Spring 2009 Courses (projected - subject to change)
Please note that the registrar's website is the official listing of courses.
Core Courses
WMGS 5a Women and Gender in Culture and Society
C. Freeze, T/Th 10:30-12:00pm
Note: Discussion sections will meet outside of class
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 105b Feminist Theories in Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspective
Prerequisite: Students are encouraged, though not required, to take WMGS 5a prior to enrolling in this course. May not be repeated for credit by students who have taken WMNS 105a in previous years.
Examines diverse theories of sex and gender within a multicultural framework, considering historical changes in feminist thought, the theoretical underpinnings of various feminist practices, and the implications of diverse and often conflicting theories for both academic inquiry and social change.
WMGS 106b Women in the Health Care System
L. Klerman
May not be repeated for credit by students who have taken WMNS 106b in previous years.
Explores the position and roles of women in the U.S. health care system and how it defines and meets women's health needs. The implications for health care providers, health care management, and health policy are discussed.
WMGS 146a Gender, Technology, and the Body
Explores the ways in which specific technologies are involved in establishing gender as a natural fact or in reshaping it through bodily manipulation. Investigates technologies ranging from photography, film, and anthropometry to bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery.
WMGS 205a Graduate Foundational Course in Women's and Gender Studies
J. Mandrell
An advanced interdisciplinary inquiry into the history, theories, concepts and practices that have formed women's and gender studies as a scholarly field, with particular attention to current intellectual trends and critical controversies.
Elective Courses
AMST 142b Love, Law and Labor: Asian American Women and Literature
S. Dave, T/F 1:30-3:00pm
ANTH 127a Medicine, Body, and Culture
Staff, T/Th 5:00-6:30pm
ANTH 145a Anthropology of the Body
S. Lamb, T/F 3:00-4:30pm
NEJS 233a Gender and Jewish Studies
S. Fishman, T 1:30-4:30pm
SOC 210b Gender and Race Relationality
K. Hansen, F 9:00-12:00pm
Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies
Please visit web.mit.edu/gcws for additional information about GCWS.
Gender, Race, and the Complexities of Science and Technology: A Problem-Based Learning Experiment
Thursdays, 5:00 - 8:00 PM / 1.29.09 – 5.14.09
Meets at MIT, building and room TBA
Science and technology are relatively insulated from wider public deliberation-art and literary criticism is familiar, but not "science criticism." Yet there is a large body of social interpretation of science and technology, to which feminist, anti-racist, and other critical analysts and activists have made significant contributions. Building on this work, this course sets out to challenge the barriers of expertise, gender, race, class, and place that restrict wider access to and understanding of the production of scientific knowledge and technologies. In this spirit, students participate in an innovative, problem-based learning approach that allows them to shape their own directions of inquiry and develop critical faculties as investigators and skills as prospective teachers. In these inquiries students are guided by individualized bibliographies co-constructed with the instructors and by the projects of the other students. Students from all fields and levels of preparation are encouraged to join and learn about gender, race, and the complexities of science and technology.
Faculty:
Anne Fausto-Sterling is Professor of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University and is a visiting professor at the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at MIT in 2009. Author of scientific publications in developmental genetics and developmental ecology, she has achieved recognition for works that challenge entrenched scientific beliefs while engaging with the general public.
Peter Taylor is a Professor at the UMass Boston, where he directs the Programs in Science, Technology and Values and Critical & Creative Thinking. His teaching spans biomedical and environmental sciences, science and technology studies, critical pedagogy and reflective practice. He is author of Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement and co-editor of Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities.
Gender, Armed Conflict, and Peacemaking
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM / 1.28.09 – 5.13.09
Meets at MIT, building and room TBA
Peace Keeping operations involving both military and civilian personnel have been deployed in a number of countries such as Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Afghanistan. These interventions have come about following intense levels of violence, breakdown in law and order, systems of governance and social systems as well as violations of human rights. This course is designed to review the phenomena of conflict, forced migration and militarization from a gender perspective to highlight the policy and operational implications that arise from this analysis.
The gendered nature of conflict and intervention will be explored from a multi-disciplinary framework involving anthropology, sociology, policy analysis, philosophy and the arts. Presenters will utilize literature, poetry, film, witness testimonies from the field, ethnographic narratives and other resources to explore the complex ways in which women and men experience, manage and respond to violence and situations of protracted crisis.
Faculty:
Carol Cohn is the Director of the Boston Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights. Her research and writing has focused on gender and international security, ranging from work on discourse of civilian defense intellectuals, gender integration issues in the US military, and, most extensively, weapons of mass destruction.
Gordana Rabrenovic is Associate Professor of Sociology and Education and Associate Director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University. Her substantive specialties include community studies, urban education and inter group conflict and violence.
Lisa Rivera is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her areas of specialization are moral and political theory, feminist philosophy and ethics in international affairs.
Feminist Inquiry
Thursdays, 6 - 9 PM / 1.31.08 – 5.8.08
Meets at MIT, building and room TBA
This course investigates theories and practices of feminist inquiry across a range of disciplines. Doing feminist research involves rethinking disciplinary assumptions and methodologies, developing new understandings of what counts as knowledge, seeking alternative ways of understanding the origins of problems/issues, formulating new ways of positing questions and redefining the relationship between subjects and objects of study.
All research grows out of complex connections between epistemologies, methodologies and research methods. We shall explore how these connections are formed in the traditional disciplines and raise questions about why the traditional disciplines are inadequate and/or problematic for feminist inquiry. What, specifically, are the feminist critiques of these disciplines? The course will consider methodology, i.e., the theory and analysis of how research should proceed. We shall be especially attentive to epistemological issues—pre-suppositions about the nature of knowledge. We shall examine the theoretical positions our authors take, and evaluate the usefulness of their methodological approaches.
As feminist inquiry has developed over the last thirty-some years, it has become increasingly clear that its practice is inherently interdisciplinary. Our aim is to promote the development of feminist theory and methods by providing a forum for sharing, assessing, discussing and debating strategies used by feminist scholars in an array of fields such as literary and cultural studies, history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, political science, religion, and international studies. We will also explore in what specific ways feminist inquiry is, or can be, interdisciplinary. What topics are especially illuminated by an interdisciplinary gendered approach to the world? We will examine how feminist theorists may create the wider interdisciplinary spaces with which to explore problems that cut across, and expose as arbitrary, traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Faculty:
Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is an Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University. Her areas of specialization include African American literature and gender and sexuality studies. She has published articles in African American Review, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, and The Faulkner Journal, among others. Her current research concerns representations of transgressive sexualities in African American fiction.
Frinde Maher is Professor of Education at Wheaton College, where she directs the Secondary Education Program. She has taught Women’s Studies courses for many years, including, for the past decade, Feminist Theory. She has published widely in the fields of feminist pedagogy and women in education, and is co-author, with Mary Kay Tetreault, of two books: The Feminist Classroom (1994; second edition 2001) and Privilege and Diversity in the Academy (2007).
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 Brandeis University. Her scholarly interests have centered on English literature and history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is the author of Player’s Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660-1833, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660-1789, and articles and essays on literary, legal, historical, medical, and musical subjects.
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