We often think of technology as something that is separate from our bodies, without gender, race, sexual orientation, or (dis)ability. How do preconceived ideas and inherent biases about identity inform the development and use of technology? The field of media archaeology offers a means to understand gendered and racial biases inherited by new technology through studying new and old technologies—and their cultural representations in advertising and media—for successes, failures, and alternative possibilities that were never realized. In a culture that is constantly adopting new technologies and upgrading gadgets, where does the history of technology and the people who developed it go? Women were often the unsung and forgotten laborers who manufactured and operated new technologies. By digging through layers of technological history and challenging the usual narrative of technological progress, this course questions assumptions underlying how technology is built and operates. It examines the relationship of technology to society and our everyday, embodied lives through taking concrete examples of technology, like photography or artificial intelligence, as case studies. We will also consider cultural imagination about technology and its oppressive or emancipatory possibilities. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach in the chosen readings and incorporates films and popular media. Classes rely upon student participation and discussion. Students will acquire critical skills to better understand our technological present with implications for the methodology and practice of creating new media and developing future technologies that break with the biases of the past.

This class can count for a "media history, theory, and practice" requirement for the DMS major and minor. This course may also be taken to fulfill and upper level writing requirement in consultation with the professor.

Location

Morey Room 501 (W 9:00AM - 11:40AM)

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary scholarship of Gender, Sexuality and Women's studies. 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.

Location

(M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary scholarship of Gender, Sexuality and Women's studies. 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.

Location

Gavett Hall Room 202 (MW 9:00AM - 10:15AM)

Blank Description

Location

Online Room 1 (ASE) (MW 6:15PM - 7:30PM)

A methodological inquiry into ethnicity, race, and religion as constituents of personal and communal identity. The course will emphasize the implications of these categories for a religiously pluralistic society such as the United States. Topics to be covered in this course include American immigration history, race relations, and the process of Americanization. How do Americans achieve “whiteness”? What is the difference between “ethnic” and “racial”? How are these differences gendered? How does religion factor into these questions? Twentieth and twenty-first century shifts in American religious practice will be examined in light of immigration.

Location

Online Room 2 (ASE) (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

The focal point of this course is to engage womanist literature and theory, works written by Black women, as a source for doing theology and rhetoric. Commencing with the seminal scholarship of Rev. Dr. Katie Cannon, womanist theological ethicist, who affirms, “the Black women’s literary tradition is the best available repository for understanding the ethical values Black women have created and cultivated in this society.” This course takes up writings that engage the everyday experiences of women of the African Diaspora navigating oppressive socio-political contexts (particularly) and the human condition (universally). Students will read primary historical and contemporary autobiographical, fictional, theoretical, and poetic texts.

Location

Online Room 9 (ASE) (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course surveys African American literature of a variety of genres—poetry, drama, autobiography, fiction, and non-fiction essays—from the 20th Century.  The course interprets this tradition not only as the production of American writers of African descent, but also as a set works that display formal characteristics associated with black cultural traditions.  Discussion topics include the meanings of race, the construction of black identity, and intra-racial differences of class, gender, and sexuality.   Special attention will be paid to approaching literary texts from a variety of critical perspectives.

Location

Lechase Room 161 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

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.

Location

Interfaith Chapel Room 200 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course is a discussion-based learning experience that explores the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender, and intersex (LGBTQI) history, communities, and identity through theory, pop culture, literature, and intersectional analysis. Topics include the emergence of subcultures and the organized activist movements from the 1920's through today, early sexuality theory and poststructuralist queer theory, and major historical events including the AIDS epidemic and Stonewall Riots.

Location

(R 6:15PM - 8:55PM)

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.

Location

Gavett Hall Room 310 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

Though we often assume that religion deals with the spirit or the soul, the earliest Christians were deeply and primarily concerned with the body. In this course, we examine the multiple and various early Christian debates and practices relating to the body focusing in particular on issues related to physical suffering, death, sexuality, identity, and asceticism. Topics include: early Christian debates over the nature of the body and its relationship to personal identity and the nature of the self; conflicting ideas about the nature of Jesus’ incarnated, crucified, and resurrected body; gender, sexuality, and the bodies of men and women; Christian valorization of physical suffering and the bodies of the ill; the cult of the martyrs and the cult of the relics; the rise of asceticism and the bodies of saints.

