This course is designed to provide students with a solid understanding of the mechanisms by which international norms of gender equality and women’s rights develop and are implemented, with a special emphasis on discourses and practices of international human rights. The course analyzes international treaties such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and addresses issues regarding domestic violence, political participation, reproductive rights, economic opportunities, and modern slavery, among other gendered problems. Bridging gender and global politics, we explore the ways international norms are transported from the United Nations to the daily reality of women throughout the world, and how states, civil society and institutions collaborate (or not) to promote women’s rights where they are most needed.
Fall semester. Visiting Professor Picq.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course explores gender and ethnicity in Latin America, focusing on the tension between universal rights and cultural rights. The first part maps the daily lives of indigenous women across the region, looking at indigenous women in Central America (Mexico and Guatemala), the Andes (Ecuador, Chile, and Bolivia) and the Amazon (Shuar, Huaorani). We look at socio-economic indicators, gender-based violence, and political participation, while taking into consideration history and culture. In the second part of the course, we examine the ways social and political movements (e.g., agrarian reform, democratic, and environmental movements, the New Left), and, most recently, discourses of indigenous rights (e.g., Ecuador’s Pachakutik) have affected them and their communities over time. Through various case studies, such as that of Rigoberta Menchú in Guatemala, we analyze women’s capacity to maneuver politics of identity to advance their rights as women and as Indians. The third part pays special attention to the issue of minorities within minorities and the debate between universalism and cultural relativism. This section explores issues such as indigenous justice and the discrepancies between international norms of gender and the inequalities prevailing in indigenous practice. Through the lenses of gender, this course offers a window on the complexity of Latin America.
Fall semester. Visiting Professor Picq.
2023-24: Not offeredLatin America has the greatest extremes of wealth of any region in the world, and gender is one of the most important factors leading to this inequality. The study of gender therefore offers a valuable window into the socio-economic structures and political systems of the region. Bringing together the disciplines of comparative politics, political economy, and gender, this course proposes to analyze the gender implications of economic and political reforms at large in Latin America, from the military dictatorships of the 1970s through the democratization of the 1980s, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, and the New Left. We will also explore the history and geography of women's rights in terms of political participation, agrarian reform, informal economics, reproductive rights, welfare policies, migration, and human trafficking. Beyond women's rights, the class offers a larger analysis of social movements and the politics of contestation in Latin America, the movements’ interactions with state actors and the impact of changing markets on women's empowerment.
Spring semester. Visiting Professor Picq.
2023-24: Not offeredThis interdisciplinary course lies at the intersection of gender and environmental studies. Exploring different regions of the world from Latin America to South East Asia, we will study the impact of environmental degradation on women's security, dealing with such themes as access to water, resource governance, and how access to resources such as firewood, food, and property affect education and health. The course also explores political ecology and diverging discourses on conservation and resource management by analyzing the engendering of international norms and practices in the U.N. system and beyond. Lastly, the course looks at the securitization of gender in global politics, pointing to the central role of women's agency in promoting environmental security and peace-making.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Picq.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course introduces students to the issues involved in the social and historical construction of gender and gender roles from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective. Topics change from year-to-year and have included women and social change; male and female sexualities including homosexualities; the uses and limits of biology in explaining human gender differences; women’s participation in production and reproduction; the relationship among gender, race and class as intertwining oppressions; women, men and globalization; and gender and warfare.
Fall semester. Professors Bumiller and Saxton.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course we will explore the intimate relations of gender and labor: both the necessary labor of genders’ production as well as the gendered organization of labor itself. In general the course will use gender to focus on contemporary concerns in the American workplace--class, ethnicity, sexuality, and race--but will also make critical comparisons with developments in other nations. The biological labor of reproduction and its intersection with the labor of production will necessarily be a constant concern in our discussions. We shall have to become familiar with certain terms: glass ceiling, glass escalator, mommy-track, affirmative action, child care, sexual harassment, welfare to workfare. We certainly might want to ask what constitutes work? But we also might need to wonder if work is done for love, is it still work?
Spring semester. Professors Barale and Olver.
