Undergraduate Programs

All over the world, women have been at the heart of movements for freedom and justice and against tyranny, but their contributions have often been glossed over. Studying their stories is a crucial practice in understanding the strength and power behind some of the greatest campaigns in human history. In this class we'll examine major global historical movements, such as the American Civil Rights Movement, gay pride, women’s rights, and religious reform and freedom movements. We’ll spend time uncovering the vital roles of lesser-discussed women, as well as more well-known individuals, offering a comprehensive exploration of women’s activism around the world. By examining films about queer icons such as David France’s The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, literature on intersectionality like Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, podcasts on the fight for birth control in 1930s Canada, archival footage from protests against oppressive religious regimes in Iran, and literary and historical criticism, students will learn about the struggles and origins of the women who fought for the rights we enjoy today and discuss how we can critically engage with important causes in our communities. With each theme we examine, students will compare a historical event to a current concern to track the trajectory of activism from the late 19th century to now. We will ask, “What more remains to be done, so that future generations will continue to experience the rights that should belong to all women?” and “What can we do to ensure hardships we still face are made easier for the women who come after us?” The ultimate goal of this class is for students to embody in praxis the scholar-activism we’ve studied. Through a combination of community outreach and academic scholarship, students will demonstrate in their final projects an active engagement with social justice movements in our local or global community.

Location

Lechase Room 161 (MW 10:25AM - 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

Dewey Room 2110E (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

The aim of this course is two-fold: First, to develop an understanding of the extraordinary variety of ways meaning is produced in visual culture; secondly, to enable students to analyze and describe the social, political and cultural effects of these meanings. By studying examples drawn from contemporary art, film, television, digital culture, and advertising we will learn techniques of analysis developed in response to specific media and also how to cross-pollinate techniques of analysis in order to gain greater understanding of the complexity of our visual world. Grades are based on response papers, class attendance and participation, and a midterm and a final paper. Occasional film screenings will be scheduled as necessary in the course of the semester.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course surveys African American literature of a variety of genres—poetry, drama, autobiography, fiction, and non-fiction—with a focus on the 18th and 19th Centuries. 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 literature as historical document. Special attention will be paid to approaching literary texts from a variety of critical perspectives. Featured writers include Phillis Wheatley, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet W. Wilson, Charles W. Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and more. Course requirements include two formal writing assignments, bi-weekly reading responses, and class participation.

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 315 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

Traditional Folkloric roots of Middle Eastern Dance, focusing on specific Bedouin dance styles of North Africa (Raks Shaabi). Discourse and research will address issues of gender and body image. Improving strength, flexibility and self-awareness of the body, the class work will include meditative movement, dance technique, choreography and improvisation. No prior dance experience necessary.

Location

Spurrier Gymnasium Room 104 (MW 6:30PM - 7:45PM)

In this colloquium we will look at the history of international feminism and explore its many faces. We will examine the various factors that have contributed to women’s historically lower status in society; will look at the emergence of women’s rights and feminist movements as well as the distinctions among various feminist theories, and will discuss the relevance of feminism today.

Location

Morey Room 502 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

In this colloquium we will look at the history of international feminism and explore its many faces. We will examine the various factors that have contributed to women’s historically lower status in society; will look at the emergence of women’s rights and feminist movements as well as the distinctions among various feminist theories, and will discuss the relevance of feminism today.

Location

Morey Room 502 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Sometimes people think of feminist philosophy as its own little corner of the discipline, that sits off to the side and has more in common with other areas of academic inquiry than with philosophy. In this class, we’ll challenge that idea in two ways: by making the case that feminist concerns need to be taken seriously by every traditional area of philosophy, and by making the case that the tools of the traditional areas of philosophy have much to offer to feminism. We’ll investigate the metaphysics of gender, the epistemology of sexual harassment and assault, the ethics of abortion and the ethics of care, and the social and political philosophy of internalized oppression and the gendered distribution of labor. 

Location

Harkness Room 210 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This interdisciplinary course is an introduction to critical concepts and approaches used to investigate the intersections of gender, health, and illness, particularly in the context of individual lives both locally and transnationally. Special attention will be paid to the historical and contemporary development of medical knowledge and practice, including debates on the roles of health-care consumers and practitioners, as well as global linkages among the health industry, international trade, and health sector reform in the developing world. Emerging issues around the politics of global health include clinical research studies, bodily modification practices, and reproductive justice movements. This is a writing-intensive course and may be counted toward the University of Rochester’s Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies (GSW) major, minor, or cluster.

Location

Lechase Room 104 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Survey course on understanding sexuality. Includes such topics as biological sexual differentiation, gender role, gender-linked social behaviors, reproduction issues, intimacy, and the role of social and personal factors in psychosexual development.

This is a social science course.

