Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WMST BC1006 Introduction to Environmental Humanities. 3.00 points.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course introduces students to key concepts and texts in environmental humanities, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, sexuality, capital, nation, and globalization. The course examines the conceptual foundations that support humanistic analyses of environmental issues, climate crisis, and the ethics of justice and care. We will also focus on how the generalized contemporary environmental crisis plays out on the specific terrain of New York City. LEARNING OBJECTIVES: Students will learn what difference humanistic studies make to understanding environmental issues and climate crisis. The course will prepare students to: • Identify humanistic methods and how they contribute to understanding the world; • Demonstrate critical approaches to reading and representing environments; • Apply concepts from the course to synthesize the student’s use of humanistic approaches to address urgent environmental questions; • Develop a strong understanding of how generalized elements of the environmental crisis play out in and are resisted in New York City

WMST BC2140 Critical Approaches in Social and Cultural Theory. 3.00 points.

This course examines the conceptual foundations that support feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students; required for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE)

WMST BC2150 INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISMS. 3.00 points.

Enrollment for this class is by instructor approval and an application is required. Please fill out the form here: https://forms.gle/bPsV7rcf5RWB35PM9 This introductory course for the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE) as well as Majors/Minors in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) is open to all students. We focus on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, the professor will frequently be joined by other faculty and guest speakers who bring distinct disciplinary and subject matter expertise. Some keywords for this course include hybridity, diaspora, borderlands, migration, and intersectionality

WMST UN3311 FEMINIST THEORY. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Feminist Texts I, or II, and the instructor's permission.
This course explores the formation of desire, sexuality, and subjectivity through the frameworks of feminist epistemologies (the question of what we can know) and feminist ethics (the question of how to be responsible within our relationships and local and global communities). We will reflect on the tension between the limits of what we can know about ourselves and others and the imperative to care for each other and remain accountable for our individual and collective actions and inaction. We will investigate how our deepest emotions, intimate encounters, and secret fantasies are formed by larger social and political contexts. In turn, we will also question how these intimate relationships with ourselves and our companions may be seen as feminist acts of resistance, disruption, and creation. Objective I: to closely engage diverse feminist perspectives in late-twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, queer theory, critical race theory, and psychoanalysis. Objective II: to begin to locate your own feminist perspective within the intersection of your unique experiences and the larger historical and social contexts that form you and which you may seek to transform

WMST BC3504 GENDERED CONTROVERSIES. 4.00 points.

Love and sex have long been studied as historical constructs influenced by social, political, and economic dimensions. This course aims to expand this discourse by incorporating the often-overlooked lens of technological mediation. Beginning with the premise that romantic love is deeply shaped by the affordances of the technology of the time, a critical awareness of technological mediation in romance –especially of digital technologies, i.e. online dating, social media, or cybersex— allows for a deeper understanding of how social categories such as gender, race, class, ability, or sexuality are technologically-mediated, thereby informing our societal and cultural perceptions of love, dating, and sex. Sandra Moyano-Ariza is Term Assistant Professor of WGSS and Research Director at BCRW. Her research works at the intersection of pop culture, philosophy, and digital technologies, with interests in the fields of media studies and digital scholarship, contemporary feminist theory, critical race theory, posthumanism, and affect theory

WMST BC3514 HIST APPROACHES FEMINIST QUES. 4.00 points.

Comparative study of gender, race, and sexuality through specific historical, socio-cultural contexts in which these systems of power have operated. With a focus on social contexts of slavery, colonialism, and modern capitalism for the elaboration of sex-gender categories and systems across historical time

WMST BC3518 STUDIES IN U.S. IMPERIALISM. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 20 students.
Historical, comparative study of the cultural effects and social experiences of U.S. imperialism, with attention to race, gender and sexuality in practices of domination and struggle

WMST UN3525 Senior Seminar I (Barnard). 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. Enrollment limited to senior majors.
Student-designed capstone research projects offer practical lessons about how knowledge is produced, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the application of interdisciplinary feminist methodologies

WMST UN3915 GENDER, SEXUALITY ＆ POWER IN TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES. 4.00 points.

Enrollment limited to 15.

Prerequisites: Critical Approaches or the instructor's permission.
This course considers formations of gender, sexuality, and power as they circulate transnationally, as well as transnational feminist and queer movements that have emerged to address contemporary gendered and sexual inequalities. Topics include political economy, global care chains, sexuality, sex work and trafficking, feminist and queer politics, and human rights. If it is a small world after all, how do forces of globalization shape and redefine the relationship between gender, sexuality, and powerful institutions like the state? And, if power swirls everywhere, how are transnational power dynamics reinscribed in gendered bodies? How is the body represented in discussions of nationalism and in the political economy of globalization? These questions will frame this course by highlighting how gender, sexuality, and power coalesce to impact the lives of individuals in various spaces including workplaces, the academy, the home, religious institutions, the government, and civil society, and human rights organizations. This course will enable us to think transnationally, historically, and dynamically, using gender and sexuality as lenses through which to critique relations of power and the ways that power informs our everyday lives and subjectivities

WMST GU4100 Modes of Living: Feminist and Critical Approaches to Ethics. 4.00 points.

Connecting cultural and social issues to ethical questions, this course in feminist and critical interdisciplinary studies offers students the opportunity to consider the relationship between values and value in different modes of living. All too often in public discourse ethical values are invoked but not clearly articulated in terms of their meaning, parameters, and relation to each other. This research seminar investigates values through a semester-long consideration of a single overarching question. This version of the course focuses on the environmental humanities, but other instantiations may use this method to consider different issues. Here, the values commonly invoked in public discussions of the environment are considered in relation to each other, placed in larger analytic contexts, and applied. The final section of the course brings the study of values together with a study of major environmental issues, with a focus on inter-relations amongst those issues. The course uses these interdisciplinary and critical approaches that have become central to feminist ethics as the basis for students developing a major semester-long research project on a question of their own choosing

WMST GU4210 BLACK GEOGRAPHIES. 4.00 points.

