Gen&WS 350: Special Topics in Gender & Literature – Women Writers & Social Fictions in 20th Century Literature

Analyzes 20th century transnational literature by women writers *about* women writers and creative women. Authors portray female characters who are in the process of writing or other artistic endeavors and, through the characters, show them grapple with gendered “social fictions” regarding women’s roles, creativity, and power. Focusing on literature that portrays women who write and women who are creative, we will examine how women’s written works of art are shaped by social fictions regrading domestic labor, pregnancy, motherhood, sexual repression, woman as visual/representational, and more. We will also examine different forms of creativity and different access to the creative realm among women in literature. What historical, institutional, and systemic obstacles have shaped what women write and which women write? How does the portrayal of writerly/creative female characters vary based on their gender, race, sexuality, and locationality?

File: GenWS-350-Spring-2025-Syllabus-T-Lemaster.pdf

Gen&WS 340: Topics in LGBTQ+ Sexuality: Queer Worldmaking

Across the last half-century, we have witnessed continued social, political, and legislative efforts to control, suppress, and eradicate queer life around the world; at the same time, LGBTQ+ creators have resisted these efforts by imagining new worlds on the street, the screen, and the page. In this humanities-oriented course, we will examine cultural histories of LGBTQ+ worldmaking in North America from the 1950s to the present through film, literature, and popular culture. Objects will include queer coming-of-age narratives and love stories that subvert archival silences; radical manifestos that imagine a world liberated from rigid gendered divides and homophobia; speculative fiction that rewrites the past, present, or future to center LGBTQ+ life; iconic queer music videos that invent new worlds in a matter of minutes; and documentaries capturing countercultural worlds of queer art, eroticism, and activism from the twentieth century to today. This reading and viewing-heavy course will culminate with a final project that combines historical research and creative remediation, so that students can try their hand at worldmaking of their own.

File: GenWS_340_SP25_Syllabus_Cannell.pdf

Gen&WS 950: Gender, Race, and Ecology

Ecological spaces and nonhuman beings play a key role in human politics, the human imagination, and in constructing this idea of “the human.” Animals have long played a key role (not voluntarily) in distinguishing a hierarchy among humans, but plants also play a key role in the Western Enlightenment ideal that sets humans as “apart from” rather than “part of” an ecology of beings. Bringing environmental studies, indigenous studies, and critical race theory perspectives to bear on gender and sexuality studies, this course takes feminism as an identity, an object of analysis, a methodological approach and social justice practice.

File: GenWS-950_Gender-Race-Ecology_Spring-2025_Goldstein.pdf

Gen&WS 547: Theorizing Intersectionality

The aim of this course is to critically examine important issues, questions, and debates regarding intersectionality or the notion that race, gender, sexuality, and other terrains of difference are mutually constructing. GWS 547 is interdisciplinary in its approach. Course materials include texts, films, and other multimedia resources drawn from an array of disciplines including gender and women’s studies, sociology, critical race theory, history, political theory, and cultural studies.

File: GenWS-547_Spring-2025_Syllabus.pdf

Gen&WS 539: Pregnancy, Parenthood, Illness & Disability

The physical, social, and emotional work of pregnancy, birth, and parenting is heavily gendered in the United States and elsewhere. Although not all pregnant, birthing, or parenting people are women, this work is frequently feminized and devalued in various ways linked to gender within patriarchal and androcentric social institutions. Within the matrix of domination, other identity categories also shape the experiences of parents, children, and families; for example, disabled parents, queer parents, and parents of color are also affected by ableism, hetero/cisnormativity, and white supremacy. In this course, we will cover a broad array of topics related to the ways in which pregnancy, birth, and parenting are socially understood, constructed, and controlled in the United States today.

File: GWS-539-FALL-2024-Gathman-Syllabus-FINAL.pdf

Gen&WS 350: Special Topics in Gender and Literature – Narrating Gender & Sexual Difference

In this session of Gender and Women’s Studies/English 350, we will traverse North American literary fiction, drama, manifestos, memoirs, and poetry in order to apprehend intersectional archives of gender and sexual expression from the 1960s to the present. As we interrogate how these vastly different texts might touch one another in unexpected ways, we will also contextualize them through their cultural and historical contexts in liberatory political movements in North America and abroad. Together, we will reckon with the literary and lived experiences of gender and sexual outlaws over the last half-century as they express new ways of being in the world and even new worlds.

File: GenWS-350-002_Fall-2024_Cannell.pdf

Gen&WS 449: Special Topics in Feminist Theory – Uncertainty & Possibility

In this session of Gender & Women's Studies 449, we will address feminist theories of “uncertainty, doubt,” and “skepticism,” alongside theoretical and cultural texts which take that uncertainty as a site of radical “political imagination” and possibility. By examining work from queer and feminist theorists including Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Barbara Johnson, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Jennifer Nash, Sara Ahmed, Marquis Bey, Jasbir Puar, and more, we will identify new forms for reckoning with uncertainty as we navigate activist pasts and imagine new feminist futures.

File: GenWS-449-003_Uncertainty_Fall-2024_Cannell.pdf

Gen&WS 104: Gender, Sexuality, and Global Health

Giving an introductory overview to critical global health studies by linking past trends to current research and health inequalities, this course examines current trajectories in global public health interventions through a gendered lens, with a solid grounding in the historical context. We will explore social, demographic, political, economic, and ecological determinants of global health, and the ways that these factors interconnect with biomedicine to create and affect health outcomes, both within and across countries. Global Health is a diverse and sometimes contradictory field, with an ever-growing number of multilateral, non-governmental, philanthropic and academic enterprises dedicated to improving the health of the global population. But what does health mean for different people across the globe?

File: GWS-104_Final-Syllabus-version_2024.docx

Gen&WS 533: Gender, Race & Botany

With rising pandemics of mosquito-borne viruses like zika, malaria, dengue, and continuing searches for cures for Ebola, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and infectious diseases (like COVID-19), plants (in addition to animals) provide insight, inspiration, and often ingredients for possible cures. The World Intellectual Property Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization have dedicated special programs for plant medicine, traditional knowledge (folklore) and genetic resources (biological specimens of plants). The high value placed on traditional knowledge, particularly from indigenous communities, has led to vandalism and biopiracy of plants (and animals) across national borders. There also deeper histories of plant knowledge and dispossession woven into the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the cotton and tobacco industry in the US South, as well as rubber from the Amazon rainforest that become crucial to world wars.

File: GWS-533_Gender-Race-and-Botany_Syllabus_2024.docx