Class Schedules

This course will deal with aspects of human anatomy and physiology of special interest to women and/or those who identify as women, especially relating to sexuality and reproduction. Biological topics covered will include menstruation and menopause, sexuality, conception, contraception, infertility, abortion, pregnancy, cancer, and AIDS. Advances in assisted reproductive technologies, hormone therapies, and genetic engineering technologies will be discussed. Three lecture hours each week.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Natural science and mathematics

Course Materials

Well, some of them. Terms like socialism, feminism, (neo)liberalism, radical, queer, globalization, colonialism, trans. People from all walks of life, across a range of experiences and understanding, use them out of fear, pride, love, a little or a lot of knowledge, and curiosity. This course will be our collective exploration of how the terms show up in the past and present; we might even speculate how they will appear in the future. The goal is to empower you to speak about, and use, the terms in all kinds of communities. From Goldman to Federici, from Truth to Yousafzai, from Rich to Daly, from Rivera to Puar, and a host of others, the course will also include music, storytelling, video, and film to make the terms more...or less...scary. Acquaintance with feminist, queer, and trans knowledges and experiences is great but not required. An enthusiasm to know more is a requisite.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This class addresses conceptual and ethical questions at the foundation of the study of sexism, racism, heterosexism, and transphobia. Many of us believe, for example, that race and gender are both socially constructed. But what exactly is social construction?  Would there be room for races and genders in a perfectly just society, or are races and genders intrinsically oppressive categories that should be eliminated?  Nowadays we are taught to distinguish gender from sex. But what is sex? Is sex socially constructed, like gender, or is it a strictly biological phenomenon?  Population geneticists have recently argued that, surprisingly, race is biological after all. Are their arguments convincing, or flawed?  How can thinking carefully about gender and sex problematize our ordinary understanding of sexual orientation? In our unjust society, when if ever does it make sense to respond to racial injustice with affirmative action? Is sex-selective abortion immoral? If you think it is, can you still be pro-choice? What should we think about affirmative action? We will address these questions, and others, by drawing on recent work at the intersection of philosophy, social science, and biology. Authors to be studied include Elizabeth Anderson, Anthony Appiah, Sally Haslanger, Kate Manne, Debra Satz, Tommie Shelby, Quayshawn Spencer, and Laurence Thomas.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course examines traditions of 20th century African American women's activism and the ways in which they have changed over time. Too often, the narrative of the "strong black woman" infuses stories of African American women's resistance which, coupled with a culture of dissemblance, makes the inner workings of their lives difficult to imagine. This course, at its heart, seeks to uncover the motivations, both personal and political, behind African American women's activism. It also aims to address the ways in which African American women have responded to the pressing social, economic, and political needs of their diverse communities. The course also asks students to consider narrative, voice and audience in historical writing, paying particular attention to the ways in which black women's history has been written over the course of the twentieth century.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Prerequisite(s): This course focuses on reproductive health as a human right following the reproductive justice framework. It will focus on women and how they navigate the system to expand their rights. The course will pay particular attention to women who are marginalized due to their race, class, gender identity, indigeneity, and religion. In doing so, this course studies reproductive health and human rights in relation to the broader structural context in the Americas (e.g. national laws and international conventions). As the topic of women's reproductive rights is vast, we will be focusing on abortion, domestic violence, and motherhood. Students in the class will study these issues from the perspective of women's organizations that have mobilized to expand reproductive rights. This course will be comparative in nature as it will focus on reproductive rights in the U.S. and Latin America from the 1980s onwards. These two regions are intimately connected politically and economically, and in regards to reproductive rights. For example, the gag rule introduced by the Reagan administration in 1984 jeopardized the reproductive health services provided in Latin American countries that received funding from the U.S. government. Yet another way that these two regions have been coupled is through feminist networks that have been working to expand reproductive rights in the Americas.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This seminar-style class examines the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the history of medicine and health in the U.S. Our diverse topics for study include eugenics, sexuality, midwifery, cultural/spiritual healing methods, pandemics, race- and gender-based ailments and medical experiments (such as the science and politics of the birth control pill and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment), gender reassignment surgery, and sex-testing in the Olympics. This wide range of topics will prepare students to explore a research topic of their own choosing for a final paper.