Provisional University Bulletin (2025-2026)

• Minors

• 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 women, 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 five different fields (anthropology, English, music, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, sociology) 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-conforming 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 (WGS 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
• Master of Arts in Anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Master of Arts in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Master of Arts in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Master of Arts in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Master of Arts in Sustainable International Development and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

To learn more about the learning goals for the joint programs, please consult the relevant program’s bulletin section for their learning goals.

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

Knowledge

Students completing the MA 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 MA 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.

WGS offers an undergraduate major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and two minor options: in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and in Sexuality and Queer Studies. As early as possible in their academic careers, students interested in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies should take WGS 5a (Women, Genders, and Sexualities), the required introduction to the field. Students wishing to focus on sexuality and queer studies may wish to start with WGS 6b (Sexuality and Queer Studies, formerly SQS 6b), and many students may choose to take both core courses. 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.

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.

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. 

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.

ChaeRan Freeze, Chair
(Near Eastern and Judaic Studies)

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)

Jill Greenlee, Undergraduate Advising Head
(Politics)

Karen Hansen
(Sociology)

Anita Hill
(Heller School)

Sarah Lamb
(Anthropology)

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)

Elizabeth Bradfield
(English)

Susan Dibble
(Theater Arts)

Emilie Diouf
(English)

Cristina Espinosa
(Heller School)

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

Brian Horton
(Anthropology)

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

Dorothy Kim
(English)

Thomas King
(English)

Adrianne Krstansky
(Theater Arts)

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

Evangelina Macias
(Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Nidhiya Menon
(Economics)

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

Paul Morrison
(English)

Rajesh Sampath
(Heller School)

David Sherman
(English)

Sara Shostak
(Sociology)

Siri Suh
(Sociology)

Anya Wallace
(African and African American Studies; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

1. Successful completion of WGS 5a Women, Genders, and Sexualities or WGS 6b Sexuality and Queer Studies.

2. Four additional semester courses that carry the WGS 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 WGS 5a or WGS 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.

Sexuality and Queer Studies

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

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

2. One course focusing on the history of sexuality and gender prior to WWII or on sexuality and queer studies from a comparative perspective.

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

4. With the approval of the Undergraduate Advising Head, students may substitute a relevant independent study, internship, senior essay, or other capstone experience for one elective. Students must submit a proposal (including the project description, methodology, and working bibliography, or, in the case of an internship, the objectives, proposed written work, and criteria of evaluation) for approval by their faculty adviser and the UAH before the end of the semester preceding that in which they will undertake the project.

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

6. No course with a final grade below C- can count toward fulfilling the requirements for the minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies. No course counting for the minor may be taken on a pass/fail basis.

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

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

1. One introductory core course is required: WGS 5a Women, Genders, and Sexualities or WGS 6b Sexuality and Queer Studies (formerly SQS 6b). Students may wish to take both of these courses, and the second course will count as an elective.

2. One course in feminist theory is required: WGS 105b Feminisms: History, Theory, and Practice, AAAS/WGS 136a Black Feminist Thought, or WGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms. If students wish to take more than one course, the other course(s) will count as electives.

3. Seven additional courses that either carry the WGS 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. 

   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.

   3. At least one course must focus on sexuality.

   See the Courses of Instruction section for the list of elective courses.

4. 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. Students are not allowed to double count between elective categories listed in numbers 1, 2, and 3, above.

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

   • Fulfill the writing intensive requirement by successfully completing one of the following: Any WGS course or WGS elective approved for WI, or WGS 99b.

   • Fulfill the oral communication requirement by successfully completing one of the following: Any WGS-subject course approved for OC.

   • Fulfill the digital literacy requirement by successfully completing one of the following: WGS 5a or WGS 6b.

6. 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 WGS 99a (fall) or WGS 99b (spring). Students who complete the essay option cannot count either WGS 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 WGS 99a in the fall and WGS 99b in the spring. Students who complete the thesis option (WGS 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.

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

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

9. 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 the core course or feminist theory requirements, nor can they receive credit for internships taken abroad.

Program of Study

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

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

B. A course in feminist research methodologies (WGS 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)).

C. Six elective graduate courses, four of which must be cross listed with WGS. 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 (WGS 310a,b).

D. 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 WGS 299a, "Master's Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.

E. 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 in-person residence requirement of one full year of course work (eight semester courses), and complete the following course requirements:

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

B. ANTH 244a Gender and Sexuality Seminar (or ANTH 144a Anthropology of Gender or ANTH 166b Queer Anthropology, by petition).

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

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

E. 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 (WGS 310a,b).

F. Students also must also enroll in the anthropology departmental graduate proseminar (ANTH 340a), a year-long, non-credit requirement. 

G. 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 WGS 299a,b, "Master’s Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.

H. 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, and language requirements do not count toward degree requirements.

Program of Study

A. WGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

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

C. 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. Up to two sections of ENG 298a, Independent Study, can be counted towards required coursework.

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

E. 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 WGS 299a,b, "Master's Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.

F. Students may enroll on a full or part-time basis. There is a one-year minimum in-person residence requirement for full-time students. Most full-time students will take an additional one or two semesters beyond the first year to complete the degree as Extended Master's students. Part-time students have a residency requirement that is the equivalent to the full-time version of the program (i.e., once students have completed the equivalent of one full-time year). For more information, see the GSAS Bulletin section.

G. Note: ENG 350a (Proseminar) and ENG 360c (Article Publication Proseminar) are credit/no-credit courses that do not count towards the eight course requirement. Creative Writing Workshops do not count towards the degree.

Interested students must first be admitted to the PhD program.

The Music department offers the opportunity for PhD 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

A. WGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

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

C. 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 (WGS 310a,b).

D. 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 (Form and Analysis) and MUS 205A (Musicology lab) are also required. Note: the 2-credit course “Musicology Lab” must be taken twice for credit.

E. Attendance at all departmental musicology colloquia.

F. 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 WGS 299a,b, "Master's Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.

G. Additional requirements as listed in the accompanying PhD program.

Language Requirement

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

Residence Requirement

One year, in person.

Program of Study

Courses must include:

A. WGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

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

C. 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 (WGS 310a,b).

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

E. 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 language component (e.g., primary research in a Near Eastern Language like Hebrew or Arabic) it may satisfy requirement G below.

F. 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.

G. All candidates are required to demonstrate language proficiency, normally in Arabic, Hebrew (Modern or Biblical), or Yiddish, by graduation. The language requirement for Arabic, Hebrew (Modern or Biblical), or Yiddish, 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 Arabic, Hebrew (Modern or Biblical), or Yiddish, 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 adviser or by the ​​Arabic, Hebrew (Modern or Biblical), or Yiddish, faculty. Students are permitted the use of an appropriate (hard copy) dictionary. Electronic dictionaries are not permitted.

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

Residence Requirement

Ordinarily, two years of full-time in-person residence are required at the normal course rate of seven courses each academic year. The program may take an additional one or two semesters to complete as an Extended Master's student.

Program of Study

A. WGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

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

C. 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 (WGS 310a,b).

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

E. One additional elective graduate course.

F. 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 WGS 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, in person. 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:

A. WGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

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

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

D. SID-WGS students have the option of writing a research paper (15-20 pages) or policy brief (8-10 pages). 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.

E. Participation in the SID/MA Capstone Week

F. 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.

Every student, whether or not currently in residence, must register at the beginning of each term. All graduate students will be evaluated by the program each spring. At this evaluation the records of all graduate students will be carefully reviewed with reference to the timely completion of coursework and non-course degree requirements, the quality of the work and research in progress and the student’s overall academic performance in the program.

WGS 5a Women, Genders, and Sexualities
[ deis-us dl 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.

WGS 6b Sexuality and Queer Studies
[ djw dl hum ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took SQS 6b in prior years.

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.

WGS 41b Storyweaving: Movement and Creative Process through Dance
[ ca ss ]

No prior dance experience or training is required. Attendance and physical participation is the primary mode of learning for this course. Therefore, students at risk for health concerns or potential obstacles related to in-person attendance or physical participation are encouraged to consult with their advisor and the instructor in advance of the start of class.

Explores forms of modifiable movement, alongside guided movement and creative processes for dance making. Pedagogy and readings for this course will center on Indigenous approaches to movement and dance, and Indigenous performance and dance studies scholarship. Usually offered every year.

WGS 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.

WGS 92a Internship and Analysis

Usually offered every semester.

WGS 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.

WGS 98b Independent Study

Yields half-course credit.

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

WGS 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.

WGS 99b Senior Research

See WGS 99a for special notes and course description. Usually offered every year.

AAAS/WGS 121a Black Visibility
[ deis-us ss ]

Drawing on theories of the Black gaze rooted in both Black feminist visual culture (Tina Campt, bell hooks, Nicole Fleetwood) and surveillance studies (Simone Browne, Kelly Ross), this interdisciplinary course pairs a discussion of histories of anti-Black social control with an emphasis on Black reclamations of the visual field in modalities including popular film, social media, performance art, and literature. Students will emerge with a deepened understanding of how linked formations of Blackness, gender, and sexuality shape ways of seeing in American culture, and how different Black women, gender-expansive, and queer folx negotiate these formations with their art. Usually offered every year.

AAAS/WGS 122a Carceral Arts
[ deis-us djw ss ]

With more than 10 million people imprisoned around the world in jails, detention centers, refuge camps, for-profit prisons, the effects of a carceral state are evident in many ways. Modern democratic societies often rely upon practices of incarceration, detention, and surveillance to demonstrate the power of a rule of law. This course will be an introductory study covering the social costs of the practice of incarceration across geographies and global communities. Special one-time offering, fall 2021.

AAAS/WGS 123b Black Girlhood Sexual Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

This seminar uses a feminist perspective to provide students with an overview of the achievements, experiences, productions, and sexual politics of Black girlhood in art, visual culture, 20th century American Literature, and popular media. We will explore the ways Black girlhood has been understood in popular imaginings as well as the ways Black girls represent themselves—their experiences, bodies, sexuality, race, class, knowledge histories, and labors, cultural productions. This seminar introduces students to the field of gender and sexuality as cultural study through visual culture and the aesthetics of narrative. Special one-time offering, spring 2021.