Far from obvious renderings of place, maps are spatial arguments about who belongs where and how living should be defined. This course approaches place as something that is contested daily in the U.S. through the struggle of who gets to lay claim to a way of life. From the landscapes of dispossession to the alternative ways marginalized people work with and against traditional geographies, this course centers Black place-making practices as political struggle. This class will look at how power and domination become a landed project. We will critically examine how ideas about “nature” are bound up with notions of race, and the way “race” naturalizes the proper place for humans and non-human others. We will interrogate settler colonialism’s relationships to mapping who is and isn’t human, the transatlantic slave trade as a project of terraforming environments for capital, and land use as a science for determining who “owns” the earth. Centered on Black feminist, queer and trans thinkers, we will encounter space not as a something given by maps, but as a struggle over definitions of the human, geography, sovereignty, and alternative worlds. To this end, we will read from a variety of disciplines, such as Critical Black Studies, Feminist and Intersectional Science Studies, Black Geographies and Ecologies, Urban Studies and Afrofuturist literature. (Note: this class will count as an elective for the CCIS minors/concentrations in F/ISTS, ICORE/MORE, and Environmental Humanities.)

WMST BC4303 GENDER, GLOBALIZATION AND EMPIRE. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 20 students. Study of the role of gender in economic structures and social processes comprising globalization and in political practices of contemporary U.S. empire. This seminar focuses on the ways in which transformations in global political and economic structures over the last few decades including recent political developments in the U.S. have been shaped by gender, race, sexuality, religion and social movements

WMST GU4322 Planetary Questions. 4.00 points.

This advanced seminar examines important approaches, issues, perspectives, and themes related to planetary concerns of environmental crisis, climate change, life sustainability, and multi-species flourishing, with a focus on feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist, and queer perspectives. Topics for discussion and study include the global pandemic, histories of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, Prereqs: BOTH 1 WMST Intro course PLUS any WGSS 'Foundation' course, OR instructor permission

WMST GU4325 EMBODIMENT AND BODILY DIFFERENCE. 4.00 points.

At once material and symbolic, our bodies exist at the intersection of multiple competing discourses, including the juridical, the techno-scientific, and the biopolitical. In this course, we will draw upon a variety of critical interdisciplinary literatures—including feminist and queer studies, science and technology studies, and disability studies—to consider some of the ways in which the body is constituted by such discourses, and itself serves as the substratum for social relations. Among the key questions we will consider are the following: What is natural about the body? How are distinctions made between presumptively normal and pathological bodies, and between psychic and somatic experiences? How do historical and political-economic forces shape the perception and meaning of bodily difference? And most crucially: how do bodies that are multiply constituted by competing logics of gender, race, nation, and ability offer up resistance to these and other categorizations?

WMST UN1001 INTRO-WOMEN ＆ GENDER STUDIES. 3.00 points.

An interdisciplinary introduction to key concepts and analytical categories in women's and gender studies. This course grapples with gender in its complex intersection with other systems of power and inequality, including: sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and nation. Topics include: feminisms, feminist and queer theory, commodity culture, violence, science and technology, visual cultures, work, and family.

WMST BC2150 INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISMS. 3.00 points.

Enrollment for this class is by instructor approval and an application is required. Please fill out the form here: https://forms.gle/bPsV7rcf5RWB35PM9 This introductory course for the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE) as well as Majors/Minors in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) is open to all students. We focus on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, the professor will frequently be joined by other faculty and guest speakers who bring distinct disciplinary and subject matter expertise. Some keywords for this course include hybridity, diaspora, borderlands, migration, and intersectionality

WMST BC1050 WOMEN AND HEALTH. 3.00 points.

Combines critical feminist and anti-racist analyses of medicine with current research in epidemiology and biomedicine to understand health and health disparities as co-produced by social systems and biology

WMST BC1006 Introduction to Environmental Humanities. 3.00 points.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course introduces students to key concepts and texts in environmental humanities, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, sexuality, capital, nation, and globalization. The course examines the conceptual foundations that support humanistic analyses of environmental issues, climate crisis, and the ethics of justice and care. We will also focus on how the generalized contemporary environmental crisis plays out on the specific terrain of New York City. LEARNING OBJECTIVES: Students will learn what difference humanistic studies make to understanding environmental issues and climate crisis. The course will prepare students to: • Identify humanistic methods and how they contribute to understanding the world; • Demonstrate critical approaches to reading and representing environments; • Apply concepts from the course to synthesize the student’s use of humanistic approaches to address urgent environmental questions; • Develop a strong understanding of how generalized elements of the environmental crisis play out in and are resisted in New York City

WMST BC2026 Authority, Power, ＆ Evidence: An Introduction to Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies (F/ISTS). 3.00 points.

Science and Technology Studies (STS) is an interdisciplinary academic field that investigates entanglements between the technical and social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. Understanding this interplay is central to addressing many of the most pressing problems of our times, such as struggles around vaccination; climate justice and environmental racism; health disparities; digital surveillance; the biology of gender, sex, and sexuality; and the growing mistrust in “science” as a domain of authority. Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies (F/ISTS) is a focused approach to Science and Technology Studies (STS) that homes in on the reciprocal relations between techno-scientific knowledge and practices, on the one hand, and gender, race, class, and other intersecting axes of power, on the other

WMST BC2140 Critical Approaches in Social and Cultural Theory. 3.00 points.

This course examines the conceptual foundations that support feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students; required for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE)

WMST BC3125 Pleasures and Power: An Introduction to Sexuality Studies. 3 points.

BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Social Analysis (SOC I).

This introduction to sexuality studies is an examination of the historical origins, social functions, and conceptual limitations of the notion of “sexuality” as a domain of human experience and a field of power relations. Sexuality is often taken to be a natural and unchanging element of individual life. In this course, we seek to examine the ways in which sex is both social and political. We will consider how sexuality has been socially constructed, paying careful attention to the ways these ideas relate to other social forces such as gender, race, and class.

WMST UN2340 Women, Power, and Popular Music. 3.00 points.

From blues singers to girl groups, pop divas to hip-hop icons, women are central to the histories of popular music. The musical landscape of the past century would be unrecognizable without the contributions of women including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Celia Cruz, Queen Latifah, Lady Gaga, Lauryn Hill, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, and Cardi B. Women, Power, ＆ Popular Music develops modes of feminist listening to a range of music, including the blues, spirituals, jazz, gospel, traditional music, pop, rock, R＆B, soul, salsa, country, hip-hop, and crossover music. The course’s primary focus will be attending to sounds, words and images with an ear to themes of voice, power, presence, and representation. Students will develop a critical vocabulary and practice a variety of modes of hearing and analyzing the meanings and effects of popular music. By examining popular music in relation to intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, the body, class, politics, and activism, students will examine a wide repertory of music by using a variety of analytical “sieves,” refining and enriching their musical experience as critically astute listeners and writers. The course weaves together close listening with some of the central writings on women musical artists, listening, and feminist theory through seminar-style discussion and written work. Students will develop skills in hearing popular music through critically aware ears and will reflect upon popular music and the discourse about it through close listening and viewing, discussion of assigned readings, recordings, and videos, and writing projects

WMST BC2950 SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, POWER. 3.00 points.

