#blackgirlmagic and the Lemonade syllabus are two recent examples of black women taking collective control over the way they are depicted in American culture. These two projects are reactions against the way black women’s bodies have been constructed as simultaneously human and animal, person and commodity. In this class, we will explore how slavery and colonialism constructed the black female body as monstrous by using foundational feminist texts and current theoretical approaches to black women’s bodies, the white gaze, and black feminism. This framework will help us to consider how racist depictions have transcended their historical origins to contemporary areas of pop culture, government, science, and technology. Using critical texts from Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and bell hooks, we will analyze how black women writers like Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Nnedi Okorafor have used monsters and monstrous black bodies to explore feminine subjectivity and sexuality.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 540

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary scholarship of Gender, Sexuality and Women's studies and will be team taught by Tanya Bakhmetyeva (Lecturer of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies) and David Holloway (Assistant Professor of Japanese). As a survey course, this class is designed to give students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines a basic understanding of debates and perspectives discussed in the field. We will use gender as a critical lens to examine some of the social, cultural, economic, scientific, and political practices that organize our lives. We will explore a multitude of feminist perspectives on the intersections of sex, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and other categories of identity. In this course, we will interrogate these categories as socially constructed while acknowledging that these constructions have real effects in subordinating groups, marking bodies, and creating structural, intersectional inequalities.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 525

Exploration of anthropological interpretation, research, and writing on the ways different peoples understand and deal with issues of illness and disease.

BUILDING: GAVET | ROOM: 301

In this course we will examine approaches to the body and gender as described and manifested in Jewish texts, rituals, and communal practice from the biblical period to the present. We will look at interpretations of the body, and its effect on the status of women in particular, in the Bible and Talmud, paying close attention to the historical and cultural contexts of these interpretations. There will be a strong focus on modern reevaluations of gender and the body and how such revaluations have transformed what it means to be “Jewish.” Topics include rites of passage, images of women in the Bible, feminist theology, as well as theories and depictions of the “Jewish body.”

BUILDING: B&L | ROOM: 270

Examines American politics, society, and culture since 1973. Focus is on the deindustrialization of the economy, the revitalization of conservatism, the "culture wars," the end of the Cold War and post-Cold War foreign affairs--including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq--, and the collapse of bipartisan policy-making.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 210

The study of issues surrounding human sexuality as it has been treated in world religions. Issues, such as homosexuality, transgender/transsexual, marriage, family, sexual ethics, gender in world religions will be covered. Also, the role of Eros in mystical traditions of various world religions (Sufi, Christian Mysticism, Hinduism) will be examined in those instances where the erotic and the spiritual have been manifested together. Classroom discussion about what is the connection between sexuality and spirituality and how have religious traditions dealt with that connection? College hook-up culture is also examined in light of the study of spirituality and sexuality.

BUILDING: CHAPL | ROOM: 202

Improve strength, flexibility and self-awareness of the body. Includes meditative movement, dance technique, improvisation and rhythm identification through music and drumming.  Dance forms such as Egyptian, Turkish, and American Tribal will be taught.  Traditional costuming will be addressed. History, art, and culture from these countries will be explored and experienced.  Discourse and research topics will explore issues of gender, body image, historical perspectives and Orientalism. 

BUILDING: SPURR | ROOM: DANCE

This course explores how ideas about gender and sex have shaped past and present approaches to health and medicine. We will consider the effects gender, race, and class have had on medical knowledge and practices, with particular emphasis on women’s bodies and women’s health. Topics will include the social and cultural constructions of gender, the politics of human sexuality, women’s interventions in the fields of health and medicine, and reproductive politics. This is a writing-intensive course and may be counted toward the University of Rochester’s Women’s Studies major, minor, or cluster.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 502

This course explores the relationship between the environment and social inequality, focusing specifically on issues of gender, race, and class. Is there a connection between sexism, racism, class exploitation, and environmental destruction? This is the question we raise. Using intersectional feminist analysis, we will investigate the historical roots of modern dualist constructions that juxtapose humans and the environment, men and women, creating an anthropocentric, racialized, and engendered framework that produces and maintains both social inequalities and our destructive attitude towards the environment. Topics might include but are not limited to the following: historical ideas about nature and environment; eco-imperialism; eco-feminism; climate change and its connection to issues of race, gender, and class; justice and sustainability; poverty and natural resources; food justice; natural disasters (such as Hurricane Katrina) and their context, and others.

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This course explores the relationship between the environment and social inequality, focusing specifically on issues of gender, race, and class. Is there a connection between sexism, racism, class exploitation, and environmental destruction? This is the question we raise. Using intersectional feminist analysis, we will investigate the historical roots of modern dualist constructions that juxtapose humans and the environment, men and women, creating an anthropocentric, racialized, and engendered framework that produces and maintains both social inequalities and our destructive attitude towards the environment. Topics might include but are not limited to the following: historical ideas about nature and environment; eco-imperialism; eco-feminism; climate change and its connection to issues of race, gender, and class; justice and sustainability; poverty and natural resources; food justice; natural disasters (such as Hurricane Katrina) and their context, and others.

