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Courses - Fall 2012
For a list of affiliated Women, Gender and Sexuality courses, please also see the links below:
Approved primary and adjunct courses - Summer 2012 and Fall 2012
Past Course Offerings
WGS 2100 - Introduction to Gender Studies
Amanda Davis
9:30-10:45 a.m. TR
11:00-12:15 a.m. TR
An introduction to gender studies, including the fields of women’s studies, feminist studies, LGBT studies, & masculinity studies. Students will examine historical movements, theoretical issues, & contemporary debates, especially as they pertain to issues of inequality & to the intersection of gender with race, class, sexuality, & nationalism. Topics will vary according to the interdisciplinary expertise & research focus of the instructor. Prerequisite for WGS majors and minors.
WGS 2224: Black Femininities and Masculinities in Media
Lisa Shutt
6:30-9:00 p.m. M
Combined with MDST
This course will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of "Blackness" in the United States, particularly where it converges with popular ideologies about gender. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, television, and print news media create categories of race and gender in different ways for (different) Americans – each media encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise – each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information; in particular, we will be analyzing cultural texts, the cultural environment in which they have been produced, and the audience reception of those texts. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information have – and whether or not the consuming/viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility. This class will enable students to cultivate theoretical tools and critical perspectives to analyze and question the influence of the popular media that saturate our lives.
WGS 2559-001 - Introduction to LGBTQ Studies
Rachel Riskind
3:30-6:00 p.m. T
This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) Studies. We will study historical events and political, literary, and artistic figures and works that have influenced thinking about sexual orientation and/or gender identity. We will discuss contemporary social and political issues such as assimilation, kinship, and the politics of discrimination. We will explore the meaning and development of sexual and gender identities across the life course and in overlapping communities defined by location, race, ethnicity, class, and religion. Throughout, we will discuss and compare different disciplinary definitions of meaning and knowledge. No prerequisites.
WGS 2559-002 - Women in Social Media in the Middle East and South Asia
Lisa Goff
2:00-3:15 p.m. MW
Combined with MESA 2559
Women in the Middle East have figured prominently in media accounts of the Arab Spring, and have proved themselves particularly adept at using social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs to promote their dual message of political reform and women's rights. Similarly, women in South Asia have embraced social media as a tool for expressing their identities and promoting causes important to women in the region. This course will examine media depictions of women during and after revolutions and uprisings in five selected countries (Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, and Pakistan), and explore how women in those countries have used social media to embrace, rebut, or amplify those depictions. It will pay special attention to the ways in which social media facilitate, or possibly limit, women’s roles as producers and creators of culture. A wave of post-Arab Spring literature, films, etc. from across the region has just started to break. The readings in this course will reflect this flood of new material, but will also look back to earlier revolutions and uprisings, including those that overthrew colonial rulers, in order to compare pre- and post-revolutionary depictions of women in media. One aim of the class will be to examine the ways that politicians and religious leaders have historically used women’s bodies to define pro- and anti-revolutionary forces, as well as nationhood. How are women now, with the tools of social media at their command, (re)defining themselves? The course will address themes of mobility and public space, and will examine the multiple ways in which women in the region have both fueled revolutions and been affected by them. Finally, the course will address the current backlash against women in these regions, and the ways in which women remain divided on issues of how best to achieve, and even to define, their own empowerment. Course satisfies Global Perspectives requirement.
WGS 2891 - Issues Facing Adolescent Girls I
Edith “Winx” Lawrence and Melissa Levy
4:00-6:00 p.m. M
Combined with EDHS 2891 and EDHS 5891
Requires instructor permission to register
This course provides an opportunity for students to develop their leadership skills through involvement in academic service learning. Students will explore the psychological, social, and cultural issues affecting adolescent girls and apply this understanding through service with the Young Women Leaders Program (YWLP), a mentoring program that pairs middle school girls with college women for a year. As we delve into theory and research on adolescent development, effective mentoring practices, and leadership development, students will test their theoretical knowledge and its application by serving as a Big Sister to an area middle school girl. The class pays special attention to the ways that racial, economic, and ethnic differences affect girls’ voice and self-concept during this developmental phase.
WGS 3140 - Border Crossing: Women’s Literature Middle East & Africa
Farzaneh Milani
3:30-4:45 p.m. TR
This course will focus on a bloodless, non-violent revolution that is shaking the foundation of the Islamic Middle East and North Africa--women's literature. Hidden behind real or imaginary walls, veils, and silences, the Middle Eastern and North African women have suffered yet another distortion of their identity, mainly the critical neglect surrounding their literature. For centuries, however, and especially in the last few decades, women have made their voices heard through their writings. They have seized every opportunity to break away from the silence that has veiled them at home or abroad. This course, in a small way, is an attempt to remedy this oversight. It examines the rhetoric and poetics of sex segregation, voice, visibility, and mobility in a spectrum of genres that includes folklore, novel, short story, poetry, biography, autobiography, and essay. Course satisfies Global Perspectives requirement.