This course explores the intimate entanglements of technology, science, bodies, culture, and power, with a focus on post-World War II U.S. society. In this lecture course, we will draw on history, feminist thought, anthropology, sociology, science fiction, and visual/digital art to investigate the historical and cultural contexts shaping the dreams, practices, and products of technoscience. We will explore technologies and sciences as sites of power, complex pleasures, and embodied transformations in our own everyday lives

WMST BC3122 Contemporary American-Jewish Women Writers: 1990 to the Present. 4 points.

BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA).

Explores the international character of the Jewish people through the experiences of Jewish women in various historical periods and contexts. Identifies issues and concerns, past and present, articulated by contemporary Jewish feminists: perspectives of secularists, observant traditional women, heterosexuals, lesbians, feminists, and activists committed to diverse political ideologies.

WMST BC3131 WOMEN AND SCIENCE. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 18 students.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 18 students. History and politics of womens involvement with science. Womens contributions to scientific discovery in various fields, accounts by women scientists, engineers, and physicians, issues of science education. Feminist critiques of biological research and of the institution of science

WMST BC3132 GENDERED CONTROVERSIES. 4.00 points.

This seminar investigates the significance of contemporary and historical issues of social, political, and cultural conflicts conducted through the language of gender. How do such conflicts constitute social relations, and what do they tell us about societies, cultures, and politics? How do we understand gender analysis in relation to intersectionality? How to we read and analyze gender through contested social issues? How do we analyze the ethical discourses employed in such conflicts? How do we best create change in response to such conflicts?

WMST UN3311 FEMINIST THEORY. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Feminist Texts I, or II, and the instructor's permission.
This course explores the formation of desire, sexuality, and subjectivity through the frameworks of feminist epistemologies (the question of what we can know) and feminist ethics (the question of how to be responsible within our relationships and local and global communities). We will reflect on the tension between the limits of what we can know about ourselves and others and the imperative to care for each other and remain accountable for our individual and collective actions and inaction. We will investigate how our deepest emotions, intimate encounters, and secret fantasies are formed by larger social and political contexts. In turn, we will also question how these intimate relationships with ourselves and our companions may be seen as feminist acts of resistance, disruption, and creation. Objective I: to closely engage diverse feminist perspectives in late-twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, queer theory, critical race theory, and psychoanalysis. Objective II: to begin to locate your own feminist perspective within the intersection of your unique experiences and the larger historical and social contexts that form you and which you may seek to transform

WMST BC3514 HIST APPROACHES FEMINIST QUES. 4.00 points.

Comparative study of gender, race, and sexuality through specific historical, socio-cultural contexts in which these systems of power have operated. With a focus on social contexts of slavery, colonialism, and modern capitalism for the elaboration of sex-gender categories and systems across historical time

WMST V3915 Gender and Power in Transnational Perspective. 4 points.

 How have development and globalization impacted (and attempted to impact) gender and sexuality around the world? How do gender and sexuality circulate across national, political, and technological borders in the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization? How has feminism itself become part of these increasingly complex cultural circulations, to women’s benefit as well as detriment? In addition to linking together what Chandra Mohanty has described as the “One Third” and “Two Thirds” worlds, this discussionbased seminar seeks to reconnect the disparately gendered intimate and global spheres, situating the feminized “private” domains of love, sex, and caring within fields of action such as geopolitics and global political economy.  How do formations of gender and sexuality shift when intimate relations are transnationalized? Does the globalization of intimacy exacerbate inequalities of gender, race, class, and nation, or might it also and simultaneously create unexpected opportunities to alleviate these? Under what circumstances does feminism itself get intertwined in circuits of gendered power? In the first part of this class, we will carefully examine issues of gender, sexuality, and development. In the latter, we turn increasingly toward issues of emotion and transnational intimate exchange and emotional labor while situating these encounters within the economic context we discussed in the first section.

WMST BC3138 AFFECT AND ACTIVISM. 4.00 points.

From love to anger to disappointment to hope, political activism mobilizes emotions towards certain ends but also generates new affective states and feelings along the way. This advanced seminar will familiarize students with feminist, anti-racist and queer scholarship on affect, feelings and emotion as intrinsic to politics and as crucial for understanding how political thought and action unfold in contingent and often unexpected ways. Mixing theoretical and cultural texts with case studies, we will look at how affect permeates structures of power and domination, embodiment and identity, and collective activist projects concerned with gender and sexual liberation. Students will have an opportunity to read theories of affect as well as to “read” activist movements for affect by working with archival documents (such as zines, manifestos, and movement ephemera) and other primary sources (such as memoir, photography and documentary film)

WMST V3140 Race and Sexuality: Black Queers. 4 points.

Seminar.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. Application instructions: women's and gender studies majors and concentrators should e-mail Professor Marcellus Blount (mb33@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Race and Sexuality seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

This undergraduate seminar draws upon feminist, African American, and queer theories and cultural practices to explore the relations of male masculinity and queer subjectivities. We will use literature and film, primarily, to provide a critique of normative notions of the binary oppositions of "black" and "gay" that oversimplify the complex social formations that structure racial and queer representations. We will attempt to find a way into discussions of how sexuality studies can enhance discussions of race and gender within the context of African American artistic forms. Cultural theorists include Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Karla Holloway, bell hooks, Kobena Mercer, and Robyn Wiegman. Writers and filmmakers will come from diverse canons, including the black feminist tradition of Mae V. Cowdery, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Dees Rees. This course will pay particular attention to the possibility of black queer texts and critical practices with an emphasis on deconstructing black masculinity through the languages of intimacy. Artists include Melvin Dixon, Thomas Allen Harris, Essex Hemphill, Issac Julien, Randall Kenan, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Marlon Riggs. One fifteen-page essay.

WMST BC3145 Environmental Humanities in Action. 4.00 points.

