Courses of Study
Sections
An interdepartmental program in Sexuality and Queer Studies
Last updated: July 19, 2013 at 1:37 p.m.
The undergraduate interdisciplinary minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies, earned within the Women’s and Gender Studies program, offers students the opportunity to examine socially and historically specific experiences, meanings, and representations of sexuality and gender and the centrality of sexuality and gender to personal and collective identities in modernity. Students in the program critically consider the relationships among sex, gender, and sexual orientation, desire and identification, and erotic and affectional behavior, as these intersect with other cultural formations including gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, ability, age, and class. Across our curriculum, students may study the relation of sexuality and gender; develop understanding of non-heteronormative genders (including gender non-conforming, intersex, transgender, transsexual, and genderqueer individuals and collectives); study gender and sexuality in relation to heterosexual as well as LGBTIAQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual, and queer) persons; explore discrimination toward non-normative genders and sexualities and historical struggles for rights and legal representation; and analyze the normative function of all identity categories.
Knowledge: Students completing the minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies will:
- Know the major concepts that organize the field of sexuality and queer studies;
- Critically engage sexualities and genders (normative and nonconforming) in their historical, geographical, and cultural diversity, including the social organization and diverse cultural expression of the erotic;
- Understand the complex and contingent relationships among sex, gender, and sexuality;
- Be able to analyze sex, gender, and sexual orientation, desire and identification, and erotic and affectional behavior as these intersect with other cultural formations such as class, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, age, and ability; and
- Know the histories and trajectories of modern sexual and gender identity movements, their intellectual and ideological underpinnings, and their social, cultural, and legal effects.
Core Skills: Students completing the minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies will:
- Read critically, and be able to interpret within the frameworks of sexuality and queer studies, a wide variety of primary and secondary texts, data, and cultural artifacts, from a variety of disciplines, historical periods, and cultures;
- Be able to conduct qualitative and/or quantitative research in relevant disciplines;
- Undertake independent research and present it in oral, written, and or/digital form through intellectually rigorous presentations;
- Create scholarly research that questions assumptions about gender and sexuality; and
- Analyze the situations of individuals and groups and the understandings of gender and sexuality within a range of global societies and historical periods.
Social Justice:
The minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies is committed to fostering justice for all gender non-conforming, intersex, transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, and cisgender individuals worldwide. We support and affirm our students' identifications as lesbian, gay, bisexual, heterosexual, asexual, polyamorous, and queer. Sexuality and Queer Studies is thus necessarily concerned with the structural inequalities wrought not only by sexism, homophobia, and transphobia but by racism, economic exploitation, imperialism, global traffic, religious oppression, and ableism, among other instruments or expressions of inequality. As part of the Women's and Gender Studies Program, the minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies has a primary commitment to prepare students to analyze systems of power and privilege, to examine the causes, manifestations, and consequences of institutional discrimination of every kind, and to understand and respect a range of cultural perspectives. Not only the topics in our curriculum but the writings, theories, and empirical research we assign are deliberately diverse in the ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender identity, nationality, and range of physical abilities of their authors. As a program we are committed to what has been recently identified as intersectionality: a theory that recognizes the interconnected nature of experience, discrimination, and privilege, and that explores the interactive ways in which identities intersect or converge to form patterns of dominance, subordination, exclusion and possibility.
Bernadette Brooten
(Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Classical Studies, Religious Studies, Women's and Gender Studies)
ChaeRan Freeze
(Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, History, Women's and Gender Studies)
Thomas A. King
(English, Women's and Gender Studies)
Ann Koloski-Ostrow
(Classical Studies, Anthropology, Fine Arts, Women's and Gender Studies)
Sarah Lamb
(Anthropology, Health: Science, Society, and Policy, South Asian Studies, Women's and Gender Studies)
Sue Lanser
(English, Comparative Literature, History of Ideas, Women's and Gender Studies)
James Mandrell
(Hispanic Studies, Comparative Literature, Film, Television and Interactive Media, Women's and Gender Studies)
Paul Morrison
(English, Film, Television and Interactive Media)
Faith Smith
(African and Afro-American Studies, English, Latin American and Latino Studies, Women's and Gender Studies)
Students enrolled in Sexuality and Queer Studies will take five semester courses, as follows:
A. WMGS 6b (Sexuality and Queer Studies). Ideally WMGS 6b should be taken as the first course, as it provides an introduction to critical theories of gender and sexuality, the history of LGBTIQ activism in the United States, and methods of analysis.
