Undergraduate Program

• Course Code: 01:988:409
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Spring
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:408
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Spring
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:407
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Spring
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:406

Course Overview

            This course focuses on women in the workforce. As current statistical data demonstrate women make up a significant and growing portion of the American labor force. However, women’s positions and experiences in the workforce in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, occupation, and class are very diverse, as are the culturally constructed meanings of those position. As such women’s experiences differ greatly based on the specific social and historical contexts in which they work. But while specific conditions of gender based workplace oppression manifest differently, they are structured in systematic ways. The goal of scholars of women and work is to uncover the patterns of inequality in order to find ways to address them.

            This course will look at how workplace conditions affect women. They study of women and work is an interdisciplinary endeavor and we will explore this topic using literature from such disciplines as sociology, economics, labor studies and psychology. While the topic of women and work is quite broad, we will focus in on some of the main aspects of this topic. In addition, this class is unique in that it will provide you with the opportunity to enter the world of social scientists as researches. This seminar will be centered on the use of scientific methods to research issues of women and work. You will be required to engage in a step by step research project, and then presenting your work at a research seminar in May. This first hand research experience will be valuable in preparing you to do research in graduate education, nonprofit organizations and corporations.

• Course Code: 01:988:405
• Semester(s) Offered: Spring
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:399

Community service placement in women's and gender studies. Corequisite: Must be taken in conjunction with a designated CESEP (Civic Engagement and Service Education Partnerships) course offered in the women's and gender studies program.

• Course Code: 01:988:398

Course Description

            This course provides an introduction to some of the central concepts in the writings of Sigmund Freud, focusing mainly on his understanding of the development of the ego or sense of self, the operations of the unconscious and the genesis of sexual drives in the constitution of male and female subjects. The course will explain these basic Freudian concepts through the central feminist question of sexual difference.

            Being a self-contained introduction to the overlapping concerns of psychoanalysis and feminist theory, the course aims to familiarize issues and debates that have ensued in feminist theory.

            The overall aim of the course will be to develop accounts of the ways in which male and female subjects are formed through the construction and control of infantile sexual drives, the pre-oedipal and oedipal forms of sexual desire, and the creation of the unconscious as a system of repressed wishes. Special emphasis will be placed on the different paths of development laid out in our own culture for masculine and feminine forms of subjectivity.

• Course Code: 01:988:397

At the end of the nineteenth century Sigmund Freud began to publish a body of texts that gave birth to the field of psychoanalysis. For the next four decades Freud created a massive archive based both on his therapeutic experiences and on the philosophical conclusions he drew from these experiences. Though Freud is perhaps best known for his insistence that the “unconscious” informs—and also deforms—our conscious behaviors, as well as the ways we make sense of them, he was not the first to propose this concept. However, he did give the unconscious a new significance when he affirmed that these unconscious meanings constitute “psychical reality” which is just as “real” as any other reality. Moreover, the reality of the psyche contains elements that do not properly belong to us insofar as they come to us from the world in which we live and from those with whom we live as infants. Freud’s emphasis on “infantile sexuality” and on the “Oedipus complex” represent his attempt to give meaningful shape to the paradox that we only become our “selves” by incorporating aspects of others who are not us. Freud recognized that the

internal tension produced among these different aspects of the psyche causes friction between competing desires and drives, often leading to deleterious or painful patterns of thought and behavior. Thus, as a therapeutic practice psychoanalysis sought to ameliorate such human suffering, while as an intellectual practice psychoanalytic writings sought to understand the psychic dynamics that give rise to it.

In this course we will attempt to understand some of the basic concepts and insights of psychoanalysis with regard to sexuality. While what Freud meant by sexuality is not exactly clear, it nevertheless served as the crux for his interpretation of human existence. In this regard Freud takes up and transforms a trajectory of European thought which extends from the middle of the 18th century to the present that sees individual human beings as belonging to a species whose continued existence as a species relies on sexual reproduction. Concomitantly, this line of thought holds sexuality to be the most animal—and hence least “rational”—aspect of human lives, leading to conflicts within the individual between these distinct animal/human imperatives. As a late 19th century Viennese physician trained in neurology, Freud took up this paradox of the human animal by situating sexuality on the borderline between the biological and the psychic. In so doing, he elaborated some of the contradictions that bourgeois European society systematically engendered, and then he sought to explain and to treat them. Although Freud believed that his insights applied universally to all human beings, it seems more likely that Freud’s work illuminates the tensions created within a distinct cultural and economic milieu—tensions which contemporary American culture continues in many ways to develop and transform. This course is not psychoanalytic per se. Rather it seeks to reflect on the ways Freud explains the dynamics of the human psyche and to consider some of the intellectual tools he offers us make sense of our own lives.

• Course Code: 01:988:396
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:395

Course Description

            This course will provide an interdisciplinary learning experience in which students consider the unique and dynamic relationship between law, gender, and race in contemporary popular and political culture. More specifically, students will engage three questions, namely: (1) How does the law generate, reinforce, and, at times, disrupt our gendered and racialized understandings of politics and society? (2) How has the rise in televised court cases and other legal and official proceedings (particularly the introduction of media technology and advanced scientific evidence) altered and/or reflected public perception of the legal system? (3) How has courtroom TV created new “communities of assessment” in the public sphere and enabled different perspectives on and public debate about justice, fact-finding, and the search for truth? In addressing these concerns, the course will integrate scholarship from critical legal studies and critical race theory within the law, political science, public policy, women’s studies, and Black and ethnic studies.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, students should:

1. Be able to define racism and sexism and explain how they function in individual and institutional dynamics;
2. Be aware of key theories and concepts regarding the operation of race and gender in the production of cultural media, such as television news programming, sitcoms, movies, and advertising;
3. Be conversant with key contemporary debates and issues concerning gender, race, and the law such as rape, sexual harassment, domestic abuse/violence, and election coverage; and
4. Be familiar with basic legal concepts regarding trial functioning, including, but not limited to, trial psychology/the psychology of persuasion, burdens of proof, legal epistemology and techniques (e.g., opening and closing statements and direct and cross-examinations).