Courses

GNSE 12114 Feminist Ethics | Instructor: Kat Myers
Many injustices in the world are related to gender oppression and inequality. In this introductory course, we will examine the ways that feminist ethics aims to identify, assess, and correct gender biases that perpetuate these harms. We will begin by situating feminist ethics within its historical context to understand its development and motivations. We will then consider different methods and approaches that feminists use to identify and critique oppressive social structures. With these tools in hand, we will turn our attention to several acute sources of gender oppression and inequality, paying particular attention to the global labor market, human and non-human bodies, reproductive mores, and climate change. Throughout the course, we will examine the intersections of gender with religion, race, class, and global location, while critically evaluating the influence of Western feminism on global perspectives of oppression and inequality. We will focus on the influence of religion on feminist ethics and will include texts by feminists that engage with religious traditions. As we read, we will explore the normative commitments that are expressed in the texts, as well as the bases for these commitments and the religious and secular sources of authority to which the authors appeal as they claim to advance gender justice. This course is designed for undergraduate students and assumes no prior knowledge of ethics, feminist studies, or religious studies. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12135 Reading the Rom-Com: Renaissance and Modern | Instructor: Sarah Gray Lesley
This course challenges the common assumption that modern romantic comedies are not worthy of academic study by examining early modern iterations of the genre--from William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew (1590) to Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677). In turning to these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, we will consider how this often trivialized genre encodes, theorizes, and problematizes issues of gender, sex, class, race, and desire through its familiar formula of "simply" getting some people to fall in love. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12140 Eccentrics, Visionaries, Deviants? Queer Religion, Ethics, and Politics | Instructor: Virginia White
Challenging the assumption that religion and queerness are inherently at odds, this course introduces the dynamic field of queer religious studies. We will ask: what do religions teach about sex and gender? How have religious communities defined and resisted sexual and gendered norms? How do religious LGBTQ+ people navigate, negotiate, and sometimes contest these ideas? Readings will allow us to trace the contemporary rise of homophobia and transphobia in politics, law, and religion as historical phenomena, while uncovering the hidden religious histories and lives that defy religious heteronormativity and transphobia. To lay the groundwork for investigating the complex relationships between religion, sexuality, and politics, we will read foundational texts in queer theory (Judith Butler and Michel Foucault). While selected case studies of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities will demonstrate the complexities of today’s landscape, and engagement with queer religious thinkers will illustrate some political and social trajectories for queer religion and spirituality. Ultimately, seminar conversations and student site-visits will provide opportunities to learn how religion and sexuality interact and to consider how queer religiosities can enliven eccentric ways of being and transformative visions of community. No prior experience with religious studies or queer theory required. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12141 Reproductive Futures | Instructor: Emily D. Crews
What is the future of human reproduction? What do religious and literary narratives tell us about when, how, why, and with whom we should (and should not) be reproducing? What do alien pregnancies, magical births, forced surrogacy, and artificial wombs have to do with the landscape of contemporary religions? And what can religion, science fiction, and fantasy—as (sometimes inter-related) modes of speculation about what is possible in an uncertain world—help us to understand about the conditions under which the human species might persist or perish?

In this course, we will address these and other questions by putting theories about/from the areas of religion, reproductive politics, and science fiction into conversation with novels, poetry, music, film, and other forms of popular culture. Along the way, we’ll learn how gender, race, migration, the law, and the environment are implicated in the stories and technologies that shape human reproduction.This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12143 Trans Literature in the United States | Instructor: Gabriel Ojeda-Sague
This course focuses on the American history and aesthetics of trans literature. How has American literature changed through the innovations of trans writers? How has trans identity been shaped by literary narrative and form? And how has trans literature responded to or been shaped by American politics and culture, up to and including the executive declaration against the category of “gender” entirely? In this class, we will read together through major works by trans authors to gain a sense of the relationship between transgender life, narrative/poetic form, and the culture of the United States. Our syllabus thinks comparatively about trans literature across time periods, genres, and genders, including taking other forms of difference like sexuality, race, and ability as active analytical questions which modify and are modified by gender. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12144 The Invention of Lesbian Literature | Instructor: R.L. Willis
What is lesbian literature? Should any text produced by a self-identified lesbian be considered part of its canon, or are there identifiable lesbian styles, forms, conventions, or other parameters through which we might define it? What is the relationship between modernism and the explosion of literary works taking up lesbian themes in the 20th century? In this course, we will tackle these questions and more while reading lesbian literature across the 20th century, beginning with queer(ed) works from writers of modernist period–Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and Nella Larsen, before moving on to think about lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s, radical feminist science-fiction of the 1970s, and Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 transgender novel Stone Butch Blues, among others.This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 15002 Gender and Sexuality in World Civ I | Instructors: Various
The first quarter of the GNSE Civ sequence offers a historical examination of bodies, sex, and gender. Through a series of readings that include historical primary sources and examples of cultural production from antiquity to the present, we will investigate how bodies across a variety of cultures become sexed and gendered. In particular, we will ask how the very categories of sex and gender not only produce social meaning from bodies and their anatomical differences but may also be complicit in acts violence, oppression, and colonization. Thematically we will pay attention to the emergence and critique of the distinction between sex and gender; resistances to the gender binary; the relationship between gender, power, and authority; feminism and critiques of Western feminism; the category of woman as an object of scientific knowledge; and the flourishing of and violence against trans life. Finally, while we will be dealing with historical accounts in this course, the aim is to understand how the regulation of bodies in the past has informed and may challenge our understanding of the diversity of embodied experience in the present.

GNSE 20001 Theories of Sexuality and Gender | Instructor: Kristen Schilt
This is a one-quarter, seminar-style course for undergraduates. Its aim is triple: to engage scenes and concepts central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality; to provide familiarity with key theoretical anchors for that study; and to provide skills for deriving the theoretical bases of any kind of method. Students will produce descriptive, argumentative, and experimental engagements with theory and its scenes as the quarter progresses. PQ: 3rd or 4th year status and previous coursework in GNSE.

GNSE 20116 Queering the American Family Drama | Instructor: Leslie Buxbaum
This course will examine what happens to the American Family Drama on stage when the 'family' is queer. Working in dialogue with a current production at Court Theatre, we will move beyond describing surface representations into an exploration of how queering the family implicates narrative, plot, character, formal conventions, aesthetics and production conditions (e.g. casting, venues, audiences, marketing and critical reception). Texts will include theatrical plays and musicals, recorded and live productions, and queer performance theory. This course will be a combined seminar and studio, inviting students to investigate through readings, discussion, staging experiments, and a choice of either a final paper or artistic project.This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20127 Black Women Work: The Labor of Black Women in Communities, Families, and Institutions | Instructor: Lisa Moore
This multidisciplinary course will explore the labor of Black women in three distinct arenas-communities, families, and institutions. Students will explore these areas through engaging with historical and contemporary narratives, research, and popular media, heavily drawing in a U.S. context, but not exclusively. Through an engagement of Black women in the U.S. labor force, this course will explore three questions. How has the labor of Black women contributed to the sustainability of communities, families, and institutions? What are the choices Black women make to engage and sustain their work? What is the future of the labor of Black women? Is the future one that is liberatory or not? Students will leave this course with an understanding of the ways intersectional experiences of oppression contribute to complex conditions and decision-making, that shape the labor of Black women, the function of certain labor decisions as sites of resistance, as well as the generative resources that support the professional success and well-being of Black women. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20137 Horror, Abjection, and the Monstrous Feminine | Instructor: Hoda El Shakry
This course explores cinematic and literary works of horror (the uncanny, gothic, sci-fi, paranormal, psychological thriller, killer/slasher, gore) from around the world. As a mode of speculative fiction, the genre envisions possible or imagined worlds that amplify curiosities, dreads, fears, terrors, phobias, and paranoias which simultaneously repel and attract. Horror frequently explores the boundaries of what it means to be human by dwelling on imaginaries of the non-human and other. It often exploits the markers of difference that preoccupy our psychic, libidinal, and social lifeworlds—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, but also the fundamental otherness that is other peoples’ minds and bodies. Interrogating the genre’s tension between desire and fear, our course will focus on the centrality of abjection and the monstrous feminine—as both thematic and aesthetic tropes—to works of horror. Films and fiction will be paired with theoretical readings that contextualize the genre of horror while considering its critical implications in relation to biopolitical and geopolitical forms of power.

Content Warning: Course materials will feature graphic, violent, and oftentimes disturbing images and subjects. Enrolled students will be expected to watch, read, and discuss all course materials. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20148 Drama Queens: Women Playwrights in the Renaissance | Instructor: Noémie Ndiaye
This course will introduce you to early modern women playwrights from England (Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn) and from continental Europe (the French Marguerite de Navarre and Madame de Villedieu, the Italian Antonia Pulci and Margherita Costa, the Spanish Ana Caro and—beyond Europe— the Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz). We will analyze the complex works, ideas, and lives of those brilliant playwrights through the lenses of intersectional trans inclusive feminism, transnationalism, and premodern critical race studies. Throughout, we will remain alert to the sense of possibility that suffuses these plays’ political imagination. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE  20155 Queer Love Poetry | Instructor: Anna Elena Torres  
This course examines the long history of queer love poetry, from the ancient world to postmodernism. Its readings are particularly interested in how modernists claimed literary lineages of queer poetics, queered social practices and communal literary spaces, and reinvented verse forms to reflect queer eros. We will study works from Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Greek, and several other languages. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20156 Female Complaint from Sappho to Aphra Behn | Instructor: Sarah Kunjummen
Beginning with influential classical texts, including the poetry of Sappho and Ovid's Heroides, this class explores early modern articulations of female complaint, both in women's writing of the period and as depicted by male writers. The course takes up some works in the mode of gender apologetic and polemic, including excerpts from Christine de Pisan's City of Ladies, Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" and Rachel Speght's "A Mouzell for Melastomus." It also tracks poetic complaint in the works of such writers as Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne ("Sappho to Philaenis"), Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, and excerpts of women's life-writing by Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. The class turns to contemporary critical frameworks including affect and trauma studies in order to explore the dynamics of how these texts stage questions of suffering, sympathy and representability. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20157 Labor, Sex, and Magic: Celestina and Other Witches | Instructor: Noel Blanco Mourelle
The image of witchcraft in the Iberian Peninsula is rooted in a tradition of technique, healing, bodily care, and the management of sexual labor. In this class, we will discuss the numerous witches of Iberian literary traditions (Trotaconventos, Eufrosina, Fabia), paying particular attention to Fernando de Rojas’s "Celestina," written during the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. These witches orchestrate the romances of unfortunate young people and strive for survival in the shifting urban landscape of pre-modernity, a time of wars, revolts, plagues, and catastrophes. In this class, we will explore the status of these women within the social transformations of their time, why so many authors regarded them as emblematic figures of pre-modern Iberian cities, and what they reveal to us today about the lives of women in that era.This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20158 Celebrity Cultures: Divas, Queers, and Drags in Latin America
| Instructor: Carlos Gustavo Halaburda
This course takes students on a journey into the dazzling world of divas, queers, and drag performers who reshaped Latin America’s cultural, social, and political repertoires. From Eva Perón’s iconic political mythology and María Félix’s femme fatale allure to the radical defiance of Pedro Lemebel and the cosmic magnetism of Walter Mercado, we will explore how these larger-than-life figures resisted and undermined heteronormative and misogynistic regimes. Engaging critical theory, queer studies, and aesthetic analysis, the course invites students to engage with the commodification of celebrity in the culture industry, the performative dynamics of identity, and queer culture’s fascination with camp, glamour, and abjection. Revisiting concepts like the society of the spectacle and hyperreal personas, students will uncover how these icons transformed the public sphere  and disrupted hegemonic power structures. The course also examines celebrity labor as affective production and the participatory cultures that turn fandom into a consumer community, and into a nostalgic and repetitive ritual in the context of digital neoliberalism. Through discussions, close readings of critical texts, and multimedia explorations of films and performances, students will learn how divas, queers, and drag performers redefined aesthetic innovation and became fearless agents of political subversion in the region and beyond. The course will be taught in Spanish and English. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20164 Queer Reproduction | Instructor: Paula Martin
What makes reproduction queer, and how do queers reproduce? In some senses, more people than ever before have access to reproductive technologies and to family building resources. People of all genders and sexualities utilize tools to combat infertility such as in vitro fertilization, gamete donation, surrogacy, and adoption, sometimes reproducing the normative family form and other times expanding it. Kinship categories, from “diblings” (donor siblings) to house mothers, can be artifacts both of culture and of science, and reflect ways of understanding what constitutes a family and what relationships become considered family. This course asks after the many mechanisms which can be taken to foster or hinder queer reproduction, thinking through the tools for managing social and biological infertility alongside cultural anxieties about queer reproduction more broadly, as enacted through bans on queer representation in classrooms and other policies. We will consider how specific technologies emerge and are utilized among groups who identity as queer and those who do not, ask after the legacy of queerness and its association with non-procreative forms of intimacy, and map the ways that the figure of the child is always bound up with some vision of the future (of the family, the nation, or humanity itself). This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20165 How did we get to Dobbs? Reproduction, gender, and the law 
| Instructor: David Lebow
This course will situate the landmark Dobbs decision, which held that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, within four widening concentric horizons of interpretation. The first horizon is legal: we will examine other relevant landmark cases on privacy and "history and tradition," as well as the state-state, state-federal, and public-private legal relations of the emerging abortion landscape. The second is jurisprudential--debates in legal scholarship over pertinent issues such as the liberty and equality rights of 14th Amendment, bodily integrity, and fetal personhood. Third will be social science that situates the conservative legal movement in the contexts of American constitutional development, historical patterns of political recurrence, and the political economy of the "family values" discourse. The fourth horizon will draw from social and political theory to consider other possible civic, biopolitical, economic, psychological, and racial dimensions to the legal regulation of reproduction and motherhood. This course is an LLSO junior colloquium and will accordingly require a substantial independent research paper. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20620 Literature, Medicine, and Embodiment | Instructor: Heather Glenny
This class explores the connections between imaginative writing and embodiment, especially as bodies have been understood, cared for, and experienced in the framework of medicine. We’ll read texts that address sickness, healing, diagnosis, disability, and expertise. The class also introduces a number of related theoretical approaches, including the medical humanities, disability studies, narrative medicine, the history of the body, and the history of science. 

