Winter 2025 gender, sexuality and women's studies courses

October 29, 2024

The following courses are being offered for the winter 2025 semester.

GSW 2100: Introduction to Queer Studies

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary academic field of queer studies. The course begins with an overview of queer terminology and identities and includes units on queer history, queer theory, contemporary queer issues and queer art.

Offered: Offered every term
Credits: 3
Satisfies general education requirement: Diversity equity incl inquiry

GSW 2360: Feminist Philosophy

This course is an introduction to feminist philosophy. Feminist philosophy is not a type of philosophy, but rather a unified focus on issues that concern feminists. Feminist philosophers question the institutions and structures that regulate our lives. Students will explore a range of topics, such as the differences between gender and sex, the relationship between knowledge and social identity, gender oppression, race, sexuality and how other marginalized situations relate to feminist philosophy, feminist critiques and ethical issues (disability, reproductive rights, consent, pornography, sexual agency and silencing).

Equivalent: PHI 2360
Offered: Offered every year
Credits: 3
Satisfies general education requirements: Cultural inquiry, diversity equity incl inquiry

GSW 2500: Humanities Perspectives on Gender, Sexuality and Women

Focusing on literature, art and other media from different historical periods and geographical locations, students will examine strategies and artistic forms used to represent diverse lived experiences of gender and sexuality.

Offered: Offered every term
Credits: 3
Satisfies general education requirements: Cultural inquiry, diversity equity incl inquiry, philosophy letters

GSW 2530: Queer Literature: Writing about Literature

Queer Literature explores queer voices and perspectives in writing. We will consider the frameworks of queer history and queer theory in order to understand and discuss the queer meanings of literature and the culturally specific writing practices of queer authors. Topics will include queerness as ambient and repressed subtext within classic horror and sci-fi literature, historicized explorations of queer shame via memoir and imagined queer futures in YA literature and graphic novels.

Equivalent: ENG 2530
Offered: Offered every year
Credits: 3
Satisfies general education requirements: Diversity equity incl inquiry

GSW 2570: Women Writers: Writing about Literature

Introduction to major themes and issues of writing by and about women. Reading and writing about representative fictional and non-fictional works.

Equivalent: ENG 2570
Offered: Offered every term
Credits: 3
Satisfies general education requirements: Cultural inquiry, diversity equity incl inquiry

GSW 2600: History of Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Modern World

Drawing on different methods of historical analysis, students apply a comparative perspective to understanding the experiences of women and constructions of gender and sexual identity.

Equivalent: HIS 2605
Offered: Offered every term
Credits: 3
Satisfies general education requirements: Diversity equity incl inquiry, global learning inquiry

GSW 2650: Gender and Crime

Critical examination of gender-related issues in criminal justice; impact on defendants, inmates, victims and criminal justice personnel; relation to policy issues.

Equivalent: CRJ 2650
Offered: Offered every term
Credits: 3
Satisfies general education requirement: Diversity equity incl inquiry

GSW 2700: Social Science Perspectives on Gender, Sexuality and Women

Students will explore the ways political, social and cultural institutions shape gender, sexuality and women's experiences within a local and global context.

Offered: Offered every term
Credits: 3
Satisfies general education requirements: Diversity equity incl inquiry, Social Inquiry

GSW 2750: Diversity Issues in Criminal Justice

Critical examination of gender, race, class and ethnicity issues in criminal justice; impact on defendants, inmates, victims and criminal justice personnel; relation to policy issues. No credit after CRJ/GSW 3750.

Equivalent: CRJ 2750
Offered: Offered yearly
Credits: 3
Satisfies general education requirement: Diversity equity incl inquiry

GSW 3100: Womxn of Color: Social Activism and Power

This course will explore how Womxn of Color have impacted the trajectory of the social justice movement in the U.S. through scholarship and sisterhood, despite racism, sexism and classism. During this interdisciplinary study, learners will look at the history of Womxn of Color in the feminist movement and how it parallels the current movement. This course will answer the questions, “what has been done?” and “where do we go from here?”