AAAS/WGS 124a Gender and Surrealism in Popular Black TV and Film
[ deis-us ]

Interprets contemporary Black experimental TV and Film (including Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness, Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country) through two distinct yet overlapping intellectual and political traditions: Black feminism (as a politic that interrogates assumptions behind gender, sexuality, and race in the interests of Black women’s freedom) and Afrosurrealism (as an anti-imperialist poetic, musical, and artistic movement that denaturalizes linked power structures from African diasporic perspectives). Students will identify and articulate key features, principles, and goals of Black feminism and Afrosurrealism, tracing how different Black artists and thinkers have employed and revised these traditions since the 1960s. Special one-time offering, fall 2022.

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.

AAAS/WGS 136a Black Feminist Thought
[ deis-us oc 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.

AAAS/WGS 152b Beyoncé and Beyond: The Politics of Black Popular Music
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisite: AAAS 5a, AAAS/WGS 125a or AAAS/WGS 136a.

Introduces the history of contemporary black popular music and uses Beyoncé's wide-ranging and African diasporic musical repertoire as an entry-point into Black sound cultures from the US, Africa, the Caribbean, and Western Europe. Each week will spotlight part of Beyoncé's repertoire, i.e., Lemonade, Black is King, B-day, and Dangerously in Love, taking these as a jumping off point from which to survey and delve into such genres as R&B, Hip-hop, Disco, Dancehall, UK Garage, Trap Soul, New Orleans Bounce, as well as Jungle & Afrobeats. In addition to understanding these histories and genres, students will also explore public-facing popular music writing and criticism, and produce a piece of music criticism such as a blog post or Op-ed. Overall, this course investigates the aesthetic, political, cultural, and economic dimensions of Black popular music, paying particular attention to questions of gender, sexuality, class, nation, language, and technology. Usually offered every second year.

AAAS/WGS 180b Black Sexual Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisites: AAAS 5a and/or WGS 5a recommended for participating undergraduates.

Grounded in Black feminist theories of eroticism, pleasure, and embodiment, this seminar invites students into complex conversations about how racially and sexually minoritized people build robust sexual worlds even in the face of anti-Blackness, misogyny, and heterosexism. Inspired by Patricia Hill Collins’ 2004 monograph Black Sexual Politics, this seminar asks: how have Black women, Black queer people, and Black gender-expansive people in America used culture and social movements to create in-group knowledge and to challenge linked racial-sexual structures of oppression? How have different practitioners created and revised theories of sexuality depending on time and place? Students will emerge from this seminar with a deepened understanding of Black feminist theoretical vocabularies including but not limited to: the politics of respectability, the culture of dissemblance, ungendering, fungibility, theories of the flesh, pleasure, and misogynoir. Special one-time offering, spring 2023.

AAPI/WGS 125b Gender, Migration, and Sexuality in a Global Asia
[ ss ]

Provides an overview of the study of gender, sexuality, and migration in Asia. It begins with studies that provide a big picture of the study of gender, sexuality, and migration. It then proceeds to highlight how gender shapes institutions of migration and various forms of mobility followed by case studies of different groups of women and minoritarian subjects such as students, factory workers, and sex workers.This course will pay particular attention to the intersections of gender, sexuality, and global economy; changing constructs of masculinity and femininity; and how dynamics of gender and sexuality shift across time and space. Usually offered every year.

AAPI/WGS 126a Asian American and Pacific Islander Women
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history is an interdisciplinary field of study at the intersections of national and global histories of the United States; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; Asian American and Pacific Islander studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; and more. This course introduces students to seminal works in the field of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history, covering a broad range of topics and ethnic groups. We will explore important historical figures, feminist writers and scholars, activists, cultural producers, popular icons, and historical events in our quest to understand AAPI women’s positions and movements within the US social formation. While the experiences of AAPI women vary greatly over time and space, common themes we will explore include globalism and transnationalism; exclusion, empire, and colonialism; gender and intersectionality; agency, resistance, and resilience; and culture and identity. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/WGS 130a Critical Adoption Studies
[ deis-us djw oc ]

Although adoption has a storied past spanning a range of diverse cultural, geographic, and temporal settings, the adopting of children across national boundaries is a relatively new phenomenon—one that emerged in tandem with America’s postwar expansion into Asia. Today, international adoption is a normalized and accepted institution that helps to express dominant US ideologies of humanitarianism, internationalism, and multiculturalism. But American’s sudden and unprecedented desire to adopt children from abroad was anything but natural, informed instead by the dynamic geopolitical imperatives of the early Cold War years. Since then, the discourse surrounding international adoption in the United States has been dominated by American social workers and adoptive parents, rather than adoptees themselves or those who lose children in adoption. This course interrogates the knowledge production about international adoption that has historically privileged perspectives from the receiving country or that of adoptive parents in particular. Instead, we investigate the cultural, ethnic, and racial experiences of transnationally, transracially adopted individuals as well as their birth families long overlooked in adoption studies. Usually offered every year.

AAPI/WGS 137b Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Examines performances of Asian/American women and how they have changed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We analyze American film, television, and stage performances to trace the shifting, yet continuous participation of Asian/American women on screen and scene in the United States. Important issues include Orientalism and representation, race and racism, immigration and diasporas, militarism and hypersexualization, yellow face practices then and now, as well as assimilation and resistance. We ask: what have dominant representations of Asian/American been like from the silent film era to the current digital age? How have the figures of the lotus blossom, the dragon lady, the trafficked woman, the geisha, the war bride, the military prostitute, the orphan, among other problematic tropes emerged to represent Asian/American women? How has the changing political, social, and cultural position of Asian/Americans shaped their participation in media production, as well as their media representations in the United States broadly speaking? Students will leave this course with a strong understanding of how media and culture shapes the racial and sexual formation of Asian Americans, as well as how to interact with that media and culture beyond just consumption but instead towards analysis and critique too. Usually offered every second year.

ANTH/WGS 176a Queer/Trans Theories from Elsewhere
[ deis-us djw ss ]

Centers the notion of 'elsewhere' in relationship to studies of gender, sexuality, power, and desire. 'Elsewhere' refers not only to place, but also to body and method. While terms like 'queer' and 'transgender' have become useful analytics for exploring gender, sexuality, feeling, space, place, relationality, and time, the academic theories that focus on these categories have remained mostly within white, US- and European academic spaces. We invite students to trouble these analytics - that is, the categories themselves, the bodies that these analytics center, and the methods deployed in relation to these analytics - by reading diverse approaches to gender and sexuality. The semester's engagement with 'elsewhere' is divided into three units: body, place, and method. Our objective is to teach students to cultivate new ways of seeing and ultimately new theories of gender and sexuality through engaging with non-canonical perspectives. Usually offered every third year.

HIST/WGS 120b Queer History in the United States
[ deis-us dl oc ss ]

Traces shifting concepts and practices of gender and sexual deviance in the United States from the colonial period to the present. We will treat queer identity and experience as a topic of historical inquiry as well as a theoretical problem, following the way that currently distinct concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality historically defined each other in shifting configurations. Topics include: queer life and concepts of gender and sexuality before Stonewall; the emergence of the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and later transgender identity; the dependence of gender and sexual categories on class and racial categories; the mechanisms of state and informal policing of gender and sexual norms; the creation of social movements around queer an0d gender-nonconforming identities; attitudes towards gender nonconformity in the gay rights and feminist movements of the seventies; the AIDS Crisis and activist responses to it; and the politics of contemporary representations of the history of queer and transgender struggle. Usually offered every year.

NEJS/WGS 110a Sexual Violence in Film and Culture
[ deis-us djw hum oc ]

Explores the effects of sexualized violence in society. While exploring representations of gender-based sexual violence in documentaries and features, stand-up comedy, memoirs, poetry, and visual art, this course will offer a critical discussion on Rape Culture in the 21st century, with particular attention to the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability in the construction of sexual violence. Usually offered every second year.

POL/WGS 125a Gender in American Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took POL 125a in prior years.

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.

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.

WGS 105b Feminisms: History, Theory, and Practice
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Prerequisite: Students are encouraged, though not required, to take WGS 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.

WGS 106a The American Social Body
[ deis-us ]

Explores the ways in which the body is shaped in American culture. What social and cultural meanings do we attach to certain bodies? How do social systems of inequality, such as racism, sexism, ableism and classism influence how we see bodies? Topics to include dieting and bodybuilding, body image and "the beauty myth," body modification, ability and disability, and the moralization of health. Usually offered every second year.

WGS 107a Introduction to Indigenous and Native Women, Gender, and Sexualities
[ deis-us ss ]

This introductory course will critically examine colonial constructions of Native American and Indigenous women, gender diversity, and sexualities, and will explore topics relevant to contemporary experiences of Native American and Indigenous peoples in settler states known as the United States and Canada. Topics surveyed include: decolonization, gender violence, gender expansiveness, body sovereignty, and sexual sovereignty. This course will illuminate Native American and Indigenous Studies, Indigenous Feminisms, Queer Indigenous Studies, and perspectives from Indigenous authors. Students will read, view, discuss, and write about current issues in terms of topics relevant to studies of Native American and Indigenous Women, Genders, and Sexualities. Usually offered every second year.

WGS 107b In and Beyond the Powwow Arena: Introduction to Native American Indigenous Dance
[ deis-us ss ]

Introduces history, contemporary practices, and cultural contexts of Native American Powwow dancing within the United States and Canada. The first half of the semester will focus on Native American Powwows and Powwow dances in their emergence. The second half of the semester will focus on examining contemporary practices and iterations of Powwow dancing outside of the Powwow arena. This course will touch on topics of gender and gender expansiveness, decolonization, body sovereignty, sexual sovereignty, and the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women, Girls, Two Spirit and Trans people (MMIWG2ST). Special one-time offering, fall 2022.

WGS 108a Ecofeminism and Climate Justice Activism
[ ss wi ]

From local activism to regional and national fights against militarization and deforestation to broader movement organizing, education, and international politics, this class aims to showcase how ecofeminists and ecowomanists nurture and grow resilience in times of multiple crises through employing “a radical political orientation grounded in solidarity, rather than sameness, as an organizing principle.” Usually offered every second year.

WGS 108b Native Indigenous Bodies: Gender Violence and Gender Defiance
[ ss ]

Locates the position of Native Indigenous bodies in the contexts of settler nations of the United States and Canada. Centering Native Indigenous bodies, this course will delve into studies of gender, race, and theory. We will focus on major areas of: 1) history grounding colonial violence and gendering of Native Indigenous bodies, 2) gender based violence, and 3) defiance through expressions of the body (dance, burlesque, drag). Throughout the course we will discuss how Native Indigenous bodies are central and disruptive to colonization. Usually offered every year.

