Class Schedules

This course is an introduction to the range and importance of 20th century as well as current feminist and queer theories and practices to our understanding of positive social change. It will analyze feminist and queer histories of resistance and alternatives to economic and political control, in the U.S. and elsewhere. The framework for the course is the intersection of gender and sexuality with race, class, nationality, and dis/ability; it will address such issues as economic marginalization, social movements, the institutions of family and marriage, migration and the role of the state/nation among others. Depending on the instructor, the course generally focuses on either LGBTQI studies or on transnational perspectives of these issues.

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

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course examines the history of childhood and youth in the United States. The historical voices and perspectives of childhood that we study will pay close attention to the significance of race, ethnicity, class,\\ gender, sexuality, time periods, and social settings. Some questions we will consider relevant to the study of history: Do children have agency? What is the role of children as subjects in history? How has childhood been socially and historically constructed? Why are children such galvanizing social and political symbols? How is identity shaped in childhood and what impact does this have on adult society at certain historical moments?

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course examines the ways in which gender and sexuality are understood in modern visual culture. It also covers a wide range of feminist approaches in the 20th and 21st century art and as they have been articulated in theory. Students explore social constructions of gender and sexualities, their visible and invisible representation, and discuss the impact of feminism and the changing role of women in society. The course will also cover some of the most recent global feminist trends and new directions in the feminist theory. Feminist work from Africa, India, Asia and Eastern and Central Europe and various marginalized cultural centers in Western Europe and the United States will be addressed.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course examines the ways in which gender and sexuality are understood in modern visual culture. It also covers a wide range of feminist approaches in the 20th and 21st century art and as they have been articulated in theory. Students explore social constructions of gender and sexualities, their visible and invisible representation, and discuss the impact of feminism and the changing role of women in society. The course will also cover some of the most recent global feminist trends and new directions in the feminist theory. Feminist work from Africa, India, Asia and Eastern and Central Europe and various marginalized cultural centers in Western Europe and the United States will be addressed.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This class is an introduction to feminist psychological theory and research dedicated to understanding and critiquing biological, psychological, social, and cultural meanings and implications of gender and its intersections with class, race, physical ability, sexual orientation, etc. Examples of research and theory will come from a wide variety of areas in psychology and related disciplines, and will address such issues as socialization and social development, stereotypes, bodies and body image, social relationships, identity, language, violence, sexuality and sexual behavior, well-being, work, etc. We will also learn about the historical, cultural, and epistemological underpinnings of psychological research on gender. Counts as a UP3 course. Prerequisite(s): PSYC 100 or permission of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

What is “health” in both a globalized world and a world shaped by legacies of colonialism, transatlantic enslavement, climate change, and forced migration? Is “healthy” a politically neutral and universally accessible classification? How do we understand disability - chronic or short term - as not just a biological experience, but a social one shaped by gender, sexuality, race, and empire? In this interdisciplinary class we will look at case studies to try to answer these questions. Some case studies include, but are not limited to, public health and labor migration between the US/Mexico border, medical racism and biological warfare, US imperialism in the Pacific Islands, the War on Gaza, detentions and quarantine in Guantanamo Bay, and South African apartheid. Through these examples, we will discuss the ways that health, medicine, and disability become used to uphold US/European power and white supremacy, and become the gauge for deciding who is worth the classification of “human” and who is deemed not worthy of life.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this seminar, we will consider how epistemicide and its originary instantiation in formalized educational institutions and academic disciplines both contained the core of empire’s brutal logics and the kernel of empire’s impending collapse. Studying across intellectual traditions and genres, we will develop vigorous dialectic inquiry into this extraordinary contradiction. And we will study some of the vital educational traditions that precede empire, that have continued uninterrupted, and that exceed dialectic relations to modernity through resurgence, the fantastic, and more.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will read some of the best novels of the twentieth century—classics of queer literature. We will study how queer writers navigated censorship and discrimination and created radical visions of love, hope, and joy. E.M. Forster wrote a novel about queer love to be published only after his death; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a trans character who lives for hundreds of years; and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room takes us to a Parisian gay bar. These queer masterpieces (among others!) paved the way for a dynamic canon of queer literature and theory, and our class will seek to understand the enduring impact of these texts. Students will read deeply and undertake a semester-long zine project.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Endarkened Feminist Epistemology (EFE) is an approach to research that honors the wisdom, memory, spirituality, and critical interventions of transnational Black women’s ways of knowing (Dillard, 2016). A framework created by scholar Dr. Cynthia Dillard, it articulates how reality is known from the vantage point of transnational Black women - transnational recognizing the connections between African descended women throughout the diaspora as well as the continent. Through reflecting on course readings, writing, and sacred practice, this class will explore EFE’s claims and methodologies, as well as center other transnational Black women whose work helps us make connections between history, spirituality, and our collective positionality within academia.