Some of the central questions in the study of environmental humanities focus on human action, its context, and its effects. Thus, one major contribution of the environmental humanities is to study and consider how we conceptualize action, relations (both between humans and environments and among humans), and even the meaning of human being. The environmental humanities places these conceptual questions in the context of value and values, as well as questions of how values are materialized in practice. This course considers all of these questions through the study both theories of action in the context of environmental humanities and research into existing projects that are informed by and can inform the study of environmental humanities

WMST W3153 Sexing Art Sound. 4 points.

Open to all majors.

This course explores sound-based creative practices as sites where gender, race, and sexuality are always, and sometimes explicitly negotiated. We will study contemporary sound art that variously speaks to inequalities in canon-formation, participates in human rights movements of the late 20th and 21st centuries, and suggests feminist and queer readings of everyday sonic praxis. Readings in feminist theory, critical theory, art history, musicology, and media studies will guide in-class discussion of artworks accessed through on-line archives and New York-based installations. We will also review artist statements, exhibition catalogues, conference programs, on-line media, and journalistic articles. The seminar will address the following questions: What role do sound-based creative practices play in re-/de-/forming raced, gendered, and sexual subjects? What is the place of activism in sound-based arts engaged with feminist and queer politics? Can sound be feminist, queer, Afrofuturist? How should theorists of race, gender, and sexuality address sound in and out of the arts?

WMST UN3200 QUEER THEORY. 4.00 points.

This class will ask you to read a set of novels, theoretical essays and social science studies in order to think deeply about sexuality, identity, desire, race, objects, relationality, being, knowing and becoming. We will consider sexuality, desire and gender not as a discrete set of bodily articulations, nor as natural expressions of coherent identities so much as part off the formulation of self that Avery Gordon names “complex personhood.” Beginning with a recent film from the UK that rereads queerness back through a history or labor and ending with a recent film made entirely on the iPhone and that stages queerness as part of an alternative articulation of Hollywood, we will explore new and old theories of queer desire.

Through the readings, discussions, and assignments, you will develop critical analytical skills to consider social change movements with particular attention to how sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, sexual orientation, and other systems of power shape people’s everyday lives. We will trace the intersection of histories of labor, medicine, representation and activism and we will ask difficult questions about assimilation, mainstreaming, globalization and pink capitalism.

WMST UN3225 TRANSGENDER STUDIES - THEMES AND TOPICS. 3.00 points.

This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. While we will read about gender variable bodies within a long historical arc, the categories of both “transsexual” and "transgender" are recent social constructions. How did the many different forms of gender variance resolve into these singular forms and what has been lost in the medical and legal narrowing of gender variance to only these forms? Can we make any connections between witches in the 17th century (often accused on the grounds of cross-gender identification), mollies and dandies in the 19th century (often marked as effeminate), inverts in the late 19th and early 20th century and later constructions that assemble under the banner of “trans*”? Many academic disciplines-- including anthropology, history, gender studies, literary studies, and gay and lesbian/queer studies--have studied transgender identities, bodies and communities, but only very recently has the field become institutionalized in the academy as a discipline "Transgender Studies." In this course we examine the ongoing development of the concept of transgender as it is situated across social, cultural, historical, medical, and political contexts. Along the way, we will try to answer some fundamental questions: when did trans* emerge as a distinct social formation? What might be the differences between the understanding of gender variance in the second half of the 20th century and formulations of the phenomena of cross-dressing and passing and transvestism in earlier periods? Is the term "transgender" applicable to non-Western and previously occurring embodiments and practices?

WMST UN3265 Queer ＆ Trans Migration. 3.00 points.

Queer ＆ Trans Migration places a special emphasis on queer, transgender, and gender nonbinary global migrant experiences and how these expand conceptions such as citizenship and diaspora alongside sexuality, gender, race, indigeneity and class. This course will ask: how do queer, transgender and feminist studies offer critical insights on - and inform politics regarding - issues of forced displacement, migration, citizenship, national belonging and global rights? Students will engage with ethnography, history, fiction, and digital media to explore the multi-dimensional phenomenon of (internal and transnational) queer, transgender and gender nonbinary migration. The course gives special attention to viewpoints from the global South and to New York City as a queer migrant nexus. Students will develop their expertise on course themes through their own digital ethnographic research projects, that can include observation of social media and other virtual spaces for queer, transgender, and non-binary communities in diaspora. Throughout the course, they will put their research in conversation with queer and feminist theory from interdisciplinary perspectives that draw attention to the ways migration and citizenship is entwined with sexuality, gender, race, settler colonialism, indigeneity, Blackness, and political economy. In class dialogue and readings will allow students to consider the implications of such analysis for political and cultural movements related to migration, and how these politics play out in everyday life, from language to love and desire

WMST V3312 Theorizing Activism. 4 points.

Prerequisites: Critical Approaches or Feminist Theory or permission of instructor.

Helps students develop and apply useful theoretical models to feminist organizing on local and international levels.  It involves reading, presentations, and seminar reports.  Students use first-hand knowledge of the practices of specific women's activist organizations for theoretical work.

WMST UN3335 Gender and Wars: Perspectives from the Global South. 3 points.

Wars are salient features of globalization. But, how can we understand the relationship between gender and war? How do notions of masculinities and femininities operate in the organizing, waging, protesting, and commemorating war? Starting from the premise that gender is crucial to explaining what happens in national revolutionary wars, postcolonial conflicts and civil wars, peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions, and the social and personal aspects when wars come to an end; this course considers a transnational feminist analysis to reflect on the relationship between gender and militarism. It pulls together literature from different disciplinary fields to explore the gendered dimensions of wars of national liberation, armed conflicts, wartime gender based/sexual violence, politics of victimhood, anti-war activism, resistance and agency. We will pay particular attention to case studies from the global South.

The gendered analyses of war will be explored from a multi-disciplinary framework including history, anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, philosophy, literature and film. We will utilize film, journalistic accounts, ethnographic narratives and other resources to explore the complex ways in which people, especially men and women experience and respond to wars differently. 

WMST UN3345 Reframing Gender Violence: Global Agendas. 3 points.

