Academics

• Course Code: 01:988:331

Since the late eighteenth century, sex has occupied a privileged place in Western cultures. For the past two hundred years, sex has seemed to tell us something essentially "true" about who we are. More than just biological necessity or personal preference, sexuality envelops us in a web of practices, institutions, discourses, pleasures, fantasies, and desires that organize our relations both to ourselves and to each other, as individuals and as groups.

This course will follow the play between sex and gender as it has unfolded across the last two centuries in order to explore the significance that these ways of making sense of human experience have for us today. In particular we will examine the paradoxical oscillation between "equality" and "difference" that cuts across our ideas of personhood and that has made the emergence of what we call "sexual politics" possible. By focusing on how sexual and gender differences have been made meaningful historically, we will try to understand how what we now call feminist and queer theory became imaginable.

• Course Code: 01:988:330

Course Description

This course explores femininity through memory, autobiography, body as text, and testimonials in the following paradigms: sexuality purity, the maternal, and deviance; colonialism and postcolonialism; master narratives and counter-discourse; cross-cultural imaginations and the Other woman; perceptions of indigenous and minority populaces; community and nationalism; diaspora and home; language; history and (re)memory; commodification and capitalism.

• Course Code: 01:988:329
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall
• Credits: 3

Description:

Race, Gender, Nation explores how strategies affected in the name of ‘national security’ can affect a range of violence against human beings residing within those nation-states, including: genocide; restrictions placed human beings’ autonomy and rights over their own bodies; displacement, deportation, and permanent ‘removals’; racial profiling and mass incarceration; and systemic forms of socio-economic oppression.  As those forms of violence undermine the human security of the people they impact, they in fact constitute human rights violations that in certain contexts corroborate acts of terrorism according to international law even if they cannot be officially labeled as acts of terrorism. 

In this course we will examine how the political entity of the ‘nation’ has been appropriated by various state and non-state actors to affect a range of human rights violations meant to affirm the security only of the privileged in those nations.  We will also examine how those security measures resonate with various definitions of terrorism.  To that end, students will learn about how the recent era of Western colonialism directly impacts how privilege, criminality, and terrorism are understood in Global North and South today.  We will complicate this discussion be examing cases wherein laws meant to secure human rights have, instead, problematized the realization of human rights in their applications and appropriations in other contexts.  Students will also learn about the development of and ambiguous applications of human rights discourses and international debates concerning what constitutes terrorism.

We will examine these dynamics in different global contexts and in the US in four primary contexts: 1) how nation-building, nationalism, and national security has been affirmed through genocide and displacement; how the security of the privileged in a nation is affected by ongoing and mass detention and incarceration of those socio-economically marginalized within the same nation, including religious minorities, all females, and members of the LGBT+ communities within those nations; and how Western influence internationally, mainly in the United Nations, is blurring the line between what is defined as legal acts relating to national security or illegal acts relating to terrorism.  Given ideologies debated in relation to the upcoming Presidential elections, this information will prove invaluable to students. 

• Course Code: 01:988:326

Evaluation of some major psychological conceptualizations of women in light of current research. Bases for these formulations and their influence on the position of women today. Credit not given for both this course and 01:830:381.

• Course Code: 01:988:325
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall
• Credits: 3

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Women on the Fringe examines societal responses to female behavior deviating from prescribed norms of social and feminine behavior from the colonial period to the present through the use of historical narratives, literature, and film to treat such themes as heresy, madness, prostitution, adultery, criminality, juvenile delinquency, drug and alcohol addiction, political protest, and lesbianism.

Department Learning Goals Met by this Course:

Students will be able to synthesize an interdisciplinary dialogue among the different disciplinary methodologies that compose American Studies investigation of American culture across time and space in the history, politics, literature, and arts of the peoples of the United States. Students will be able to write well; speak articulately; and think critically, analytically, and creatively.

Additional Learning Goals Met by this Course:

Women on the Fringe will provide students with an historical perspective on the evolution of the concepts of female deviance from the colonial period to the present with particular attention to the influence of race, ethnicity, class, region, gender, and religion. Students will learn how to analyze film critically in terms of its cultural context and will receive training in the analytical and methodological skills necessary to pursue a research project in American Studies on the history of female deviance.

• Course Code: 01:988:321
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Spring
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:317
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Winter, Summer
• Credits: 3
• SAS Core Certified: CCD, CCO

• Course Code: 01:988:312
• Semester(s) Offered: Spring
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:311

Course Description

We live in volatile times. Across the country, people are faced with job insecurity, decreasing wages, long working hours, continual war, and police violence, all against the backdrop of a dramatically uncertain future for the existence of life as we know it on earth. How do we manage? How do our different positions according to hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality shape our ability to thrive in these difficult conditions? Do our popular forms of entertainment, especially TV and blockbuster films, serve to anesthetize us to our difficult reality or to engage with it and maybe even strategize resistance?

In this class, we will examine visual culture, especially Hollywood cinema and television in light of the economic structure of our day: neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is predominantly characterized by extreme wealth inequality. However, neoliberalism materializes not only in the economic realm, resulting in shrinking paychecks for the vast majority of us. It also works through the social structures of race, gender, and sexuality. We will analyze how TV shows such as Transparent and films including The Wolf of Wall Street and The Hunger Games help to construct new racial, gendered, and sexual roles that respond to the political imperatives of late capitalism. In this way, we will be exploring how these notions of human difference function as dense sites of power, serving as sites of both oppression and resistance.

We will look at culture as political ideology and commodity, examining the story each text tells as well as its conditions of production, distribution, and reception. For example, when looking at TV, we will consider its function as cultural entertainment and also as a site of labor. We will examine a documentary about how Mexican women are organizing for better labor conditions in the Tijuana factories that produce most of the world’s television sets. Students will gain practice in analyzing race, gender, and sexuality as sites of power, analyzing visual texts, and making connections between culture and politics.

• Course Code: 01:988:310

Objectives:

Using a variety of materials, including theoretical texts, videos, movies, research projects, and guest lectures, this course will explore the situation of South Asian women in general and Indian women in particular since the early 20th century. This course will also discuss about the role of women within the current challenges of informal economy through scholarly debates. This course thus intends to examine the development process, particularly in India with a reflection on of the entire South. Also in addition a few lectures on empirical perspectives with a macro-micro linkage perspective would be imparted for understanding the role of informal economy and gender aspects within it.

Using multitude teaching materials as noted students will examine: (1) Gender inequalities which hinder women's progress in developing countries, like in India. (2) Contribution of women workers even those functioning in the informal economy to development, (3) A system of developing linkages of women’s participation to the economy through both formal and informal work as well as non-market work (such as household chores, care work) and (4) Programmes and efforts made by the governments and other organizations to improve the conditions of informal workers and women's lives in developing countries, and specially in India.