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This reading intensive course is centered on public and private discourses of the body in contemporary Japan. Topics will include, but are not limited to: gender and sexuality, reproductive rights and motherhood, body image and beauty standards, youth and old age, masculinity and femininity, and health and disease. Through the conduit of journal articles, films, autobiographical essays, fiction, manga, and scholarly critiques, this course will expose students to a variety of rhetorical strategies and popular mediums concerning the body in Japan. In addition, this course will enrich students’ understanding of issues facing contemporary Japan and the ways in which we read and write about the body.

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Emblem and metaphor of vices and virtues, the female body has been the undisputed protagonist of ancient and modern art. But how profound was the feminine influence in Italian art from the 14th to the 20th century? More specifically, what importance did female artists have in the visual arts, art collecting, art-related business, and patronage? This course will address this theme along three lines of inquiry: female portraiture and self-portraiture, body anatomy (the nude), and women’s role in the practice of the visual arts. While examining fashion as a way of understanding social conventions regulating women’s public and private life, we will also analyze how powerful and influential women artists like Isabella d’Este and Artemisia Gentileschi, or American art collectors in love with Italian culture, like Isabella Stewart Gardner and Peggy Guggenheim were, in fact, not merely ‘objects’ of (male) inspiration but real agents of innovation in the business world, in society, and in the artistic environment.

BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 219

“Be a man” or “He acted like a real man” – we hear these and similar phrases around us all the time, but what does it mean “to be a real man”? How do we define what masculinity is? Does our definition of masculinity differ from, say, the medieval or Victorian? If so, then how and why? Using primary and secondary sources, as well as film and other media, this seminar explores the historical development of the modern concept of masculinity, the strategies that are used to learn to be “men” (such as sports), and how modern ideas about masculinity affect gender relationships in general as well as men’s mental and physical health.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 143

“Be a man” or “He acted like a real man” – we hear these and similar phrases around us all the time, but what does it mean “to be a real man”? How do we define what masculinity is? Does our definition of masculinity differ from, say, the medieval or Victorian? If so, then how and why? Using primary and secondary sources, as well as film and other media, this seminar explores the historical development of the modern concept of masculinity, the strategies that are used to learn to be “men” (such as sports), and how modern ideas about masculinity affect gender relationships in general as well as men’s mental and physical health.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 143

Dance/Movement Therapy Foundations examines the field’s approaches to (1) enhancing personal, professional, and creative development, and (2) treating a wide range of challenges (e.g., autism, anxiety, eating disorders, abuse, developmental challenges, and psychosis). To these ends, students will learn how Dance/Movement Therapy integrates natural movement, formal elements of dance, music, language, psychology, counseling, neuroscience, and concepts drawn from Asian approaches to healing. Improvisational dance, music-making, role plays, live music, and videotapes of actual sessions highlight these concepts. Dress comfortably. Be prepared to move. Participation in 3 labs during the semester will be required.

BUILDING: SPURR | ROOM: DANCE

Female genital cutting encounters vaginal cosmetic surgeries at the intersection of poverty and wealth, race and class, barbaric practices and the pleasure principle. Bodies of poor, African, and mostly black women and children embody a fateful condition that can be redeemed by technologies of progress and humanitarian discourses. This course invites students to challenge assumptions related to agency, race, class, the representation of the body, and the fragmented transnational sisterhood. The discussion expands to bodies caught in domestic violence, rape, lynching, and skin whitening. Readings and films: Alice Walker's "Warrior's Marks" and "Possessing the Secret of Joy"; "Manya Mabika"; "Fantacola"; "Sarabah"; "Women with Open Eyes"; "Black Sisters, Speak Up"; "The Suns of Independence"; "Desert Flower"; and Maryse Condé's "Who Slashed Célanire Throat?"

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This course explores Hollywood's current fascination with race and gender as social issues and spectacles. In particular, we will focus on the ways that social difference have become the sites of increasingly conflicted narrative and visual interactions in our films. To examine competing representations of racial difference and sexual difference in contemporary US culture, we analyze popular films of the 1980s and 1990s, from thrillers to action films to comedies.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

Understanding social psychology of modern & contemporary Western/American family experience, & especially its means of abetting the concealment, repression, & suppression of people's emotional lives. Study of the films combines with the readings seek to develop critical understanding of the nuclear family & the conditions it may create for child-rape, racism, homophobia, murder & self-destructive behavior such as substance abuse, self- mutilation, & suicide. Sometimes the violence is arbitrary, sometimes inevitable, sometimes incomprehensible. Each case the course's attention is on the personal & collective machineries of repression, resulting rage in many individuals & frequent (now often familiar) violent results. Readings incl; Nancy Chodorow, Alice Miller, Kristin Kelly, & Stephanie Coontz. Films are taken from: A Price Above Rubies, A Thousand Acres, All My Sons, American Beauty, American History X, Bastard out of Carolina, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Dolores Claiborne, and others.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 501

Exploration of the ways males and females differ in interaction, theories of development of sex differences, consequences for social change.

BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 203

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