GNSS 0090B. Bodies Out of Bounds.

In this seminar we will examine what happens to bodies - and the world around them - when they refuse to stay within "normal" boundaries. We will focus our readings on literature, essays, and memoir from the past two centuries, and use film and contemporary cultural theory for comparison and context. Readings range from Jeannette Winterson's Written on the Body to fiction by Octavia Butler. Enrollment limited to 19 first-year students.

GNSS 0090C. Reproductive Health: Science, Politics, and the Media.

Reproductive health issues such as contraception, abortion, sexually transmitted infections and gay and lesbian health are some of the most controversial and politically charged issues in the US today. After an introduction to the interpretation of medical literature we will explore scientific, political, religious and cultural aspects of these important public policy issues. Successful national and international programs will be discussed. Although all views are welcome, it is expected that students will be respectful of other's opinions and will incorporate the best available scientific data into their conclusions. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

GNSS 0091A. Documenting the Feminized Body: Literature, Photography, Science.

How are certain bodies made to express femininity, to satisfy the expectations of the gender binary? How can femininity be used to vilify or control people? How do these operations intersect with other complex identity categories, such as race and class? This first-year seminar introduces students to questions central to gender and sexuality studies. Reading twentieth-century American works (poems, novels, comics, and photographs) we consider the creative function of documentation. Highlighting the work of contemporary poets, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, and Ocean Vuong, this course introduces students to new ways of reading poetry beyond the lyric tradition. students are encouraged to think critically about how knowledge and subjectivity are contextually produced. This course will provide an introduction to important critical traditions, including feminist theory, trans studies, Black feminism, and photography theory. This course satisfies the WRIT requirement.

GNSS 0092. Reading Reproductive (In)justice.

How might the representation of reproductive injustices in literature, visual art, and film inform our conceptions of and fight for reproductive justice? In this discussion-driven first-year seminar, we will consider artistic renderings of reproductive injustices from the nineteenth century to the present, alongside theories of gender and sexuality. In taking up the Black feminist framework of reproductive justice, we will attend to violations of not only the right to be a parent and the right not to be a parent, but also the right to parent in a supportive and safe environment. Through this work, we will better understand the debates over reproductive freedom, especially in relation to difference, and engage in the work of theorizing reproductive justice for ourselves. Texts include Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Annie Ernaux’s Happening, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Alice Diop’s Saint Omer.

GNSS 0100. Introduction to Feminist Theory.

An historical and cross-cultural introduction to the various strands of feminist theory. The course will cover a range of theoretical frameworks, examine the connections and discomforts between theory and activism, and explore the impact of feminist theories on contemporary thought.

GNSS 0120. Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Explores the interdisciplinary fields of Gender and Sexuality Studies, considering the relation between formations of gender and those of sexuality across a range of historical and disciplinary contexts. Considers how both sexuality and gender are shaped in relation to race and ethnicity, economic inequality, and the postcolonial legacy.

GNSS 0610. Convulsive Beauty: Hysteria and the Arts.

Hysteria marks the presence of a traumatic memory that arouses wild bodily symptoms, treated psychologically by putting feeling into words. Often considered a particularly female ailment, hysteria has been read by feminist scholars as a deviant, desirous language of the female body. This course considers the boundaries of pain and pleasure, madness and lucidity, and the personal and the political.

GNSS 0620. Recording the Self: Gender Between Word and Image.

Why do we feel compelled to record our lives? To keep diaries and take photos of ourselves? How is our self-perception affected by how others see us? This seminar examines aesthetic approaches to self-writing and self-recording in literature, photography, film, comics, and online media. Together, we will theorize how these genres of self-documentation have become gendered, as well as how race, gender, and sexuality shape identity formation and self-observation. Rather than presume a coherent identity or “inner self” that is expressed through these works, we will consider how the self multiplies, blurs, fragments, or becomes divided through the meta-biographical process of self-recording. Exploring the various ways that text and image refract and relay in unexpected directions, we will investigate self-referentiality as an ongoing temporal problematic, rather than a simple reflection. This course satisfies the WRIT requirement.

GNSS 0630. Is This Working? Doing as Value.

This interdisciplinary course will consider the ways race, gender, ableism, transnational exchange, slavery, technology, immigration, environmental degradation, and the carceral state are implicated in the ways work is divided, practiced, and compensated. We will explore the ways productivity, citizenship, and respectability constellate around the idealized 40+-hour work week and the ways some bodies are used up and rendered debilitated by labor. Why are laziness, unproductivity, and dependence considered moral failings, and how do we define these traits? In the context of nearly two years of living with a pandemic, crushing student debt, rising inflation, and the monetization of everything, this course will toggle between questions of value and values, remuneration and fulfillment, exploitation and satisfaction. We will study a variety of written genres by authors such as DuBois, Graeber, Hochschild, Marx, Melville, Moshfegh, and Weeks.

GNSS 0640. Relatable Content?: Identification, Identity, and Difference.

What do we mean when we call something relatable? Which relations do we mean and between whom? And in what ways might this demand for relatability be gendered or even gendering? Moreover, does prizing relatability necessarily mean privileging the general over the specific, the familiar over the strange, the known over the unknowable? In other words, does centering relatability mean overwriting difference? Or, is rendering something relatable what enables connections to be forged across difference? Which ethical and political possibilities does this fantasy of sameness (“it me”) open up and which does it foreclose? In this second-year seminar, we will take up these questions through an examination of aesthetic and theoretical works from the nineteenth century to the present. In so doing, we will analyze the ways in which works of art invite us to connect and to what ends.

GNSS 0710. Feminist Digital Humanities.

