Course Descriptions
Listed below are the current electives associated with the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Department. Please note that not all electives are listed below -- if you have a question about a certain course and whether it could count as a WGS elective, please contact the director of undergraduate programs, Bonnie Hagerman.
AAS 2500 Black Genders
Lower-level topics course: reading, class discussion, and written assignments on a special topic in African-American and African Studies Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor.
AAS 2500 Black Bodies in Literature
Lower-level topics course: reading, class discussion, and written assignments on a special topic in African-American and African Studies Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor.
AAS 3745 Women in African History
In this course, we will read a sampling of some exciting new works of fiction from Africa's young and established writers. In particular, we will examine the literary innovations that African writers use to narrate issues affecting the continent such as dictatorship, the lingering effects of colonization, the postcolonial nation state, the traumas of war and geo-politics, religion, gender and sexuality, and migration, among others.
AAS 3770 Black Girlhood in the Media
How do movies, viral videos, and memes impact the material lives of Black girls? This course offers an introduction to the emergent and growing field of Black Girlhood Studies, especially in relation to media representation and engagement. The course will cover foundational texts about Black girlhood alongside a range of media to explore the ways in which Black girlhood has been constructed and portrayed through these platforms.
AMST 2130 Narratives of Girlhood
This course treats a range of contemporary English language literatures about girlhood. Our comparative analyses of texts will pay particular attention to their play with genre and their use of literary devices -- e.g., structure, voice, point of view, dialogue, temporality, language ¿ to render narratives about girlhood in contexts of (im)migration, loss, displacement, violence, revolution, war, and trauma.
ANTH 2620 Sex, Gender, and Culture
Examines the manner in which ideas about sexuality and gender are constructed differently cross-culturally and how these ideas give shape to other social phenomena, relationships, and practices.
EDHS 2891 Mentorship Skills with Adolescent Girls
This course is an opportunity for students to develop their leadership skills through academic service learning. Students explore the psychological, social, and cultural issues affecting adolescent girls and apply this understanding through service with the Young Women Leaders Program (YWLP), a mentoring program pairing middle school girls with college women for a year. Offered on the Undergraduate and Graduate levels.
EDHS 3891 Fostering Leadership in Girls and Women
The aim of this course is to help YWLP Facilitators acquire the skills and knowledge required for successful facilitation as well as to provide lots of support. Given the diverse members of each group, the mentoring group curriculum, and other factors that affect the group, how can YWLP be the most rewarding experience possible for each group member? How can students grow as facilitators and leaders through their experience as YWLP Facilitators? Prerequisite: EDHS 2891 and EDHS 2892
EDHS 5230 Women, Work, and Wellness
Have you wondered what the world of work looks like for women? Is it just about equal pay or could there be deeper, systemic dynamics and systems in place than we realize? And what about "having it all" or a work-life balance? Explore what women experience(d) in the workplace in the past, present, and future. Specific attention will be given to career development and wellness models related to women and gender using a growth-oriented perspective.
EDLF 3895 Front Lines of Social Change I: Women's Center Internship
Front Lines of Social Change I explores gender equity and social justice theory. FLSC I provides the Women's Center internship cohort a structured classroom environment to actively reflect upon their experience; engage in professional development; and learn about the field, including gender equity issues addressed by the internship. FLSC I (fall) and FLSC II (spring) are required components of the Women's Center internship for all new interns.
ENGL 2592 Women in Literature
In eighteenth-century England young women were taught that their most desirable attribute was modesty and that their destiny lay in marriage. Such an education discouraged women from competing with men in the crowded, unruly, and potentially lucrative public sphere of commercial publishing. Or so one might think. In fact, women authors flourished at this time. By the early 1800s, some men even feared they had come to dominate popular literature. How did this come to be? One of the most effective vehicles by which women infiltrated the world of print was via the humble form of the letter. Letters could express all sorts of things, be addressed to diverse audiences, and be sent from myriad locations. But while letters proved themselves an adaptable form, they were also, at least theoretically, a private one. It was the letter’s association with privacy – with the merely personal – that allowed women to disguise their epistolary compositions as modest, slight, and unthreatening. The letter was the perfect secret weapon for making women’s voices heard.