Location

Goergen Hall Room 109 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

Whether fugitive or enslaved, diseased or disfigured, in anguish or ecstasy, laboring, dissenting, dying, or engaged in racial or gender-based passing—the situation of the body in nineteenth-century U.S. literature provides a fascinating lens onto the political complexity and aesthetic inventiveness of this period of literary history. Reading across a wide range of poetry, narrative prose, and nonfiction, this course examines representations of individual bodies and conditions of embodiment, in light of the broader political pressures and state projects that imagined Americans as collectively forming a “body politic” shaped by the body politics of discourses of race, gender, disability, and sexuality. For example, we will ask how celebrations of the sexual body’s liberatory potential in later nineteenth-century works by Walt Whitman and Kate Chopin connect to that era’s racialized politics of population management, which perceived sex as a site of containment, control, and eugenicist social engineering. In addition to Whitman and Chopin, authors we will read include Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, W.E.B. DuBois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Julia Ward Howe, and Harriet Jacobs. 

Location

Online Room 16 (ASE) (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

Rochester sits in one of the world’s most explicitly carceral landscapes, with more than a dozen state prisons within a 90 min drive. This co-taught course is a collaborative ethnographic research project designed to examine how the presence of prisons in towns around Rochester reflects and shapes the political, economic, and cultural lives of those who live in the region. Students will be introduced to methods and practices of ethnography and conduct firsthand research on the cultural politics of prison towns. Through assigned reading, students will learn about the history, sociology, and cultural logics of Rochester and the wider region, and of mass incarceration. What does a prison mean for a person living near one? How does the presence of prisons shape people’s notions of justice, citizenship, and punishment? How do these nearby but largely invisible institutions shape the ways that we live in Rochester? Recommended prior courses: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology or Incarceration Nation

Location

Online Room 7 (ASE) (W 9:00AM - 11:40AM)

In Black Skins, White Masks, Frantz Fanon wrote, “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” In the United States, popular cultural understandings of race have often located blackness within the body: in DNA, in blood, in skin, in hair texture, in facial features. How does race get mapped onto the body? In this interdisciplinary course on race and embodiment, students will encounter texts and writing assignments prompting them to think critically about how black bodies ‘matter’ in the contemporary U.S. Course materials and assignments will encourage students to explore how blackness intersects with other social categories such as gender and class at the site of the body, while exploring how these categories are socially constructed and can and should be troubled, blurred, and contested in the practice of social life. The dual themes of intersectionality and visuality will act as a frame for our explorations.

Location

Online Room 4 (ASE) (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

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.

Location

Online Room 18 (ASE) (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

The category of “guilt” floats between theology, psychology, and criminology. Sometimes as a feeling, sometimes as a purported objective condition, guilt stars in big stories moderns tell about what it is to be a member of a society, what it is to be a religious person, and how it feels to be a creature with sexual appetites. Meanwhile, for legal and mental health professions, proof of guilt is used to sort the good from the bad, the normal from the deviant, and the socially respectable from the socially disposable. Not all is so dour, however. Guilt lives in confession, denunciation, and in criminal sentencing, but it is also the stuff of jokes, of ethnic pride, and of eroticism. Toward an anatomy of guilt, in this course we will draw on the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Arendt, Foucault, Janet Malcolm and Sarah Schulman, and we will wrestle with the films—and complicated legacies—of Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, two filmmakers who are preoccupied with (and implicated by) guilt, as feeling and as fact.

Location

Online Room 6 (ASE) (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Central to human experience, food serves not only as a source of substance but also as a marker of our identities. Through our choices in food, we send complex messages to others about our family and culture, our religious, racial, and gender identities, our relationship with health and wellness, and our place in the world. Food production and consumption can be used to exercise power and to define and reinforce social and socioeconomic hierarchies in the modern world - but also to challenge them. Through a series of readings, films, lectures, cooking workshops, site visits, written reflections, and class discussions, students in this course will examine the significance of food from personal and global perspectives. 