GNSE 21001 Cultural Psychology | Instructor: Richard Shweder
There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of "normal" psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a single or uniform fundamental psychology for all peoples of the world. Research findings in cultural psychology thus raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. In this course we analyze the concept of "culture" and examine ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.

GNSE 21370 Ships, Tyrants, and Mutineers | Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
Since the Renaissance beginnings of the “age of sail,” the ship has been one of literature’s most contested, exciting, fraught, and ominous concepts. Ships are, on the one hand, globe-traversing spaces of alterity and possibility that offer freedom from the repression of land-based systems of power. From Lord Byron to Herman Melville to Anita Loos, the ship has been conceived as a site of queerness and one that puts great pressure on normative constructions of gender. At the same time, the ship has been a primary mechanism for the brutality of empire and hegemony of capital, the conduit by which vast wealth has been expropriated from the colony, military domination projected around the world, and millions of people kidnapped and enslaved. Indeed, the horror of the “Middle Passage” of the Atlantic slave trade has been a major focus of inquiry for theorists like Paul Gilroy and Hortense Spillers, interrogating how concepts of racial identity and structures of racism emerge out of oceanic violence. In the 20th and 21st centuries, science-fiction writers have sent ships deep into outer space, reimagining human social relations and even humans-as-species navigating the stars. While focusing on the Enlightenment and 19th century, we will examine literary and filmic texts through the present that have centered on the ship, as well as theoretical texts that will help us to deepen our inquiries. Note: one session will be held at the Newberry Library's maps collections. 

GNSE 22200 Haunting and/as/of Power | Instructor: Tanima Sharma
Haunting is a liminal category that signifies presence despite absence, unfinished pasts in the present, and ruptures within what is considered rational, normal and real. In this course we will examine multiple hauntings - as metaphor and as experience - situating them within the geographies and afterlives of racial and caste capitalism, gendered dispossession, empire, and the postcolony. Mediated through cultural theory, literature, film, historical archives and ethnographies, we will encounter vampires, zombies, witches, jinn, ghosts, transgender monsters, ancestors, the paranormal, phantoms, and other desiring, friendly or vengeful spirits in order to understand how they story memory, time, space, embodiment, and violence. How can the spectral be deciphered? What does being haunted feel like? How does haunting as an analytic foreground the sensuous, affective, intimate and overwhelming dimensions of structures of power? We will answer these questions and more through the work of David McNally, Tithi Bhattacharya, Silvia Federici, Hil Malatino, Diego Escolar, Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, Avery Gordon, Stefania Pandolfo, Emily Ng, Ryo Morimoto, Susan Lepselter, and Tanya Tagaq, among others.

GNSE 22320 Critical Videogame Studies | Instructors: Patrick Jagoda and Ashlyn Sparrow
Since the 1960s, games have arguably blossomed into the world's most profitable and experimental medium. This course attends specifically to video games, including popular arcade and console games, experimental art games, and educational serious games. Students will analyze both the formal properties and sociopolitical dynamics of video games. Readings by theorists such as Ian Bogost, Roger Caillois, Alenda Chang, Nick Dyer‐Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Soraya Murray, Lisa Nakamura, Amanda Phillips, and Trea Andrea Russworm will help us think about the growing field of video game studies. Students will have opportunities to learn about game analysis and apply these lessons to a collaborative game design project. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in digital media or game cultures will make for a more exciting quarter.

GNSE 23143  Intro to Porn Studies | Instructor: Gabriel Ojeda-Sague
This course is a multi-media introduction to the Western history and study of the mode/label/genre of aesthetic production called pornography and its other appearances as “obscenity,” “erotica,” “porn,” “filth,” “art,” “adult,” “hardcore,” “softcore,” “trash,” and “extremity.” We will study how others have approached this form, how they have sought to control it, uplift it, analyze it, destroy it, take it seriously, or learn to live with it. This course is both an introduction to the academic field of “porn studies” and to its equal and opposite: the endless repository of historical and current attempts to get pornography out of the way, to keep it somewhere else out of sight, to destroy it, or to deem it unworthy of study. We begin with a conversation about what the stakes are and have been in studying porn and how we might go about doing it, and then move through history and media technologies beginning with the category of pornography’s invention with regards to drawings from Pompeii. The course is meant to introduce students to various forms pornography has taken, various historical moments in its sociocultural existence, and various themes that have continued to trouble or enchant looking at pornography. The goal of this course is not to make an argument for or against porn wholesale, but to give students the ability to take this contentious form and its continued life seriously, intelligently, and ethically. This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23165 Sexuality in U.S. History to 1900 | Instructor: Red Tremmel
In this course we will study the history of changing sexual practices, relations, politics, cultures, and social systems in the region of North America now comprising the United States and 574 sovereign tribal nations. We begin in the pre-colonial period and end in the late twentieth century, focusing on how gendered, racial, economic, religious, medical, and commercial discourses shaped and were shaped by sexual ones. Moving through various contexts, such as occupied indigenous territories, the secret parties of enslaved people, scientific societies, urban drag balls, medical schools, liberatory movements, and popular culture, we will use primary and secondary sources to develop a research-based understanding of how sexual discourses are produced, revised, and remixed among and across generations.This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23174 Sex, Gender and Kinship: Colonial Perspectives | Instructor: Deirdre Lyons
This course analyzes the contested relationships between gender, sexuality, kinship, and western colonialism from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Drawing on historical case studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, this course will cover a broad range of empires and colonies to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between colonization and ideologies and practices of gender, sex, and kinship. Analyzing case studies predominately from the Atlantic World (with attention to colonies elsewhere), we will explore topics such as the emergence of colonial gender ideologies, gender and colonial governance, family life and kinship strategies, the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with race and class, queerness and queer lives, the politics of sex work and reproduction, and gendered migrations across empires. This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23178 The Queer Enemy and the Politics of Homophobia | Instructor: Omar Safadi
How is the queer enemy politically constructed? And what are the uses and effects of this enemy in contemporary politics? This course investigates queer sexuality as a specific kind of threat and homophobia as a specific mode of political antagonism. Key to understanding this specificity is the examination of other kinds of political enemies. Across categories of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and empire, the course theorizes the queer enemy in a comparative perspective. Engaging scholars like Monique Wittig, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Jean Paul Sartre, we compare homophobia with other forms of political enmity like misogyny, anti-Black racism, and anti-Semitism. After investigating antagonism across categories of political difference, we delve into the specificities of homophobic antagonism in the second half of the course. Here, we explore how the queer threat is framed: through metaphors of civilizational destruction but also through anti-sodomy and anti-disclosure laws. We also trace how the normalization of the queer enemy has produced new enemies. Through notions of “Pinkwashing” and the “Gay International,” we further examine how queer liberation is made to stand in for colonial domination. But we also read critiques of the “gay=colonialism” equation, asking how homophobia mediates anti-colonial politics. Finally, we conclude the course with Michel Foucault’s seminal essay and relate the question of the queer enemy to the threat of new human relations.This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23187 Mormonism, Feminism, and Agency | Instructor: Elizabeth Brocious
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or “Mormon”) teaches that every person is equipped with agency, the ability to act for oneself rather than to be merely acted upon by others. However, some have been puzzled by Mormon women’s simultaneous commitment to a doctrine of agency and to a faith tradition that embraces the concept of patriarchy and is thus structured by gendered hierarchies. One method of analysis might interrogate Mormon women’s choices according to the typical feminist view of agency as resistance. But does resistance adequately account for the operations of agency? How do non-resisting religious women reflect on their own capacities for agency? This course will first look at a set of theorists, including (among others) Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, who will help us to examine agency by describing how the self is disciplined to desire certain types of action. Using these theorists as a framework, we will then explore, as a case study, how Mormon women have narrated their own desires, power, and actions. We will read primary documents from three episodes in Mormon history: (1) nineteenth-century Mormon women’s involvement in both polygamy and the national suffrage movement; (2) Mormon women’s grappling with the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement and the Equal Rights Amendment; and (3) the sharp divide among Mormon women regarding the 2013 Ordain Women movement. This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23425 Helen of Troy Through the Centuries | Instructor: Christina Filippaki   
Helen of Troy has been a source of fascination for ancient and modern writers alike, serving as a symbol of unattainable beauty and destructive femininity. This course explores the various portrayals of Helen throughout Greco-Roman poetry (epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy) and prose (historiography, oratory), as well as contemporary literature and film. Taking into account the conventions and historical context of each genre we will examine her character as it relates to questions of gender, sexual power, agency, identity, embodiment and social structures. All readings will be in English and include but are not limited to selections from Homer, Euripides, Gorgias, Ovid, Seferis, Marlowe, and Walcott. 

GNSE 23602 Critical Security Studies | Instructor: Kara Ann Hooser
This graduate-level elective course is designed to introduce students to approaches to global politics beyond the traditional mainstream canon, surveying a range of perspectives that fall under the heading of ‘critical.' The main goal is to develop an understanding of what is at stake, politically, with some of the main concepts, theories, methodological approaches, and empirical objects within the study of international relations (IR) and international security. The course is divided into two sections. First, we begin by considering what makes a critical approach critical—that is, how is it set apart from conventional approaches? In particular, we will explore how critical approaches encourage us to question our assumptions, first, about what security, power, sovereignty, and other core concepts mean in global politics, and second, about who or what (individuals, groups, nonhuman animals, states, the planet) can be agents of global politics. Some examples of approaches we cover are: theories from the Global South, approaches to human security, global feminisms, securitization theories, ontological security, emotions and affect, the visual turn, new materialisms, and post-colonial perspectives. In the second half of the course, we apply these approaches to a range of issues, including nuclear weapons, borders and  immigration, drone warfare, terrorism, and climate change.

GNSE 23645 Body and the Digital |  Instructor: Crystal Beiersdorfer  

As digital technology advances, the separation between IRL and URL blurs. Participants enrolled in this course will explore techniques that will help them create thought-provoking work, learn how to create a research-based digital artwork, strengthen their ability to give and receive critique, and build an understanding of how the corporeal interacts with the digital. Students will offer and receive constructive feedback during instructor-led critiques on peers' works throughout this course. Students will also explore the intersection of gender and digital spaces through weekly readings and discussions. By the end of this course, students will feel comfortable utilizing different processes of development to create digital artwork and speaking about digital spaces, including how different social identities affect our relationship with them.

GNSE 23702 Sexual Health | Instructor: David Moskowitz
Sexual health is a growing component of public health outreach. The goal of this course is to provide students with a foundational understanding of sexual health from a public health perspective. Through participation in this course, students will increase their knowledge about the history of sexual health promotion in the public health sphere. They will delve into sexual and gender identity construction and explore identity-behavioral expressions. They will critically examine and discuss common sexual health issues addressed by public health practitioners, their epidemiology, and their underlying social determinants; a global health lens will be applied to such examinations. Additionally, recognition of the key methodological considerations in the measurement of sexual behavior and sexual health outcomes will be elucidated (including strengths and limitations of various methodological approaches –quantitative, qualitative, clinical, and biomedical). By the completion of the course, students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and application of key theoretical foundations of sexual health promotion and sexual health behavior change and be able to promote sexual health messages through marketing and dissemination. From a policy perspective, student can expect an increased knowledge about issues related to social and legislative policy analyses, their applications, and implications.

GNSE 23926. Écrivaines des Lumières | Instructor: Ryan Brown                     
L’époque des Lumières est traditionnellement étudiée sous le prisme de l’écriture et de la pensée masculines. Le 18e siècle fût cependant profondément marqué par une ré-imagination du rôle des femmes dans la société française, une ré-imagination conceptualisée par les femmes elles-mêmes. Les écrivaines des Lumières réfléchirent sur leurs propres rôles dans les sphères privées et publiques, exposant sur l’éducation, la maternité, la vie sociale, le bonheur et la libération. Ce cours propose donc une lecture des Lumières qui se concentrera sur des écrivaines souvent écartées, telles qu’Émilie du Châtelet, Françoise de Graffigny, Louise d’Épinay, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Isabelle de Charrière et Olympe de Gouges. Afin d’étudier l’immensité de ces réflexions, nous allons lire des romans, pièces de théâtre, écritures de soi, traités et correspondances, qui illumineront dans quelle mesure ces écrivaines ont revendiqué leurs positions dans les mouvements intellectuels de l’époque et ont commencé à forger un nouveau rôle politique pour elles-mêmes.      PQ/Notes: FREN 20500 or equivalent. Taught in French.