WGS 109a Sick, Fat, Ugly, Useless: Disability, Fat Studies, and the Politics of the Body
[ ss ]

We are now in the twenty-first century: Why do we still have so much prejudice about bodies that differ from the "norm?" What, indeed, is the "norm" and why is it so important to us? In this course, students will be introduced to fat studies and disability studies in tandem to explore the politics of the body. We will examine questions drawn from disability studies about bioethics, community organization, and the use of technology. And we will examine questions drawn from fat liberation about the construction of aesthetics, the history of fatphobia and racism, and the way we layer symbolic meaning on the body. We'll look at stereotypes of disabled and fat people in media studies, examine prejudice in sociology, and ask some hard questions about the persistence of eugenics through the lens of biopower and necropolitics. Usually offered every third year.

WGS 111a Gender, Abolition, and the Politics of Getting Free
[ deis-us ss ]

From prisons to carceral logics (e.g., “kill the cop in your head”) to identity categories (such as gender), the language of abolition has long held a place in scholarly and activist discourse. But what, exactly, does abolition mean, and how do we know when we are engaged in abolitionist politics, praxis, or theory? This course takes a Black feminist approach to the study of abolition as a conceptual framework, abolition as a political orientation, and abolition as a (proposed) practical reality. Students will engage historical and archival materials, organizational pamphlets and websites, and academic and public feminist scholarship that mobilize the language of “abolition” in order to develop a robust theoretical and political understanding of the concept. Students will also work on their own political projects and apply these concepts of abolition to the production of manifestos, political campaigns, and personal writing. Special one-time offering, spring 2025.

WGS 128b Transgender Health and Wellness
[ deis-us 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.

WGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms
[ hum oc ]

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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

GSAS 360c Article Publication Workshop

Full year course. Yields two credits per semester. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit. Students should check with their departments about whether or not the course will fulfill any degree requirements.

Open to PhD, including ABD, and MA students in all Humanities, Arts, and Humanistic Social Sciences graduate programs.

This proseminar/workshop will meet every other week and introduce graduate students to the larger philosophy, as well as the nuts and bolts, of academic publication. Each student should come to the class with an academic journal article project in mind and aim to send out the article to a journal by the end of the year (or earlier!). We will workshop the papers in class, and peer review will be an essential component of coursework. Discussions will be general as well as field-specific.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

WGS 218b WGS Graduate Proseminar

Introduces graduate students in the diverse field of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGS) Studies. The MA program at Brandeis seeks to enable students to take an academic path to a doctoral program or to become active practitioners in a variety of fields from law to social work. Usually offered every year.

WGS 292a Graduate Internship

WGS 298a Independent Study

WGS 299a Master's Project in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Usually offered every year.
Staff

WGS 299b Master's Project in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Usually offered every year.

WGS 310a Directed Reading in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Directed Reading for graduate students in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

WGS 5a Women, Genders, and Sexualities
[ deis-us dl 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.

WGS 6b Sexuality and Queer Studies
[ djw dl hum ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took SQS 6b in prior years.

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.

AAAS/WGS 136a Black Feminist Thought
[ deis-us oc 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.

AAPI/WGS 126a Asian American and Pacific Islander Women
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history is an interdisciplinary field of study at the intersections of national and global histories of the United States; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; Asian American and Pacific Islander studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; and more. This course introduces students to seminal works in the field of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history, covering a broad range of topics and ethnic groups. We will explore important historical figures, feminist writers and scholars, activists, cultural producers, popular icons, and historical events in our quest to understand AAPI women’s positions and movements within the US social formation. While the experiences of AAPI women vary greatly over time and space, common themes we will explore include globalism and transnationalism; exclusion, empire, and colonialism; gender and intersectionality; agency, resistance, and resilience; and culture and identity. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/WGS 130a Critical Adoption Studies
[ deis-us djw oc ]

Although adoption has a storied past spanning a range of diverse cultural, geographic, and temporal settings, the adopting of children across national boundaries is a relatively new phenomenon—one that emerged in tandem with America’s postwar expansion into Asia. Today, international adoption is a normalized and accepted institution that helps to express dominant US ideologies of humanitarianism, internationalism, and multiculturalism. But American’s sudden and unprecedented desire to adopt children from abroad was anything but natural, informed instead by the dynamic geopolitical imperatives of the early Cold War years. Since then, the discourse surrounding international adoption in the United States has been dominated by American social workers and adoptive parents, rather than adoptees themselves or those who lose children in adoption. This course interrogates the knowledge production about international adoption that has historically privileged perspectives from the receiving country or that of adoptive parents in particular. Instead, we investigate the cultural, ethnic, and racial experiences of transnationally, transracially adopted individuals as well as their birth families long overlooked in adoption studies. Usually offered every year.

AAPI/WGS 137b Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Examines performances of Asian/American women and how they have changed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We analyze American film, television, and stage performances to trace the shifting, yet continuous participation of Asian/American women on screen and scene in the United States. Important issues include Orientalism and representation, race and racism, immigration and diasporas, militarism and hypersexualization, yellow face practices then and now, as well as assimilation and resistance. We ask: what have dominant representations of Asian/American been like from the silent film era to the current digital age? How have the figures of the lotus blossom, the dragon lady, the trafficked woman, the geisha, the war bride, the military prostitute, the orphan, among other problematic tropes emerged to represent Asian/American women? How has the changing political, social, and cultural position of Asian/Americans shaped their participation in media production, as well as their media representations in the United States broadly speaking? Students will leave this course with a strong understanding of how media and culture shapes the racial and sexual formation of Asian Americans, as well as how to interact with that media and culture beyond just consumption but instead towards analysis and critique too. Usually offered every second year.

NEJS/WGS 110a Sexual Violence in Film and Culture
[ deis-us djw hum oc ]

Explores the effects of sexualized violence in society. While exploring representations of gender-based sexual violence in documentaries and features, stand-up comedy, memoirs, poetry, and visual art, this course will offer a critical discussion on Rape Culture in the 21st century, with particular attention to the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability in the construction of sexual violence. Usually offered every second year.

WGS 5a Women, Genders, and Sexualities
[ deis-us dl 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.

WGS 105b Feminisms: History, Theory, and Practice
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Prerequisite: Students are encouraged, though not required, to take WGS 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.

WGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms
[ hum oc ]

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.

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.

ANTH 144a The Anthropology of Gender
[ djw nw ss wi ]

Anthropology majors have priority for enrollment.

Explores gender, sexuality, and cultural systems from a comparative perspective. Topics may include rituals of masculinity and femininity, the vexing question of the universality of women's subordination, culturally-specific classifications of sexual orientation and gender identity, transnational feminisms, sex work, migrant labor, reproductive rights, and much more. Usually offered every year.

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.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

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.

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.

HIST 115b War and Gender in U.S. History
[ ss wi ]

Examines the ways that military conflict has both shaped and been shaped by gender norms and roles in the course of U.S. history, from colonial wars to contemporary conflicts. We will analyze how wars have influenced gender expectations, identities, and experiences for various groups including American service members, civilians, and people around the world affected by U.S. military operations. Usually offered every second year.

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.

HIST 157b 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.

NEJS 128b Gender, Multiculturalism, and the Law
[ hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took PHIL 128a in prior years.

Can the state determine what children must learn in schools run by religious minorities? Should the state intervene to prevent forced or underage marriage if these practices are based on religious traditions? Can the state accommodate religiously-based demands to provide separate but equal public services to men and women, in prayer, on public transportation or at universities? These are some of the issues we will explore in this class through reading texts in law, political philosophy and modern Jewish thought. Usually offered every second year.

NEJS 130b Denial and Desires: Gender and Sexuality in Early Christianity
[ hum wi ]

Formerly offered as NEJS 218a.

Investigates how Christians (1st-4th C.) contested and reshaped attitudes toward the family gender expectations (for nonbinary persons, men, and women), sexuality, and aging in cities, the countryside, and in monasteries. Readings include the New Testament, early Christian literature, and modern studies regarding the body, sexuality, and theological frameworks for defining how to maintain the Christian body. Usually offered every fourth year.
Darlene Brooks Hedstrom

PSYC 160b Seminar on Sex Differences
[ oc 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.

SOC 113a Sociology of Love
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Examines the concept of love in sociological theory and research, through the lenses of race, economy, gender, sexuality. Usually offered every second year.

THA 142b Women Playwrights: Writing for the Stage by and about Women
[ ca deis-us wi ]

Introduces the world of women playwrights. This course will engage the texts through common themes explored by women 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.

WGS 99b Senior Research

See WGS 99a for special notes and course description. Usually offered every year.

WGS 108a Ecofeminism and Climate Justice Activism
[ ss wi ]

From local activism to regional and national fights against militarization and deforestation to broader movement organizing, education, and international politics, this class aims to showcase how ecofeminists and ecowomanists nurture and grow resilience in times of multiple crises through employing “a radical political orientation grounded in solidarity, rather than sameness, as an organizing principle.” Usually offered every second year.

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.

AAAS 131b African Women's and Gender Studies
[ djw ss wi ]

Introduction to the genealogy, epistemology, and pedagogy of African Women's and Gender Studies. Students examine a range of gendered experiences in Africa by applying interdisciplinary frames from feminist theory, history, queer studies, development studies, political science, economics, peace studies, literary, art and performance studies, and so on. Students critically evaluate scholarship that deconstructs static notions about women and gender in Africa by centering decolonial perspectives on the topics covered. Usually offered every second year.

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.

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.

AAAS/WGS 122a Carceral Arts
[ deis-us djw ss ]

With more than 10 million people imprisoned around the world in jails, detention centers, refuge camps, for-profit prisons, the effects of a carceral state are evident in many ways. Modern democratic societies often rely upon practices of incarceration, detention, and surveillance to demonstrate the power of a rule of law. This course will be an introductory study covering the social costs of the practice of incarceration across geographies and global communities. Special one-time offering, fall 2021.

AAAS/WGS 123b Black Girlhood Sexual Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

This seminar uses a feminist perspective to provide students with an overview of the achievements, experiences, productions, and sexual politics of Black girlhood in art, visual culture, 20th century American Literature, and popular media. We will explore the ways Black girlhood has been understood in popular imaginings as well as the ways Black girls represent themselves—their experiences, bodies, sexuality, race, class, knowledge histories, and labors, cultural productions. This seminar introduces students to the field of gender and sexuality as cultural study through visual culture and the aesthetics of narrative. Special one-time offering, spring 2021.

