University Bulletin (2019-2020)

• Minor

The undergraduate interdisciplinary minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies 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, disability, and class.

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:

1. Know the major concepts that organize the field of sexuality and queer studies;
2. 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;
3. Understand the complex and contingent relationships among sex, gender, and sexuality;
4. 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
5. 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:

1. 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;
2. Be able to conduct qualitative and/or quantitative research in relevant disciplines;
3. Undertake independent research and present it in oral, written, and or/digital form through intellectually rigorous presentations;
4. Create scholarly research that questions assumptions about gender and sexuality; and
5. 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.

The program is open to all Brandeis undergraduates. Students should take the core course, SQS 6b, Sexuality and Queer Studies, as soon as possible, preferably in the first or second year. Students are required to declare the minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies no later than the beginning of their senior year, by meeting with the Undergraduate Advising Head and filling out a declaration form available from the Office of Academic Services. In consultation with the student, the Undergraduate Advising Head will assign each student an adviser, chosen from program faculty, who will assist the student in structuring a coherent course of study.

Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman
(African and Afro-American Studies, English, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Bernadette Brooten
(Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Classical Studies, Religious Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Wendy Cadge
(HSSP, Sociology, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

ChaeRan Freeze
(Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, History, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Thomas A. King
(English, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Ann Koloski-Ostrow
(Classical Studies, Anthropology, Fine Arts, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Sarah Lamb
(Anthropology, Health: Science, Society, and Policy, South Asian Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Paul Morrison
(English, Film, Television and Interactive Media)

Faith Smith
(African and Afro-American Studies, English, Latin American and Latino Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Students enrolled in Sexuality and Queer Studies will take five semester courses, as follows:

1. SQS 6b (Sexuality and Queer Studies). Ideally SQS 6b should be taken as the first course, as it provides an introduction to critical theories of gender and sexuality, the history of LGBTIAQ activism in the United States, and methods of analysis.

2. One course focusing on the history of sexuality and gender prior to WWII or gender constructs, sexuality, and cultural systems from a comparative perspective. The following courses fulfill this requirement: AAAS 135a, ANTH 144a, ANTH 166b, CLAS 140a, COML 150b, ENG 28b, ENG 153a, HIST 71b, HIST 142b, HIST/SOC 170b, HIST/SOC 216a, NEJS 29a, NEJS 148b, NEJS 166a, SQS 145b, SQS 160a. Note: ENG 57b 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.

3. Three additional courses chosen from the list of SQS Elective Courses given below. Two of these three courses must be at the 100-level.

4. 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.

5. With the approval of the Undergraduate Advising Head, students may substitute an independent study, internship, senior essay, or other capstone experience, taken under a SQS 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.

6. Students who wish to minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies and major in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality 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, Gender, and Sexuality Studies may count no more than one course toward both degrees.

7. 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.

8. Minors are allowed to get credit for one course taken while abroad. These limits are in place regardless of how many semesters are spent abroad. Courses taken while abroad can fulfill elective distribution requirements, as determined by the UAH. Students are not allowed to substitute courses taken while abroad for SQS 6b, nor can they receive credit for internships taken abroad.

SQS 6b Sexuality and Queer Studies
[ djw 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.
V Varun Chaudhry

SQS 126a Trans(gress)ing the 'Normal': Transgender and Sex/Gender Nonconforming Lives
[ ss ]
Introduces the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. We will trace out the terrain of "transgender," its historical and contemporary articulations from a cross-cultural perspective. Social, cultural, political and historical changes will be our focus in order to gain a deeper insight into the formation and circulation of "transgender" as a category, as well as into transgender lives, identity and politics. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

SQS 160a Transnational Sexualities 
[ nw ss ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took WMGS 160a in prior years.
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. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

SQS 6b Sexuality and Queer Studies
[ djw 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.
V Varun Chaudhry

AAAS 135a Race, Sex, and Colonialism
[ djw oc ss ]
Explores the histories of interracial sexual relations as they have unfolded in a range of colonial contexts and examines the relationships between race and sex, on one hand, and the exercise of colonial power, on the other. Usually offered every year.
Carina Ray