GNSE 24220 Anxious Spaces | Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
This course explores built (architectural), filmic, and narrative spaces that disturb our bearings, un-situate us, and defy neurotypical cognition. In the sense that "angst" is a mode that can be understood as both stalling and generative, we analyze spaces and representations of spaces such as corridors, attics, basements, canals, viaducts, labyrinths, forests, ruins, etc., spaces that are 'felt' as estranging, foreboding, in short, anxiety-provoking, in order to understand why-despite or because these topoi are hostile-they are produced, reproduced, and craved. We will pay special attention to abject spaces of racial and sexual exclusivity, sites of spoliation, and of memory and erasure. Among our primary texts are films by Kubrick, Tarkovksy, and Antonioni, and Chytilová, short fiction by Borges, Kafka, Nabokov, and selections from the philosophical/theoretical writings of Bachelard, Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Foucault, Kracauer, and the edited volume, Mapping Desire, Geographies of Sexuality.

GNSE 25203 Sociology of the Future | Instructor: Eman Abdelhadi
Between global militarism, intensive inequality, and climate catastrophe, the future looks uncertain. This class engages lay, scholarly and fictional futurisms—particularly emerging from Queer, Feminist, Indigenous and Black traditions. We will read sociological and anthropological texts that consider how different communities envision the decades and centuries to come alongside speculative fiction that theorizes where earth and humanity are heading. Does humanity have a future? How does that future look? How do differing answers to these questions shape individuals’ and communities’ lives and decisions? The course will culminate in a futurist creative or research project of the student’s design.

GNSE 29003 Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts |
Instructors: Alireza Doostdar and Hoda El Shakry
This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human—from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge.

GNSE 10422 Body Problems: Theorizing Fat and Thin in Early Modern Literature | Instructor: Sarah-Gray Lesley
Whether in the doctor’s office or in our TikTok algorithm, messages about body weight, size, and shape are ubiquitous in our current moment. This class tracks the history of this phenomenon through early modern English literary representations of fatness, thinness, and everything in between. Thinking with critical race, trans, and queer theory, we will read widely from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales through William Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor to Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World to unpack how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England theorized fatness and thinness through and with theories of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

GNSE 10438 Lies, Mess, and Gossip | Instructor: Jennifer Williams
What happens when we take seriously stories that can't be verified? In this course, we’ll explore how bodies and the stories told about them are often assumed to track truth. Rooted in Black Studies and Trans and Queer Studies, we’ll examine how bodies—through rumor, gossip, and even lies—become sites where power and identity are made and unmade. Rather than dismissing these untidy truths, we’ll learn to read them as responsive disruptions to the historical moments in which they took place, as approaches to reconsider belonging, power, and knowledge. Drawing on the work of scholars like Stephen Best, we’ll explore how rumor and gossip function as strategies of self-making, challenging dominant narratives and revealing the messy realities that shape the world around us. We will engage with the works of scholars such as C. Riley Snorton, Jayna Brown, Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, Édouard Glissant as well as the autobiographical writings of Harriet Jacobs. This course encourages a collaborative approach, where students will be invited to bring in their own “messy” objects of study that reflect their engagement with specific conscriptions of race, gender, sexuality, and body politics. Central to our study will be genealogies of refusal—how Black feminist thought, queer critique, and minoritarian theory not only confront but actively reimagine dominant structures of power.

GNSE 10455 Madwomen | Instructor: Rhya Marlene Moffitt
What is madness? What does it mean to go crazy? What does it mean to be driven crazy? This course examines different forms of madness, probes the relationship between race, gender, and disability, and explores the potential wisdom found in madness by looking to madwomen in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. We will both consider madness as an object within literary studies and the lived experience of the madwomen characters and authors through the lens of Mad studies and activism. Tentative readings include The Bell Jar (Plath, 1963), The Bluest Eye (Morrison, 1970), Freshwater (Emezi, 2018), excerpts from The Collected Schizophrenias (Wang, 2019), and others. Students will also be asked to engage spaces that center the Mad such as the Center for Mad Culture and Project LETS. This course will include writing components that ask students to read literary texts and/or cultural moments through mad methodology and a final essay in lieu of an exam.

GNSE 12103 Treating Trans-: Practices of Medicine, Practices of Theory | Instructor: Paula Martin
Medical disciplines from psychiatry to surgery have all attempted to identify and to treat gendered misalignment, while queer theory and feminisms have simultaneously tried to understand if and how trans- theories should be integrated into their respective intellectual projects. This course looks at the logics of the medical treatment of transgender (and trans- more broadly) in order to consider the mutual entanglement of clinical processes with theoretical ones. Over the quarter we will read ethnographic accounts and theoretical essays, listen to oral histories, discuss the intersections of race and ability with gender, and interrogate concepts like "material bodies" and "objective science". Primary course questions include: 1. How is "trans-" conceptualized, experienced, and lived? How has trans-studies distinguished itself from feminisms and queer theories? 2. What are the objects, processes, and problematics trans- medicine identifies and treats? How is "trans-" understood and operationalized through medical practices? 3. What meanings of health, power, knowledge, gender, and the body are utilized or defined by our authors? What relations can we draw between them? This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12105 Foundations in Masculinity Studies | Instructor: Omar Safadi
In recent years, the term “toxic masculinity” has been used in contexts from the #MeToo movement to the rise of Donald Trump, from Gillette advertisements to the behavior of men on the reality show The Bachelorette. Why is the conversation around “toxic masculinity” taking place in the United States at this moment? In this course, we will go beyond banal statements like “toxic masculinity” and “men are trash” to critically ask, What role does masculinity play in social life? How is masculinity produced, and are there different ways to be masculine? This course provides students with an intensive introduction to the foundational theory and research in the field of masculinities studies. We will use an intersectional lens to study the ways in which the concept and lived experience of masculinity are shaped by economic, social, cultural, and political forces. We will examine how the gendered social order influences the way people of all genders perform masculinity as well as the ways men perceive themselves and other men, women, and social situations. Verbally and in writing, students will develop an argument about the way contemporary masculinity is constructed and performed. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12145 Gender and the Dancing Body | Instructor: Erin Kilmurray
This course explores the relationship between dancing bodies and gender identity in locations such as the stage, nightclubs, on social media, in film, and on the streets. Anchored in intersectional perspectives, the course examines dance as a site of personal and cultural history, resistance, and protest, while also considering its connections to nation and race. The aim of this course is to explore how ideas about gender and sexuality have shaped formal and aesthetic approaches to dance, even as dance serves as a space for contesting normative ideologies. This discussion-based seminar includes film screenings, guest artist sessions, and a final creative project. No previous dance experience required. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12146 Translating Gender Across France and Italy
“Frenemies” since the Middle Ages, the literary traditions of Italy and France illustrate the productive tensions that can arise from cultural and geographic proximity. This course explores practices of translation and adaptation across the Alps through the lens of gender and sexuality. We will focus on two periods of literary flourishing: the early modern age, when Italy led Europe into the era we now call the Renaissance, and the dawn of literary modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when France stood out for its innovations. We will address topics such as:  how do female authors adapt works originally written by men? how do treatments of masculinity change when they move from one cultural setting to another?  what role does sexuality play in later realist genres such as naturalisme and verismo? how does the post-modern representation of love and femininity change across French and Italian works in the 20th century? Authors and works may include fabliaux, chansons de geste, Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Orlando furioso, Émile Zola, Giovanni Verga, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau. Theory readings will include Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, and others. Class will be conducted in English and those taking the class for ITAL, FREN, or RLLT credit will read works and complete assignments in French and/or Italian, as relevant. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 15003 Gender and Sexuality in World Civ II | Instructors: Various
The second half of the civ sequence will extend our earlier interrogation of bodies, sex, and gender into an examination of sexualities and socialities. Through an encounter with theoretical texts, literature, and art, we will investigate a series of important critiques of biopower, or statist strategies for regulating bodies and controlling populations. These interventions include critiques of nationalism, colonialism, capitalism, and heteronormativity, all of which, as we will see, contribute to our understanding of sexuality. Throughout the course, feminist and queer critique will fundamentally frame our analyses of power, desire, and sexuality. PQ: GNSE 15002.

GNSE 20108 Feminist Political Philosophy | Instructor: Tyler Zimmer
This course is a survey of recent work in feminist political philosophy. We’ll focus on three interrelated themes: objectification; the relation of gender oppression to the economic structure of society; and the problem of “intersectionality,” that is, the problem of how to construct adequate theories of gender injustice given that gender “intersects” with other axes of oppression, e.g. race and class. Authors we’ll read include: Martha Nussbaum, Sandra Bartky, Angela Davis, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Serene Khader. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20145 Women in 20th Century Architecture | Instructor: Jacobé Huet
From the Renaissance to the present day, architecture has been a blatantly male-centric field. This course invites students to consider women who overcame systemic barriers to become figures of agency in 20th-century architecture. We will examine the lives and works of women who have managed to attend architecture schools, despite historical gender-based exclusion or restriction on enrollment, as well as those who found impactful ways to play architectural roles without academic training. We will pay particular attention to how these protagonists add necessary complexity to the modernist canon. The course will start with a first module on positionality (women as architects, women as clients, and women as residents) followed by a second module with a biographical scope (Minnette De Silva, Eileen Gray, bell hooks, and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy). This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20151 Hooking Up, Shacking Up, Breaking Up: Public Policy and Intimate Relationships | Instructor: Karlyn Gorski
Every aspect of our lives is shaped by policy choices, including our most intimate relationships. In this course, we will examine the sociological and policy dimensions of different aspects of intimate relationships, including campus hookup cultures, relationship formation, housing policy, marriage, parenting, breakups and divorce. Each week, students will be responsible for reading an assigned book related to these topics, and class meetings will be dedicated to discussing the texts in depth. Students should be aware that texts will engage with themes of assault, abuse, and intimate partner violence. Together, we will examine how macro-level policy decisions shape pivotal intimate moments throughout the lifecourse. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20154 The Salem Witch Trials: Magic, Religion, and Hysteria in Colonial New England | Instructor: Peggy Heffington
By the time the Salem Witch Trials ended in May 1693, 200 people had been accused of witchcraft, 30 had been convicted, and 19 executed—most of them women. The Trials are one of the best-known outbursts of violence in American history, often seen as a brief but intense slip into witchcraft hysteria almost a century after European witch hunts had faded out. But the Salem Witch Trials did not occur in a vacuum. This course will place the trials in their religious and cultural context, considering how orthodox theology, popular religion, magic, the supernatural, witchcraft, and gender were understood by Puritan New Englanders in the seventeenth century. It will then examine the trials themselves—both Salem and witchcraft trials more broadly—to tease out the anxieties they expressed (all of which are still relevant today): fear of women, fear of God, fear of change, and fear of the other. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20160 Family Sagas: Women's Writing from Africa and the African Disaspora | Instructors: Kaneesha Parsard, Julie Iromuanya
This seminar focuses on family sagas: multigenerational stories of intimacy, friction, and survival in women's writing of Africa and the African diaspora. We will focus on three recent, acclaimed novels: Yaa Gyasi’s (US/Ghana) Homegoing (2016), Tiphanie Yanique’s (U.S. Virgin Islands) The Land of Love and Drowning (2014), and Namwali Serpell’s (US/Zambia) Old Drift (2019). We will both study the techniques that these writers use to craft their stories and test them out in short stories or novel excerpts of our own. Our class will also include trips to literary events and visiting speakers.This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20163 Playwriting: Queer Form and Court Theatre's New Musical | 
Instructor: Leslie Buxbaum 
Students will write short plays or one longer play that experiment(s) with queer form. We will consider linear and non-linear structures, disrupting expectations, subverting conventions, and shifting between the fictional world of the play and the real-time presence of the audience. We will focus on how form is integral to queer content. Students are welcome to bring in projects in progress or the germ of an idea, including original stories, adaptations or autobiographical material. Designers interested in ‘writing’ from a designer perspective are also welcome. Our work will be in dialogue with the new musical Out Here at Court Theatre, for which instructor Leslie Buxbaum is the book writer & co-lyricist. Students will meet production collaborators and be invited to production activities that fall within winter quarter. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 21400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality | Instructor: Dana Glaser
Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the “new social movements” of the 60s and 70s, this seminar questions critically examines the theoretical histories that have determined how we think about gender and sex, as alternately something imposed on us externally, as ‘structure,’ and something identity-based, subjective, and internal. Since the 1990s, developments in queer, trans, feminist theory and Black studies have turned away from imagining politics and identity as structures in favor of thinking in terms of disruption, performativity, and fluid models of social construction and political action against it -- even as the movements they emerged out of relied heavily on critiques of Freud and Marx, refusing as well as using their theoretical imaginaries of politics as (materialist or psychic) structure. We will ask: what is a structural analysis? What is not a structural analysis, what is it opposed to? What do we mean when we enjoin ourselves to pay attention to structural conditions? How does thinking structure predispose us to think concepts like “sex,” “sexuality,” “race,” and “gender” together or apart, as converging aspects of experience or as different epiphenomena of a single system? Starting from Afropessimism and the queer antisocial turn, readings will move backward in time to ask how notions of structure have informed theories of identity. Undergraduate enrollment is by consent only.

GNSE 21705 Ectogenes and others: science fiction, feminism, reproduction | 
Instructor: Hilary Strang
Recent work in feminist theory and feminist studies of science and technology has reopened and reconfigured questions around reproduction, embodiment, and social relations. Sophie Lewis’s account of “uterine geographies” and Michelle Murphy’s work on chemical latency and “distributed reproduction” stand as examples of this kind of work, which asks us to think about embodied life beyond the individual (and the human) and to see ‘biological reproduction’ in expansive and utopian ways. Social reproduction theory might be an example in a different key, as might recent Marxist and communist accounts of the gendering of labor under capital. Such investigations have a long (though sometimes quickly passed over) history in feminist thought (Shulamith Firestone’s call for ectogenic reproduction is a famous example), and in the radical reimaginings of personhood, human/nature relations, and sexing and gendering of feminist science fiction. Indeed, the work of science fiction around these questions may be a whole other story than the one told by theory. This class will ask students to think between feminist science and technology studies, theoretical approaches to questions around social and biological reproduction, and the opening up of reproductive possibility found in feminist science fiction. SF authors may include Kate Wilhelm, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Naomi Mitchison, and M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, among others.

GNSE 22440 Women in Italian Organized Crime Through Cinema | Instructor: Veronica Vegna
In this course, we will study filmic representations of women in Italian organized crime, and the implications these portrayals have on the understanding of gender and the mafias through Italian cinema. Sociological and psychological studies have underscored the importance of female roles in relation to mafia organizations, notwithstanding the rigid patriarchal structure that allows only male affiliation. One of the main goals of this class is for students to gain an understanding of different Italian mafias and to get a deeper comprehension of the construction of gender in a selection of films centered around these organizations. We will also discuss how movies contribute to the perception of organized crime. This class will draw on a variety of fields, including sociology, gender studies, and film studies.

GNSE 22705 Abortion: Morality, Politics, Philosophy | Instructors: Jason Bridges and Dan Brudney
Abortion is a complex and fraught topic. Morally, a very wide range of individual, familial, and social concerns converge upon it. Politically, longstanding controversies have been given new salience and urgency by the Dobbs decision and the ongoing moves by state legislatures to restrict access to abortion. In terms of moral philosophy, deep issues in ethics merge with equally deep questions about the nature of life, action, and the body. In terms of political philosophy, basic questions are raised about the relationship of religious and moral beliefs to the criminal law of a liberal state. We will seek to understand the topic in all of this complexity. Our approach will be thoroughly intra- and inter-disciplinary, drawing not only on our separate areas of philosophical expertise but on the contributions of a series of guest instructors in law, history, and medicine.

GNSE 23025 Vidas infames. Sujetos heterodoxos en el mundo hispánico (1500-1800) | Instructor: Miguel Martinez
En este curso leeremos y discutiremos las vidas de varias mujeres y hombres comunes perseguidos por la Inquisición hispánica entre 1500 y 1800, aproximadamente, tanto en Europa y el Mediterráneo como en las Américas. La mayoría de estas vidas fueron dichas por los mismos acusados frente a un tribunal eclesiástico. Estas autobiografías orales, producidas en condiciones de máxima dureza y precariedad, revelan la forma en que la vida cotidiana es moldeada e interrumpida por el poder. Leeremos las historias de hombres transgénero, mujeres criptojudías, campesinos moriscos, renegados, profetas y monjas acusadas de sodomía, entre otras; y discutiremos temas como la relación entre poder y subjetividad, heterodoxia y cultura popular, las formas narrativas del yo o la articulación biográfica de la clase, la raza y el género en la primera modernidad. Estas 'vidas ínfimas', a pesar de su concreta individualidad, permiten ofrecer un amplio panorama de la historia cultural y social de España y América en la era de la Inquisició.

GNSE 23168 Sex and the Ethnographic Tradition | Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
This course examines the role sex has played in the formation of ethnographic knowledge, with particular attention to how studies of sex have challenged static notions of identity and illuminated the complex relationship between social behavior and gendered sense of self. We will consider interest in sex as a motivating factor in the ethnographic enterprise and, reading studies on everything from desire, kink, and play to procreation, heritance and power, will examine complex and social construction of sexed, gendered, and raced selves and Others. How has ethnographic research contested the ubiquitous salience of male/female dichotomies, of patriarchy, and of the cross-cultural, trans-historical applicability of concepts like 'third gender? We will also take a methodological eye, querying how sex has moved from a supposedly 'taboo' category of social inquiry to a focal topic in ethnographic work of all kinds. This is an introductory graduate level course with select spots for advanced undergraduates. This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23179 In a Queer Time and Place | Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s bold interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, and the times and spaces of sex and intimacy. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freeman, Halberstam, Keeling, Muñoz, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others.

Instructor consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities. Prerequisites: Open enrollment for all graduate students, as well as 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students with majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All others, please email amalinowska@uchicago.edu to request permission to enroll. This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23181 Histories of Abortion and Forced Sterilization in the United States | Instructor: Caine Jordan
In the United States, the politics of pregnancy and reproductive autonomy have historically been and continue to be categories of significance, meaning, and contention. In this course, we will explore a subsection of these broader categories, examining the relation between abortion and forced sterilization, the state, and women of color. The course will zero in on the experiences of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women, African American women, Puerto Rican women, and Native American women, considering their struggles against the state and for reproductive justice. This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23186 Saints, Sinners, and Subjects: Foucault’s Writings on Religion and Sexuality | Instructor: Kirsten Collins
What does it mean to be a subject? Throughout his career, Michel Foucault posed this question, examining the psychiatric, penitential, and religious institutions to understand how we moderns arrived at our current understanding of ourselves. But when did we begin to think of the self as something we have, and have to account for? Following the development of Foucault’s idea of confession as central to the creation of modern subjectivity, this course examines how Foucault turns from twentieth-century discourses on sexuality to early Christian monastic texts in his genealogy of modern subjectivity. Reading The History of Sexuality Volume 1, The History of Sexuality Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh, Foucault’s lectures on the relationship between religion, subjectivity, and political power alongside key sources and critical scholarship, this course asks: What is Foucault’s concept of religion? How does it relate to sexuality? What is the relationship between religion and modernity? How does religion determine our concepts of self, society, and state? This course provides an overview of Foucault’s major writings on religion, sexuality and politics. It is open to all undergraduates without pre-requisites. Those taking the course for French credit are required to read and cite Foucault readings in French, and have the option of writing course papers in French. This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23189 Feminist Dramaturgies | Instructor: Marissa Fenley
This course invites students to engage with feminism—and its many intersections—not just as a question of representation but as a method for theatrical composition and presentation. We will ask why a performance might be deemed “feminist” and will analyze the specific dramaturgical strategies used to stage feminist questions and provocations, including erasure, saturation, fabulation, distortion, and others we will discover together. Students will learn to recognize and interpret feminist dramaturgy, and will adopt this disposition in practice. Drawing from feminist theory, trans studies, critical race studies and queer theory, we will examine how these frameworks inform the work of playwrights, performance artists, devised theater makers, and choreographers. This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23191 Queer Cultures, Intimacies, and Embodiments in Historical Perspective | Instructor: Red Tremmel
This course examines queer cultures, intimacies, and embodiments in the United States from the colonial period to the 21st century—not as a linear history of LGBTQ+ identity, but as a critical inquiry into the evolving relationship between the nation and non-normative gender and sexual desires, practices, relationality, and cultures. Topics include gender and sexual diversity in the colonial era; the criminalization of queerness through sodomy and cross-dressing laws; the erotics of nineteenth century friendships; the exoticization and commodification of queerness through freak show spectacles; the emergence of queer urban nightlife and subcultures in the 1890’s; the medicalization of queer desires and practices in the early 20th century; the development of drag and camp as strategies of expression, politics and joy; the postwar rise of homophile organizations; trans life and politics in the 1960s; feminist conceptions and cultures of queerness in the 1970s; cultures of AIDS activism; the emergence of homocore and queer punk during the 1980s and 90s; and, the erotics of trans embodiment in the age of the internet. In each geographic and temporal location, we ask how queerness emerges as a socially legible and politically charged form of social difference; how it is shaped by and responds to dominant economic, religious, and political systems; and how it survives and flourishes in the face of violence, stigma, and erasure.This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23403 Cybernetic Futures in Digital Media | Instructor: Crystal Beiersdorfer  
"Cybernetic Futures in Digital Media" explores the intersection of cyberpunk aesthetics, feminist theory, and digital media. Cyberpunk, characterized by its high-tech, dystopian visions and advanced cybernetics, serves as the course's foundation. We will examine its impact on fine art, moving images, creative writing, and video games. The course will focus on evolving gendered embodiments in cyberpunk, from "masculine" identities centered on military strength to androgynous portrayals exploring emotional depth and resilience. We will analyze these themes and explore how cyberpunk and digital feminisms shape contemporary digital and artistic thought.

GNSE 24511 Kawaii (cuteness) culture in Japan and the world | Instructor: Nisha Kommattam
The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as “cute” or “adorable”) has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today’s conception of kawaii has become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called “Pink Globalization”. With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

GNSE 24551 War, So Much War: The Spanish Civil War Through Catalan Literature | Instructor: Bel Olid
This course offers an exploration of the Spanish Civil War through Catalan literature, focusing on how writers have described pivotal historical periods and their impact on individual and collective identity. Through the close reading and analysis of foundational works, we will examine the enduring legacies of war, the repression of the postwar era, and the complex, often gendered, construction of memory. We will read iconic novels such as Mercè Rodoreda's La plaça del Diamant (The Time of the Doves), a work that portrays the everyday life and intimate consequences of conflict through the eyes of its protagonist, Natàlia/Colometa, offering a poignant look at resilience and societal constraints during the Franco regime. We will explore the harrowing testimony of exile and concentration camps in Joaquim Amat-Piniella's K.L. Reich, while Joan Sales' Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory) will lead us to reflect on moral ambiguities and the weight of the past. In contrast, more recent works like Irene Solà's Et vaig donar ulls i vas mirar les tenebres (I Gave You Eyes and You Looked into Darkness), will take us on a journey into a rural world where myth, history, and matrilineal narratives intertwine, offering fresh perspectives on the transmission of memory and the agency of women within historical and folkloric landscapes. The course will also feature a selection of short stories by figures such as Caterina Albert (Víctor Català), Salvador Espriu and Mercè Rodoreda. These prose readings will be complemented by a curated selection of poems from other significant authors, providing lyrical and incisive insights into the course's central themes. Throughout the course, we will reflect on the role of literature as a form of testimony, a space for mourning, and a tool for understanding the present by amplifying the often-silenced voices and experiences of the past, with a keen focus on how gender shapes these narratives.

GNSE 25551 Molière Embodied | Instructors: Noémie Ndiaye and Larry Norman
This course will use Molière—the most famous French classical playwright and the most studied one outside of France—as testing grounds for some of the most exciting theoretical frameworks focusing on embodiment that have emerged in literary studies and cultural studies over the last few decades. What happens when we start thinking through the aversion to physicians and the distrust of medicine for which Molière’s comedies are known with the help of Disability studies and Medical Humanities? What becomes visible about Molière’s participation in the invention of racial whiteness in seventeenth-century Europe when we read his plays of conversion to Islam and enslavement in the Mediterranean through the lens of Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS)? How can the concerns and tenets of Queer studies enrich and complicate the more established feminist accounts of Molière’s place in “la querelle des femmes,” his ideas about gender and sexuality, and his embrace of the normative violence of comedic laughter?  What new dimensions does Molière’s keen interest in transformation and transcendence in the latter half of his career take on when we rethink it in light of Trans studies’ epistemological tools? By applying the theoretical frameworks of Disability studies, Critical Race studies, Queer studies, and Trans studies  to Molière’s plays, and by comparing those plays to the source texts from which Molière was drawing to compose them, we will ask new questions. 

