Spring 2013 Courses

Women’s and Gender Studies

Course Offerings for

Spring 2013

Women’s and Gender Studies Courses

Exposes students to the complex dynamics of race, ethnicity, and gender and how these have shaped the American city since 1945.

Instructor: Dr. Michele Berger, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Focuses on power, politics, and representation as expressed through the plantation paradigm.  We will explore the idea of the plantation as a physical place, an idea, personal relationships, and a lasting economic system. Using narratives, films, and images developed primarily in the US, we will juxtapose distinctions and intersections in these stories. We will interrogate storytelling conventions and constructions of history while producing our own histories. We will also consider how our own identities (sexual, racial, gender, national, and class) influence our reactions and relationships with various texts and our environment.

Instructor: Dr. Tanya Shields, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Uses photography and its aspects of role playing, performance and documentation to understand the construction of identity. We will look at historical and contemporary photographers who use assumed identities and personas to comment on and explore their changing identity roles in society and challenge society's stereotypes. We will explore identity and its representation through individual and group performance/photography projects working with still photography, video and the internet.

Instructor: Susan Harbage Page, MFA, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Explores the intersections between gender, race, class, and sexuality in American society and internationally using perspectives from multiple academic disciplines. Topics include: work; sexuality and sexual identity; health; gender relations and images of women and gender in literature, religion, art, and science; and the history of feminist movements. Course readings are drawn from the humanities and the social sciences. This course includes lecture and small discussion sections led by teaching assistants.

Instructor: Dr. Silvia Tomášková, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Introduces students to the broad range of disciplinary perspectives used by the field of sexuality studies to study, teach, and create knowledge about human sexuality in various functions and forms.  Priority will be given to Sexuality Studies Minors.

Instructor: Dr. Karen Booth, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Examines U.S. and international feminist theorizing on debates over gender-based oppression. Gives majors and minors tools to pursue academic work in women’s studies and to understand the relation between concepts, activism, and change. PREREQUISITE: WMST 101.

Instructor: Dr. Michele Berger, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Explores the lives and work of women in contemporary art through a combination of readings, films, interviews, studio visits with area artists, and visits to museums and galleries. We will engage questions of identity, gender, sexuality, politics, and cultural representation and how these affect the creativity, media and final output of women artists.

Instructor: Susan Harbage Page, MFA, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Provides an introduction to Latina literature. We will read a variety of genres from a range of ethno-national perspectives and examine such topics as immigration, identity, mother–daughter relationships, and sexuality.

Instructor: Dr. Ariana Vigil, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Focuses on the interconnectedness between nations in the Américas as well as the history of and continued impacts of U.S. intervention in various regions. We will examine the response to and representation of gender and militarization in a diverse set of contemporary U.S. Latina texts from the 19^e to 21^e centuries. Works by Dominican-American, Chicana, Central American-American and Cuban-American authors are included. Topics include women’s participation in war and revolution, the relationship between gender, identity, and military practices and the militarization of everyday life at the U.S. Mexico border and in the U.S. prison industrial complex

Instructor: Dr. Ariana Vigil, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Focuses on the history of women in African and Middle Eastern colonial and postcolonial legal systems, examining “native” customary law, Islamic law, and human and women’s rights.

Instructor: Dr. Emily Burrill, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Examines violence and violence prevention, with a particular focus on issues related to men’s violence against women. We will examine violence from individual to structural levels, considering both perpetrators and victims. This course trains students to educate their peers about issues of interpersonal violence including sexual and relationship violence and stalking.  We focus on strategies of intervention and prevention. Permission of instructor is required.

Instructor: Dr. Robert Pleasants

Explores  Western views concerning love between the sexes, focusing on courtly love in the Middle Ages and romantic love in the Victorian era, using literary, historical, and art historical materials. PREREQUISITE: WMST 101 or permission of instructor.

Instructor: Dr. Jane Burns, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Examines how women’s spirituality interacts with officially sanctioned religious institutions in a range of cultural contexts and how it forges alternatives to those traditions.  PREREQUISITE: WMST 101 or permission from instructor.