Offered: Offered intermittently
Credits: 3

GSW 3200: Introduction to Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies

This course is an introduction to key themes and methodologies within the interdisciplinary and overlapping fields of feminism, gender studies and queer theory, with a focus on both foundational readings and contemporary experiences. The central theme of our course will be care. While we are all familiar with the expression “self-care,” in its most common meaning, self-care tends to be articulated as an individual, private, often consumer-based, pursuit of those privileged already with the means, time and ability to undertake it. But we know too that most of the dynamics that produce the need for self-care (often of a life-and-death nature) are not individual problems but structural and historical ones, dynamics that disproportionally affect women, people of color and LGBTQ+ folks, who are in turn most often called upon to care for others. Through our course work, we’ll evaluate the alternative modes of collective care explored in our readings, seeking to develop our own vision of care as a socially transformative intervention in the state of the world.

Offered: Offered every term
Credits: 3

GSW 3990: Directed Studies

Individually designed research projects, developed with a supervising professor and approved by the program director.

Offered: Offered every term
Credits: 1-3

GSW 5035: Horror and Otherness

Horror and Otherness explores cultural and historical traditions of enmeshing marginalized identities with screen images of the monster. We will consider scholarship that has seen horror media as reflective of social and political struggles pertaining to gender, sexuality, race, class and disability, such as Harry M. Benshoff’s "Monsters in the Closet," Robin R. Means Coleman’s "Horror Noire," Barbara Creed’s "The Monstrous Feminine" and Angela M. Smith’s "Hideous Progeny." Through readings and screenings, we will advance a collective understanding of horror as an art form in which marginalized communities have found meaningful embrace. This includes exploring questions of narrative allegory, spectatorship and evolving practices of self-authored community-based horror cinemas. Students will develop a clear understanding of how marginalized communities have historically seen and identified with horror and how these identifications yield cultural practices that reimagine horror as a queer, Black, feminist and disabled cinema.

Offered: Offered intermittently
Credits: 3

GSW 5110: Black Women in America

In this course, students investigate the social, cultural, artistic and economic development of Black women in America; topics may include: racism, sexism, marriage, motherhood, feminism and the welfare system

Equivalent: AFS 5110
Offered: Offered yearly
Credits: 3

GSW 5200: Feminisms, Queer Theories and Trans Studies

This course evaluates foundational texts within feminism, trans studies and queer theory, focusing on the overlapping and distinct facets of these critical frameworks, with emphasis on how they shape and are shaped by other modes of social difference, such as race, class, nationality, conceptions of the body, capitalism, imperialism and colonialism.

Prerequisites: GSW 3200 with a minimum grade of C
Restriction(s): Enrollment is limited to undergraduate-level students
Offered: Offered fall and winter
Credits: 3

GSW 5300: Topics in Visual Culture: Mediated Identities

The pervasive presence of images and a range of visual technologies in our everyday lives entail that ideas, knowledge and beliefs are increasingly being disseminated through the visual. Mixing “high” cultural forms such as fine art, design and architecture with popular or “low” cultural forms such as film, print images, television and digital multimedia, our everyday reality today is increasingly marked by cross-mediation: how do we negotiate the different codes required to see and make sense of what we are looking at? How do image and word interact in the immersive textual-visual systems we inhabit? What are the social and political implications and effects of the hybridization of visual cultural forms? And how do we acquire the level of visual literacy effectively to deal with and understand the operation of images?

This course focuses on questions and theories that are critical to Visual Culture, a field at the crossroads of various disciplines (including art history, cultural studies, film and media studies, anthropology, semiotics, communication), which turns the visual, vision and visuality as such into objects of study.
We will engage both the theory and practice of visual culture by looking at and discussing a great many visual artifacts, as well as study critical methodologies that emphasize the importance of cultural diversity in defining and understanding visual culture.

