| WMGS 101 |
| Women, Gender, and Sexuality |
| This course introduces students to the study of women, gender, and sexuality, paying attention to issues of power, agency and resistance. Using a variety of 19th- and 20th-century American materials, the course seeks to understand: women’s experiences and the way they have been shaped, normative and nonnormative alignments of sex, gender and sexuality across different historical periods, and the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 102 |
| Gender & Sexuality: Issues and Controversies |
| This is an introductory survey of the major issues and controversies in the fields of gender and sexuality studies. Broadly interdisciplinary, it introduces students to social constructionist and essentialist conceptions of gender and sexuality; explores the relationship between gender and sexuality; and considers the intersection of gender and sexuality with other categories of identity such as class, race, and nationality. It also engages questions of ideology and representation, asking how stereotypes have contributed to constraining and emancipating individuals through their gender and sexuality. Course materials are drawn from a range of disciplines, including sociology, psychoanalysis, history, anthropology, and literary and film studies. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 206 |
| Sex Gender and Power |
| This course explores issues of sex, gender, and power for women and men in our society and in selected cultures of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Pacific. Issues to be explored include: the cultural construction of deviance, women’s and men’s freedom to be sexual, reproductive rights, divorce and marriage, homosexuality, ritualized genital mutilation, the relationship between sexuality and social roles. By creating “maps” of the sex/gender systems of some exotically different societies, the course encourages a reflexive analysis of our own. Enrollment limited. Counts toward the Anthropology Department major. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 207 |
| Homosexuality and Hollywood Film |
| The 20th century is generally understood as a crucial period for the emergence and consolidation of modern lesbian and gay identities and practices. A case can be made for the special role of Hollywood in this historical process. Stars such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Cliff provided lesbians and gays with powerful models of gender and sexual nonconformity, and Hollywood genres such as the musical and the domestic melodrama informed the camp sensibility in crucial ways. Beginning with the 1930s and ending with the 1990s, this course examines how Hollywood contributed to the formation of lesbian and gay subcultures. It pays particular attention to the representation of lesbians and gays in Hollywood films and how this representation did and did not shift over the course of the 20th century. In addition, it engages recent theoretical and historical work on gender and sexuality. Mandatory weekly screenings. (Also listed under English.) |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 212 |
| History of Sexuality |
| Sexuality is commonly understood as a natural or biological instinct, but as scholars have recently shown, it is better understood as a set of cultural practices that have a history. Starting with the ancient Greeks, this course examines the culturally and historically variable meanings attached to sexuality in Western culture. It pays particular attention to the emergence of sexuality in the 19th century as an instrument of power. It also considers how race, class, gender, and nationality have influenced the modern organization of sexuality. Topics covered include sex before sexuality, sexuality and colonialism, sexuality and U.S. slavery, and the emergence of the hetero/homosexual binarism in the late 19th century. Primary readings include The Symposium, A Passage to India, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Well of Loneliness, and The Swimming Pool Library. Secondary readings include work by Michel Foucault, David Halperin, Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, Martin Duberman, George Chauncey, Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Kennedy. (Also listed under History.) |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 215 |
| Drink and Disorder in America |
| Drinking as an institution has reflected the varieties of cultures, interest groups, and ideologies that have swept America. We will examine the tumultuous history of this institution from the origins of the Republic to the present in order to understand what the ‘wets’ and the ‘drys’ can tell us about the nature of community in America. Special attention to the ways in which gender, race, class, and ethnicity shape perceptions of drinking, leisure, and social control. (Also listed under American Studies and History.) |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 219 |
| American Women Artists and Cold War Culture |
| Lee Krasner’s abstract expressionist painting was praised as “…so good you would not know it was painted by a woman”; Mary McCarthy’s best-selling novel The Group was condemned as a “lady book.” Such were the terms governing the critical reception of women’s art during the Cold War era of the 1950’s and early 1960’s. This course explores the art practices of six American women (playwrights Lillian Hellman and Lorraine Hansberry, novelist Mary McCarthy, poet/novelist Sylvia Plath, choreographer Martha Graham, and painter Lee Krasner) who achieved prominence in their respective fields while negotiating a “containment culture” that equated women’s fulfillment with domestic bliss and promoted norms of womanhood that served to regulate female sexuality, labor, and representation. Course readings and discussions will situate the art of each of these figures against the backdrop of Cold War culture and will encourage students to critically examine the intersection between individual biography, art production, and socio-political forces. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 234 |
| Gender and Education |
| What is gender equity in schooling and what impact does this have on gender equity more broadly? Different disciplinary perspectives on the impact of gender in learning, school experience, performance and achievement will be explored in elementary, secondary, post-secondary, and informal educational settings. The legal and public policy implications of these findings (such as gender-segregated schooling, men’s and women’s studies programs, curriculum reform, Title IX, affirmative action and other proposed remedies) will be explored. Findings on socialization and schooling in the U.S. will be contrasted with those from other cultures. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 250 |
| Feminist Economics |
This course provides an introduction to the new field of feminist economics, which through a diverse set of questions and analysis critiques conventional economic theories, analyzes the economics of gender difference, and advocates policies that promote equality for women. Empirical, methodological, theoretical, and policy questions will be explored. For example, has the economic position of women been improving in the U.S. and in the world? Do existing economic theories embody a masculine perspective? How can economists better understand housework and childcare, and women’s predominance in them? What is a feminist analysis of welfare? What insights does feminism provide for development economics? And finally what might women’s liberation mean, in economic terms?
