Fall 2013 Approved Courses
women's and gender studies program
Below are course titles, numbers, and abbreviated descriptions. For full course descriptions please visit the Agora Portal.
| Department | Title | Course Code | Professor | Meeting Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cross-Listed | Introduction to Feminisms | SC225 (EN125/HS148) | TBD | T TH 4:30 |
| Description: This course is taught by Women's Studies faculty and undergraduate student teams under faculty direction to acquaint students with a large range of academic and life experience topics that have been affected by Women's Studies scholarship. After a preliminary meeting, the class divides into 12-14 person seminars that meet once per week to discuss and study such issues as women's history, feminist theory, sex roles, socialization, gender and health, religion, work, and literature and essays by and about women. The course emphasizes participation and collective work on projects and usually includes a continuing personal and readings-oriented journal. | ||||
| Cross-Listed | Colloquium: Teaching Women's Studies | SC664 (EN603/HS665) | TBD | T 5:30-7 |
| Description: This course is for the "Introduction to Feminisms" Teaching Assistants. Students meet weekly with the faculty adviser to discuss assigned readings--interdisciplinary feminist pedagogy--and with their respective seminar groups from SC 255. |
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| African and African Diaspora Studies |
Race, Class, and Gender |
BK138 (SC038) |
Mcguffey | MWF 4 |
| Description: Viewing race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identities as inseparable from discussions of inequality and power, this course will begin by discussing the social construction of these categories and how they are connected. We will then look at how these social identities shape and are also shaped by four general subject areas: (1) wealth and poverty, (2) education, (3) family, and (4) crime, law, and social policy. Although this course is separated into subject areas, we shall see that these areas greatly overlap and are mutually influenced by one another. | ||||
| African and African Diaspora Studies | Gender and Slavery |
BK243 | Copeland | T TH 9 |
| Description: Discussions of slavery have focused upon the enslaved males' roles and responses. To gain a more complete picture of the complex social interactions and political and social consequences of slavery, we will examine it from the enslaved female's perspective as well. This course focuses upon women's labor, their roles in family life, the plantation community, and how gender informed the style and types of resistance in which men and women engaged. We will also discuss the effects of white paternalism upon gender roles in the slave communities and white female responses to the effects of slavery upon their lives. |
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| African and African Diaspora Studies | Making & Remaking Americans: Race, Sex, & Gender/Lit & Film |
BK400 |
Harrison-Kahan |
MWF 12 |
| Description: From the literary classic "The Great Gatsby" to the current television drama "Mad Men," American culture contains countless examples of characters who discard or disguise their identities to create themselves anew. In ethnic literature, African Americans pass for white, while immigrants transform themselves into Americans. In theater and Hollywood cinema, whites wear blackface, while men cross-dress as women. By examining the literary and cinematic techniques of various narratives of self-making, this course will ask how such transformations and performances of identity inform our understandings of race, class, sex, gender, and national identity from the nineteenth century through the present day. |
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| Communication |
Communication in Family Relationships |
CO461 |
Rossetto |
T TH 3 |
| Description: This course explores communication occurring in family relationships, including marital pairs, siblings, parents and children, divorced families, stepfamilies, and gay and lesbian families. Through reading, discussion, and research, the class will examine definitions of family, family roles and types, theories of family communication, and communication patterns in families (e.g., conflict, stress, coping, secrets, disclosure, intimacy, and support). |
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| Communication | Gender Roles and Communication | CO451 | Cuklanz | T TH 12 & 1:30 |
| Description: This course is both a writing-intensive seminar and a Women's and Gender Studies minor course. Focus is on the social construction of gender through communication. The early section of the course compares historical and theoretical approaches to representations of gender in communication texts. Then, building on these comparisons, students read about, examine, and analyze texts, focusing particularly on television programming and advertising. |
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| English | Victorian Marriage/Victorian Sex | EN337 | Mcaleavey | T TH 10:30 |