In this class we will explore how British women living in the 1700’s wrote letters to do many different things: address injustice, report on fashionable society, titillate, mock, protest, and, sometimes, just tell a friend she was loved. Our readings will include private correspondence, verse epistles, epistolary novels, foreign correspondence, letters to the editor, and more.
This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
ENWR 3740 Black Women's Writing & Rhetoric
A chronological survey of the persuasive communication and writing strategies Black women have used towards the project of empowerment and activism in speeches, essays, poetry, drama, and novels
GBUS 8341 Women, Gender, & Work: Leadership Stories and Career Narratives
This course aims to answer a single question: how do gender norms influence the trajectory of one's career as well as the pursuit and attainment of leadership positions? This course seeks to unpack the social construction of gender as it shapes work so that all students, regardless of gender identity, will be prepared to lead in a variety of organizational contexts and to advance inclusive workplace policies, procedures, and cultures.
HISA 3501 Women and Wealth in South Asia
Required for history majors, to be completed before enrollment in the Major Seminar. Introduces a variety of approaches to the study of history, methods for finding and analyzing primary and secondary sources, and the construction of historical arguments. Workshops are offered on a variety of topics each term.
HIUS 3611 Gender & Sexuality in AM, 1600-1865
Studies the evolution of women's roles in American society with particular attention to the experiences of women of different races, classes, and ethnic groups.
ITTR 3685 Italy on Screen: Sex, Gender, & Racial Identities
This course considers representations of sex, gender and racial identities in Italian films, television, advertisements and other forms of visual culture. With a focus on the contemporary Italian context, students will explore issues of intersectionality from a global perspective. What can Italian critically acclaimed and more mainstream works tell us about diversity and inclusion in the worldwide context?
PLAN 3811 Gender & Built Environment
This class explores the wide range of approaches that have been taken to the complex relationships between body, sex, gender, and the built environment. Some see buildings as a direct expression of sexed bodies (phallic towers and breast-like domes), while others see buildings and settlements as expressions and reiterations of the gender structures of a culture.
PLAN 6811 Gender & Built Environment
This class explores the wide range of approaches that have been taken to the complex relationships between body, sex, gender, and the built environment. Some see buildings as a direct expression of sexed bodies (phallic towers and breast-like domes), while others see buildings and settlements as expressions and reiterations of the gender structures of a culture.
PLCP 4840 Gender Politics in Africa
Investigates the ways social structures and institutions shape gender in sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on the state. Topics include gender in the pre-colonial and colonial era, contemporary African women's movements, women in politics, development, HIV/AIDS and sexuality.
RELB 3150 Seminar in Buddhism and Gender
This seminar takes as its point of departure Carolyn Bynum's statements: "No scholar studying religion, no participant in ritual, is ever neuter. Religious experience is the experience of men and women, and in no known society is this experience the same." The unifying theme is gender and Buddhism, exploring historical, textual, and social questions relevant to the status of women and men in the Buddhist world from its origins to the present day.
RELB 8758 Tutorial in Gender and Buddhism in Asia
This tutorial will examine the making of gender in Buddhist practice across Asia. We will interweave discussions in three regions of Asia: We will read historical texts on men, women, and Pa¿¿aka from South Asia; women as patrons of Buddhist art in East Asia; and contemporary ethnographic accounts of gender and gendered Buddhist movements in Southeast Asia
RELJ 3390 Queer Judiasm
No current course description.
SOC 3400 Gender and Sexuality
Focuses on the construction of gender and sexuality, and of the many ways human groups regulate and attach meanings to these categories. Some general themes addressed will be: contemporary and historical definitions of gender, sex, and sexuality; gender socialization; the varieties of sexual identities and relationships; embodiment, childbearing, and families in the contemporary United States. Prerequisite: At least 3 credits in Sociology or permission of instructor.