AAAS/WGS 124a Gender and Surrealism in Popular Black TV and Film
[ deis-us ]

Interprets contemporary Black experimental TV and Film (including Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness, Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country) through two distinct yet overlapping intellectual and political traditions: Black feminism (as a politic that interrogates assumptions behind gender, sexuality, and race in the interests of Black women’s freedom) and Afrosurrealism (as an anti-imperialist poetic, musical, and artistic movement that denaturalizes linked power structures from African diasporic perspectives). Students will identify and articulate key features, principles, and goals of Black feminism and Afrosurrealism, tracing how different Black artists and thinkers have employed and revised these traditions since the 1960s. Special one-time offering, fall 2022.

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.

AAAS/WGS 136a Black Feminist Thought
[ deis-us oc 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.

AAAS/WGS 152b Beyoncé and Beyond: The Politics of Black Popular Music
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisite: AAAS 5a, AAAS/WGS 125a or AAAS/WGS 136a.

Introduces the history of contemporary black popular music and uses Beyoncé's wide-ranging and African diasporic musical repertoire as an entry-point into Black sound cultures from the US, Africa, the Caribbean, and Western Europe. Each week will spotlight part of Beyoncé's repertoire, i.e., Lemonade, Black is King, B-day, and Dangerously in Love, taking these as a jumping off point from which to survey and delve into such genres as R&B, Hip-hop, Disco, Dancehall, UK Garage, Trap Soul, New Orleans Bounce, as well as Jungle & Afrobeats. In addition to understanding these histories and genres, students will also explore public-facing popular music writing and criticism, and produce a piece of music criticism such as a blog post or Op-ed. Overall, this course investigates the aesthetic, political, cultural, and economic dimensions of Black popular music, paying particular attention to questions of gender, sexuality, class, nation, language, and technology. Usually offered every second year.

AAAS/WGS 180b Black Sexual Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisites: AAAS 5a and/or WGS 5a recommended for participating undergraduates.

Grounded in Black feminist theories of eroticism, pleasure, and embodiment, this seminar invites students into complex conversations about how racially and sexually minoritized people build robust sexual worlds even in the face of anti-Blackness, misogyny, and heterosexism. Inspired by Patricia Hill Collins’ 2004 monograph Black Sexual Politics, this seminar asks: how have Black women, Black queer people, and Black gender-expansive people in America used culture and social movements to create in-group knowledge and to challenge linked racial-sexual structures of oppression? How have different practitioners created and revised theories of sexuality depending on time and place? Students will emerge from this seminar with a deepened understanding of Black feminist theoretical vocabularies including but not limited to: the politics of respectability, the culture of dissemblance, ungendering, fungibility, theories of the flesh, pleasure, and misogynoir. Special one-time offering, spring 2023.

AAPI/WGS 125b Gender, Migration, and Sexuality in a Global Asia
[ ss ]

Provides an overview of the study of gender, sexuality, and migration in Asia. It begins with studies that provide a big picture of the study of gender, sexuality, and migration. It then proceeds to highlight how gender shapes institutions of migration and various forms of mobility followed by case studies of different groups of women and minoritarian subjects such as students, factory workers, and sex workers.This course will pay particular attention to the intersections of gender, sexuality, and global economy; changing constructs of masculinity and femininity; and how dynamics of gender and sexuality shift across time and space. Usually offered every year.

AAPI/WGS 126a Asian American and Pacific Islander Women
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history is an interdisciplinary field of study at the intersections of national and global histories of the United States; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; Asian American and Pacific Islander studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; and more. This course introduces students to seminal works in the field of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history, covering a broad range of topics and ethnic groups. We will explore important historical figures, feminist writers and scholars, activists, cultural producers, popular icons, and historical events in our quest to understand AAPI women’s positions and movements within the US social formation. While the experiences of AAPI women vary greatly over time and space, common themes we will explore include globalism and transnationalism; exclusion, empire, and colonialism; gender and intersectionality; agency, resistance, and resilience; and culture and identity. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/WGS 137b Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Examines performances of Asian/American women and how they have changed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We analyze American film, television, and stage performances to trace the shifting, yet continuous participation of Asian/American women on screen and scene in the United States. Important issues include Orientalism and representation, race and racism, immigration and diasporas, militarism and hypersexualization, yellow face practices then and now, as well as assimilation and resistance. We ask: what have dominant representations of Asian/American been like from the silent film era to the current digital age? How have the figures of the lotus blossom, the dragon lady, the trafficked woman, the geisha, the war bride, the military prostitute, the orphan, among other problematic tropes emerged to represent Asian/American women? How has the changing political, social, and cultural position of Asian/Americans shaped their participation in media production, as well as their media representations in the United States broadly speaking? Students will leave this course with a strong understanding of how media and culture shapes the racial and sexual formation of Asian Americans, as well as how to interact with that media and culture beyond just consumption but instead towards analysis and critique too. Usually offered every second year.

ANTH 144a The Anthropology of Gender
[ djw nw ss wi ]

Anthropology majors have priority for enrollment.

Explores gender, sexuality, and cultural systems from a comparative perspective. Topics may include rituals of masculinity and femininity, the vexing question of the universality of women's subordination, culturally-specific classifications of sexual orientation and gender identity, transnational feminisms, sex work, migrant labor, reproductive rights, and much more. Usually offered every year.

ANTH 145a Anthropology of the Body
[ dl ss ]

Explores a range of theories that use the body to understand society, culture, and gender. Topics include how social values and hierarchies are written in, on, and through the body; the relationship between body and gender identity; and experiences and images of the body cross-culturally. Usually offered every third year.

ANTH 152a The Social Fabric: An Anthropology of Fashion
[ dl ss ]

An ethnographic exploration of fashion as industry and cultural practice. This course addresses how fashion shapes our gendered, ethnic and individual identities. Understanding how much seemingly personal processes unfold within larger economic structures illuminates the linkage between power, modernity, and capitalism. Usually offered every second year.

ANTH 166b Queer Anthropology: Sexualities and Genders in Cross-Cultural Perspective
[ djw oc ss ]

When held together, “Queer Anthropology” might name something akin to a systematic way of cross-culturally studying human sexuality, gender, and desire that runs against the grain of dominant, socially held beliefs of normalcy (or what we now call normative/heteronormative). Sitting with this definition, we will chart the different worlds that Queer Anthropology might enable us to see and imagine. From transfeminine women who claim to experience pregnancy to sex between straight white Frat brothers to lesbian women finding community through anonymous love letters, this course moves between different scales and registers for talking about sexuality, gender, bodies, and difference. Together, we will trace Queer Anthropology's origins, examine its present moments, and speculate on its potential futures. Usually offered every second year.

ANTH 178b Culture, Gender and Power in East Asia
[ nw ss wi ]

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.

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.

ANTH/WGS 176a Queer/Trans Theories from Elsewhere
[ deis-us djw ss ]

Centers the notion of 'elsewhere' in relationship to studies of gender, sexuality, power, and desire. 'Elsewhere' refers not only to place, but also to body and method. While terms like 'queer' and 'transgender' have become useful analytics for exploring gender, sexuality, feeling, space, place, relationality, and time, the academic theories that focus on these categories have remained mostly within white, US- and European academic spaces. We invite students to trouble these analytics - that is, the categories themselves, the bodies that these analytics center, and the methods deployed in relation to these analytics - by reading diverse approaches to gender and sexuality. The semester's engagement with 'elsewhere' is divided into three units: body, place, and method. Our objective is to teach students to cultivate new ways of seeing and ultimately new theories of gender and sexuality through engaging with non-canonical perspectives. Usually offered every third year.

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.

CAST 125a Confronting Gender-Based Violence
[ ca deis-us djw ]

Engaging with multiple forms of creative expression and several different social change frameworks as they address and counter various aspects of gender-based violence in discrete cultural and historical contexts, this course explores gender-based violence as a grave violation of human rights, and the creative, innovative and meaningful methods through which particular communities and individuals counter such violation, including as it intersects with race and socioeconomic status. These methods might range from art installations in galleries or public spaces to formal theatrical productions, from the choreography of street protests to graffiti, films, pop-up concerts and podcasts, many involving survivors of gender-based violence in the creative process. We'll focus in particular on the experiences of those who identify as women, have been assigned to or perceived of as members of that category, or who identify and present as femme. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ECON 69a The Economics of Race and Gender
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Prerequisite: ECON 2a or ECON 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.

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the exuberant and sometimes strained relationship between black people
and joy. In addition to literature, we will encounter various performances and perspectives that approach joy from multitude of perspectives, including minstrelsy, meditation, nature writing, ancestral remembrance, and the erotics of eating well and feeling good. Usually offered every year.

ENG 52b Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood
[ deis-us hum ]

Highlights the innovations that black artists and scholars have made within the vampire tradition. Our sources range from literature and comics to television and film. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 64a Queer Readings: Before the Binary
[ hum oc ]

Explores vectors of desire, intimacy, and relationality prior to 1800 that do not always neatly line up with post-Enlightenment taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and humanness. We will read works by Austen, Behn, Marlowe, Phillips, Rochester, Shakespeare, and others, asking: What possibilities of pleasure, intimacy, love, friendship, and kinship existed alongside male-female reproductive sex and marriage before 1800? What possibilities for non-binary gender identifications and presentations? Without firm taxonomic distinctions among classes of people, between human and nonhuman animals, or even between the human and the thing, how did early moderns understand what counted as fully human? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

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.

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.

ENG 121b Literature in the Age of Mass Incarceration
[ deis-us hum ]

Investigates prison writing and the broader impact of mass incarceration on literature in the U.S. We will consider carceral institutions as distinctive, complex sites of cultural production and explore how creative practices in prisons emerge and circulate as texts. We will approach this literature as a practice of survival in extremity and resistance to an intensively racialized, dehumanizing set of institutions. And we will examine how this writing imagines very different forms of justice. Throughout, this course will investigate the volatile intersections of sexuality, gender, and race in carceral subjectivity and resistance. This course is based on the instructor’s experiences teaching incarcerated students in the Boston area and will have options for service-learning and community engagement. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 123a Violence and the Body in Early Modern Drama
[ dl hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 23a in prior years.

Explores early modern understandings of the body, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, race, and nation. Considers the role of violence in determining who counts as fully human, who can be reduced to a body, and whose bodies can be severed from citizenship, recognition, and value. Explores as well the claims of the body and voice to memorialization and belonging, and the evidence of actors' bodies on the stage. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ djw 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.

