Global Arc

Advanced seminar; focus changes from year to year. In general the seminar uses contemporary and classic works of feminist theory to examine ideas about gender that have shaped modern culture. Topics have included feminism and liberalism, literature and ideology, and psychoanalysis and feminism.

Feminist Futures explores the way in which recent women writers have transformed science fiction into speculative fiction - an innovative literary form capable of introducing and exploring new kinds of feminist and multi-cultural perspectives. These books confront the limitations imposed on women and imagine transformative possibilities for thinking about gender roles and relationships, the body, forms of power, and political and social structures.

This course is divided into four units, each unit introducing varieties of feminist engagements with bioethics, key feminist arguments and concerns, as well as contemporary debates both within feminist bioethics and regarding feminist engagement in bioethics. This course will examine the history of bioethics, as feminist critiques of its core principles-most notably autonomy-before moving on to examine debates among feminist bioethicists regarding key issues in the field. These include the importance and value of care; abortion and reproductive rights; the importance of intersectionality to bioethical analyses; and the obesity epidemic.

An exploration of the relationships between the idea of "woman'' and the art of film. Issues addressed will include the role of woman as performer and director, questions of film genre, the identification of the female image as constitutive of the cinematic image, the historical and social dimensions of the female image projected in films of different times and different cultures. Film screenings, one three-hour seminar.

The study of culture involves myriad approaches and methods, and attracts researchers in and outside sociology. This course aims to explore scholarship that draws, in different ways, on combined contributions from gender studies, criminology and deviance, media studies, and the growing field of cultural studies. Its goals are to increase your knowledge of issues in each of these sociological subfields; to explore theories and methods used by scholars in these areas; and to assist students in developing their own research projects. One three-hour seminar.

This course examines theatrical performance as a mode of theorizing about gender, sex, sexuality and embodiment. Through lecture, discussion and performance workshops, this course draws upon contemporary U.S. dramatic literature as it undertakes a multinational, historical survey of theories of performance. The course considers such topics as gender as performance, cross-gender performance, performances of sexual identity, and the explicit body in performance.

This course examines enactments of youthful masculinity in U.S. popular performance with a particular eye toward accounts of variant or queer boyhoods. As we scrutinize the regimentation and valorization of specific boyish behaviors, we will explore the cultural impact of non-normative youthful masculinities (ie. sissies, tomboys, bois, punks, transguys, etcetera) as we also assess the place of queer boyhoods in American life. Course readings will be historical, literary and theoretical, with play scripts, films, memoirs and literature for young readers functioning as primary objects for the course's analytic project.

An exploration of the literary works of women writers in the United States with an emphasis on the role gender has played and continues to play in the development of literary movements and genres. Our examination of both canonical and non-canonical writings will focus on the formation of feminist literary conventions in the 19th century and their transformations in the 20th and 21st centuries. Our reading will include romantic tales, ghost stories, realistic stories, novels of immigration, thrillers, works for children, autobiographical mythmaking, poetry, and graphic novels.

As it approaches its centennial, the Miss America Pageant (1921- ) stands among the most enduring - and enduringly controversial - popular performance traditions of American life and culture. This course offers an intensive, method-based historical overview of how "Miss America" as both idea and event documents the shifting ways gender, sexuality, race and embodiment been comprehended in the United States, even as it also examines the disparate ways the "beauty pageant" as a performance genre has been adopted and adapted by/for communities excluded by the rules of Miss America.

Science is commonly held to be the objective, empirical pursuit of natural facts about the world. In this course, we will consider an array of theoretical, methodological, and substantive challenges that feminism has posed for this account of science, and for the practice of scientific knowledge production. In the course of this survey, we shall engage a number of key questions such as: is science gendered, racialized, ableist or classist? Does the presence or absence of women (and another marginalized individuals) lead to the production of different kinds of scientific knowledge?