Equivalent: ENG 5095
Offered: Offered intermittently
Credits: 3

GSW 5400 (CRN 25631): Black Motherhood in Literature

This course takes up the question of representations of Black motherhood in African American writing from slavery through the present. How do Black writers use the figure of the Black mother to imagine possibilities for resistance, revolution and liberation of Black people? How might examining the reproductive lives and the social-reproductive labor of Black women help us theorize the ways family, kinship, care, gender and sexuality may at once be sites of resistance even as they are sites of oppression and violence? How does centering Black motherhood in our analyses help us theorize the political work of mothering Black children? Readings will include literary works from slavery through the present and scholarship that provides crucial socio-historical context and offers theoretical frameworks to guide and challenge our analyses.

Equivalent: ENG 7044
Offered: Offered intermittently
Credits: 3

GSW 5400 (CRN 25899): The Dark Sides of Social Media

In this seminar, we will discuss extant and emerging critical literature on problematic complex phenomena that have continually plagued social media and online spaces since the beginning of their existence. These phenomena have moved into the mainstream of public awareness and academic scholarship more intensely over the past five to ten years. Hate speech, abuse and harassment; privacy leaks and doxxing; digital stress, anxiety and addiction; digital labor and exploitation; epidemiology and environmental abuse; algorithmic biases and surveillance are some of the foci that have developed into subfields of study within communication and media studies.

Feminist and critical scholarship, drawing on disciplines such as gender and sexuality studies, race studies, psychology, computer science, political science, sociology, law and history, shows gendered dynamics and impacts on marginalized groups, such as LGBTQ+ folks, people of color, people, parents/mothers and Muslims among others. This seminar will encourage students to read widely and deeply on these and related issues that impact humans and the environment when they engage in the production, distribution, use and disposal of social media, digital devices and the online spaces they construct. Further, this seminar will guide participants to analyze the gendered, raced, aged and other identity-related structures that power the global digital economy and its network of social media and online spaces bringing an asymmetrical distribution of obstacles, pain and suffering and offsetting some of the assumed benefits and pleasures of social media and digital technologies.

Equivalent: COM 7010/5190
Offered: Offered intermittently
Credits: 3

GSW 5400 (CRN 25897): Topics in Global Literatures: Empire and Gender in Global Literature

This course will explore the formative role of empire and anti-imperial movements in global literature, especially as they have intersected with gender. Our task is not so much to define, or even to survey, empire and gender’s literary significance, for circumstances differ vastly among geographic and cultural sites (think, for starters, of the disparate histories of Australia, India, Ireland, South Africa and Sudan, all of which were part of the British empire). Rather, our approach will be episodic, consisting of a series of loosely connected themes and issues and it will consist of more questions than answers. What are the connections between ideas of the nation and narrative? How has literature been both complicit in the imperial project and a form of anti-colonial resistance? How are purportedly private identities (such as of gender, class and sexual orientation) and intimate relationships between people (as parents and children, as siblings, as friends, as lovers) entangled in national identities and international relations? How, above all, has gender been central to the operations of empire and to anti-imperial movements? We will read a diverse selection of novels from the colonial, postcolonial and contemporary eras by such authors as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aravind Adiga, Mulk Raj Anand, J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Arundhati Roy and Tayeb Salih.

This course has a hybrid format that provides the face-to-face meeting, collaborative learning and engagement with peers of the traditional classroom combined with the convenience of remote learning. It will meet in-person about one day a month (dates to be announced prior to the start of the semester). On all other class days, we will meet synchronously on Zoom using our cameras, speakers and microphones to facilitate class and small group discussion.

Equivalent: ENG 5595
Offered: Offered intermittently
Credits: 3

GSW 5500: Internship in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies

Internship in a public or private organization related to gender, sexuality, or women's studies.

Restriction(s): Enrollment is limited to undergraduate-level students
Offered: Offered every term
Credits: 4

GSW 5990: Senior Project Seminar

Scholarly research project or internship combined with scholarship, resulting in a substantial paper. Students meet with the instructor several times during the semester.

Prerequisite: GSW 5200
Offered: Offered yearly
Credits: 4

GSW 7200: Feminisms, Queer Theories and Trans Studies

Restriction(s): Enrollment is limited to graduate-level students
Offered: Offered fall and winter
Credits: 3

Featured program(s)

Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies (BA)

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