This course focuses on new feminist interventions in the digital humanities emerging from literary, archive, and game studies, as well as history, linguistics, and cultural studies. As an interdisciplinary field, feminist digital humanities bring together a wide range of methods including digital archiving and mapping, information visualization, online exhibitions, and social network mapping. Although the digital humanities are seen as an area of research with many new possibilities, there are many ethical concerns regarding consent, accessibility, privacy, and authorship. We consider how feminist digital humanities address these issues in theory and praxis. To gain an understanding of the many elements of feminist digital humanities, you are asked to participate in seminar discussions, complete small hands-on projects, and complete a final digital humanities project that is relevant to your research interests.

GNSS 0710A. (En)Gendering the Text: Gender & Sexuality in Latin American Literature and Film.

This course investigates films and literature within the context of Latin America since the later-half of the twentieth century, privileging works from the last two decades. It offers an overview of contemporary Latin American film and literature read through the theoretical lens of trans, queer and gender studies. The course focuses on how the films and literary works in question employ sex, gender and sexuality to contest and at times inadvertently reinforce dominant societal power structures. This course offers students an overview of theoretical readings focused on gender and sexuality, as well as the basics of formal film and literary analysis.

GNSS 0710B. Queer Comics.

Although comics have always been a little queer (Batman and Robin anyone?), not all superheroes wear capes. This class brings together queer studies, 20th century history, literary criticism, media, and comics studies to explore the cultural significance of queer comics as a form of activism from the late 1950s to the present day. Since comics often fail to stay within the confines of just one medium, will look at the ways in which comics have crossed over to film, musicals, and fashion. Our focus in this class will be mostly on the United States, but we will also consider the rich transnational culture of queer comics. You will have the opportunity to focus on specific topics of interest to you within queer comics in two short essays (3-4 pages) and a final essay (8-12 pages) or creative project.

GNSS 0710C. Queer Visual Activism.

This class is a space for thinking through some of the relationships between queer studies, visual culture, and activism. The topics covered are divided into two parts. Part 1 focuses on images (photography and print media) and Part 2 on moving imagery (documentary, narrative film, video art, online media). This class is not a comprehensive overview of these fields nor this particular collusion. Rather, we will focus on some key themes (affect, body, space) that have fueled the work of queer creators. To put our readings and discussions into practice, the main assignments for the class include a close reading of a photograph, film analysis, re-photography/video activist project, and a final activist project or essay that has the option of building on previous assignments. The final for this class can be done individually or as a small group project.

GNSS 0710D. Sapphic Arts: From Poetry to TikTok.

This course takes an intimate look at Sapphic culture from the late 19th century to present. Since its most recent renaissance in the mid-2010s, the Sapphic has emerged as an elusive disruptor; an umbrella term that welcomes lesbians, wlw, nonbinary and trans femmes and mascs. This seminar explores how the Sapphic functions not just as an identity category but a methodology (a way of reading, writing, looking, listening) and an aesthetic in art, design, fashion, and food. What are the ways in which the Sapphic works with/against lesbian and queer political identities? How does contemporary use of the Sapphic diverge from its past iterations in literature, literary criticism, and visual culture? How might we understand temporality in Sapphic expression (slow-burn, yearning)? Competency in Sapphic arts requires participation in seminar discussions, completion of 3 short essays, and a final essay/creative project.

GNSS 1070. On Both Sides of the Lens: Latin American Women Filmmakers.

Working from a selection of both feature films and documentaries, we will discuss how women filmmakers are employing and changing these two film genres. The class will endeavor to highlight the work of women filmmakers, and through the reading of these films, students will gain an understanding of some of the debates in the field of gender and sexuality, and acquire a grounding in some of the key moments of twentieth-century Latin American cinema, social, political and economic history. Additionally, students will acquire key technical knowledge of film form and the analytical apparatus necessary to critically view and debate film.

GNSS 1090W. Bodies Out of Bounds.

What happens to bodies--and the world around them--when they refuse to stay within "normal" boundaries? Against the backdrop of fiction written over the past four decades, and within the context of contemporary theory and film, we will look at what is considered normal in various locations and by whom. When are bodies we would consider "normal" somehow not suitable? How are bodies constructed/deconstructed/reconstructed? We will think about bodies in terms of gender, especially gender as it intersects with other markers of identity, including race, gender identity and expression, dis/ability, and hybridity.

GNSS 1101. A Gender Perspective on Women and Enterprise.

A distinctive pattern of economic inequality marks the female population of every nation, each with the same mechanisms standing behind the disadvantages. Everywhere, the barriers to women’s economic engagement reach beyond work and salary to encompass property ownership, capital, credit, and markets. When considered as a whole, these barriers constitute economic exclusion, not just economic inequality. To date, policy, scholarship, and activism on the economic status of women have tended to focus on inequality in the formal workplace, but the full pattern is much more visible when women-owned businesses are examined.

GNSS 1201. Feminist Utopias and Dystopias.

From the religious overtones and abhorrence of heterosexual sex in the all-female world of Millenium Hall (1762), to the need for a new race of cyborg in Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood Trilogy (1987-89), to the gender-inflected environmental apocalypse of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, feminist writers have used their utopian and dystopian fiction to imagine worlds where the standard system of male/female (or even human/machine) does not work. This course will examine feminist utopias and dystopias across historical periods and within the context of contemporary feminist and queer theory about gender, "race," sexuality, environmental justice, and interspecies communication. Sophomore seminar.

GNSS 1210. U.S. AIDS + HIV Activism in History, Theory, and Art.

The class focuses on AIDS activism in the United States from the early 1980s to present day. We will look at mainstream media coverage of the epidemic and queer activist response in publishing, art, film, photography, comics, poetry, and street action. This class is framed by three key themes: history, theory as art/art as theory, and AIDS activism in Rhode Island and at Brown University. Students will learn a variety of skills– from analyzing primary sources and visual media to conducting archival research.

GNSS 1300. Gender-Based Violence Prevention.

