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Explores the intertwined relationship between gender and politics in contemporary Middle East and North Africa. Situates the region's historical, socio-political, and cultural context that have particularly contributed to shaping the current discourse on gender in the Arab World. Explores - both theoretically and empirically - the role of Arab women in influencing the political processes across the Middle East.

This course is a mode of critical inquiry that emerges from intersecting theorizations of race, gender, sexuality, nation, class, and other sites of lived experience. While queer theory and activism have previously faced charges of insufficiently reckoning with race, activism and scholarship that take up race as their primary focus have a similar history of presumed heteronormativity. Queer of color critique, a term often credited to Roderick Ferguson, resists this divide and centers the intellectual traditions of queer thinkers of color to interrogate the mutual constitution of race, gender, and sexualities.

Where have we come from and where are we going? Designed to take us on a journey and tell stories of knowledge building over time, we will explore feminist theories from a broad array of disciplines and perspectives.

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.

Explores various aspects of identity politics and body politics such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and citizenship status as they relate to and intersect with body size and constructions of fatness. Situates how fatness has been conceptualized over time, the formation of the gendered body ideals, and the proliferation of obesity rhetoric.