GNSE 12137 Feminism and the Politics of Abortion | Instructor: Rhiannon Auriemma
This course surveys feminist politics on abortion both historically and in the contemporary moment, with particular attention to abortion activism just before the Roe decision until the post-Dobbs present. We will draw on investigative journalism, academic research, and activist literature/movements to conceptualize both the feminist politics of abortion and resistance to government restrictions on access to reproductive healthcare. The course emphasizes the multifaceted ways feminists (both in the US and elsewhere) have conceptualized abortion and reproductive politics as well as frameworks of care, solidarity, and resistance. The course takes special interest in the ever-evolving post-Dobbs landscape by incorporating both current events and histories of the anti-abortion movement of the United States. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12139 Engendering Capitalism: Women, Family, and Economy in Asia | 
Instructor: Eunhee Park
This course explores the cultural understanding of capitalism through the lens of gender as a critical analytical tool. In studying social, historical, and cultural changes shaping gender relations, we will extend our understanding of gender dynamics and its relationship to the family, the state, civil society, class, and the economy. By reading and discussing significant scholarly works, this course will help students understand Asian women in both local and global contexts. The course will be divided into two parts. The first section will address women’s issues and identities, such as women as mothers, wives, and citizens in the framework of family and social institutions, by looking at postcolonialism, patriarchy, and nationalism. Next, the latter half will examine various aspects of women and the economy, including labor, consumption, market economy, governmentality, and class and status. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12142 Queer Modern Europe | Instructor: Madeline Adams
“Queer Modern Europe” provides an overview of queer European history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Beginning with early sexologists, we will explore topics ranging from the scandals of fin-de-siècle metropoles to the vibrant interwar era, from the devastation of two world wars to modern liberation movements. Students will analyze a diverse array of primary sources, including court transcripts, medical texts, postcards, films, and manifestos. Rather than seeking fixed or essential identities, the course will encourage students to explore how ideas of sexuality and queerness were constructed in specific geographic and temporal contexts. Our focus on modern Europe will extend beyond its geographical boundaries, prompting students to consider Europe as a porous entity with complex, mutually constitutive relationships with the rest of the world. Throughout the term, we will also engage with contemporary works that draw inspiration from historical figures and events. We will consider how historians, filmmakers, and artists touch queer histories and ask what their methods and objectives reveal about the politics of queer historical storytelling. Course assignments will center on queer archives, allowing students to critically examine how the queer past is documented and represented. What kinds of questions can we ask of queer archival materials, and how can we use them to illuminate broader historical frameworks? This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 13000 Gender and Sexuality: Multidisciplinary Conversations with UChicago Researchers | Instructor: Red Tremmel
This course offers students an opportunity to be in conversation with a diverse group of University of Chicago scholars whose work uses gender and/or sexuality as critical lenses for understanding the world. Each week, we’ll dive into the work of a different scholar, from fields such as anthropology, sociology, history, medicine, law, and comparative literature. On Tuesdays, we’ll explore materials they’ve chosen for us: texts, films, archives, or gallery exhibitions. On Thursdays, we’ll host them in our classroom for open and candid conversations about these materials, their research, career paths, and the questions that keep them up at night. Throughout the quarter, students will gain a richer understanding of how gender and sexuality function as interdisciplinary tools for analysis—and how they shape scholarly inquiry across academic and professional contexts. Students will have opportunities to reflect on their learning through short writing assignments, presentations, and creative projects that connect course themes to their own intellectual interests. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 15500 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales | Instructor: Mark Miller
Close reading of the Canterbury Tales, with particular attention to the ways Chaucer’s experiments in literary form open onto problems in ethics, politics, gender and sexuality.

GNSE 18124 Poverty, Crime, and Character: 18th Century and Now | Instructor: Jacob Biel
From highwaymen and vagrants to thieves and murderers, this course will look at fictional representations of crime and criminology from the 18th century and the present. We will ask how changing concepts of character, literary and legal, shape a society’s understanding of what criminality is and how it should be managed. Looking first at how the early British novel asks us to think about literary and personal character by way of crime and confession, we will then turn to the 20th- and 21st-century afterlives of these 18th-century crime narratives, attending to how configurations of moral constitution and personal identity—especially relating to class, gender, and race—become intertwined in more recent fiction and film. Syllabus may include fiction by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Godwin, James Hogg, Richard Wright, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, and Jordy Rosenberg; films by Steven Spielberg, Bong Joon-ho, Horace Ové, Hirokazu Koreeda, and Richard Linklater; and theoretical texts by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Patrick Colquhoun, and recent criminologists.

GNSE 20072 Frankenstein | Instructor: Alexis Chema
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is arguably the most famous horror story ever written. Frankenstein is also a mythopoetic tour de force whose searching moral and ethical questions—at what cost should we pursue scientific advances, or seek to control nature? Where is the boundary between the drive to create and the desire for power? What are the effects of social marginalization and isolation?—are more relevant today than ever. In this seminar we will examine the novel both as it engaged earlier cultural works (including Plutarch’s Lives, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and as it morphed over the course of two centuries into a full-blown modern myth. We will consider some of the many afterlives of Frankenstein (including James Whale’s classic films, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, Ahmed Saadawi’s absurdist war novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, Victor LaValle’s comic book series, The Destroyer, and Rachel Ingalls’s suburban fairy tale, Mrs. Caliban) as a test case for better understanding processes of literary adaptation, remediation, and intertextuality more generally. Students will have the option of producing their own creative adaptation as their culminating project for the course.

GNSE 20115 Women, Peace and Security | Instructor: Maliha Chishti
This course focuses on critical feminist theorizing and scholarship on militarization, war and masculinities, and on feminist articulations of peace and (demilitarized) security. Students will learn about the transnational feminist research, policy and advocacy network known as the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and the important inroads this network has made in establishing international and national policies in the fields of gender, conflict, peace and development. The course highlights the background, history and policy significance of the historic Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, as well as subsequent and related UN resolutions. Students will also learn about alternative feminist approaches and visions for international peace and security, through powerful case study examples of feminist activism, solidarity and diplomacy. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20117 Feminist Theory and Political Economy | Instructor: Sarah Johnson This course has two related aims: to consider how the regulation of economic life—from the household to the global economy—has figured as an object of analysis within feminist thought; and to examine how this analysis, together with the conceptual resources of political economy, has informed feminist theories of domination, freedom, equality, rights, and justice. Readings may include works by Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Iris Marion Young, Catharine MacKinnon, Nancy Fraser, and Aihwa Ong. The course includes a substantial research requirement, which invites students to draw upon the insights of these theorists as they use archival sources to conduct their own analyses of economic life. Enrollment is limited to undergraduates who have completed their Social Sciences Core requirement. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20126 Shrews! Unladylike Conduct on Stage and Page in Early Modern England | Instructor: Ellen Mackay
This course will move between three sites of inquiry to investigate the social and material history of an evergreen trope: the domestication of a refractory servant or wife. From rare book libraries and museum collections, we will track the common features of popular entertainments that traffic in this scenario. We will then bring our findings to bear in a theatre lab environment, where we will assay scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, The Tamer Tamed, and the City Madam. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20130 Queer Theory | Instructor: Kris Trujillo
This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term “queer” and explore the contours of the field’s major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory’s emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis. Reading texts by key figures like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lorde, Bersani, Crimp, Warner, Halperin, Dinshaw, Edelman, Anzaldúa, Ferguson, and Muñoz in addition to prominent issues of journals like GLQ, differences, and Signs, we will approach these pieces as historical artifacts and place these theorists within the communities of intellectuals, activists, and artists out of which their work emerged. We will, thus, imagine queer theory as a literary practice of mournful and militant devotion, trace queer theory’s relationship to feminism and critical race theory, critique the hagiographic tendency of the academic star system, and interrogate the assumptions of queer theory’s secularity. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20153 Practicum: Women and Society | Instructor: Maria Angelica Bautista
Although the inequities between men and women have diminished during the last decades, large gaps are still evident and resistant to change. Throughout this course, we will explore the origins of these disparities which are all fundamentally rooted in the patriarchal nature of society. Understanding how patriarchy came to be the dominant order requires a multidisciplinary and historical approach. The first lectures will cover debates in biology, human evolution, history and archeology that explain the deep roots and the spread of this order throughout the centuries. The next set of lectures will cover how current cultural practices and social norms facilitate the reproduction of the patriarchy and will also examine alternative ways in which societies have organized themselves where women have powerful roles or live in matriarchies. The class will also capture how women from the Global South contest this order within their societies and on their own terms. Finally, we will evaluate policies that have aimed to close the gap between men and women around the world. A central theme of the course is that to understand how to craft effective policies one needs to understand the mechanisms which created patriarchy and led it to persist. The students will offer presentations that will revise these policies from a critical perspective based on the material we covered throughout the quarter. This is a practicum course and can satisfy the Windows requirement in the public policy major. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors

GNSE 20159 Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle Ages | Instructor: Mark Miller
The field of gender and sexuality in medieval Western Europe is both familiar and exotic. Medieval poetry is fascinated by the paradoxical inner workings of desire, and poetic, theological, and philosophical texts develop sophisticated terms for analyzing it. Feminine agency is at once essential to figurations of sexual difference and a scandal to them. Ethical self-realization gets associated both with abstinence and with orgasmic rapture. This course will examine these and other topics in medieval gender and sexuality through reading a range of materials including poetry, theology, gynecological treatises, hagiography, and mystical writing. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20161 Girlhood | Instructor: Heather Keenleyside
This course focuses on narratives in which the category of “girl” or “girlhood” is under construction, or called into question. We’ll begin with a number of foundational works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Louisa May Alcott, Harriot Jacobs), and will move into novels, films, comics, and memoirs from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (likely to include texts by Zitkala-Sa, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Myriam Gurba, and films by Peter Weir, Todd Solondz, Celine Sciamma). Throughout, the course will draw on work from fields like sociology, history, and feminist and queer theory to consider changing conceptions of childhood, adolescence, and development, as well as the way that intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability shape categories and narratives of “girlhood.” This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20162 Black in Colonial America: Three Women | Instructor: SJ Zhang
Through a survey of texts by and about Sally Hemings, Phillis Wheatley and Tituba, “the Indian,” we will consider the lives of three black women in colonial America. In this period of expansion and contraction of the concepts of race and bondage, what kind of “tellings” were possible for these women? By reading texts written as early as 1692 and as late as 2008, we will also consider how representations of these women have changed over time. This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 21882 Virginia Woolf: Love, Life, Writing | Instructor: Christine Fouirnaies
How to write a life? Virginia Woolf grappled with this question, and so will we in this course. How, indeed, does one write, not only one’s own life, but the life of others, particularly when strong feelings are involved? We will study Woolf’s reflections on how to capture a life along with her attempts to do so, delving into her essays, novels, and life-writing (letters, diaries, and auto/biographical works). With the different literary genres, along with Woolf’s various engagements with other arts, we will see different approaches to re/creating personalities and inter-personal relationships emerge. To help us understand Woolf, we will examine her Victorian background, her Bloomsbury circle, and the Modernism with which she is associated. We will also engage with relevant theories of selfhood, sexuality, and auto/biography. At stake in our investigations is the role and critical potential of the personal in literary production. We will discuss this while taking up subjects such as familial relationships, the meaning of friendship, and the complexities of love. Throughout, we will consider Woolf’s relevance for today, and we will conclude with how Woolf’s own life has been taken up by others.

GNSE 23188 Reproducing Queerly: Sex, Race, Class, and Belonging | Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we examine U.S.-based fiction, film, and theory from the late twentieth century through the present that centers on models of biological and social reproduction that depart from or disrupt the traditional white bourgeois nuclear family ideal. Cultural objects and theory around queer and trans reproduction will be central to our class archive, as will explorations into the radical potential of assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy. However, we will be equally interested in tracing how the legacies and ongoing realities of slavery, settler colonialism, racialized nationalism, and capitalist exploitation tend towards the “queering” of kinship relations for Black and Indigenous people, people of color, and poor people. This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23190 Making a Scene: Feminist & Queer Performance in South Asia |
Instructor: Sharvari Sastry
This interdisciplinary course examines key topics, trajectories and analytical methods in the study of gender and sexuality, approaching them in the context of modern and contemporary South Asia. As a constellation of mutually diverse yet interconnected postcolonial nations, the South Asia context pushes us to reflect on how questions of gender and sexuality are animated, constituted, and represented, especially within non-Euro/American frameworks. What theoretical concepts have universal purchase, and what is only ever legible in a local register? How do the forces of global capital and imperial power intervene in these processes? What role do religion, language, caste and class play? We will address these questions through the lens of performance, drawing on ethnographic, textual, visual and filmic sources from various South Asian regions, communities and languages (in translation). We will journey through a range of sites and scenes, including courtesan cultures, queer nightlife, drag performances, classical dance forms, dramatic texts, political protests, and more. This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 24299 Troubling Adolescence | Instructor: Paula Martin
Many theories of "adolescence" have often emphasized it as a development period of rapid change, risk taking, and experimentation. This course will take on some of key health-related concerns of adolescence, such as mental health (eg. depression, anxiety) and risk behaviors (eg. substance use, sexuality) asking after the phenomenological experience of such concerns as well as exploring their cultural specify. Furthermore, this course will review key historical and development frameworks for understanding "adolescence," reading them alongside anthropological and queer theories of temporality. Ultimately, the course asks, how do the troubles of adolescence play out in different contexts? And what happens if we trouble the concept of adolescence itself?