This course will introduce students to core concepts in understanding and preventing gender-based violence (GBV). GBV is violence that either targets people because of their perceived/actual gender identity (cis women, transgender people, non-binary people and others) or disproportionately impacts people with minoritized gender identities. This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to GBV prevention, grounded in public health but drawing on scholarship from gender and sexuality studies and related fields (social work, legal studies, and others). It does this as a means of both broadening and critiquing the way public health frames GBV. This CBLR-designated course requires students to participate in a team project grounded in community: teams will conduct community-based qualitative research and give a presentation on gender-based violence in the college population that will fill a knowledge gap at a community agency.

GNSS 1400. Agnotology: The Will to Ignorance.

If the will to knowledge is a will to power, what of the will to not know? How is ignorance a resource—a form of self-protection, a source of cognitive dissonance, and a tool of political control? How is ignorance produced? This course considers epistemology from the perspective of what we don’t know, what we refuse to know, and what we can’t know. Drawing from philosophical, decolonial, theological, psychoanalytic, sociological, feminist, queer, and trans discourses, this interdisciplinary course explores such concepts as Glissant’s “right to opacity,” Sedgwick’s ignorances and nonce taxonomies, and Žižek's theory of ideology as fetishistic disavowal. Texts will include Beauchamp’s Going Stealth, Derrida’s “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” Freud’s “Fetishism,” Glazer’s Zone of Interest, C. Mills’s “White Ignorance,” Moten’s “Blackness and Nothingness,” Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, Rivière’s “Woman as Masquerade,” and Smithson’s “Social Theories of Ignorance.”

GNSS 1500. The Art of Being Cared For - Gender, Race, and The Politics of Humanitarianism.

This course will explore the nature and language of humanitarianism and its political and ethical effects. We will interrogate humanitarianism as a set of practices emerging from specific contexts and historical circumstances, rather than as a normative set of laws and rules. We will explore humanitarianism not as a triumphal project that transcends violence but as a mediated space that demands reckoning with the violence, uncertainties, and possibilities inherent in contemporary humanitarianism. We will examine cases throughout the world where humanitarianism simultaneously functions as a remedy for absent justice, a rationale for intervention, and an ally for state-sponsored violence.

GNSS 1510. Transnational Sexualities.

The goal of this course is to explore the formation of both normative and non-normative sexualities within the intertwinement of local, national and global social contexts. Using historical and cross-cultural research on gender and sexuality, the course will explore how social forces such as global capitalism, citizenship, nationalism, human rights, securitization, neoliberalism, settle colonialism, tourism, mass media and migration shape and produce desires, sexual identities, sexual labor, sexual practices, bodies and genders.

GNSS 1510A. Reproductive In/Justice.

In this course, students will learn to use the lens of reproductive justice to interrogate the ways that some of our most pressing contemporary crises are rooted in long-standing histories of white supremacy and capitalism and are intimately related to reproduction and constraints against reproductive freedom. By taking up the reproductive justice movement’s primary three principles, 1) the right not to have a child, 2) the right to have a child, and 3) the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments, this course welcomes junior scholars into a nuanced, interdisciplinary space for thinking through the historical and continued role of the US and Canadian governments in controlling reproduction, and reproduction’s impact and reliance on seemingly disparate aspects of life in North America. Ultimately, this course invites students to collaboratively consider the question: “Is (racial/economic/gender/disability/environmental) justice possible without reproductive justice?”

GNSS 1520. Latin American Horror.

Latin American horror film is often overlooked within the world of film studies. This course will delve into the dark and intriguing world of the Latin American horror film genre. We will study Latin American horror cinema considering works across time periods, national contexts, and directors. This course will ask the following questions: How does the genre express individual and national anxieties in the cultural, social, political and economic realms? To what degree does horror film serve as a social barometer that explores, negotiates, and at times reifies social anxieties about difference, identity, sexuality, normativity, repression, technology, the environment, etc.?

GNSS 1530. Strange Things: Race, Gender, and Objecthood.

This course investigates the blurry divisions between persons and things, animate and inanimate beings, and human and non-human life in U.S. literature and media. This class brings together feminist theory, ethnic studies, queer theory, literary criticism, and film and media studies to explore how distinctions between the human and non-human are variously shaped and unsettled by race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability. What role do different media and technology play in producing, estranging, and transforming the meanings of persons and things? And how have these differences been structured by histories and legacies of empire and settler colonialism? To address these questions, we will read and view texts in a range of media from the nineteenth century through the present, with primary emphasis on African American and Asian American literary and cultural production from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

GNSS 1540. Bold Bodies: Race in Feminist & Queer Performance.

This course offers feminist/queer, minoritarian, and comparative perspectives to the study of race in performance. We will define minoritarian aesthetics in both content and style, underscoring the practices that remake the world from minor voices. This course understands theatre and performance as crucial for personal and community expression, political activism, and survival.

We will explore a variety of representation and performance techniques from the last sixty years—theatre and drama, modern dance, performance art, fashion, film, and music—from geographical areas including but not limited to the United States. Performances and theories will spur discussions on topics such as body politics and sexualities, representation and spectatorship, understandings of race, and uses/limitations of performance in feminist/queer activism. This course will broaden students’ perspectives on what performance can do to advance racial and social justice through the subversive voices of minoritarian subjects.

GNSS 1550. Queer Asias.

While commonly understood as universal, gender and sexuality are deeply shaped by transnational and geopolitical dynamics of culture, place, and power. This seminar investigates the politics of non-normative gender and sexuality transnationally across contexts like Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines, and Pakistan. The course challenges the idea of North America as the center of authority on trans/queer knowledge and community. Readings will be organized topically and cover interdisciplinary ethnographic and theory-based scholarship on non-normative gender and sexuality in Asia, broadly conceived. We’ll approach the terms “queer,” “trans,” and “Asia” as heterogenous, mobile, and changing concepts. We’ll examine how they are constructed and contested, as well as how they intersect with dynamics of race, kinship, activism, migration, class, religion, and neoliberalism (among others). The course aims to complicate Euro-American epistemologies in disciplines like queer studies, anthropology, and the social sciences more generally.