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.

ENG 142b Black Queer Literatures
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon the attempt to create the shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we also attend to important divisions brought about by various forms and feelings of difference (including race, gender, class, nation, age and ability). Usually offered every third year.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl 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.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

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.

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum oc ]

Students will explore two pressing questions: How do contemporary theatre artists work to rehumanize those denied humanity? During a global climate emergency, how can the theatre, which is traditionally defined by the co-presence of humans, relocate the human as only one of many lifeforms--not the center of everything but rather entwined with other organic, inorganic, and spiritual agencies? Usually offered every second year.

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ djw 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.

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.

ENG 201a Gender and Sexuality Studies

Investigates sex assignment, genders, and sexualities as categories of social knowledge and modes of social production. Reading recent critical discussions and crossing disciplinary boundaries, this course explores gender, desire, and pleasure in everyday and formal performance, literary and other written texts, and visual representations. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 248b Social Justice and Digital Humanities: Methods and Applications

Issues around accessibility–race, gender, disability, sexuality, etc.–are central to the digital humanities. This class will center these issues as we examine different method areas: archives, mapping, digital ethics, multimodality, digital pedagogy/digital praxis, data, labor, games, data visualization, new media. We will ask what methodological theories and praxis are necessary for a digital humanities that centers social justice. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 253b Medieval Women and the Book

Examines gender theory, queer theory, and critical race theory as it intersects in medieval women's literary cultures. It considers works about gender and medicine, the environment, race, and the law. Students will consider reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. Usually offered every third year.

FA 176a Fashion History of China
[ ca ]

Examines the evolution of garments, ornaments, accessories, shoes, and other bodily adornments in China through the lens of art history. Ancient murals, tomb figurines, and representations in painting will be the primary materials of investigation. Students learn about the importance of dress and fashion (and their visual representations) in shaping identities through the ages. Usually offered every third year.

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 third year.

FREN 139a Bad Girls and Boys: Du 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 male and female figures in the French and Francophone world who have failed to conform to expectations of their gender. Usually offered every second year.

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.

HISP 121b Sexualidades disidentes del sur (ensayo, ficción, cine)
[ djw fl hum ]

Prerequisite: HISP 108a, HISP 111b, or instructor approval

We will study cultural texts (fiction, essay, film) to approach issues of gender and sexuality in Latin America. The last three decades have been characterized by the emergence of gender and sexualities as central to the articulation of political and cultural dissent, with profound impact on all aspects of social life. LGBTQ+ and new generation feminist movements, artists, and cultural agents incorporate issues of class, ethnicity, coloniality, and the environment in their interventions and struggles. Usually offered every third year.

HISP 158a Latina Feminisms
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Taught in English.

Explores the theoretical frameworks and literary productions of feminisms developed by Latina/xs. It introduces students to a diversity of backgrounds and experiences (Chicana, Dominican American, Cuban American, Salvadoran American, and Puerto Rican authors) as well as a variety of genres (i.e. novel, poetry, short stories, drama). Using intersectionality as a theoretical tool for analyzing oppressions, students will explore the complex politics of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and race in the lives of Latina/xs. They will also explore Latina/x feminists' theoretical and/or practical attempts to transcend socially-constructed categories of identity, while acknowledging existing material inequalities. Usually offered every third year.

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.

HIST 115b War and Gender in U.S. History
[ ss wi ]

Examines the ways that military conflict has both shaped and been shaped by gender norms and roles in the course of U.S. history, from colonial wars to contemporary conflicts. We will analyze how wars have influenced gender expectations, identities, and experiences for various groups including American service members, civilians, and people around the world affected by U.S. military operations. Usually offered every second year.

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.

HIST 157b 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.

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.

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.

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.

HIST/SOC 170b Gender and Sexuality in South Asia
[ djw nw 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.

HIST/WGS 120b Queer History in the United States
[ deis-us dl oc ss ]

Traces shifting concepts and practices of gender and sexual deviance in the United States from the colonial period to the present. We will treat queer identity and experience as a topic of historical inquiry as well as a theoretical problem, following the way that currently distinct concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality historically defined each other in shifting configurations. Topics include: queer life and concepts of gender and sexuality before Stonewall; the emergence of the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and later transgender identity; the dependence of gender and sexual categories on class and racial categories; the mechanisms of state and informal policing of gender and sexual norms; the creation of social movements around queer an0d gender-nonconforming identities; attitudes towards gender nonconformity in the gay rights and feminist movements of the seventies; the AIDS Crisis and activist responses to it; and the politics of contemporary representations of the history of queer and transgender struggle. Usually offered every year.

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.

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.

HS 273f Law and Social Justice: Gender Equity Policies and Litigation

Meets for one-half semester and yields half-course credit.

Explores issues of gender equity that arise in different contexts. Central to the course is the study of how social policy, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and laws from other nations employ the evolving concept of gender to shape political, social, and economic experiences, and how those laws and policies are formed. A primary goal of the course is to propose solutions to contemporary gender inequities. Areas of study include, intersectionality theory and practice, critical policy theory, reproductive justice, economic equality, political participation, and gender-based violence. Usually offered every year.

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.

HS 320f LGBTQ+ Justice: A History of Pride, Prejudice, and Policy in the United States

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.

IGS 136b Contemporary Chinese Society and Culture
[ djw nw ss wi ]

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.

JOUR 139b Reporting on Diverse Communities in Journalism
[ deis-us ss ]

Examines who has been left out of the news discourse; how that has shaped public understanding of race, immigration, gender, and sexual orientation in the United States; and how to produce coverage that is more representative and better reflects reality. Usually offered every second year.

MUS 36b Divas
[ ca wi ]

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.

NEJS 115a Gender, Women, and Islam
[ djw hum wi ]

Tracks the evolving histories of women, gender, and sexuality in diverse Muslim societies. Examines how gendered norms and sexual mores were negotiated through law, ethics, and custom. We will compare and contrast these themes in diverse societies, from the Prophet Muhammad’s community in 7th century Arabia to North American Muslim communities in the 21st century. Usually offered every third year.

NEJS 115b Gender and Sexuality in 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.

NEJS 128b Gender, Multiculturalism, and the Law
[ hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took PHIL 128a in prior years.

Can the state determine what children must learn in schools run by religious minorities? Should the state intervene to prevent forced or underage marriage if these practices are based on religious traditions? Can the state accommodate religiously-based demands to provide separate but equal public services to men and women, in prayer, on public transportation or at universities? These are some of the issues we will explore in this class through reading texts in law, political philosophy and modern Jewish thought. Usually offered every second year.

NEJS 130b Denial and Desires: Gender and Sexuality in Early Christianity
[ hum wi ]

Formerly offered as NEJS 218a.

Investigates how Christians (1st-4th C.) contested and reshaped attitudes toward the family gender expectations (for nonbinary persons, men, and women), sexuality, and aging in cities, the countryside, and in monasteries. Readings include the New Testament, early Christian literature, and modern studies regarding the body, sexuality, and theological frameworks for defining how to maintain the Christian body. Usually offered every fourth year.
Darlene Brooks Hedstrom

NEJS 140b Gender, Ghettos, and the Geographies of Early Modern Jews
[ hum ]

Examines Jewish history and culture in early modern Europe: mass conversions on the Iberian peninsula, migrations, reconversions back to Judaism, the printing revolution, the Reformation and Counter Reformation, ghettos, gender, family, everyday life, material culture, communal structure, rabbinical culture, mysticism, magic, science, messianic movements, Hasidism, mercantilism, and early modern challenges to Judaism.

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 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.

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.

NEJS 173a Trauma and Violence in Israeli Literature and Film
[ deis-us djw fl hum oc ]

Taught in Hebrew.

Explores trauma and violence in Israeli Literature, film, and art. Focuses on man-made disasters, war and terrorism, sexual and family violence, and murder and suicide, and examines their relation to nationalism, Zionism, gender, and sexual identity. Usually offered every second year.

NEJS 174b Israeli Women Writers on War and Peace
[ deis-us djw fl hum oc ]

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.

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.

NEJS 178a Love, Sex, and Power in Israeli Culture
[ djw 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.

NEJS 184b Disability Cultures: Art, Film and Literature of People with Disabilities
[ deis-us djw hum oc ]

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.

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.

POL/WGS 125a Gender in American Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took POL 125a in prior years.

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.

PSYC 160b Seminar on Sex Differences
[ oc 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.

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.

SOC 83a Sociology of Body and Health
[ deis-us ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took SOC 189a in prior years.

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 and population health. Usually offered every year.

SOC 112b Social Class and Social Inequality
[ oc ss ]

Presents the role of social class in determining life chances, lifestyles, income, occupation, and power; theories of class, inequality, and globalization; selected aspects of social class and inequality; and connections of class, race, and gender. Usually offered every second year.

SOC 113a Sociology of Love
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Examines the concept of love in sociological theory and research, through the lenses of race, economy, gender, sexuality. Usually offered every second year.

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.

SOC 124a Gender, Sexuality, and Globalization
[ djw oc 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.

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.

SOC 131b Writing Activists' Lives: Biography, Gender, and Society
[ ss wi ]

This course counts toward the completion of the joint MA degree in Sociology & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Explores the relationship between individual lives, historical period, structures of inequality, and social change by examining the lives of activists in the U.S. It uses the biographical method to pose questions about voice, positionality, evidence, and “truth.” Usually offered every third year.

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.

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.

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.

THA 110a Moving Women/Women Moving
[ ca hwl2 pe-1 ]

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.

THA 142b Women Playwrights: Writing for the Stage by and about Women
[ ca deis-us wi ]

Introduces the world of women playwrights. This course will engage the texts through common themes explored by women 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.

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.

WGS 5a Women, Genders, and Sexualities
[ deis-us dl 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.

WGS 6b Sexuality and Queer Studies
[ djw dl hum ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took SQS 6b in prior years.

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.

WGS 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.

WGS 105b Feminisms: History, Theory, and Practice
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Prerequisite: Students are encouraged, though not required, to take WGS 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.

WGS 106a The American Social Body
[ deis-us ]

Explores the ways in which the body is shaped in American culture. What social and cultural meanings do we attach to certain bodies? How do social systems of inequality, such as racism, sexism, ableism and classism influence how we see bodies? Topics to include dieting and bodybuilding, body image and "the beauty myth," body modification, ability and disability, and the moralization of health. Usually offered every second year.

