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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?

What happens to the bodymind kept in waiting? This course pursues questions of the “in- between” through the lenses of health and disability justice. Considering the concept of “patient,” with connotations of compliance and medicalization, students will explore how race, gender, class, sexuality and citizenship impact how long one waits for care.

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.

This course will focus on how visionary and speculative fiction serve as a compliment to social justice activism. Students will have the opportunity to read, respond to, and produce visionary and speculative fiction.

Explores the social, cultural, and political construction of the female/feminine body. Considers specifically the bodies of women and girls, transgender women, non-binary people that embody the feminine, female masculinities, and bodies that identify and are identified as female, as bodies that have historically and traditionally been sites of political contention, of societal meaning making, of cultural symbolism, and active resistance.