GNSS 1600. Embodying Feminisms/Feminist Embodiments.

For much of its history, feminism has revolved around and centered on the gendered body, whether in terms of the body contextualized within time, space, and culture; in terms of the mind and body as oppositional forces; in terms of health, reproduction, or representation; or in terms of the body as part of or outside “nature.” This course will examine feminist relationships to the gendered body in terms of various social and historical locations, as well as in relationship to dis/ability, queerness, reproduction, and the “natural” and built environment.

GNSS 1610. Transnational Feminisms.

What constitutes transnational feminism(s)? How do activists in various parts of the world understand and articulate their relationships to feminism and feminist organizing? How do women and queer people in specific cultural contexts resist multiple forms of oppression and transform understandings of gender, citizenship, and nation? This course explores how feminism is understood throughout the world and examines struggles for gender equality in both a historical and transnational perspective. We will explore themes of colonialism, globalization, nationalism, immigration, representation, global economies, war and militarism, human rights, and politics of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Theoretical developments in transnational feminist and postcolonial theory and case studies of transnational feminist activism allow you to develop a framework to critically explore the intersections of feminism, transnationalism, and social justice and gain an understanding of intersecting inequities throughout the world.

GNSS 1620. Indigenous Feminisms: Environmental Justice and Resistance.

This course will introduce key concepts, methodologies, and arts from Indigenous feminist perspectives on environmental justice. To do this, we will examine five 21st century Indigenous environmental justice case studies from North America and Oceania: Idle No More, Mauna Kea, Sogorea Te’, Standing Rock, and the Pacific Climate Warriors. Together we will explore critical theorizations that attend to a range of contemporary issues influencing Indigenous feminist thought today: land, water, and ecology; ceremony and genealogy; healing and care work; science and medicine; reparations and justice. Course texts will include film, podcasts, poetry, visual arts, essays, and more from Indigenous womxn and Two-spirit scholars, artists, and activists

GNSS 1651. Feminist Theory and Critiques of Capitalism.

Feminist theory has long been a central site of critique of the excesses and inequalities of capitalist modes of production and social relations, whether calling for reform or theorizing a revolution. In this course, we will examine feminist critiques of capitalism, focusing in particular on questions of labor, housework and reproduction, property, and the experiences of sexuality and pleasure. We will attend first to Marxist (and anti-Marxist) feminist theory before turning to feminist critique of capitalism in the contemporary era marked by biopolitics and neoliberal government. Finally, we will consider (feminist) alternatives to capitalism and examine the possibilities for post-capitalist politics.

GNSS 1700. Iranian Women's Resistance Strategies: Gender Discrimination and the Law Since 1979.

After the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, the new government targeted women’s legal rights in the name of Islam. Family Law, Criminal Law, and even Constitutional Law were designed or amended in ways that imposed gender discriminations on Iranian women’s public and private lives. Iranian women from both secular and religious backgrounds have employed diverse strategies to resist these laws. Students will learn about the rules and regulations imposed on Iranian women and also the creative and innovative ways through which they overcome these discriminatory laws. Enrollment limited to 20.

GNSS 1710. Sex and the Law: Strange Bedfellows.

This class will examine legal debates about sexual activity and sexual speech generated by alternate, incompatible views of the source and function of laws and the role of the legal system in enforcing moral codes. We will look at works that see the law as given by God, later natural law traditions intended to enforce a common morality, and texts that see law as a human construct. Not open to first year students.

GNSS 1711. Speech and Silence, Trust, Rage and Fear: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Intimacy.

Seminar examines intimate relationships: problems that arise from failures of couples to speak to each other, when instead of silence, they fail to speak openly, honestly, from a position of equality -particularly about their feelings, needs and desires. We examine the moral agency of men and women as it is reflected in what couples do, say and think. We look at whether relationships fail when men or women consciously or unconsciously choose women who fall into oppressive, subordinate postures and examine whether men take advantage of these postures. Class material from literature, films, and readings from philosophical, literary, and legal essays.

GNSS 1712. Issues for Feminism in Ethics.

This seminar will examine some of the issues that seem to change the focus of the ethical when considered against a background of feminist values. The class will not attempt to examine all possible issues which should be addressed by the values of feminism, but will look at some which are relevant today and/or in which going forward feminist values appear to be at risk. We will examine issues in Consensual and Nonconsensual Sex; Honor Killing; Erotic Speech, Art and Pornography; Birth Control and Abortion; the Ethics of Care vs. Duty; Freedom and Risk in marriage and long-term committed partnerships.

GNSS 1720. Technologies of/and the Body: Mediated Visions.

The relationship between body and machinery, technology and biology is often thought in terms of the mechanical doll, the animated robot and other hybrid figures. Science fiction films for example offer double visions of the gendered body: women are masters/slaves of the technology and still symbolic bodies of biological surviving of the human species. We will explore mediated visions in films and other media of different kinds spanning a bridge between SciFi-films and performance art. We will also study theoretical texts (Donna Haraway et al.) on the problem of the merging of technology and body.

GNSS 1721. Cinema's Bodies.

The course explores the cinematic construction of bodies – female, male, animal, and other. Cinematic bodies do not stand alone as they are framed, cut, exposed, veiled, enlarged, distorted, and gendered. The body is screened and composed into an image of beauty, of death, of sex, of work. Cinematic devices like the close-up, camera angle, light are transform bodies into the body of the film and its specific style. This leads to the question of the spectator’s body as a screen for the filmic body and to theoretical explorations of the embodied visions cinema entails and stimulates.

GNSS 1810. Independent Study and Research.

Independent reading and research for upper-level students under the direction of a faculty member. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

GNSS 1820. Independent Study and Research.

Independent reading and research for upper-level students under the direction of a faculty member. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

GNSS 1960C. Gender, Sexuality, and Science.

Examines how American and European science has naturalized differences in the human body and gendered the natural world from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. Will consider historical changes in the scientific study of sex, gender, race, and sexuality, as well as the participation of men and women in scientific work. First-year students require an instructor override to register.

GNSS 1960D. Feminist Theory/Feminist Activism.

Some complain that feminist theory is "too academic", that it has no ties to social justice or activism. On the other hand, there are those in the academy who accus gender/women's studies of not being sufficiently academic, of not being intellectually rigorous. With those two stereotypes in mind, we will read a variety of feminist theorists, some generally thought of as "academic", and some generally seen as "activist". Can academic theory be useful to political and social activists? Can activism inform academic theorizing? Prerequisite: one theory course, one gender and sexuality studies course, or permission of instructor.

GNSS 1960E. Advanced Feminist Theory.

Feminism and Poststructuralism are two major theoretical approaches to the understanding of society, politics, and culture. What do they have in common? Where do they part company? We'll examine their views on agency, the subject, language, and materiality; and their engagements in the "cultural wars." Readings include Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva.

GNSS 1960K. Gender and the Modernist Self.

Are women more modern than men? In the early decades of the twentieth century it may have seemed so, for in these years the figure of woman came to stand as emblematic for modernity itself. In this course, we will read the literature of the turn-of-the-century (including Ibsen's A Doll's House, Grant Allen's The Typewriter Girl, Freud's Dora, Woolf's A Room of One's Own and To the Lighthouse) alongside the sociology, psychology, and philosophy from the same period to see how exaggerated portraits of hyper-modern women came to seem descriptive of a new, twentieth-century version of selfhood. Enrollment limited to 20.

GNSS 1960L. The Laws of Violence: Lawful Killings in Law Enforcement, Punishment, War and the War on Terror.

States kill: law enforcement officers kill to protect innocent victims and the military kills to protect the nation. This seminar explores the constitutive relation between law and violence. Since the rise of modern statehood, sovereignty depends on the ability of a state to hold monopoly over the legitimate use of violence and thus enforce its order. But without law, bare violence is incapable of establishing order, in the absence of order there is no sovereign. Without violence law has no enforcement power, in the absence of a coercive obligation, there is no law. Enrollment limited to 20. First year students require instructor permission.

GNSS 1960M. Sense and Scientific Sensibility: Beyond Vision, From the Scientific Revolution to Now.

Scientific inquiry is often considered an endeavor pursued using one's sense of vision: researchers peer into microscopes and telescopes and stare at graphs, diagrams, and computer screens. But on what other senses do scientists rely? Do they also gather evidence using senses of smell, taste, hearing, and touch? This class combines readings in the history, philosophy, and anthropology of science with primary sources to address questions such as: why non-visual senses historically have been devalued in the sciences, what a sensuous approach to scientific practice might be, and how attention to sensory epistemologies could contribute to feminist science studies. Enrollment limited to 20. First year students require instructor permission.

GNSS 1960N. Theories and Politics of Sexual Consent.

What is sexual consent good for? Does the language of sexual consent facilitate useful ethical interrogation? Or does it neutralize any worthwhile inquiry into power inequalities? This course interrogates sexual consent through surveying political theory texts, liberal and feminist legal scholarship, studies in sex and gender, court cases, and literature. We query how and to what effect the idea of consent organizes sexual politics and politicizes sex. We first consider consent in legal and political discourse; we next turn to modern theories and doctrines of sexual consent; we then explore case studies. The last weeks focus on youth. Enrollment limited to 20. Instructor permission required.

GNSS 1960O. Desiring the Nation: Gender and Nationalism in South Asia.

Examines the development and afterlives of nationalisms in South Asia to consider the attachments that tie citizens and subjects to the nation and to one another. What are the political, personal, and ideological commitments that allow or prevent individuals from belonging to the nation? Beginning with early 20th century anticolonialism, will trace multiple nationalist movements that lead up to the 1947 Partition of British India, and to the 1971 independence of Bangladesh. Through novels, short stories, and films, will examine the role of gender in anticolonial protest and in early nation-building in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Enrollment limited to 20.

GNSS 1960P. Post-Colonial Technoscience and the Body.

This seminar examines the intersections of race, gender, culture, and sexuality with science and technology in colonial and post-colonial contexts. How is the body a site of contestation for power enacted through medical, scientific, or technological interventions? What are the social and historical dimensions of such encounters between the global North and South? Drawing on colonial-era primary sources and accounts by science studies scholars, post-colonial theorists, historians, and anthropologists, we analyze how the uneven flow of technoscientific experts, practices, objects, and knowledge reconfigures and transforms bodies, selves, and societies. The course's geographic focus is sub-Saharan Africa. Enrollment limited to 20.

GNSS 1960Q. On Love and Intimacy.

Love and Intimacy are terms that have a lot of cultural cache. In this course, we will analyze the ways in which intimacy has been embedded within certain discourses of privacy, rights, and individuality. In addition to the couple form, we will examine friendship, celibacy, therapy and relationships people form with pets and with objects to flesh out intimacy's multiplicities to see how these forces impact these affective tides. This course will bring together history, critical theory, and film to think through various expressions of intimacy and what it means to relate to the other. Enrollment limited to 20.

GNSS 1960R. Sensing Time: Affect and the Moving Image.

Through screenings and transdisciplinary readings, this film-philosophy seminar explores concepts of time, affect, death and subjectivity. We will examine the cinema's capacity to convey events and experiences of twentieth and twentieth-first century history. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze echoes Shakespeare: "The time is out of joint." What can this mean for cinema, thought and life? What is a 'time-image' and can filmic images of time reveal or heal past wounds, those scars that haunt all time to come? How does an image conceal or expose time? How do such images respond to intimate experiences, and even shape politics, history and cultural memory? Enrollment limited to 20.

GNSS 1960S. Media and Modern Childhood.

Will explore a range of key themes in children's media and material culture since the nineteenth century. Through readings, screenings, and the close analysis of media objects themselves (including books, toys, film, television, and digital media), the class will investigate a variety of constructions of and attitudes toward children as they are visible in these cultural forms. Will explore several methodological approaches to studying children's media, and will observe how particular values, economic and political interests, and assumptions about childhood are encouraged, discouraged, and variously position children as consumers, active agents, citizens and cultural participants. Enrollment limited to 20.

GNSS 1960T. Commodity Fetishism: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives.

This course will provide an introduction to critical theory focusing on Marx's mature analysis of capitalism as a social formation founded on the fetishism of commodities. Our examination of this analysis will serve as a point of departure for a wider discussion of the relationship between Marxism and other methodologies and modes of critique, including feminist theory, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. In addition, we will also consider the contemporary relevance and implications of Marx's conception of commodity fetishism from different disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, aesthetics, postcolonial criticism and the philosophy of law. Enrollment limited to 20.

GNSS 1960U. Reinventing Cinema and Media in Post-Mao China.

Focuses on cinematic production and media culture in mainland China since the late 1970s. How was cinema reinvented beyond the conventions of socialist realism? How did cinema transform itself as a result of its intersections with other forms of media, such as television, cassette and video tape, video games and the internet? What does this mediascape tell us about the society of post-Mao China? How do we not only "see," but also "listen to" post-socialist culture? Examines films ranging from 1980s experimental and entertainment films to more recent documentaries, as well as gaming and internet culture-inspired video art. Enrollment limited to 20.

GNSS 1960V. The Communist Experience in Eastern Europe: Genres of Interpretation.

Almost twenty-five years after the disintegration of the communist regimes across Eastern Europe, the question of how to remember the communist experience is highly contested. This interdisciplinary course highlights the complexities of the collective memory of communism, which fluctuates between attempts to come to terms with communist crimes and tendencies to idealize state socialism. Focusing on a range of issues—such as nostalgia, consumer culture, sexuality, gender, violence, the legacy of repression, and attempts at transitional justice—we will explore the nature of communist and post-communist realities by discussing scholarly studies and weekly screenings of full-length feature and documentary films. Enrollment limited to 20.

GNSS 1960W. Fiction/Addiction.

In eighteenth-century Britain, the rise of global mercantile capitalism coincided with the novel’s consolidation as a cultural form. Each in its own way poses questions about habit and volition: do we control what we consume, or does what we consume control us? This course explores aspects of narrative form and character representation in the early English novel with relation to the cultural history of addiction. To anchor our approach to 18th-century fiction (Defoe, Haywood, Lennox, Burney, Edgeworth), we will investigate discussions of appetite, reason, motivation, and compulsion in philosophy and critical theory (Plato, Locke, Johnson, Foucault, Derrida, Sedgwick, Gallagher).

GNSS 1960X. The Aesthetics of Color: History, Theory, Critique.

This course introduces undergraduate students to the central themes and debates in the vibrant history of color from antiquity through the present. While we focus on color in modern and contemporary visual art, design, and media, we begin with the premise that color––like the feminine––has long been subordinated and marginalized as the “Other” within Western culture. We then challenge this assumption using an interdisciplinary approach rooted in feminism, art, visual studies, film theory, fashion, and education. Through descriptive writing, responses to critical texts, and subjective encounters with color in art and culture, students learn the fundamental paradoxes and properties of color.

GNSS 1960Z. Hysteria's Women: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Feminist Theory.

This course interrogates how psychoanalysis understands the relation between the sexuated body, femininity, knowledge, and desire. We will read texts at the intersection of literature and film, feminist studies, continental philosophy, and postcolonial studies to consider the specific challenges that feminism poses for psychoanalysis, particularly an international feminism that is attentive to class, race, and history. Readings will include texts by Freud, Lacan, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Gallop, Rose, Cornell, Spivak, and Djebar. Films could include: "A Dangerous Method" (Dir. John Kerr), "Her" (Dir. Spike Jonze), and "Fire" (Dir. Deepa Mehta).

GNSS 1961A. The Matter of Abstraction: Feminism and the Arts.

How does feminist art help us think through the matter of abstraction? How does feminism’s emphasis on the social constructiveness of needs, desires, bodies, and subjectivities affect - and resist - the terms of not only formal abstraction but also economic and political abstraction? This course considers the influence of feminist theories and practices in the arts, especially their impact upon debates about abstraction versus representation, formalism versus realism. We begin with feminist art in the 1960’s, and proceed to the recent resurgence of abstraction in contemporary art alongside analyses of an ever more abstracted world of capital.

GNSS 1961B. Queer Discipleship.

“Queer theory” names both a set of reading practices and a series of reflections on the dangers, and the possibilities, of being taught. This course will pair fictions of discipleship with recent queer accounts of why we read and what we read for. As we encounter a range of leaders and followers, fans and teen idols, bad teachers and impressionable students, we will attend to the place of queer discipleship in the discipline of queer theory. Students will gain familiarity with this discipline’s history and methods, as well as a critical vocabulary for the analysis of modern cultural forms.

GNSS 1961C. Radical Italian Feminisms and the Contemporary Politics of Refusal.

This course will assess 1970’s and 80’s radical Italian feminism as a blueprint for a new kind of networked and bodily-oriented form of political resistance. Often overlooked in favor of the French and American feminist traditions, the Italian militant tradition, a development within the workers’ movement, has recently come to be recognized as a repository of innovative tactical and theoretical responses to various forms and imprints of contemporary domination. It has clear resonances within revolutionary contestation and the politics of refusal today. Thus, the course seeks to assess the implications of radical Italian feminist movements for contemporary resistance.

GNSS 1961D. Politics of Resistance.

States claim to benefit the people they represent. But the relationship between the state and the people is not always a happy one, nor devoid of conflict and violence. In this course, we will examine the conditions of state power and forms of resistance to it. We will explore these questions through a wide range of literature from Sophocles’ Antigone to Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. Different examples of resistance around the world will be considered including anticolonial resistance, hunger strikes, conscientious objection, the civil rights movement in the US, and on women’s agency in shaping these movements.

GNSS 1961E. Feminist Freedoms.

Because feminism understands itself to be fundamentally concerned with increasing liberty, specifically of women, this course will focus on the theme of freedom. We will consider 1) what it means to be a free political actor, 2) whether freedom is the highest political good, 3), whether, and how, freedom is compatible with other values, and 4) how different forms of government and political structures contribute to, or detract from, attempts to increase freedom. We will read contemporary works from a range of genres that ask what it means to exist on the ‘margins’ of politics, where freedom seems most tenuous.

GNSS 1961F. Local Color: Multi-Ethnic American Literature, 1880-1920.

American literary regionalism ushered in new stylistic forms focused on characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to specific regions. This “local color writing” emerged, in part, as a response to the rapid growth and changing face of an industrializing nation. This course positions itself at the center of this tense moment in America’s history, reading works that pursue both diverse regional and ethnic interests. In particular, we will primarily read women authors and critics to focus on how gender and sexuality intersect with race as it relates to the question nation (re)building.

GNSS 1961G. Framing Gender in Middle Eastern Cinema.

This course examines how gender is framed in Middle Eastern cinema. Through weekly readings in film theory and culture, in-class discussion, and written and oral assignments, students will learn not only how to analyze cinema but also about gender in the modern and contemporary Middle East more generally. Most weeks students will also attend the screening of a film dealing in some way with gender in the Middle East. We will watch films from or about: Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, and Canada.

GNSS 1961H. Literary Imaginations of the Law: Human Rights and Literature.

Did you know that Robinson Crusoe was critical for the drafting of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights"? Or that autobiography has been a literary genre crucial for the articulation and propagation of both human and civil rights? Through a study of the relationship between human rights and literature, this course will explore forms of writing that enable the legal protocols, proceedings, and predicaments that make up human rights discourse. We will pair key human rights documents with literary and cinematic works that inspire and question the universal ideals of the law.

GNSS 1961I. Global America: Gender, Empire, and Internationalism Since 1890.

This course explores the cultural history of America’s relationship to the world across the twentieth century with particular attention to ideas about gender and sexuality. We will locate U.S. culture and politics within an international dynamic, exposing the interrelatedness of domestic and foreign affairs. While exploring specific geopolitical events like the Spanish-American War, World War I and II, and the Global Cold War, this course emphasizes the political importance of culture and ideology rather than offering a formal overview of U.S. foreign policy. This course analyzes the processes through which Americans come to think and feel particular ways about the world.

GNSS 1961J. Make a Body Riot: Laughter, Resistance, and African American Literature.

How does what makes us laugh position us, either as audience or collaborator? What do comedy and performance have to show us about identity formation in relation to race, class, and gender? How might laughter—as release, as physical expression, as indicator of one’s interior life, or as protest—help us understand aesthetic, thematic, rhetorical, and political aspects of African American literature? This course centers on the development of African American literature throughout the twentieth century—including the role of Black literature in society; the intersections of race, class, and gender; slavery’s afterlives; the historical novel; and the role of humor in community formation.

GNSS 1961K. Art Against Empire: Aesthetics of the “New Man” circa 1968.

This course charts dissident aesthetic practices and theories that emerged along multiple transnational axes in the “long 1960s” under the banner of anti-imperialism. Organized from a global perspective, this class considers the contributions and collaborations of radical and militant artists, filmmakers, and thinkers in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Our primary concern will be to analyze the masculinist dynamics of these movements. Above all, we will examine the deeply entrenched conceptions of gender and sexuality that frequently determined who could be seen on the front lines of these struggles, whether on the ground or in the field of representations.

GNSS 1961L. Postcolonial Horror: Political Specters in Non-Western Literature and Film.

This course explores the genre of “postcolonial horror” in contemporary non-Western literature. How are world writers and filmmakers utilizing elements of horror— including shock, supernaturalism, gore, and psychological realism— to derange viewers’ relationships to everyday life? Can horror capture controversial themes like war, genocide, and human rights crimes without exploiting violence? Or does horror merely objectify human suffering to reproduce sexist, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic stereotypes? We will take a transnational, decolonial feminist approach to supernatural motifs, including ghosts, zombies, aliens, witches, vampires, demons, and psychopaths, in films and fiction from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia.

GNSS 1961M. Humanity or Nah? Blackness, Gender, Resistance, and Memory in Monuments, Maps, and Archives.

This course explores the liberatory archaeologies of racialized, gendered, and sexual memory(-ies) articulated by Xicanx, Latinx, Native American, and Africana scholars, artists, activists, and cultural workers that resist regimes of antiblackness, colonialism, and white supremacy. Students will engage scholarly and artistic works that exemplify how Blackness rejects, while simultaneously marking in many ways, the limits and logic of gender and sexuality, exposing the colonial underpinnings of “Man” and modern ideas of “human.” This course focuses on monuments, maps, and archives as three distinct sites where antiblackness, colonialism, and white supremacy are both sanctioned and defied in the public sphere.

GNSS 1961N. Scenes of Instruction: Pedagogy, Punishment, Perversion.

This course investigates the interrelation between pedagogy, sexuality, and violence. It seeks to investigate the classroom as a site of violent interaction and a potentially sexualized space. Appraising the erotic dimension of the production and transmission of knowledge, the course will critically trace a discourse of the utmost actuality and relevance: from campus rape culture, via the prominent question of consent, through current debates around Title IX, the connection between learning and sex marks a highly problematic dimension of our academic environments deserving of scholarly attentiveness and critical scrutiny.

GNSS 1961O. Masquerade as Critique.