GNSE 24441 Lyric Intimacy in the Renaissance | Instructor: Sarah Kunjummen
Lyric has often been perceived as a peculiarly intimate genre, tasked with providing access to a person’s inner experience. This course will examine how sixteenth and seventeenth-century British writers used lyric verse as a tool for establishing, imagining or faking intimacy, with potential lovers, employers, friends, and God. We will ask how the multiple models of intimacy available within English literary culture intersected in texts of the period, and also how that literature responds to or compares with developments elsewhere in the Renaissance Atlantic and Mediterranean world. Along the way, we will explore some of the following questions: what was the gender politics of Renaissance lyric? How did writers make space for queer or heteronormative writing and attachment within the conventions of the love poem? What looks familiar about the forms of intimacy we find in these texts? What remains profoundly strange about them? Readings will include poems by Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Katherine Philips and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

GNSE 24520 Postcolonial Openings | Instructor: Darrell Chia
This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey critiques within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, and Arundhati Roy).

GNSE 25041 Cinemas South: Then and Now | Instructors: Rochona Majumdar and Daniel Morgan
The past two decades have witnessed a surge in thinking about the international spread of cinema. Studies have looked to the way that national cinemas defined themselves internationally; how intersections between national, imperial, and colonial political projects shaped the contours of multiple cinemas; and at how several cinemas, most notably Hollywood cinema, functioned as an international vernacular against and with which other cinemas could define themselves. These studies have been vital, but they have tended to retain Western Europe and North America as the fulcrums. With this course, we aim to explore the increasing recognition of the complex ways in which cinema, in all its cultural forms—films and other moving-image media, cultural artifacts, viewing practices, even theories themselves—took shape amidst the broadly defined former Third World and contemporary Global South. Combining viewings and readings, archival research and theoretical translations, Cinemas South aims to explore the vibrant life of the circulation of cinema outside its imperial nodes. The course has a chronological arc, spread over three historical junctures: the “global sixties”, and its revolutionary ambitions; the years of reaction in the 1980s and early 1990s; and contemporary political and cinematic configurations. Taken together, these decades have seen many discursive and material transitions—from the international into the global and planetary; from third world into the Global South. Cinema has framed and registered each of these shifts, while specific works bear the mark of their own post-imperial context. Thus, if films from the 1960s stage a decolonizing impulse energized by peasant and labor movements, those from our own times articulate eco-critical and queer political energies. Students in the class will learn to think about cinema comparatively across both geographic and historical contexts. We are building the class around each time-frame as a “regime of historicity”: a specific way of relating to the past, present, and future. Each time-frame is focused around three films, one each from Latin and South America, South Asia, and Africa. Along with scholarly literature, the films will be paired with manifestoes and writings by filmmakers; political tracts; and writings by contemporaneous critics. Looking at these three sites of cinematic production will give students a new sense of how political films circulate outside more official channels, while the different time periods will provide a sense of how debates—aesthetic and political—change over time.

GNSE 25474 Crossing Boundaries: Virtual Reality, Embodiment, and the Reimagining of Social Space | Instructor: Cate Fugazzola
In this course, we explore the potential for Virtual Reality (VR) experiences to push multiple boundaries: redefining bodies, crossing borders, and reimagining social spaces. In the first weeks of the course, as we think about bodies in the virtual space, we will be asking questions related to embodiment and representation: how does the process of avatar creation reinforce or dismantle assumptions about gender readability and performance? How do immersive experiences induce feelings of gender euphoria and dysphoria? The following weeks we will explore and discuss the way VR experiences can engage with the concept of physical borders—calling their existence into questions in some cases, making them particularly salient in others. We will discuss virtual travel, digital border-crossing, and explore art installations that reflect on migration experiences. The final weeks will build on our previous conversations, and together we will reflect on the fluid meaning of space in a virtual setting and on the creative possibilities that such fluidity entails: What does it mean to reimagine space beyond physical limitations? How do we understand the political salience of taking up space in digitally built social environments? The course combines readings and theoretical conversations with hands-on experiences in VR and explorations of virtual worlds. Previous experience with VR is not required. We will share a limited number of headsets that will be available for use in class.

GNSE 25702 Climate Justice | Instructor: Sarah Fredericks
Climate injustice includes the disproportionate effects of climate change on people who benefit little from the activities that cause it, generally the poor, people of color, and people marginalized in other ways. Given the complex economic, physical, social, and political realities of climate change, what might climate justice entail? This course explores this complex question through an examination of various theories of justice; the gendered, colonial, and racial dimensions of climate change; and climate justice movements.

GNSE 25988 James Baldwin | Instructor: Korey Williams
In our contemporary moment of rising inequality, James Baldwin has gained much purchase as a kind of prophet. But in his own time, Baldwin consistently called himself a witness, holding to his belief that an “artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian” who must “make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” All in all, his artistic mission was to express “what it is like to be alive.” Reading across both his fiction and nonfiction, we will consider Baldwin’s concept of the artist, exploring the affective life of inequality through what we might call his moral imagination. 

GNSE 26903 Sex, Drugs, and Mantras: Tantra and Subversive Religious Practices | Instructor: Jesse Berger
When someone chants mantras in cremation grounds to gain supernatural powers; or practices erotic yoga to achieve mystical union; or ingests illicit substances to channel cosmic deities; are these merely the irrational behaviors of a superstitious mind? Or, rather, are they expressions of profound systems of embodied spirituality with sensible motivations? To make sense of practices such as these, this course places Hindu and Buddhist Tantra in the social and historical context of medieval South Asia. Moving beyond simplistic stereotypes and fetishizations of tantra as esoteric ritualism and/or spiritual hedonism, we’ll explore how tantric practices enact sophisticated worldviews centered on the creative power of the divine feminine. As we come to appreciate the peculiar tantric fusion of cosmology and ritual, the tantra becomes a case study for subversive approaches to religious experience more generally. Key questions include: What specific rituals and doctrines constitute ‘tantra’? What social and political shifts influenced the development of tantra? What philosophical frameworks justify tantric practice? And how does the concept of feminine creative power (śakti) function? Through close readings of primary texts, secondary scholarship, and artistic media, we will touch upon not only its ancient roots, but also the relevance of tantric principles in contemporary social and religious movements. No prior familiarity with religious studies or South Asian history is required. 

GNSE 28830 Psychoanalysis: Freud and Beyond | Instructor: Kris Trujillo  
This course offers an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by surveying significant writings by Freud and by Freud's readers. We will explore Freud's various models of the psyche, his interventions into the theory of sexuality, and his writings on religion by tracking the development of key concepts like transference, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, melancholia, the unconscious, and the death drive, among others. How have these concepts evolved over the course of their deployment in 20th- and 21st-century critical and political projects like feminism and queer theory? How have major developments in psychoanalysis read Freud anew? And in what ways do these psychoanalytic projects respond to their historical conditions? Readers of Freud whom we will encounter may include Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Butler, Spillers, Edelman, Dean, and Musser.  

GNSE 30137 Horror, Abjection, and the Monstrous Feminine | Instructor: Hoda El Shakry
This course explores cinematic and literary works of horror (the uncanny, gothic, sci-fi, paranormal, psychological thriller, killer/slasher, gore) from around the world. As a mode of speculative fiction, the genre envisions possible or imagined worlds that amplify curiosities, dreads, fears, terrors, phobias, and paranoias which simultaneously repel and attract. Horror frequently explores the boundaries of what it means to be human by dwelling on imaginaries of the non-human and other. It often exploits the markers of difference that preoccupy our psychic, libidinal, and social lifeworlds—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, but also the fundamental otherness that is other peoples’ minds and bodies. Interrogating the genre’s tension between desire and fear, our course will focus on the centrality of abjection and the monstrous feminine—as both thematic and aesthetic tropes—to works of horror. Films and fiction will be paired with theoretical readings that contextualize the genre of horror while considering its critical implications in relation to biopolitical and geopolitical forms of power. Content Warning: Course materials will feature graphic, violent, and oftentimes disturbing images and subjects. Enrolled students will be expected to watch, read, and discuss all course materials.

GNSE 30148 Drama Queens: Women Playwrights in the Renaissance | 
Instructor: Noémie Ndiaye
This course will introduce you to early modern women playwrights from England (Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn) and from continental Europe (the French Marguerite de Navarre and Madame de Villedieu, the Italian Antonia Pulci and Margherita Costa, the Spanish Ana Caro and—beyond Europe— the Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz). We will analyze the complex works, ideas, and lives of those brilliant playwrights through the lenses of intersectional trans inclusive feminism, transnationalism, and premodern critical race studies. Throughout, we will remain alert to the sense of possibility that suffuses these plays’ political imagination. 

GNSE 30155 Queer Love Poetry | Instructor: Anna Elena Torres  
This course examines the long history of queer love poetry, from the ancient world to postmodernism. Its readings are particularly interested in how modernists claimed literary lineages of queer poetics, queered social practices and communal literary spaces, and reinvented verse forms to reflect queer eros. We will study works from Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Greek, and several other languages. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.  

GNSE 30157 Labor, Sex, and Magic: Celestina and Other Witches | Instructor: Noel Blanco Mourelle
The image of witchcraft in the Iberian Peninsula is rooted in a tradition of technique, healing, bodily care, and the management of sexual labor. In this class, we will discuss the numerous witches of Iberian literary traditions (Trotaconventos, Eufrosina, Fabia), paying particular attention to Fernando de Rojas’s "Celestina," written during the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. These witches orchestrate the romances of unfortunate young people and strive for survival in the shifting urban landscape of pre-modernity, a time of wars, revolts, plagues, and catastrophes. In this class, we will explore the status of these women within the social transformations of their time, why so many authors regarded them as emblematic figures of pre-modern Iberian cities, and what they reveal to us today about the lives of women in that era.

GNSE 30158 Celebrity Cultures: Divas, Queers, and Drags in Latin America | 
Instructor: Carlos Gustavo Halaburda
This course takes students on a journey into the dazzling world of divas, queers, and drag performers who reshaped Latin America’s cultural, social, and political repertoires. From Eva Perón’s iconic political mythology and María Félix’s femme fatale allure to the radical defiance of Pedro Lemebel and the cosmic magnetism of Walter Mercado, we will explore how these larger-than-life figures resisted and undermined heteronormative and misogynistic regimes. Engaging critical theory, queer studies, and aesthetic analysis, the course invites students to engage with the commodification of celebrity in the culture industry, the performative dynamics of identity, and queer culture’s fascination with camp, glamour, and abjection. Revisiting concepts like the society of the spectacle and hyperreal personas, students will uncover how these icons transformed the public sphere  and disrupted hegemonic power structures. The course also examines celebrity labor as affective production and the participatory cultures that turn fandom into a consumer community, and into a nostalgic and repetitive ritual in the context of digital neoliberalism. Through discussions, close readings of critical texts, and multimedia explorations of films and performances, students will learn how divas, queers, and drag performers redefined aesthetic innovation and became fearless agents of political subversion in the region and beyond. The course will be taught in Spanish and English. 

GNSE 31000 Cultural Psychology | Instructor: Richard Shweder
There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of "normal" psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a single or uniform fundamental psychology for all peoples of the world. Research findings in cultural psychology thus raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. In this course we analyze the concept of "culture" and examine ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.

GNSE 32201 Haunting and/as/of Power | Instructor: Tanima Sharma
Haunting is a liminal category that signifies presence despite absence, unfinished pasts in the present, and ruptures within what is considered rational, normal and real. In this course we will examine multiple hauntings - as metaphor and as experience - situating them within the geographies and afterlives of racial and caste capitalism, gendered dispossession, empire, and the postcolony. Mediated through cultural theory, literature, film, historical archives and ethnographies, we will encounter vampires, zombies, witches, jinn, ghosts, transgender monsters, ancestors, the paranormal, phantoms, and other desiring, friendly or vengeful spirits in order to understand how they story memory, time, space, embodiment, and violence. How can the spectral be deciphered? What does being haunted feel like? How does haunting as an analytic foreground the sensuous, affective, intimate and overwhelming dimensions of structures of power? We will answer these questions and more through the work of David McNally, Tithi Bhattacharya, Silvia Federici, Hil Malatino, Diego Escolar, Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, Avery Gordon, Stefania Pandolfo, Emily Ng, Ryo Morimoto, Susan Lepselter, and Tanya Tagaq, among others.

GNSE 33165 Sexuality in U.S. History to 1900 | Instructor: Red Tremmel
In this course we will study the history of changing sexual practices, relations, politics, cultures, and social systems in the region of North America now comprising the United States and 574 sovereign tribal nations. We begin in the pre-colonial period and end in the late twentieth century, focusing on how gendered, racial, economic, religious, medical, and commercial discourses shaped and were shaped by sexual ones. Moving through various contexts, such as occupied indigenous territories, the secret parties of enslaved people, scientific societies, urban drag balls, medical schools, liberatory movements, and popular culture, we will use primary and secondary sources to develop a research-based understanding of how sexual discourses are produced, revised, and remixed among and across generations.

GNSE 33425 Helen of Troy Through the Centuries | Instructor: Christina Filippaki   
Helen of Troy has been a source of fascination for ancient and modern writers alike, serving as a symbol of unattainable beauty and destructive femininity. This course explores the various portrayals of Helen throughout Greco-Roman poetry (epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy) and prose (historiography, oratory), as well as contemporary literature and film. Taking into account the conventions and historical context of each genre we will examine her character as it relates to questions of gender, sexual power, agency, identity, embodiment and social structures. All readings will be in English and include but are not limited to selections from Homer, Euripides, Gorgias, Ovid, Seferis, Marlowe, and Walcott. 