Prerequisite: C- or better in Economics 101. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 251 |
| Gender & Dislocation |
| The plight of women raped in Bosnia, women and children in Afghan refugee of camps, homeless mothers and sweatshop workers in the USA, or Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, as well as the boy soldiers of Africa, reflect the gendered nature of modern upheavals across the globe. This course examines the gendered consequences of contemporary forms of uprootedness, such as homelessness, labor migration, and refugee flight, and the impact of these on family and intergenerational relations, cultural expression and identity, relationships to home place and culture, and forms of multicultural citizenship. Students will use case studies, ethnographies, and other accounts to consider the conditions, such as environmental disasters, economic restructuring, genocide, violence, and political oppression, which give rise to dislocation and the gender differences in the reconstitution of self and community among individual migrants and survivors of trauma. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 278 |
| Sexual Orientation and the Law |
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the growing theoretical literature and case law in the area of sexual orientation and the law. We will study the historical treatment of gays and lesbians as a matter of law and public policy, and we will examine the particular discriminatory laws that have been enacted at the local, state, and national level. Texts will include books on a variety of policy issues concerning the legal status of gays and lesbians, as well as court cases, legal briefs, and law review articles. Topics will range from same-sex marriages to discrimination against individuals infected with the HIV virus.
Prerequisite: Women Gender and Sexuality 101 or 212 or Public Policy 201 or 202 |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 280 |
| Women in Sports |
| This course examines how the social, cultural and political aspect of sports helps inform our understanding of gender and vice versa. Issues we will consider include the prevailing notions of women's physical and mental abilities and consciousness regarding sports; the role that sports play in transmitting values, and whether sports, or specific sports, contribute to gender-role stereotypes. Focusing on important women such as Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Nancy Lopez, Althea Gibson , Fanny Blankers Koen, Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Nancy Greene, Marilyn Bell, who made sports history in golf, tennis, track and field, skiing, and swimming, respectively, we will consider the historical, political, socioeconomic, and physical factors which supported and/or impeded these women's lives and careers and how these factors informed and were informed by society as a whole. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 297 |
| Gender&Colonialism Lit&Film |
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No Course Description Available.
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 301 |
| Western Feminist Thought |
An exploration of the main currents in American feminism, with occasional excursions into European thought. The course readings assume (rather than demonstrate) women’s historical subordination to man and put forward various explanations and strategies for change. Readings in J.S. Mill, C. P. Gilman, Emma Goldman, Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Mary Daly, Audre Lorde, and others. Primarily for sophomores and juniors. Permission of the instructor is required.