Over the past couple of decades, violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) have come to prominence as loci for activism throughout the world. Both VAW and GBV regularly garner international media attention and occupy a growing place in international law and global governance. Since 2000 alone there have been more than 25 UN protocols, instruments and conventions directed at its eradication or mitigation.  By embedding gendered violence in a complex matrix international norms, legal sanctions, and humanitarian aid, the anti-VAW movement has been able to achieve a powerful international “common sense” for defining, measuring, and attending to violence against women in developing countries, particularly during conflict and post-conflict situations. When invoked in the halls of the United Nations and used to shape international policy, the terms violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) are often assumed to have stable meanings; yet they do not.  What do different parties mean when they talk of violence against women or of gender-based violence?  What is left out when the problem is framed in particular ways, and whose interests are served by such framings?  Religion, culture, and ethnicity are often linked to gendered violence with entire groups pathologized. Women in conflict situations are abstracted from their local contexts while the conflicts themselves are insistently localized. The definition of VAW or GBV is narrowed to attacks on bodily integrity, with economic, political and structural forms of violence increasingly excluded from the frames.

This course will explore transnational feminist debates about gender-based violence and examine the critical concepts being developed within the scholarly literature to question this “common sense.” What are the elisions and exclusions in many common-sense understandings of these terms? Can we deepen the ways in which we engage with the manifestations and causes of such violence?

We will proceed through close readings of the texts of the key feminist thinkers, researchers, and activists who are contributing to the critical analysis of the dynamics and history of this international agenda. We pay special attention to place-based research on the applicability and deployment of particular approaches to gender-based violence as found in human rights work, humanitarianism, philanthrocapitalism, and the proliferating organizations, governmental and nongovernmental, around the world that promote girls’ and women’s rights and freedom from violence. Case studies will focus mostly on the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.

This course is open to advanced undergraduates with preference given to WGS majors and those with previous coursework on the relevant regions. By permission, cap of 20.

WMST BC3512 Art/Work: Sex, Aesthetics, and Capitalism. 4 points.

How can performances, theatrical texts, and other art/media objects illuminate the operations of gender, sexuality, and race in global capitalism? Drawing from a range of artistic media and critical traditions, we explore how aesthetic thought can help us analyze the sexual, racial, and national character of contemporary labor and life.

WMST BC3513 CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES. 4.00 points.

"This course collaborates between students and professor, humans and animals, subjects and objects, to investigate the Animal Problem. What are non-human animals? How do we relate to them? How do we account for our animal nature while reconciling our cultural aspirations? What are our primary desires with respect to non-human animals?

WMST BC3518 STUDIES IN U.S. IMPERIALISM. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 20 students.
Historical, comparative study of the cultural effects and social experiences of U.S. imperialism, with attention to race, gender and sexuality in practices of domination and struggle

WMST BC3530 FEMINIST MEDIA THEORY. 4.00 points.

The integration of contemporary media and social practices of all types is intensifying. This seminar examines media theory and various media platforms including Language, Photography, Film, Television, Radio, Digital Video, and Computing as treated by feminists, critical race and queer theorists, and other scholars and artists working from the margins. Prerequisite: Either one introductory WGSS course or Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory or Permission of the Instructor

WMST BC3535 Feminist Media Praxis. 4.00 points.

Feminist Media Praxis is an advanced research seminar that integrates the theory and production of diverse media forms—from film and video, to photography, the digital, and television. We explore media as well as their associated materials, practices, and embodiments as methods for feminist research, collaboration, and expression. The course interrogates feminist histories, learns from diverse feminist political expressions and activism, and seeks to find, incorporate, and build archives and other records of media research and production.Feminist Media Praxis is an advanced research seminar that integrates the theory and production of diverse media forms—from film and video, to photography, the digital, and television. We explore media as well as their associated materials, practices, and embodiments as methods for feminist research, collaboration, and expression. The course interrogates feminist histories, learns from diverse feminist political expressions and activism, and seeks to find, incorporate, and build archives and other records of media research and production

WMST UN3600 THE POLITICS OF FOOD. 4 points.

Who is food for? The simple answer is that food is for everyone, yet a close look at the stories we tell reveals that, actually, food is not for everyone. In our novels, nonfiction, films and even in our manifestoes, some people eat and some provide food; some appetites must be unleashed and others, regulated and controlled; and some people—some people are food. Instead of a benign arena for the imagination and enactment of universal rights, food thus exposes “universal” “human” and “rights” as crucial and deeply contested terrains of raced and

gendered power. This economy of exchange, of consumption and deprivation, of the satiation of some bodies through devourment of others, of the invisibility of some hungers and the criminalization of some appetites, are all aspects of our founding narrative. These relations define the past and have also come to define our time. In this seminar, will explore the ways that we imagine food and narrate acts of feeding and eating as a means of examining both the historical enactments and contemporary mechanisms of power.

WMST W3625 Memoir and Embodiment. 4 points.

Recent decades have witnessed a flood of life writing about the body, much of it by women and much of it about experiences of illness and disability.  This development represents a significant change, as autobiography has historically been reserved for the most accomplished and able-bodied among us.  Our course will study the rise of what G’ Thomas Couser calls “the some body memoir,” asking how it revises traditional autobiography as it attempts to carve out literary space for voices and bodies that have not historically been represented in public.  We will consider how these new memoirs talk back to doctors and other health care professionals who medicalize the disabled body, as well as social environments that stigmatize and exclude the ill and disabled.  We will also ask how race and gender inform stories of illness and disability, as well as investigating differences between physical and mental illness and/or disability.   Each week we will read one memoir, paired with other writings meant to prompt discuss and critical examination.  In addition to more traditional academic writing, students will also have opportunities to experiment with their own life writing.

WMST UN3655 Gender and Public Health: Disparities, Pathways, and Policies. 3.00 points.

This seminar providea an intensive introduction to critical thinking about gender in relation to public health. We begin with a rapid immersion in social scientific approaches to thinking about gender in relation to health, and then examine diverse areas in which gendered relations of power – primarily between men and women, but also between cis- and queer individuals – shape health behaviors and health outcomes. We engage with multiple examples of how gendered social processes, in combination with other dimensions of social stratification, shape health at the population level. The overarching goal of this class is to provide a context for reading, discussion, and critical analysis to help students learn to think about gender – and, by extension, about any form of social stratification – as a driver of patterns in population health. We also attend consistently to how public health as a field is itself a domain in which gender is reproduced or contested

WMST UN3800 Feminist Listening. 3 points.

