Spotlighted Fall 2020 Classes

Our courses challenge students to think critically about questions surrounding gender, sexuality and issues impacting women. And for Fall 2020, we will feature a broad range of courses focusing on topics such as women in the political process and at work, LGBTQ issues and sexuality nature vs. nurture debates, race and transnational feminism, and more.

Below are just a sampling of our offerings for this fall.

Selected Spotlighted Courses

GSF 199S.01: Thinking Gender Kathi Weeks Introduction to foundational concepts in feminist thought on sex and gender. Survey of core concepts in the field of Women's Studies and introduction to the fundamental debates within the history of feminist thinking. Download Course Flyer: GSF 199S.01 (pdf - 110.38 KB)

GSF 202: LGBTQ Studies Robert Franco What is sexuality and what is its power in the current world? What do we desire and why do we desire it? What is the relationship between love and desire, or love and sex? If we wanted to change our sexuality, could we? This course surveys a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to these questions. Drawing from literature, anthropology, biology and medicine, sociology, history, and feminist and queer theory, we will investigate the role that sexuality plays in structuring identity, gender and race, everyday life, popular culture, and national and geopolitical controversies. Download Course Flyer: GSF 202 (pdf - 530 KB)

GSF 221: Women at Work Riikka Prattes This course will investigate women at work, by drawing on an inclusive definition of work and examining not only paid employment but the relationships between different kinds of paid and unpaid work and their imbrication with systems of oppression: the coloniality of labor, racism, patriarchal and class oppression. Download Course Flyer: GSF 221 (pdf - 130.42 KB)

GSF 225: Women in the Political Process Jocelyn Olcott This class explores women's relationship to formal and informal politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will consider the political leadership of women inside and outside the United States, with particular attention to the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. Each student will follow the campaign of a female candidate during this historic election cycle, and students will collaborate to weave these collected materials into a documentary film. Download Course Flyer: GSF 225 (pdf - 540.62 KB)

GSF 278: Sex/Gender: Nature/Nurture Ara Wilson/Christina Williams Debates about sexuality, sex, and gender extend well beyond the walls of the academy or the science laboratory to be found in living room conversations, policy discussions, religious sermons, and popular culture. These debates hinge on radically different ideas about the relative effects of biological forces vs. social forces, or nature vs. nurture. This course will explore how nature/nurture emerged as a scientific and popular debate, giving time to both “sides” of the debate and presenting perspectives from biological and brain sciences as well as social-construction theories. Download Course Flyer: GSF 278 (pdf - 400.37 KB)

GSF 361: Money, Sex & Power Kathi Weeks 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, sweatshop labor. Download Course Flyer: GSF 361 (pdf - 864.26 KB)

GSF 364S: Race, Gender, and Sexuality Patrice Douglass This course centers transatlantic slavery to introduce students to the rhetorical problems, constraints, and possibilities of thinking the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. By engaging slavery through the lenses of black feminist and queer theory, students will consider across a range of texts (literary, cinematic, artistic, dramatic, and theoretical) how blackness as a category of (non)being structures understandings of racialized gender and sexuality as possessive identities. Download Course Flyer: GSF 364S (pdf - 256.47 KB)

GSF 369: Transnational Feminism Frances S. Hasso 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/militarism, racism, embodiment, and health. Download Course Flyer: GSF 369 (pdf - 178.54 KB)