Course Clusters

Literature + Performance + Visuality (LPV)

Designed for students interested in the arts and their connections to social change, this series of GSF-Housed courses explores the ways in which orders of representation—whether literary, visual or performative—frame and reflect upon social hierarchies and their relationships to power and desire. Putting creative acts in their historical contexts, these courses address how gender, sexuality, and race are imaginatively and materially represented and the effects of these representations in both consolidating and contesting social values. Students taking courses in this cluster will acquire concepts and frameworks that enable them to address both the autonomy of artistic and representational practices and their connections with the social world beyond them.

Global + Politics + Inequality (GPI)

This cluster of GSF-Housed courses considers forms of hierarchy that exist across the world and within the United States, including those based on gender, sexuality, race, and class. The courses address how such hierarchies are made or potentially unmade by social movements, governments, corporations, and advocacy groups. They focus on developing students' vocabulary, frameworks, and analytical skills related to the politics of inequality and social transformation. Students who take courses in this cluster will be able to connect configurations of gender & sexuality with political and economic currents and systems. The courses will also improve students’ ability to contribute effectively to debates about the sources of enduring inequalities. This cluster fits particularly well with interests in public policy, international comparative studies, economics, law, non-profit advocacy, and social justice.

Science + Technology + Environment + Medicine (STEM)

The GSF-Housed classes in this cluster explore dialogues between feminism and science from a range of perspectives.  Examining assumptions about scientific objectivity and empiricism, these classes consider different ways of viewing the human body, the environment, and the animal body. Using race, class, gender, sexuality, among other rubrics, classes in this cluster will ask how feminism might expand the scope of ecology, human and animal medicine, and the life sciences.

Theory (T)

The GSF-Housed courses in this cluster highlight our interests in theorizing and theory in gender, sexuality and feminist studies, shaped by the focus of a class and interests and expertise of its professor. Theories are meta-level explanatory frameworks used to understand the hows and whys of the world and its phenomena and dynamics. Classes in this cluster use theory to explore the conceptual, ontological, epistemological, material, and ideological bases of gender, sex, and sexuality, including how they are produced in interaction with class, racial, geopolitical, and other forms of difference and social inequality in particular contexts and times.