Graduate Program

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

WGSS Graduate Students with an interest in a specialized area not represented in the current curriculum may arrange an Independent Study under the supervision of a member of the Graduate Faculty.

Field work for M.A. degree candidates.

This course examines how recent 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.

As a methodology, genealogy does not trace concepts back to their origins (a task which presupposes continuity), but to points at which contradictions and contestations erupt in a manner productive of later discursive formations. This course examines key modern theories whose contradictions provoked feminist thought and elicited feminist critiques (for example, Hegelian, Liberal, Marxist, Existentialist and others).

• Instructor: Brittney Cooper
• Course Delivery: H 45 0200 P - 0500
• Current Course Description: Black women’s relationship to the politics of gender identity has a been a subject of both interrogation and theorization since the 19thcentury when Black women began widely publishing on matters of both race and gender. Beginning here, this graduate seminar traces the long history of Black feminist thought, arguing primarily for Black women as theorists of their own experience. We will approach Black feminisms, as a plurality, as a site of contestation, and as what Hazel Carby once called “a locus of contradiction,” which is to say there is no one-size fits all approach to Black women’s experience of or thinking about gender. After grounding ourselves in the 19thcentury, we will move forward to focus more specifically on the last fifty years of Black feminist knowledge production considering how Black women have theorized intersectionality, epistemology, affect, sexuality, hip hop, social movements, queer and trans theory, and abolition.

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.

Topic varies according to instructor.

This course aims to illuminate the interconnections between 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 has expanded the repertoire of strategies for realizing social change.

• Instructor: Ed Cohen
• Course Delivery: T 56 0350 P - 0650
• Current Course Description: At the time of his death from AIDS in 1984, Michel Foucault was completing the fourth volume of the History of Sexuality entitled Les Aveux de la Chair (Confessions of the Flesh).  This volume culminates Foucault’s reflections on the emergence of Western “sexuality” from the ways in which early Christian writers appropriated earlier Greek and Greco-Roman thinking, including the terms that Sigmund Freud popularized, “libido.”  In order to understand the context for Foucault’s final thoughts on sexuality—and especially the way he frames Christian sexuality as what I like to call a “mind-fuck”—we need to follow the development of his thinking through the lectures he gave at the Collège de France beginning in the early 1970s.  While it is not possible to read all of these texts in one semester, we will consider a number selectively, including Lessons on the Will to Know; Abnormal; Security, Territory, Population; The Subject and Truth; Hermeneutics of the Subject; The Government of the Self and Others, vols. 1 & 2; as well as a number of essays and interviews.   More than just a explication of these texts, we will consider the developments of Foucault’s thinking across the span of these lectures in order to both how he thinks and why he thinks thinking matters.

This concentration investigates the hierarchical production of cultural differences. Technologies of gender and sexuality refer to the manifold imaginary and material practices through which such categorical differences inform particular social and historical contexts. The poetics of gender and sexuality involve the creative and symbolic work that situates “difference” as a defining element of human relationships and cultural meanings.

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