Instructor: Dr. Jane Burns, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Uses films, novels, and essays to engage with various notions of activism (as represented in art and social justice organizations) at play in hemispheric America.

Instructor: Dr. Tanya Shields, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Compares the histories, experiences, identities, and political struggles of sexual and gender minorities in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas and at the United Nations.  PREREQUISITE: WMST 101 or WMST 111.

Instructor: Dr. Karen Booth, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Looking specifically at the social and cultural construction of women’s bodies, this course considers the ways in which biological difference is imbued with social significance. PREREQUISITE: WMST 101 or permission from instructor.

Instructor: Dr. Joanne Hershfield, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Explores the complex interaction between Women's Studies, Feminist Studies and Gender Studies as these fields have evolved within and across academic disciplines, intersecting with issues of race, class, ethnicity, masculinity, sexuality and with practices of queer theory and cultural studies. Open to graduate students only.

Instructor: Dr. Emily Burrill, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Cross-listed Courses

Examines social differentiation between men and women with attention to the extent, causes and consequences of gender inequality, and the changes in gender roles and their impact on interpersonal relations.

Instructor: Dr. Robin Gary, Department of Sociology

Introduces literary and cultural topics such as the AIDS crisis, gender stereotypes, aging in queer communities, racial politics and gay/lesbian sexuality, and representations of political activism and queer politics.

Instructor: Dr. Wendy Weber, Department of English

Examines multiple relationships between communication and gender. Emphasizes how communication creates gender and power roles and how communicative patterns reflect, sustain, and alter social conceptions of gender.

Instructor: Dr. Kumarini Silva, Department of Communications

Examines gender, race, and class in terms of the spatial patterns of everyday life, regional patterns, and global patterns.

Instructor: Dr. Altha Cravey, Department of Geography

Examines law, religion, medicine, social practices, and ideologies in the lives of women in ancient Greece, from Homer to Hellenistic Egypt, using literature, art, and epigraphy.

Instructor: Dr. Sharon James, Department of Classics

Explores women’s changing roles and influence, onstage and behind the scenes, in the history of opera.

Instructor: Dr. Anne MacNeil, Department of Music

Examines and compares women’s and men’s lives and the history of women’s struggle for emancipation in modern Europe from the era of the late Enlightenment and the French Revolution to the period after World War II.

Instructor: Dr. Karen Hagemann, Department of History

Introduces recent literature, theoretical questions and methodological issues concerning the study of women in Africa.  Topics include women in traditional society, and the impact of colonial experience and modernization on African women.

Instructor: TBD

Intensive study, focused on gender issues in criticism and writing.

Instructor: TBD

Introduces feminist theory and its implications for the study and practice of political theory.  Topics: women in feminist critiques of the western political tradition and schools of feminist political theory.

Instructor: Dr. Hollie Mann, Department of Political Science

Examines the individual and collective experiences of black women in America from slavery to the present and the evolution of feminist consciousness.

Instructor: Dr. Kia Caldwell, Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies

Examines gender from many different angles. Some questions we will consider are: What are biological sex and gender and how are they related? How do we distinguish between genders and how is this related to the oppression of women by men? How is sexism related to other forms of oppression, including homophobia and species-ism? In addition, we will learn to think philosophically about a few concrete ethical issues that centrally involve gender, including sex, marriage, and social pressures on our bodies.

Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Kling, Department of Philosophy

Examines the importance of feminist theory across the curriculum.  Topics include language and linguistics; psychoanalysis; anthropology, and myth; women's labor, production, and reproduction; history, political science, and religious studies; and literature, predominantly French and English.

Instructor: TBD

Examines gender as it relates to media producers, subjects, and audiences with a focus on current practices and possibilities for change.

Instructor: Dr. Barbara Friedman, School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Explores contemporary poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and feminist thought by U.S. women of color through performance.

Instructor: TBD