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Against the swirling backdrop of political discourses about women in the Islamic world, this course will engage with feminist and postcolonial debates through literary works by Muslim women writers. The course will begin with an exploration of key debates about women's agency and freedom, the Islamic headscarf, and Qur'anic hermeneutics. With this in mind, we will turn to the fine details of literature and poetry by Muslim women. How do these authors constitute their worlds? How are gendered subjectivities constructed? And how do the gender politics of literary texts relate to the broader political and historical contexts from which they emerge? Themes will include an introduction to Muslim poetesses and Arabic poetic genres, the rise of the novel in the Arabic speaking world, and Muslim women's literary production outside of the Middle East: from Senegal to South Asia, and beyond.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Word for word, Emily Dickinson is the most powerful writer in the history of the English language. She is the King of All Media, the feature star in movies, television, radio, lawsuits and criminal investigations, novels, AI language models, cookbooks, museums, a video game, and just about every other possible platform of public fascination. Barring Shakespeare, no other English or American poet has been the focus of such fervid public devotion. What’s behind this cult of Dickinson? In our class you will find out. You will study Dickinson’s poems, which are teasingly fun, hair-raisingly creepy, romantically uplifting, existentially wrenching, philosophically staggering, and aesthetically gorgeous. You will also study Dickinson herself. Transformed into a mythical figure since her death in 1886, she has been used as a symbol to embody a range of bitterly conflicting cultural fantasies. To understand the history of Emily Dickinson is to understand some of the most painful—and liberating—ideological revolutions in modern US history. This course fulfills the19th-c. American literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is designed to teach students how to think like Africanist historians to interpret the stories of the past in meaningful and accurate ways. Since interpretation is central to creating or narrating history, students will learn how the degree of accuracy can be skewed in the construction and reconstruction of narrations of the past. Students will learn about and use ideas and methods that inform both feminist theories and historical thinking. The aim of Women in African History is to use case studies to examine the lived experiences of various women from different parts of Africa who lived from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. This can count towards "Gender," "Colonization and Empire," "Race and Indigeneity," or "Africa & Atlantic World" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A history of feminism and feminist thought in the United States between 1848-2022, this course focuses on women’s rights: the ideologies, leaders, and actions that forced change in long-held gender roles and patriarchal governing norms. We will also interrogate the myths, hypocrisies, and the backlash moments that are central to United States history, culture, and politics in the context of women’s rights. Critical to our course is learning about the many divergent ways that ethnicity, race, sexuality, and class came to inform how we understand feminism and its history to the present day. SPECIAL PROJECT SPRING 2024: This class will be working to write biographies of feminists from Minnesota for an exciting digital humanities project, Sharing Stories, centered on the historic 1977 National Women’s Conference.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this class, reproductive justice will become a critical framework for both political theory and political action. As a theoretical framework, reproductive justice is a way of thinking about freedom and the rights to maintain bodily autonomy, to have children, to not have children and to parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. Insofar as reproductive justice centers the politics of sex, we’ll begin this class thinking about sexual autonomy (including access to contraception, sex education, prevention and treatment for STIs, etc.). From there, we’ll move into U.S. histories of forced sterilization, the fight for access to safe and legal abortion and the risks of childbirth and infant mortality, especially for BIPOC people. These histories will bring us into an exploration of reproductive justice as a framework for political practice and as a social justice movement. It’s about the legal and political action that may limit or expand the scope of justice to include things that would make reproduction meaningfully free (e.g., access to health care and safe housing, a living wage, and decarceration). We’ll study these issues through legal cases, historical readings, political theory, ethics and personal narratives that put focus on reproductive justice in the U.S. This class requires your thoughtful participation both in writing and discussion.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Much about mainstream narratives of gender transgression are determined by powerful, cis-dominated institutions, still even to this day: the media, schools, police, the law, doctors and psychiatrists. These are institutions structured by a racialized, heteronormative gender binary, and for whom trans people pose a problem to be managed. Oral history offers the possibility for trans people to tell their own stories, and, in doing so, give more nuanced, complex analysis of identity, activism, and of the intersectional operations of systems of power. Oral history also makes room for the complex interplay of joy, playfulness, grief, anxiety, and connection that makes queer and trans life so valuable. In this project-based and community engaged course, students will have hands on experience working with an archive of queer and trans oral histories in the context of the pandemic and uprisings for racial justice. Working closely with our community partner, the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, we will learn about oral history methodology and interview techniques, and then have the opportunity to conduct oral history interviews, develop audio or video projects using extant oral histories, and contribute to an online archive of queer and trans oral history.