Academics

Open to Ph.D. students preparing dissertation proposals.

• Instructor: Jasbir Puar
• Course Delivery: W 34 1210 P - 0310
• Current Course Description: We are in the midst of political upheaval and struggles that will dominate our lifetimes and lifetimes to come: the rise of authoritarian governments under the guise of democracy; engulfing forms of disaster capitalism, climate change, and ecocide; refugee, immigration, and crises of abandoned populations; unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, policing, and counter terrorism surveillance; the consolidation of post-1971 speculative financial markets and the sustaining of US empire through privatized debt and deficit economies; repression of political protest, freedom of speech rights, and the right to assembly; the failure of human rights to stem state violence; and local, regional, transnational and global modes of resistance, refusal, and revolt.  This class focuses on theoretical texts that resonate with our contemporary political struggles and those on the horizon. Reading these works from feminist, queer, postcolonial, settler colonial, critical disability and critical race studies, we will trace the debates, dialogues and interventions pivotal to the production of feminist knowledge production over the last several decades. While only some of these books are explicitly feminist projects and/or gender studies, each is situated in a critical nexus of different inter/disciplines, field formations, intertextual debates, and genealogies of thought. Furthermore, they have been selected in part because rather than foregrounding subjectivity, subject formation, identity, or national location, they develop alternative analytics for systems and structures that span international scales--legal apparatuses, maiming as global governance, debt as spatial enclosure, the biopolitics of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, the commodification of violence--that critically engage and impact relations of gender, race, class, disability, nationhood.  In addition, we will highlight the pragmatics and materiality of the production aspect of knowledge, looking very specifically at how knowledge is dialectically and dialogically created and implicate numerous actors despite authorial attribution. We will focus on intertextual exchange, citational practices, convergences and departures from disciplinary and field norms and expectations, and the repurposing of canonical work for critical race feminist interventions, postcolonial feminist theory, and transnational feminist analysis. We will pay special attention to the literal production of knowledge, highlighting the relationships to capitalist production embedded in the elements constructing a book: the acknowledgements, the chapter structures, the marketing and circulation, the citational strategy, the form and use of footnotes, the use of primary and secondary texts and archives, the choice of press, the process of research involved in creating the text, the institutional conditions within which the project came about, the politics of tenure, recognition, and reception.  

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. 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 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.