B. One course focusing on the history of sexuality and gender prior to WWII. The following courses fulfill the historical requirement: CLAS 140a, COML 150b, ENG 64b, ENG 120a, NEJS 29a, NEJS 29b, NEJS 148b, NEJS 166a. Note: ENG 57b and HIST 127b may count towards the historical requirement with the addition of a paper (or equivalent project) on the topic of sexualities and/or queer studies and prior permission of the Undergraduate Advising Head.
C. Three additional courses chosen from the list of SQS Elective Courses given below. Two of these three courses must be at the 100-level.
D. Students may substitute a course from the Elective Courses (requiring a substantial paper) category listed below for one of the three required elective courses. Students taking such a course for credit toward the minor must write a paper (or undertake an equivalent project) on the topic of sexualities and/or queer studies and receive approval from the Undergraduate Advising Head prior to enrolling in the course.
E. With the approval of the Undergraduate Advising Head, students may substitute an independent study, internship, senior essay, or other capstone experience, taken under a WMGS course number, for one of these four courses. Students must submit a proposal (including the project description, methodology, and working bibliography, or, in the case of an internship, the objectives, proposed written work, and criteria of evaluation) for approval by their faculty adviser and the UAH before the end of the semester preceding that in which they will undertake the project.
F. Students who wish to minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies and major in Women's and Gender Studies may count no more than two courses toward both degrees. Students who wish to minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies and minor in Women's and Gender Studies may count no more than one course toward both degrees.
G. No course with a final grade below C- can count toward fulfilling the requirements for the minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies. No course counting for the minor may be taken on a pass/fail basis.
Courses of Instruction
Core Course
WMGS
6b
Sexuality and Queer Studies
[
hum
ss
]
Examines cross-cultural and historical perspectives on sexual meanings, experiences, representations, and activist movements within a framework forged by contemporary critical theories of gender and sexuality. Usually offered every year.
Staff
SQS Elective Courses: Historical Focus
CLAS
140a
Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Greek and Roman Art and Text
[
ca
hum
]
An exploration of women, gender, and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome as the ideological bases of Western attitudes toward sex and gender. Includes, in some fashion, Greek and Roman myth, literature, art, architecture, and archaeological artifacts. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Koloski-Ostrow
COML
150b
Critique of Erotic Reason
[
hum
]
Explores transformations in erotic sensibilities in the novel from the early nineteenth century to the present. Works by Goethe, Austen, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Bronte, Chekhov, Garcia-Marquez, Kundera, and Cormac McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden
ENG
64b
From Libertinism to Sensibility: Pleasure and the Theater, 1660-1800
[
hum
]
Investigates the exchange between performance texts and contemporaneous discussions of class, nationality, and political party. Emphasizes the emergence of modern gender and sexual roles and the impact of the first professional women actors. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King
ENG
120a
The Orlando Project
[
hum
]
Explores the uses of pastoral in queer literary history and for a queered understanding of selfhood. Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography guides a survey of English pastoral, queer and postcolonial literary criticism, and feminist and queer ecocriticism. Pondering the nature and capacities of poetry, gendered selfhood, erotic desire, and even Nature itself, Orlando canvasses the history of English literature and criticism from the age of Shakespeare to that of Freud. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
153a
Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[
hum
]
Reading libertine and erotic writing alongside medical and philosophical treatises and commercially mainstream fiction, we will ask how practices of writing and reading sex contributed to the emergence and surveillance of a private self knowable through its bodily sex and sensations. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
HIST
142b
History of Sexualities in Europe
[
ss
]
Formerly offered as HIST 55b.
Explores a social history of sexualities in Europe from early modern to contemporary times. Topical emphasis on changing patterns in kinship, child rearing, gender differentiation, immodesty, and marriage. Usually offered every 3 years.
