Through feminist analyses of actual events and phenomena such as globalization and transnationalism, this course offers surprising and exciting discoveries surrounding these questions that reveal how our past and present are linked. It uses historical documents, film, fiction, ethnographies, and autobiographies to show how we accept, negotiate, resist, and recreate where we belong in the world and how we interact with others, through texts such as Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives and Gender Through the Prism of Difference. Some writers included are bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, R.W. Connell, Alice Walker, Nawal el Saadawi, Richard Falk, Barbara Smith, and Gloria Anzaldua.

This class employs an innovative system of qualitative assessment. Students take the course “S/SD/N with Written Evaluation.” This provides a powerful opportunity for students to stretch their limits in a learning community with high expectations, but without a high-pressure atmosphere. This ungraded course has been approved for inclusion on major/minor plans in Political Science, Latin American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

This course is an interdisciplinary examination of the body primarily from the perspectives of psychology, disability studies, and feminist studies, with a strategically split focus primarily on the United States and Russia/Eastern Europe. We will rely on analysis of theoretical and empirical research, personal narrative, and film, as well as visits from a variety of guest speakers, to explore such questions as: What is a “normal” body? A “beautiful” body? How does the media inform how we feel about our bodies? How are bodies – especially women’s bodies – objectified, exploited, commodified, and regulated? How and why do we discriminate against people with non-normative bodies? How do people represent the experience of having a disabled body? How can we think critically about the various ways in which people change, regulate, and enhance their bodies (e.g., via body building, cosmetic surgery, diet, etc.)? How do sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression influence how different bodies are viewed, treated, educated, and experienced? And how does all this change when we travel in time or across space?

The course’s cross-listing with Russian Studies will give students a comparative context for thinking about how the body is built – and minded – differently depending on cultural, political, and economic considerations.

This will be a writing-intensive course in which students will write (and re-write) personal essays, analytical and reflective essays, and a research paper.

This course is an interdisciplinary examination of the body primarily from the perspectives of psychology, disability studies, and feminist studies, with a strategically split focus primarily on the United States and Russia/Eastern Europe. We will rely on analysis of theoretical and empirical research, personal narrative, and film, as well as visits from a variety of guest speakers, to explore such questions as: What is a “normal” body? A “beautiful” body? How does the media inform how we feel about our bodies? How are bodies – especially women’s bodies – objectified, exploited, commodified, and regulated? How and why do we discriminate against people with non-normative bodies? How do people represent the experience of having a disabled body? How can we think critically about the various ways in which people change, regulate, and enhance their bodies (e.g., via body building, cosmetic surgery, diet, etc.)? How do sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression influence how different bodies are viewed, treated, educated, and experienced? And how does all this change when we travel in time or across space?

The course’s cross-listing with Russian Studies will give students a comparative context for thinking about how the body is built – and minded – differently depending on cultural, political, and economic considerations.

This will be a writing-intensive course in which students will write (and re-write) personal essays, analytical and reflective essays, and a research paper.

Drawing from various feminist frameworks and queer theory, this advanced seminar interrogates the ways in which race, sexuality, class, gender, and nation are imbricated in, and thus connected to, the global marketplace. This course thus examines power relations under contemporary globalization in terms of the racial and sexual dynamics of labor, citizenship, and migration. Course material considers the local and transnational dynamics of free trade, labor fragmentation, and structural adjustment, as these shape industrial and informal labor, community organizing, and global trends as they pertain to gender, sexuality, and racial/ethnic formations. The material foregrounds ethnographic analyses of the everyday conditions of people situated in struggles with the effects of global capitalism