ANTH 144a The Anthropology of Gender
[ djw nw ss wi ]
This course offers a 2-credit optional Experiential Learning practicum.
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.
Anita Hannig, Sarah Lamb, Keridwen Luis, or Ellen Schattschneider

ANTH 166b Queer Anthropology: Sexualities and Genders in Cross-Cultural Perspective
[ djw 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.
Brian Horton, Sarah Lamb, or Keridwen Luis

CLAS 140a Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Greek and Roman Art and Text
[ ca djw hum wi ]
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.
Ann O. 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.
Stephen Dowden

ENG 28b Queer Readings: Before Stonewall
[ hum ]
Students read texts as artifacts of social beliefs, desires, and anxieties about sexed bodies and their pleasures. Readings may include Plato, Virgil, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Phillips, Behn, Gray, Tennyson, Lister, Whitman, Dickinson, Wilde, Freud, Woolf, Barnes, Stein, Larsen, Genet, and Baldwin. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas 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.
Thomas King

HIST 71b Latin American and Caribbean History II: Modernity, Medicine, Sexuality
[ djw hum nw ss ]
Studies the idea of "modernity" in Latin America and Caribbean, centered on roles of health and human reproduction in definitions of the "modern" citizen: post-slavery labor, race and national identity; modern politics and economics; transnational relations. Usually offered every year.
Gregory Childs

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 third year.
Alice Kelikian

HIST/SOC 170b Gender and Sexuality in South Asia
[ djw ss ]
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or permission of the instructor.
Explores historical and contemporary debates about gender and sexuality in South Asia; revisits concepts of "woman," "sex," "femininity," "home," "family," "community," "nation," "reform," "protection," and "civilization" across the colonial and postcolonial periods. Usually offered every second year.
Hannah Muller and Gowri Vijayakumar

HIST/SOC 216a Migration, Dislocation and Dispossession in North American History
Prerequisite for undergraduates: A course on immigration.
Explores migration, displacement of Native Americans and Civil War refugees within North America. It examines contests over land, movements of people, patterns of settlement, senses of home, the meanings of dispossession, and debates over empire and citizenship. Usually offered every third year.
Abigail Cooper and Karen Hansen

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.
Staff

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.
Staff

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 third year.
ChaeRan Freeze

SQS 160a Transnational Sexualities 
[ nw ss ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took WMGS 160a in prior years.
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. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

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.
Faith Smith

CLAS 140a Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Greek and Roman Art and Text
[ ca djw hum wi ]
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.
Ann O. 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.
Stephen Dowden

ENG 28b Queer Readings: Before Stonewall
[ hum ]
Students read texts as artifacts of social beliefs, desires, and anxieties about sexed bodies and their pleasures. Readings may include Plato, Virgil, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Phillips, Behn, Gray, Tennyson, Lister, Whitman, Dickinson, Wilde, Freud, Woolf, Barnes, Stein, Larsen, Genet, and Baldwin. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas King

ENG 31b Rethinking the Gay Bar: Queer Utopias from Stonewall to Pulse
[ hum ]
Identifies genre in LGBT literature, history and theory. Pays special attention to literary and artistic experimentation in representing LGBT spaces. Authors may include Leslie Feinberg, Michel Foucault, José Esteban Muñoz, Audre Lorde, Martin Duberman, Terrance Hayes, and Samuel R. Delany. Special one-time offering, spring 2019.
Brenden O'Donnell

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.
Thomas 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.
Faith Smith

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.
Paul 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.
Thomas King

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ hum nw ]
Introduces students to writings on love, desire and sexuality from ancient India to the present. Topics include ancient eroticism, love in Urdu poetry, Gandhi's sexual asceticism, colonial regulation of sexuality, Bollywood, queer fiction and more. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka Anjaria

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.
Thomas 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.
Thomas King