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course explores how bodily practices of fasting and sexual abstinence have shaped Christian identities from the first century, C.E. to today. From Paul of Tarsus' instructions about sexual discipline to the True Love Waits® campaign, from the desert fathers' rigorous bodily regimens to the contemporary Christian diet movement, Christians have often understood the practice of renunciation as a necessary feature of spiritual perfection. In this course we will consider several ascetic movements in Christian history, including the development of ascetic practice in late antiquity, the rise of fasting practices among women in medieval Europe, and the culture of Christian dieting and chastity in the U.S. We will pay special attention to how Christian practices of piety both draw upon and contribute to cultural understandings of gender and the body.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course explores the history and politics of, and theoretical approaches to, gender and sexuality in relation to the racial politics of mass incarceration, or what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the "carceral geography" of the United States. By engaging recent work in queer and trans studies, feminist studies, and critical prison studies, we will consider how prisons and policing have shaped the making and remaking of race, gender, and sexuality from slavery and conquest to the contemporary period. We will examine how police and prisons have regulated the body, identity, and populations, and the larger social, political, and cultural changes connected to these processes. While we will focus on the carceral system itself, we will also think of policing in a more expansive way by analyzing the racialized regulation of gender and sexuality on the plantation, in the colony, at the border, in the welfare office, and in the hospital, among other spaces, historical periods, and places.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

What is "disability" and what does an understanding of disability tell us about human experience more generally? What is a "disability identity" and what implications might claiming that identity have for psychological well-being and social change? How do stereotypes of disabled people and expectations of "normality" affect everyone's lives (not just those with disabilities)? Why don't many Deaf people consider themselves "disabled?" What might we learn from shifting the "problem" of disability from the individual person to the social environment? How do sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression influence how different bodies are viewed, treated, educated, and experienced? This course will explore questions that emerge from thinking about the experience of disability (and its intersection with identities based on gender, race, class, and sexuality). Our work together will be grounded in critical disability and Deaf studies frameworks that are themselves informed by and in conversation with feminist, queer, and critical race theories and perspectives. Through a consideration of the socially, culturally, linguistically, and historically constructed meanings of physical, sensory, and cognitive "impairments," the course will rely on theoretical and empirical readings from psychology and related disciplines, personal essays, film/video, and guest visitors as we explore the social and psychological meanings of disability. Prerequisite(s): PSYC 100; and PSYC 201 or STAT 155

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Art reflects, refracts and helps construct a society’s culture. Thousands of pieces of sculpture survive from the ancient Roman period and can provide valuable information to the historian. Material from Rome includes looted Greek, Etruscan and Egyptian sculpture, copies of antique masterpieces, and new creations combining different styles for varied purposes. After we develop a basic history and understanding of Roman sculpture, this course will examine select pieces each week to explore questions that may be productively brought to bear on this unusual historical source. For example, the popularity and adaptations of masterpieces of Venus, Dionysus and Apollo will be used to explore the way artists shaped differences between male and female and the cultural assumptions about sexuality and the body these works communicate (Knidian Aphrodite, Praxitelean youths, Sleeping Hermaphrodite). In turn, we will investigate how these artistic conventions for gender could be employed to communicate the subjugation of enslaved or conquered people and the authority of the emperor (Antinoos Sculptures, Suicide Gauls, Dying Gaul, Marcus Aurelius reliefs, Portonaccio Sarcophagus). We will also look at self-representation, including how former slaves chose to present themselves in hyper-realistic portraits on their tombs; how this may have impacted Roman portraiture as a whole; and what it meant for some members of the elite to put such hyper-realistic portrait heads onto the bodies of gods and goddesses (Tomb of the Haterii, Tomb of Rabiria, Tivoli General, Flavian Matron as Venus). What can these varied representations of the human form tell us about the complex interplay of legal status, citizenship, gender, nudity, ethnicity, power, vulnerability and identity in the Roman Empire? The course will meet once a week during the day to allow for two field trips to see sculpture in the round. Responses to the weekly readings will be due every week. During the last third of the course, students will direct our classwork as they build toward a final project. No formal prerequisites, but some prior experience with ancient art, art history or Roman history is recommended.