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

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course offers an intersectional analysis of LGBTQ+ policy in the United States. We will explore key achievements such as federal marriage equality, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and expanded anti-discrimination protections, while critically examining their impacts on historically marginalized groups—including queer people of color, transgender, gender nonconforming, disabled, and low-income individuals. Additionally, the course acknowledges the recent major setbacks in LGBTQ+ rights policy, drawing on readings from queer liberation scholars and political scientists to evaluate current gains and challenges, and to envision what full equality might look like for LGBTQ+ people.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In this course, students will explore how stories of past and present Christians and the theologies they produced contribute to the histories of gender and sexuality, particularly in the United States. We will pay special attention to the development of and intersections among queer theory, queer and trans activism, queer biblical interpretation, and queer theology in the U.S. from the late twentieth century on. Students will learn how the development of queer biblical interpretation and theology grew out of the intellectual and activist work of feminist, womanist, and mujerista scholars, theologians, ethicists, and pastors. In readings, class discussion, online forums, and written and creative work, students will be invited to explore the social construction of gendered identities and sexualities over time, from antiquity to the postmodern, and the intersections of these identities with religion, race, ethnicity, class, and dis/ability. Although the majority of the class will be devoted to historical scholarship and theological writing that insists on the inclusion of diverse sexualities and genders in the Christian past, present, and future, we will also examine the role that some forms of American Christianity play in the exclusion of LGBTQ+ people, the enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality, the “naturalization” of a gender binary, and the reification of patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and transphobic cultures.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

When it comes to gender and English, people often think about third-person pronouns (they, she, he, ze, etc.), what others call you. In contrast, Japanese language speakers choose from a variety of first-person pronouns, what you call yourself. Some follow societal norms while others subvert them. This course examines how individuals and media creators make such linguistic choices (not just pronouns, but other expressions as well), and how these choices are fluid and based on such diverse factors as age, region, trend, rhetoric, and ideology. A very basic knowledge of Japanese is required, but all readings will be in English. Prerequisite: JAPA102 or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Are we living in revolutionary times?  How do we know? This course takes a journey through the last 50 years of some large upheavals across the world-in language, politics, economics, culture, and media-to find some answers of how we are similar and different.  It uncovers how and why the struggles, in theories and practices, for power and representation have created the conditions in which we exist today. We travel through all kinds of 'post' and 'neo'-liberalism, humanism, feminism, nationalism, and colonialism-and how they intertwine in our own lived experiences.  Some topics: protest against gender, sexual, race, economic, and linguistic bio-regimes, revolts of the colonized and marginalized, and resistant/ liberatory creations in art, technology, and media. Authors include Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Michel Foucault, Theresa Cha, Silvia Federici, Noam Chomsky, Ta-Nehisi Coates, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, and Gayatri Spivak, among others.  At the end of the course, we will all know a little more about where we stand. People from all disciplines welcome. Prerequisite(s): Sophomore or junior standing or permission of instructor, and at least one course in the department (core course recommended, cross-listed accepted).

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

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS). This resolution acknowledged the inordinate impact of armed conflict on women and girls, as well as the crucial role that women can and do already play in conflict prevention, conflict resolution, peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts. It urged states and other actors to increase the participation of women - and to incorporate gender perspectives - in all peace and security efforts. Since 2000, there have been nine additional resolutions that together have created the Women, Peace and Security agenda, a global framework for advancing gender equity in all areas of international peace and security. This course will explore feminist scholarship on armed conflict, peace and security leading up to the adoption of UNSCR 1325, as well as the 20 years of research, policy and practice on Women, Peace and Security. We will focus on the contributions and limitations of the WPS agenda as well as on new themes and issues that have emerged over time. This fall, which marks the 25th anniversary of Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, students in the course will have the opportunity to travel to New York City for three days of meetings at the United Nations focused on the development and implementation of the WPS agenda. Travel details, including cost, are currently being worked out but will be available to students before the start of the course.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course provides an interdisciplinary mechanism for exploring Indigenous feminisms and queer Indigenous studies. We will explore Indigenous histories through women’s, feminist, two-spirit, and queer writings that raise critical questions about normative gender and sexuality, nationhood, colonization, and decolonization. We will also explore the following topics: the relationship between mainstream feminism and Indigenous feminism; gender and sexual violence; settler colonialism and decolonization; law and restorative justice; sexuality; two-spirit, queer, and gender non-conforming subjectivities and politics; sexual and reproductive health; activism; the environment, embodiment, and materialisms; culture and tradition; erotics; biopolitics; Indigenous epistemologies; and sovereignty and governance.