HIST/SOC 170b Gender and Sexuality in South Asia
[ djw ss ]
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or permission of the instructor.
Explores historical and contemporary debates about gender and sexuality in South Asia; revisits concepts of "woman," "sex," "femininity," "home," "family," "community," "nation," "reform," "protection," and "civilization" across the colonial and postcolonial periods. Usually offered every second year.
Hannah Muller and Gowri Vijayakumar

HIST/SOC 216a Migration, Dislocation and Dispossession in North American History
Prerequisite for undergraduates: A course on immigration.
Explores migration, displacement of Native Americans and Civil War refugees within North America. It examines contests over land, movements of people, patterns of settlement, senses of home, the meanings of dispossession, and debates over empire and citizenship. Usually offered every third year.
Abigail Cooper and Karen Hansen

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.
Staff

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.
Staff

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 third year.
ChaeRan Freeze

NEJS 178a Love, Sex, and Power in Israeli Culture
[ fl hum ]
Taught in Hebrew. May be repeated for credit.
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.
Ilana Szobel

SOC 169b Issues in Sexuality
[ oc ss ]
Not open to first-year undergraduate students. This course counts toward the completion of the joint MA degree in Sociology & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality 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.
Staff

SQS 160a Transnational Sexualities 
[ nw ss ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took WMGS 160a in prior years.
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. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

THA 145a Queer Theater
[ ca deis-us ]
Explores significant plays that have shaped and defined gay identity during the past 100 years. Playwrights span Wilde to Taylor Mac. Examining texts as literature, history, and performance, we will explore cultural change, politics, gender, the AIDS epidemic, camp, and coming out. Usually offered every third year.
Dmitry Troyanovsky

WMGS 151a The Social Politics of Sexual Education
[ deis-us ss ]
Covers the history and sociocultural politics of sexual education in the Global North with a strong focus on the U.S. Using queer, feminist, disability, and race theory, it examines what shapes "sex" and "education." Usually offered every third year.
Keridwen Luis

WMGS 156b Sexuality and Healthcare
[ deis-us ss ]
Considers how ideas about gender and sexuality affect healthcare, with a particular focus on queer and trans communities. Examines the creation of "the homosexual" and "the transsexual" as medicalized categories; the recent expansion of access to healthcare; and medicine's role in constructing certain kinds of bodies. Usually offered every second year.
Keridwen Luis

WMGS 166a Gender, Sexuality, and Social Media
[ deis-us ss ]
Asks how gender, sexuality, race, dis/ability, class, and other intersections of identity impact how we use and appear on social media. Early internet theorists imagined the World Wide Web as a "free" society, where "bodily" issues such as race, gender, and disability would somehow disappear. However, these identities have not vanished; in fact, we might argue that they remain even more potent in today's age of constant media connection. We will explore feminist theories of media, gender, sexuality, and race, as well as applying these theories to current events online. Students will explore the boundaries of digital activism, question the ways we continue to be embodied online, and consider power relations, discipline, and surveillance. Usually offered every third year.
Keridwen Luis

WMGS 171a Transgender Studies
[ deis-us ss ]
Introduces students to key terms and debate in the field of transgender studies, while critically interrogating how ideologies of race, class, gender, and sexuality have informed the category's rapid institutionalization. Usually offered every year.
V Varun Chaudhry

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 ]
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.
Daniel Breen

AMST 124b Sex, Love, and Marriage in America
[ 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.
Keren McGinity

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.
Harleen Singh

ECON 69a The Economics of Race and Gender
[ deis-us 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.
Elizabeth Brainerd

ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.
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.
Staff

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.
Kate Moran or Marion 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.
Gordon Fellman

SOC 189a Sociology of Body and Health
[ deis-us 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.
Sara Shostak

WMGS 89a When Violence Hits Home: Internship in Domestic Violence
Combines fieldwork in domestic and sexual violence prevention programs with a fortnightly seminar exploring cultural and interpersonal facets of violence from a feminist perspective. Topics include theories, causes and prevention of rape, battering, child abuse, and animal abuse. Internships provide practical experience in local organizations such as rape crisis, battered women's violence prevention, and child abuse prevention programs. Usually offered every fall.
Deirdre Hunter