University Bulletin (2019-2020)

• Minor

• Major (BA)

• Master of Arts

Undergraduate Program

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies challenges students to explore and think critically about the ways gender and sexuality are constructed and experienced within societies and across historical periods. This exciting interdisciplinary field investigates how assumptions about gender and sexuality operate in society and intersect with other axes of identity and inequality, including race, class, ethnicity, religion, ability, age, and nationality. Students have the opportunity to explore feminine, masculine, transgender, gender nonconforming, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and heterosexual identities and experiences in contemporary and historical global contexts. One important topic is the history of struggles around women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights in the United States and around the world. The curriculum brings students into contact with the extensive research on women, gender, sexuality, and feminism that has burgeoned over the past fifty years. Students also think about challenges faced by marginalized individuals in both domestic and foreign spaces, and work to conceptualize solutions.

Graduate Programs in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

The Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program (WGS) offers a stand-alone MA program as well as a number of joint Master’s programs outlined below. WGS provides a strong grounding in discipline-specific studies along with an interdisciplinary education in the theories, methods, and scholarship of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. By introducing students to current research in a variety of fields, Master’s degree programs generate cross-disciplinary dialogue and prepare students for positions and professions in women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Students enrolled in PhD programs in eight different fields (anthropology, English, history, music, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, psychology, sociology, social policy) are eligible to undertake the joint MA. Five fields—four in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (anthropology, English, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, sociology) and one in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management (sustainable international development)—offer a terminal Master’s with Women's, Gender, and Sexuality.

Undergraduate Major

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies draws upon the full range of the human arts and sciences to examine the diversity of gender and sexuality within and across cultures; women's past and present experiences; representations of women and people with varying sexualities in diverse cultures; and concepts, structures, and practices that underwrite gender and sexuality as social categories. Students in our program have the opportunity to study the global and historical range of the lives, works, and circumstances of women, men and gender non-conforming people; to scrutinize different theoretical frameworks that seek to describe, explain, and remedy sexual inequalities and gender inequities; and to encounter current findings and debates within the field. As it engages students with the extensive research on women, gender, and sexuality that has burgeoned during the past thirty years, as well as with creative work focusing on gender and sexuality, our curriculum is particularly committed to addressing the intersections of gender with race, class, nation, religion, age, sexuality, and ethnicity, among other critical vectors of identity.

Knowledge

Students completing the major in women's, gender, and sexuality studies will be able to:

1. Analyze the lives, roles and experiences of women, men and gender non-conforming people in contemporary and historical global contexts

2. Understand gender and sexuality as dynamic components of human existence across cultures and academic disciplines

3. Understand how gender and sexuality intersect with other complex categories, including race, class, ethnicity, disability, religion and age

4. Understand and rethink gender’s and sexuality’s impacts on other disciplines

5. Use gender and sexuality as categories of analysis in diverse fields of the academy and in the wider world

6. Articulate an understanding of feminism and LGBTQ+ rights movements in a national and global context

7. Learn and apply feminist and other gender-based methodologies addressing distinct cultures and historical periods

Core Skills

1. Read and interpret texts and/or data from a variety of disciplines, historical periods, and cultures

2. Conceptualize, develop, and engage in complex research both orally and in writing

3. Create scholarly research that questions assumptions about women, gender, and sexuality

4. Analyze the situation of real individuals in daily life in the world and the understandings of gender and sexuality within a range of global societies and historical periods

Social Justice

Women's, gender, and sexuality studies as a field is explicitly committed to fostering justice for all women, men, and gender non-conforming individuals world-wide. It is thus necessarily concerned with the structural inequalities wrought not only by sexism but by racism, economic exploitation, imperialism, global traffic, religious oppression, homophobia, and transphobia, among other instruments or expressions of inequality. Our Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program has pledged as 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. This commitment necessarily means learning about the different experiences and struggles of women, men and gender non-conforming people both around the world and within the United States. 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, and nationality of their authors. As a program we are committed to 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.

Experiential Learning

Because women’s, gender, and sexuality studies developed in conjunction with a wider movement for social justice and because studying the lives of women, men and gender non-confirming people in the past and present necessarily means confronting social, political, economic and cultural inequalities, women’s studies tends to encourage students toward experiential and activist learning. (Sometimes the movement lies in the other direction: students already concerned about injustice are motivated to gain the intellectual background to act effectively.) Our program provides particular opportunities for service learning and is developing new ones. In the 1990s the Program established an annual internship course, When Violence Hits Home: Internship in Domestic Violence (WMGS 89a). This course provides students with a rigorous intellectual study of gender and violence as well as guidance through a semester-long internship. Many students have extended their internships into the full year, have drawn their senior projects from this field, and have gone on to related careers.

Upon Graduation

The women's, gender, and sexuality studies curriculum prepares students for a wide range of careers. Graduates of our program are applying their skills and knowledge to academic and professional pursuits in medicine, law, education, government, social service, public policy, religion, counseling, international relations, journalism, publishing, business, and the arts.

Graduate Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Master of Arts in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Knowledge

Students completing the M.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies will be able to demonstrate knowledge of:

1. The core theories, concepts, and debates of interdisciplinary scholarship in women’s, gender, sexuality, feminist, and queer studies.

2. How gender and sexuality intersect with other complex categories, including race, class, nation, and ethnicity.

3. How feminist methodologies are employed in research.

4. How feminist and queer theories connect with practice through feminist and queer activism.

Core Skills

Students completing the M.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies will:

1. Develop critical analytical skills in assessing theories, concepts, and data related to women, gender and sexuality from a variety of disciplines.

2. Be able to engage in and conduct original research, from research design, to data analysis, to writing.

3. Prepare to be professionals in careers that require training at an advanced level in issues related to women, gender, and sexuality.

Social Justice

Our Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program aims 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. This commitment necessarily means learning about the different experiences and struggles of women, men, and gender nonconforming people both around the world and within the United States.

As early as possible in their academic careers, students interested in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies should take WMGS 5a (Women, Genders, and Sexualities), the required introduction to the field. In order to declare a major or minor, each student should meet with the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies undergraduate advising head, who will help them select as an adviser a faculty member well suited to the student's academic interests. The adviser will help to plan a course of study tailored to the student's intellectual and professional interests, while meeting the core and elective requirements for the degree.

The Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program offers three MA degree options:

The first option is a terminal Master's degree in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The MA program is a full-time, two semester program (8 courses) that offers students grounding in feminist and gender theory, knowledge, and methodologies.

Prospective students apply to the WGS program through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The general requirements for admission to the Graduate School apply to candidates for admission to graduate study in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Admission decisions are based primarily on the candidate's undergraduate academic record, letters of recommendation, Graduate Record Examination scores, writing sample, and personal statement that is part of the application form.

The second option is a joint terminal Master's degree in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in conjunction with one of the following five fields: anthropology, English, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, sociology, or sustainable international development. This degree option may require one or two calendar years, depending on requirements in the affiliated program. Please see the WGS website for information on Joint Program advisers.

Prospective students apply to one of the five home departments through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences or the Heller School. For specific admission requirements, see the Bulletin section of the home department in which there is interest in pursuing a joint degree.

The third option is a joint Master's degree while in pursuit of a PhD in one of the following eight fields: anthropology, English, history, music, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, psychology, social policy (Heller School), or sociology. This degree option replaces a Master's degree in the student's program.

Current Brandeis PhD students may pursue the joint MA at any time during their graduate career with the approval of their adviser and the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Prospective PhD students interested in pursuing a joint MA must apply directly to the PhD program through the home department but should note their interest in the joint program in their statement of purpose.

Students pursuing the joint MA are encouraged to enroll in courses offered by the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) at MIT.

