Spotlighted Spring 2021 Classes

GSF 89S.01: Gender & Science: Feminist Studies of Science and Medicine
Ara Wilson

How does inequality affect scientific practice and knowledge?
Do colonial, racist, or sexist contexts matter for the science produced?
Does the identity of the scientist matter?
This seminar provides an overview of research that puts scientists under the lens, studying medicine & science in relation to gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism.

GSF 101: Gender and Everyday Life
Farren Yero

Introduction to the transnational study of gender, sexuality, and feminism. Topics covered include: the sex/ gender distinction; biological determinism and social construction; the sexual division of labor; heteronormativity; colonization, post coloniality, imperialism, and racialization. We will explore these topics through the lens of the everyday to ask how gender shapes how people live, work, consume, see themselves, relate to others, forge identities, and navigate institutions across the globe. How are various social institutions—law and government, education, the family—constructed through gender? In every part of the course, we will connect gender to race, sexuality, class, and nation, and we will consider how activist movements have impacted these categories.

GSF 265: Introduction to Digital Feminism
Tania Rispoli

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.

GSF 272S: Sexuality and the Law
Juliette Duara

• What principles should guide laws regulating sexuality in a secular society?
• Whose interests should prevail when LGBTQ rights are asserted to be in conflict with the religious liberty of others?
• Who should decide the answers to these questions?

This course will explore these and other questions on the subject of Law and Sexuality.

GSF 274S: Masculinities and Global Politics
Frances Hasso

This survey course examines gun lovers, racists, Red Pill misogynists, soccer fans, fraternity brothers, and parkour performers. It considers policing, militarism, and petro-masculinities, as well as masculine desires, fragilities and fears. Each student is trained to conduct oral interviews with three male-identifying persons from different generations and completes a final paper based on this research.

GSF 362S: Gender and Popular Culture
Kathy Rudy

How the body has come to define the human in language, law, science, politics and economics. The body's relation to identity and subjectivity. The representation of the body in particular cultural discourses and the social history and dynamic in which that representation has taken place.

1) How is a singer remembered?
2) How do singers represent themselves sexually?
3) How does the race of the artist influence sales?

GSF 363S: Interpreting  Bodies: Death in These Times
Kathy Rudy

How the body has come to define the human in language, law, science, politics and economics. The body’s relation to identity and subjectivity. The representation of the body in particular cultural discourses and the social history and dynamic in which that representation has taken place.