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.
File: GenWS-523-Spring-2025-Syllabus.pdfExamines the contemporary global health project in historical and cultural context, highlighting some of the greatest sources of tension and struggle. Uses a feminist lens and focuses on gender as key analytic category to course explore the ways that the distribution of global wealth and power impacts health and well-being around the world.
File: GWS-525_Critical-Persepctives-on-Gender-and-Global-Health_V2.pdfThis interdisciplinary course focuses on scientific approaches to studying sexuality. We discuss current biological and neuroscientific research about sexuality, as well as feminist scholarship on these topics and critical responses to this research. Topics cover the intersections between biology (e.g., hormones, anatomy, neural activity, psychophysiology, evolution, etc.), sexuality (e.g., desire, dysfunction, arousal, bisexuality, orgasm, same-sex sexuality, pleasure, etc.), and feminist/critical scholarship about this research (e.g., feminist science studies, queer theory, feminist psychology, medicalization, etc.).
File: GenWS-528_Sexuality-Science-Syllabus_Fall-2024_Chadwick.pdfWomen as patients and as health professionals in America from the colonial period to the present.
File: Women-and-Health-2019.pdfThis course demonstrates that human bodies have social and cultural histories. It will highlight the social values placed on different bodies, the changing social expectations bodies create, and the role of science and medicine in creating the cultural meanings of bodies.
File: GWS532Spring2013Houck-1.pdfWith 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.docxThis course explores several theoretical lenses, disciplinary approaches, and substantive topical areas relating to reproductive and sexual health.
File: GenWS_534_Senderowicz_Syllabus_Spring-2023.pdfThis course will take a human rights approach to global women's health to provide an overview of health issues within the context of a woman's life cycle. It will pay special attention to the socio-cultural and economic factors that play a role in determining women's access to quality basic health care.
File: GenWS-535_Alonso_Fall2022_Syllabus.pdfSituates sexual health education in historical and contemporary context by tracing its discursive production and envisioning a queering of both content and practice. An examination of what might it mean to queer sex education and what would a queer sex education look like. Utilizing theoretical interventions from critical education studies, queer theory, and trans/gender studies, this course.
File: GWS-536_2020_Spring_Barcelos.pdfUsing a reproductive justice framework, analyze contexts, experiences, practices, ideologies, and historiographies of childbirth in the United States from roughly the 17th century to the present, with the heaviest emphasis on the 20th and 21st century.
File: GWS-537_Spring_2019_Menzel.pdf