This seminar will investigate the theoretical and political interventions of Asian American feminist thought, activism, and culture. Through interdisciplinary examinations of imperialism and racial justice, the study of 20th and 21st century Asian America has gained new significance; in particular, feminist scholars offer context as we navigate sexual violence, antiblackness, and transformative justice, issues at the crux of today’s movements. We begin by establishing a foundation in Asian American feminism, examining its history as well as the contributions of leaders like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama. We proceed by interrogating the present-day concerns of Asian American feminists. Here, we consider the impact of migration, disability, indigeneity, policing, and anti-Asian violence, among others. We conclude with poetry and performance art that spotlights queer and trans voices, multiracial solidarity, and climate justice. In doing so, we end with an archive that informs new alliances, directions, and possibilities towards a feminist Asian America.
Some scientists contend that the Earth has entered a new geological age in which human actions and effects are the dominant force shaping the planet, a so-called "anthropocene." Such a planet offers diminishing possibilities for other creatures to live beyond the influence of Homo sapiens. How do animals fit into human societies when human society is now so inescapable? Do animals still exert agency and shape how we live? And how can humans maintain ethical relationships to nonhuman critters? Can we share landscapes and ecosystems, much less an entire planet? This course explores these questions, surveying different approaches to the critical study of animals from the humanities as well as the natural, environmental, and social sciences. We will pursue these questions through scientific papers, philosophical essays, literature, films, and experiential learning activities.
This course is an introduction to foundational concepts in feminist thought on sex and gender.
Topics include homosexuality and theory, history, law, religion, education, the arts and literature, the military, and the health sciences.
Analysis of gender, class and race in contemporary business organizations and roles of men and women within them. Management systems, information technology and human resource systems, as artifacts to larger, gendered environment.
The aim of this course is to critically analyze digital culture from a feminist and gender studies
perspective. We will address topics related to digital innovation and its history, unpacking and
questioning them through the insights offered by genders studies
analytical tools. Subjects such as the rise of the Silicon Valley, gaming culture, social media, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, extraction of data applied to biotechnology, macroeconomic
development of IT platforms and the impact of technology on ecology will be discussed
starting from a current event or debate, to which we will give a historical, ethical, sociological,
theoretical, literary or cinematographic perspective.
Explore feminist projects and approaches that cross a variety of borders. Under what conditions is solidarity across difference and inequality possible? This seminar examines this and other questions using relevant theories, film, and scholarship. Topics include activism, human rights, development, capitalism, war/militarization, racism, embodiment, and health. Assigned readings and films largely focus on the Global South but situate the Global North within circuits and relationships. The professor guides each student in preparing an original research paper on a relevant topic of interest to the student.
This class examines the role that technology, globalization, late capitalism, ideas about health and ability, and advances in feminist theory play in human reproduction. It will investigate new frontiers of reproductive technology, and try to understand the many different ways of using and viewing interventions such as IVF, surrogacy, and embryo selection. We will examine popular ideas about “the perfect child,” and how the issue of abortion intersects and competes with the quest for healthier, able-bodied children.
This course explores the intersections among sexual identity, desire, and behavior and political institutions, public policy, and concepts of citizenship. Course readings and methods will be interdisciplinary and will examine the politics of sexuality in diverse sociocultural, international, and historical contexts. Course topics may include: social movements; laws, policing, and incarceration; medicalization and eugenics; militarism and geopolitics; immigration and human rights; welfare policies; nationalism and citizenship; and reproductive rights.
Examines a tradition in which Black American artists and writers make clothing a primary theme of their work. Moving among photographic, painted, and literary portrayals by and of Black Americans to explore fashion and clothing as aesthetic practices of everyday life that defy racism’s flattening and objectifying effects and affirm—often covertly—the value of Black Americans’ lives. Pays particular attention to artwork that explores the multiple resonances of “fabrication”—working with materials, making and fictionalizing—to reveal and reconfigure the psychic consequences of living within the eye of white dominance.