This course introduces students to issues involved in the social and historical construction of gender identities and roles from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective. Topics, which change from year-to-year, have included gender and sexuality; the uses and limits of biology in explaining gender differences; women’s participation in production and reproduction; the intertwining of gender, race, nationality, and class in explaining oppression and resistance; women, men and globalization; and gender and warfare.
Fall semester. Professor Henderson.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SWAG 105 and FAMS 377) In this course, students will interrogate the precarious relationship between political and popular culture. As we study how politics has successfully deployed popular culture as an ideological tool, we will also consider how politics has overburdened popular culture as a vehicle of change. These broad issues will serve as our framework for analyzing black femininity, womanhood, and the efficacy of the word “feminism” in the post-Civil Rights era. We will think critically about the construction of gender, race, sexuality, and class identity as well as the historical and sociopolitical context for cultural icons and phenomena. Students will read cultural theory, essays, fiction as well as listen to, and watch various forms of media. Expectations include three writing/visual projects as well as a group presentation.
Limited to 18 students. Fall semester. Professor Henderson.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ANTH 211 and SWAG 108) This course introduces students to theories and methodologies in the interdisciplinary field of feminist science studies. Specific areas of investigation include scientific cultures, animal models, and science in the media and popular culture. Students will continuously engage larger questions such as: What kinds of knowledge count as "science?" What is objectivity? How have cultural assumptions shaped scientific knowledge production in this and other historical periods? What is the relationship between "the body" and scientific data? And, finally, is feminist science possible?
Fall semester. Visiting Professor Hamilton.
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.
Requisite: Open to first-year students who have taken SWAG 100 and upper-class students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Hamilton.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025(Offered as SWAG 207, ASLC 207, and POSC 207) 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?
Fall semester. Professor Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SWAG 208, BLST 345 [US], ENGL 276, and FAMS 379) Through a close reading of texts by African American authors, we will critically examine the characterization of female protagonists, with a specific focus on how writers negotiate literary forms alongside race, gender, sexuality, and class in their work. Coupled with our explication of poems, short stories, novels, and literary criticism, we will explore the stakes of adaptation in visual culture. Students will analyze the film and television adaptations of The Color Purple (1985), The Women of Brewster Place (1989), and Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005). Authors will include Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Gloria Naylor. Expectations include three writing projects, a group presentation, and various in-class assignments.
Limited to 18 students. Priority given to those students who attend the first day of the class. Open to first-year students with consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Professor Henderson.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SWAG 221 and ANTH 328) This course uses interdisciplinary feminist approaches in the social sciences and humanities to explore the politics of law, science, and technology, especially in relation to questions of power and identity. How do law and technology influence our understandings of sex, gender, race, and sexuality? How are gendered identities constituted locally and transnationally through engagements with science, technology, and law? To explore these questions, we examine a variety of topics including legal and scientific understandings of sex and sexuality; gendered and racialized aspects of biomedical research; the role of law and technoscience in reproductive justice movements; and, the gendered character of patent law, pharmaceutical development and marketing.
Fall semester. Visiting Professor Hamilton.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SWAG 256 and THDA 256) This course engages debates and conversations about the ways in which our identities influence our academic performance. Focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability, we will explore the ways that our complex identities intersect with the implicit and explicit expectations of teaching and learning. The course will draw on theory, empirical research, first-person narratives, guest speakers, and various forms of media. The texts include works from many disciplines, including creative writing, education studies, feminist studies, law, queer studies, performance studies, psychology, sociology, and theatre. Students will develop their skills in critical reading, participant observation, performance analysis, and qualitative data analysis in order to observe and analyze classroom behaviors. Weekly assignments will prepare students to write and perform in a participatory theatre workshop through which we will explore strategies for productively engaging marginalizing behavior in the classroom. This course and our exploration of identity in the classroom rely on the foundational idea that everyone, regardless of their identity (not necessarily behavior), deserves respect and access to a positive, inclusive educational experience.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Lecturer Caldwell-O'Keefe.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SWAG 260 and PHIL 260) The course will introduce concepts that feminists and queer theorists have developed in continental philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism. It will further explore feminist philosophies of sexual difference developed primarily in the French feminist tradition. We will address the role of the lived body in feminist and intersectional theories of gender, sexuality, and identity; the relation between self and other; the situatedness of subjectivity; and the meaning of sexual difference. We will study texts by Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Luce Irigaray, Adriana Cavarero, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, and Sara Ahmed, among others. In addition to original philosophical texts, we will use a variety of interdisciplinary materials, such as film, literature, art, personal narratives, medical texts and empirical studies to approach the themes at hand.