Prerequisite: PSYC 101

Location

Strong Auditorium Room 011 (TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

We rarely pause to consider how our understanding of what is "normal" influences how we understand the present and how we imagine futures. This course centers the experiences of multiply-marginalized disabled people and introduces students to a transnational framework that considers how our thinking about disability is rooted in settler colonialism, Christian hegemony, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. From an intersectional, interdisciplinary multimedia perspective students will learn to critically examine the history of Western medicine, law, politics, and culture. This class offers a space in which we approach disabilities, from depression and anxiety to autism to spina bifida, as well as Deaf culture, chronic illnesses, body size, sexual orientation and gender identity, and many other forms of difference as complex sites of social expectations, personal experiences, state interventions, knowledge production, and exuberant life.

Location

Morey Room 504 (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

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

Lechase Room 143 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Does it matter where our power comes from? Why or how and to whom? This course uses anthropological case studies of different kinds of energy sources (fossil fuels, nuclear, water, solar, wind) and different kinds of electrification (centralized grids versus micro-grids) around the world to think about the relationship between energy, environments, power, and culture with a specific focus on intersectional gender and sexuality. How do energy practices and cultural norms of racialized gender shape each other in various places around the world, and to what effects? What might empirical attention to how people talk about and use energy help us to understand about the energy transitions and climate crises of the 21st century?

Location

Morey Room 205 (MW 9:00AM - 10:15AM)

How does Black Paris, as the lived experience of today marginalized immigrants, as a site of the production of a certain understanding of blackness, contribute to our understanding of the global black condition? This course is a study of Black Paris, as imagined by generations of Black cultural producers. Paris is a space of freedom and artistic glory that African American writers, soldiers and artists were denied back home. For students from French colonies, Paris was the birthplace of Negritude, the cultural renaissance informed by the Harlem Renaissance. Black Paris, for those caught in poor suburbs, calls to mind images of riots, dilapidated schools, but also rap music and hip-hop, elements of transnational black imagination that sometimes speaks the language of the Black Lives Matter movement. In English

Location

Lechase Room 161 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir said “throughout humanity superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills.” Is it true that the matter with men is killing? Do men kill because they think they are superior? Do they think they are superior because they kill? Are men violent because they can’t speak? Why don’t men “use their words”? How is men’s woman-hating related to killing and raping? Why do women say that “men don’t listen”? Writers, who do use their words, have depicted men’s killing and their chronic melancholia over two millennia. This course considers how well-read stories and poems show men’s struggle with shame, anger, violence, and language. Writers studied include: James Baldwin, Samuel Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Greenberg, Ira Levin, Herman Melville, Anne Petry, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf. 

Location

Lechase Room 181 (TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

Trans studies is an interdisciplinary field that addresses questions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment through the lens of transgender experiences. How does this field change both the ways we look at objects and their forms, and how we consider subjectivity —the ways in which we are overdetermined by not only our individual and interpersonal experiences, but the many frameworks (race, class, etc.) that tell us who we are? In other words, how do we understand a field that is about “who” we are but also about change and transition to fundamentally alter the concept of subjectivity? Further: how can we understand the process of transition as a question inside not only subjectivity, but also form? What terms—from “becoming” to “the body,” from “capacity” to “visibility”—lend trans aesthetics a specific usefulness to thinking about form, and make it an urgent set of methods and methodological challenges for the present? Objects from film and television to contemporary art and media will be the main focus, along with texts by Susan Stryker, Eliza Steinbock, Marquis Bey, Kay Gabriel, Paul Preciado and others; a background or some prior readings in queer theory or queer studies is recommended.

Location

Morey Room 524 (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Why did fertility rates decline over the nineteenth century? Why did women begin choosing hospital rather than home births in the twentieth century? What difference have the Pill and other reproductive technologies made in shaping how women think about pregnancy and childbirth? Why have breastfeeding rates been rising since the 1970s? How have women's reproductive experiences differed along lines of race and class? In this course, we will consider these questions and more as we explore how women's reproductive experiences and the meanings attached to such experiences have changed over time and why. This is a research seminar, so students will further explore these issues through their own research and writing on some aspect of the history of reproduction. Readings and discussions will focus on the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but students may explore the location and period of their choice in their papers.

Location

Rush Rhees Library Room 305 (W 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course is for students completing a GSWS thesis in their final semester. Since this is a small group, our meeting day and time may be flexible dependent on student schedules. This course is primarily taken by GSWS majors, but is open to students who wish to complete rigorous research in GSWS as well. Contact Tanya Bakhmetyeva with questions.

Location

Dewey Room 2110E (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

For students completing a GSWS Honors thesis in the final semester of their senior year. Students will complete their final GSWS honors projects started in the previous semester. Since this is a small group, our meeting day and time may be flexible dependent on student schedules. This course is primarily taken by GSWS majors, but is open to students who wish to complete rigorous research in GSWS as well. Contact Tanya Bakhmetyeva with questions.

Location

Dewey Room 2110E (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)