Sarah Lamb, Chair
(Anthropology)

Gannit Ankori
(Fine Arts)

Elizabeth Brainerd
(Economics; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Wendy Cadge
(Sociology)

V Varun Chaudhry
(Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Yuri Doolan
(History; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

ChaeRan Freeze, Director of Graduate Studies
(Near Eastern and Judaic Studies)

Jill Greenlee
(Politics)

Karen Hansen
(Sociology)

Anita Hill
(Heller School)

Peter Kalb
(Fine Arts)

Shoniqua Roach
(African and African American Studies; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Ellen Schattschneider
(Anthropology)

Harleen Singh
(German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Marion Smiley
(Philosophy)

Faith Smith
(African and African American Studies; English)

Ilana Szobel
(Near Eastern and Judaic Studies)

Gowri Vijayakumar
(Sociology)

Sabine von Mering
(German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature)

Sava Berhané
(International Business School)

Elizabeth Bradfield
(English)

Beth Clark
(Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Susan Dibble
(Theater Arts)

Cristina Espinosa
(Heller School)

Gordon Fellman
(Sociology)

Elizabeth Ferry
(Anthropology)

Matthew Fraleigh
(German, Russian, and East Asian Languages and Literature)

Laura Goldin
(American Studies)

Anita Hannig
(Anthropology)

Deirdre Hunter
(Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Caren Irr
(English)

Alice Kelikian
(History)

Thomas King
(English)

Ann Koloski-Ostrow
(Classical Studies)

Adrianne Krstansky
(Theater Arts)

Keridwen Luis
(Anthropology/Sociology/Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies)

Nidhiya Menon
(Economics)

Robin Feuer Miller
(German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature)

David Sherman
(English)

Sara Shostak
(Sociology)

Aida Yuen Wong
(Fine Arts)

1. Successful completion of WMGS 5a.

2. Four additional semester courses that carry the WMGS designation or are approved as Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies electives. No more than two of these courses may come from a single department or program.

3. No course with a final grade below C- can count toward fulfilling the requirements for the minor in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

4. No course counting for the minor may be taken on a pass/fail basis.

5. Minors can 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 WMGS 5a or WMGS 105b, nor can they receive credit for internships taken abroad.

All minors are encouraged to submit a senior paper on women's, gender, and sexuality studies to be considered for the Giller-Sagan Prize.

Nine courses are required for the major and are to be distributed as follows:

1. Two core courses are required: WMGS 5a (Women, Gender, and Sexualities) and WMGS 105b (Feminisms: History, Theory and Practice), or AAAS/WGS 136a (Black Feminist Thought). Both WMGS 5a and WMGS 105b will be offered each fall. AAAS/WGS 136a is offered every spring. With permission of the Undergraduate Advising Head, students may be allowed to substitute another feminist theory course for WMGS 105b or AAAS/WGS 136a.

2. Seven additional courses that either carry the WMGS designation or are approved as Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies electives. These seven courses must meet the following additional requirements:

   1. At least one course must have a historical focus encompassing a period before 1945. Courses that fulfill this requirement include but are not limited to: AAAS 135a, AMST 124b, ANTH 141b, CLAS 140a, ENG 28b, ENG 44b, ENG 153a, ENG 243a, FA 69b, FA 157a, FA 176a, FA 178a, GECS 131b, HIST 71b, HIST 121a, HIST 142b, HIST 157b, HIST 158b, HIST 161a, HIST 179a, NEJS 115b, NEJS 148b, NEJS 166a.

   2. At least one course must engage in a systematic and comprehensive exploration of cultural differences, including racial, class and/or ethnic difference within or across cultures. These courses include but are not limited to: AAAS 125b, AAAS 133b, AAAS 135a, AAAS/ENG 141b, AAAS/WGS 125a, AAAS/WGS 136a, AAPI 150b, ANTH 144a, ANTH 178b, COML 122b, ENG 107a, ENG 127b, ENG 138b, ENG 152a, ENG 171b, FA 176a, HIST/SOC 170b, HIST/SOC 216a, IGS 136b, SAS 110b, SAS 150b, SOC 130a, SOC 138a, SQS 160a, WMGS 135b, WMGS 161b, WMGS 170a.

   3. At least one course must focus on sexuality. These courses include but are not limited to: AAAS 125b, AAAS 135a, ANTH 144a, ANTH 166b, CLAS 140a, ENG 31b, ENG 87a, ENG 107a, ENG 121a, ENG 151a, ENG 152a, ENG 153a, HIST 71b, HIST 142b, HIST/SOC 170b, HIST/SOC 216a, NEJS 29a, NEJS 148b, NEJS 166a, NEJS 178a, SOC 169b, SQS 6b,  SQS 126a, SQS 160a, THA 145a, WMGS 151a, WMGS 156b.

      No more than three courses may be taken from any one department or program outside Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Students are encouraged to undertake an internship in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as one of their electives. Courses that fulfill the requirements for another major may also count toward the major in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Students are not allowed to double count between elective categories listed in numbers 1, 2, and 3, above.

3. Foundational Literacies: As part of completing the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies major, students must:

   • Fulfill the writing intensive requirement by successfully completing: WMGS 105b.

   • Fulfill the oral communication requirement by successfully completing one of the following: WMGS 5a or WMGS 105b.

   • Fulfill the digital literacy requirement by successfully completing: WMGS 5a.

4. To be considered for honors in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, students are required to complete and defend a senior essay or thesis. Program honors are awarded on the basis of excellence in all courses applied to the major, as well as all courses taken in the program, including the senior essay or thesis, as determined by the program faculty.
   
   Completion of a senior essay: Students interested in writing a senior essay must complete either WMGS 99a (fall) or WMGS 99b (spring). Students who complete the essay option cannot count either WMGS 99a or b toward the nine courses required for the major.

   Completion of a senior thesis: Students interested in writing a senior thesis must complete WMGS 99a in the fall and WMGS 99b in the spring. Students who complete the thesis option (WMGS 99a and b) may receive one course credit towards the nine courses required for the major provided the thesis earns a grade of C or higher.

   Both the essay and the thesis options require a defense. Three faculty members must evaluate the completed thesis; two faculty members must evaluate the essay. Of these faculty members, one must be from the WGS core faculty, and the second from the WGS core or affiliate faculty. For thesis students, the third reader may be selected from the general Brandeis faculty.

   Students are encouraged to revise the essay or thesis based on the comments of their core faculty readers and submit the revised copy to be considered for the Giller-Sagan Prize at the end of the spring term. Students must receive a “C” or higher on their senior thesis for credit towards the major.

5. No course with a final grade below C- can count toward fulfilling the requirements for the major in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

6. No course counting for the major may be taken on a pass/fail basis.

7. Majors are allowed to request WGS credit for up to two courses 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 WMGS 5a or WMGS 105b, AAAS/WGS 136a, nor can they receive credit for internships taken abroad.

Brandeis undergraduates who are NEJS or IMES majors with either a second major in WMGS or a minor in WMGS are invited in their senior year to apply for admission to the BA/MA joint degree in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Students must complete all requirements and earn the BA, including the successful completion of the major in NEJS or IMES prior to the start of the one-year Master's program.

Program of Study

Fourteen courses are required:

1. Internal transfer credit: seven Brandeis undergraduate courses (NEJS, IMES, WMGS, and/or approved cross-listed courses) numbered 100 or above for which grades of B- or higher have been earned.

2. Seven courses taken in the fifth year: four approved NEJS electives and three WMGS courses approved by the program adviser. Between the BA and the MA the following WMGS courses must be completed: a course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b or the feminist inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS), or an alternate), WMGS 205a and two elective courses in WMGS, one inside and one outside the NEJS department.

3. Successful completion of one of the following: a comprehensive examination, a culminating project or a Master’s thesis. If a Master’s thesis encompasses both a NEJS and a WMGS component it will satisfy requirement D below.

4. Joint MA paper requirement: Completion of a Master’s research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members, one of whom is a member of the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department, and one of whom is a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty. NEJS 299b Master’s Thesis may be taken for credit one semester only.

Resident Requirement

One year of full-time residence (the fifth year) is required subsequent to completing the BA.

Language Requirement

All candidates are required to demonstrate proficiency in Biblical or Modern Hebrew or in Arabic.

Program of Study

Candidates for the degree of Masters of Arts in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies must fulfill the residence requirement of one full year of coursework (eight semester courses), and successfully complete the following course requirements:

1. WMGS 205a, the graduate foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (usually offered in the fall semester).

2. A course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b, usually offered in the spring semester or the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)).

