General Graduate Course Descriptions

This course will focus on the technologies and poetics through which sexuality and gender are constructed, examining the ways in which cross-culturally and historically the gendered and sexed body has been socially and cultural will focus on the technologies and poetics through which sexuality and gender are constructed, examining the ways in which cross-culturally and historically the gendered and sexed body has been socially and culturally produced. Focuses particularly on how the construction of gender for men and women has been embedded in conceptions of cultures mapped through categories including race, class, ethnicity, age and sexuality

This course aims to illuminate the interconnections of theory and practice by exploring particular modes of feminist activism and the complex theoretical issues that feminist praxis raises. The course seeks to foster an understanding of the multiple ways that feminist theory has opened our imaginations to the possibilities for inclusive democratic practices, and expanded the repertoire of strategies for realizing social change.

The opening decades of the 21st century have been characterized by growing inequalities within and across nations, war, terrorism, and devastating climate and environmental crises. The U.S. “War on Drugs” has contributed to the growth of the “prison-industrial complex,” which incarcerates 2.2 million Americans, 70% of whom are people of color. Hyper-surveillance, police harassment and brutality, and the deaths of unarmed African Americans in police custody have given rise to the Black Lives Matter campaign. New reproductive and genetic technologies have raised a host of ethical issues not only about how to conceive human life but also about who should be born. Trans* activists have mobilized against surgical interventions and state practices that coerce people to conform to binary gender formations. These developments make it clear that social justice continues to be a pressing and unresolved issue. This course is designed to introduce students to competing theories of social justice and the complexity of social justice issues, while also familiarizing them with various social justice strategies and the demands of successful social justice advocacy and activism. In examining social justice activism, the course focuses on women’s mobilizations for economic, environmental, and reproductive justice, as well as immigrant, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and Trans struggles for livelihoods, rights, and recognition. The course will help students not only to deepen their understanding of the dynamics of oppression with particular attention to issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality, but to develop their ability to participate in social change.

Find your voice as a feminist advocate. Learn key concepts such as heterosexism, privilege and oppression, intersectionality, and decoloniality. Explore the multiple histories, presents, and futures of varied feminist activisms and organizing across the global North and South. Develop your anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist gender analysis, feminist writing, researching, and reflective participatory decision-making skills. This course will prepare you for the demands of transformative social change advocacy and will assist you in developing basic capacities such a public speaking, agenda-setting, needs assessment, harnessing free media, group facilitation, grant writing, networking, and community organizing.

This course investigates women’s mobilizations to transform social and political institutions, which also transform women activists themselves. Examining global feminist movements in the past as well as in the contemporary world, this course seeks to explicate how women’s activism and agency continue to challenge dominant discourses on agency, subjectivity, culture, politics, authority, religion, and society.

The topic varies depending on the specialization of the instructor.

Feminist science studies has gained prominence within the field of gender and sexuality studies in the wake of the ontological turn. At the same time, a number of recent works engage with ideas of matter and materiality in ways that sometimes unwittingly echo positivist ideas about scientific knowledge in which it is understood to be an unbiased source of truth. This approach overlooks important feminist work on science and technology that prioritizes racialization and colonialism as interpretive frames. In this course, we will explore a range of important feminist critiques of science that analyze the production of scientific truth in relation to its social and political context. Topics to be covered may include: the development of scientific objectivity in the nineteenth century; the emergence of the science of sex and race difference and its ongoing legacy, including genetics and hormones; theories of evolution; race and physics; feminist epistemology; and feminist speculative futures.

The course provides a multi-disciplinary materialist approach to understanding the way that capitalist development has created/es gendered borders and changes/ed boundaries. The course examines the global economic system and the ways in which it has changed over time. This is an advanced reading seminar that explores various (but especially feminist) approaches to theorizing how the global economy works to deconstruct and unmask the neo-liberal, market driven policy agenda and examine national and global alternatives. It will focus on how the changing nature of production with global flows of capital and people, have a gender differentiated impact on the lives of women in different locations. Particular attention will be paid to macro economic policy, supply chains and labor rights, financialization, development policy and inclusive growth.

The history and discourse of women's human rights, United Nations instruments, reframing of human rights as women's rights, gender-based violence, health, sexuality.

This course analyzes women’s location in economic development processes within theoretical frameworks, reflects upon linkages between the global economy and gendered processes of development, and examines a rights-based approach to gender justice.

This course examines the intersection of poverty, inequality and gender by exploring feminist approaches to theorizing, measuring, and experiencing the relationship between capitalist development and gender and race/ethnic inequality and poverty.

Introduction to quantitative methods in feminist research, with an emphasis on interpretation of quantitative claims as well as feminist uses and critiques of quantitative methods.

Advanced study of particular feminist theories or theorists. The topics vary by instructor.

This course provides a broad survey of contemporary Black feminist theory, including the emergence of Black feminist thought and political action, key actors and debates, theoretical engagements with questions of gender, racial, and sexual difference.

As a methodology, genealogy seeks to trace concepts back not to their origins (a task which presupposes continuity), but to points at which contradictions and contestations erupted in a manner productive of later discursive formations. This course examines key modern theories whose contradictions provoked feminist thought and elicited feminist critiques. Hegelian, Liberal, Marxist, Existentialist and other theories will be examined with specific attention to the historical and comparative development of modern gender, racial, national, sexual, colonial, and class formations. Both primary and secondary texts will be examined from perspectives of the first wave of the 19th century feminism, and second and third wave twentieth century feminism.

This course examines contemporary feminist debates with structuralism, poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies and postmodernism. This course will examine how feminist theories have critiqued a variety of traditional boundaries such as theoretical categories of identity, global hierarchies of power, and disciplinary boundaries. The original contributions of feminist theories to conceptual thinking will be explored around key concepts such as agency, identity, difference, location, intersectionality, transnationalism and nationalism, representation, resistance, power and sexuality.

Field work for M.A. degree candidates.

Advanced introduction to the classic works in feminist pedagogy with particular attention to the challenges of teaching interdisciplinary course material addressing race, class, gender, sexuality.

Open to Ph.D. students preparing for qualifying exams.

This course focuses on both the advantages and disadvantages of different philosophical, methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary traditions for contributing to our knowledge of central issues in Women’s and Gender Studies. The goal is to provide students with the critical tools to utilize and interrogate existing methodologies and to adapt them to the enterprise of feminist research. Since much of feminist scholarship has been concerned with the status and creation of knowledge—What counts as authoritative knowledge? What defines good research and bad research? What is the role of the social in the constitution of knowledge? What constitutes research as feminist?—the course will begin by debating several different perspectives on the definition of science, social science, and the humanities. The aim will be to understand the implications for feminist research of different philosophies of science, including positivism, realism, pragmatism, idealism, postmodernism, and others. We also consider the development of feminist hybrid epistemologies, such as strong objectivity, situated knowledge, and agential realism.   

This course is an introduction to many of the methods used in feminist interdisciplinary research. The course looks at how to formulate a research question, collect data, interpret and analyze evidence, and report research results. This methodological overview raises broader issues about the relationship among theory, methods, and research goals. In other words, do certain research problems impose methodological restrictions? Does reliance on some methods rather than others limit what we can know? In addition, the course will review various assessments and critiques of different research methods. Finally, the course will be a forum to apply knowledge of methods and methodologies to students’ own research and research-activist interests.

Open to Ph.D. students preparing dissertation proposals.