WGS 3200 - Women, Gender, and Sports: A History of American Female Athletes
Bonnie Hagerman
9:30-10:45 a.m. TR
This course traces the history of American female athletes from the late 1800s through the early 21st century. By gaining an historical understanding of the contributions of female athletes, we will explore the social, political, economic, and cultural constraints that have been placed on sportswomen, and their attempts to transcend such limitations. We will use gender as a means of understanding the evolution of female athletes, and will also trace the manner by which issues of class and race inform sportswomen’s journeys over time, particularly with regard to issues of femininity and homophobia. Meets the second writing requirement.
WGS 3250: MotherLands: Landscapes of Hunger, Futures of Plenty
Kendra Hamilton
3:30-6:00 p.m. R
This course explores the legacy of the "hidden wounds" left upon the landscape by plantation slavery along with the visionary work of ecofeminist scholars and activists daring to imagine an alternative future. Readings, guest lectures, and field trips illumine the ways in which gender, race, and power are encoded in historical, cultural, and physical landscapes associated with planting/extraction regimes such as tobacco, mining, sugar, and corn. Course satisfies the Global Perspectives requirement.
WGS 3350 - Gender Politics in Comparative Perspective
Denise Walsh
2:00-3:15 p.m. TR
Combined with PLCP 3350
This course examines how different countries “do” gender, exploring the political, social and economic construction of sexual difference. Our focus will be on how power is gendered and its effects on women and men in the developing world. We begin with a theoretical discussion of patriarchy, gender and feminist methods. Continuing to draw upon these theoretical debates, the course then investigates a series of issues, including gender and state formation in the Middle East, women’s political participation in India and South Africa, feminist and women’s movements in Latin America and Uganda, and globalization in South East Asia. Course satisfies the Global Perspectives requirement.
WGS 3405 - Gender and Sexuality
Matthew Morrison
3:30-4:45 p.m.
Combined with SOC 3400
Focuses on the construction of gender and sexuality, and of the many ways human groups regulate and attach meanings to these categories. Some general themes addressed will be: contemporary and historical definitions of gender, sex, and sexuality; gender socialization; the varieties of sexual identities and relationships; embodiment, childbearing, and families in the contemporary United States.
WGS 3500 – YWLP: Women’s Leadership and Technology I
Edith “Winx” Lawrence
5:15-6:00 p.m. M
Combined with EDHS 3500
Requires instructor permission to register
Provides students an opportunity to integrate youth mentoring and leadership development with digital storytelling exploration and creation. While serving as a mentor to a middle school girl in the Young Women Leaders Program (YWLP), a mentoring program that pairs area girls with college women for a year, students will participate in a weekly group that focuses on developing leadership projects using engaging dynamic media programs.
WGS 3559 – African-American Women in 20th Century Visual Arts
Jacqueline Taylor
2:00-3:15 p.m. MW
Through the 20th century, African‐American women, like their white counterparts,
challenged gender constraints on their political, social and economic rights. Unlike
their white counterparts, however, black women battled a long history of entrenched racist ideology. From the first moments of encounter, European imperialists appropriated the black body in service of a propaganda of consumption and exploitation. Subjected to the male gaze, women of African descent were imagined as exotic and highly sexualized, or barbaric and hideous, providing evidence in support of white superiority. In the 20th century however, African Americans sought to overturn negative stereotypes of the black female body, replacing them with both real and differently imagined black female identities. This course will explore the ways in which African American women presented themselves and were represented in visual culture from the New Negro to the Black Power Movement and beyond.
WGS 3810 - Feminist Theory
Denise Walsh
11:00-12:15 p.m. TR
Requires instructor permission to register
This course provides an overview of the historical bases and contemporary developments in feminist theorizing and analyze a range of theories on gender, including liberal, Marxist, radical, difference, and postmodernist feminist theories. We will explore how feminist theories apply to contemporary debates on the body, sexuality, colonialism, globalization and transnationalism. Throughout the course we will incorporate analysis of race, class, and national differences as well as cross-cultural perspectives. Required for all WGS majors and minors.
WGS 3993 - Independent Study
Requires instructor permission to register
WGS 4100 - Readings in Sexuality Studies
Geeta Patel
2:00-4:30 p.m. T
This course explores key topics that have shaped the field of sexuality studies, with a focus on those that fall under the rubric of "queer studies." Such topics have included the history of sexuality, scientific racism and critical race theory, cyborgs, biopower, nationalism, colonialism, sexuality and the law, the relationship of sexuality to race and class, and bodily aesthetics. Students engage a series of rotating interdisciplinary readings that draw upon fiction, poetry, theory, ethnographies, law, philosophy, criticism, film and media studies, music, science and/or economic history.
WGS 4350 - Comparative Gender Stratification
Rae Blumberg
12:30-1:45 p.m. TR
Combined with SOC 4350; Requires 6 credits of Sociology or instructor permission.
Examines gender stratification - the relative level of equality of men and women in a given group - in comparative and cross-historical perspective. Several theories are presented to explain the variations, from gender-egalitarian to highly patriarchal groups.
WGS 4998 - Senior Thesis I
Restricted to WGS Majors Only.
Instructor’s Permission Required
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