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

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This is an advanced psychology course on the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexually and gender diverse (LGBTQ+) people. The course is designed to engage students in a critical examination of health and healthcare disparities among LGBTQ+ populations, and evidence-based health models that explain the root causes and drivers of disparities. Students will also learn about and gain experience in behavioral interventions: how these are researched, developed, and implemented to target disparities, and promote the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ populations. Class time will consist of didactic instruction, large and small group discussions, application activities, and student presentations.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course examines visual methods, particularly those employed by Black women artists and thinkers work in visual practices as forms of resistance, survival, and world-building. Through critical engagement with photography, film, installation art, and experimental media, we explore how Black feminist visual strategies challenge dominant regimes of representation while imagining otherwise possibilities. The course traces visual genealogies that refuse the violence of hypervisibility while simultaneously confronting erasure, navigating what Saidiya Hartman calls "the visual field of black captivity and its afterlife." Students will analyze works by artists who transform the very grammar of visuality, developing critical frameworks to understand how Black feminist aesthetics rework time, space, and embodiment. Through both analytical and creative projects, we will consider how these visual practices serve as methods of theorizing that expand beyond conventional academic boundaries, offering provocations for imagining and enacting more liberatory futures.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Reading Plays guides students in close readings of dramatic literature, in particular of plays that are typically left out of the traditional theatrical canon. This edition of Reading Plays will focus on texts and performances considered “queer” with an emphasis on plays and performances created post-Stonewall and their relationship to queer history. Students will attempt to define several terms as a class and for themselves, in particular the terms “queer,” “queer theater,” and “queer performance.” We will complicate these definitions by posing questions such as, what does queer embodiment illuminate about these plays and performances? What happens if these plays are performed without queer people? For straight audiences? Students will learn about the socio-historical context of each play, and in-class exercises will introduce them to the foundation of script analysis: they will examine the play’s given circumstances, dialogue, dramatic action, characters, and style. While we will be studying theater scripts, you do not need to be a theater expert to enjoy this class. Students will read on average one play per week.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This introductory English course covers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and Two Spirit literature in America—with a focus on resistance and resilience. We will examine how American culture and politics have shaped and been shaped by LGBTQ2S+ writing and art. We’ll appreciate intersections of race, ethnicity, and class in historical and current work. And we’ll explore what it means to queer a text, a life and a culture. Requirements include written responses to reading, a creative project, a 5-7 page essay, and an optional escape room scenario. Authors we’ll read include: Jewelle Gomez, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Qwo-Li Driskill, Gloria Anzaldúa, Allison Bechdel, Kai Cheng Thom, Tommy Pico, Mariko Tamaki, and Junauda Petrus.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is a historical survey of theories and methodologies used in feminist and queer studies. Course material highlights the unique and intertwined knowledges feminist and queer scholars have produced; these include the re-makings of liberal, Marxian, antiracist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, and their uses in humanities and social science methods. The course centrally examines how feminist and queer studies transform societies and are transformed through struggle over their gender/sexual identities, racial formations, and global/transnational locations. The course considers how feminist and queer studies have arisen in close relationships-of union, tension, and antagonism-and how feminist and queer work today may link. Prerequisite(s): 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:

Distribution Requirements:

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

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 U.S Public Health Service syphilis experiment in Tuskegee), 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. Can count towards "Gender," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Law and Social Justice," or "North America" fields​.

