Courses

From Audre Lorde’s biomythography detailing black lesbian life in 1950s Harlem, to Alison Bechdel’s tragicomic comic books, Chelsea Manning’s whistleblower tell-all, or Carmen Maria Machado’s experimental memoir about same sex domestic abuse, LGBTQ+ autobiographical works provide us with richly subjective, historically situated insights into the lived experiences of queer and trans individuals. Interdisciplinary in scope, this course considers a variety of LGBTQ+ takes and twists on the memoir genre, including photo diaries; video selfies; illustrated works; self-ethnographies; life-as-art performances; stand-up specials; auto theoretical works; and literary or lyrical forms centering on the personal.

This course investigates the concept of biopolitics and applies intersectional feminist theories to examine how European states control the biological aspects of human life, including birth, health, mortality, and sexuality. It examines how health serves as a domain of power, shaping the lives and well-being of individuals and populations while reinforcing disparities based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. Analyzing the biopolitics of health across different Western and East Central European political systems, case studies include medicalized childbirth, forced sterilization, immigration policies, and LGBT rights. Critical theories of gender, sexuality, and race are central to the course’s analysis. This course is offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

We are surrounded by images, stories and experiences of war, conflict, aggression, genocide, and widespread human suffering.  In this course we will engage with the field of transnational feminist theorizing in order to understand how globalization and militarism are gendered, and the processes through which gender becomes globalized and militarized.  We will examine hegemonic ideals of security and insecurity and track how they are gendered. You will learn to conduct and analyze in-depth interviews focusing on the militarization of civilians/ordinary people so as to understand how all our lives have been shaped by the acceptance and/or resistance to globalized militarism.

Gender and sexuality has been reinvented and reinscribed for centuries in Russia. Beginning with the role gender in Slavic mythology and ancient Rus, this course examines how gender and sexuality evolve— or are reconfigured— in accordance with changing sociocultural, economic, and political norms (and vice versa). Considering how Western history and Cold War narratives position both gender and Russia, this course looks at gender and sexuality as ideological projects from the development of a national identity in the Russian Empire, to the New Soviet Woman. Most critically, it examines how gender and sexuality are weaponized by the Putin regime today. 

This seminar offers students an opportunity to engage closely with key concepts, figures, and arguments in the Black Feminist intellectual tradition. We will focus primarily on texts by key figures/scholars from the Americas/Caribbean—in order to situate Black Feminisms within a transnational feminist context. We will take a historical approach, starting in the 19th century and work our way to more contemporary figures and texts throughout the term. Some of the key figures we will examine are Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Angela Y. Davis, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins. Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

This capstone seminar reads representations of racial, gender, and sexual minorities in popular culture through the lenses of feminist, critical race, queer, and trans theories. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in the late 1980s to describe an approach to oppression that considered how structures of power act multiply on individuals based upon their interlocking racial, class, gender, sexual, and other identities. This seminar takes up the charge of intersectional analysis—rejecting essentialist theories of difference while exploring pluralities—to interpret diversity (or lack thereof) in forms of art and entertainment, focusing on film, TV, and digital media.