GNSE 33702 Sexual Health | Instructor: David Moskowitz
Sexual health is a growing component of public health outreach. The goal of this course is to provide students with a foundational understanding of sexual health from a public health perspective. Through participation in this course, students will increase their knowledge about the history of sexual health promotion in the public health sphere. They will delve into sexual and gender identity construction and explore identity-behavioral expressions. They will critically examine and discuss common sexual health issues addressed by public health practitioners, their epidemiology, and their underlying social determinants; a global health lens will be applied to such examinations. Additionally, recognition of the key methodological considerations in the measurement of sexual behavior and sexual health outcomes will be elucidated (including strengths and limitations of various methodological approaches –quantitative, qualitative, clinical, and biomedical). By the completion of the course, students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and application of key theoretical foundations of sexual health promotion and sexual health behavior change and be able to promote sexual health messages through marketing and dissemination. From a policy perspective, student can expect an increased knowledge about issues related to social and legislative policy analyses, their applications, and implications.

GNSE 34220 Anxious Spaces | Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
This course explores built (architectural), filmic, and narrative spaces that disturb our bearings, un-situate us, and defy neurotypical cognition. In the sense that "angst" is a mode that can be understood as both stalling and generative, we analyze spaces and representations of spaces such as corridors, attics, basements, canals, viaducts, labyrinths, forests, ruins, etc., spaces that are 'felt' as estranging, foreboding, in short, anxiety-provoking, in order to understand why-despite or because these topoi are hostile-they are produced, reproduced, and craved. We will pay special attention to abject spaces of racial and sexual exclusivity, sites of spoliation, and of memory and erasure. Among our primary texts are films by Kubrick, Tarkovksy, and Antonioni, and Chytilová, short fiction by Borges, Kafka, Nabokov, and selections from the philosophical/theoretical writings of Bachelard, Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Foucault, Kracauer, and the edited volume, Mapping Desire, Geographies of Sexuality.

GNSE 35201 Sociology of the Future | Instructor: Eman Abdelhadi
Between global militarism, intensive inequality, and climate catastrophe, the future looks uncertain. This class engages lay, scholarly and fictional futurisms—particularly emerging from Queer, Feminist, Indigenous and Black traditions. We will read sociological and anthropological texts that consider how different communities envision the decades and centuries to come alongside speculative fiction that theorizes where earth and humanity are heading. Does humanity have a future? How does that future look? How do differing answers to these questions shape individuals’ and communities’ lives and decisions? The course will culminate in a futurist creative or research project of the student’s design.

GNSE 39109 Sex, Gender and Kinship: Colonial Perspectives | Instructor: Deirdre Lyons
This course analyzes the contested relationships between gender, sexuality, kinship, and western colonialism from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Drawing on historical case studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, this course will cover a broad range of empires and colonies to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between colonization and ideologies and practices of gender, sex, and kinship. Analyzing case studies predominately from the Atlantic World (with attention to colonies elsewhere), we will explore topics such as the emergence of colonial gender ideologies, gender and colonial governance, family life and kinship strategies, the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with race and class, queerness and queer lives, the politics of sex work and reproduction, and gendered migrations across empires.

GNSE 40156 Female Complaint from Sappho to Aphra Behn | Instructor: Sarah Kunjummen
Beginning with influential classical texts, including the poetry of Sappho and Ovid's Heroides, this class explores early modern articulations of female complaint, both in women's writing of the period and as depicted by male writers. The course takes up some works in the mode of gender apologetic and polemic, including excerpts from Christine de Pisan's City of Ladies, Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" and Rachel Speght's "A Mouzell for Melastomus." It also tracks poetic complaint in the works of such writers as Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne ("Sappho to Philaenis"), Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, and excerpts of women's life-writing by Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. The class turns to contemporary critical frameworks including affect and trauma studies in order to explore the dynamics of how these texts stage questions of suffering, sympathy and representability.

GNSE 41370 Ships, Tyrants, and Mutineers | Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
Since the Renaissance beginnings of the “age of sail,” the ship has been one of literature’s most contested, exciting, fraught, and ominous concepts. Ships are, on the one hand, globe-traversing spaces of alterity and possibility that offer freedom from the repression of land-based systems of power. From Lord Byron to Herman Melville to Anita Loos, the ship has been conceived as a site of queerness and one that puts great pressure on normative constructions of gender. At the same time, the ship has been a primary mechanism for the brutality of empire and hegemony of capital, the conduit by which vast wealth has been expropriated from the colony, military domination projected around the world, and millions of people kidnapped and enslaved. Indeed, the horror of the “Middle Passage” of the Atlantic slave trade has been a major focus of inquiry for theorists like Paul Gilroy and Hortense Spillers, interrogating how concepts of racial identity and structures of racism emerge out of oceanic violence. In the 20th and 21st centuries, science-fiction writers have sent ships deep into outer space, reimagining human social relations and even humans-as-species navigating the stars. While focusing on the Enlightenment and 19th century, we will examine literary and filmic texts through the present that have centered on the ship, as well as theoretical texts that will help us to deepen our inquiries. Note: one session will be held at the Newberry Library's maps collections. 

GNSE 41401 The Legacy of Fatima Mernissi: Feminism, Islam, and Politics | 
Instructor: Khalid Lyamlahy
Moroccan writer and sociologist Fatima Mernissi (1940-2015) is widely recognized as one of the most prominent Islamic feminists, whose legacy continues to be celebrated in North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. Through a body of work that encompasses fictional autobiography, historical inquiry, sociopolitical critique, and religious reinterpretation, she engaged in a double critique of patriarchal structures within Muslim societies and Western dominant frameworks, aiming to advance women’s rights, challenge stereotypical representations of gender roles, and promote an alternative reading of Islamic texts and traditions. This course examines her most influential works and considers her intellectual legacy across disciplines.

GNSE 43602 Critical Security Studies | Instructor: Kara Ann Hooser
This graduate-level elective course is designed to introduce students to approaches to global politics beyond the traditional mainstream canon, surveying a range of perspectives that fall under the heading of ‘critical.' The main goal is to develop an understanding of what is at stake, politically, with some of the main concepts, theories, methodological approaches, and empirical objects within the study of international relations (IR) and international security. The course is divided into two sections. First, we begin by considering what makes a critical approach critical—that is, how is it set apart from conventional approaches? In particular, we will explore how critical approaches encourage us to question our assumptions, first, about what security, power, sovereignty, and other core concepts mean in global politics, and second, about who or what (individuals, groups, nonhuman animals, states, the planet) can be agents of global politics. Some examples of approaches we cover are: theories from the Global South, approaches to human security, global feminisms, securitization theories, ontological security, emotions and affect, the visual turn, new materialisms, and post-colonial perspectives. In the second half of the course, we apply these approaches to a range of issues, including nuclear weapons, borders and immigration, drone warfare, terrorism, and climate change.

GNSE 44603 Song of Songs | Instructor: Simeon Chavel
In this text course, we will combine philology and literary theory to describe the work's coherence as a single speech event -- as a single poem and not a collection. We will also analyze its distinctive word-smithing and tones. We will also attend to its paratext, at 1:1; in the rubrics in the ancient Greek witnesses; and in the chapter division. PQ: 1 year of biblical Hebrew and 1 text course. Undergraduates may petition to enroll.

GNSE 46500 Learning from/with Black girls: Identity, Intersectionality, and Intervention | Instructor: Leoandra Rogers
This seminar examines adolescent identity development by listening to learning from Black girls. We will discuss research and literature about and by Black girls (and women) to articulate how identities are formed, the contexts in which identities unfold, and the strategies used to resist oppression and promote healthy development. The course focuses on how the ideas of identity, intersectionality, and intervention are conceptualized, operationalized, and applied in scholarship with Black girls.

GNSE 47400 Women, Development, and Politics | Instructor: Maria Bautista 
Although the inequities between men and women have diminished during the last decades, large gaps are still evident and resistant to change. Throughout this course, we will explore the origins of these disparities which are all fundamentally rooted in the patriarchal nature of society. Understanding how patriarchy came to be the dominant order requires a multidisciplinary and historical approach. The first lectures will cover debates in biology, human evolution, history and archeology that explain the deep roots and the spread of this order throughout the centuries. The next set of lectures will cover how current cultural practices and social norms facilitate the reproduction of the patriarchy and will also examine alternative ways in which societies have organized themselves where women have powerful roles or live in matriarchies. The class will also capture how women from the Global South contest this order within their societies and on their own terms. Finally, we will evaluate policies that have aimed to close the gap between men and women around the world. A central theme of the course is that to understand how to craft effective policies one needs to comprehend the mechanisms which created patriarchy and led it to persist.

GNSE 49003 Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts | 
Instructors: Alireza Doostdar and Hoda El Shakry
This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human—from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge.

GNSE 50112 Sem: Health And Society | Instructor: Linda Waite
A long and healthy life is a widely sought after human goal. But not everyone has equal chances of achieving this goal. This course focuses on the role played by society in differential access to physical, psychological, cognitive health and well-being. We will discuss the role of parental characteristics and childhood circumstances in later-life health, differences in health and well-being for men and women, for racial and ethnic groups, by characteristics of our neighborhoods and communities, and by regions or countries. Each class meeting we will read and discuss three or four journal articles or sections of a book, with class participants presenting each reading, summarizing it, and then critiquing it. The class will then discuss. We will add to and subtract from the readings to match the interests of participants on each topic; the syllabus will list readings as a starting point for this process.

GNSE 62705 Colloquium: Approaches To Atlantic Slavery Studies | Instructor: Rashauna Johnson
We are witnessing an outpouring of scholarship on Atlantic slavery even as some historians are increasingly critical of the archival method. This course uses select theoretical readings and recent monographs and articles to examine this conceptual and methodological debate. Topics to be examined include histories of women, gender, and sexuality; dispossession and resistance; urban and migration history; and interdisciplinary and speculative techniques.

GNSE 30108 Feminist Political Philosophy | Instructor: Tyler Zimmer
This course is a survey of recent work in feminist political philosophy. We’ll focus on three interrelated themes: objectification; the relation of gender oppression to the economic structure of society; and the problem of “intersectionality,” that is, the problem of how to construct adequate theories of gender injustice given that gender “intersects” with other axes of oppression, e.g. race and class. Authors we’ll read include: Martha Nussbaum, Sandra Bartky, Angela Davis, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Serene Khader.

GNSE 31400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality | Instructor: Dana Glaser
Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the proliferation of “new social movements” such as feminism and gay liberation, this seminar explores the key debates around which gender and sexuality were articulated as tenacious but open structures of power subject to political critique and social transformation. The relatively stable yet dynamic character of what Gayle Rubin in 1975 famously called “the sex/gender system” raises basic questions of structure and event: (1) how are systemic relations of domination and rule historically constituted and sustained over time?; and (2) how can that which is regularly reproduced be not only momentarily interrupted, but fundamentally altered through both quotidian and extraordinary forms of action and worlding? The unexpected character of the new social movements called for a radical rethinking of structures and their transformation. Haunted by unpredictable forms of resistance, heteropatriarchal structures challenged theorists and activists to forge new frameworks of critique that refigured basic concepts of power, subjectivity, and agency. These frameworks are examined with an eye to how racialized sexuality and gender are created and contested in the context of modern biopolitical capitalism and its constitution of naturalized conceptions of rule. Undergraduate enrollment is by consent only.

GNSE 32705 Abortion: Morality, Politics, Philosophy | Instructors: Jason Bridges and Dan Brudney
Abortion is a complex and fraught topic. Morally, a very wide range of individual, familial, and social concerns converge upon it. Politically, longstanding controversies have been given new salience and urgency by the Dobbs decision and the ongoing moves by state legislatures to restrict access to abortion. In terms of moral philosophy, deep issues in ethics merge with equally deep questions about the nature of life, action, and the body. In terms of political philosophy, basic questions are raised about the relationship of religious and moral beliefs to the criminal law of a liberal state. We will seek to understand the topic in all of this complexity. Our approach will be thoroughly intra- and inter-disciplinary, drawing not only on our separate areas of philosophical expertise but on the contributions of a series of guest instructors in law, history, and medicine.