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course provides an introduction to the diversity of twentieth century visual culture of the United States, within the historical, social, and cultural contexts in which it is created. It will analyze the intersection and the social dynamics of race and ethnicity, along with gender and class, and how these shaped the experience of American artists and their audiences at various historical moments during the last century. Studying the work of Native American, African-American, Asian-American, and Latinx-American artists in response to the mainstream US art and culture, will provide students with broad and complex understanding of concepts of race, ethnicity, class, and gender as reflected in artistic production of this marginalized artists and art groups. Frequency: Offered in the fall every two years.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This experience brings you to the intersection of some paths you have taken in WGSS! The goals of the course are to work collectively in reviewing feminist, queer, and trans genealogies that you have been learning about in your WGSS career, to contextualize our places in relation to them, and to test past and present frameworks so we can imagine together how they may be part of our future experiences. Most importantly, this course will be an opportunity to connect theories to your own feminist/queer/trans practices towards positive social change, and look at ways to craft your post-graduation careers and professions.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Could it be possible that your own gender, race, class, and sexuality as well as your questions about them, are intimately related to global politics and culture? How does your life connect to those of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the Love Canal protesters, voting and reproductive rights activists, the Narmada Dam resisters, the Nike shoemakers, the diasporic Asian gay filmmaker, Hurricane Katrina activists, and male feminists? We will explore how different histories of women’s and gender studies intersect to expand this matrix of identities. We will debate and critique diverse identities—from Latina to Norse, from Black to Indigenous, from the First to the Fourth World. We will study how feminists and their allies have fought economic exploitation, challenged racial discrimination, protested gender oppression, redefined environmental and industrial relations, and gained strength from political and cultural coalitions. The goals of the course are to understand the fundamental concepts and theories in WGSS, to learn about the history of minority experiences around the world, and to relate the concepts and experiences to our own practices of positive social change, and greater justice and equity. This course invites you to analyze and situate your identities, your commitments, and your responsibilities in relation to the academic and other bodies of knowledge that form the foundation of a liberal arts education.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course investigates the ways in which gender identities and relationships between “men” and “women” have been articulated, constructed, and refashioned throughout the Muslim World. Starting with problematizing fixed notions of gender and sexuality, we map prominent attitudes through visiting a diverse array of sources from the Qur’an, Sunna, and legal documents to historical and anthropological case studies, literature, and film from across the region. Exploring notions of femininity and masculinity, as well as attitudes towards same-sex relations and transgendered populations, we witness their implications in case studies and stories, from a divorce court in Iran to a matriarchal utopia in India.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In less than ten years we have gone from Laverne Cox gracing the cover of Time Magazine, declaring that we have reached the “transgender tipping point,” to a broad based anti-trans culture war. From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, CeCe MacDonald to Chelsea Manning, Transparent to Pose, trans people have experienced unprecedented media coverage over the past ten years. And yet, alongside this positive media coverage, trans exclusion has emerged as a key component of the global rise of white nationalism, and we see legislatures across the country foment fear of the transsexual child predator, pass bills to restrict trans kid’s participation in sports, and limit gender affirming medical care for youth and adults. Even more concerning, The National Coalition of Antiviolence Projects reports that 2021 saw a record number of murders of transgender individuals, in particular trans women of color. In all of these instances, it’s useful to consider how and why the specter of transness is raised. What social and political work does that figure do? This course investigates the ways that ideas about normative and non-normative gender are produced in the context of white supremacy and capitalism, recognizing that discourses about gender, race, class, sexuality and nation are co-constitutive and historically contingent. Foregrounding intersectionality, we begin with situating the production and policing norms around gender and sexuality as a key tactic of settler colonialism, and then we move forward in time through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to think about how norms around racialized gender and sexuality have been policed, resisted, and transformed in various historical moments.This course will examine transness as practices of gender transgression, rather than solely an identity category, practices that are historically and geographically contingent. In doing so, we will ask: What has gender non-conformity meant in various historical moments? How do race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability structure trans lives and communities? How have key institutions within the US constructed ideas about gender normativity and policed gender transgression? How has that policing impacted and shaped trans life? What is the relationship between feminism and trans people and trans liberation? How have trans people envisioned and fought for social justice? What space can trans embodiment and politics open up for new ways of living, relating, and imagining otherwise?

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course introduces students to debates, methods, and conceptual frameworks in race and gender, as represented in performance. It engages students in an interdisciplinary exploration of key terms - such as corporeality, embodiment, intersectionality, and performativity - that remain central to the fields of gender and sexuality, critical race theory, and performance. Through drafts and revisions of written work, critical dialogues and oral presentations in small groups, peer feedback, and analytical reading, students will engage in questions around identity formation, structural inequality, and the politics of citizenship.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course we will examine the roles, identities, and representations of women in the Tanakh/ Old Testament, New Testament, and Jewish and Christian apocrypha.  We will explore how biblical writers used women "to think with," and we will consider how gender is co-constructed alongside religious, social, and sexual identities.  We will ask the following sorts of questions: What opportunities for social advancement and leadership were open to women in ancient Israelite, early Jewish, and early Christian communities, and how did these opportunities differ from those open to women in other religious formations in the ancient Mediterranean?  How did biblical regulations of bodies, sexuality, marriage, and family life shape women's lives? What are the social and material effects of biblical representations of women? And how might current feminist theories inform our interpretation of biblical texts about women?

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Since the 1960s historians have revisited early American history to identify populations on the margins and historical actors whose stories and experiences were neglected in the traditional canon of history. Historians of women made some of the first forays into this important work of recovery. Building up the foundations produced by women's historians, the field of gender and sexuality studies have flourished and enriched the narratives of American history. This course examines American peoples and cultures from the 16th through early 19th centuries to uncover the ways in which gender and sexuality shaped the formation of an early American society. Particular attention will be given to the way that ideologies of gender and sexuality shaped early concepts of race and the development of North American political institutions.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course examines traditions of 20th century African American women's activism and the ways in which they have changed over time. Too often, the narrative of the "strong black woman" infuses stories of African American women's resistance which, coupled with a culture of dissemblance, makes the inner workings of their lives difficult to imagine. This course, at its heart, seeks to uncover the motivations, both personal and political, behind African American women's activism. It also aims to address the ways in which African American women have responded to the pressing social, economic, and political needs of their diverse communities. The course also asks students to consider narrative, voice and audience in historical writing, paying particular attention to the ways in which black women's history has been written over the course of the twentieth century.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course brings together discourses that have remained somewhat parallel and unrelated--Whiteness Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Before and during the pandemic, these intertwine in similar but also radically different ways. The course is based on the premise that “Whiteness,” as an academic/social framework, stems from and is intertwined with social and political identity-based movements (feminist, critical race, indigenous, etc.). This course explores where and how the notion of 'whiteness' converges and diverges from post-colonialism. The goals are to learn how “Whiteness” is a category to define identity and to analyze experiences in literature and in our lives, to understand what “Post/Colonialism” is as a historical experience for so many of us and as a field of study, to intersect the two and interpret literature and culture, and to move towards decolonial knowledge and praxis by reflecting on the ways in which we are positioned at the intersection of these histories. Literature by James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Gordimer, Zadie Smith; music by Pete Seeger and Macklemore, critiques of White nationalisms, and films by Hector Babenco and James Cameron are included.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Understanding the conditions we live in through a greater awareness of systems and ideologies, both dominant and marginalized, could help us to place individuals’ and communities’ beliefs and actions in context, provide a deeper knowledge of how power works, and become aware of counterhegemonies. Antonio Gramsci, whom Mussolini incarcerated and who died in prison, offers us a modern theory of hegemony that not only addresses hierarchies but also analyzes how constructs become naturalized. Authors and creators include some among Gramsci, José Carlos Mariátegui, Walter Benjamin, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri Spivak, Paolo Freire, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Arundhati Roy, Chela Sandoval, Cathy Cohen, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Silvia