3. Six elective graduate courses, four of which must be cross listed with WMGS. Students must complete a coherent course of study that is approved by a faculty advisor. Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Reading course (WMGS 310a,b).

4. MA Paper Requirement: Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally 25-40 pages) on a topic related to the course of study. The paper will be read by two faculty members, one of whom must be a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty. In consultation with the primary advisor, a student may register for WMGS 299a, "Master's Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.

5. The program may take an additional one or two semesters to complete as an Extended Master's student.

Program of Study

Candidates for the joint degree of Master of Arts in Anthropology & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies fulfill the residence requirement of one full year of course work (eight semester courses), and complete the following course requirements:

1. ANTH 203b Contemporary Anthropological Theory (or ANTH 201a History of Anthropological Thought, by petition).

2. ANTH 244a Gender and Sexuality Seminar (or ANTH 144a Anthropology of Gender, by petition).

3. WMGS 205a or another course designated as a graduate foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

4. A course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b or the feminist inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)).

5. Four elective graduate courses, including one in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, from a field other than anthropology, selected with the approval of the student's faculty adviser. Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Reading course (WMGS 310a,b).

6. Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members, one of whom is a member of the anthropology department and one of whom is a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty. In consultation with the primary advisor, a student may register for WMGS 299a,b, "Master’s Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.

7. The program may take an additional one or two semesters to complete as an Extended Master's student.

Language Requirement

There is no foreign language requirement for the joint Master's degree.

Program of Study

1. WMGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

2. One course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b or the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)).

3. Five additional courses in the English department selected from 100-level courses and graduate seminars (200-level courses). At least three of these courses must be at the 200 level. One of these courses must be listed as an elective with the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. ENG 200a (Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies) is optional but recommended. (ENG 352a/b cannot be counted towards the 200-level requirement.) Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Research course.

4. One Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course in a department other than the English department.

5. Language requirement: A reading knowledge of a language other than English with evident relevance to intended field of study or to professional commitments must be demonstrated by passing a written translation examination. The completion of the language requirement at another university does not exempt the student from the Brandeis requirement. Terminal joint MA candidates who are native speakers of a language other than English are exempt from the requirement.

6. Joint MA paper requirement: Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members, at least one of whom is a member of the English department, and at least one of whom is a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty. In consultation with the primary advisor, a student may register for WMGS 299a,b, "Master's Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.

7. The program may take an additional one or two semesters to complete as an Extended Master's student. Note: ENG 350a (Proseminar), a credit/no-credit course that does not count toward the eight course requirement, is optional but recommended.

Interested students must first be admitted to the PhD program.

Program of Study

During the course of their work toward the PhD, students in History may earn a joint MA with Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies by completing the following requirements in conjunction with program requirements for the MA in History:

1. WMGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

2. One course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b or the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)).

3. Two elective courses in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, one inside and one outside the history department. Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Reading course (WMGS 310a,b).

4. Completion of a master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members, one of whom is a member of the history department and one of whom is a member of the Women's and Gender Studies core or affiliate faculty. In consultation with the primary advisor, a student may register for WMGS 299a,b, "Master's Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses in History.

Interested students must first be admitted to the PhD program.

The Music department offers the opportunity for Ph.D. students to earn a joint M.A. with Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Topics include feminist theory, gender studies, cultural history and the investigation of work by and about women.

Program of Study

1. WMGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

2. One course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b, or the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)).

3. Two courses at the graduate level from another department listed as electives in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Reading course (WMGS 310a,b).

4. Four courses at the graduate level in the Music department. One graduate course from the consortium that is related to music & women’s, gender and sexualities studies may be substituted. One of the four courses must include a seminar paper that focuses on a topic related to women's and gender studies. In cases where this is not possible, an independent study leading to a paper addressing an issue specifically related to music & women’s and gender studies may be substituted. MUS 171a is also required.

5. Attendance at all departmental musicology colloquia.

6. Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members, one of whom is a member of the music department and one of whom is a member of the Women's and Gender Studies core or affiliate faculty. In consultation with the primary advisor, a student may register for WMGS 299a,b, "Master's Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.

7. Additional requirements as listed in the accompanying Ph.D. program.

Language Requirement

There is no foreign language requirement for the joint Master's degree.

Residence Requirement

One year.

Program of Study

Courses must include:

1. WMGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

2. A course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b or the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)).

3. Two elective courses in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, one inside and one outside the NEJS department. Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Reading course (WMGS 310a,b).

4. The remaining courses must be jointly approved by each student's NEJS adviser and by the NEJS Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies adviser.

5. Successful completion of one of the following: a comprehensive examination, a culminating project or a Master’s thesis. If a Master’s thesis encompasses both a NEJS and a WGS component it will satisfy requirement G below.

6. Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members, one of whom is a member of the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department and one of whom is a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty. NEJS 299b Master's Thesis may be taken for credit one semester only.

7. All candidates are required to demonstrate language proficiency, normally in biblical or modern Hebrew or Arabic. The language requirement for Hebrew or Arabic may be fulfilled in one of two ways:

   1. By enrolling in and receiving a grade of B- or higher in a 40-level or higher Hebrew or Arabic course, or by passing a classical Hebrew text course, or modern Hebrew literature course taught in Hebrew;

   2. By passing the language examination offered by the advisor or by the Hebrew faculty or Arabic faculty.

8. All candidates for the Master of Arts degree are required to pass a comprehensive examination.

Residence Requirement

Ordinarily, two years of full-time residence are required at the normal course rate of seven courses each academic year. Students who enter with graduate credit from other recognized institutions may apply for transfer credit for up to four courses, or, with prior approval of the MA adviser, candidates may receive transfer credit for up to four courses at a university abroad. The program may take an additional one or two semesters to complete as an Extended Master's student.

Interested students must first be admitted to the PhD program.

1. PSYC 210a and b (Advanced Psychological Statistics I and II).

2. PSYC 211a (Graduate Research Methods in Psychology).

3. PSYC 300a and 302a (Proseminar in Brain, Body and Behavior I and II).

4. A PSYC course numbered PSYC 220 through PSYC 240 with successful completion of first-year research project in psychology, reported in APA manuscript format. This project must be on an issue relevant to women's, gender, and sexualities studies, and will be read, and must be accepted by two faculty members from the psychology department, one of whom should be a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty. If neither faculty member is associated with Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, then a third faculty member from the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program must be included on the review committee. This paper will serve as the Master's research paper.

5. A course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b or the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)).

6. One additional course from 100-level courses in psychology.

7. WMGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Reading course (WMGS 310a,b).

8. Two elective courses in Women's and Gender Studies.

9. Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members, one of whom is a member of the psychology department and one of whom is a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty. In consultation with the primary advisor, a student may register for WMGS 299a,b, "Master's Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.

Admission to the Joint Degree of Master of Public Policy & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies has been suspended.

Program of Study

Students must fulfill all core requirements for the MPP as described in the Heller School section found elsewhere in this Bulletin as well as the following:

1. WMGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

2. One course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b or the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)).

3. Two elective graduate courses in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (one inside the Heller School and one outside the Heller School). Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Reading course.

4. Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The MPP Capstone policy paper can fulfill this requirement as long as it is on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members, at least one of whom is a member of the Heller School faculty, and at least one of whom is a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty.

5. Courses in both programs will be reviewed to determine which would satisfy the requirements for both programs.

Please refer to the Heller School section found elsewhere in this Bulletin for complete information on MPP policies and procedures.

Program of Study

Interested students must first be admitted to the PhD program in Social Policy. Students may earn a joint MA with Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies by completing the following requirements in conjunction with program requirements for the PhD as described in the Heller School section found elsewhere in this Bulletin:

1. WMGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

2. A course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b or the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)).

3. Two courses cross-listed with Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (one inside the Heller School and one in any department other than the Heller School). Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Reading course (WMGS 310a,b).

4. Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members, one of whom is a member of the Heller School faculty and one of whom is a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty.

Please refer to the Heller School section found elsewhere in this Bulletin for complete information on PhD policies and procedures as this MA is open only to PhD students in social policy.

Program of Study

1. WMGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

2. One course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b, or the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)).