Fall semester. STINT Fellow Käll.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SWAG 279, BLST 302, and ENGL 279) What do we mean by “women’s fiction”? How do we understand women’s genres in different national contexts? This course examines topics in feminist thought such as marriage, sexuality, desire and the home in novels written by women writers from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. We will draw on postcolonial literary theory, essays on transnational feminism and historical studies to situate our analyses of these novels. Texts include South African writer Nadine Gordimer’s July's People, Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India, and Caribbean author Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea.
Spring semester. Professor Shandilya.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2023This course is an interdisciplinary methods course designed to complement the existing SWAG core sequence. Using theories and approaches from the discipline of performance studies, the explicit mission of the seminar is to acquaint students with the study of LGBT history, politics, and culture while also strengthening student research skills in four overlapping areas: archival research, close-reading, performance analysis, and community engagement-as-activism. Course activities include working in the Amherst College Frost Archives, the production of a performance piece, and structured engagement with contemporary LGBT activism in the Pioneer Valley and the larger world.
Requisite: SWAG 100 or similar Five College intro to gender and sexuality courses. Recommended requisite: SWAG 200, 300, 330, or 353. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Polk.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2019, Spring 2020(Offered as SWAG 329, BLST 377 [US], and ENGL 368) History has long valorized passive, obedient, and long-suffering African American women alongside assertive male protagonists and savants. This course provides an alternative narrative to this representation by exploring the ways in which African American female characters, writers, and artists have challenged ideals of stoicism and submission. Using an interdisciplinary focus, we will critically examine transgression across time and space in diverse twentieth- and early twenty-first century literary, sonic, and visual texts. Expectations include three writing projects, a group presentation, and various in-class assignments.
Open to first-year students with consent of the instructor. Priority given to students who attend the first day of class. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Henderson.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SWAG 331 and ENGL 319) What is the novel? How do we know when a work of literature qualifies as a novel? In this course we will study the postcolonial novel which explodes the certainties of the European novel. Written in the aftermath of empire, these novels question race, class, gender and empire in their subject matter and narrative form. We will consider fiction from South Asia, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa. Novels include Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome, Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and North African author Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North.
Spring semester. Professor Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SWAG 336 and ANTH 336) This course introduces students to ethnographic research methods by exploring how interdisciplinary feminist scholars have engaged and challenged traditional anthropology. We will consider the dynamics of fieldwork, the ethics of research, and the production of anthropological knowledge through an engagement with the history of feminism in the discipline as well as with contemporary feminist debates. Students will design their own projects and conduct mini-ethnographies throughout the semester. Course topics include the cultures of biomedicine; the anthropology of reproduction; race, gender, and embodiment; and multispecies ethnography.
Recommended Requisite: 100-level SWAGS or ANTH course. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Hamilton.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 372 and SWAG 365) Do people the world over love in the same way, or does romance mean different things in different cultures? What happens when love violates social norms? Is the “romance” genre an escape from real-world conflicts or a resolution of them? This course analyzes romantic narratives from across the world through the lens of feminist theories of sexuality, marriage, and romance. We will read heterosexual romances such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, alongside queer fiction such as Sarah Waters’ Fingersmiths and Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness. We will also pay attention to the Western romantic-comedy film, the telenovela and the Bollywood spectacular.
Limited to 18 students. Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Shandilya.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2023, Fall 2023(Offered as SWAG 400 and POSC 407) The topic will vary from year to year. A student may take this course more than once, providing only that the topic is not the same. The current iteration of this seminar will explore the consequences of neoliberalism, cultural conservatism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiments for women of different social and economic strata as well as women’s divergent political responses. Why have some women become prominent right wing leaders and activists while others have allied with leftist, anti-racist, and other progressive forces to fight for the rights of women and other marginalized groups? How have transnational forces influenced both forms of women’s activism? To what extent are there cross-national similarities in the impact of the far right surge on women, gender and sexuality? The seminar will draw on examples from many different regions of the world, with particular attention to India and the U.S. There will be a final research paper for this course.
Limited to 18 students. Not open to first-year students. Spring semester. Professor Basu.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2017, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024(Offered as SWAG 469, ASLC 452, 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 2019-20. Professor Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offeredIndependent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024Open to senior majors in Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies who have received departmental approval.
Spring semester. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025