist Theory Workshop speakers and affiliated scholars as conceptual foundations to research contemporary artists and cultural producers whose work extends, challenges, or reimagines these theoretical frameworks.
The course emphasizes collaborative, research-driven exhibition making. Students develop original curatorial concepts, conduct archival and visual research, and translate theory into curatorial narratives and materials. The semester culminates in the collective development of a fully realized mock exhibition, with opportunities, when applicable, for student work to contribute to public facing exhibitions connected to ongoing Feminist Theory Workshop programming.
Hortense Spillers and Her Interlocutors
GSF 960/LIT 890
Tuesday, 10:05 AM-12:35 PM
Jennifer Nash and Robyn Wiegman
This seminar focuses on the work of Hortense Spillers, whose 1987 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” is one of the most important essays in feminist theory in the last half century. Reading across Spillers’s archive, we will explore the thinkers who influenced her and those who provoked her interventions, while devoting the final weeks to tracing her work’s impact on recent conversations in Black feminist theory, Trans Studies, and Afro-pessimism. The course is part of the 2026-27 annual theme in GSF on the Feminist 1980s. It is oriented toward doctoral candidates who have successfully completed GSF 701: Foundations in Feminist Theory or its equivalent, but will consider MA students with the relevant training in feminist studies. Admission is by permission only.