Courses

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 700 - Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Pro-Seminar

WGS 710 - Research Design

WGS 752R - Queer Theory

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES  

WGS 585 Special Topics: The Logics of Security: Sexuality, Race, Gender

WGS 756: Feminist and Queer Freud

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 730R-2 Special Topics WGSS: Scholarly and/as the personal

(Same as CPLT 751R 2, ANT 585 6, ENG 789 3)

CORE FACULTY COURSES

 WGS 700 - Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Pro-Seminar

Park - M 4 pm-6:45 pm | In-Person

Course Description:

The goal of Proseminar is to help the incoming cohort of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) doctoral students orient themselves to their new field of study. We will examine the critical texts and debates that have shaped and reshaped the contemporary field of WGSS in the US. We will look carefully at how specific texts, arguments, and assumptions are taken up and circulated as foundations for scholarly work in WGSS, only to be taken up and contested again. We will explore how theory, political movements, and everyday practices become institutionalized as the academic field of WGSS. We will also pay close attention to how an academic field is always unsettled and how we can locate ourselves in relation to those ongoing scholarly transformations.

WGS 710 - Research Design

 Reingold, W 10am-12:45pm | In-Person

 Course Description:

This course is designed as a workshop to help women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies students develop their dissertation prospectus. The topics discussed and tasks assigned will be fitted to the interests and needs of participating students and will be finalized in the first few weeks of the semester. Nonetheless, topics or tasks most likely will include: refining research questions; identifying scholarly contributions; clarifying concepts and conceptual or theoretical frameworks; and thinking self-consciously and critically about methods of inquiry. For the purposes of this course, “methods” is defined broadly to include questions, concerns, and debates about doing research, or making informed choices about available tools of inquiry and analysis. The intention is to include, support, and evaluate the full range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches that students bring to the table, from the most humanistic to the most scientific (and everything else between and beyond that dichotomy). Students will be expected to work both individually and collaboratively on their projects and, thus, should be willing and able to both give and receive constructive criticism. The instructor and students will also work collaboratively with dissertation advisors, to the extent possible.

WGS 752R - Queer Theory

Amin - Th 4 pm-6:45 pm | In-Person

Course Description:

When queer theory emerged in US English Departments around 1990, 'high' theory held significant cultural capital in the Humanities, the "linguistic turn" was in full force, gays and lesbians could not legally marry or even have sex in many states, homophobia was the norm, and LGBT culture and sexuality were considered scandalous. By contrast, today in the US, the heyday of high theory is over, many have turned away from the linguistic turn, gays and lesbians can legally marry and have sex, homosexuality is increasingly acceptable, and LGBT people have become the figureheads for "homonationalist" politics. What is the place of queer theory in this changed landscape?

By now, early queer theory has been thoroughly critiqued for its implicit whiteness, its US-centrism, its linguistic basis, and its bias towards humanistic methods and habits of thought. At the same time, the interdisciplinary and increasingly global field of Queer Studies is flourishing. What aspects of queer theory still have a future? What is the relationship between queer theory and Queer Studies? Does queer theory itself need to be radically remade for a changed world?

This course will explore the career of queer theory in its material context. It will attend to key critiques of queer theory and foreground provocative new works proposing a different way forward for the field.

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVES COURSES

 WGS 585 Special Topics: The Logics of Security: Sexuality, Race, Gender

Sheth T 2:30 – 5:15 pm| In-Person

Course Description:

National security, global security, climate crises—these often revolve around ideas of safety, freedom, and violence, but they involve tacit assumptions about sexuality, race, and gender. The subtext of all security-talk is about protecting certain populations from danger. Security is often implemented through subtle techniques and unpredictable populations. In this course, we will consider these techniques of security and surprising populations: debilitation, environmental sedimentation, military practices, climate refugees, and the reversal of security logics. that is, how and when victims become oppressors. We will read some of the following authors, who think about these questions in various traditions, Jasbir Puar, Paul Amar, Saba Mahmood, Achille Mbembe, Hagar Kotef, Sherene Razack, Sunera Thobani, Francoise Verges, and others.

 Instructor Consent Required

WGS 756: Feminist and Queer Freud

Wilson, M 1 pm-3:45 pm |In Person 

Course Description:

The death drive? Castration? Penis envy? Repression? The unconscious? What do all these Freudian terms mean, and what is their relevance for contemporary feminist and queer theory? The aim of this course is two-fold: (1) to introduce students to the core concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, and (2) to relate these psychoanalytic ideas to advanced work in feminist and queer theory. The course will begin by introducing students to the central theoretical concepts in Freud’s metapsychology: instincts/drives, repression, the unconscious, and dream interpretation. We will be particularly interested in how psychoanalysis challenges the notion of a unified, conscious subject. We will then read one of the most influential Freudian case histories: Dora (1905). In the second half of the semester, the course will focus on one particular part of Freudian theory: the construction of masculinity and femininity and its relation to sexuality. We will start with an examination of the perverse and corporeal nature of infantile sexuality and use this to investigate psychoanalytic accounts of adult sexuality. In the final weeks of the course, we will undertake an intensive investigation of the death drive and its uses in feminist and queer theory, especially in relation to film.

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 730R-2 Special Topics WGSS: Scholarly and/as the Personal

Bammer, W 1 pm-4 pm | In-Person

(Same as CPLT 751R 2, ANT 585 6, ENG 789 3)

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 720:  TATTO: Teach Women's Studies

WGS 752:  Queer Theory

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Queer and Feminist Ethnography

WGS 730 WGSS Special Topics: Global Black Feminism

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 513 Gender & Sexual Diversity

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 720:  TATTO: Teach Women's Studies

1. Scully, Th 1:00 pm-3:45pm, In-Person

This course is organized as a workshop on pedagogy and specifically to prepare to teach WGS 200.  We will engage current debates in pedagogical research and commentary (via the Chronicle of Higher Education), we will create a toolkit of materials, activities, and techniques for teaching, and we might occasionally invite a guest speaker to the class. Attention will be paid through the semester to the challenges and difficulties that arise in the classroom, and we will discuss strategies for meeting those challenges. Flexibility is built into the syllabus--we can adapt the syllabus to accommodate your interests, needs and goals as they emerge.

We will read important pedagogical theories to provide conceptual frameworks for your teaching. You will produce a statement of teaching philosophy and a syllabus and supporting materials (assignments, exams, projects etc.) for WGS200.

WGS 752:  Queer Theory

1. Park, M 4:00 pm-6:45pm, In-Person

Same as: CPLT 751/PHIL 789/AAS 710

The point of departure of this seminar is the question of sexuality and desire posed in queer theory and in respect to psychoanalysis, gender, and critical theories of race. An underlying question is what queerness does to theory, but also what, in turn, may remain unthought or an impossibility for theory in relation to queerness. The seminar is divided in three parts. The seminar will begin with a study of Freud’s works on sexuality, namely his reflections on the foundational myth of the castration complex. In this first section, we will also study how Freud’s theories have influenced contemporary psychoanalytic theories (Lacan, Winnicott, Bersani, Edelman) and psychoanalytic feminisms (Irigaray, Kristeva, Rose, Sedgwick, Butler) on the question of sexuality. The second section explores how critical theorists and philosophers of race have taken up and departed from such lines of inquiry (Tinsley, Warren, Jackson, Bradley, Puar, Munoz, Snorton). The third section places our interrogations against the words that comprise the sub-heading of the course title: the universal, worlding, and difference. We will ruminate on them as concepts, figures, and effects of rhetoric to ask how they come into being and into relation with language, representation, and politics. In this final sense, we will explore the contributions of queer theory to a range of other fields (including anthropology, film and media studies, political theory).