Prerequisites: HUMA UN1123

Feminist Listening: Critical and Intersectional Approaches to Popular Music develops modes of feminist listening to a variety of examples in popular music including hip-hop, pop, rock, R&B, country music, and crossover/experimental music. By examining the sonic, texted, and visual components of popular music in relation to gender, sexuality, the body, race, ethnicity, economics, and nation, students will develop a critical vocabulary for discussing and analyzing the effects and meanings of popular music as filtered by twenty-first century listeners. Through close listening, discussion of assigned readings and pieces, and analytical writing on recorded and live performances, the course will encourage students to examine a wide repertory of popular music by using a variety of intersectional analytical “sieves,” refining and enriching their experience of popular music as critically astute listeners and writers. This course is designed for students who are interested in sharpening their listening practices but does not assume previous formal study of music. The course 1) introduces the fundamental of music through exercises in listening and writing, 2) focuses on a selection of current literature on listening, theoretical approaches to music analysis, and feminist/queer criticism; 3) attunes students to the various indices of musical structure (melody, form, harmony, rhythm & meter, words, flow & groove, performance); 4) brings together these parts of music into feminist/queer, alternative hearings of specific works. COURSE

WMST UN3813 Knowledge, Practice, Power. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: WMST V1001 and the instructor's permission.
Knowledge, Practice, Power is a practical and multi-disciplinary exploration of research methods and interpretive strategies used in feminist scholarship, focusing on larger questions about how we know what we know, and who and what knowledge is for. Open to non-majors, but sophomore and junior majors in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) are encouraged to enroll in this course as preparation for Senior Seminar I. This course is required for students pursuing the concentration or minor in Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies. Prerequisite: Either one introductory WGSS course or Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory or Permission of the Instructor

WMST BC3814 ACTIVISM ＆ INQUIRY LAB A. 1.00 point.

This lab course is an optional addition to the WGSS junior colloquia courses “Theorizing Feminist Activisms” and “Feminist Inquiry”; students must take one of those courses simultaneously with this lab. The lab gives students an opportunity to gain practical experience with one or more qualitative research methods that are frequently used in feminist and gender studies. It will be particularly valuable as groundwork for senior thesis research, but all students enrolled in Theorizing Activisms or Feminist Inquiry are encouraged to take the lab to deepen their understanding of practical and ethical issues in conducting research in support of social change

WMST W3922 The Jazz Age: fictional representations of Jewish-American and African-America women in the city. 4 points.

The “Roaring 20s” evokes images of jazz, the flapper, cabarets, Harlem, the bohemian life of Greenwich Village, and a time of greater freedoms for women in the US.  All of these images are associated with urban life and have clear racial, class, gender, and sexual connotations. In this course, we will be examining classic Jazz-Age Jewish-American and African-American fiction that presents "New Woman" female protagonists.   We will be tracing the differences between the representation of the Jewish-American "New Woman" and the "New Negro Woman," while discussing what these differences might signify with respect to the positionality of Jewish and black women in the US. 

WMST BC3950 SENIOR SEMINAR I. 4.00 points.

Senior Seminar 1 integrates the study of research methods with critical epistemological questions about how knowledge is produced, its effects and its uses. By carrying out an original research project of their own design, students will learn how practices are embedded in knowledge claims, how to analyze the relation of knowledge to power, how feminist knowledge is deployed to meet a range of feminist goals, and what types of practices they will take up in their own production and use of knowledge. In this course, students develop a capstone research project (20-page essay or alternative digital project with permission of instructor) on a topic of feminist significance and characterized by a critical interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to the study of women, sexuality, and/or gender. Students will investigate the nexus of knowledge, practice, and power in the contexts of their research, reflecting on the conditions and implications of their own knowledge production within these fields and beyond. Students will develop a research proposal and a research plan with timeline and deadlines to be carried out over the course of the semester. (Significant parts of your paper or project will be drafted by mid-semester). Students will complete all aspects of their research plan. This course is conducted as a workshop and student engagement with peers is central to the process. The final grade is based upon the final research paper/project as well as active participation in constructive peer feedback

WMST BC3960 SENIOR SEMINAR II. 4.00 points.

Individual research in Women's Studies conducted in consultation with the instructor. The result of each research project is submitted in the form of the senior essay and presented to the seminar

WMST BC3965 FEMINIST/INTERSECTIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES (F/ISTS) CAPSTONE. 1.00 point.

This capstone course intended for juniors and seniors who are pursuing the minor or concentration in Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies (F/ISTS) will provide opportunities for students to engage with practical applications of F/ISTS theories and methodologies through interactive discussions. We will focus on current events of national and international importance for which F/ISTS-based tools and case studies offer relevant empirical evidence and analytic frameworks (scientific, political, social, and ethical). Focusing on one current issue of public importance (a policy, a circulating claim, an event, etc.), students will practice crafting synthetic and accessible analyses by producing a “message” that is empirically and conceptually grounded in F/ISTS scholarship and accessible to the general public

WMST BC3999 INDEPENDENT STUDY. 1.00-4.00 points.

INDEPENDENT STUDY

WMST GU4000 GENEALOGIES OF FEMINISM. 4.00 points.

Genealogies of Feminism: Course focuses on the development of a particular topic or issue in feminist, queer, and/or WGSS scholarship. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates, though priority will be given to students completing the ISSG graduate certificate. Topics differ by semester offered, and are reflected in the course subtitle. For a description of the current offering, please visit the link in the Class Notes

WMST GU4100 Modes of Living: Feminist and Critical Approaches to Ethics. 4.00 points.

Connecting cultural and social issues to ethical questions, this course in feminist and critical interdisciplinary studies offers students the opportunity to consider the relationship between values and value in different modes of living. All too often in public discourse ethical values are invoked but not clearly articulated in terms of their meaning, parameters, and relation to each other. This research seminar investigates values through a semester-long consideration of a single overarching question. This version of the course focuses on the environmental humanities, but other instantiations may use this method to consider different issues. Here, the values commonly invoked in public discussions of the environment are considered in relation to each other, placed in larger analytic contexts, and applied. The final section of the course brings the study of values together with a study of major environmental issues, with a focus on inter-relations amongst those issues. The course uses these interdisciplinary and critical approaches that have become central to feminist ethics as the basis for students developing a major semester-long research project on a question of their own choosing

WMST GU4200 Temporality and Sexuality. 4 points.

If queerness, as José Muñoz put it, “exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future,” we can ask about what comes next, what comes after the future? What queer understandings of time and place enliven the field of queer studies now? Where are we going, where have we been, what time is it and when will we get there? Temporality has become a major concern in studies of sexuality and gender in the last decade and this class sets out to explore why and with what impact? How do concerns about time and temporality rest upon assumptions about space and spatiality? How does a focus on time and temporality allow for or foreclose upon post-colonial questions of mimicry, authenticity, sequence and procession? What can a study of queer temporalities reveal about orientations, speed, embodiment, becoming, being, doing,touching, feeling, unbecoming? Finally, what does the focus on temporality allow us to think, say, see or imagine about the multiple points of intersection between race and sexuality in a global frame?

WMST GU4210 BLACK GEOGRAPHIES. 4.00 points.

Far from obvious renderings of place, maps are spatial arguments about who belongs where and how living should be defined. This course approaches place as something that is contested daily in the U.S. through the struggle of who gets to lay claim to a way of life. From the landscapes of dispossession to the alternative ways marginalized people work with and against traditional geographies, this course centers Black place-making practices as political struggle. This class will look at how power and domination become a landed project. We will critically examine how ideas about “nature” are bound up with notions of race, and the way “race” naturalizes the proper place for humans and non-human others. We will interrogate settler colonialism’s relationships to mapping who is and isn’t human, the transatlantic slave trade as a project of terraforming environments for capital, and land use as a science for determining who “owns” the earth. Centered on Black feminist, queer and trans thinkers, we will encounter space not as a something given by maps, but as a struggle over definitions of the human, geography, sovereignty, and alternative worlds. To this end, we will read from a variety of disciplines, such as Critical Black Studies, Feminist and Intersectional Science Studies, Black Geographies and Ecologies, Urban Studies and Afrofuturist literature. (Note: this class will count as an elective for the CCIS minors/concentrations in F/ISTS, ICORE/MORE, and Environmental Humanities.)

WMST GU4235 Indigenous Feminisms. 4.00 points.

Indigenous women, queers, trans- and Two Spirit people have been at the forefront of activism and resistance to state incursion into Indigenous lands and waters. This was evident most recently at Mauna Kea, a mountain sacred to Kanaka Maoli in Hawaii as women, trans and queer formed the first line of resistance and occupation against the construction of a 1000-meter telescope on the site. This is not unique, their voices, along with indigenous queer and feminist scholars, have been working to address issues as far-ranging as mascots, settler appropriation of indigenous cultures, missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, and the violence against indigenous urban youth. This seminar will consider how those indigenous feminist, queer, and Two Spirit scholars have theorized gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism, alongside issues of land, water and sovereignty. We will read works that consider how indigeneity challenges how gender and sexuality are expressed in the context of settler colonialism and racial capitalism

WMST GU4300 Queer Theory/ Visual Culture. 4 points.

This class will ask you to read a set of theoretical essays and social science studies in order to think deeply about sexuality, identity, desire, race, objects, relationality, being, knowing and becoming. We will consider sexuality, desire and gender not as a discrete set of bodily articulations, nor as natural expressions of coherent identities so much as part of the formulation of self that Avery Gordon names “complex personhood.” Over the course of the semester, we will explore new and old theories of queer desire alongside a history of queer cultural production.

WMST W4301 Early Jewish Women Immigrant Writers: 1900-1939. 4 points.

BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
Enrollment limited to 15.

Prerequisites: students must attend first day of class and admission will be decided then.

Covers significant pre-Holocaust texts (including Yiddish fiction in translation) by U.S. Ashkenazi women and analyzes the tensions between upholding Jewish identity and the necessity and/or inevitability of integration and assimilation. It also examines women's quests to realize their full potential in Jewish and non-Jewish communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

WMST GU4302 The Second Wave and Jewish Women's Artistic Responses: 1939-1990. 4 points.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. Enrollment limited to 13 students.

A study of  Jewish women’s fiction, memoirs, art and film in response to the feminist/gender issues raised by the Second Wave. The seminar includes analysis of the writings and artwork of Jo Sinclair, Tillie Olsen, Judy Chicago, Helene Aylon, Elana Dykewomon, Rebecca Goldstein, E.M. Broner and others.

WMST BC4303 GENDER, GLOBALIZATION AND EMPIRE. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 20 students. Study of the role of gender in economic structures and social processes comprising globalization and in political practices of contemporary U.S. empire. This seminar focuses on the ways in which transformations in global political and economic structures over the last few decades including recent political developments in the U.S. have been shaped by gender, race, sexuality, religion and social movements

WMST GU4305 Decolonization and Feminist Critique. 4.00 points.

This advanced seminar examines historical, social, cultural, and theoretical propositions for decolonizing praxis and their complex relations to feminist critique. How do we understand Western European colonialism and coloniality as modes, conditions, and institutions of power, dispossession, subjugation, and subjection continuing into the present? What are the methods, practices, and vision enacted and proposed by the colonized for undoing and radically transforming the determinate logics, instruments, and structures of colonialism as these persist in the present moment? We will consider how gender and sexuality as well as race – as technologies of social organization, codes of valuation, and modes of survival – shape colonialism and the struggles against it. We will inquire into their significance to projects of decolonization. How might decolonization envision and make possible other ways of life?

WMST W4308 SEXUALITY AND SCIENCE. 4.00 points.

WMST GU4310 CONTEM AMER JEWISH WOMEN'S LIT. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 15 students. Sophomore standing.
The seminar will focus on trends that have emerged over the past three decades in Jewish American women's writing in the fields of memoirs, fiction and Jewish history: the representation and exploration through fictive narratives of women's experiences in American Jewish orthodox communities; reinterpretation of Jewish history through gender analysis; the recording of migration and exile by Jewish women immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Morocco, Iran, and Egypt; and gender transformations. Texts will be analyzed in terms of genre structures, narrative strategies, the role of gender in shaping content and Jewish identity, and the political, cultural and social contexts in which the works were created. The course aims for students to discuss and critically engage with texts in order to develop the skills of analytical and abstract thinking, as well as the ability to express that critical thinking in writing. Prerequisites: Both one introductory WGSS course and Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory, or Permission of the Instructor

WMST W4311 Feminism and Science Studies. 4 points.

Prerequisites: Feminist Theory or permission of instructor.

Investigates socially and historically informed critiques of theoretical methods and practices of the sciences. It asks if/how feminist theoretical and political concerns make a critical contribution to science studies.

WMST GU4317 ADVANCED TOPICS. 4 points.

WMST W4320 Queer Theories and Histories. 4 points.

Enrollment limited to 20.

The course will cover a range of (mostly U.S. and mostly 20th-Century) materials that thematize gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender experience and identity. We will study fiction and autobiographical texts, historical, psychoanalytic, and sociological materials, queer theory, and films, focusing on modes of representing sexuality and on the intersections between sexuality and race, ethnicity, class, gender, and nationality. We will also investigate connections between the history of LGBT activism and current events. Authors will include Foucault, Freud, Butler, Sedgwick, Anzaldua, Moraga, Smith. Students will present, and then write up, research projects of their own choosing.

WMST GU4322 Planetary Questions. 4.00 points.

This advanced seminar examines important approaches, issues, perspectives, and themes related to planetary concerns of environmental crisis, climate change, life sustainability, and multi-species flourishing, with a focus on feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist, and queer perspectives. Topics for discussion and study include the global pandemic, histories of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, Prereqs: BOTH 1 WMST Intro course PLUS any WGSS 'Foundation' course, OR instructor permission

WMST GU4325 EMBODIMENT AND BODILY DIFFERENCE. 4.00 points.

At once material and symbolic, our bodies exist at the intersection of multiple competing discourses, including the juridical, the techno-scientific, and the biopolitical. In this course, we will draw upon a variety of critical interdisciplinary literatures—including feminist and queer studies, science and technology studies, and disability studies—to consider some of the ways in which the body is constituted by such discourses, and itself serves as the substratum for social relations. Among the key questions we will consider are the following: What is natural about the body? How are distinctions made between presumptively normal and pathological bodies, and between psychic and somatic experiences? How do historical and political-economic forces shape the perception and meaning of bodily difference? And most crucially: how do bodies that are multiply constituted by competing logics of gender, race, nation, and ability offer up resistance to these and other categorizations?

WMST GU4330 SWANA Diasporas: Culture, Politics and Identity Formation in a Time of War. 4.00 points.

In this class we will study South-West Asian and North African (SWANA) diasporic populations, social movements and cultural production that have responded to the multi-faceted ramifications of the 21st century war on terror. We will focus on diverse Arab, Iranian, and Afghan diasporas in the United States, where 19th and 20th century legacies of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and Orientalism combined in new ways to target these groups after the September 11th, 2001 attacks. Drawing on an interdisciplinary array of texts, including ethnography, fiction, feminist and queer theory, social movement theory, and visual and performance art, we will look at how the “war on terror” has shaped the subjectivities and self-representation of SWANA communities. Crucially, we will examine the gender and sexual politics of Islamophobia and racism and study how scholars, activists and artists have sought to intervene in dominant narratives of deviance, threat, and backwardness attributed to Muslim and other SWANA populations. This course takes up the politics of naming, situating the formation of “SWANA” as part of an anti-colonial genealogy that rejects imperial geographies such as “Middle East.” We will ask how new geographies and affiliations come into being in the context of open-ended war, and what new political identities and forms of cultural production then become possible

WMST GU4336 GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN YIDDISH LITERATURE. 4.00 points.

Early publications in Yiddish, a.k.a. the mame loshn, ‘mother tongue,’ were addressed to “women and men who are like women,” while famous Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem, created a myth of “three founding fathers” of modern Yiddish literature, which eliminated the existence of Yiddish women writers. As these examples indicate, gender has played a significant role in Yiddish literary power dynamics. This course will explore representation of gender and sexuality in modern Yiddish literature and film in works created by Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Fradl Shtok, Sh. An-sky, Malka Lee, Anna Margolin, Celia Dropkin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kadya Molodowsky, Troim Katz Handler, and Irena Klepfisz. You will also acquire skills in academic research and digital presentation of the findings as part of the Mapping Yiddish New York project that is being created at Columbia. No knowledge of Yiddish required

WMST GU4350 Performing feminist activisms in Contemporary Latin America. 4 points.

This course explores different ways in which feminist artists and activists use performance to spark social change in Latin America. Using feminism and performance studies as critical lenses, this course addresses how performative actions can challenge patriarchal systems in neoliberal times. We begin the course by reviewing key texts to discuss the key terms “feminisms”, “performance” and “activisms” Then, the course turns to an examination of contemporary feminist activisms in Latin America, including the #niunamenos movement in Argentina, the 2018 feminist tsunami in Chile and the work of Mujeres Creando in Bolivia. In each session, we will discuss the performative strategies activists use to denounce, protest and resist dominant discourses of power, neoliberalism and gender violence, searching to trace connectivities and fractures among different contemporary feminist activist movements across Latin America.

WMST G4440 Gender and Affective Politics: Hate, Fear and Love in the MENA region. 4 points.

The course will examine how masculinities and femininities are produced, remade, expressed and negotiated through theories of materiality and affect and relate them to relevant ethnographic examples of such processes (for example masculine soundscapes and edible portraits of Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on chocolate pralines). We will explore gender in relation to the multifaceted dynamic processes unfolding in North Africa in the aftermath of earlier political fluxes, as well as today’s instabilities and unrest and tomorrow’s politics. Materiality and non-discursive forces, what can be called affective politics, impact our sense of belonging and desire for comfort in times of chaos, religious and political instability. Specifically we will focus on forces of affect and the material aspects of its public manifestation—the materiality of affect—through tangible manifestations of affects of passion: hate and love: two opposed but interlinked “emotions of revolution”, as well as their sibling, fear. The same material experiences can produce materialized emotions such as love or hate depending on specific political and social positioning within the larger polity. Passion is at once a phenomenological state and an extremely fluid currency of social, political and economic transaction. The experience of passion morphs continuously, changing valence while passing from hand to hand, body to body, circumstance to circumstance.

WMST GU4905 Labor and Life: Critiques of Capitalism. 4.00 points.

This advanced seminar examines materialist conceptions of labor and life as approached through feminist, black, anti-racist, indigenous, queer, postcolonial, and Marxist perspectives. We will trace the ways that labor and life as well as their constitutive relations have been understood in historical and contemporary radical critiques of capitalism, with a focus on gender, race and sexuality as analytical categories for understanding their shifting roles in structures and practices of social reproduction, the production and expropriation of value, the logic and exercise of violence, the organization of sociality and culture, and the practice and imagination of freedom, justice, and new forms and potentials of collective existence. Finally, we will consider the limits and possibilities of different conceptions of “material life” for understanding politics today