Prerequisite: C- or better in one other course in Women Gender and Sexuality. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 307 |
| Women's Rights as Human Rights |
| This course is a cross-cultural investigation of the gendered nature of human rights and of the changes in different societies that have resulted from struggles for human rights for women. Topics covered will include rights to protection against sexual abuse and gender violence (such as female genital mutilation), subsistence rights, reproductive rights, human rights and sexual orientation, and the rights of female immigrants and refugees. The course will make use of formal legal documents as well as cultural materials such as novels, films, personal testimonies, religious rituals, and folk traditions in music. (Also listed under Public Policy.) |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 311 |
| Women in Development |
| This course provides an introduction to women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America from an interdisciplinary as well as cross-cultural and cross-national perspective. It examines patterns of women's subordination in the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial context. Particular attention is paid to the role of women in economic development. This involves looking at women's involvement in various activities, from the individual household unit to women's role in agricultural production and the emerging global assembly line. Prerequisite: Political Science 106 and Anthropology 201, or permission of the instructor. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 315 |
| Women in America |
| An examination of women’s varied experiences in the public and private spheres, from their own perspective as well as that of the dominant society. The experiences of women of different classes and races will be compared, as will the relationship between images of women and changing realities of their lives. Emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 317 |
| Black Feminism & Popular Culture: The Quest for Power in Life and Art |
| This course explores popular fictional representations of black women's lives in television, music and film, as well as non-fictional narratives in the mainstream and alternative news media. Our objective is to find patterns and gaps in such representations, and to better understand the ways in which the actual, lived "realities" of black women's lives are either silenced, distorted, or perhaps, successfully honored in such cultural productions. Particularly strong emphasis will be placed on the project of bringing feminist thought and practice to newspaper and magazine journalism. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 320 |
| Women and Globalization |
This course looks at the increasing integration of societies and cultures around the world and its effects on women and gender. In addition to examining the increasing integration of economies, this class will consider globalization from the perspective of the movement and integration of people, ideas and things, balancing cultural and political factors with economics. We will consider the advantages and disadvantages of globalization as experienced by people, especially women, across the globe, and examine in turn, how globalization affects the social construction of gender and how women and their activities are giving shape and meaning to this phenomenon.
Prerequisite: C- or better in at least one course in either Anthropology, Economics, International Studies, or Women Gender and Sexuality. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 322 |
| American Literary Realism |
| We will read works by Caroline Kirkland, Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Mark Twain, Henry James, and William Dean Howells, asking what is real? What does it mean to be a realist? How was realism as a literary movement constructed by male critics in gendered opposition to sentimentalism? |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 330 |
| Gender and Multiculturalism in Trinidad and Tobago |
| This multidisciplinary seminar explores gender relations in the unique multicultural setting of Trinidad and Tobago. Variations in gender and sexuality will be examined through a discussion of history, political economy, family life, religion, race and class, and the cultural politics of national identity, with particular attention given to Afro-, Hindu-, and Muslim-Trinbagonian experiences. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 340 |
| Race, Gender and the Politics of Poverty in the U.S. |
| Images such as the lazy, irresponsible and sexually promiscuous “welfare queen” or the welfare-abusing “illegal” immigrant dominate contemporary U.S. political discourse about poverty. Not only do these images work to criminalize women of color, but they locate the origins of economic inequality in the cultural behaviors of the poor themselves. This course traces the historical emergence and development of these images of a “culture of poverty” in order to analyze how interlocking structures of race, gender, sexuality and capitalism have shaped social science approaches to poverty in the U.S. In particular, the course draws on historical analysis, political theory, and cultural studies to examine how contemporary understandings of poverty, deservingness, citizenship rights and obligations, and U.S. national identity gain their meaning through discourses of race, gender and sexuality. Specific issues we will consider include but are not limited to globalization, immigration and the feminization of poverty; recent changes in U.S. welfare policy; reproductive rights and population control; and women of color and the criminal justice system |
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1.00 units, Seminar
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| WMGS 350 |
| American Women Artists & Cold War Culture |
| Lee Krasner’s abstract expressionist painting was praised as “so good you would not know it was painted by a woman”; Mary McCarthy’s best-selling novel, The Group, was condemned as a “lady book.” Such were the terms governing the critical reception of women’s art during the Cold War era of the 1950s and early 1960s. This course will explore the art practice of six American women { playwrights Lillian Hellman and Lorraine Hansberry, novelist Mary McCarthy, poet/novelist Sylvia Plath, choreographer Martha Graham, and painter Lee Krasner} who achieved prominence in their respective fields while negotiating a “containment culture” that equated women’s fulfillment with domestic bliss and promoted norms of womanhood regulating female sexuality, labor and representation. Course material will include: McCarthy’s The Group, Plath’s The Bell Jar, Hellman’s Scoundrel Time, Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, Graham’s Night Journey, and selected paintings by Krasner. In addition, students will read passages from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, selections from Freud, and historical accounts of the politics and culture of the Cold War era. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 369 |
| Queer Studies: Issues and Controversies |
| This broadly interdisciplinary course examines the impact of queer theory on the study of gender and sexuality in both the humanities and the social sciences. In positing that there is no necessary or causal relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality, queer theory has raised important questions about the identity-based understandings of gender and sexuality still dominant in the social sciences. This course focuses on the issues queer theory has raised in the social sciences as its influence has spread beyond the humanities. Topics covered include: queer theory’s critique of identity; institutional versus discursive forms of power in the regulation of gender and sexuality; the value of psychoanalysis for the study of sexuality; and lesbian and gay historiography versus queer historiography. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 378 |
| Sexual Orientation and the Law |
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the growing theoretical literature and case law in the area of sexual orientation and the law. We will study the historical treatment of gays and lesbians as a matter of law and public policy, and we will examine the particular discriminatory laws that have been enacted at the local, state, and national level. Texts will include books on a variety of policy issues concerning the legal status of gays and lesbians, as well as court cases, legal briefs, and law review articles. Topics will range from same-sex marriages to discrimination against individuals infected with the HIV virus.
