Fall 2008 Courses
Please note that the registrar's website is the official listing of courses.
Core Courses
WMGS 5a Women and Gender in Culture and Society
H. Singh, M/W 3:30-5:00pm
This interdisciplinary course introduces central concepts and topics in the field of women’s and gender studies. Explores the position of women in diverse settings and the impact of gender as a social, cultural and intellectual category in the United States and around the globe. Asks how gendered institutions, behaviors and representations have been configured in the past and function in the present and also examines the ways in which gender intersects with many other vectors of identity and circumstance in forming human affairs.
WMGS 89a Internship in Women's and Gender Studies: Prevention of Violence against Women and Children
D. Hunter, T 4:30-7:30 pm
Combines fieldwork in violence prevention programs with a weekly seminar concerning violence against women and children. The seminar examines the tensions and commonalities between “family violence” and “feminist” approaches, with an emphasis on feminist scholarship.
WMGS 136a Gender, Race, and Science
Staff, T/F 12:00-1:30pm
Addresses scientific claims about race and gender from the nineteenth century onward. Investigates the biological sciences as a source of knowledge with profound effects on cultural practices, social struggles, and individual as well as collective identities.
WMGS 198a Women's and Gender Studies Research Seminar
S. Reinharz, Th 5:00-8:00pm
Examines theories and practices of feminist scholarship and introduces interdisciplinary methodologies in order to guide students in designing and completing an independent research project.
Elective Courses
S. Dave, T/F 10:30-12:00pm
*Fulfills Cultural Differences Elective Requirement
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.
ANTH 127a Medicine, Body and Culture
Staff, F 1:30-4:30pm
Examines main areas of inquiry in medical anthropology, including medicine as a sociocultural construct, political and economic dimensions of suffering and health, patients and healers in comparative medical systems and the medical construction of men’s and women’s bodies.
ANTH 144a Anthropology of Gender
S. Lamb, T/F 10:30-12:00pm
*Fulfills Cultural Differences Elective Requirement
An examination of 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 women’s lives, and the history of feminist anthropology.BIO 160b Human Reproductive and Developmental Biology
J. Jackson, F 1:30-4:30pm
* Prerequisites: BIOL 22a and 22b
Course deals with hormonal, cellular, and molecular aspects of gametogenesis, fertilization, pregnancy, and birth. Pathological and abnormal variations that occur and the available medical technologies for intervention, correction, and facilitation of these processes are discussed.
ENG 28b Queer Readings: Before Stonewall
T. King, T/F 1:30-3:00pm
*Fulfills History Elective Requirement
Students read texts as artifacts of social beliefs, desires, and anxieties about sexed bodies and their pleasures. Readings may include Plato, Vergil, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Phillips, Behn, Gray, Tennyson, Lister, Whitman, Dickinson, Wilde, Freud, Woolf, Barnes, Stein, Larsen, Genet, and Baldwin.
ENG 128a Alternative Worlds: Modern Utopian Texts
M. Campbell, M/W 5:00-6:30pm
* Prerequisite: ENG 11a
British, European, and American works depicting alternate, often “better” worlds, including More’s Utopia, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing-World, Voltaire’s Candide, Casanova’s Icosameron, selections from Charles Fourier, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis: Dawn, Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin!
ENG 145b Jane Austen: Gender, Art, and History
S. Lanser, M/W/Th 12:00-1:00pm
*Fulfills History Elective Requirement
Explores Austen’s writings from multiple perspectives, with particular attention to the historical and aesthetic dimensions of her work. Considers divergent interpretations of her novels and the impact of gender, not only on her novels but on their reception.
GECS 150a From Rapunzel to Reifenstahl: Real and Imaginary Women in German Culture
S. von Mering, M/W/Th 1:00-2:00pm
* Fulfills History Elective Requirement
Exploring German cultural representations of women and real women’s responses. From fairy-tale princess to Nazi filmmaker, from eighteenth-century infanticide to twentieth-century femme fatale, from beautiful soul to feminist dramatist, from revolutionary to minority writer. Readings include major literary works, feminist criticism, and film.
HIST 157a Americans at Work: American Labor History
J. Jones, T/F 9:00-10:30am
*Fulfills History Elective Requirement
Throughout American history, the vast majority of adults (and many children, too) have worked, although not always for pay. Beginning with the colonial period, we shall explore the idea that a job is never just a job; it is also a social signifier of great value. Topics include slavery and servitude, race and gender in the workplace, household labor and its meanings, technological innovation, working-class political movements, and the role of the state in shaping patterns of work.
POL 125a Women in American Politics
J. Greenlee, M 2:00-5:00pm
Addresses three major dimensions of women’s political participation: social reform and women-identified issues; women’s organizations and institutions; and women politicians, electoral politics, and party identification. Covers historical context and contemporary developments in women’s political activity.
SOC 132b Social Perspectives on Motherhood and Mothering
K. Hansen, F 9:00-12:00pm
*Previous course on families or gender is recommended
Explores motherhood as an identity and a social institution, and mothering as a set of socially and historically constructed activities. Reviews the theoretical approaches to motherhood and how they are understood in the context of race/ethnicity, class, and gender inequalities in the United States.
SOC 189a Sociology of Body and Health
S. Shostak, M/W/Th 11:00-12:00pm
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.
Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies
Please visit web.mit.edu/gcws for additional information about GCWS.
Women's Activism: Gender, Literacy and Human Rights
Wednesdays, 5:30 - 8:30 PM / 9.10.08 – 12.10.08
Meets at MIT, building and room TBA
This course explores education, literacy, and human rights as sites of women’s activism. It seeks to build deepened understandings of gender and intersectionality as we use different lenses to focus on these sites; we will consider how gender, race, class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, age, location, literacy, and ideologies impact upon activism.
Women throughout the world have engaged in collective and individual actions both to resist oppression but also sometimes to further their own privileges. This activism has taken place in formal educational institutions, at the community and grassroots level, and through national and international organizations and movements. This course will examine the meaning of women’s activism around education and human rights both globally and locally.
Faculty:
Lorna Rivera is Associate Professor of Sociology and Community Planning at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She is also a Research Associate at the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Public Policy at UMass-Boston. Dr. Rivera’s work focuses on women’s literacy, Latino Studies, and social inequalities in public education.
Kathleen Weiler is Professor of Education at
A sociologist and activist, Loretta J. Williams directs the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, a 24 year old national network with a hub office at Simmons College, that, among other things, publishes Multidiversity: Myers Book Commentary and the annual Sheroes Womyn Warriors calendar series. She consults locally and nationally on multicultural organizational development with particular attention to anti-oppression strategies.
Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies
FALL & SPRING, Tuesdays, 1:00 - 4:00 PM / 9.9.08 - 5.5.09
Meets every other week at MIT, building and room TBA
A writing workshop for dissertation writers. Classes will include presentation and discussion of students’ work-in-progress. Discussion will move back and forth between theoretical considerations and practical ones as we address three subjects central to dissertation work: the archive, methodology, and rhetoric. Each student will be asked to reflect on ways that feminism and gender studies affected her discipline’s views of its appropriate archive and on the question of what archive of materials is best suited to answer the questions raised in her dissertation. We will also consider general issues of scholarly method, methodological issues that feminism and gender studies have raised, and methodological issues prominent within the disciplines of participants’ different disciplinary fields. The inquiry into rhetoric will ask how a dissertation writer convinces various audiences that her work is significant. Each student will also give an oral presentation to the group that has been self-consciously adapted for an interdisciplinary audience. Enrollment is limited to ten students.
Faculty:
Susan Staves is Paul Proswimmer Professor Emerita of
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