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Queer and Feminist Ethnography

1. Mulla, T 1:00 pm-3:45pm, In-Person

What makes an ethnography queer, trans or feminist? Ethnography is a fieldwork-based methodology embedded in the discipline of anthropology, though it has taken on a transdisciplinary character and has been lauded by feminist scholars. This course begins by thinking through the theoretical, conceptual, and ethical implications of constituting an ethnographic tradition that is either queer, feminist, or both. This course asks how queer and feminist theory and epistemology are embodied in ethnographic work. We will examine how ethnographic writing positions the queer, trans, and/or feminist subject within its texts in relation to the world, and to its readership. We will specifically interrogate how queer and feminist ethnographies have sought to engage what it means to be human through their attention to these categories.

WGS 730 WGSS Special Topics: Global Black Feminism

1. Finch, M1:00 pm-3:45pm, In-Person

Same as AAS 710: Topics in Gender & Sexuality.

 Global Black Feminism

This course will examine the broad and interdisciplinary field of what scholars have called global Black feminism. At its core are the political struggles, theoretical interventions, and worldmaking possibilities that Black feminists have created in and for a variety of global contexts, particularly in the Global South. Focusing on the histories and legacies of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, this course will examine the ways in which feminist and queer thinkers of African descent have theorized, imagined, and innovated beyond the violent structures of western modernity. In so doing, the course will expand the contours of how we understand Black feminism, paying particular attention to the ways in which transnational, diasporic, and decolonial frameworks have produced critical, but often-understudied genealogies of Black feminist thought. Central to this polyglot field of study will be the study of feminist knowledge-making in a variety of global contexts; queer and trans theorizations of Black life; Black womens histories of radicalism and internationalism; and transnational activist critiques of gendered, racial, and sexual violence.

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 513 Gender & Sexual Diversity

Peletz, TBD -  In-Person

Same as: ANT 513

This course aims to provide advanced undergraduates and graduate students with anthropological perspectives on gender and sexual diversity both cross-culturally and historically. We begin with early anthropological debates (from the 1970s) on "the status of women" , the prevalence of male dominance, and the ways scholars involved in these debates drew upon 19th- and early 20th-century theorists (such as Marx, Engels, Freud, and Levi-Strauss) to frame both their research questions and their contributions to these debates. We continue with an introduction to the work of Foucault on discourses of sexuality and gender hegemonies. Subsequent sections of the course explore non-binary systems of gender and sexuality and issues of pluralism, particularly in Southeast Asia and Native North America; "sexual subcultures" in the contemporary U.S.; genealogies of queer studies in the U.S. and beyond; Black feminist anthropology and intersectional perspectives on race, class, gender, sexuality, and stratified reproduction; and, finally, some of the implications for gender and sexuality of the recent global turn toward punitiveness, authoritarianism, conservativism, and illiberalism.

CORE FACULTY COURSES 

WGS 700 - Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Pro-Seminar 

WGS 710 - Research Design 

WGS 751R - Feminist Theory 

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES 

WGS 730R-1 - Special Topics WGSS: Power, Identity, and the Logics of Legibility 

AFFILIATED COURSES 

WGS 730R-2 Special Topics WGSS: Gender, Sexuality, Mughal World 

(same as ICIVS 770-2)

WGS 730R-3 Special Topics WGSS: Brown Queer Theory (same as CPLT 751R-1)

WGS 730R-4 Special Topics: WGSS: States of Migration

(Same as FREN 785-2)

 WGS 730R-5 Special Topics WGSS: Anthropology and Law

(Same as ANT 585-5)

WGS 754-1 Foucault (Same as PHIL 789 & CPLT 751)

CORE FACULTY COURSES 

WGS 700 - Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Pro-Seminar 

Finch, Th 2:30 pm-5:30 pm | In-Person  

This course offers WGSS doctoral students the opportunity to examine critical texts, debates, fissures, and disruptions that have constituted the field of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. We will read a range of different texts that have shaped the field, paying close attention to how a field becomes unsettled and remade. As the course progresses, students will develop a working vocabulary around key analytical concepts, rubrics, and questions that have defined the study of gender and sexuality. We will give particular attention to the ways in which fields of radical critique become institutionalized, and how WGSS scholars have approached a range of ideas, from intersectionality to the politics of attachment. Among other questions we will consider are: how do we approach the study of gender and sexuality as co-constituted by race, class, citizenship, nationhood, histories of violence, and transnational movement? What place do structures of racial capitalism, empire, secularism, liberalism, and neoliberalism as well as profound critiques of those structures have in shaping our understandings of WGSS? What is the relationship between theory and activism, between critique and social justice? How do we approach the field with an ethics of care and relationality? We will read a range of texts that address these and other questions, inviting students to continually examine their own relationship to the field. 

WGS 710 - Research Design 

 Reingold, Th 2:30 pm-5:30 pm | In-Person 

This course is designed as a workshop to help Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies students develop their dissertation prospectus. The topics discussed and tasks assigned will be fitted to the interests and needs of participating students and will be finalized in the first few weeks of the semester. Nonetheless, topics or tasks most likely will include: refining research questions; identifying scholarly contributions; clarifying concepts and conceptual or theoretical frameworks; and thinking self-consciously and critically about methods of inquiry. For the purposes of this course, methods is defined broadly to include questions, concerns, and debates about doing research, or making informed choices about available tools of inquiry and analysis. The intention is to include, support, and evaluate the full range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches that students bring to the table, from the most humanistic to the most scientific (and everything else between and beyond that dichotomy). Students will be expected to work both individually and collaboratively on their projects and, thus, should be willing and able to both give and receive constructive criticism. The instructor and students will also work collaboratively with dissertation advisors, to the extent possible. 

WGS 751R - Feminist Theory  

Mulla, T 1pm-3:45pm | In-Person 

In this course, students will attend to multiple and diverse perspectives within feminist theory. The course will locate key texts in the historical and political contexts in which they were written and seek to connect them to the key questions of the moment with which they struggled. Students will trace the ways in which questions about power, race, gender, and sexuality are taken up within interdisciplinary conversations. The course will explore how theory scaffolds our epistemological stakes in research, writing and practice, and seek to deepen our sense of what constitutes a feminist research subject, or a feminist method. 

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVES COURSES 

WGS 730R-1 - Special Topics WGSS: Power, Identity, and the Logics of Legibility 

(Same as AAS 710-1, CPLT 751R-3, and PHIL 789-3) 

Sheth, W 1 pm-3:45 pm | In-Person 

Why are some populations more legible than others? Why do certain political subjects have an easier time being protected than others? In this course, we will explore theories of power in relation to questions of violence and vulnerability to understand how vulnerable groups are created and cemented in relation to elite and powerful populations. How does violence manifest itself institutionally? How does vulnerability become imposed through various logics and techniques: of law, of class, of race? Power, violence, and vulnerability can be inflicted and challenged through technologies, understood conceptually as instruments by which to accomplish certain ends. Readings will include writings in the traditions of decolonial, Latinx, and Black feminist theories, Foucauldian, and Indigenous writings on power, land, and sovereignty. Authors may include Frantz Fanon, Francoise Verges, Joy James, Kimberle Crenshaw, Maria Lugones, Michel Foucault, Christina Sharpe, Katherine McKittrick, and Elaine Scarry among others. 

AFFILIATED COURSES 

WGS 730R-2 Special Topics WGSS: Gender, Sexuality, Mughal World 

(Same as ICIVS 770-2) 

 Lal, M 1 pm-3:45 pm | In Person 

Scholars of Mughal India and the early modern Islamic world have taken a bold interest in thinking about the feminine and ambiguous figures (women, eunuch, concubines, wet nurses), spaces (harem, gardens, tents), and multiple forms of desire by critically re-engaging archival practices. In placing female courtly and wider worlds in history, the question, of what constitutes the evidence, and the rich and vibrant feminist theory as it relates to the archive, is vital in this seminar. Soaked in present debates, and historiography, this graduate seminar rests upon reading seminal intellectual works - and sources, that include textual works, painterly forms, and architectural spaces - that enabled radical departures in Mughal history. At the heart of our discussion is the key issue of knowledge legacies, such as those of colonialism, and the heavily male-dominated histories of the pre-modern world. Our goal in probing the fundamental departures made in Mughal historiography is to enable us to see closely the scholarly practices, which might fruitfully help us discern playful approaches in writing `other' histories. Located in the north Indian geography of the Mughal Empire, the context of our readings and discussions will delve into the wider Ottoman-Safavid nexus, the vitality of court life in relation to the early modern period, questions of domestic and state formation and the movement and migration of people throughout the Indian subcontinent and beyond. 

WGS 730R-3 Special Topics WGSS: Brown Queer Theory

(Same as CPLT 751R-1)

Quiroga, Th 1 pm-4 pm | In Person

This course focuses on a specific body of literary texts, critical approach, or theoretical problem in the area of Comparative Literature. Students may repeat this course for credit if the subject matter varies.

Course Description:

Brown Queer Theory: Before the 1990s, there were two movie houses in my neighborhood in San Juan. The first was owned by an older Puerto Rican actress whose last movie was filmed in the 1950s, the final years of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. There we watched Pasolini double features on certain weekends, Montgomery Clift classics, Swedish films with gratuitous frontal nudity, anything by Buñuel, Goddard, or Charlton Heston. The second movie house was the Lorraine and it was a regular porno theater. The projectionist arrived at 2 or 3 PM and finished work around midnight. The movies seemed to have no beginning or end and would play continuously.

But during timed intermissions every two hours or so, the lights came on and all the men who had been helping hands, or making out, or showing off, moved to the front seats to cheer on the female strippers who had probably just arrived from the airport. The strippers danced with a chair as prop, or with a broom as prop, or simply danced--sometimes with enthusiasm. And it was a point of honor for no man to stay seated in the back rows when there was a woman getting naked up front. You could say it was just a performance of heterosexuality but it was more an issue of courtesy and respect. And yes, it was a performance of heterosexuality.

Let's call these movie houses "Queer Theory"--or better still "Brown Queer Theory" at the risk of invoking an impossibility: partly autobiographical sites that are escape routes for each other, temporary homes where we can suspend all belief but also all finality, devious cultural translations that cover up fake difference. As long as we don't see them as metaphor, we can even engage in their manufactured pleasure, or their brave appeal to a heroic nostalgia, within a time that feels out of joint. The choice of texts may even propose new beginnings or at best reiterate how those figures are simply engaging in a rite past the age when those rites are supposed to take place.

 Texts may include Nestor Perlongher, Severo Sarduy. Roland Barthes, Sylvia Molloy, Jack Halberstam, Lisa Duggan, Judith Butler, Paisley Currah, Juana Maria Rodriguez, Gayatri Gopinath, and others.

With special appearances by Manuel Puig and Jose Esteban Muñoz.

WGS 730R-4 Special Topics WGSS: States of Migration

(Same as FREN 785-2)

Xavier, W 1:00-4:00 pm | In Person

The late 20th and 21st centuries have often been called the age of migration with the mass movement of peoples redefining the relationship between migrants and the states that house them. Some scholars even maintain that international migration is the human face of globalization, but human mobility across national borders has a long history that has taken various and sundry forms. From forced migrations to impelled and chain migrations, politically driven and economically motivated migration, individual and collective mobility defies notions of territoriality and citizenship, nationality and belonging. This course will examine literature and cinema from the French-speaking world that take up questions of migration from a multi-modal perspective, mobilizing a particular set of aesthetics, developing a migrant poetics and interrogating the ethics of em/immigration. Our study will revolve around multiple states of migration, exploring how the political landscape and economic backdrop spur mobility and shape cultural production, questioning the very limits of the nationhood, statehood through the lens of migration.

Works studied may include:

Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies (2003); Denis Villeneuve, Incendies (2010); Régine Robin, La Québécoite (1993) ; Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal( 1939) and Abderrahmane Sissako, La vie sur terre (1998), En attendant le bonheur (2003)

Ying Chen, Lettres chinoises (1993); Philippe Falardeau, Pâté chinois (1997); Shan Sa, Le Miroir du Calligraphe (2002)

Raoul Peck, Lumumba : Mort du prophète (1990); Emile Ollivier, Passages (2002)

Ousmane Sembène, La Noire de' (1966); Fatou Diome, La Préférence Nationale (2001)

This seminar will be taught in English.

 WGS 730R-5 Special Topics WGSS: Anthropology and Law

(Same as ANT 585-5)

Peletz, T 10 am-12:45 pm | In Person

This seminar examines anthropology's engagement with law and law-like phenomena in the 21st century. It is geared toward graduate students and advanced undergraduates who intend to pursue (or have already conducted) research on topics ranging from human rights, humanitarianism, gender inequities, and sex trafficking to mass incarceration, racialized state violence, and social justice. Throughout the course we will examine regimes of knowledge, power, and governance, and why, as many scholars claim, the rise of neoliberal globalization has typically gone hand in hand with a punitive turn both in legal arenas and in more expansive cultural-political domains. One of the more general goals of the course is to explore how contemporary discourses and practices bearing on crime, risk, security, and policing illuminate new forms of sovereignty and citizenship as well as recent transformations in the relationships linking capital, governance, and the state.

WGS 754-1 Foucault

(Same as PHIL 789-1 & CPLT 751)

Huffer, Th 1 pm-3:45 pm | In Person

 This course will explore the writings of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. We will focus in particular on Foucault’s analysis of the rise of sexuality, the power of normalization, the disciplinary and biopolitical specification of bodies, and the production of deviance in the modern era. The course’s primary purpose is to provide an opportunity to read Foucault’s work in depth, rather than to examine how his work has been used by others. 

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 720: TATTO: Teach Women's Studies

WGS 751: Feminist Theory

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Queer in the Global South

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 585 Special Topics in History: Voicing the Voiceless: India/US

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 720: TATTO: Teach Women's Studies

E. Wilson, T 1:00 pm-3:45pm, In-Person

This course is organized as a workshop. We will undertake three tasks this semester:

1. Reading and discussing important pedagogical theories in order to provide conceptual frameworks for your teaching. You will write a short theoretical reflection on teaching.
2. Producing a statement of teaching philosophy.
3. Producing a syllabus and supporting materials (assignments, exams, projects etc.) for WGS200.

Along the way we will engage current debates in pedagogical research and commentary (via the Chronicle of Higher Education), we will create a toolkit of materials, activities, and techniques for teaching, and we may occasionally invite a guest speaker to the class. Attention will be paid through the semester to the challenges and difficulties that arise in the classroom, and we will discuss strategies for meeting those challenges. Flexibility is built into the syllabus--we can adapt the syllabus to accommodate your interests, needs and goals as they emerge.

WGS 751: Feminist Theory

S. Mulla, M 1:00 pm-3:45pm, In-Person

In this course, students will attend to multiple and diverse perspectives within feminist theory. The course will locate key texts in the historical and political contexts in which they were written and seek to connect them to the key questions of the moment with which they struggled. Students will trace the ways in which questions about power, race, gender, and sexuality are taken up within interdisciplinary conversations. The course will explore how theory scaffolds our epistemological stakes in research, writing and practice, and seek to deepen our sense of what constitutes a feminist research subject, or a feminist method.

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Queer in the Global South

K. Amin, Thu 1:00 pm-3:45pm, In-Person

What does it mean to do queer theoretical scholarship on the Global South? What are the life experiences, political priorities, and social relations of gender-variant and same-sex loving people in the Global South? Guided by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel's observation that "geopolitics provides the exemplars, but rarely the epistemologies" for queer theory, this course works toward generating epistemologies of gender and sexuality from the Global South. We will read and debate critiques of the US and Eurocentrism of queer theory and methodological proposals for how to do queer scholarship in the Global South. We will also survey of exemplary scholarship on sexuality and gender variance in the Global South to see what theoretical insights we can glean. Our readings will span history, anthropology, area studies, and sociology. One of our key questions will be whether queer theory focused on the Global South demands a different set of methods that those of North American and European focused queer theory. 

AFFILIATED COURSES

HIST 585 Special Topics in History: Voicing the Voiceless: India/US

Instructors: Gyan Pandey and Jonathan Prude

Th 2:30pm-5:30pm | In- Person

Same as: WGS 585 / ANT 585 / RLR

Course Description:

This course deals with histories of the marginalized and the subordinated in South Asia and North America: women; gays, lesbians and transsexuals; dispossessed indigenous communities; religious minorities; African-Americans, Dalits, lower classes and migrants. We are concerned with the disfranchised in the broadest sense of the term, groups who were considered incapable of representing themselves or writing their own histories – indeed, often as people without history, and certainly without an archive. We will investigate different modes of disenfranchisement, and different kinds of silences.

The seminar will examine how recent intellectual and political challenges and debates have produced new ideas of history and archive. We will examine new trends in the writing of history following interventions by feminism, the African American and Dalit movements, anti-colonial, postcolonial and ‘minority’ histories. While the instructors’ specialization means the seminar is built around the history and historiography of North America and South Asia, students working on other parts of the world will be encouraged to bring their own questions, perspectives and readings to the table – to enrich the conversation and extend the scope of our discussions.

Weekly readings will include classic texts in North American and South Asian history, and more recent interventions in the debates on the historical discipline and the meaning of the archive. Examples are Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll; Laurel T. Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale. The Life of Martha Ballard; Ted Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers, The Life of Nate Shaw; on the American side; Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency; Shahid Amin’s Event, Metaphor, Memory; Prathama Banerjee’s The Politics of Time; Ruby Lal’s Coming of Age in 19th Century India; plus various Pandey edited anthologies, which include important contributions from leading US and Indian scholars.

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 700:  Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies  Pro-Seminar

WGS 710:  Research Design

WGS 752:  Queer Theory

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES

WGS 589R - Bodies, Sexualities & Science “On Care and Its Limits”

WGS 756 - Feminist and Queer Freud

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 730R WGSS Special Topics: Surrealism and Psychoanalysis

Same as ENG 789 3, CPLT 751R 2, and PSP 789 2)

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 700:  Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies  Pro-Seminar

Finch,  W 1pm-3:45pm, In-Person

What is Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies? Is it necessary to commit to one of these categories in order to be a WGSS scholar? Is it possible to understand oneself as a WGSS scholar in a radically different way, e.g. through (an)other field/discipline altogether? Designed for WGSS doctoral and certificate students, this course explores the question of WGSS in the current North American context. Related themes will include the location/relation of studies in gender, sexuality, race, and feminism in relation to WGSS; the meaning and role of interdisciplinary scholarship; the question of feminist politics in relation to scholarship, and form and function of identity in being a WGSS scholar. Other questions may include the following: how should we understand race and gender in relation to each other? Does prioritizing one over the other change one's relation to WGSS? What places do political structures, from empire, capitalism, liberalism, corporate institutions have in shaping our understandings of the WGSS? What is the relationship between theory in relation to questions of scholarship and/or justice? We will read mostly contemporary pieces that address these questions, and readings may shift as the conversation shifts through the term.

 WGS 710:  Research Design

Reingold, T 2:30pm-5:30pm, In-Person

This course is designed as a workshop to help Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies students develop their dissertation prospectus. The topics discussed and tasks assigned will be fitted to the interests and needs of participating students, and will be finalized in the first few weeks of the semester. Nonetheless, topics or tasks most likely will include: refining research questions; identifying scholarly contributions; clarifying concepts and conceptual or theoretical frameworks; and thinking self-consciously and critically about methods of inquiry. For the purposes of this course, ?methods? is defined broadly to include questions, concerns, and debates about doing research, or making informed choices about available tools of inquiry and analysis. The intention is to include, support, and evaluate the full range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches that students bring to the table, from the most humanistic to the most scientific (and everything else between and beyond that dichotomy). Students will be expected to work both individually and collaboratively on their projects and, thus, should be willing and able to both give and receive constructive criticism. The instructor and students will also work collaboratively with dissertation advisors, to the extent possible.

WGS 752R:  Queer Theory

Amin, Th 2:30pm-5:15pm, In-Person

(Same  as ENG 789 4)

When queer theory emerged in US English Departments around 1990, 'high' theory held significant cultural capital in the Humanities, the ""linguistic turn"" was in full force, gays and lesbians could not legally marry or even have sex in many states, homophobia was the norm, and LGBT culture and sexuality were considered scandalous. By contrast, today in the US, the heyday of high theory is over, many have turned away from the linguistic turn, gays and lesbians can legally marry and have sex, homosexuality is increasingly acceptable, and LGBT people have become the figureheads for ""homonationalist"" politics. What is the place of queer theory in this changed landscape?

By now, early queer theory has been thoroughly critiqued for its implicit whiteness, its US-centrism, its linguistic basis, and its bias towards humanistic methods and habits of thought. At the same time, the interdisciplinary and increasingly global field of Queer Studies is flourishing. What aspects of queer theory still have a future? What is the relationship between queer theory and Queer Studies? Does queer theory itself need to be radically remade for a changed world?

This course will explore the career of queer theory in its material context. It will attend to key critiques of queer theory and foreground provocative new works proposing a different way forward for the field."

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES

WGS 589R - Bodies, Sexualities & Science | On Care and Its Limits

Mulla, M 1pm-3:45pm, In-Person

(Same as ANT 585-3)

What constitutes care, particularly care for the body, is often demarcated by a tension between institutionally capacitated care, and projects of radical care that are located in spaces beyond these institutions. When medicine or the law or the state in its many guises falls short of provision of care, what and who emerges to meet these needs? How do these distinctive approaches to care sustain life, orient our relations to death, and frame our notions of a good life? As care structures our relationships to the self and to racial/sexual/and differently embodied others, how does it also generate our epistemological orientations and prescribe, restrict, or challenge knowledge making structures? And in the practice and theory of provisioning care for humans, how might care be recruited into a project of discerning between different forms of the human, and generating a boundary between the human and non-human? Drawing on an interdisciplinary literature that ranges from critical indigenous studies, anthropology, disability studies, to Black feminist theory, we explore the possibilities, limits, ethics, and practices through which care is harnessed for its worldmaking potential.

 WGS 756 - Feminist and Queer Freud

Wilson, M 4pm-6:45pm, In-Person

(Same as PSP 789)

Penis envy?  Castration?  Narcissism?  Perversion?  Repression?  Disavowal?  What do all these Freudian terms mean, and what is their relevance for contemporary life?  The aim of this course is two-fold: (i) to introduce students to the core concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, and (ii) to track these concepts in feminist and queer theory. The course presumes no prior knowledge of psychoanalysis and will provide the foundations for students who have interests in post-Freudian thinkers like Lacan, Klein, Winnicott etc. The course will begin with the central theoretical concepts in Freud's metapsychology: drives, repression, the unconscious, dream interpretation, the symptom.  We will be particularly interested in how psychoanalysis challenges the notion of a unified, conscious subject. In the second half of semester, the course will focus on the perverse and corporeal nature of infantile sexuality, and use this to investigate psychoanalytic accounts of adult sexuality and gender. In the final weeks of the course, we will survey some influential feminist and queer uses of Freud.  "

AFFILIATED COURSES

 WGS 730R - Special Topics: Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

Topic: Surrealism and Psychoanalysis

Kalaidjian, W 1pm-4pm

(Same as ENG 789 3, CPLT 751R 2, and PSP 789 2)

This interdisciplinary seminar will explore literary and pictorial surrealism with particular attention to surrealism's ongoing dialogue with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in transnational contexts. In addition, the seminar will consider the affinities between the surrealist ""found object"" (l'objet trouve) and the object relations theory of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott in discerning fantasies of race and gender difference in the surrealist imaginary. Readings and discussions will begin with surrealist manifestoes of the modern interwar period, Salvador Dali's early dialogue with Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille's writings for the journal and secret society Acephale, and particular attention will be devoted to the gender and sexual politics of women's place within and beyond surrealism by examining the feminist writing, visual art, and occult practices of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Mina Loy, and Ithell Colquhoun. In addition, the seminar will study postcolonial surrealist aesthetics in figures such as Frida Kahlo, Suzanne Cesaire, Alejo Carpentier, and Wifredo Lam as well as contemporary Afrosurrealism.

We will explore the archive of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library and investigate surrealism's migration at mid-century from Europe to London and finally New York City in little magazines such as Minotaure,,VVV, and View, Charles Henri Ford's avant-garde journal of the 1940s.

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 720:  TATTO: Teach Women's Studies

WGS 751:  Feminist Theory

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Queer and Feminist Ethnography

WGS 586R-1: Race, Class & Justice - Violence and Vulnerability

WGS 586R-2: Race, Class & Justice - Politics of Race & Gender

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 513 Gender & Sexual Diversity

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 720:  TATTO: Teach Women's Studies

Scully, Th 1:00 pm-3:45 pm, In-Person

This course is organized as a practical workshop to help develop confidence in and knowledge about teaching. This seminar is designated as the departmental component of the Laney Graduate School's TATTO requirements.  We address both theoretical as well as practical discussions of pedagogy. Throughout the class, we will cultivate our individual approaches to 'feminist pedagogy' and 'interdisciplinarity,' linking these themes to the practical aspects also of our teaching.  By the end of the class, you will have created a syllabus and supporting materials (exams, projects) for WGS 200.

WGS 751:  Feminist Theory

Amin, Th 4:00 pm – 6:45 pm, In-Person

What is gender? Is gender primarily a division of labor, a fundamental element of kinship, an erotic display, a compelled performance of norms, an internal identity, an artefact of white supremacy, or an anchor for the government of the life of populations? Is it possible to have gender without gender inequality, or is inequality part of the very ontology of gender? Is gender oppression more fundamental than race, class, or sexuality-based oppressions; is it a mere effect of these other oppressions, or does it intersect equally with them? Is the goal of a politics of gender justice to mitigate the harms of gender, to achieve gender equality, to multiply gendered possibilities, or to abolish gender altogether? This course will broach such questions by surveying theories of gender. We will attend to the relationship between theoretical claims about the origins of gender, local gendered experiences, and implied political futures.

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Queer and Feminist Ethnography

Mulla, M 2:30 PM – 5:30 PM, In-Person

Same as ANT 585

This course asks how queer and feminist theory and epistemology are embodied in ethnographic work. We will examine how ethnographic writing positions the queer and/or feminist subject within its texts in relation to the world, and to its readership. Our starting point will be to ask how ethnographies locate and challenge gender, sexuality, race, and power. We will specifically interrogate how queer and feminist ethnographies have sought to engage what it means to be human through their attention these categories. We approach each text tracing the material, ideological, emotional, and psychic modalities through which gender, sexuality, race and power are produced. Students will also delve into questions of ethnography as craft, and the ways in which form might come to reflect queer and feminist subjects and epistemologies. We will explore tensions and resonances between queer and feminist approaches, while we discuss and experiment with what it means to make theory through ethnography. Readings are clustered around shared themes and topics, such as abolition, violence, girlhood, pregnancy, legal subjectivity, and kinship. Texts are drawn from a range of historical and geographic localities to allow us to work through what it means to think transnationally and across disciplines.

WGS 586R-1: Race, Class & Justice - Violence and Vulnerability

Sheth, T 2:30 PM – 5:15 PM, In-Person

Same as: ANTH 585, PHIL 789, CPLT 751

In this course, we will explore logics of violence and vulnerability in relation to race as the war underlying the polity, as Michel Foucault defines it. How does violence manifest itself institutionally? How does vulnerability become imposed through various logics and techniques: of law, of class, of race? Philosophers and sociologists have considered technology in its multiple dimensions: legal, political, social, and phenomenological, to name a few. Each epoch brings with it either new logics by which technology functions for societal management. Power, violence, vulnerability can be inflicted and challenged through technologies, understood conceptually as instruments by which to accomplish certain ends. We will look beyond immediate/concrete forms of technology to understand their implicit foundations origins in sovereignty and order, and their purposes; for management, vulnerability, and resistance. Readings will include texts by Ida Wells, Chandan Reddy, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Elaine Scarry, and others.

WGS 586R-2: Race, Class & Justice - Politics of Race & Gender

Reingold, W 2:30 PM – 5:30 PM, In-Person

Same as POLS 585-2

Gender and race interact and intersect in complex and confounding ways, yet they have a persistently powerful influence upon politics and society. This seminar will introduce students to major theoretical perspectives, debates, controversies, and research findings in the empirical study of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and politics primarily, but not exclusively, in the United States. We will study gender and race (and, to a lesser extent, sexuality and ethnicity) not only as identities but also as political constructs or ideologies and as systems of stratification and power that shape political institutions, processes, and outcomes. In addition, we will examine how these aspects of gender and race affect the political behavior and experiences of individuals as citizens, workers, voters, political activists, community leaders, political candidates, and public officials.

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 513 Gender & Sexual Diversity

Peletz, TTh 1:00 pm-2:15pm In-Person

Same as: ANT 513

This course aims to provide advanced undergraduates and graduate students with anthropological perspectives on gender and sexual diversity both cross-culturally and historically. We begin with early anthropological debates (from the 1970s) on "the status of women" , the prevalence of male dominance, and the ways scholars involved in these debates drew upon 19th- and early 20th-century theorists (such as Marx, Engels, Freud, and Levi-Strauss) to frame both their research questions and their contributions to these debates. We continue with an introduction to the work of Foucault on discourses of sexuality and gender hegemonies. Subsequent sections of the course explore non-binary systems of gender and sexuality and issues of pluralism, particularly in Southeast Asia and Native North America; "sexual subcultures" in the contemporary U.S.; genealogies of queer studies in the U.S. and beyond; Black feminist anthropology and intersectional perspectives on race, class, gender, sexuality, and stratified reproduction; and, finally, some of the implications for gender and sexuality of the recent global turn toward punitiveness, authoritarianism, conservativism, and illiberalism.

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 700:  Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies  Pro-Seminar

WGS 710:  Research Design

WGS 752:  Queer Theory

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES

WGS 585: Special Topics WGSS: Trans Epistemologies

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Black Feminist Epistemologies

WGS 754: Foucault

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 730R: WGSS Special Topics: Islamic Modernism: Progressive and Feminist Islam 

Same as: Religion (RLR 700); Islamic Civilization (ICIVS 723)

WGS 730R: WGSS Special Topics: Literary Theory Seminar

Same as: CPLT 750: Literary Theory; FREN 780 & PHIL 789

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 700:  Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies  Pro-Seminar

Sheth,  W 1pm-3:45pm, In-Person

What is Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies? Is it necessary to commit to one of these categories in order to be a WGSS scholar? Is it possible to understand oneself as a WGSS scholar in a radically different way, e.g. through (an)other field/discipline altogether? Designed for WGSS doctoral and certificate students, this course explores the question of WGSS in the current North American context. Related themes will include the location/relation of studies in gender, sexuality, race, and feminism in relation to WGSS; the meaning and role of interdisciplinary scholarship; the question of feminist politics in relation to scholarship, and form and function of identity in being a WGSS scholar. Other questions may include the following: how should we understand race and gender in relation to each other? Does prioritizing one over the other change one's relation to WGSS? What places do political structures, from empire, capitalism, liberalism, corporate institutions have in shaping our understandings of the WGSS? What is the relationship between theory in relation to questions of scholarship and/or justice? We will read mostly contemporary pieces that address these questions, and readings may shift as the conversation shifts through the term.

WGS 710:  Research Design

Reingold, Tu 6pm-9pm, In-Person

This course is designed as a workshop to help Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies students develop their dissertation prospectus. The topics discussed and tasks assigned will be fitted to the interests and needs of participating students, and will be finalized in the first few weeks of the semester. Nonetheless, topics or tasks most likely will include: refining research questions; identifying scholarly contributions; clarifying concepts and conceptual or theoretical frameworks; and thinking self-consciously and critically about methods of inquiry. For the purposes of this course, ?methods? is defined broadly to include questions, concerns, and debates about doing research, or making informed choices about available tools of inquiry and analysis. The intention is to include, support, and evaluate the full range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches that students bring to the table, from the most humanistic to the most scientific (and everything else between and beyond that dichotomy). Students will be expected to work both individually and collaboratively on their projects and, thus, should be willing and able to both give and receive constructive criticism. The instructor and students will also work collaboratively with dissertation advisors, to the extent possible.

WGS 752R:  Queer Theory

Marvel, T 2:30pm-5:30pm, In-person

This class will operate as both a survey course - to familiarize students with some of the key texts and (dis)organizing principles in queer theory - as well as an investigation of emerging threads of scholarship and analysis held loosely under the rubric of queer thought. This latter section will draw specifically from works within critical race scholarship, indigenous understandings of queerness, and science and technology studies, as well as from queer legal theory and its attention to questions of governance and power. Throughout, we will ask what work that queer might perform as an object, subject, modifier, foundation, imaginary, genealogy, trajectory, archive, and/or form of solidarity.

CORE FACULTY ELECTIVE COURSES

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Trans Epistemologies

Amin, Th 2:30pm-5:30pm, In-Person

The medicalization of transsexuality in the 1950s in the US, followed by the emergence of an activism that called itself 'transgender' in the 1990s in North America set into motion consequential epistemological transformations and made possible new ways of living. This course will explore these crucial transformations from a decolonial perspective. We will ask how the emergence of transsexuality, then transgender, helped to reify and/or establish key aspects of Western personhood, including possessive individualism, the mind/body distinction, and the separation of gender from sexuality. We will inquire into how these epistemological transformations at once shape trans life in the West and fail to encompass the complexity of trans experience. We will ask to what extent the global exportation of transgender as a category 'colonizes' historically prior, indigenous, racialized, and non-Western modes of transness. Finally, we will explore the alternate epistemologies of personhood held within such pre-transgender modes of transness.
Note: Master and Undergraduate students require Instructor approval to enroll; please contact Dr. Kadji Amin at kadji.amin@emory.edu in advance.

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Black Feminist Epistemologies

Finch, Mon: 2:30-5:30pm, In-person

Course Description: TBA

WGS 754 Foucault (Same as Comp Lit 751/Phil 789)

Huffer, W 6pm-9pm, In-Person

This course will explore the writings of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. We will focus in particular on Foucault's historical analysis of madness, the rise of sexuality, the power of normalization, the disciplinary production of delinquency and deviance, and the biopolitical specification of bodies and populations in the modern era. We will also pay special attention to Foucault's discursive style and genealogical method. Our main objective will be to read Foucault's work in depth rather than to examine how his work has been used by others. That said, the course aims to provide a solid foundation for assessing the many uses of Foucault, especially in contemporary queer and feminist theories. Members of the seminar will be encouraged to connect their readings in Foucault with their own intellectual projects.

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 730R WGSS Special Topics: Islamic Modernism: Progressive and Feminist Islam 

Same as: Religion (RLR 700); Islamic Civilization (ICIVS 723)

Kugle, W 2:30-5:15 pm; In-Person 

Contemporary Progressive Islam and its related Feminist Islam grew out of “Islamic Modernism.” During colonial times, Muslim scholars sought Islamic reformation, insisting that the Islam is adaptable to modern social, technical and political life. This seminar will focus on two regions (Egypt-Sudan and India-Pakistan). Into the 21^st century, the goal shifted from “reform to become modern” toward “liberation to acquire rights, freedom and dignity.” One essential theme was that democracy is integral to Islam, despite the monarchal and patriarchal social structure that shaped Islam and gave it dominance in pre-modern periods. As the seminar ends with a deep read of key scholars in Islamic Feminism (like amina wadud, Asma Barlas, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Fatima Mernissi and Sadiyya Shaikh) the geographical scope of the seminar widens because Islamic feminists form a transnational and global network. 

WGS730R: WGSS Special Topics: Literary Theory Seminar

Same as: CPLT 750: Literary Theory; FREN 780 & PHIL 789

Bennington, Th 1-3:45PM, In-Person

The course explores some of the ways in which an influential way of thinking about language has affected ways of thinking about literature. After investigating the main tenets of structuralist theory, as derived from Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, we shall go on to see how the internal logic of structuralism led to the rather different positions often referred to as `post-structuralism' and/or `post-modernism', and to a questioning of the position of theory itself.

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: The Racial History of Sex

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Feminism and Deconstruction

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Feminist/Queer Ethnography

WGS 720: TATTO: Teaching Women’s Studies

WGS 751: Feminist Theory

AFFILIATED COURSES

SEM: 833(LAW):  Law & Vulnerability

WGS 730R/ FREN 775/CPLT 751: Revolutionary Perversions

WGS 730R/HIST585/ANT 585/RLR 700: Colonial/Postcolonial History

SEM: 823(LAW): Family Law: From Partners to Parents

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: The Racial History of Sex

Amin, Wed. 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm, Distance Learning

Sex, gender, and sexuality are foundational categories within Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. This course will examine how histories of race and colonialism constituted sex/gender/sexuality, both jointly, and later on, as distinct categories. The course will emphasize historical scholarship and the historical grounding of more theoretical scholarship. We will study the colonial governance of sex, environmental and climate-based theories of sex, eugenics, black ungendering in North America, and decolonial approaches to epistemologies of sex

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Feminism and Deconstruction

Wilson, Mon. 1:00pm - 4:00 pm, Distance Learning

 What happens when we deconstruct a text, a theory, or an identity? What does it mean to say "there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte)?  What are the critical effects of putting something 'under erasure'? What is at work in Derrida's infamous neologism différance? This course in an introduction to the logics and methodology of deconstruction and their implications for feminist and queer readers. The course will begin with close readings of early texts by Derrida (e.g., Of Grammatology, 'Différance', 'Freud and the Scene of Writing') and will examine key hinge terms generated by his deconstructive readings: writing, gram, trace, pharmakon, différance. The course will then investigate how this work has been taken up by influential feminist and queer readers (e.g., Judith Butler, Penelope Deutscher, Lee Edelman, Barbara Johnson, Vicki Kirby, Gayatri Spivak). Students will emerge from this course with a proficiency in the methodology of deconstruction and an understanding of the scope of deconstruction's influence on feminist and queer theory.
 

WGS 585 Special Topics WGSS: Feminist/Queer Ethnography

Karkazis, Thr. 1:00pm – 4:00 pm, Distance Learning

This seminar examines feminist ethnography and queer ethnography as scholarly subfields, bodies of critical theory, and methods in arenas in which trans, queer, and feminist critical work is advanced. Through ethnographic case studies and theoretical essays, we will engage theoretical, epistemological, practical, and ethical questions of how to research, observe, describe, record, interpret, and present material about the contemporary world. We will pay particular attention to how sex, gender, and sexuality are constructed, lived, performed, subverted, transformed, and transgressed in a variety of cultural contexts, as well as the impact of colonialism and western thought on conceptions/embodiments of these categories.  Through readings, discussions, and independent research, we will grapple with enduring questions and new inquiries about issues of sex, gender, and sexuality in relation to race, class, ethnicity, nationalism and globalization.

WGS 720: TATTO: Teaching Women’s Studies

 Wilson, Wed. 9:40am – 12:40 pm, Distance Learning

This course (WGS720 Teaching Assistant Training and Teaching Opportunity [TATTO]) is a core WGSS course and part of the LGS requirements for graduate teacher training. The course is organized as a workshop.  We will undertake three tasks this semester:

(1) reading and discussing important pedagogical theories in order to provide conceptual frameworks for your teaching. You will write a short theoretical reflection on teaching and submit it to a WGSS journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, or similar publication venue;

(2) producing a statement of teaching philosophy;

(3) producing a syllabus and supporting materials (assignments, exams, projects etc.) for WGS200.

Along the way we will engage current debates in pedagogical research and commentary (via the Chronicle of Higher Education), we will create a toolkit of materials, activities and techniques for teaching, and we will occasionally invite a guest speaker to the class. Attention will be paid through the semester to the challenges and difficulties that arise in the classroom and we will discuss strategies for meeting those challenges. Flexibility is built into the syllabus—we can adapt the syllabus to accommodate your interests, needs and goals as they emerge.

 WGS 751: Feminist Theory

 Sheth, Tue. 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm, Distance Learning

 Feminist thought has been articulated in many forms, from organized social activism to the oft-attempted, sometimes successful institutional reform of laws and practices, to the contestation of monolithic visions of feminism. However, common to all of these is the need to think through and beyond institutions and structures. The readings in this course will explore those fissures and fragmentations through various popular and lesser known texts. Selected texts will address questions of gender, race, sexuality, and agency, against the backdrop of culture, violence, religion, and the polity.

AFFILIATED COURSES

SEM: 833(LAW):  Law & Vulnerability

Fineman, Tue. 12:15pm – 2:15pm, Distance Learning

DATES: 2021-01-19 through 2021-04-26

This seminar explores the relationship between law and vulnerability from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. The course is anchored in the understanding that fundamental to our shared humanity is our shared vulnerability, which is universal and constant and inherent in the human condition. It will offer students an opportunity to engage with multiple perspectives on vulnerability, with an emphasis on law, justice, state policy, and legislative ethics. While vulnerability can never be eliminated, society through its institutions confers certain "assets" or resources, such as wealth, health, education, family relationships, and marketable skills on individuals and groups. These assets give individuals "resilience" in the face of their vulnerability. This seminar will explore how a society now is structured, however, certain individuals and groups operate from positions of entrenched advantage or privilege, while others are disadvantaged in ways that seem to be invisible as we engage in law and policy discussions.

 WGS 730R/ FREN 775/CPLT 751: Revolutionary Perversions, : Literature, Sexuality, Anachrony

 Marder, Wed. 1:00 pm – 4:00pm, Distance Learning

In this course, we shall examine how representations of 'non-normative' sexuality in several major nineteenth-century works relate to the problem of representing history in the aftermath of the French revolution. Many of the most famous canonical literary texts written in French prior to 1871 include references to impotence, lesbianism, hysteria, cross dressing, bestiality, masturbation and prostitution in the context of narratives that re-write or un-write the legacy of the French revolution. By focusing on the literary treatment of these 'perverse' forms of sexuality, we shall attempt to see how they encourage us to think differently about questions of historical transmission, language, gender, and sovereignty. Possible texts include: La Philosophie dans le boudoir (Sade), René (Chateaubriand), Ourika, Mme de Duras, Armance (Stendhal), Le Père Goriot and La Fille aux yeux d'or (Balzac), L'Education sentimentale (Flaubert), 'Le Secret de l'Echafaud' (Villiers de L'Isle-Adam), and selections from Baudelaire's prose poems. Critical readings may include works by Freud, Marx, Benjamin, Blanchot, Daniel Arasse, Derrida, and others. The course will be taught in English although we will focus on the works in the original French texts. Reading knowledge of French recommended but not required as (almost) all of the works are available in translation.

 WGS 730R/HIST585/ANT 585/RLR 700: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories: Explorations

Pandey, Mondays 2:40 pm - 5:35 pm, Distance Learning

The course begins with a consideration of the philosophical differences between colonial and postcolonial histories. The former believes in the absolute, universal truth of their findings, presented from some Archimedean standpoint, above if not outside society. Postcolonial histories speak of multiple knowledge-positions, of histories that are necessarily partial and selective, that appear different from different locations, and are always implicated in the here and now of social and political interests. The seminar will investigate crosscurrents within and across cultures and regions, confluences and contradictions that go into the articulation of particular histories. We will also explore intersections across time, the conversation between a mutually constitutive past and present that occurs whenever history is written.

The seminar will be built around a close reading of texts recognized for their critical intervention in debates on the making of the modern world: texts emerging from deliberations in feminism, subaltern studies, borderland studies, critical race theory – in South Asia, North and South America, Europe and other areas that participants wish to explore.

SEM: 823(LAW): Family Law: From Partners to Parents

Fineman, Th. 12:15pm – 2:15pm, Distance Learning

Dates: 2021-01-19 through 2021-04-26

This seminar will explore the trends in family law governing marriage and parenthood over the past several decades. During the latter part of the 20th century, substantial changes in behavior have occurred, reflecting attitudinal shifts about women’s equality, sex and sexuality, and the importance and permanence of the marriage bond. Often identified as battlegrounds in the “cultural wars,” these are areas where the law has scrambled to adjust to evolving expectations and emerging notions of equity and equality. We will look at “traditional” marriage, challenges from those excluded from marriage, the “breakdown” of marriage, and alternatives to formal marriage, such as contract and non-marital cohabitation. Laws governing the parent-child relationship have also changed in response to or as part of the disruption of the traditional family model. The very idea of absolute parental rights has been questioned as the child has partially emerged from the cloak of family privacy and is seen as an independent rights holder in some circumstances. The seminar will also consider how new technologies and altered attitudes about assisted reproduction have presented unique challenges for the law in regard to who is or how one becomes a parent.

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 585: Special Topics: Blackness and Psychoanalysis

WGS 586R: Race, Class, & Justice: Violence and Vulnerability

WGS 700: Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Pro-Seminar

WGS 710: Research Design

WGS 752R: Queer Theory

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 589R: Bodies, Sexualities & Science: Medicine, Science, and Power

WGS 730R: Special Topics: Édouard Glissant and Feminist

WGS 730R: Special Topics: Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 585: Special Topics: Blackness and Psychoanalysis

Warren; Th 4:20pm-7:20pm

Is blackness an irresistible fetish (caught within the matrix of perversion), the object of a destructive drive, or the inexhaustible (circular) movement of desire? How do our cultural fantasies teach us to desire blackness? Is anti-blackness an unconscious symptom, a corporeal letter written on the `body politic,' and are we resigned to `enjoy our symptom'? Does psychoanalysis offer blackness a powerful intramural hermeneutic or is it best left for the analytic session? This course will stage an encounter between blackness and psychoanalysis; ultimately considering how the encounter transforms/deforms both. We will grapple with the unconscious operations of blackness, the historical absence of blackness in psychoanalytic thought, and the usefulness of psychoanalytic reading practices for Black Studies. The course will rely heavily on Lacanian psychoanalysis (along with readings from Freud and Kristeva). Readings will include theoretical texts by David Marriott, Hortense Spillers, Franz Fanon, Kalpana Sheshadri-Crooks, Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson, Slavoj Zizek, Bruce Fink, Tracy Mcnulty, Henry Krips, Adrian Johnson, Serge Leclaire, and Kaja Silverman, among others.

WGS 586R: Race, Class, & Justice: Violence and Vulnerability

Sheth; T 4:20pm-7:20pm

In this course, we will explore logics of violence and vulnerability in relation to race war, as Michel Foucault defines it. How does violence manifest itself institutionally? How does vulnerability become imposed through various logics and techniques: of law, of class, of race? Philosophers and sociologists have considered technology in its multiple dimensions: legal, political, social, and phenomenological, to name a few. Each epoch brings with it either new logics by which technology functions for societal management. Power, violence, vulnerability can be inflicted and challenged through technologies, understood conceptually as instruments by which to accomplish certain ends. We will look beyond immediate/concrete forms of technology to understand their implicit foundations origins in sovereignty and order, and their purposes; for management, vulnerability, and resistance. Readings may include Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe, Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, Jasbir Puar, Ann Stoler, Judith Butler, as well as court cases and archival materials.

WGS 700: Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Pro-Seminar

Wilson; M 9:40am-12:40pm

The goal of Proseminar is to help the incoming cohort of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) doctoral students orient themselves to their new field of study. We will examine the critical texts and debates that have shaped and reshaped the contemporary field of WGSS in the US. We will look carefully at how specific texts, arguments, and assumptions are taken up and circulated as foundations for scholarly work in WGSS, only to be taken up and contested again. We will explore how theory, political movements, and everyday practices become institutionalized as the academic field of WGSS. We will also pay close attention to how an academic field is always unsettled and how we can locate ourselves in relation to those ongoing scholarly transformations.

WGS 710: Research Design

Reingold; W 1pm-4pm

This course is designed as a workshop to help Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies students develop their dissertation prospectus. The topics discussed and tasks assigned will be fitted to the interests and needs of participating students, and will be finalized in the first few weeks of the semester. Nonetheless, topics or tasks most likely will include: refining research questions; identifying scholarly contributions; clarifying concepts and conceptual or theoretical frameworks; and thinking self-consciously and critically about methods of inquiry. For the purposes of this course, 'methods' is defined broadly to include questions, concerns, and debates about doing research, or making informed choices about available tools of inquiry and analysis. The intention is to include, support, and evaluate the full range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches that students bring to the table, from the most humanistic to the most scientific (and everything else between and beyond that dichotomy). Students will be expected to work both individually and collaboratively on their projects and, thus, should be willing and able to both give and receive constructive criticism. The instructor and students will also work collaboratively with dissertation advisors, to the extent possible.

WGS 752R: Queer Theory

Marvel; Th 9:40am-12:40pm

This class will operate as both a survey course - to familiarize students with some of the key texts and (dis)organizing principles in queer theory - as well as an investigation of emerging threads of scholarship and analysis held loosely under the rubric of queer thought. This latter section will draw specifically from works within critical race scholarship, indigenous understandings of queerness, and science and technology studies, as well as from queer legal theory and its attention to questions of governance and power. Throughout, we will ask what work that 'queer' might perform as an object, subject, modifier, foundation, imaginary, genealogy, trajectory, archive, and/or form of solidarity.

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 589R: Bodies, Sexualities & Science: Medicine, Science, and Power

Karkazis; W 9:40am-12:40pm

Medicine and science influence nearly every aspect of life--they create, heal, and augment, but they also diminish, disrupt, and destroy. Possibly most importantly, they organize our lives, and that organization both determined by and confers (or denies) power. Drawing on science and technology studies and feminist, race, and disability theory (among others), this seminar will explore the relationships among medicine, science, and broader systems of social organization and power, including the politics embedded in and enacted through medicoscientific knowledges and practices. We will pay particular attention to the role of medicine and the biological sciences in the construction of 'difference' (e.g., sex/gender, race, sexuality), exploring how knowledge is produced, and its effects on structures of inequality and lived experience. Throughout the course, we consider the general methodological problem of how "differences" deemed socially-important are conceptualized and represented in medicoscientific investigations, and the ways that 'expert' scientific discourses influence law and policy.

WGS 730R: Special Topics: Édouard Glissant and Feminist

Loichot; T 1pm-4pm

Édouard Glissant and Feminist Theory Content: Martinican poet and Philosopher Edouard Glissant seems like an unlikely partner for feminist theory. Some critics have argued that the question of women, gender, and sexuality was thwarted in his writings that privilege the imperative of remaining human (i.e. non-gender-marked or coded as masculine by default) in a context of enslavement, colonization and de-colonization. This seminar will show, however, that Glissant's thought had a lot to gain from women and feminist thinkers and poets, and that his theories (or Relation, Opacity, Creolization, Tout-Monde, and Caribbeanness/Antillanité) have a lot to contribute to feminist theories of sexuality, time, space, memory, theology, and ecology. The seminar is organized around systematic pairings of Glissant's texts and its feminine/feminist interlocutors. Seminar contributors will be encouraged to propose and theorize their own pairings with authors from the syllabus and/or of their own choosing.

WGS 730R: Special Topics: Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

Bruyere; W 1pm-4pm

Health Humanities Content: In this seminar, the emergent field of Health Humanities serves as a platform to both think about the pressure to be interdisciplinary scholars in precarious times and reabsorb some of it in the form of close readings. A focus on temporality will allow us to make provisions for notions of demographic transition, chronic illness, and health crisis in the critical repertoire of affect studies, visual culture, and literary criticism. Taught in English.

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 586: Special Topics: Race, Class, & Justice

WGS 720: TATTO: Teaching Women’s Studies

WGS 751: Feminist Theory

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 730R/HISP 740/ANTH 585: Brazilian Ideas: Art and Culture

CORE FACULTY COURSES

WGS 586: Special Topics: Race, Class, & Justice

Sheth; W 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

“Visibly” Muslim women are often perceived as clashing with liberal principles. This perception often emerges from flawed presumptions about how liberated women of color (should) look or behave in Western contexts. Hijabis are only a recent and particularly charged example of regulatory discourse and practices related to women’s behavior and dress that have plagued liberal societies across various regions and historical periods. Black women, Muslim and non-Muslim, face restrictions on their public comportment in many places. In this course, we will reverse the colonial gaze by interrogating discourses that question whether hijabis and other women of color are rational, autonomous or “suitably secular” given their public presentations. Drawing on a rich multidisciplinary archive, including scholarly texts, legal archives, workplace practices, and film, we will explore the assumptions directed towards women of color in contemporary and post-colonial contexts. Readings will include texts by Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Lila Ahmed, Leila Abu-Lughod, Su’ad Abeer, Anne McClintock, and others.

WGS 720: TATTO: Teaching Women’s Studies

Wilson; W 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

This course explores the scholarship on, and experience of, teaching in WGSS. Class sessions will be structured around discussion of academic texts about pedagogy, commentary on pedagogical practice from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and construction of syllabi and supporting materials (assignments, projects, etc.) for WGS200. We will approach the seminar as a collective endeavor, so students will be responsible for: leading discussion of the readings; providing feedback on each other’s course materials, and sharing information and experiences about teaching. The goal is to discover and refine each student’s particular approach to the interdisciplinary pedagogy required for teaching a WGS 200 course.

WGS 751: Feminist Theory

Wilson; M 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM

The institutionalization of feminist theory over the past four decades has produced splits, paradoxes, and contestations that have repeatedly threatened the coherence of the field. In particular, critics have argued that feminist theory is destabilized by the fragmentation of its proper object, woman, as an analytic category. But what if we were to presume that feminist thinking and feminist objects have been splintered, uncertain, and contentious from the very beginning? With this anti-foundationalism in mind, this seminar will not be concerned with producing a proper object for a universal narrative about feminist theory. Rather, it will attempt to think with and about some of the most visible “classic” texts that circulate as theory in US academic feminism. Articulating a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, methods, and discursive styles, these texts will allow students to reflect on the epistemological and political stakes of feminist thinking today.

AFFILIATED COURSES

WGS 730R/ HISP 740/ ANTH 585 – Brazilian Ideas: Art and Culture

Duarte; M 4:00 PM - 7:00 PM

This course will explore 20th-century intellectual thought and how it conceives the cultural relationship between Brazil and the Western world, taking into account art, music, literature, cinema, and philosophy. Brazilian culture has long questioned its national identity. Since the novels of the 19th century, when Romanticism set the tone, this question has been the core of most Brazilian art. This means that we could look to some art movements as we consider some intellectual figures that thought about Brazil’s formation.

It is the case of Modernism, in the 1920s, and Tropicalism, in the late 1960s. They both were not only striving to create modern works of art but also consciously raising the question of a national identity in a context that, although they didn't called it that way, was a transnational one. The metaphor of anthropophagy – elaborated by the writer and critic Oswald de Andrade in a 1928 manifesto – was the link between the two movements, because it made it possible to conceive the formation of Brazil neither as a mimic of Western World nor as a complete autonomous land. To practice, anthropophagy was the challenge for Brazil to open itself to the world, but only to culturally ingest this world and, through that, gain strength – and even be recognized, at the end, by this world.

This was, of course, a strategy for their art: Modernism would “consume” all the European avant-gardes and Tropicalism did the same with rock, disregarding an essentialist nationalism that was concerned about losing the country’s purity – as if that ever existed. But not only that: this anthropophagy was the cornerstone to imagine the formation of Brazil. The songs of Tropicalism, as well as the essays around it, were actually a powerful expression of anthropophagy. It did not attempt to find a symbolical synthesis for national identity – but rather an allegorical syncretism. This makes Tropicalism a movement that conceived Brazil in a transnational perspective.