Prerequisite: Women Gender and Sexuality 101 or 212 or Public Policy 201 or 202 |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 380 |
| Contempory Black Women Writers |
| The past decade has witnessed a flowering of cultural production from young black women. This course locates contemporary black transnational women writers and filmmakers—from the 1990’s into the present—within a larger tradition of black women’s literary and cultural production and black feminist thought. We will consider issues of race, gender, sexuality, cultural trauma, subjectivity and aesthetics from the post-Civil Rights and postcolonial context in which these contemporary works of fiction arise. Our primary goal is to examine the ways in which these contemporary black women writers revise and diverge from the political and aesthetic concerns of their predecessors. We will read texts from the US, the Caribbean and West Africa in order to engage the possibilities and limitations of theorizing from a black transnational frame of reference. Seating for this class will be limited to 20 students. |
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1.00 units, Lecture
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| WMGS 399 |
| Independent Study |
| Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office, and the approval of the instructor and director are required for enrollment. |
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1.00 units min / 2.00 units max, Independent Study
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| WMGS 401 |
| Senior Seminar |
The goals of this seminar are to sharpen critical thinking and to afford an opportunity for synthesis of student work in women, gender, and sexuality. Towards these ends we will examine the construction of race, class, and sexuality in America as they intersect with gender. The capstone of the course is a twenty-five-page research paper. There will be opportunities to share work in progress with seminar members and to involve the wider campus community in the issues.
Course open only to senior Women Gender and Sexuality majors and minors. |
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1.00 units, Seminar
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| WMGS 402 |
| Feminist Legal Theory |
| This course will explore selected issues and controversies in American feminist legal theory and will emphasize the development of its theoretical foundations. We will examine how and why legal theory has become one of the most vital areas for the emergence of a distinctly feminist critical approach to questions of the relationship between law, gender and society. In readings and class discussions we will study and evaluate the ways in which feminists have attempted to redefine legal problems and have applied legal analysis to sex and gender issues. Topics will include: feminist critiques of the liberal law; sex and gender equality; sex discrimination; affirmative action; abortion; pornography; and sexual harassment. Authors we will read include Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Deborah Rhode, Mary Jo Frug, Patricia Williams, Kimberle Crenshaw, Robin West, and Zellah Eisenstein. Enrollment limited. |
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1.00 units, Seminar
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| WMGS 406 |
| Current Issues Seminar: Gender, Sexuality, & the Law |
| This course will explore selected issues and controversies concerning gender, sexuality, and the law in America. We will examine the issues from a variety of legal perspectives and will focus on the social and political circumstances that have given rise to them. We will also analyze the relationship between the ongoing litigation of gender questions and the shaping of public policy. Topics to be discussed include sexual harassment, pornography, assisted reproduction, and gay and lesbian marriage. |
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1.00 units, Seminar
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| WMGS 466 |
| Teaching Assistantship |
| Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office, and the approval of the instructor and director are required for enrollment. |
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0.50 units min / 1.00 units max, Independent Study
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| WMGS 490 |
| Research Assistantship |
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No Course Description Available.
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1.00 units, Independent Study
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| WMGS 497 |
| Senior Thesis |
| Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office, and the approval of the instructor and director are required for enrollment in this single term thesis. |
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1.00 units min / 2.00 units max, Independent Study
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| WMGS 498 |
| Senior Thesis Part 1 |
| Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office, and the approval of the instructor and director are required for each semester of this yearlong thesis. (2 course credits are considered pending in the first semester; 2 course credits will be awarded for completion in the second semester). |
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2.00 units, Independent Study
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| WMGS 499 |
| Senior Thesis Part 2 |
| Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office, and the approval of the instructor and chairperson are required for each semester of this yearlong thesis. (Two course credits are considered pending in the first semester; 2 course credits will be awarded for completion in the second semester.) |
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2.00 units, Independent Study
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