Global Arc

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?

This introduction to disability studies draws together the work of feminists and queer theorists with that of historians and clinicians in order to contextualize the field's major theoretical claims. We will take up and critique the oft-made distinction between natural, physical impairment and socially constructed disability, situating it with regards to Michel Foucault's account of biopower, and his controversial claims in Society Must Be Defended regarding "racism against the abnormal".

Queer Sexualities is an interdisciplinary course, which intertwines the study of human sexuality from scientific and public health perspectives with queer academic writing about sexual orientation and gender. Through the lenses of human sexuality theory, social science and medical perspectives, biological and sexual functioning, and LGBT history and subcultures, this course will explore the many ways in which queer sexualities, identities, and relationships are constructed, expressed, and regulated.

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.