This 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. Professor Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as WAGS 104 and ENGL 104.) In this course we will examine a broad variety of texts – novels and short fiction, academic essays and first person narratives – in order to critically analyze their points of view, arguments, opinions, biases, and omissions. Readings this semester will cluster around the topic of education in its broadest sense: as acts of discovery, moments of insight, and as ways of learning what a culture deems important. Authors will include Dorothy Canfield, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Johnson, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. This is a writing intensive course with weekly assignments.
Limited to 12 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Barale.
We will examine some of the most challenging issues about women and gender in our contemporary postmodern world, through the lens of popular culture. We will investigate representations of women in popular and material culture in the U.S. through music, television, blogs, fiction, and advertisements. As we interrogate some of the major theories in cultural criticism, we will use our own expertise as consumers of popular culture as an entryway for exploring the diverse roles mass-mediated popular culture plays in our lives. Several questions shape the syllabus and provide a framework for approaching the course materials: How do familiar aspects of popular culture reveal broader cultural concerns about women and gender? In what ways does popular culture blur the boundaries between the highbrow and the lowbrow? What kinds of fears or anxieties about women and gender does popular culture elicit and how do we negotiate those anxieties? Expectations include diligent reading, active participation, one presentation, two exams, and two writing projects.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Visiting Professor Henderson.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course we will investigate contemporary feminist thought from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. We will focus on key issues in feminist theory, such as the sex/gender debate, sexual desire and the body, the political economy of gender, the creation of the "queer" as subject, and the construction of masculinity, among others. This course aims also to think through the ways in which these concerns intersect with issues of race, class, the environment and the nation. Texts include feminist philosopher Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran's Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, and feminist economist Bina Agarwal's The Structure of Patriarchy.
Spring semester. Professor Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course introduces the burgeoning field of feminist science and technology studies. How should we theorize the relationship between race, gender, sexuality and the sciences? How has science grown to be the center of our cultural visions and imaginations and what does that mean for our futures? Drawing on the literature of the history, sociology and philosophy of science the course first examines some of the foundational theories pertaining to feminism, gender and science. Then, using examples from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it looks at the way science and technology are embedded within a social and historical context. Finally, the course examines a series of modern debates and case studies relating to claims about biological differences of gender, race and sexuality, genetic technologies, reproductive biology and technologies, eugenics, environmental feminism, alternate energy, climate change, and women’s health. Students will have flexibility in picking case studies that interest them. This is a discussion course and students are expected to participate. One class meeting per week.
Spring semester. Visiting Professor Subramaniam.
2023-24: Not offeredWhether by categorising and experimenting on bodies, criminalising and incarcerating them or exoticising and desiring them, European imperial power operated through the body. This course looks at how Western European empires constructed and governed colonised bodies both "at home" and in the colonies. The course charts the ways in which ideas of masculinity, femininity and able-bodiedness changed as a result of colonial encounter. It looks at a number of case studies, including the history of an enslaved South African woman, Sarah Baartman, who in life and death was displayed in Britain and France as the "Hottentot Venus." The course explores and discusses controversial questions in historical perspective, for example the practice of female circumcision (also referred to as female genital mutilation) during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. Using queer, post-colonial and feminist theory, this class explores how changing constructions of race, class, disability and gender were used as a tool of imperial governance. Two class meetings per week.
Fall semester. Visiting Professor Gust.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as WAGS 207 and POSC 207 [SC - starting with the Class of 2015].) This course will study South Asian women and gender through key texts in film, literature, history and politics. How did colonialism and nationalism challenge the distinctions between the “home” and the “world” and bring about partitions which splintered once shared cultural practices? What consequences did this have for postcolonial politics? How do ethnic conflicts, religious nationalisms and state repression challenge conceptions of “home”? How have migrations, globalization and diasporas complicated relations between the home and the world? Texts will include Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, Ram Gopal Varma’s epic film Sarkar and Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments.
Spring semester.. Professors Basu and Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offeredThis seminar will explore the influence of gender studies and of feminism on our research questions, methods and the way we situate ourselves in relationship to our scholarship. For example, how can we employ ethnography, textual analysis, empirical data and archival sources in studying the complex ties between the local and the global, and the national and the transnational? Which ideas and methods are best suited to analyzing the varied forms of women’s resistance across ideological, class, racial and national differences? Our major goal will be to foster students' critical skills as inter-disciplinary, cross cultural writers and researchers. This course counts as a proseminar designed for juniors and seniors in WAGS.
Requisite: WAGS 100 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 20 students. Not open to first-year students. Spring semester. Professor Hunt.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course will critically examine multiple works by three writers: Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and Carson McCullers. As American regional writers--Jewett, Maine; Cather, the West; McCullers, the South--all three concern themselves with insiders and outsiders, with foreigners, neighbors, strangers, and natives. When these deeply national, and often highly racial or ethnic, distinctions begin to also make sense as sexual and gender categories, the textual layering of the narratives becomes perplexing. This course will require three short papers and one lengthy one.
Requisite: One WAGS and/or English course. Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Barale.
2023-24: Not offeredThe publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981 produced a radical change in the way that gender and genre were tackled in the South Asian novel. Writers in the post-Rushdie era experimented with genres such as magical realism, the postcolonial science fiction thriller and the postmodern spy novel to re-imagine the nation’s construction of gendered subjects. This course looks at the intersection of gender and genre in the work of Rushdie himself, namely his Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh among others, as well as Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Calcutta Chromosome, and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Through a close reading of the fiction of these writers, literary theory on genre and gender, as well as feminist theory we will examine a range of topics such as the mapping of woman onto nation, the transgendered cyborg body as citizen of the nation and the production of masculinity through state-sponsored violence among others.
Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as WAGS 469, ASLC 452 [SA], and FAMS 322.) How do we define the word “feminism”? Can the term be used to define cinematic texts outside the Euro-American world? In this course we will study a range of issues that have been integral to feminist theory--the body, domesticity, same sex desire, gendered constructions of the nation, feminist utopias and dystopias--through a range of South Asian cinematic texts. Through our viewings and readings we will consider whether the term “feminist” can be applied to these texts, and we will experiment with new theoretical lenses for exploring these films. Films will range from Satyajit Ray’s classic masterpiece Charulata to Gurinder Chadha’s trendy diasporic film, Bend It Like Beckham. Attendance for screenings on Monday is compulsory.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offeredIndependent Reading Courses.
Fall and spring semester.
2023-24: Not offeredOpen to senior majors in Women’s and Gender Studies who have received departmental approval.
Spring semester.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as WAGS 202 and BLST 242 [US].) Why does love and courtship continue to be a central concern in black women's literature and contemporary black popular culture? Do these thematic issues signal apolitical yearnings or an allegory for political subjectivity? We will draw on a literature, music, magazines, and film to examine what gender, race, class, and sexuality reveal about the politics of love and courtship. Surveying the growing discourse in media outlets such as CNN and The Washington Post regarding the "crisis" of the single black woman, students will analyze the contentious public debates regarding courtship and marriage and connect them to black women's literature and black feminist literary theory. Authors and texts covered will range from Nella Larsen and Toni Morrison to Aretha Franklin and Mary J. Blige. Writing Attentive. Limited to 20 students. Open to first-year students with consent of the instructor.
Limited to 20 students. Open to first-year students with consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Henderson.
2023-24: Not offered