General Education Requirements:

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:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

When you think of ‘nature,’ what comes to mind? Do gender and sexuality come to mind? How about racial capitalism, settler colonialism, or heteropatriarchy? In this course, we will examine how systems of power shape our concepts and relationships with nature, paying particular attention to the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. We will place feminist and queer ecologies in dialogue to destabilize assumptions about nature and science that reinforce ideas of what is “natural” and “normal.” Feminist and queer ecologies critique the ways in which heterosexuality, monogamy, and gender binaries render “nature” as orderly and pure, in need of protection from populations or relationships deemed deviant or dangerous. Instead, feminist and queer ecologies invite us to reimagine how our relationships with nature are rooted in intimacy, multiplicity, and interdependence. Special emphasis will be placed on critiquing the colonial unconscious of feminist and queer ecologies that tends to erase longstanding Indigenous practices of other-than-human relationality and kinship. Topics we will explore include environmental justice, queer theory, environmental racism, ecofeminism, science and technology studies, urban studies, rural studies, new materialism, political ecology, queer Indigenous feminisms, relationality and kinship, reproductive justice, climate justice, feminist and queer futurities, animal studies, and posthumanism.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Word for word, Emily Dickinson is one of the most powerful writers in the history of the English language. She is the King of All Media—appearing everywhere from novels and video games to prestige TV and pop culture myth. Barring Shakespeare, no other English or American poet has inspired such fervent and lasting devotion. In contemporary music, Taylor Swift is an equally unparalleled force—a songwriter whose work inspires a level of obsession, interpretation, and emotional investment rivaling Dickinson’s. Known for her fascination with Dickinson, Swift is also— in one of literary history’s most delightful surprises—her distant cousin. What’s behind the cults of Dickinson and Swift? In this class, you’ll find out. We’ll study their poems and songs—works that are aesthetically joyful and existentially wrenching. And we’ll study their legacies: how both have been mythologized, idolized, and contested, used to embody conflicting fantasies of gender, genius, privacy, power, and pain. To study Dickinson and Swift side by side is to trace some of the most revealing—and unresolved—ideological struggles in modern American life. Students will have the opportunity to write creative nonfiction, poetry, and songs. The course fulfills the 19th-century American literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we examine the social construction of the gender binary and its weaponization. How has bodily autonomy been constrained because of gendered hierarchy, and how has that oppression been resisted? Cases we will consider will include access to abortion and hysterectomy as well as the politics of feeding infants. We will think through play and deep care as means of providing belonging in a world structured by gendered hierarchy, as well as how these practices have challenged and provided alternatives to gender injustices in the family, intimate relationships, and medicine.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

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

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

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; PSYC 201 or STAT 155; and one intermediate psychology course.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In this seminar, we will study across genres and knowledge traditions to consider gender in and through captivity stories. Specifically, we will study in response to ongoing anti-colonial calls to exceed frameworks of: Indigeneity as reducible to subject of settler colonial studies (J. Kēhaulani Kauanui); carcerality as coterminous with prison (Ruth Wilson Gilmore); and resistance as featured solely by oppositional entanglement with empire (Cedric Robinson). How might we learn through capacious global Indigenous analytics, carcerality as a vast societal and ideological organizing colonial force, and refusal, resurgence, and self-determination as abundant epistemic and ontologic praxes beyond and outside the narrow dichotomies of empire? How does a global attention to captivity guide a political, intellectual struggle over and through colonial gender and gendering?

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Through Orientalist and Colonial "Feminist" lenses Arab and Middle Eastern women have been pigeonholed into a multitude of binaries: invisible/hyper visible, silent/silenced, submissive/unruly, oppressed victim/violent terrorist, etc. By de-centering European and U.S. dominated discourse, we will examine feminist movements in both Arab countries and their diasporas. From fights for women’s education in 1920’s Egypt to the Arab Springs in 2011, indigenous feminist movements like the 2019 "No Free Homeland Without Free Women" work of Tal’at in Palestine and Iran’s Jin, Jîyan, Azadî (Women, Life, Freedom) movement in 2022, to the work of the Palestinian Feminist Collective against colonial feminism in the wake of October 7th, we will construct a living timeline of women’s movements against intra-cultural patriarchy, liberal/Western feminisms, and colonialism/imperialism from the 20th century up through todays political world. Through this course, students develop anti-colonial language and gain historical context required to challenge ongoing erasure of the roles of Arab/Middle Eastern women in liberation movements.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

The relationship between academic theorizing and community organizing for positive social and political change is a vital, complex, and an ever-changing source of feminist inquiry. This course builds on that relationship by juxtaposing activist social work with theoretical writings on globalization, gender, race, class-relations, sexuality, community, democracy, and civil society, and exploring how these arenas inform and transform each other. The issues in this seminar are related ultimately to the student's "location," personally and professionally, at the threshold of the future, in search of a space of her/his own. One substantial research paper and a formal oral presentation on its ideas are the primary assignments. Prerequisite(s): At least three WGSS core courses and senior standing, or permission of instructor.  Preferred: a working relationship with a local women's or minority organization, established the spring or summer prior to enrollment in the course.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials