Gender and Sexuality Studies

In this course, students will think dynamically about the relationship between archival records of Black life and Black women's creative expression to interrogate the possibilities and the limits of historical archives. Through hands-on engagement with archival objects in special collections and deep readings of literature, poetry, and visual arts, we will explore what the archival record affords, erases, and silences, and, conversely, how imaginative practices can begin to address and redress its subjects and their histories.

We will take as our primary text the new translation of Simone deBeauvoir"s landmark volume The Second Sex, one of the most significant origin points of current understandings of gender. In our sustained consideration of The Second Sex, we will explore Beauvoir's ideas about the influence of sex and gender on childhood, the family, sexuality, relationships, aging, work, the social order, and the philosophical imaginary. We will also consider contemporary writing alongside that text, taking Beauvoir as our tour guide as we encounter and interpret contemporary representations of gender.

This seminar uses the prevailing analytical tools and critical perspectives of African American Studies to consider comparative approaches to groups, broadly defined. Students will examine the intellectual traditions, socio-political contexts, expressive forms, and modes of belonging of people who are understood to share common boundaries/experiences as either (1) Africans and the African Diaspora outside of the United States; and/or (2) non-African-descended people of color within the United States.

This course considers how gender enters and shapes politics, primarily in the US context. It addresses a range of questions that center elections: How did women gain the right to vote? Are women voters really different than men voters? Are women politicians really any different than men politicians? Has women's involvement in electoral and institutional politics changed anything? It also considers how the gendered space of the American electoral system has limited its effectiveness in delivering outcomes desired by some groups of women, what their alternatives might be, and how those alternatives have been and continue to be pursued.

This course will at different times deal with particular currents of literature and thought in the 18th century, or with individual authors. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Each year a different kind of writing is featured, depending on the specialty of the McGraw Professor of Writing. One three-hour seminar.

The prison is a growth industry in the U.S.; it is also a central institution in U.S. political and social life, shaping our experience of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and political possibility. This course explores the history of incarceration over the course of more than two centuries. It tracks the emergence of the penitentiary in the early national period and investigates mass incarceration of the late 20th century. Topics include the relationship between the penitentiary and slavery; the prisoners' rights movement; Japanese internment; immigration detention; and the privatization and globalization of prisons.

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A seminar for graduate students engaged in research in gender studies, examining the guiding concepts and methodologies across the humanistic disciplines. Taught by scholars from different departments, topics include approaches in anthropology, history, literature, sociology, film studies, and political science. Application available in 113 Dickinson Hall.

In this interdisciplinary class, students of race and gender read deeply and broadly in academic journals as a way of learning the debates in their fields and placing their scholarship in relationship to them. Students report each week on the trends in the last five years of any journal of their choice, writing up the articles' arguments and debates, while also revising a paper in relationship to those debates and preparing it for publication. This course enables students to leap forward in their scholarly writing through a better understanding of their fields and the significance of their work to them.

Themes in Islamic religion are examined.

In this seminar we examine representations of masculinity in modern European and American art, exploring how the complexity of gender appears in art and its reception. How did masculinity contribute to artists¿ formal and conceptual concerns, from revolutionary France to postwar New York? Topics include the masculine body, artistic brotherhoods, homoeroticism, historical trauma, the gendered dynamics of the studio, the politics of virility, and psychoanalytic approaches to art history. Readings open onto broader issues of gender, sexuality, and aesthetics, and bring feminist and queer critical approaches to the table.

A study of the historical connections linking sex and gender to major social, political, and economic transformations. Comparative approaches are taken either in time or by region, or both. Topics may include family, gender, and the economy; gender, religion, and political movements; gender and the state; and gender and cultural representation.

This course offers an introduction to theory, perspectives, and empirical research in the Sociology of Gender. The course covers a combination of canonical and contemporary work, consider traditional and current debates, and will include local and global material. This is a reading and writing intensive class.

This course offers an introduction to theory, perspectives, and empirical research in the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality. The course covers a combination of canonical and contemporary work, consider traditional and current debates, as well as cover US and cross-cultural material. This is a reading and writing intensive class.

The expansion of race theory from the Americas into the global scene invites a cross-cultural approach to the fluidity of identity. This seminar investigates fiction and film from the African American, Jewish American, LGBTQ, and Israeli-Palestinian contexts to broadly explore how society constructs and deconstructs race, ethnicity, and gender. It focuses on representations of passing and reverse passing as well as doubled/split identities for a wide-ranging, comparative discussion of the political and the psychological dynamics of identity and selfhood.

This course aims to explore different forms that the question of liberation has taken in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 1960s, the course touches upon different philosophical concepts and poetic figures that have shaped the language of women's struggles (intersectionality, black and third world feminism, subalternity and feminist epistemologies, capitalist accumulation and "witch"-hunting, (re)transmission of knowledge).

A consideration of the primary topoi and defining oppositions of Enlightenment thought. Texts and specific focus vary from year to year.

A study of selected major American writers in the context of intellectual, religious, and cultural traditions.

A study of 19th-century English fiction, emphasizing social contexts, narrative forms, and critical theory.

The seminar focuses on the study of a particular problem in modernism. Possible topics include the advent of modernist abstraction, the different uses of advant-garde devices of collage and photomontage, the readymade and the construction, art and technology, art and the unconscious, art and political revolution, and antimodernism.

This course asks how intersectional feminism, queer, and trans theory can spearhead new methods of research, objects of study, and ways of seeing and analyzing spaces, buildings, cities, and human alliances within them. Overall, the seminar focuses on practices and forms of organizing around LGBTQ+ rights and how historical actors have formed networks and associations to resist dominant spatial and political regimes.