Undergraduate Program

• Course Code: 01:988:337

Course Description

This course takes a close look at what it means for the most intimate of relationships to be formed at a transnational scale. In recent decades there has been a dramatic increase in people crossing borders to engage in sex, find work in other’s households, or form families. We will examine several of the most common of these types of relationships, including: sex tourism, trafficking in women and children, international domestic work, transnational adoption, interracial marriage, and so-called “mail-order brides.”

We will learn about historical antecedents to the current globalization of sex and family and ask why these relationships are experiencing such a dramatic increase in recent decades. Economics, war, political relationships, media images of others, changes in fertility and marriage patters, etc. will all be considered as factors. We will investigate the difference it makes to definitions of kinship, family, romance, sexuality, gender, racial identity, health and other personal domains when people cross borders to form intimacies.

Readings for the course will be interdisciplinary. We will read several monographs, including ethnographic and social scientific studies, fiction, as well as personal accounts and memoirs. Articles and films will also give a vivid sense of what it is like for persons engaging in such transnational intimacies. Do people who travel long distances for work, sex or marriage maintain family ties at “home” or do they make new homes for themselves? How do people engage in emotional and/or sexual intimacy across barriers of culture, language, class, and race? What kinds of stigma, exploitation or inequality might be generated through the globalization of intimacy? What are the costs of such phenomena? Are there gains? Do such new intimacies have something to teach us about the future?

• Course Code: 01:988:333

Examines development of feminist concepts of power and the relations between feminist and patriarchal theories.

• Course Code: 01:988:332
• Semester(s) Offered: Spring, Summer
• Credits: 3

• 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