Global Arc

Calls for civility saturate contemporary public culture. Cultural commentators look to the promise of civility to solve the "problems" and challenges of stabilizing public norms. Civility is invested with the hope of regulating unseemly, offensive and non-normative practices across a variety of contexts. In this course, we will examine civility as an object for which we long and which in its various manifestations can be seen doing the work of normalizing political practice.

An exploration of the ways in which gender and crime are intertwined in some of the most significant and popular works of American fiction. Our analysis of the aesthetic, cultural, and psychological dimensions of narratives based on crime and detection will focus on texts by both women and men with an emphasis on the capacity of gender studies to illuminate American crime fiction's recurring concern with questions of race and class, justice and power, violence and victimhood.

Pleasure Power and Profit explores the intimate ways that sexualities and race are entwined in contemporary culture, historically, and in our own lives. Why are questions about sexuality and race some of the most controversial, compelling, yet often taboo issues of our time? Exploring films, popular culture, novels, social media, and theory, we engage themes like: race, gender and empire; fetishism, Barbie, vampires and zombies; sex work and pornography; marriage and monogamy; queer sexualities; and strategies for social empowerment such as: Black Lives Matter, the new campus feminism, and global movements against sexual and gender violence.

This course will explore the emergence and circulation of the category of transgenderism within medical, philosophical, feminist, autobiographical, political, and literary discourses. What can transpeople's accounts teach feminist and queer theory about embodiment and gender? Conversely, what sort of framings has queer theory offered trans studies and what might it continue to provide? Is transsexual to transgender as homosexual is to queer? If, as some have suggested, transgender studies has ushered in a post-queer era, what is it, exactly, in queer theory that has been surpassed?

Addresses contributions by women, LGBT people, feminists, and people of color to contemporary U.S. theatre and performance. Analyzes performance forms, contents, intents, contexts, and reception to ponder how people who straddle identity vectors influence American culture and help imagine our changing nation. Surveys significant U.S. human rights movements and the performance forms through which many were vitalized. Considers how some minority groups became central to theatre culture by the 21st century and whether or not forums like Broadway dilute the radical politics in which these struggles began.

The goal of this course is to help you find your unique, creative voice by writing the body. We devote each class to two things: work-shopping your stories or essays in an intimate, collaborate environment; and engaging some of the most exciting published writers of our time.

An exploration of the graphic memoir focusing on the ways specific works combine visual imagery and language to expand the possibilities of autobiographical narrative. Through our analysis of highly acclaimed graphic memoirs from the American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese traditions, we analyze the visual and verbal constructions of identity with an emphasis on the representation of gender dynamics and cultural conflict.

Things work to construct our social relationships and categories, to shape our social lives and worlds. This course will consider how things have lives of their own specifically in the construction of modes and practices of gender - things like items of dress, but also public washrooms, children's toys, cereal boxes, and even trash. Making use of the emerging discourse of "thing theory," a conversation about material culture including anthropologists, philosophers, cultural theorists, archaeologists, art historians, political scientists, economists, and others, we will work to consider objects in their influence on the social world of gender.

An exploration of two aspects of the gender and science literature: the historical participation of women (and men) in scientific work and the feminist critique of scientific knowledge. The seminar will explore ways in which women have been systematically excluded from science and assess the problems with that thesis. One three-hour seminar.

Feminist media studies are a rich field of inquiry, while feminism is a recurring object of media fascination. Media stories of feminism circulate as authoritative. Feminist arguments often become public spectacles where the media leers at and dismisses feminist speech. These spectacularly public representations reduce the multiplicity of feminist positions and voices.