Events, Involvement, and News

This class focuses on the intertwined relationship between Islam, gender and society in Muslim-majority contexts. The course will cover topics ranging from from gender, Islam, and patriarchy; women and Islamist movements; personal status laws and women’s empowerment; gender and sexuality in Islam as well as Islamic and Islamist Feminism and its discontents.

This course examines intersections of race, gender, sexuality, media, and new media to answer key questions about the role of the “digital” in United States culture. We will ask, how has the digital become a meaningful way to understand social and cultural worlds? And in what ways are structures like race and gender reproduced, reflected, or challenged in these worlds, particularly given how embedded digital technology and media have become in to the ways that we live and work? This includes examinations of how women and people color have constructed digital worlds as sites of resistance, creative expression, and community formation.

This course brings environmental studies and critical race theory perspectives to bear on gender and sexuality studies, taking “eco-feminism” as an identity, an object of analysis, and as a methodological approach. While “Feminism” in practice need not be (though often is) gender-specific, as a political and academic practice it often carries racialized inflections. The term, “eco”, from the Greek “oikos,” has multiple translations: “dwelling,” “household,” “home,” “family” and “hearth,” laying the foundation for examining the roles that gender and sexuality play in changing forms of kinship, citizenship, and (environmental) politics beyond and within the concept of the human. These different meanings of the “eco” in economy and ecology shape scholarly analyses as well as the lived experiences for those do not feel “at home” in a white hetero-normative structure. This course emphasizes creative thinking and offers opportunities for community engagement.

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In this course students will explore literary, visual, and many other cultural representations of genders and sexualities impacted by illness and disability. We will move through the legacies of freak shows, sterilization laws, medical racism, and the institutionalization of the “unfit” into present day eugenics and the impact of pandemics then and now. We will pursue questions such as “What are the differences between disability rights and disability justice? Who can claim disability identity? What is the relationship between disability, illness, and race? Is disability gendered? And why is it so difficult to conceptualize a sex life for people with disabilities?” Alongside developing analytical and critical thinking skills through academic discussion and writing, students will also have the option to complete a creative, critical or scholarly final project of their choosing.

This course introduces key concepts in queer, queer of color, trans, and crip theory through visual practices and tactics that challenge the terms of visibility and what and how we see across art and media. The mobilization of the very words “queer” and “crip” negotiate shame and stigma by occupying and reworking terms of injury and often signal a certain “bad attitude. In its critical questioning of assumptions regarding norms, queer embraces deviance and indeterminacy. In its focus on performance and discourse production, the practice of queering also attends to the intersectional analysis of sexuality, that is, the imbrication of questions of desire and identification with embodiment, gender, class, ability, and race. Queering is an activity of questioning, a critical and creative practice of turning taken-for-granted tropes that makes strange the assumed “naturalness” of binary systems. To queer is to affect the ethical and political activation of speculative theorizing and aesthetics. The work of queering also involves a self-critical approach to one’s own discursive and visual production. Throughout the course, we will be forging links between queer, queer of color, trans and crip theorization about visual culture, interventions in the archive, and critical tactics of queering and cripping.

Feminist Neuroscience is an interdisciplinary course unlike most other GWS or other science courses. We will explore neuroscience narratives as they relate to sex, gender, and sexuality. We will examine how white and cisheteronormative biases shape the production of scientific knowledge. Readings include original scientific journal articles as well as contemporary feminist neuroscience works by Gina Rippon, Daphna Joel, Cordelia Fine, and Deboleena Roy. By the end of this course, students should be able to analyze biological texts and identify gendered language and cisheteronormative biases.

This course will engage LGBTQIA+ health and well-being from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in the health and social sciences. The course focuses on health status and outcomes at both the individual and community levels in three major ways:

This course 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. We begin by understanding how fatness has been conceptualized over time, the formation of the thin feminine ideal, and the proliferation of obesity rhetoric. We investigate how fat individuals experience the social world, related to arenas such as the American health care system, and other societal institutions such as education, social welfare, immigration, and media. We will investigate and interrogate how the obesity epidemic came to be, how it is framed in the United States, and how it intersects with other systems like big pharma, the food industry, beauty industry, globalization, neoliberalism, and consumerism. This class takes a critical approach in understanding fatness and body size as dimensions of difference that inform experiences of privilege and oppression.

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 typically feminized and devalued in various ways within patriarchal and androcentric social institutions. Within the matrix of domination, other identity categories also shape the experiences of parents, children, and families; in particular, disabled parents and parents of color are also affected by ableism 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 constructed, viewed/understood, and structured in the United States today.

Concentrating social and ecological environments as well as the that of the body, this course focuses on the toxic effects of late industrialism on epigenetics and maternal/fetal health.  Heavy metals and many a chemical can move through human and nonhuman bodies, passing the blood-brain barrier, swimming through amniotic fluid, and changing the body chemistry of all living organisms. While heavy metal and chemical contaminants often have a marked visibility on the landscape, their impact on human health is not always so easily detected, except in fetal development. Through the figures of the mother-and-child and of nature’s body – often gendered female, public health officials and environmental scientists, call for eliminating the toxic “body burden” placed on human and nonhuman bodies, for a less weighted future. This class delves into these gendered calls, examining the intersections with considerations of race, class, and what constitutes “able” bodies.