| Description: The Victorian era may call to mind strict gender roles and romantic novels culminating in marriage. Yet this period also saw rampant prostitution, feminist agitation for rights, and debates over competing definitions of masculinity. This course explores the interrelation between Victorian literary forms and nineteenth-century debates about gender and sexuality. Our focus will be on fiction, most likely: Bronte's Jane Eyre, Eliot's Adam Bede, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, and Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Along the way, we will encounter a wide range of readings, from Sherlock Holmes stories to Victorian poetry, and from books of household advice to pornography. | ||||
| English |
Witches and Apocalypses in Young Adult Fiction |
EN302 |
Young |
T TH 10:30 |
| Description: Recent young adult fiction seems oddly focused on both the supernatural and the post-apocalyptic. In our quest to understand why, we will trace the genre looking specifically at how supernatural entities might uniquely speak to adolescent readers; how post-9/11 fears have been translated into stories where the protagonist must survive in a post-apocalyptic world or navigate a pre-apocalyptic setting in which s/he must save the world. Finally, we will consider how earlier themes: social pressure, race and class tension, family dysfunction, and addiction find expression in the current strand of young adult fiction. |
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| History |
Studying and Writing of History: Women of the Renaissance |
HS300-37 |
Ross |
TH 3-5:25 |
| Description: Did women have a renaissance during the Renaissance? How did contemporary gender categories function? This course explores these and related questions about the women who lived in Italy and Northern Europe between 1350 and 1650. We will read dialogues, treatises and letters written by women from diverse backgrounds--from the published writing of Christine de Pizan to the domestic correspondence of Alessandra Strozzi--in conjunction with works by their male contemporaries (Castiglione, Erasmus and others) and recent scholarship in this field. |
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| History |
Nannies, Maids and Mail Order Brides: Gender and Migration in U.S. History |
HS534 |
Oh |
T TH 1:30 |
| Description: How does gender shape immigration and migration? How does it influence the lived experiences of migrants in the workplaces, families and communities? How does it shape migrants' perceptions and assimilation into U.S. society? How does it intersect with transnational practices and imaginaries? We will consider these questions through a study of migration to and within the United Sates from the late-19th-century to the present. The class considers a broad range of racial and ethnic groups while also attending to certain categories of migrants in an effort to understand the role of gender, race, and class in migration. |
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| Romance Languages and Literatures |
Early Spanish American Women Writers |
RL167 |
Beckjord | T TH 10:30 |
| Description: A close study of the intellectual and literary productions of women writers from the colonial period and nineteenth century, with special attention to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Readings will be drawn from different genres and will also include works by Catalina de Erauso, la Madre Castillo, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, among others. |
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| Sociology | Women and the Body |
SC089 | Hesse-Biber | T TH 1:30 |
| Description: This course covers Western cultural pressures on women be super-slender. We analyze biological, sociological, and feminist perspectives on the body especially with regard to issues of beauty and body image and sexuality. We analyze how race, ethnicity and class intersect to create differences among women’s relationship to their bodies. In what way do biological perspectives illuminate as well as cloud understanding of women's relationship to their bodies? We explore mass-mediated pressures on women's bodies through films, women's magazine, reality TV, and social networking sites. We examine the plastic surgery industry and the growing trend toward "designer bodies." |
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| Sociology | Legal and Illegal Violence Against Women |
SC144 | Holmstrom | MWF 11 |
| Description: This course will analyze the use of violence and the threat of violence to maintain the system of stratification by gender. The focus will be on rape, incest, spouse abuse, and related topics. Strategies for change will also be discussed. | ||||
| Sociology | Gender and Popular Culture | SC302 | Pabst | M 12-2:30 |
| This course will look critically at gender in popular culture in terms of production, representation, and audience interpretation. Rather than seeing popular culture as mindless entertainment, we will explore it as an area of culture that provides stories and images that instruct us about masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. We will ask what popular culture is, who has the power to make it, and how this power relates to gender. We will also look at the oppositional potential of popular culture. The course will also attend to the intersection of race, class, and other identity markers with gender in popular culture. |
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