3. Two elective graduate courses in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, one inside and one outside the sociology department. Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Reading course (WMGS 310a,b).

4. Three graduate sociology courses (one theory, one outside the area of gender, and one elective, which could be a directed reading).

5. One additional elective graduate course.

6. Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members one of whom is a member of the Sociology department, and one of whom is a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty. In consultation with the primary advisor, a student may register for WMGS 299a,b, "Master's Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.

Language Requirement

There is no foreign language requirement for the joint Master's degree.

Residence Requirement

One year. The program may take an additional one or two semesters to complete as an Extended Master's student.

Program of Study

Students must fulfill all first-year requirements for the MA in Sustainable International Development as described in the Heller School section found elsewhere in this Bulletin as well as the following:

1. WMGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

2. A course in feminist research methodologies (WMGS 208b, or the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS)).

3. Two elective graduate courses in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (one inside the Heller School and one outside the Heller School).

4. Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. The paper will be read by two faculty members, one of whom is a member of the Heller core or adjunct faculty and one of whom is a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty.

5. Participation in the SID/MA Capstone Week

6. Courses in both programs will be reviewed to determine which would satisfy the requirements for both programs.

Please refer to the Heller School section found elsewhere in this Bulletin for complete information on MA policies and procedures.

WMGS 5a Women, Genders, and Sexualities
[ deis-us oc ss ]
This interdisciplinary course introduces central concepts and topics in the field of women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Explores the position of women and other genders 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 and sexuality intersect with many other vectors of identity and circumstance in forming human affairs. Usually offered every fall.
ChaeRan Freeze, Sarah Lamb, or Harleen Singh

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

WMGS 92a Internship and Analysis
Usually offered every semester.
Staff

WMGS 98a Independent Study
Independent readings, research, and writing on a subject of the student's interest under the direction of a faculty adviser. Usually offered every year.
Staff

WMGS 98b Independent Study
See WMGS 98a for special notes and course description. Usually offered every year.
Staff

WMGS 99a Senior Research Project
Independent research and writing under faculty direction, for the purpose of completion of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies senior honors thesis. Usually offered every year.
Staff

WMGS 99b Senior Research
See WMGS 99a for special notes and course description. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AAAS/WGS 125a Intellectual History of Black Women
[ deis-us ss ]
Takes a historical approach to the development of black feminist thought in the United States. We will explore major themes and events in U.S. history from the perspectives of black women (e.g., forced black migration to the Western world, transatlantic slavery, black emancipation from slavery, Jim Crow, the great migration(s), the civil rights era, and the “post” civil rights era, etc.). We will contextualize the emergence of black feminist thought within and in relation to these events, as well as highlight black feminisms’ intersections with other black intellectual traditions and freedom struggles. By the end of the course, students will be able to demonstrate a robust familiarity with the above mentioned historical events as well as define black feminist conceptual/theoretical frameworks such as standpoint theory; oppositional consciousness; intersectionality; the culture of dissemblance; the politics of respectability; controlling images; pleasure, and the erotic, among others. Usually offered every year.
Shoniqua Roach

AAAS/WGS 136a Black Feminist Thought
[ ss ]
Formerly offered as AAAS 136a.
Critical examination of the historical, political, economic, and ideological factors that have shaped the lives of African-American women in the United States. Analyzing foundation theoretical texts, fiction, and film over two centuries, this class seeks to understand black women's writing and political activism in the U.S. Usually offered every second year.
Shoniqua Roach

AAAS/WGS 149a Black Privacy
[ deis-us ]
Informed by recent work in Black feminist, queer, and trans studies, this course explores "Black privacy" and its various meanings and contours. What is Black privacy? Can "Black privacy" exist given the public construction of blackness? How do we make legal claims to Black reproductive, informational, biomedical and domestic privacy when it is already a nebulous concept and an illusory constitutional right? How might Black privacy safeguard against or potentially reinforce the proliferation of public blackness, or its hypervisibility, iconicity, and/or surveillance? What is the erotic potentiality of Black privacy? How do concepts and practices of privacy respond to carceral regimes that animate Black surveillance and counter-surveillance? How do we balance the use of digital media as a strategy of self-making and community building even as Black critical information studies scholars demonstrate that the Internet is a space in which private information is sold and exchanged for "public" resources? Usually offered every second year.
Shoniqua Roach

AAPI/WGS 126a Asian American Women's History
[ deis-us ss ]
Explores race, gender, and U.S. history from the perspective of Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Course culminates in a final AAPI women's digital oral history project. Usually offered every second year.
Yuri Doolan

WMGS 105b Feminisms: History, Theory, and Practice
[ deis-us oc ss wi ]
Prerequisite: Students are encouraged, though not required, to take WMGS 5a prior to enrolling in this course.
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. Usually offered every year.
ChaeRan Freeze, Keridwen Luis, or Faith Smith

WMGS 128b Transgender Health and Wellness
[ ss ]
Explores transgender health and wellness, through a depathologizing, decolonizing, intersectional, and gender-affirming approach. Topics include gender health across the lifespan, social determinants of gender health, transgender representation in the media, strategies to address health inequities within transgender communities. Usually offered every year.
Beth Clark

WMGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms
[ hum ]
Examines feminist theories, literature, and film from formerly colonized, Anglophone countries in South Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa. It takes the shared path of decolonization and postcoloniality to discuss the development of feminist discourse and the diverse trajectories of gendered lives. Usually offered every third year.
Harleen Singh

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 155a Gender and Fandom
[ deis-us ss ]
Examines "fans" through the lens of anthropology, sociology, and gender studies to consider community, identity, cultural production, race, and gender. Students will study online fandoms, sports fandoms, sci-fi/fantasy fandoms, and read works by sociologists, anthropologists, and fans. Usually offered every second 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 170a Blackness and Masculinity
[ ss ]
Introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of masculinity by focusing on its intersection with blackness. We will explore historical and contemporary theories and issues through the lens of freedom. Examines the social, political, economic freedoms of everyday black masculine lives. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

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

WMGS 182b Feminist Bioethics: Social Justice and Equity in Health Care
[ deis-us ss ]
Examines emergence of feminist bioethics, current issues of ethical debate related to human health, and the historical context of the field. Real-world applications of feminist ethical analysis are explored through problem-based learning, discussion, reading, research, and written, oral, and visual communication. Usually offered every year.
Beth Clark

WMGS 205a Graduate Foundational Course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
An advanced interdisciplinary inquiry into the history, theories, concepts, and practices that have formed women's, gender, and sexuality studies as a scholarly field, with particular attention to current intellectual trends and critical controversies. Usually offered every year in the fall.
Harleen Singh or Marion Smiley

WMGS 208b Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Research Seminar
Examines theories and practices of women's, gender, and sexuality studies as produced in various disciplines and in interdisciplinary ways, to offer students a historical and contemporary awareness, and to allow students to understand and critically analyze feminist scholarship across a range of disciplines. By the end of class, students will produce a set of research questions or proposal that will help them conceptualize their own independent research projects. Usually offered every year.
V Varun Chaudhry, Karen Hansen, Keridwen Luis, or Faith Smith

WMGS 292a Graduate Internship
Staff

WMGS 298a Independent Study
Staff

WMGS 299a Master's Project in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Usually offered every year.
Staff

WMGS 299b Master's Project in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Usually offered every year.
Staff

The following courses are approved for the program. Not all are given in any one year. Please consult the Schedule of Classes each semester.