Ms. Kelikian
NEJS
29a
Feminist Sexual Ethics in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
[
hum
]
Analyzes a variety of feminist critiques of religious texts and traditions and proposed innovations in theology and religious law. Examines biblical, rabbinic, and Qur'anic texts. Explores relation to U.S. law and to the social, natural, and medical sciences. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Brooten
NEJS
29b
Slavery, Women, and Religion
[
hum
]
Slavery is the most extreme form of power that one human being can exercise over another. Religion aims to express humanity's highest ethical aspirations. How, then, does religion support slavery? Are enslaved women treated differently than enslaved men? Do slave-holding women exercise their power differently than slave-holding men? To answer these questions, female slave narratives, pro-slavery biblical interpretation, American slave religion, and biblical, early Christian, and early rabbinic statutes and teachings are examined. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Brooten
NEJS
148b
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Jews and Christians: Sources and Interpretations
[
hum
]
Introduction to the classical Jewish and Christian sources on same-sex love and on gender ambiguity and to a variety of current interpretations of them, to the evidence for same-sex love and gender fluidity among Jews and Christians through the centuries, and to current religious and public policy debates about same-sex love and gender identity and expression. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Brooten
NEJS
166a
Carnal Israel: Exploring Jewish Sexuality from Talmudic Times to the Present
[
hum
]
Explores the construction of Jewish sexuality from Talmudic times to the present. Themes include rabbinic views of sex, niddah, illicit relations, masculinity, medieval erotic poetry, Ashkenazi and Sephardic sexual practices, and sexual symbolism in mystic literature; the discourse on sex, race, and nationalism in Europe; debates about masculinity, sexual orientation, and stereotypes in America and Israel. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Freeze
WMGS
130b
History of Sexuality in the United States
[
ss
]
Examines selected topics in the history of sexuality in the United States from colonialism to the present day. Course readings and discussions focus on public conflicts over sexuality and how they shaped the political order. We will explore how shifting sexual behaviors, attitudes, and identities changed the cultural, social, and political meanings of sexuality over time. Moving chronologically we will discuss how, when, and why sexuality became a cultural and political battleground, a source of public identity, an object of scientific study and legal regulation, a commodity in the consumer economy, and the impetus for the development of the gay, lesbian, and transgender political movements. Special one-time offering, spring 2013.
Ms. Leslie
SQS Elective Courses
AAAS
125b
Caribbean Women and Globalization: Sexuality, Citizenship, Work
[
ss
wi
]
Utilizing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, fiction, and music to examine the relationship between women's sexuality and conceptions of labor, citizenship, and sovereignty. The course considers these alongside conceptions of masculinity, contending feminisms, and the global perspective. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith
ANTH
142a
AIDS: Science, Society, and Policy
[
ss
]
An examination of the AIDS pandemic from cross-cultural and anthropological perspectives. Topics include biosocial approaches to disease, epidemiology of transmission, national and international institutions, prevention and treatment, and ethical issues; case studies from the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Kammerer
ANTH
144a
The Anthropology of Gender
[
nw
ss
wi
]
Examines gender constructs, sexuality, and cultural systems from a comparative perspective. Topics include the division of labor, rituals of masculinity and femininity, the vexing question of the universality of women's subordination, cross-cultural perspectives on same-sex sexualities and transsexuality, the impact of globalization on systems, and the history of feminist anthropology. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Lamb or Ms. Schattschneider
ANTH
166b
Queer Anthropology: Sexualities and Genders in Cross-Cultural Perspective
[
ss
]
Explores ethnographic approaches to the study of sexuality and gender in diverse cultural contexts, such as the US, Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico. Examines how sexuality intersects with other cultural forms, including gender, race, ethnicity, labor, religion, colonialism and globalization. Explores also how the discipline of anthropology has been shaped by engagements with questions of sexuality and the field of queer studies. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Lamb and Ms. Schattschneider
CLAS
140a
Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Greek and Roman Art and Text
[
ca
hum
]
An exploration of women, gender, and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome as the ideological bases of Western attitudes toward sex and gender. Includes, in some fashion, Greek and Roman myth, literature, art, architecture, and archaeological artifacts. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Koloski-Ostrow
COML
150b
Critique of Erotic Reason
[
hum
]
Explores transformations in erotic sensibilities in the novel from the early nineteenth century to the present. Works by Goethe, Austen, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Bronte, Chekhov, Garcia-Marquez, Kundera, and Cormac McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden
ENG
87a
Sex and Race in the American Novel
[
hum
]
Depictions of racial and sexual others abound in American literature of the twentieth century. Reading texts across racial, geographical, and temporal divides, this course investigates the representation of non-normative sexualities as signaled, haunted, or repaired by an appeal to race. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
ENG
87b
Queer Readings: Beyond Stonewall
[
hum
]
How have LGBTQ writers explored the consolidation, diaspora, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer personhoods since the 1960s? Texts include fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, and film. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King
ENG
107a
Women Writing Desire: Caribbean Fiction and Film
[
hum
]
About eight novels of the last two decades (by Cliff, Cruz, Danticat, Garcia, Kempadoo, Kincaid, Mittoo, Nunez, Pineau, Powell, or Rosario), drawn from across the region, and read in dialogue with popular culture, theory, and earlier generations of male and female writers of the region. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith
ENG
120a
The Orlando Project
[
hum
]
Explores the uses of pastoral in queer literary history and for a queered understanding of selfhood. Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography guides a survey of English pastoral, queer and postcolonial literary criticism, and feminist and queer ecocriticism. Pondering the nature and capacities of poetry, gendered selfhood, erotic desire, and even Nature itself, Orlando canvasses the history of English literature and criticism from the age of Shakespeare to that of Freud. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
ENG
121a
Sex and Culture
[
hum
]
An exploration of the virtually unlimited explanatory power attributed to sexuality in the modern world. "Texts" include examples from literature, film, television, pornography, sexology, and theory. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Morrison
ENG
151a
Queer Studies
[
hum
]
Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.
Historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives on the construction and performance of queer subjectivities. How do queer bodies and queer representations challenge heteronormativity? How might we imagine public spaces and queer citizenship? Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King
ENG
181a
Making Sex, Performing Gender
[
hum
]
Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.
Gender and sexuality studied as sets of performed traits and cues for interactions among social actors. Readings explore the possibility that differently organized gender and sexual practices are possible for men and women. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King
NEJS
29a
Feminist Sexual Ethics in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
[
hum
]
Analyzes a variety of feminist critiques of religious texts and traditions and proposed innovations in theology and religious law. Examines biblical, rabbinic, and Qur'anic texts. Explores relation to U.S. law and to the social, natural, and medical sciences. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Brooten
NEJS
29b
Slavery, Women, and Religion
[
hum
]
Slavery is the most extreme form of power that one human being can exercise over another. Religion aims to express humanity's highest ethical aspirations. How, then, does religion support slavery? Are enslaved women treated differently than enslaved men? Do slave-holding women exercise their power differently than slave-holding men? To answer these questions, female slave narratives, pro-slavery biblical interpretation, American slave religion, and biblical, early Christian, and early rabbinic statutes and teachings are examined. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Brooten
NEJS
148b
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Jews and Christians: Sources and Interpretations
[
hum
]
Introduction to the classical Jewish and Christian sources on same-sex love and on gender ambiguity and to a variety of current interpretations of them, to the evidence for same-sex love and gender fluidity among Jews and Christians through the centuries, and to current religious and public policy debates about same-sex love and gender identity and expression. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Brooten
NEJS
166a
Carnal Israel: Exploring Jewish Sexuality from Talmudic Times to the Present
[
hum
]
Explores the construction of Jewish sexuality from Talmudic times to the present. Themes include rabbinic views of sex, niddah, illicit relations, masculinity, medieval erotic poetry, Ashkenazi and Sephardic sexual practices, and sexual symbolism in mystic literature; the discourse on sex, race, and nationalism in Europe; debates about masculinity, sexual orientation, and stereotypes in America and Israel. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Freeze
NEJS
178a
Love, Sex, and Power in Israeli Culture
[
hum
]
Taught in Hebrew. Prerequisite: HBRW 141a, 143a, 144a, or 146a or permission of the instructor.
Explores questions of romance, gender, marriage, and jealousy in the Israeli context by offering a feminist and psychoanalytic reading of Hebrew texts, works of art, and film. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Szobel
SOC
169b
Issues in Sexuality
[
oc
ss
]
This course counts toward the completion of the joint MA degree in sociology & women's and gender studies.
Explores dimensions of human sexuality. This course will take as its central tenet that humans are sexual beings and their sexuality is shaped by gender, class, race, culture, and history. It will explore the contradictory ways of understanding sexual behavior and relationships. The course intends to teach students about the social nature of sexual expression. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Cadge
THA
145a
Queer Theater: Wilde to Fabulous
[
ca
]
Explores significant plays that have shaped and defined gay identity during the past 100 years. Playwrights span Wilde to Kushner. Examining texts as literature, history, and performance, we will explore religion, poiltics, gender, the AIDS epidemic, and coming out. Usually offered every third year.
Staff
WMGS
160a
Transnational Sexualities
[
ss
]
Explores the transnational production of gender and sexualities across cultures. This course examines how the acceleration of the circulation of information, people, and capital across borders intersects with the development of gender and sexual identities, practices and communities. Special one-time offering, fall 2013.
