First Year Seminar: Gender and Science
GSF 89S-03
CCI, STS, SS
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.
Memory, Family, Generation
GSF 190S
ALP, CCI
Rachel Gelfand
How do we access the past? What memories pass on? Using gender, queer, and feminist studies, this course untangles ideas of generation, inheritance and trauma. Students engage with fiction and film about remembering, home, family, belonging, and forgetting.
Women at Work
GSF 221, SOC 331
CCI, STS, SS
Tania Rispoli
How do we understand gender, class and race in contemporary business organizations and the roles of men and women within them? This course focuses on management systems, information technology and human resource systems as artifacts of a larger gendered environment and society.
Climate, Culture & Identity
GSF 256, DOCST 256
CCI, EI, NS, SS
Saskia Cornes & Lauren Henschel
Climate change is altering not just human lives and livelihoods, but the very definition of the human. What roles can feminist and queer theory play in helping us to understand these changes to human identity? What can gender studies contribute to techno-scientific understandings of a global warming? How can we understand and navigate our obligations, if any, to the non-human world? We’ll take on these and many other questions through readings in literature and theory, and experiential learning with the Duke Campus Farm.
Introduction to Digital Feminism
GSF 265S, SOCI 217S, ISS 265S, VMS 286S, COMPSCI 112S, I&E 265S, CMAC 265S
R, STS, SS
Rachel Gelfand & Lauren Henschel
How can we as users and producers critically and effectively analyze digital culture from a feminist and gender studies perspective? This course will help by focusing on digital innovation and its history, unpacking and questioning them through the insights and tools offered by gender, sexuality and feminist studies. We will discuss 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 using a current event or debate to give a historical, ethical, sociological, theoretical, literary or cinematographic perspective.
Gender and Human Rights
GSF 268
CCI, EI, SS
Juliette Duara
How can we critically and analytically understand gender and human rights? This course uses case studies from different parts of the world to address gender-based violence and poverty, as well as access to healthcare, education, and political participation. We examine the efficacy of human rights institutions and "non-governmental organizations" in their ability to promote, protect and enforce human rights, using perspectives from the field of gender, sexuality and feminist studies.
Faith & Feminism in NC
GSF 290S
CCI, EI, CZ, W
Amy Laura Hall
How have feminists of religious faith worked and organized in North Carolina? This introductory course examines North Carolina's deep, diverse history of feminist collaboration and activism in faith communities and bridging different faiths. We will use the Women's History Manuscript Collection at the Duke Rubenstein Library and recordings from the Southern Oral History Program at UNC-CH to address these topics. The course provides students with skills in 1) archival research, 2) close reading of imagery and words, 3) ethical reasoning across different religious practices, and 4) attention to the authority of women inside and outside traditional, institutional leadership in North Carolina.
Feminist Theory
GSF 299
CCI, W, SS
Frances S. Hasso
Theories, or big explanations for how and why the world works as it does, structure everything said and done but are taken for granted by most adherents. This introductory seminar pulls to the surface some of these core theoretical concepts, debates, and frameworks in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Short assignments are designed to build hands-on skills that debate and creatively apply theories in the field to real world objects of analysis for the purpose of understanding them better. This course is required for the GSF major and minor, and the Interdepartmental Major with GSF, and is a prerequisite for GSF 499S, which is offered in fall for GSF seniors in the major and the IDM. GSF 299 is ideally taken in the sophomore or junior year and is offered every spring term, although first-year students are welcome.
Money, Sex, Power
GSF 361
CCI, CZ, SS
Ara Wilson
How does feminist scholarship understand gendered dynamics in markets, economies, and capitalism itself? The course includes empirical studies (historical, cross-cultural, and sociological research) and theoretical approaches to feminist 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.
Race, Gender, and Sexuality
GSF 364S, SXL 264S, AAAS 242, AADS 346S, SOCI 364S
CCI, SS
Nikki Lane
What would it take to end violence? How is solidarity made possible? Focusing on the contributions of queer, trans, and feminist writers, artists, organizers, and healers, this seminar explores Asian, Black, Latinx/e, and Native affinities, surveying the ways communities respond to harm and repression. Course materials are drawn from theoretical texts, contemporary culture, historical archives, and social movements.
Feminist Reproductive Ethics
GSF 367, ETHICS 204S
CCI, EI, SS
Rachel Gelfand
Politics of Sexuality
GSF 386S, SXL 386S, RIGHTS 386S, PUBPOL 383S, HISTORY 346S
CCI, R, W, CZ, SS
Gabriel Rosenberg
When is sex political? Can sex spark a revolution? Why does the state police some kinds of sex but encourage other kinds? This course examines how, when, and why sex and sexuality become matters of political controversy. Among the topics covered will be sex laws and policing, LGBTQ activism and civil rights, and sex work.
Black Queer Studies
GSF 651
CCI, SS, EI, ALP
Nikki Lane
This course offers an introductory survey of Black Queer Studies. Beginning with a brief survey of foundational texts, we will discuss the range of emergent within the interdisciplinary body of work referred to as Black Queer Studies. We then explore a range of black queer pop cultural formations including film, ballroom culture, drag, poetry, fiction, and music. And finally discuss the theoretical and practical implications of applying queer theory to understand the lives and experiences of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals as well as black heterosexuals, frequently marked as being outside of normative frameworks of sexuality, and thus queer.
Foundations in Feminist Theory
GSF 701S
Jennifer Nash
Required for all students pursuing the graduate certificate in Women's Studies, this course serves as an in-depth introduction to the various theoretical frameworks that have and continue to inform scholarship in the field of Women's Studies. It explores differences between distinct feminist theoretical traditions (Marxist feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, queer theory) and seeks to historicize accounts of identity, difference, social movement, globalization, nationalism, and social change. Consent of instructor required.
Marxist Feminism
GSF 740S
Kathi Weeks
This course serves as an in-depth investigation into the many different theoretical traditions that inform interdisciplinary feminist studies. Specific foci include Marxist-feminism, poststructuralism, feminist film theory, psychoanalysis, French feminism, postcolonial theory, deconstruction, the Frankfurt school, etc.