Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Courses

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

• WGS 586: Special Topics
  • Course Description: Topics Vary
  • Topics Include:Logics of Violence and Vulnerability, Dark Continent: Blackness and the Feminine, Black Feminist Genealogies, Politics of Race and Gender
  • Frequently Taught By: Falguni Sheth, Rizvana Bradley, Beth Reingold

• WGS 587: Globalization: Feminist Inroads in Epistemology, Theory and Method
  • Course Description:For many social critics “globalization” is a signpost of “late-capitalism” or “neoliberalism” with the rise of multinational corporations, mass consumption and the multidirectional flows of capital, labor, media, communication, and ideologies across national borders.  Feminist analyses of globalization and the gendered and sexualized permutations of these phenomena offer a critical stance for theorizing these processes, and for studying their complex articulations across time and space.  This seminar will examine diverse manifestations and sites of globalization (migration, tourism, labor, consumption, media/internet communication, sexual commerce, and the circulation of social movements like feminism(s) through the lens of gender and feminist analysis.  In so doing, we will raise questions about the relationships between theory, epistemology and method as they pertain to contemporary globalization. The goals of the course are twofold: to analyze the gendered forces and enactments of globalization as they are currently unfolding across the world, and to explore a range of epistemologies with which contemporary scholars are attempting to interpret these phenomena.  We will examine how globalization works in and through relations of gender, sexuality, class, and race, and analyze feminist and interdisciplinary efforts to unearth and explain these processes.  Globalization serves as a prism through which we will explore social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of contemporary life and some of the advances, gaps, convergences, and puzzles in developing a feminist analytics.
  • Frequently Taught By: Carla Freeman

• Wgs 589: Femist Science and Thechnology studies: Race and Postcolonial Theory
  • Course Description: In the past two decades, we have witnessed the growth of a more “inclusive” science.  This sense of inclusion however has occurred not through the increased participation of women and/or minorities in scientific careers, but rather through their increased participation as valuable research subjects in scientific enterprises.  Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration have instituted new policies to encourage inclusion and representation from diverse human populations for both experimental research designs and clinical trials.  This in turn has led to a rise in the production of “ethnic drugs,” and the development of “racial medicine.”   In this course we will use feminist and postcolonial theory frameworks to discuss the ways in which ideas of race, difference, and modernity have been approached in science and medicine.  Drawing from feminist and postcolonial critiques of science, we will also examine current scientific studies that search for biological differences based on categories of race and ethnicity.
  • Frequently Taught By: Deboleena Roy

• WGS 700: Proseminar
  • Course Description: This course offers WGSS doctoral and certificate students the opportunity to examine critical texts, debates, fissures, and disruptions that have helped constitute the contemporary field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) in the West. We will read a combination of original sources from the 18^thto mid 20^th century and contemporary commentaries that illuminate questions relating to the production, circulation, institutionalization, and forgetting of feminist knowledge. Which texts and arguments have been resuscitated and acknowledged by dominant narratives of feminist thought? Which texts and ideas have been ignored, forgotten, or rejected? How have Western formations of empire, nationalism, capitalism, science, rationality, race, bodies, and sexuality affected the shape of WGSS? We will end the course by examining contemporary challenges to WGSS from queer, trans-, transnational, decolonial, and religious/non-secular theories.
  • Frequently Taught By: Holloway Sparks