WGS 107b In and Beyond the Powwow Arena: Introduction to Native American Indigenous Dance
[ deis-us ss ]

Introduces history, contemporary practices, and cultural contexts of Native American Powwow dancing within the United States and Canada. The first half of the semester will focus on Native American Powwows and Powwow dances in their emergence. The second half of the semester will focus on examining contemporary practices and iterations of Powwow dancing outside of the Powwow arena. This course will touch on topics of gender and gender expansiveness, decolonization, body sovereignty, sexual sovereignty, and the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women, Girls, Two Spirit and Trans people (MMIWG2ST). Special one-time offering, fall 2022.

WGS 108a Ecofeminism and Climate Justice Activism
[ ss wi ]

From local activism to regional and national fights against militarization and deforestation to broader movement organizing, education, and international politics, this class aims to showcase how ecofeminists and ecowomanists nurture and grow resilience in times of multiple crises through employing “a radical political orientation grounded in solidarity, rather than sameness, as an organizing principle.” Usually offered every second year.

WGS 108b Native Indigenous Bodies: Gender Violence and Gender Defiance
[ ss ]

Locates the position of Native Indigenous bodies in the contexts of settler nations of the United States and Canada. Centering Native Indigenous bodies, this course will delve into studies of gender, race, and theory. We will focus on major areas of: 1) history grounding colonial violence and gendering of Native Indigenous bodies, 2) gender based violence, and 3) defiance through expressions of the body (dance, burlesque, drag). Throughout the course we will discuss how Native Indigenous bodies are central and disruptive to colonization. Usually offered every year.

WGS 128b Transgender Health and Wellness
[ deis-us 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.

WGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms
[ hum oc ]

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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AAAS/WGS 136a Black Feminist Thought
[ deis-us oc 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.

AAAS/WGS 148b Black Dance: The Politics of Black Movement
[ ca ss ]

Introduces students to theories, debates, and critical frameworks in African Diaspora Dance Studies. How is black movement political? What makes a dance "black"? How do conceptualizations of gender and sexuality inform our reading of dancing bodies? Uses African diaspora, critical dance, performance, and black feminist frameworks to examine the history, politics, and aesthetics of "black dance." Usually offered every year.

AAAS/WGS 152b Beyoncé and Beyond: The Politics of Black Popular Music
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisite: AAAS 5a, AAAS/WGS 125a or AAAS/WGS 136a.

Introduces the history of contemporary black popular music and uses Beyoncé's wide-ranging and African diasporic musical repertoire as an entry-point into Black sound cultures from the US, Africa, the Caribbean, and Western Europe. Each week will spotlight part of Beyoncé's repertoire, i.e., Lemonade, Black is King, B-day, and Dangerously in Love, taking these as a jumping off point from which to survey and delve into such genres as R&B, Hip-hop, Disco, Dancehall, UK Garage, Trap Soul, New Orleans Bounce, as well as Jungle & Afrobeats. In addition to understanding these histories and genres, students will also explore public-facing popular music writing and criticism, and produce a piece of music criticism such as a blog post or Op-ed. Overall, this course investigates the aesthetic, political, cultural, and economic dimensions of Black popular music, paying particular attention to questions of gender, sexuality, class, nation, language, and technology. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/WGS 125b Gender, Migration, and Sexuality in a Global Asia
[ ss ]

Provides an overview of the study of gender, sexuality, and migration in Asia. It begins with studies that provide a big picture of the study of gender, sexuality, and migration. It then proceeds to highlight how gender shapes institutions of migration and various forms of mobility followed by case studies of different groups of women and minoritarian subjects such as students, factory workers, and sex workers.This course will pay particular attention to the intersections of gender, sexuality, and global economy; changing constructs of masculinity and femininity; and how dynamics of gender and sexuality shift across time and space. Usually offered every year.

AAPI/WGS 126a Asian American and Pacific Islander Women
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history is an interdisciplinary field of study at the intersections of national and global histories of the United States; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; Asian American and Pacific Islander studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; and more. This course introduces students to seminal works in the field of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history, covering a broad range of topics and ethnic groups. We will explore important historical figures, feminist writers and scholars, activists, cultural producers, popular icons, and historical events in our quest to understand AAPI women’s positions and movements within the US social formation. While the experiences of AAPI women vary greatly over time and space, common themes we will explore include globalism and transnationalism; exclusion, empire, and colonialism; gender and intersectionality; agency, resistance, and resilience; and culture and identity. Usually offered every second year.

ANTH 144a The Anthropology of Gender
[ djw nw ss wi ]

Anthropology majors have priority for enrollment.

Explores gender, sexuality, and cultural systems from a comparative perspective. Topics may include rituals of masculinity and femininity, the vexing question of the universality of women's subordination, culturally-specific classifications of sexual orientation and gender identity, transnational feminisms, sex work, migrant labor, reproductive rights, and much more. Usually offered every year.

ANTH 145a Anthropology of the Body
[ dl ss ]

Explores a range of theories that use the body to understand society, culture, and gender. Topics include how social values and hierarchies are written in, on, and through the body; the relationship between body and gender identity; and experiences and images of the body cross-culturally. Usually offered every third year.

ANTH 178b Culture, Gender and Power in East Asia
[ nw ss wi ]

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.

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.

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ djw 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.

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.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl 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.

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ djw 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.

ENG 175b Getting Behind in Black Gay Men's Literatures
[ deis-us hum ]

Examines black queer men’s sexualities in the field of twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures. Our focus on “getting behind” draws together topics that we will explore throughout term. These include varying attitudes that black queer writers have toward cruising and intimacy; falling behind the times; and falling behind at work, or in life, because of certain sexual pursuits. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 211a Black Queer Literatures

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon varied attempts to create a shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we will also attend to important divisions brought about by various intersections of identity, as well as divergent perspectives on desire, aesthetics, and organizing. Usually offered every third year.

FA 176a Fashion History of China
[ ca ]

Examines the evolution of garments, ornaments, accessories, shoes, and other bodily adornments in China through the lens of art history. Ancient murals, tomb figurines, and representations in painting will be the primary materials of investigation. Students learn about the importance of dress and fashion (and their visual representations) in shaping identities through the ages. Usually offered every third year.

HISP 158a Latina Feminisms
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Taught in English.

Explores the theoretical frameworks and literary productions of feminisms developed by Latina/xs. It introduces students to a diversity of backgrounds and experiences (Chicana, Dominican American, Cuban American, Salvadoran American, and Puerto Rican authors) as well as a variety of genres (i.e. novel, poetry, short stories, drama). Using intersectionality as a theoretical tool for analyzing oppressions, students will explore the complex politics of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and race in the lives of Latina/xs. They will also explore Latina/x feminists' theoretical and/or practical attempts to transcend socially-constructed categories of identity, while acknowledging existing material inequalities. Usually offered every third year.

HIST 127a Women and Gender in Modern China
[ ss ]

HIST/SOC 170b Gender and Sexuality in South Asia
[ djw nw 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.

IGS 136b Contemporary Chinese Society and Culture
[ djw nw ss wi ]

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.

NEJS 128b Gender, Multiculturalism, and the Law
[ hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took PHIL 128a in prior years.

Can the state determine what children must learn in schools run by religious minorities? Should the state intervene to prevent forced or underage marriage if these practices are based on religious traditions? Can the state accommodate religiously-based demands to provide separate but equal public services to men and women, in prayer, on public transportation or at universities? These are some of the issues we will explore in this class through reading texts in law, political philosophy and modern Jewish thought. Usually offered every second year.

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.

WGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms
[ hum oc ]

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.

AAAS/WGS 152b Beyoncé and Beyond: The Politics of Black Popular Music
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisite: AAAS 5a, AAAS/WGS 125a or AAAS/WGS 136a.

Introduces the history of contemporary black popular music and uses Beyoncé's wide-ranging and African diasporic musical repertoire as an entry-point into Black sound cultures from the US, Africa, the Caribbean, and Western Europe. Each week will spotlight part of Beyoncé's repertoire, i.e., Lemonade, Black is King, B-day, and Dangerously in Love, taking these as a jumping off point from which to survey and delve into such genres as R&B, Hip-hop, Disco, Dancehall, UK Garage, Trap Soul, New Orleans Bounce, as well as Jungle & Afrobeats. In addition to understanding these histories and genres, students will also explore public-facing popular music writing and criticism, and produce a piece of music criticism such as a blog post or Op-ed. Overall, this course investigates the aesthetic, political, cultural, and economic dimensions of Black popular music, paying particular attention to questions of gender, sexuality, class, nation, language, and technology. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/WGS 126a Asian American and Pacific Islander Women
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history is an interdisciplinary field of study at the intersections of national and global histories of the United States; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; Asian American and Pacific Islander studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; and more. This course introduces students to seminal works in the field of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history, covering a broad range of topics and ethnic groups. We will explore important historical figures, feminist writers and scholars, activists, cultural producers, popular icons, and historical events in our quest to understand AAPI women’s positions and movements within the US social formation. While the experiences of AAPI women vary greatly over time and space, common themes we will explore include globalism and transnationalism; exclusion, empire, and colonialism; gender and intersectionality; agency, resistance, and resilience; and culture and identity. Usually offered every second year.

AAPI/WGS 137b Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Examines performances of Asian/American women and how they have changed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We analyze American film, television, and stage performances to trace the shifting, yet continuous participation of Asian/American women on screen and scene in the United States. Important issues include Orientalism and representation, race and racism, immigration and diasporas, militarism and hypersexualization, yellow face practices then and now, as well as assimilation and resistance. We ask: what have dominant representations of Asian/American been like from the silent film era to the current digital age? How have the figures of the lotus blossom, the dragon lady, the trafficked woman, the geisha, the war bride, the military prostitute, the orphan, among other problematic tropes emerged to represent Asian/American women? How has the changing political, social, and cultural position of Asian/Americans shaped their participation in media production, as well as their media representations in the United States broadly speaking? Students will leave this course with a strong understanding of how media and culture shapes the racial and sexual formation of Asian Americans, as well as how to interact with that media and culture beyond just consumption but instead towards analysis and critique too. Usually offered every second year.

AMST 121a The American Jewish Woman: 1890-Present
[ ss ]

Surveys the experiences of American Jewish women in work, politics, religion, family life, the arts, and American culture generally over the last 100 years, examining how the dual heritage of female and Jewish "otherness" shaped often-conflicted identities. Usually offered every second year.

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.