2023-24: Not offeredHistorically the law has functioned as much to differentiate women from men as to assert their similarities. This course will explore the variety of types of laws (natural law, religious law, statute law, customary law, and the like) that have been used to regulate women’s lives and try to assess the philosophies that lie behind them. Family law, especially where it pertains to marriage, divorce, married women’s property, domestic assault, custody, and so forth, will receive special attention through a comparison of Western European and American legal traditions with Muslim shari’a law, both in the past and the present. The course will look closely at the law and law enforcement as they pertain to female sexuality, and assess issues to do with women criminals as well as women as victims of specific types of criminal acts such as rape. It will examine what happens to women when (a) legal structures break down, as in war, and (b) when “the law” becomes a tool of racial, ethnic, religious, sexual or gender repression. Finally, it will address the extent to which “changing the law” succeeds as a strategy for empowering women by looking at several key legal campaigns involving women in both Western and non-Western settings.
Sources will include religious writing (such as the Book of Leviticus from the Bible and the second and fourth surahs of the Qur’an), transcripts of court cases from a variety of times and places, historical writings on adultery and prostitution, biographical accounts of female criminals, and contemporary discussions in various media pertaining to the human rights of women and sexual minorities. Two class meetings per week.
Spring semester. Professor Hunt.
2023-24: Not offeredWe consider how evolving sexual identities (homosexual/LGBT/queer) have used foundational texts (or “classics”) to create a shared history without getting trapped in it. We look at these emerging identities in the context of more visible racial and ethnic communities, and read theory by Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, and others. Some questions: How are queer kids parented by texts and, since great books tend to be tragic books, do we get more pride than pain from the experience? What do we gain and lose by recruiting earlier authors into identities that they would not have recognized or admitted? Are such canons a relic of the closet or do they still matter amid mainstreaming and the Internet? Authors and directors include: Sappho, Sophocles, Plato, Petronius, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Yukio Mishima, Manuel Puig, and Marlon Riggs.
Spring semester. Professor Griffiths.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as WAGS 32 and Political Science 24 [CP, GP].) This course is intended to give students a sense of the challenges and satisfactions involved in the practice of human rights work as well as a critical sense of how the discourses calling it forth developed and continue to evolve. We intend to provide specific historical and cultural context to selected areas in which human rights abuses of women and men have occurred, and to explore how differing traditions facilitate and inhibit activism within these areas. The semester will begin by exploring the historical growth of human rights discourse in Europe and the United States, culminating in the emergence of the post-World War II Universal Declaration. We will then turn to the proliferation of these discourses since the 1970s, including the growing importance of non-governmental organizations, many of them internationally based, the use of human rights discourse by a wide range of groups, and expanding meanings of human rights including new conceptions of women’s human rights. The third part of the course will explore criticisms of human rights discourses, particularly the charge that for all their claims to universalism, these discourses reflect the values of European Enlightenment traditions which are inimical to conceptions of rights and justice that are grounded in culture and religion. Throughout the course, rights’ workers will discuss their own experiences, abroad and in the U.S., and reflect on the relationship between their work and formal human rights discourse.
Spring semester. Professors Basu and Saxton.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as WAGS 44 and Political Science 63.) Globally as well as locally, women are claiming a new voice in civil society by spearheading both egalitarian movements for social change and reactionary movements which would restore them to putatively traditional roles. They are prominent in local level community-based struggles but also in women’s movements, perhaps the most international movements in the world today. This course will explore the varied expressions of women’s activism at the grass roots, national and transnational levels. How is it influenced by the intervention of the state and international agencies? How is it affected by globalization? Among the issues and movements which we will address are struggles to redefine women’s rights as human rights, women’s activism in religious nationalism, the international gay-lesbian movement, welfare rights activism, responses to state regulation, and campaigns around domestic violence. Our understanding of women’s activism is informed by a richly comparative perspective and attention to cases from diverse regions of the world.
Omitted 2009-10. Professor Basu.
2023-24: Not offeredOpen to senior majors in Women’s and Gender Studies who have received departmental approval.
Spring semester.
2023-24: Not offeredIndependent Reading Courses.
Spring semester.
2023-24: Not offered