GNSE 33025 Vidas infames. Sujetos heterodoxos en el mundo hispánico (1500-1800) | Instructor: Miguel Martinez
En este curso leeremos y discutiremos las vidas de varias mujeres y hombres comunes perseguidos por la Inquisición hispánica entre 1500 y 1800, aproximadamente, tanto en Europa y el Mediterráneo como en las Américas. La mayoría de estas vidas fueron dichas por los mismos acusados frente a un tribunal eclesiástico. Estas autobiografías orales, producidas en condiciones de máxima dureza y precariedad, revelan la forma en que la vida cotidiana es moldeada e interrumpida por el poder. Leeremos las historias de hombres transgénero, mujeres criptojudías, campesinos moriscos, renegados, profetas y monjas acusadas de sodomía, entre otras; y discutiremos temas como la relación entre poder y subjetividad, heterodoxia y cultura popular, las formas narrativas del yo o la articulación biográfica de la clase, la raza y el género en la primera modernidad. Estas 'vidas ínfimas', a pesar de su concreta individualidad, permiten ofrecer un amplio panorama de la historia cultural y social de España y América en la era de la Inquisició

GNSE 33168 Sex and the Ethnographic Tradition | Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
This course examines the role sex has played in the formation of ethnographic knowledge, with particular attention to how studies of sex have challenged static notions of identity and illuminated the complex relationship between social behavior and gendered sense of self. We will consider interest in sex as a motivating factor in the ethnographic enterprise and, reading studies on everything from desire, kink, and play to procreation, heritance and power, will examine complex and social construction of sexed, gendered, and raced selves and Others. How has ethnographic research contested the ubiquitous salience of male/female dichotomies, of patriarchy, and of the cross-cultural, trans-historical applicability of concepts like 'third gender? We will also take a methodological eye, querying how sex has moved from a supposedly 'taboo' category of social inquiry to a focal topic in ethnographic work of all kinds. This is an introductory graduate level course with select spots for advanced undergraduates.

GNSE 33181 Histories of Abortion and Forced Sterilization in the United States | Instructor: Caine Jordan
In the United States, the politics of pregnancy and reproductive autonomy have historically been and continue to be categories of significance, meaning, and contention. In this course, we will explore a subsection of these broader categories, examining the relation between abortion and forced sterilization, the state, and women of color. The course will zero in on the experiences of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women, African American women, Puerto Rican women, and Native American women, considering their struggles against the state and for reproductive justice.

GNSE 33191 Queer Cultures, Intimacies, and Embodiments in Historical Perspective | Instructor: Red Tremmel
This course examines queer cultures, intimacies, and embodiments in the United States from the colonial period to the 21st century—not as a linear history of LGBTQ+ identity, but as a critical inquiry into the evolving relationship between the nation and non-normative gender and sexual desires, practices, relationality, and cultures. Topics include gender and sexual diversity in the colonial era; the criminalization of queerness through sodomy and cross-dressing laws; the erotics of nineteenth century friendships; the exoticization and commodification of queerness through freak show spectacles; the emergence of queer urban nightlife and subcultures in the 1890’s; the medicalization of queer desires and practices in the early 20th century; the development of drag and camp as strategies of expression, politics and joy; the postwar rise of homophile organizations; trans life and politics in the 1960s; feminist conceptions and cultures of queerness in the 1970s; cultures of AIDS activism; the emergence of homocore and queer punk during the 1980s and 90s; and, the erotics of trans embodiment in the age of the internet. In each geographic and temporal location, we ask how queerness emerges as a socially legible and politically charged form of social difference; how it is shaped by and responds to dominant economic, religious, and political systems; and how it survives and flourishes in the face of violence, stigma, and erasure. 

GNSE 35551 Molière Embodied | Instructors: Noémie Ndiaye and Larry Norman
This course will use Molière—the most famous French classical playwright and the most studied one outside of France—as testing grounds for some of the most exciting theoretical frameworks focusing on embodiment that have emerged in literary studies and cultural studies over the last few decades. What happens when we start thinking through the aversion to physicians and the distrust of medicine for which Molière’s comedies are known with the help of Disability studies and Medical Humanities? What becomes visible about Molière’s participation in the invention of racial whiteness in seventeenth-century Europe when we read his plays of conversion to Islam and enslavement in the Mediterranean through the lens of Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS)? How can the concerns and tenets of Queer studies enrich and complicate the more established feminist accounts of Molière’s place in “la querelle des femmes,” his ideas about gender and sexuality, and his embrace of the normative violence of comedic laughter?  What new dimensions does Molière’s keen interest in transformation and transcendence in the latter half of his career take on when we rethink it in light of Trans studies’ epistemological tools? By applying the theoretical frameworks of Disability studies, Critical Race studies, Queer studies, and Trans studies  to Molière’s plays, and by comparing those plays to the source texts from which Molière was drawing to compose them, we will ask new questions. 

GNSE 40450 In a Queer Time and Place | Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s bold interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, and the times and spaces of sex and intimacy. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freeman, Halberstam, Keeling, Muñoz, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others. Instructor consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities. Prerequisites: Open enrollment for all graduate students, as well as 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students with majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All others, please email amalinowska@uchicago.edu to request permission to enroll.

GNSE 41700 Ectogenes and others: science fiction, feminism, reproduction |
Instructor: Hilary Strang
Recent work in feminist theory and feminist studies of science and technology has reopened and reconfigured questions around reproduction, embodiment, and social relations. Sophie Lewis’s account of “uterine geographies” and Michelle Murphy’s work on chemical latency and “distributed reproduction” stand as examples of this kind of work, which asks us to think about embodied life beyond the individual (and the human) and to see ‘biological reproduction’ in expansive and utopian ways. Social reproduction theory might be an example in a different key, as might recent Marxist and communist accounts of the gendering of labor under capital. Such investigations have a long (though sometimes quickly passed over) history in feminist thought (Shulamith Firestone’s call for ectogenic reproduction is a famous example), and in the radical reimaginings of personhood, human/nature relations, and sexing and gendering of feminist science fiction. Indeed, the work of science fiction around these questions may be a whole other story than the one told by theory. This class will ask students to think between feminist science and technology studies, theoretical approaches to questions around social and biological reproduction, and the opening up of reproductive possibility found in feminist science fiction. SF authors may include Kate Wilhelm, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Naomi Mitchison, and M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, among others.

GNSE 41740 Gender and Policy | Instructor: Yana Gallen
For the past 70 years, women have made remarkable advances in the labor market in the US—the experiences of women in past generations are almost unimaginable in today’s labor market. Women are now more educated than men. However, progress has stalled and the lifetime labor market outcomes of women are different from those of men on average. Why? What is the role for policy? In this course we will think about how differences in preferences, norms, and abilities potentially contribute to differences in outcomes by gender. If there are such differences, does policy intervention hurt or help, and whom does policy intervention hurt or help? What should be the aims of policy with respect to gender?

GNSE 34520 Postcolonial Openings | Instructor: Darrell Chia
This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey critiques within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, and Arundhati Roy).

GNSE 35041 Cinemas South: Then and Now | Instructors: Rochona Majumdar and Daniel Morgan
The past two decades have witnessed a surge in thinking about the international spread of cinema. Studies have looked to the way that national cinemas defined themselves internationally; how intersections between national, imperial, and colonial political projects shaped the contours of multiple cinemas; and at how several cinemas, most notably Hollywood cinema, functioned as an international vernacular against and with which other cinemas could define themselves. These studies have been vital, but they have tended to retain Western Europe and North America as the fulcrums. With this course, we aim to explore the increasing recognition of the complex ways in which cinema, in all is cultural forms—films and other moving-image media, cultural artifacts, viewing practices, even theories themselves—took shape amidst the broadly defined former Third World and contemporary Global South. Combining viewings and readings, archival research and theoretical translations, Cinemas South aims to explore the vibrant life of the circulation of cinema outside its imperial nodes. The course has a chronological arc, spread over three historical junctures: the “global sixties”, and its revolutionary ambitions; the years of reaction in the 1980s and early 1990s; and contemporary political and cinematic configurations. Taken together, these decades have seen many discursive and material transitions—from the international into the global and planetary; from third world into the Global South. Cinema has framed and registered each of these shifts, while specific works bear the mark of their own post-imperial context. Thus, if films from the 1960s stage a decolonizing impulse energized by peasant and labor movements, those from our own times articulate eco-critical and queer political energies. Students in the class will learn to think about cinema comparatively across both geographic and historical contexts. We are building the class around each time-frame as a “regime of historicity”: a specific way of relating to the past, present, and future. Each time-frame is focused around three films, one each from Latin and South America, South Asia, and Africa. Along with scholarly literature, the films will be paired with manifestoes and writings by filmmakers; political tracts; and writings by contemporaneous critics. Looking at these three sites of cinematic production will give students a new sense of how political films circulate outside more official channels, while the different time periods will provide a sense of how debates—aesthetic and political—change over time.

GNSE 35700 Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle Ages | Instructor: Mark Miller
The field of gender and sexuality in medieval Western Europe is both familiar and exotic. Medieval poetry is fascinated by the paradoxical inner workings of desire, and poetic, theological, and philosophical texts develop sophisticated terms for analyzing it. Feminine agency is at once essential to figurations of sexual difference and a scandal to them. Ethical self-realization gets associated both with abstinence and with orgasmic rapture. This course will examine these and other topics in medieval gender and sexuality through reading a range of materials including poetry, theology, gynecological treatises, hagiography, and mystical writing.

GNSE 36855 Queer Theory | Instructor: Kris Trujillo
This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term “queer” and explore the contours of the field’s major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory’s emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis. Reading texts by key figures like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lorde, Bersani, Crimp, Warner, Halperin, Dinshaw, Edelman, Anzaldúa, Ferguson, and Muñoz in addition to prominent issues of journals like GLQ, differences, and Signs, we will approach these pieces as historical artifacts and place these theorists within the communities of intellectuals, activists, and artists out of which their work emerged. We will, thus, imagine queer theory as a literary practice of mournful and militant devotion, trace queer theory’s relationship to feminism and critical race theory, critique the hagiographic tendency of the academic star system, and interrogate the assumptions of queer theory’s secularity.

GNSE 36901 Christianity and/as Virility | Instructor: Willemien Otten
This class will focus on the notion of virility seen as a distinctive modern Christian habitus. We will begin with an explorative reading of Kristen Kobes du Mez’ Jesus and John Wayne, as we try to understand how American Christians tap into a kind of understanding of gender, of masculinity, and especially of virility. Going from the contemporary American situation to the past, we will focus on early Christian situations of gender-bending and on medieval practices of bridal mysticism before landing in early modernity. We will see how from there certain developments are being accepted and others are being denied, leading us to end up in the world of Jesus and John Wayne. The final questions revolve around whether this situation is typically American, whether it is inevitable or whether there are workable sociological and theological alternatives that can also be credibly called Christian? 

GNSE 38830 Psychoanalysis: Freud and Beyond | Instructor: Kris Trujillo  
This course offers an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by surveying significant writings by Freud and by Freud's readers. We will explore Freud's various models of the psyche, his interventions into the theory of sexuality, and his writings on religion by tracking the development of key concepts like transference, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, melancholia, the unconscious, and the death drive, among others. How have these concepts evolved over the course of their deployment in 20th- and 21st-century critical and political projects like feminism and queer theory? How have major developments in psychoanalysis read Freud anew? And in what ways do these psychoanalytic projects respond to their historical conditions? Readers of Freud whom we will encounter may include Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Butler, Spillers, Edelman, Dean, and Musser.  

GNSE 40115 Women, Peace and Security | Instructor: Maliha Chishti
This course focuses on critical feminist theorizing and scholarship on militarization, war and masculinities, and on feminist articulations of peace and (demilitarized) security. Students will learn about the transnational feminist research, policy and advocacy network known as the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and the important inroads this network has made in establishing international and national policies in the fields of gender, conflict, peace and development. The course highlights the background, history and policy significance of the historic Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, as well as subsequent and related UN resolutions. Students will also learn about alternative feminist approaches and visions for international peace and security, through powerful case study examples of feminist activism, solidarity and diplomacy.

GNSE 40126 Shrews! Unladylike Conduct on Stage and Page in Early Modern England | Instructor: Ellen Mackay
This course will move between three sites of inquiry to investigate the social and material history of an evergreen trope: the domestication of a refractory servant or wife. From rare book libraries and museum collections, we will track the common features of popular entertainments that traffic in this scenario. We will then bring our findings to bear in a theatre lab environment, where we will assay scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, The Tamer Tamed, and the City Madam.

GNSE 43188 Reproducing Queerly: Sex, Race, Class, and Belonging | Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we examine U.S.-based fiction, film, and theory from the late twentieth century through the present that centers on models of biological and social reproduction that depart from or disrupt the traditional white bourgeois nuclear family ideal. Cultural objects and theory around queer and trans reproduction will be central to our class archive, as will explorations into the radical potential of assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy. However, we will be equally interested in tracing how the legacies and ongoing realities of slavery, settler colonialism, racialized nationalism, and capitalist exploitation tend towards the “queering” of kinship relations for Black and Indigenous people, people of color, and poor people.  

GNSE 44441 Lyric Intimacy in the Renaissance | Instructor: Sarah Kunjummen
Lyric has often been perceived as a peculiarly intimate genre, tasked with providing access to a person’s inner experience. This course will examine how sixteenth and seventeenth-century British writers used lyric verse as a tool for establishing, imagining or faking intimacy, with potential lovers, employers, friends, and God. We will ask how the multiple models of intimacy available within English literary culture intersected in texts of the period, and also how that literature responds to or compares with developments elsewhere in the Renaissance Atlantic and Mediterranean world. Along the way, we will explore some of the following questions: what was the gender politics of Renaissance lyric? How did writers make space for queer or heteronormative writing and attachment within the conventions of the love poem? What looks familiar about the forms of intimacy we find in these texts? What remains profoundly strange about them? Readings will include poems by Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Katherine Philips and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.