ENG 64a Queer Readings: Before the Binary
[ hum oc ]

Explores vectors of desire, intimacy, and relationality prior to 1800 that do not always neatly line up with post-Enlightenment taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and humanness. We will read works by Austen, Behn, Marlowe, Phillips, Rochester, Shakespeare, and others, asking: What possibilities of pleasure, intimacy, love, friendship, and kinship existed alongside male-female reproductive sex and marriage before 1800? What possibilities for non-binary gender identifications and presentations? Without firm taxonomic distinctions among classes of people, between human and nonhuman animals, or even between the human and the thing, how did early moderns understand what counted as fully human? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

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.

ENG 253b Medieval Women and the Book

Examines gender theory, queer theory, and critical race theory as it intersects in medieval women's literary cultures. It considers works about gender and medicine, the environment, race, and the law. Students will consider reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. Usually offered every third year.

FA 176a Fashion History of China
[ ca ]

Examines the evolution of garments, ornaments, accessories, shoes, and other bodily adornments in China through the lens of art history. Ancient murals, tomb figurines, and representations in painting will be the primary materials of investigation. Students learn about the importance of dress and fashion (and their visual representations) in shaping identities through the ages. Usually offered every third year.

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.

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.

HIST 147a Russian Empire: Gender, Minorities, and Globalization
[ djw dl oc ss ]

Examines the processes and problems of modernization--state development, economic growth, social change, cultural achievements, and emergence of revolutionary and terrorist movements. Usually offered every year.

HIST 157b 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.

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.

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.

HIST/WGS 120b Queer History in the United States
[ deis-us dl oc ss ]

Traces shifting concepts and practices of gender and sexual deviance in the United States from the colonial period to the present. We will treat queer identity and experience as a topic of historical inquiry as well as a theoretical problem, following the way that currently distinct concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality historically defined each other in shifting configurations. Topics include: queer life and concepts of gender and sexuality before Stonewall; the emergence of the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and later transgender identity; the dependence of gender and sexual categories on class and racial categories; the mechanisms of state and informal policing of gender and sexual norms; the creation of social movements around queer an0d gender-nonconforming identities; attitudes towards gender nonconformity in the gay rights and feminist movements of the seventies; the AIDS Crisis and activist responses to it; and the politics of contemporary representations of the history of queer and transgender struggle. Usually offered every year.

NEJS 27a Abortion, Reproduction, and Contraception in Jewish Law and Ethics
[ hum ]

Challenges the usual framing of abortion in the U.S. as a conflict between religious and secular, or murder versus personal autonomy, and challenges the predominant Christian framings of ethical considerations for abortion, by introducing Jewish sources from the bible until today. Students will gain detailed, critical, and historical information about how Jewish law and Jewish individuals have deliberated about ending pregnancies. The primary sources, along with guest speakers and academic scholarship, will empower students to weigh and propose alternative framings of abortion and reproduction in the U.S. Topics include: Is a fetus considered alive? What grounds do Jewish ethics offer for abortion? How does a pregnant woman or person’s mental and physical health affect a decision for abortion? Do Jewish ethics recognize rape to be grounds for abortion? Who should be the decision-maker on abortion? How should genetic testing affect decisions to terminate pregnancies? How greatly do modern Jewish legal voices range on abortion? Special one-time offering, fall 2022.

NEJS 115b Gender and Sexuality in 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.

NEJS 121a Cloistered Life: Masculinity, Monasticism, and Material Religion
[ djw dl hum ]

Surveys the literature and artifacts related to the early monastic movement in the Eastern Mediterranean world, where monasticism began, and concludes with examinations in the Medieval Roman (Byzantine) and European world. In translation, students read Greek, Syriac, Latin, and Coptic literature of popular Christian authors to investigate how men constructed ideals of masculinity within a religious landscape. We will use gender and materiality theorists to develop reading strategies to understand gender expectations, sexuality, and how monks lived together in their cloistered communities. Students will build a Virtual Reality monastery by building rooms of monks over time based on the texts and artifacts studied in class as part of developing skills in digital literacy. Usually offered every second year.

NEJS 140b Gender, Ghettos, and the Geographies of Early Modern Jews
[ hum ]

Examines Jewish history and culture in early modern Europe: mass conversions on the Iberian peninsula, migrations, reconversions back to Judaism, the printing revolution, the Reformation and Counter Reformation, ghettos, gender, family, everyday life, material culture, communal structure, rabbinical culture, mysticism, magic, science, messianic movements, Hasidism, mercantilism, and early modern challenges to Judaism.

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.

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.

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.

AAAS/WGS 123b Black Girlhood Sexual Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

This seminar uses a feminist perspective to provide students with an overview of the achievements, experiences, productions, and sexual politics of Black girlhood in art, visual culture, 20th century American Literature, and popular media. We will explore the ways Black girlhood has been understood in popular imaginings as well as the ways Black girls represent themselves—their experiences, bodies, sexuality, race, class, knowledge histories, and labors, cultural productions. This seminar introduces students to the field of gender and sexuality as cultural study through visual culture and the aesthetics of narrative. Special one-time offering, spring 2021.

AAAS/WGS 180b Black Sexual Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisites: AAAS 5a and/or WGS 5a recommended for participating undergraduates.

Grounded in Black feminist theories of eroticism, pleasure, and embodiment, this seminar invites students into complex conversations about how racially and sexually minoritized people build robust sexual worlds even in the face of anti-Blackness, misogyny, and heterosexism. Inspired by Patricia Hill Collins’ 2004 monograph Black Sexual Politics, this seminar asks: how have Black women, Black queer people, and Black gender-expansive people in America used culture and social movements to create in-group knowledge and to challenge linked racial-sexual structures of oppression? How have different practitioners created and revised theories of sexuality depending on time and place? Students will emerge from this seminar with a deepened understanding of Black feminist theoretical vocabularies including but not limited to: the politics of respectability, the culture of dissemblance, ungendering, fungibility, theories of the flesh, pleasure, and misogynoir. Special one-time offering, spring 2023.

ANTH 144a The Anthropology of Gender
[ djw nw ss wi ]

Anthropology majors have priority for enrollment.

Explores gender, sexuality, and cultural systems from a comparative perspective. Topics may include rituals of masculinity and femininity, the vexing question of the universality of women's subordination, culturally-specific classifications of sexual orientation and gender identity, transnational feminisms, sex work, migrant labor, reproductive rights, and much more. Usually offered every year.

ANTH 166b Queer Anthropology: Sexualities and Genders in Cross-Cultural Perspective
[ djw oc ss ]

When held together, “Queer Anthropology” might name something akin to a systematic way of cross-culturally studying human sexuality, gender, and desire that runs against the grain of dominant, socially held beliefs of normalcy (or what we now call normative/heteronormative). Sitting with this definition, we will chart the different worlds that Queer Anthropology might enable us to see and imagine. From transfeminine women who claim to experience pregnancy to sex between straight white Frat brothers to lesbian women finding community through anonymous love letters, this course moves between different scales and registers for talking about sexuality, gender, bodies, and difference. Together, we will trace Queer Anthropology's origins, examine its present moments, and speculate on its potential futures. Usually offered every second year.

ANTH/WGS 176a Queer/Trans Theories from Elsewhere
[ deis-us djw ss ]

Centers the notion of 'elsewhere' in relationship to studies of gender, sexuality, power, and desire. 'Elsewhere' refers not only to place, but also to body and method. While terms like 'queer' and 'transgender' have become useful analytics for exploring gender, sexuality, feeling, space, place, relationality, and time, the academic theories that focus on these categories have remained mostly within white, US- and European academic spaces. We invite students to trouble these analytics - that is, the categories themselves, the bodies that these analytics center, and the methods deployed in relation to these analytics - by reading diverse approaches to gender and sexuality. The semester's engagement with 'elsewhere' is divided into three units: body, place, and method. Our objective is to teach students to cultivate new ways of seeing and ultimately new theories of gender and sexuality through engaging with non-canonical perspectives. Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 52b Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood
[ deis-us hum ]

Highlights the innovations that black artists and scholars have made within the vampire tradition. Our sources range from literature and comics to television and film. Usually offered every third year.

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.

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.

ENG 142b Black Queer Literatures
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon the attempt to create the shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we also attend to important divisions brought about by various forms and feelings of difference (including race, gender, class, nation, age and ability). Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl 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.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

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.

ENG 211a Black Queer Literatures

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon varied attempts to create a shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we will also attend to important divisions brought about by various intersections of identity, as well as divergent perspectives on desire, aesthetics, and organizing. Usually offered every third year.

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.

HIST/SOC 170b Gender and Sexuality in South Asia
[ djw nw 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.

HIST/WGS 120b Queer History in the United States
[ deis-us dl oc ss ]

Traces shifting concepts and practices of gender and sexual deviance in the United States from the colonial period to the present. We will treat queer identity and experience as a topic of historical inquiry as well as a theoretical problem, following the way that currently distinct concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality historically defined each other in shifting configurations. Topics include: queer life and concepts of gender and sexuality before Stonewall; the emergence of the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and later transgender identity; the dependence of gender and sexual categories on class and racial categories; the mechanisms of state and informal policing of gender and sexual norms; the creation of social movements around queer an0d gender-nonconforming identities; attitudes towards gender nonconformity in the gay rights and feminist movements of the seventies; the AIDS Crisis and activist responses to it; and the politics of contemporary representations of the history of queer and transgender struggle. Usually offered every year.

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.

NEJS 178a Love, Sex, and Power in Israeli Culture
[ djw 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.

NEJS/WGS 110a Sexual Violence in Film and Culture
[ deis-us djw hum oc ]

Explores the effects of sexualized violence in society. While exploring representations of gender-based sexual violence in documentaries and features, stand-up comedy, memoirs, poetry, and visual art, this course will offer a critical discussion on Rape Culture in the 21st century, with particular attention to the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability in the construction of sexual violence. Usually offered every second year.

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.

WGS 6b Sexuality and Queer Studies
[ djw dl hum ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took SQS 6b in prior years.

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.

WGS 107a Introduction to Indigenous and Native Women, Gender, and Sexualities
[ deis-us ss ]

This introductory course will critically examine colonial constructions of Native American and Indigenous women, gender diversity, and sexualities, and will explore topics relevant to contemporary experiences of Native American and Indigenous peoples in settler states known as the United States and Canada. Topics surveyed include: decolonization, gender violence, gender expansiveness, body sovereignty, and sexual sovereignty. This course will illuminate Native American and Indigenous Studies, Indigenous Feminisms, Queer Indigenous Studies, and perspectives from Indigenous authors. Students will read, view, discuss, and write about current issues in terms of topics relevant to studies of Native American and Indigenous Women, Genders, and Sexualities. Usually offered every second year.