Location

(T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

The influence of Black people is a profound contribution to both culture and politics in America, and yet, anti-black racial injustice, police brutality, and violence against women and queer people persist throughout the country. To understand ​the complex relationships between gender, sexuality, and race, and cultural products and lived experiences, t​his course addresses questions of entertainment, artistic forms of resistance, and the relationship between cultural producers and capitalism. Rooted in Black feminism and critical race theory, in this course we examine contemporary art, movements, and popular culture to identify sites of contradiction at the intersections of identity, celebrity, capitalism, and feminisms, among other features at play. Topics include Colin Kaepernick’s political activism and Nike campaign, Lebron James’s HBO series ​The Shop​, Beyonce’s feminism from Destiny’s Child to ​Lemonade​, and social media phenomena such as “trending” and “cancel culture.” Texts include the work of cultural writers and theorists, Michelle Alexander, Hazel V. Carby, Brittany Cooper, Ralph Ellison, Roxane Gay, Audre Lorde, Quincy T. Mills, Jennifer C. Nash, Claudia Rankine, Phoebe Robinson, Omise’eke Tinsley, and Michelle Wallace.

Location

(MW 9:00AM - 10:15AM)

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

Location

Online Room 2 (ASE) (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

What kinds of power do words really have? What does it mean to be a writer-activist? How can we use writing as a tool for social change? Drawing on social and political concepts like community, power, justice, and democracy, and scholars who reflect on these issues, this course will engage with a variety of texts (scholarship, blogs, documentary films) as we consider how the political can inform what we believe and impact the choices we make as writers. Through experiential learning and reflective writing, students will explore the power of writing to elicit equity, inclusion, and change. Research projects may include traditional academic source material, primary research such as fieldwork, surveys, and interviews, and direct work with local community organizations. Class time will include visits from community speakers and off-campus events. This is a community-engaged course that meets the requirement for the citation in community-engaged scholarship.

Prerequisite: Completion of Primary Writing Requirement

Location

Online Room 19 (ASE) (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Recently, women have collectively mobilized to announce and describe their anger to the public. We ask how to locate anger in social relations as well as in individuals. We try to distinguish between the behaviors emerging from men’s and women’s anger. We read Mercy and other works by Andrea Dworkin, graphic stories by Phoebe Gloeckner and Isabel Greenberg, the off-genre What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life by Marie Calloway, The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh, Vox by Christina Dalcher, autobiographical/documentary films by Michelle Citron, Su Friedrich, and Cheryl Dunye, the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale, and political writings such as Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister, Eloquent Rage: a Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower by Brittney Cooper, and Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly. Weekly essays, final essay, no exams.

Location

Online Room 3 (ASE) (TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

This course examines the origins, history, and present-day circulations of “intersectionality,” a concept first introduced into feminism’s critical lexicon in 1989 by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. For Crenshaw, “intersectionality” made visible the overlap and convergence of gender- and race-based structures of oppression through which Black women’s specific experiences of discrimination were frequently illegible and thus invisible to courts who understood legal claims of discrimination on the basis of race and sex through the experiences of African American men and white women, respectively. Since Crenshaw’s now classic essay first appeared, “intersectionality” has come to dominate U.S. feminism as an interpretive paradigm in academic research and teaching and as a powerful tool for feminist social critique and activism beyond the academy. Intersectionality is also today a major force for aesthetic and narrative innovation in the wider public sphere, as reflected in influential art and literature, popular music, and film and television of the recent decade.
 

In tracing this history, we will revisit Crenshaw’s foundational writings, some of the race-conscious legal theories and prior women-of-color feminisms that informed her interventions, and later Black feminist writing that took up this new critical paradigm. We will also attend to the wide theoretical reach of Crenshaw’s original concept, which scholars have deployed to understand the intersections of race and gender with other axes of difference—such as sexual orientation, disability, and immigration status—and to illuminate the complex operations of social oppressions beyond race- and gender-based discrimination, including Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia, and ableism. Students will also engage intersectionality’s wider impact through several cultural objects and discourses that index this history. The course will conclude by looking at academic debates over intersectionality, which has faced critiques from within Black feminist thought, and Crenshaw’s most recent writings, including her response to intersectionality’s critics.

Location

Online Room 20 (ASE) (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

This course will examine the varieties of thought about, and practice of, civil disobedience within social movements, with an emphasis on contemporary activism. When, why, and how do communities choose to push back against structures of violence and injustice? Throughout the semester, we will study canonical texts? of modern resistance history speeches, writing, direct action protests, art and will consider the role of this form of counter-conduct within larger campaign strategies to build power from below and get free.

Location

Online Room 18 (ASE) (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Blank Description

Required senior project course for GSWS Majors

For GSW Majors completing an honors thesis. To be taken during their penultimate semester (typically the fall of senior year).

Blank Description

Blank Description

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Blank Description