AAAS 170a Black Childhoods
[ deis-us ss ]
Explores historical experiences of growing up black in America. We will examine the role of race in shaping experiences and meanings of childhood from slavery to the present day, including studies of black girlhood and boyhood. Usually offered every second year.
Wangui Maigai

AAAS/ENG 141b Critical Race Theory
[ hum ]
Traces an intellectual and political history of critical race theory that begins in law classrooms in the 1980s and continues in the 21st century activist strategies of Black Lives Matter movement. We proceed by reading defining theoretical texts alongside African American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AAAS/WGS 125a Intellectual History of Black Women
[ deis-us ss ]
Takes a historical approach to the development of black feminist thought in the United States. We will explore major themes and events in U.S. history from the perspectives of black women (e.g., forced black migration to the Western world, transatlantic slavery, black emancipation from slavery, Jim Crow, the great migration(s), the civil rights era, and the “post” civil rights era, etc.). We will contextualize the emergence of black feminist thought within and in relation to these events, as well as highlight black feminisms’ intersections with other black intellectual traditions and freedom struggles. By the end of the course, students will be able to demonstrate a robust familiarity with the above mentioned historical events as well as define black feminist conceptual/theoretical frameworks such as standpoint theory; oppositional consciousness; intersectionality; the culture of dissemblance; the politics of respectability; controlling images; pleasure, and the erotic, among others. Usually offered every year.
Shoniqua Roach

AAAS/WGS 149a Black Privacy
[ deis-us ]
Informed by recent work in Black feminist, queer, and trans studies, this course explores "Black privacy" and its various meanings and contours. What is Black privacy? Can "Black privacy" exist given the public construction of blackness? How do we make legal claims to Black reproductive, informational, biomedical and domestic privacy when it is already a nebulous concept and an illusory constitutional right? How might Black privacy safeguard against or potentially reinforce the proliferation of public blackness, or its hypervisibility, iconicity, and/or surveillance? What is the erotic potentiality of Black privacy? How do concepts and practices of privacy respond to carceral regimes that animate Black surveillance and counter-surveillance? How do we balance the use of digital media as a strategy of self-making and community building even as Black critical information studies scholars demonstrate that the Internet is a space in which private information is sold and exchanged for "public" resources? Usually offered every second year.
Shoniqua Roach

AAPI/WGS 126a Asian American Women's History
[ deis-us ss ]
Explores race, gender, and U.S. history from the perspective of Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Course culminates in a final AAPI women's digital oral history project. Usually offered every second year.
Yuri Doolan

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

ANTH 244a Gender and Sexuality Seminar
Examines gender constructs, sexuality, and cultural systems from a comparative perspective, and major theoretical trends in feminist and queer anthropology. Usually offered every second year.
Sarah Lamb

BIOL 160b Human Reproductive and Developmental Biology
[ sn ]
Prerequisites: BIOL 14a and BIOL 15b.
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. Usually offered every year.
Judith Jackson

BUS 125a Leading in the Era of Diversity
[ ss ]
Prerequisite: BUS 6a and BUS 10a or WMGS 5a or or permission of the instructor.
Introduces students to analytical frameworks for understanding and influencing individual, group, inter-group, and total organization dynamics. Increases students' awareness of and competence in recruiting, collaborating with, retaining, managing, and advancing people different from themselves. Usually offered every year.
Sava Berhane

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 78a Virginia Woolf
[ hum ]
An immersion in Woolf's astonishing body of writing. How did her fiction and non-fiction re-imagine the self in the changing social worlds of the early twentieth century? How did her experiments with narrative open new understandings of gender, sexuality, war, the knowing subject, the dimensions of space and time. A chronological survey of her diverse forms of writing that energized, all at once, modernist aesthetics, feminist politics, and philosophical speculation. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

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 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 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ hum nw ]
Beginning with the region's representation as a tabula rasa, examines the textual and visual constructions of the Caribbean as colony, homeland, backyard, paradise, and Babylon, and how the region's migrations have prompted ideas about evolution, hedonism, imperialism, nationalism, and diaspora. Usually offered every second year.
Faith Smith

ENG 137b Women and War
[ djw dl hum nw ]
Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 143b Chaucer’s “Global and Refugee Canterbury Tales"
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]
Focuses on situating Chaucer, and particularly the Canterbury Tales, as a global
work. We will examine black feminist writers, playwrights, and poets of the African diaspora who have revised, adapted, extrapolated, and voiced the Canterbury Tales in Jamaican patois, Nigerian pidgin, and the S. London dialects of Brixton. Usually offered every second year.
Dorothy Kim

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 151b Performance Studies
[ dl hum ]
Explores paradigms for making performance inside and outside of institutionalized theater spaces, with an emphasis on the performance of everyday life. Students read theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance. Combining theory with practice, students explore and make site-specific and online performances. Usually offered every third year.
Thomas King

ENG 157b American Women Poets
[ hum wi ]
Students imagine meanings for terms like "American" and "women" in relation to poetry. After introductory study of Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, and Emily Dickinson, readings of (and about) women whose work was circulated widely, especially among other women poets, will be selected from mainly twentieth-century writers. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum ]
Surveys English-language drama and performance after the innovations of Beckett and Brecht, investigating theater and performance artists' engagement of human rights, identity politics, decolonization, state, and interpersonal violence, environmental justice and climate change, and performance after the Anthropocene. Usually offered every year.
Thomas King

ENG 180b Romantic Comedy / Matrimonial Tragedy
[ hum ]
A genre study of romantic comedy, from early to recent cinema. How does its narrative machinery work and what social functions does it serve? An exploration of comedic pleasure as strategy for fashioning gender identities, sexualities, marriages, and anti-marriages. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

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

ENG 231a Performing the Early Modern Self
Examines contemporary performance theory against everyday and formal performances of the Restoration and eighteenth-century England. Investigates agents' negotiations of social and personal space in plays, diaries, novels, and treatises. Usually offered every third year.
Thomas King

FA 178a Frida Kahlo: Art, Life and Legacy
[ ca nw ]
Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) has become an international cultural icon. Her innovative paintings brilliantly re-envision identity, gender and the female body, inspiring celebrities from Madonna to Salma Hayek. This course explores the art and life of Frida Kahlo, as well as her immense influence on contemporary art, film and popular culture. Usually offered every second year.
Gannit Ankori

FA 192a Studies in Modern and Contemporary Art
[ ca oc ]
Topics may vary from year to year; the course may be repeated for credit.
Usually offered every second year.
Gannit Ankori, Peter Kalb, and Nancy Scott

FILM 114a Genre Films in Cinema and Television
[ hum ]
Explores the analytical framework for understanding genre film. From Steven Spielberg's Jaws to Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Tim Story's Barbershop, genre films break box office records and have lasting cultural significance in cinema. Usually offered every third year.
Alice Kelikian

FREN 134b Masculine/Feminine
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Examines diverse representations of masculinity and femininity in French texts today and in the past with special emphasis on historical and cultural aspects. Readings include Edward Louis, En finir avec Eddie Bellegueule; Duras, L’amant; excerpts from Rousseau and Beauvoir and films like l'Esquive et La loi du marché (on working class and minority conceptions of gender). Usually offered every fourth year.
Martine Voiret

FREN 139a Bad Girls / Les Filles de mauvais genre
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Through a selection of literary texts, articles, images and films, students will explore how works from the Middle Ages to present day depict female figures in the French and Francophone world who have failed to conform to expectations of their gender. Usually offered every second year.
Hollie Harder

GECS 130b The Princess and the Golem: Fairy Tales
[ hum wi ]
Conducted in English.
Compares Walt Disney’s films with German and other European fairy tales from the nineteenth and twentieth century, focusing on feminist and psychoanalytic readings. Usually offered every second year.
Sabine von Mering

HIST 161a Women's Work: Gender and Capitalism in American History
[ ss ]
Although economic history usually focuses on men, domestic labor, women workers, social norms, and family welfare have all profoundly affected American economic life. This course will explore how gender has shaped American economic life since the eighteenth century. Special one-time offering, spring 2019.
Rachel Knecht

HIST 162a Writing on the Wall: Histories of Graffiti in the Americas
[ djw dl ss ]
Focuses on the history of graffiti in the U.S. from 1960s forward. Includes the historical role of Caribbean migration, the impact of criminology and economic recession of the 1970s on graffiti culture, and the relationship between private property, public space, and graffiti. Usually offered every second year.
Gregory Childs

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

HS 223f Gender and Development in the Context of Neoliberalism and Globalization
Meets for one-half semester and yields half-course credit.
Reviews connections between gender and macroeconomics and explores changes brought by globalization and neoliberal policies as they affect livelihoods, families, and gender hegemonies. The course provides a critical analytical framework to understand the role of gender within development in light of globalization, which has transformed relations between the state, markets, and civil society and the context of gender practice. Usually offered every year.
Cristina Espinosa

HS 224f Gender and the Environment
Meets for one-half semester and yields half-course credit. May not be repeated by students who have taken HS 259f with this topic in previous years.
Introduces students to the field of gender and the environment, examining the relevance of gender for environmental conservation that includes social sustainability, and the different ways gender has been conceptualized and integrated within environmental conservation and within sustainable development interventions. Usually offered every year.
Cristina Espinosa

HS 283f Gender and Development
Meets for one-half semester and yields half-course credit.
Examines politics and policies of international development from a gender-sensitive perspective. Concepts of "development" and “gender” are framed within historical and political contexts. Students examine how development affects women and men differently according to class, ethnicity, geography, age, and seniority. Ways in which gender asymmetries have been addressed in development and approaches to mainstreaming gender are explored. Usually offered every year.
Cristina Espinosa

HS 320f The American Gay Rights Movement: Social Justice and Social Policy
Meets for one-half semester and yields half-course credit.
This course is about the last forty years (1969-2009) of social justice and social policy in the American Gay Rights Movement. It is about the development of social justice and social policy in America that is inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity. And, it is about policy development, and human behavior, in America that reflects the full civil, political, legal and moral equality of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people. Usually offered every second year.
Susan Curnan

HS 515a Race/Ethnicity and Gender in Health and Human Services Research
Explores theoretical and empirical approaches to race/ethnicity and gender as factors in health and human services practices, programs, and policies in the United States. Begins by examining current data on racial/ethnic and gender differences in health, mental health, functional status, and lifestyle. Attention then turns to alternative accounts of the causes of these differences. Although primary focus is on patterns of race/ethnicity and gender differences in health outcomes and services that have received the most comprehensive attention, the course offers perspectives on research methods and analytic frameworks that can be applied to other issues. Usually offered every year.
Rajesh Sampath

HS 527a Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Public Policy
Students will examine framing in public policy in general, and its relationship to challenges faced by communities of color. Further, we will address the topics of race and gender in health and health care; education, welfare policy, immigration, housing, and other issues. Students will hone their skills in policy analysis, political advocacy, communication, coalition building and networking as they relate to the policy process. Class discussion, essays/case studies, and in-class assignments are used. Usually offered every year.
Staff

HS 529a Diversity, Inclusion and Equity in Social Policy
Examines how social scientists and policymakers define “vulnerable” or “disadvantaged” population groups, how these constructions can shift or change over time, and how policies and programs address inequalities and serve the needs of diverse groups. We explore the causes, correlates, and consequences of inequalities across the lifespan, and consider how race, ethnicity, gender, disability, social class, sexual orientation, age, and their intersections shape lived experiences and well-being. The potential of social movements, institutional restructuring, and policy initiatives to reduce inequalities and promote inclusion, equality, and social justice are analyzed. Usually offered every year.
Alexandra Pineros-Shields

MUS 136b Divas
[ ca ]
Though her name means “goddess,” the diva is frequently imagined as a creature with all-too-human failings; she is both talented and tempestuous, both revered and reviled. This course will explore the complex image of the diva in Western culture from the middle ages to the present day. We’ll treat the category of “diva” expansively – encompassing opera singers and pop stars, composers and castrati – and engage with thorny questions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and power, in hopes of understanding the enduring cultural potency of this compelling and problematic figure. Usually offered every second year.
Emily Frey

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 128b Gender, Multiculturalism and the Law in Philosophy
[ hum wi ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took PHIL 128a in prior years.
Examines debates over the legal accommodation of cultural difference. We will critically evaluate the concept of culture, consider the value of cultural membership and examine how cultural claims can be balanced against the need for shared civic values. Usually offered every second year.
Lisa Fishbayn Joffe

NEJS 141a Russian Jews in the Twentieth Century
[ hum ]
Examines Russian Jewish history from 1917 to the present. Focuses on the tsarist legacy, Russian Revolution, the creation of a new socialist society, development of Yiddish culture, the "Great Turn" under Stalin, Holocaust, post war Judaism, anti-Semitism, emigration, and current events. Usually offered every second year.
ChaeRan Freeze

NEJS 160a Jewish Feminisms
[ deis-us hum ]
Examines the role of Jewish women in the broader feminist movement and the impact and the impact of feminist theory and activism on Jewish thought, law, ritual practice and communal norms in the 20th and 21st century. We will explore classic feminist critiques and transformations of traditional Judaism and examine contemporary controversies involving issues such as equality under Jewish ritual and family law, sex segregation in public life, inclusion of Jewish People of Color and of LGBTQ Jews and antisemitism in the women's movement. Usually offered every year.
Lisa Fishbayn-Joffe

NEJS 161b American Jewish Family Matters
[ hum ]
Examines the evolution of the American Jewish family from the colonial period to the present from historical, sociological and cultural perspectives. We will explore how the definition of family; the rituals and performance of family life; and the challenges that families negotiate have changed in response to cultural forces. We will also utilize the lenses of ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality to analyze the representations of the Jewish family in American popular culture, including literature, film and television. Usually offered every third year.
Jonathan Krasner

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 174b Israeli Women Writers on War and Peace
[ fl hum ]
Taught in Hebrew.
An exploration of nationalism and gender in Modern Hebrew literature. By discussing various Hebrew texts and Israeli works of art and film, this course explores women's relationship to Zionism, war, peace, the state, politics, and processes of cultural production. Usually offered every second year.
Ilana Szobel

NEJS 176b Jewish Graphic Novels
[ hum ]
Examines the complex genre of the Jewish graphic novel. Explores Jewish artists' use of graphic narratives to grapple with issues of acculturation, trauma, and identity. Special focus on the reconfiguration of Jewish gender identities. Structured around primary texts. Secondary readings provide historical context and theoretical analysis. Usually offered every second year.
Ellen Kellman

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

NEJS 184b Disability Cultures: Art, Film and Literature of People with Disabilities
[ djw hum ]
Explores cultural representations of disability in Israel, Europe, and the US. By focusing on literature, film, dance, and visual art, it explores physical, mental, and emotional disability experiences, and their relations to gender, sexuality, nationalism, and identity politics. Usually offered every second year.
Ilana 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.
Kate Moran or Marion Smiley

PHIL 128b Philosophy of Race and Gender
[ deis-us hum ]
Explores the nature of racism and gender oppression, as well as various remedies to them, including reparations, affirmative action, and policies of group representation at the state level. Usually offered every second year.
Marion Smiley

POL 125a Seminar: Women in American Politics
[ deis-us ss ]
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. Usually offered every second year.
Jill Greenlee

PSYC 160b Seminar on Sex Differences
[ ss wi ]
Prerequisite: PSYC 10a, 51a, 52a or permission of the instructor.
Considers research evidence bearing on sex differences in the cognitive domain and in the social domain, evaluating this evidence in light of biological, cultural, and social-cognitive theories as well as methodological issues. Usually offered every year.
Ellen Wright

SAS 150b Love, Sex, and Country: Films from India
[ djw hum nw ]
A study of Hindi films made in India since 1947 with a few notable exceptions from regional film, as well as some recent films made in English. Students will read Hindi films as texts/narratives of the nation to probe the occurrence of cultural, religious, historical, political, and social themes. Usually offered every third year.
Harleen Singh

SOC 112b Social Class and Social Change
[ ss ]
Presents the role of social class in determining life chances, lifestyles, income, occupation, and power; theories of class, inequality, and globalization; selected social psychological aspects of social class and inequality; and connections of class, race, and gender. Usually offered every second year.
Gordon Fellman

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 117a Sociology of Work and Gender
[ ss ]
Many people think gender differences in work are disappearing. Yet gender segregation by job type is pervasive and women predominate in the lower paid, lower status jobs, particularly in the care sector. Women are also still doing disproportional amounts of domestic and parenting labor at home, which exacts a great cost from them in the paid workforce. This course examines gender disparities in both paid an unpaid work, and how that affects women’s and men’s lives, work/family conflicts, and society at large. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

SOC 124a Gender, Sexuality, and Globalization
[ djw ss ]
Introduces theories of gender, sexuality, and transnational feminism. Uses sociological research to examine labor, social movements, politics, and culture in global perspective, emphasizing Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Usually offered every second year.
Gowri Vijayakumar

SOC 131b Narratives of the Self
[ ss ]
This course counts toward the completion of the joint MA degree in Sociology & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Through reading biographies of intellectuals, political leaders, artists and "ordinary" people and exploring the biographical method, this seminar investigates the relationship between everyday life, history, social patterns of behavior, and the sex/gender system. Usually offered every third year.
Karen Hansen

SOC 133b Sociology of Reproduction
[ ss ]
Explores reproduction as a social and biological set of meanings and processes through which racial, national, gender, and socio-economic inequalities have been amplified, reconfigured and contested across time and place. It locates individual reproductive experiences and outcomes in regional, national and global contexts. Usually offered every year.
Siri Suh

SOC 138a Sociology of Race, Gender, and Class
[ oc ss ]
Examines race, class and gender as critical dimensions of social difference that organize social systems. Uses a variety of media to analyze how race, class and gender as axes of identity and inequality (re)create forms of domination and subordination in schools, labor markets, families, and the criminal justice system. Usually offered every third year. Usually offered every third year.
Derron Wallace

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

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

SOC 210b Gender, Class, and Race
Examines primarily gender, class, and race, but also addresses inequality as structured by citizenship status and sexuality. Examines how U.S. and other societies distribute resources accordingly, shape discourse and ideology, and foster individual and group identities. Usually offered every third year.
Karen Hansen

SOC 228b Gender and Sexuality in Transnational Perspective
Examines the ways in which gendered and sexual dynamics can illuminate transnational processes, such as humanitarian projects, social movements, and financial globalization, and the ways in which comparative and transnational approaches can enhance the study of gender and sexuality, using recent, primarily ethnographic and qualitative research in sociology. Usually offered every third year.
Gowri Vijayakumar

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

THA 110a Moving Women/Women Moving
[ ca ]
Counts as one activity course toward the physical education requirement.
Among the influential women leaders in America are choreographers who shaped the history of modern dance in the twentieth century. This course will focus on the work and lives of these women. Students will learn dance techniques and investigate the twists and turns in the lives of these extraordinary artists. Usually offered every third year.
Susan Dibble

THA 142b Women Playwrights: Writing for the Stage by and about Women
[ ca deis-us wi ]
Introduces the world of female playwrights. This course will engage the texts through common themes explored by female playwrights: motherhood (and daughterhood), reproduction, sexuality, family relationships, etc. Students will participate in writing or performance exercises based on these themes. Usually offered every second year.
Adrianne Krstansky

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 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

WMGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms
[ hum ]
Examines feminist theories, literature, and film from formerly colonized, Anglophone countries in South Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa. It takes the shared path of decolonization and postcoloniality to discuss the development of feminist discourse and the diverse trajectories of gendered lives. Usually offered every third year.
Harleen Singh

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 155a Gender and Fandom
[ deis-us ss ]
Examines "fans" through the lens of anthropology, sociology, and gender studies to consider community, identity, cultural production, race, and gender. Students will study online fandoms, sports fandoms, sci-fi/fantasy fandoms, and read works by sociologists, anthropologists, and fans. 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

WMGS 182b Feminist Bioethics: Social Justice and Equity in Health Care
[ deis-us ss ]
Examines emergence of feminist bioethics, current issues of ethical debate related to human health, and the historical context of the field. Real-world applications of feminist ethical analysis are explored through problem-based learning, discussion, reading, research, and written, oral, and visual communication. Usually offered every year.
Beth Clark

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

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

ANTH 141b Engendering Archaeology: Exploring Women's and Men's Lives in the Past
[ ss ]
Explores people's pasts through archaeology. Topics include theoretical foundations of creating engendered pasts, methodological aspects of "doing" engendered archaeology, and intersections between political feminism, knowledge production, and the politics of engendered archaeology. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff

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

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 35b Women's Friendship (and More) in Nineteenth-century Literature
[ hum ]
While many people think nineteenth-century fiction is all about marriage, other relationships are equally important. This course will focus on intimate relationships between women, including friendship, sisterhood, and queer romance, in authors including Austen, Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Oliphant, and Levy. Special one-time offering, spring 2020.
Abigail Arnold

ENG 144b The Body as Text
[ hum wi ]
How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Usually offered every third 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

ENG 243a Women and the Renaissance
Explores women's writing in the Renaissance. Although the primary focus will be on England, texts will also be read in translation from Italy and France. Both published works and private diaries and letters will be examined. Usually offered every third year.
Ramie Targoff

FA 69b Inventing Tradition: Women as Artists, Women as Art
[ ca ]
Provides an art-historical overview and a feminist critique of gender and representation followed by select case studies of the art and life of women artists. Examples include non-Western art. Usually offered every second year.
Gannit Ankori

FA 157a Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Life
[ ca ]
Explores the art of Georgia O'Keeffe, and her place in American culture and history, within the larger development of American modernism in the culture of New York and the Southwest. Other important painters of the early 20th century, from Marin, Hartley, Dove and Demuth to the photographers Stieglitz, Strand and Steichen, paralleled and fueled her creative work. On-campus resources in Native American arts, along with museum visits, will enlarge our view of O'Keeffe's world. Usually offered every third year.
Nancy Scott

FA 176a Fashion History of China
[ ca nw ]
Examines the evolution of garments, ornaments, accessories, shoes, and other bodily adornments in China through the lens of art history. Students learn about the importance of dress and fashion (and their visual representations) in shaping identities through the ages. Usually offered every third year.
Aida Wong

FA 178a Frida Kahlo: Art, Life and Legacy
[ ca nw ]
Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) has become an international cultural icon. Her innovative paintings brilliantly re-envision identity, gender and the female body, inspiring celebrities from Madonna to Salma Hayek. This course explores the art and life of Frida Kahlo, as well as her immense influence on contemporary art, film and popular culture. Usually offered every second year.
Gannit Ankori

GECS 131b Goethe—A European Romantic and his Muses
[ hum wi ]
Conducted in English.
The women he loved and collaborated with inspired Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) to write bestsellers like The Sorrows of Young Werther, which in turn inspired Jules Massenet to compose the opera “Werther”. In this course we will look at Goethe’s work with a critical eye to the representation of women, and the influence Goethe had on 19th century Europe and beyond. Usually offered every third year.
Sabine von Mering

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 121a Breaking the Rules: Deviance and Nonconformity in Premodern Europe
[ djw ss wi ]
Explores the ways in which "deviant" behavior was defined and punished by some, but also justified and even celebrated by others in premodern Europe. Topics include vagrancy, popular uprisings, witchcraft, religious heresy, and the status of women. Usually offered every second year.
Govind Sreenivasan

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 157b The Secret Lives of the Enslaved: Marginalized Voices and the Writing of History
[ deis-us dl ss wi ]
Seeks to understand not only the system but the inner lives and cultures of slaves within that system. This course is a reading-intensive seminar examining both primary and secondary sources on American slaves. Focuses on the American South but includes sources on the larger African diaspora. Usually offered every second year.
Abigail Cooper

HIST 158b Social History of the Confederate States of America
[ deis-us dl ss ]
An examination of the brief life of the southern Confederacy, emphasizing regional, racial, class, and gender conflicts within the would-be new nation. Usually offered every third year.
Abigail Cooper

HIST 161a Women's Work: Gender and Capitalism in American History
[ ss ]
Although economic history usually focuses on men, domestic labor, women workers, social norms, and family welfare have all profoundly affected American economic life. This course will explore how gender has shaped American economic life since the eighteenth century. Special one-time offering, spring 2019.
Rachel Knecht

HIST 179a Labor, Gender, and Exchange in the Atlantic World, 1600-1850
[ deis-us ss ]
An examination of the interaction of cultures in the Atlantic World against a backdrop of violence, conquest, and empire-building. Particular attention is paid to the structure and function of power relations, gender orders, labor systems, and exchange networks. Usually offered every second year.
Govind Sreenivasan