Federici, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Trinh Minh-ha, and others. The materials for this course includes essays, poems, fiction, film, art, and music, and will focus on intersections of feminist, postmodern, socialist, indigenous, queer, critical race, critical Whiteness, and post/neocolonial, and neo/liberal frameworks.The space-time of one semester will be insufficient to conduct a deep and careful study of all this. This course is Part 1. Part 2 will be in Spring 2025, with authors not covered in Part 1. Being familiar with theory, being able to read slowly, being willing to discuss carefully, and being patient with building knowledge collectively are highly desirable prerequisites. The space-time of one semester will be insufficient to conduct a deep and careful study of all this. This course is Part 1. Part 2 will be in Spring 2025, with authors not covered in Part 1. Being familiar with theory, being able to read slowly, being willing to discuss carefully, and being patient with building knowledge collectively are highly desirable prerequisites. The space-time of one semester will be insufficient to conduct a deep and careful study of all this. This course is Part 1. Part 2 will be in Spring 2025, with authors not covered in Part 1. Being familiar with theory, being able to read slowly, being willing to discuss carefully, and being patient with building knowledge collectively are highly desirable prerequisites. The space-time of one semester will be insufficient to conduct a deep and careful study of all this. This course is Part 1. Part 2 will be in Spring 2025, with authors not covered in Part 1. Being familiar with theory, being able to read slowly, being willing to discuss carefully, and being patient with building knowledge collectively are highly desirable prerequisites. Students may take either or both.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Much about the mainstream narratives of queerness and gender transgression have been determined by powerful, cis-dominated institutions, still even to this day: the media, schools, police, the law, doctors and psychiatrists. These are institutions structured by a racialized, heteronormative gender binary, and for whom trans people pose a problem to be managed. Oral history offers the possibility for queer and trans people to tell their own stories, and, in doing so, give more nuanced, complex analysis of identity, activism, and of the intersectional operations of systems of power. Oral history also makes room for the complex interplay of joy, playfulness, grief, anxiety, and connection that makes queer and trans life so valuable. In this course, students will have hands-on experience building an archive of queer and trans oral histories in the context of the pandemic and uprisings for racial justice. In this community-engaged course we will work closely with the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota, learning about oral history methodology, interview techniques, and having the opportunity to conduct oral history interviews and contribute to an online archive of queer and trans oral history. In particular, this semester, students will have the opportunity to work on an ongoing collaborative research project entitled "The Long Fire at Lake and Minnehaha," which uses oral history and archival research to grapple with the layers of history at the Lake/Minnehaha intersection in South Minneapolis, from the legacies of colonialism, to the intersecting systems of racialized capitalism that unevenly expose some members of the community to homelessness, policing, and violence, to the narratives of racialized gender that animate these struggles over space.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Explorations of the relationship between women and violence typically take place from the perspective of women as victims. However, how does the discourse change when the traditional paradigm is inverted and we explore women as perpetrators of violence? This seminar examines representations of women who kill in Latin American and Latino narratives (including novels, short stories, films, and newspapers). Drawing on feminist theory, media studies, criminology, and literary criticism, we will seek to understand the ways women's violence has been read and framed in contemporary society as well as how their violence intersects with discussions of nationalism, race, class, and gender. This course satisfies the Area 2 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 307 or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course explores how philosophers, creative writers, artists, and filmmakers have taken everyday life as a point of departure for critical reflection and creative practice. Grounded in cultural studies and feminist approaches to knowledge production, we will examine the everyday as a lens into a wide range of topics, including power, the body, race, gender, sexuality, capitalism, and colonialism. While surveying a wide range of approaches, the course will focus on the emerging genre of Autotheory, which blends critical theory with autobiography and memoir, leading to new insights and modes of resistance. In doing so, we will derive inspiration from contemporary writers, filmmakers, and artists who break with traditional approaches to academic writing and research by using the everyday as raw material. Students will have the opportunity to carry out a creative research project in the form of a written essay, film, or other multimedia form.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials