Academics

• Instructor: Hasnaa Mokhtar
• Course Delivery: M 56 0350 P - 0650
• Current Course Description: Find your voice as a feminist advocate. Learn key concepts such as heterosexism, privilege and oppression, intersectionality, and decoloniality. Explore the multiple histories, presents, and futures of varied feminist activisms and organizing across the global North and South. Develop your anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist gender analysis, feminist writing, researching, and reflective participatory decision-making skills. This course will prepare you for the demands of transformative social change advocacy and will assist you in developing basic capacities such a public speaking, agenda-setting, needs assessment, harnessing free media, group facilitation, grant writing, networking, and community organizing.

Find your voice as a feminist advocate. Learn key concepts such as heterosexism, privilege and oppression, intersectionality, and decoloniality. Explore the multiple histories, presents, and futures of varied feminist activisms and organizing across the global North and South. Develop your anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist gender analysis, feminist writing, researching, and reflective participatory decision-making skills. This course will prepare you for the demands of transformative social change advocacy and will assist you in developing basic capacities such a public speaking, agenda-setting, needs assessment, harnessing free media, group facilitation, grant writing, networking, and community organizing.

• Instructor: Radhika Balakrishnan
• Course Delivery: T 1100 A - 0200

The course provides a multi-disciplinary materialist approach to understanding the way that capitalist development has created/es gendered borders and changes/ed boundaries. The course examines the global economic system and the ways in which it has changed over time. This is an advanced reading seminar that explores various (but especially feminist) approaches to theorizing how the global economy works to deconstruct and unmask the neoliberal, market-driven policy agenda and examine national and global alternatives. It will focus on how the changing nature of production with global flows of capital and people, have a gender differentiated impact on the lives of women in different locations. Particular attention will be paid to macro economic policy, supply chains and labor rights, financialization, development policy and inclusive growth.

• Instructor: Maya Mikdashi
• Course Delivery: W 45 0200 P - 0500

This course focuses on new feminist and queer movements, and their knowledge production, in post-colonial and colonial contexts. How do these movements practice, theorize, and refuse agency and subjectivity as defining ways to understand queer and feminist life and politics?

• Instructor: Charlotte Bunch
• Course Delivery: Synchronous Remote Th 2:15pm-5:15pm

This course offers students an opportunity to learn the basic history and discourse of women’s human rights. It will cover United Nations instruments of human rights law, the reframing of women’s rights as human rights as an example of feminist theory in action, and the application of human rights to issues of gender-based violence, health, and sexuality.

It is grounded in the experience of the global movement for women's human rights and the diverse voices from around the world that have shaped it over the past two decades.

The second semester of the Honors Research Seminar is designed to support student research and writing in completing the senior honors thesis in women’s and gender studies. The seminar provides a space to generate and critique the work required to complete the thesis, to discuss the knotty problems of interdisciplinary scholarship on gender, and to help you prepare to present and defend your work in front of an audience.

• Instructor: Ed Cohen

HOW TO READ MICHEL FOUCAULT

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze famously characterized Foucault’s life by saying: “Only one thing mattered to Foucault: What does it mean to think?” I’d restate that as: “Only one thing mattered to Foucault: How does thinking matter?” Indeed, as Foucault himself remarked: “In what does [philosophical thought] consist if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? … The object [is] to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so to enable it to think differently.” In this course we will closely read just a few of the texts Foucault wrote in the mid-1970s in order to trace the development of his thinking. We will focus on texts he wrote about public health, “abnormality,” the origin of the prison, “sexuality,” and modern governance in order to explore his desire to “think differently”–especially insofar as living differently always entails thinking differently as well. We might learn something about thinking along the way as well.

• Instructor: Deborah Gray White

Cross-listed with 01:512:366:01

This course explores the ways that race and sex have influenced identity in America. It investigates how class, gender and nationalism have intersected with race and sex to determine life chances in America; how the state (local, state and national government) has impacted sexuality, people of color, and women; and how our ideas about masculinity and femininity were formed. The course begins with an exploration of the concepts used in this class with particular focus on the concept of intersectionality. It continues by taking a close look at the way that the variables under review came together at various times in American history. We will study topics such as race-making, interracial marriage, gender making, immigration, gay identity and rights. Because of the continued concerns about Covid-19, the course will be conducted online using zoom.

• Instructor: Voichita Nachescu

In this course, we explore the significance of mass consumption in relation to gender and racial capitalism. What does it mean to be a consumer? What are the possibilities and limits of consumer activism? Over the course of the semester we will be tackling these questions as we explore different aspects of consumer culture, its institutions and sub-cultures, and its global reach. In addition, we examine consumption from a historical and transnational perspective, beginning with the emergence of the raced and gendered consumer in relationship with capitalism and modernity, and linking consumption with citizenship, race, class, and sexuality.

• Instructor: Judy Gerson

Run as a workshop, this seminar offers students a semester to explore their own research questions and develop important and useful research skills. We start synchronously with six weeks of common readings and then turn to everyone’s own research projects. We’ll work collectively and proceed step-by-step to make sure every student will have a meaningful, hands-on, and manageable research experience. Your final project may take the form of a research proposal, a research paper, a zine, podcast, photo album, lecture, webinar, performance, etc. You’ll come away with skills that will enable you to think critically and produce new knowledge relevant both within and outside the academy. All students are truly welcome in this interdisciplinary course, which also fulfills a WGSS requirement. There are no prerequisites and no prior knowledge is necessary. Any questions or need more information, please contact Professor Gerson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

• Instructor: Susana Galan

This course will survey some of the ways visual representation serves to reflect and critique the construction of racial and gender identity in society. Our study will focus on how such identity groupings are defined culturally and globally, and we will look at a range of contemporary art practices used to challenge, highlight, confront, and ultimately encourage recognition of the complex systems of representation that give way to ideas about race and gender and their relationship to identity performance and subjective experience. We will also learn methods used to interrogate the representation of race and gender, and consider how viewing art through this critical lens may enrich our understanding of art in general. While art historians have focused extensively on questions of gender since the late 1960s, robust research on issues of race is a more recent phenomenon in the discipline and there is still much work to do. Much of this scholarship has focused on African American/Black identity, especially as it is closely tied in with larger themes of American art and society, so while we will address other racial and ethnic identities, the content of this course skews heavily in this direction. Students are encouraged to bring into class discussions additional examples of contemporary artists addressing cultures and identities not explicitly covered in the course material.