In this course, students will explore the major themes and debates in the interdisciplinary field of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies through the lens of popular music and the body. Students will engage with musical examples as a jumping-off point to consider the ways in which music is variously entangled with ideas about gender, race, labor, and media. In the 20th century, popular music has become a major cultural force in the U.S., and starting with the “soundtrack” of daily life allows us to consider questions like: Which voices count? Who’s work matters? Which bodies are represented as normative? And, how do power and politics shape our lives? The course will engage with major texts in the field of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and will challenge students to analyze the workings of gender in non-text-based modalities like sound, visual media, performance, and film. This course will consider the ways in which issues of gender influence those who perform and record popular music as well as the ways in which listening practices are shaped by gendered ideas. As such, students are encouraged to draw on their personal musical preferences, while also critically examining and challenging their existing beliefs. Background knowledge in music analysis welcome but not required.

Location

Lechase Room 161 (F 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

Lechase Room 163 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Exploration of anthropological interpretation, research, and writing on the way different peoples understand and deal wit issues of illness and disease. Open only to First Year and Sophomore students.

Location

Morey Room 205 (MW 6:15PM - 7:30PM)

During the Renaissance and Reformation, many people throughout Europe became convinced that society was threatened by conspiracies of witches. The resulting panics led to the execution of thousands of people, mostly lower-class women. The course delves into intellectual, cultural and social history to explain how and why this happened, with discussion of both broad trends and local factors. As we will see, responses to witchcraft reflected major changes in European society, culture, and politics that lent new meanings to traditional ideas about witches, possession, and malefice and enabled the systematic condemnation of certain groups of people. The ways in which these ideas were mobilized in individual communities and the reasons for doing so varied widely, however, and we will therefore closely examine several specific examples of witch hunts in order to better understand why they were appealing to so many, why they flourished for a time, and why they ultimately faded.

Location

Computer Studies Room 209 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

Why can women read from the Torah in some synagogues but are excluded in others, and why do some Jewish women cover their head? In this course, we will examine religious, literary, and historical sources to understand the role of Jewish women in ritual, communal, and family life. We will begin by looking at the female figures of the Hebrew Bible and the development of Jewish law that regulated the ritual dimensions of female body. We will then move to the study of early modern Jewish women, based on possession accounts from the Ottoman city of Safed, the diary of Glückel of Hameln from Germany, and stories concerning the holy Maiden of Ludmir from Eastern Europe. Finally, we will explore contemporary issues that relate to the role of women in Judaism in Israel, Europe, and North America.

Location

Rush Rhees Library Room 428D (T 3:25PM - 6:05PM)

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)

The goal of this course is to radically problematize the concepts of queer, gender and sexuality, fundamentally questioning the assumptions that attend the usage and deployment of these terms in quotidian discourse. This will not be your typical queer theory course as we will not move from the center to the margins, relegating racialized bodies to the position of reactionary actors responding to an epistemic erasure. Rather we will center these critiques as the basis for a new canon and thus grounds for theory.

Location

Lechase Room 148 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

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.

Location

Morey Room 501 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Location

Morey Room 501 (T 2:00PM - 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

Lattimore Room 210 (W 6:15PM - 8:55PM)

Location

Hylan Building Room 105 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

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

O'Brien Residence Hall Room 104 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

An isolated country parsonage. A half mad father. A profligate brother addicted to drugs. Three uniquely gifted sisters who burned their hearts and brains out on the moors, but not before leaving us some of the most passionate and revolutionary literature of the 19th century. This is the stuff of the Brontë legend. This course will explore the continuing appeal of the Brontës and the peculiar fascination that they have exercised on the literary imagination. Looking intensively at some of the best-loved novels of all time, we will explore the roots and reaches of the Brontë myth. We will also consider the Brontës’ legacy in in some of the many adaptations (and continuations) of their work in print and on the screen. And we will look at our seemingly insatiable appetite for new tellings of the Brontës’ life stories. The course, then, will consider not the only the Brontës’ literary productions, but also our culture’s production and reproduction of “the Brontës” over the years.

Location

Lattimore Room 413 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

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 Cond's "Who Slashed Clanire Throat?" Conducted in English.

Location

Lechase Room 182 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Eve let the Devil through the door, and her punishment was terrible pain in childbirth: for the vagina is a crossroad between the external and the internal. This course examines medieval and later texts where the feminine and the monstrous intersect: the female body is porous, secretive, associated with the abject, the messy, the sinful, the incomplete, and all the more horrifying when it’s not constrained socially and politically—a mindset that persists even now. We'll look at the “monstrous feminine” in the evil mother, the temptress, the hag, the witch, the fairy and the shapeshifter in Eve, Medea and Melusine; the vetula, the “loathly lady”; Sheela na Gig, Malleus Maleficarum, De Secretis mulierum, “Duessa” and “Error” in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, “Sin” in Milton’s Paradise Lost, films and social media about monstrous mothers, and articles from Cohen, Kristeva, Miller, Urban and Creed.

Location

Meliora Room 205 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

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

Prerequisite: PSYC 101

Location

Meliora Room 203 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course explores the same-sex desires, love, non-exclusive relationships, and adoptive families with two fathers, two mothers, etc. that were represented as ideal relationships in 18th century German literature. In contrast to traditional views of the 18th century obsession with bourgeois and aristocratic families determined by fathers interested only in economic endeavors and preserving heritage, this course will explore the counter discourses that arose in the 18th century that highlighted the fundamental need for love as the foundation of all families. This course is taught in English.

Location

Meliora Room 218 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Location

Todd Union Room 107 (R 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

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

Rush Rhees Library Room G108 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

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

Meliora Room 224 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course addresses questions such as these: Do species have “origins”? Does the universe have a beginning? What is meant by “creation”? Are “fundamental” particles related to religious fundamentalism? Is cognitive science connected to the “tree of knowledge”? Are “knowledge” and “truth” key terms in both science and religion? Are there “higher” and “lower” organisms? Do mothers have “instincts”? Are people smarter than other animals? Have “instincts” and “intelligence” been identified by science? Does a sperm “penetrate” or “fertilize” an egg? Do either God or Nature have “laws”? Is “the invisible hand” a religious idea? Is “the great chain of being” a religious idea, and did Darwin overtake it? Do people need to be “saved”? Is “evil” a “problem”? How do people describe the practices of circumcision and communion? Readings are taken from the bible, history of science, feminist critiques of religion and science, and literature. Emphasis is on common language usages and their political valences.

Location

Lechase Room 141 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

For GSWS majors completing an honors project in their fourth year, typically taken in the fall to be followed by 393H in the spring. The time of the class is flexible and will be decided by those enrolled in collaboration with the instructor.

Location

Lattimore Room 540 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

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

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