WGS 108b Native Indigenous Bodies: Gender Violence and Gender Defiance
[ ss ]

Locates the position of Native Indigenous bodies in the contexts of settler nations of the United States and Canada. Centering Native Indigenous bodies, this course will delve into studies of gender, race, and theory. We will focus on major areas of: 1) history grounding colonial violence and gendering of Native Indigenous bodies, 2) gender based violence, and 3) defiance through expressions of the body (dance, burlesque, drag). Throughout the course we will discuss how Native Indigenous bodies are central and disruptive to colonization. Usually offered every year.

WGS 128b Transgender Health and Wellness
[ deis-us 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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

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.

AAAS/WGS 121a Black Visibility
[ deis-us ss ]

Drawing on theories of the Black gaze rooted in both Black feminist visual culture (Tina Campt, bell hooks, Nicole Fleetwood) and surveillance studies (Simone Browne, Kelly Ross), this interdisciplinary course pairs a discussion of histories of anti-Black social control with an emphasis on Black reclamations of the visual field in modalities including popular film, social media, performance art, and literature. Students will emerge with a deepened understanding of how linked formations of Blackness, gender, and sexuality shape ways of seeing in American culture, and how different Black women, gender-expansive, and queer folx negotiate these formations with their art. Usually offered every year.

ANTH 144a The Anthropology of Gender
[ djw nw ss wi ]

Anthropology majors have priority for enrollment.

Explores gender, sexuality, and cultural systems from a comparative perspective. Topics may include rituals of masculinity and femininity, the vexing question of the universality of women's subordination, culturally-specific classifications of sexual orientation and gender identity, transnational feminisms, sex work, migrant labor, reproductive rights, and much more. Usually offered every year.

ANTH 166b Queer Anthropology: Sexualities and Genders in Cross-Cultural Perspective
[ djw oc ss ]

When held together, “Queer Anthropology” might name something akin to a systematic way of cross-culturally studying human sexuality, gender, and desire that runs against the grain of dominant, socially held beliefs of normalcy (or what we now call normative/heteronormative). Sitting with this definition, we will chart the different worlds that Queer Anthropology might enable us to see and imagine. From transfeminine women who claim to experience pregnancy to sex between straight white Frat brothers to lesbian women finding community through anonymous love letters, this course moves between different scales and registers for talking about sexuality, gender, bodies, and difference. Together, we will trace Queer Anthropology's origins, examine its present moments, and speculate on its potential futures. Usually offered every second year.

ANTH/WGS 176a Queer/Trans Theories from Elsewhere
[ deis-us djw ss ]

Centers the notion of 'elsewhere' in relationship to studies of gender, sexuality, power, and desire. 'Elsewhere' refers not only to place, but also to body and method. While terms like 'queer' and 'transgender' have become useful analytics for exploring gender, sexuality, feeling, space, place, relationality, and time, the academic theories that focus on these categories have remained mostly within white, US- and European academic spaces. We invite students to trouble these analytics - that is, the categories themselves, the bodies that these analytics center, and the methods deployed in relation to these analytics - by reading diverse approaches to gender and sexuality. The semester's engagement with 'elsewhere' is divided into three units: body, place, and method. Our objective is to teach students to cultivate new ways of seeing and ultimately new theories of gender and sexuality through engaging with non-canonical perspectives. Usually offered every third year.

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.

COML 150b Critique of Erotic Reason
[ hum ]

Explores transformations in erotic sensibilities in the novel from the early nineteenth century to the present. Works by Goethe, Austen, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Bronte, Chekhov, Garcia-Marquez, Kundera, and Cormac McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 64a Queer Readings: Before the Binary
[ hum oc ]

Explores vectors of desire, intimacy, and relationality prior to 1800 that do not always neatly line up with post-Enlightenment taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and humanness. We will read works by Austen, Behn, Marlowe, Phillips, Rochester, Shakespeare, and others, asking: What possibilities of pleasure, intimacy, love, friendship, and kinship existed alongside male-female reproductive sex and marriage before 1800? What possibilities for non-binary gender identifications and presentations? Without firm taxonomic distinctions among classes of people, between human and nonhuman animals, or even between the human and the thing, how did early moderns understand what counted as fully human? Usually offered every third year.

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.

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.

ENG 142b Black Queer Literatures
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon the attempt to create the shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we also attend to important divisions brought about by various forms and feelings of difference (including race, gender, class, nation, age and ability). Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl 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.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

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.

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.

HIST/SOC 170b Gender and Sexuality in South Asia
[ djw nw 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.

HIST/WGS 120b Queer History in the United States
[ deis-us dl oc ss ]

Traces shifting concepts and practices of gender and sexual deviance in the United States from the colonial period to the present. We will treat queer identity and experience as a topic of historical inquiry as well as a theoretical problem, following the way that currently distinct concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality historically defined each other in shifting configurations. Topics include: queer life and concepts of gender and sexuality before Stonewall; the emergence of the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and later transgender identity; the dependence of gender and sexual categories on class and racial categories; the mechanisms of state and informal policing of gender and sexual norms; the creation of social movements around queer an0d gender-nonconforming identities; attitudes towards gender nonconformity in the gay rights and feminist movements of the seventies; the AIDS Crisis and activist responses to it; and the politics of contemporary representations of the history of queer and transgender struggle. Usually offered every year.

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.

NEJS 178a Love, Sex, and Power in Israeli Culture
[ djw 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.

NEJS/WGS 110a Sexual Violence in Film and Culture
[ deis-us djw hum oc ]

Explores the effects of sexualized violence in society. While exploring representations of gender-based sexual violence in documentaries and features, stand-up comedy, memoirs, poetry, and visual art, this course will offer a critical discussion on Rape Culture in the 21st century, with particular attention to the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability in the construction of sexual violence. Usually offered every second year.

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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

WGS 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.

ANTH 144a The Anthropology of Gender
[ djw nw ss wi ]

Anthropology majors have priority for enrollment.

Explores gender, sexuality, and cultural systems from a comparative perspective. Topics may include rituals of masculinity and femininity, the vexing question of the universality of women's subordination, culturally-specific classifications of sexual orientation and gender identity, transnational feminisms, sex work, migrant labor, reproductive rights, and much more. Usually offered every year.

ANTH 166b Queer Anthropology: Sexualities and Genders in Cross-Cultural Perspective
[ djw oc ss ]

When held together, “Queer Anthropology” might name something akin to a systematic way of cross-culturally studying human sexuality, gender, and desire that runs against the grain of dominant, socially held beliefs of normalcy (or what we now call normative/heteronormative). Sitting with this definition, we will chart the different worlds that Queer Anthropology might enable us to see and imagine. From transfeminine women who claim to experience pregnancy to sex between straight white Frat brothers to lesbian women finding community through anonymous love letters, this course moves between different scales and registers for talking about sexuality, gender, bodies, and difference. Together, we will trace Queer Anthropology's origins, examine its present moments, and speculate on its potential futures. Usually offered every second year.

ANTH/WGS 176a Queer/Trans Theories from Elsewhere
[ deis-us djw ss ]

Centers the notion of 'elsewhere' in relationship to studies of gender, sexuality, power, and desire. 'Elsewhere' refers not only to place, but also to body and method. While terms like 'queer' and 'transgender' have become useful analytics for exploring gender, sexuality, feeling, space, place, relationality, and time, the academic theories that focus on these categories have remained mostly within white, US- and European academic spaces. We invite students to trouble these analytics - that is, the categories themselves, the bodies that these analytics center, and the methods deployed in relation to these analytics - by reading diverse approaches to gender and sexuality. The semester's engagement with 'elsewhere' is divided into three units: body, place, and method. Our objective is to teach students to cultivate new ways of seeing and ultimately new theories of gender and sexuality through engaging with non-canonical perspectives. Usually offered every third year.

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.

COML 150b Critique of Erotic Reason
[ hum ]

Explores transformations in erotic sensibilities in the novel from the early nineteenth century to the present. Works by Goethe, Austen, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Bronte, Chekhov, Garcia-Marquez, Kundera, and Cormac McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 64a Queer Readings: Before the Binary
[ hum oc ]

Explores vectors of desire, intimacy, and relationality prior to 1800 that do not always neatly line up with post-Enlightenment taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and humanness. We will read works by Austen, Behn, Marlowe, Phillips, Rochester, Shakespeare, and others, asking: What possibilities of pleasure, intimacy, love, friendship, and kinship existed alongside male-female reproductive sex and marriage before 1800? What possibilities for non-binary gender identifications and presentations? Without firm taxonomic distinctions among classes of people, between human and nonhuman animals, or even between the human and the thing, how did early moderns understand what counted as fully human? Usually offered every third year.

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.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl 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.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

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.

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.

HIST/SOC 170b Gender and Sexuality in South Asia
[ djw nw 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.

HIST/WGS 120b Queer History in the United States
[ deis-us dl oc ss ]

Traces shifting concepts and practices of gender and sexual deviance in the United States from the colonial period to the present. We will treat queer identity and experience as a topic of historical inquiry as well as a theoretical problem, following the way that currently distinct concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality historically defined each other in shifting configurations. Topics include: queer life and concepts of gender and sexuality before Stonewall; the emergence of the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and later transgender identity; the dependence of gender and sexual categories on class and racial categories; the mechanisms of state and informal policing of gender and sexual norms; the creation of social movements around queer an0d gender-nonconforming identities; attitudes towards gender nonconformity in the gay rights and feminist movements of the seventies; the AIDS Crisis and activist responses to it; and the politics of contemporary representations of the history of queer and transgender struggle. Usually offered every year.

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.

AMST/ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.

An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.

ECON 69a The Economics of Race and Gender
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Prerequisite: ECON 2a or ECON 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.

JOUR 139b Reporting on Diverse Communities in Journalism
[ deis-us ss ]

Examines who has been left out of the news discourse; how that has shaped public understanding of race, immigration, gender, and sexual orientation in the United States; and how to produce coverage that is more representative and better reflects reality. Usually offered every second year.

SOC 83a Sociology of Body and Health
[ deis-us ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took SOC 189a in prior years.

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 and population health. Usually offered every year.

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.

WGS 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.