Undergraduate WGS Course Descriptions
WGS 2100 Intro to Gender & Sexuality Studies
Corinne Field
An introduction to gender and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) studies, including the fields of women’s studies, feminist studies, & masculinity studies. Students will examine historical movements, theoretical issues, & contemporary debates, especially as they pertain to issues of inequality & to the intersection of gender, race, class, sexuality, & nationalism. Emphasis will vary according to the interdisciplinary expertise & research focus of the instructor.
Special Note: Required for all WGS majors and minors, Intro courses do not count toward concentrations.
WGS 2559 Feminist Science Studies
Sarah Orsak
Scientific claims are seen as objective and the pinnacle of real knowledge; this has given them incredible power to shape how we understand our identities and how we imagine social transformation. For these reasons, feminist and queer thinkers have spent many decades grappling with science and imagining new, feminist, sciences. In this course, we will explore the vibrant interdisciplinary field of Feminist Science Studies. Feminist Science Studies asks philosophical questions about how scientific knowledge is produced. To study “science” (to study how “we” study and make claims about the world around us) is to ask how scientific research and practices emerge from our social worlds.
This course introduces the varied ways feminist and queer thinkers have engaged science, which include conducting scientific research, critiquing science, and using science for social change. We will also address feminist and queer perspectives on scientific claims about race, gender, and sexuality (both modern and historical), contemporary scientific and ethical issues, and interdisciplinary research practices.
Fulfills the Science & Society requirement
WGS 2559 Sexual Health & Peer Leadership
To Be Announced
This course will equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary for serving as peer leaders for their friends and organizations (e.g., dorms, CIOs, Greek chapters, professional organizations, etc.) related to sex, sexual health, sexual harm, and university resources. Broadly, this course will cover sexual health education, the landscape of sexual harm, and leadership and communication skills. Note: this course does not teach individual-level counseling skills.
WGS 2600 Human Sexualities
Lisa Speidel
Examines human sexuality from psychological, biological, behavioral, social, and historical perspectives. Topics include sexual research and theoretical perspectives, sexual anatomy and physiology, sexual health, intimacy, communication, patterns of sexual response and pleasure and sexual problems and therapies. Course will also include examination of the development of sexuality and the intersections of other identities, gender identity, sexual orientation, sexuality and the law, sexual assault, and other social issues in sexuality.
WGS 2700 Men and Masculinities
Lisa Speidel
What is understood as "masculine" has varied throughout time as well as across cultural contexts and distinct social groupings, it is equally true that most historical periods, cultures, groups, etc. believe their own understandings of masculinity to be universal. In this course, we will deconstruct this. From this class, you should be able to think critically about where men and masculinity have been, where they are going, and what this might mean more generally for gender relations and gender inequality.
WGS 3100 Intro to WGS Theory
Tiffany King
Explores major debates, key ideas, and historical developments in women, gender, & sexuality theory. Students will gain familiarity with queer, trans, and feminist theory, including Black, Native, socialist, crip, and other approaches. Will consider the different methods that gender & sexuality scholars have used to explain the social world, and why such explanations are vital to WGS. Course emphasizes reading, discussion,and critical writing.
WGS 3125 Transnational Feminism
Srimati Basu
This course places women, feminism, and activism in a transnational perspective, and offers students the opportunity to examine how issues considered critical to the field of gender studies are impacting women's lives globally in contemporary national contexts. We will look closely at how violence, economic marginality, intersections of race and gender, and varied strategies for development are affecting women in specific geographical locations.
Course Category: Non-Western Perspectives
WGS 3150 Race & Power in Gender & Sexuality
Taylor Nichols
Offers a study of race-racialization in relation to gender-sexuality. Consider how the concept of race shapes relationships between gendered selfhood & society, how it informs identity & experiences of the erotic, & how racialized gender & sexuality are created-maintained-monitored. With an interdisciplinary perspective, we will consider how race & power are reproduced & resisted through gender & sexuality, individually-national-international.
WGS 3230 Gender and the Olympic Games
Bonnie Hagerman
In ancient Greece, women risked death if they even attended the Olympic Games. As Pierre de Coubertin looked to revive the games in 1896, he thought women better suited to cheering on the male victors, than to competing themselves. This course will explore women's early participation in the Olympic Games, the pressures upon Olympic sportswomen to be feminine, and the important intersections of race, class, and sexual orientation.
Course Category: Non-Western Perspectives
WGS 3500 RM Course: Gender, Law, Violence
Srimati Basu
This course considers the relations between the terms gender, law and violence, with a focus on methods and strategies for investigating and representing these topics. The course is interdisciplinary and transnational in its scope, and examines scales of violence from intimate to community to State, bodily to psychological, economic to cultural. Texts for discussion include essays, films and TV episodes, a play, survey and ethnographic research. You will also work on an independent project where you apply these questions to your topic.
Fulfills the Second Writing Requirement and Enhanced Writing Requirement
Course Category: Non-Western Perspectives
WGS 3500 RM Course: Feminist Methods
Sarak Orsak
WGS is interdisciplinary; it encompasses a wide range of topics and draws on methods from
a multitude of disciplines. What holds this work together? What makes this research “feminist” or “queer”? Feminist and queer scholars continue to debate these questions. So, if you’ve ever wondered “what even is gender studies?” you’re not alone!
This class focuses on these questions about what we know and how we know it (epistemology). We will move through the “who,” “what,” “why,” “how,” and “where” of feminist and queer research, exploring scholars’ varied answers to questions like:
- How does personal experience matter (or not) for research?
- What kinds of topics do WGS scholars study?
- Why do we /they study these things?
- Can knowledge be produced in genres or forms beyond academic writing?
- How does the context of the university shape feminist research?
Because these are such big questions, we will engage a multitude of fields, including Black feminist theory, woman of color feminisms, affect theory, queer of color critique, disability studies, and critical university studies.
As a Second Writing course, the class also addresses more practical habits of mind for feminist scholars, building your skills in critical thinking, reading, and writing. You will learn to enter scholarly conversations and engage feminist scholarship in order to research a topic of interest to you. The course aims to increase your confidence in reading feminist, queer, and theoretical scholarship and in expressing your own unique contributions to these conversations.
Fulfills the Second Writing Requirement
WGS 3600 Pleasure Activism Across Time
Lisa Speidel
The history of white supremacy & the heteropatriarchy includes denying sexual pleasure of marginalized communities. A major benefit of pleasure is empowerment, which threatens power structures & leads to restrictive practices & laws. This course focuses on queer activists & feminists of color who examine pleasure, systemic oppression, & the connection of inner desires & needs -physical, mental, & emotional -as a part of enacting social change.
WGS 3612 Gender and Sexuality in the United States, 1865-Present
Bonnie Hagerman
This course explores the significance of gender and sexuality in the territory of the present-day U.S. during the period from the Civil War to the present.
Fulfills the Second Writing Requirement and Historical Perspectives
WGS 3896 Front Lines of Social Change II
Taylor Nichols
This course explores the diverse narratives and strategies of individuals and groups at the forefront of social justice movements. Through a critical examination of selected readings, students will engage with a variety of ideologies and approaches aimed at creating systemic change. While these activists may share common goals, their pathways to achieving these objectives differ significantly, reflecting a rich tapestry of thought and action.
WGS 4500 Topics Course: How To Do Drag
Aaron Stone
Course description: This course examines drag performance as a cultural phenomenon with an emphasis on representation: how various forms of media "do" drag by shaping cultural narratives about it. We will analyze and compare representations of drag in film, television, novels, life writing, social media, and academic theory to consider how these diverse representational forms construct our ideas about what "doing drag" is and what it means.
WGS 4500 Topics Course: Sex, Power, and Rock n' Roll
Isabel Gonzales
Popular music has long been a site for contestations over gender, sex, race, and class. From Disco Demolition Night to fears over the “Sinister Cult of Emo,” spectacles around popular music have been sites of power and its pushback. But popular music also offers inroads to better understand the institutions, structures, systems, and histories that shape our everyday lives. In this class, we will explore gender, sex, race, class, empire, and power through the last century of popular music and its spectacles. Through critically examining the songs, albums, and performances that have shaped shared sonic and visual cultural landscapes, students will come to better understand the important role that pop culture plays in shaping the conditions of our lives, including possibilities of resistance.
Undergraduate Elective Course Descriptions
AAS 3500 Black Women, Slavery & Freedom
Adam McNeil
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 2559 3500 Intro to Black Queer Film
Ashon Crawley
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.
AMST 2500 Commodify Race/Gender/Sexuality
David Coyoca
Topics vary according to instructor. The goal of the course is to introduce students to interdisciplinary work in American Studies by juxtaposing works across disciplinary boundaries and from different methodological perspectives.
AMST 3428 Race, Gender, Music
Fiona Ngo
This class explores the political connections between race, gender, and music. The course considers questions of representation, the practice and politics of listening, the political and economic modes of production, and racial formation. In order to explore these topics, this version of the course is broken into three thematic sections: Sound, Score, and Structure. The course is taught intersectionally, meaning we will deal with issues of race, gender, sexuality, labor, and national identity.
AMST 3559 Queer Cultures
Fiona Ngo
New Course in the subject of American Studies
BIOL 4559 Sex and the Genome
Katja Kasimatis
New course in the subject of biology.
CHTR 3840 Writing Women in Modern China
Charles Laughlin
This seminar focuses on works of fiction from modern China that articulate womanhood from a variety of perspectives. In addition to women writers (Qiu Jin, Ding Ling, Eileen Chang, Xi Xi, Chen Ran, Zhu Tianxin), male writers such as Xu Dishan, Mao Dun, and Lao She who devote unusual attention to feminine subjectivity are also included. Familiarity with Chinese culture and society and literary analysis are preferred, but not required.
Course Category: Non-Western Perspectives
DRAM 4040 Queer Performance
Katelyn Wood
This seminar will examine queer performance and its many meanings in the contemporary United States. We will study a wide range of queer-identifying artists and artists with significant queer fan bases. We will also read foundational texts in queer studies and engage in various learning activities, such as writing prompts, group discussion, creative practice, and improvisation.
ENGL 2506 Queer American Poets
Peyton Davis
What does it mean to be queer? What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be a poet? All of these questions have a major characteristic in common: they are each associated with entire fields of study. In this class, we will look at queer American poets through each of these lenses (sexuality/queer studies, American studies, and poetic studies) to understand how poets seek to answer these questions for themselves.
How have poets over the last century balanced multiple facets of identity (e.g., race, gender, class) in relation to their queerness and Americanness? How have major historical events influenced or inspired queer American poetry? What characteristics does queer American poetry have outside of being queer and American? In order to answer some of these questions, we will read poets such as Amy Lowell, Claude McKay, Pauli Murray, Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Ocean Vuong.
Course requirements include regular attendance and active participation in discussion, a presentation, and shorter and longer writing assignments together totaling 20 pages.
ENGL 2508 Gender and the Gothic
Cristina Griffin
In this class, we will read (and watch) stories that engage with the long tradition of the gothic: stories that are pleasurably thrilling, that structure themselves around suspense, secrecy, romance, intrigue, and even sometimes fear. We will begin the term by focusing on some of the eighteenth-century texts that established and popularized the gothic conventions that novelists, filmmakers, and television writers still use today. We will then turn to more contemporary reactions to the gothic, investigating how twentieth- and twenty-first-century forms respond to the gothic genre. Our focus as we make our way across the centuries will be on how these stories open up questions about gender. How do gothic texts represent women’s bodies? What is the relationship between gender and violence? How do gendered portrayals of the gothic change over time or embody different political and cultural crises? How do popular contemporary forms—the television show, dystopian fiction—reimagine the gothic?
UVA is the ideal place to study gothic literature, since it houses the world’s largest collection of gothic fiction. We will immerse ourselves in this vast treasure trove with an archival project in which you will become an expert on a gothic novel, and contribute your findings to a digital companion to the archive. No library or research experience necessary: we will be working from the ground up as you learn to give these important gothic texts new lives in the twenty-first century.
ENGL 2520 Queer Writing
John Modica
This course is designed to transform your relationship to writing by introducing you to queer theories and practices of writing. We will consider what it means to enact a ‘queer’ approach to writing today, and put our theories to the test in our own writing and classroom activities.
ENGL 2572 Black Women Writers
Lisa Woolfork
This seminar uses Black women’s writings from mid-century to the present to introduce new English majors to important concepts in literary analysis. To better understand genre, themes, and assorted literary conventions, we will focus closely on a range of literary styles. We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day. Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women’s writing of the last eighty years? How has the literature adapted in response to specific cultural or historical moments? Writers include Gwendolyn Brooks, Deesha Philyaw, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde and more. This course satisfies the English major prerequisite, the second writing requirement, and the AIP disciplines requirement.
ENGL 4510 Medieval Women
Courtney Watts
The Middle Ages left behind written discourses about women, by women, and for women that are surprisingly rich and varied. In exploring that record, we will consider not only misogyny, but also women as protagonists of their own adventures and women as authors and authorities in both secular and religious texts. We will read the words of the visionaries St. Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich, tales of the crossdressing St. Euphrosyne and a fictional knight named Silence, and the writing of prominent female authors Marie de France and Christine de Pizan. Along the way, we will consider the meanings of gender, sexuality, and authority in Medieval Europe and the many roles of women as subjects of and participants in literary discourse. This course assumes no prior knowledge of Middle English or the Middle Ages, but it will require you to (learn to) read a few of these texts in their original Middle English. It will also invite you to think about gender, sexuality, and the medieval world in new and nuanced ways and to consider the inheritences, literary and intellectual, left to our own time.
ENGL 4560 Contemporary Women's Texts
Susan Fraiman
This course takes up recent Anglophone works by women across multiple genres and referencing a range of cultural contexts. Primary texts include visual as well as literary forms. A selection of secondary materials will help to gloss their formal, thematic, and ideological characteristics while giving students a taste of contemporary theory. Possible works (final list still to be determined) include fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri, Carmen Machado, Alice Munro, Doris Lessing, Danzy Senna, Ryu Murakami, and Chimamanda Adichie; memoirs by Suad Amiry, Maggie Nelson, Michelle Zauner, and Sarah Smarsh; a graphic narrative by Roz Chast; a play by Annie Baker; a neo-Western film by Kelly Reichardt; images by South African photographer Zanele Muholi. Among our likely concerns will be the juxtaposition of verbal and visual elements in a single text; depictions of queer, raced, immigrant, and transnational subjectivities; narratives that make “truth claims” and how such claims affect the reader; representations of growing up, aging, migration, maternity, violence, marriage, creativity, sexuality, and work; ties and tensions among women across boundaries of place, generation, class, and race. One project of the course will be to explore its own premise that “women’s texts” is a useful and meaningful category. Two papers and a final exam. This course is intended for 3rd- and 4th-year English majors or other advanced students with a background in literary/cultural/gender studies.
HIUS 4501 Race, Nation, and Gender
Chloe Porche
The major seminar is a small class (not more than 15 students) intended primarily but not exclusively for history majors who have completed two or more courses relevant to the topic of the seminar. The work of the seminar results primarily in the preparation of a substantial (ca. 25 pp. in standard format) research paper. Some restrictions and prerequisites apply to enrollment. See a history advisor or the director of undergraduate studies.
JPTR 3391 Women and Gender in Modern Japanese Literature
Anri Yasuda
This course will study how women and femininity have been represented in modern Japan--roughly defined as Japan from the 1890s to the present--mostly through textual literature but also through other mediums including film, manga, and stage productions. We will also analyze how modern and contemporary Japanese treatments of gender and individual identity reflect and/or defy broader global discourses on these issues.
Course Category: Non-Western Perspectives
MUSI 2150 Women in Jazz
Nicole Mitchell Gantt
Jazz has historically been a male-dominated field. Who are the women artists whose work emerged in jazz, what is their music, and what are their stories of inspiration, creativity, struggles and triumphs? Through our exploration of recordings, scholarship, music journalism, video, film and live music performance we will ponder these questions and gain a better understanding of how the politics of gender have challenged jazz music.
SATR 3000 Women Writing in India & Pakistan: 1947-Present
Mehr Farooqi
We will read and critique the fiction and poetry of culturally specific regions while reflecting on the assumption that experiences and identities are fundamentally gendered. We will explore issues associated with women writing in regional languages to writing in mainstream languages like Hindi, Urdu and English. We will also examine how the publication and dissemination of women's texts are related to the women movements in India and Pakistan. Prerequisite: Completion of First Writing Requirement
Course Category: Non-Western Perspectives
SOC 2320 Gender and Society
Esta Sarioglu
Gender and Society
Graduate WGS Course Descriptions
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Graduate Elective Course Descriptions
ENGL 5500 Transforming Desire
Clare Kinney
This seminar will focus upon lyric, narrative and dramatic works from the medieval and Renaissance periods which explore the striking metamorphoses and the various (and on occasion very queer) trajectories of earthly—and not so earthly--love. We'll be examining the ways in which desire is represented as transforming the identity and consciousness and language of the lover; we will also be examining (and attempting to historicize) strategies employed by our authors to variously transform, redefine, enlarge and contain the erotic impulse. We'll start with some selections from the Metamorphoses of Ovid; we will finish with two of Shakespeare’s most striking reinventions of love. Along the way we’ll be looking at the gendering of erotic representation and erotic speech, the intermittent entanglement of secular and sacred love, the role of genre in refiguring eros, and some intersections between the discourses of sexuality and the discourses of power.
HISA 5559 Decolonial Gender
Indrani Chatterjee
This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of South Asian history.
PSYC 9501 Intersect Identity & Sexuality
Lanice Avery
Independent laboratory research undertaken with advisor. Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory and can be repeated. Instructor permission required.
SOC 9570 Advanced Topics in Gender and Sexuality
TBA
This course covers selected topics related to gender and sexuality.