Ms. Russo Garrido
SQS Elective Courses (requiring a substantial paper)
Students taking a complementary courses for credit toward the minor must write a paper (or undertake an equivalent project) on the topic of sexualities and/or queer studies.
AMST
60a
The Legal Boundaries of Public and Private Life
[
ss
]
May not be taken for credit by students who took AMST 187a in prior years.
Examine civil liberties through landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases. Explores confrontations between public interest and personal rights across four episodes in American cultural history; post-Civil War race relations; progressive-era economic regulation; war-time free-speech debates; and current issues of sexual and reproductive privacy. Close legal analysis supplemented by politics, philosophy, and social history. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Gaskins
AMST
124b
American Love and Marriage
[
ss
]
Ideas and behavior relating to love and marriage are used as lenses to view broader social patterns such as family organization, generational conflict, and the creation of professional and national identity. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Antler
AMST
139b
Race and Gender in the News
[
ss
]
Examines the ways in which news coverage of women and minorities has both shaped our understanding of gender and race in the United States and influenced the tone and content of public discourse on such policy matters as gay marriage, pay equity, and racial profiling. We will consider the implications of the historical under-representation of women and minorities in the nation's newsrooms for efforts to combat cultural stereotyping of blacks, women, ethnic minorities and the GLBT community. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. McNamara
AMST
142b
Love, Law, and Labor: Asian American Women and Literature
[
ss
]
Explores the intersection of ethnicity, race, class, gender, and sexualities in the lives and literatures of diverse Asian American women. Discusses the historical, social, political, and economic forces shaping those lives and how they are reflected in literature. Usually offered every second year.
Staff
AMST
144b
Signs of Imagination: Gender and Race in Mass Media
[
ss
]
Examines how men and women are represented and represent themselves in American popular culture. Discusses the cultural contexts of the terms "femininity" and "masculinity" and various examples of the visibility and marketability of these terms today. Usually offered every second year.
Staff
ANTH
145a
Anthropology of the Body
[
ss
]
Explores a range of theories that use the body to understand society, culture, and gender. Topics include how social values and hierarchies are written in, on, and through the body; the relationship between body and gender identity; and experiences and images of the body cross-culturally. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lamb or Ms. Schattschneider
COML
122b
Writing Home and Abroad: Literature by Women of Color
[
hum
nw
]
Examines literature (prose, poetry, and memoirs) written by women of color across a wide spectrum of geographical and cultural sites. Literature written within the confines of the "home country" in the vernacular, as well as in English in immigrant locales, is read. The intersections of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class as contained by the larger institutions of government, religion, nationalism, and sectarian politics are examined. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Singh
ECON
69a
The Economics of Race and Gender
[
ss
]
Prerequisite: ECON 2a or 10a.
The role of race and gender in economic decision making. Mainstream and alternative economic explanations for discrimination, and analysis of the economic status of women and minorities. Discussion of specific public policies related to race, class, and gender. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Brainerd
ENG
57b
Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison
[
hum
]
An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman
HIST
127b
Household and Family in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1300-1800)
[
qr
ss
]
An examination of the fundamental building block of premodern European society. Topics include the demographic structures, economic foundations, and governing ideologies that sustained the household, as well as the repercussions of failure or refusal to live according to "normal" forms. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sreenivasan
NEJS
178b
Masculinity and Femininity in Israeli Film, Literature, and Culture
[
hum
]
Taught in English.
Focuses on Israeli film, literature, and culture, exploring how film and literature represent and establish masculinity and femininity. Examines the ways in which film and literature reflect the politics, religions, conflicts, and ideologies of Israeli society. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Szobel
PHIL
108a
Philosophy and Gender
[
hum
]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or PHIL 17a.
Explores the place of gender in the works of particular Western philosophers (e.g., Kant, Hume, and Rousseau) and uses the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy to address questions about gender equality, sexual objectification, and the nature of masculinity. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smiley
SOC
115a
Masculinities
[
ss
]
Men's experiences of masculinity have only recently emerged as complex and problematic. This course inquires into concepts, literature, and phenomenology of many framings of masculinity. The analytic schemes are historical, sociological, and social-psychological. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Fellman
SOC
189a
Sociology of Body and Health
[
ss
]
Explores theoretical considerations of the body as a cultural phenomenon intersecting with health, healing, illness, disease, and medicine. Focuses on how gender, race, class, religion, and other dimensions of social organization shape individual experiences and opportunities for agency and resistance. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Shostak