NEJS 115b Gender, Sexuality and the Bible
[ hum ]
Open to all students.
The Bible’s depiction of gender, relationships, and social values in narrative, poetry, and law. Topics include the legal status of women, masculinity, prostitution, and how particular readings of the biblical text have shaped modern ideas about gender and sexuality. Usually offered every third 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

SOC 130a Families, Kinship and Sexuality
[ oc ss ]
Counts toward the completion of the joint MA degree in Sociology & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Investigates changes in the character of American families over the last two centuries. A central concern will be the dynamic interactions among economic, cultural, political, and social forces, and how they shape and are reshaped by families over time. Particular attention is paid to how experiences of men and women vary by class, race, and ethnicity. Usually offered every year.
Karen Hansen

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

AAAS 133b The Literature of the Caribbean
[ hum nw ss wi ]
An exploration of the narrative strategies and themes of writers of the region who grapple with issues of colonialism, class, race, ethnicity, and gender in a context of often-conflicting allegiances to North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Usually offered every second year.
Faith Smith

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

AAAS 170a Black Childhoods
[ deis-us ss ]
Explores historical experiences of growing up black in America. We will examine the role of race in shaping experiences and meanings of childhood from slavery to the present day, including studies of black girlhood and boyhood. Usually offered every second year.
Wangui Maigai

AAAS/ENG 141b Critical Race Theory
[ hum ]
Traces an intellectual and political history of critical race theory that begins in law classrooms in the 1980s and continues in the 21st century activist strategies of Black Lives Matter movement. We proceed by reading defining theoretical texts alongside African American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AAAS/WGS 125a Intellectual History of Black Women
[ deis-us ss ]
Takes a historical approach to the development of black feminist thought in the United States. We will explore major themes and events in U.S. history from the perspectives of black women (e.g., forced black migration to the Western world, transatlantic slavery, black emancipation from slavery, Jim Crow, the great migration(s), the civil rights era, and the “post” civil rights era, etc.). We will contextualize the emergence of black feminist thought within and in relation to these events, as well as highlight black feminisms’ intersections with other black intellectual traditions and freedom struggles. By the end of the course, students will be able to demonstrate a robust familiarity with the above mentioned historical events as well as define black feminist conceptual/theoretical frameworks such as standpoint theory; oppositional consciousness; intersectionality; the culture of dissemblance; the politics of respectability; controlling images; pleasure, and the erotic, among others. Usually offered every year.
Shoniqua Roach

AAAS/WGS 136a Black Feminist Thought
[ ss ]
Formerly offered as AAAS 136a.
Critical examination of the historical, political, economic, and ideological factors that have shaped the lives of African-American women in the United States. Analyzing foundation theoretical texts, fiction, and film over two centuries, this class seeks to understand black women's writing and political activism in the U.S. Usually offered every second year.
Shoniqua Roach

AAAS/WGS 149a Black Privacy
[ deis-us ]
Informed by recent work in Black feminist, queer, and trans studies, this course explores "Black privacy" and its various meanings and contours. What is Black privacy? Can "Black privacy" exist given the public construction of blackness? How do we make legal claims to Black reproductive, informational, biomedical and domestic privacy when it is already a nebulous concept and an illusory constitutional right? How might Black privacy safeguard against or potentially reinforce the proliferation of public blackness, or its hypervisibility, iconicity, and/or surveillance? What is the erotic potentiality of Black privacy? How do concepts and practices of privacy respond to carceral regimes that animate Black surveillance and counter-surveillance? How do we balance the use of digital media as a strategy of self-making and community building even as Black critical information studies scholars demonstrate that the Internet is a space in which private information is sold and exchanged for "public" resources? Usually offered every second year.
Shoniqua Roach

AAPI/WGS 126a Asian American Women's History
[ deis-us ss ]
Explores race, gender, and U.S. history from the perspective of Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Course culminates in a final AAPI women's digital oral history project. Usually offered every second year.
Yuri Doolan

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 178b Culture, Gender and Power in East Asia
[ nw ss ]
Examines the role of culture in changing gender power relations in East Asia by exploring how the historical legacy of Confucianism in the region influences the impact of changes such as the constitutional proclamation of gender equality and rapid industrialization. Usually offered every third year.
Elanah Uretsky

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

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 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ hum nw ]
Beginning with the region's representation as a tabula rasa, examines the textual and visual constructions of the Caribbean as colony, homeland, backyard, paradise, and Babylon, and how the region's migrations have prompted ideas about evolution, hedonism, imperialism, nationalism, and diaspora. Usually offered every second year.
Faith Smith

ENG 137b Women and War
[ djw dl hum nw ]
Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 138b Toni Morrison
[ hum ]
An advanced introduction to the oeuvre of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. Reading her novels and nonfiction, we investigate concerns that shaped our world in the last century and haunt the current one, foregrounding Morrison's writing as a key site of trouble and of transformation. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

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 171b African Feminism(s)
[ hum nw ]
Examines African Feminism(s) as a literary and activist movement that underlines the need for centering African women's experiences in the study of African cultures, societies, and histories. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

FA 176a Fashion History of China
[ ca nw ]
Examines the evolution of garments, ornaments, accessories, shoes, and other bodily adornments in China through the lens of art history. Students learn about the importance of dress and fashion (and their visual representations) in shaping identities through the ages. Usually offered every third year.
Aida Wong

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

IGS 136b Contemporary Chinese Society and Culture
[ nw ss ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ANTH 136b in prior years.
Introduces students to contemporary Chinese society, with a focus on the rapid transformations that have taken place during the post-Mao era with a focus on family, gender, sexuality, migration, ethnicity, and family planning. Usually offered every third year.
Elanah Uretsky

NEJS 128b Gender, Multiculturalism and the Law in Philosophy
[ hum wi ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took PHIL 128a in prior years.
Examines debates over the legal accommodation of cultural difference. We will critically evaluate the concept of culture, consider the value of cultural membership and examine how cultural claims can be balanced against the need for shared civic values. Usually offered every second year.
Lisa Fishbayn Joffe

SAS 101a Women Writers from South Asia
[ hum nw ]
Includes literature by South Asian women writers such as Amrita Pritam, Ismat Chugtai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kamila Shamsie, Tahmina Anam, and Chandini Lokuge. Some of the works were originally written in English, while others have been translated from the vernacular. Usually offered every second year.
Harleen Singh

SAS 110b New Nations, New Stories: Postcolonial Literature
[ hum nw ]
Examines the postcolonial novel written in English within the shared history of colonialism, specifically British imperialism, for South Asia. Writers include R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Mohsin Hamid, Romesh Gunesekera and Daniyal Mueenudin. Usually offered every second year.
Harleen Singh

SAS 150b Love, Sex, and Country: Films from India
[ djw hum nw ]
A study of Hindi films made in India since 1947 with a few notable exceptions from regional film, as well as some recent films made in English. Students will read Hindi films as texts/narratives of the nation to probe the occurrence of cultural, religious, historical, political, and social themes. Usually offered every third year.
Harleen Singh

SOC 138a Sociology of Race, Gender, and Class
[ oc ss ]
Examines race, class and gender as critical dimensions of social difference that organize social systems. Uses a variety of media to analyze how race, class and gender as axes of identity and inequality (re)create forms of domination and subordination in schools, labor markets, families, and the criminal justice system. Usually offered every third year. Usually offered every third year.
Derron Wallace

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

WMGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms
[ hum ]
Examines feminist theories, literature, and film from formerly colonized, Anglophone countries in South Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa. It takes the shared path of decolonization and postcoloniality to discuss the development of feminist discourse and the diverse trajectories of gendered lives. Usually offered every third year.
Harleen Singh

WMGS 170a Blackness and Masculinity
[ ss ]
Introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of masculinity by focusing on its intersection with blackness. We will explore historical and contemporary theories and issues through the lens of freedom. Examines the social, political, economic freedoms of everyday black masculine lives. 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

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

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 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

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 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

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 128b Transgender Health and Wellness
[ ss ]
Explores transgender health and wellness, through a depathologizing, decolonizing, intersectional, and gender-affirming approach. Topics include gender health across the lifespan, social determinants of gender health, transgender representation in the media, strategies to address health inequities within transgender communities. Usually offered every year.
Beth Clark

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