Critique is most often figured as an act that reveals a reality that was previously hidden, as though one were pulling back a curtain or lifting a veil. But, as the critic Craig Owens points out, “in a culture in which visibility is always on the side of the male, invisibility on the side of the female…are not the activities of unveiling, stripping, laying bare…unmistakably male prerogatives”? This seminar develops an alternate genealogy of critique informed by feminist and queer of color perspectives. It eschews the modernist drive toward transparency, instead examining masquerade, mimicry, code-switching, duplicity, fugitivity, passing, and appropriation.

GNSS 1961P. Poetics of the World: The Making and Unmaking of the African Diaspora.

This course critically engages with the meaning and making of African Diaspora literature by examining a range of novels, poetry, and memoirs, as well as theoretical texts. Part of the work of this course will be to examine the genre of Afro-diasporic literature. What does it mean to belong to a diaspora? How do writers from across the diaspora communicate with one another? What unexpected models of sociality and community does this literature produce? How do writers engage with one another across national boundaries? Our discussions will delve into themes of opacity, entanglement, identity, race, gender, and sexuality.

GNSS 1961Q. Conversations in Trans/Feminisms: Theories, Cultures, & Politics.

This course explores the bridges and tensions between trans* and feminist movements through academic & activist literature/cultural production. How & why did transfeminism as a critical intervention in relation to feminist theory & politics arise, & why are transfeminist discourses & theories fiercely relevant from the 1960s to the present. How does trans*, as an infinite spectrum of categories, theories, & identities rupture, and/or transcend the gender binary? We will explore the that ways can trans* scholars, artists, and organizations contest gendered meanings, borders, & hierarchies within systems of oppression such as anti-blackness, white supremacy, settler colonialism, homophobia, and xenophobia.

GNSS 1961R. Sex and Money: The History of Paris since 1750.

Paris, seen through the rose-tinted glasses of Hollywood, is the city of love. How did this come to be? And what does this image hide? Across the modern period, shopping and women’s work were sexualized, prostitution was normalized, regulated, and made “safe” for bourgeois clients, nude women performed on music hall stages, and gay cultures emerged in new commercial venues. This class will examine how sexual commerce shaped the identity of the city, how the commercial spaces of the city shaped sexual identities, and how discourses about sexuality contributed to the legitimation of capitalism. We will engage with topics ranging from the construction of gender difference and the emergence of mass media, to the relationship between the expansion of global capitalism and the rise of moral panics.

GNSS 1961S. Boom Towns: Finance and Literature in Latin America.

Studying the works of Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Rosario Castellanos (Mexico)... this class explores the implications of using this financial metaphor to refer to the cultural production of the region since the nineteenth century. We will examine the relationship between finance and writing by looking at, among other things, the literary creation of three fictional boom towns: Kíllac, Macondo, and Tora. Through the invention of these places, literature in Latin America has sought to give sense to its ‘peripheral’ position within the capitalist world-system and challenged common-sense narratives about economic development, progress, and social structures. Students will thus learn about economic cycles and financial crises in Latin America from a cultural perspective. Emphasis on the role of finance in the reproduction of gender, race, class inequalities, and ecological impacts.

GNSS 1961T. Transpacific Femininities.

As theoretical framework, archival method, activist practice, transpacific femininities places gender and sexuality at the center of Asian American literature, culture, and Pacific Rim geopolitics. Since at least the 19th century, femininity has played a critical role in the material and discursive mediation of transpacific relations: from the circulation of feminized Asian commodities and the migration of sex workers, care workers, and other female laborers to the idea of the Orient as the feminine counterpart to the masculinized West. Yet, because Asian and Asian American women have been subject to extensive and aggressive fantasizing in the American imagination, they remain, in many ways, proximal to dominant narratives, occluded by the abstract significations they carry. We will test the parameters of transpacific femininities as an approach for contending with complex networks of relations within and between multiple competing nations and empires.

GNSS 1961U. Women of Color Feminisms.

This course interrogates the constructs of race, gender, sexuality, and class from the standpoint of women of color feminist writers and thinkers. We will draw from a range of materials, including Black feminist theory, literature, memoir, and film in order to examine how social differences are fundamentally entangled and co-produced. We will explore how systemic oppressions (such as racism, economic exploitation, and sexism) interact and rely upon one another to produce different social identities in particular geographic and historical contexts. The course will cover texts that have become foundational to intersectional feminist thought as well as texts that reflect how new generations of feminists are reinterpreting and expanding intersectional politics in order think about oppression and resistance and establish what real human liberation might ultimately entail. Writers and thinkers might include Angela Davis, Octavia Butler, Gayatri Spivak and Kim Tallbear.

GNSS 1961V. Black on Earth: Race, Gender, and the Environment.

This seminar operates on the notion that white supremacy and environmental degradation are historically related—and that Black Americans have long confronted the two together. In this course, we will interrogate how different Black thinkers and activists have done so, from the Antebellum period to the present day. We will begin by considering how enslaved people drew from nature in their resistance to slavery and the Middle Passage. We will investigate the role of pollution, toxics, environmental disasters, gentrification, and more in the formation of a twentieth-century Black radical tradition. We will identify its constituent strands—feminism, communism, nationalism, and more—and their respective visions of liberation. Toward the end of the course, we will explore the environmental justice movement and Black-led responses to climate change. Weekly readings will include one or more primary sources in addition to secondary readings.

GNSS 1961W. Feeling Race.

This advanced research seminar examines how emotion factors into a longer history of race, racism, and resistance in the United States. Using the tools of affect studies, ethnic studies, queer theory, and American literature and film, we will explore the racial politics of feeling, both as a noun and as a verb. What do emotions like rage, melancholy, shame, and irritation—as well as states of unfeeling or disaffection—afford for subjects marginalized by their race, gender, and sexuality? How do feelings include or exclude people of color, especially queer people of color, from projects of U.S. nation-building? Over the course of the semester, we will ask how feeling might reorient our relationship to troubled pasts, help us politically engage with a racist present, and imagine alternative futures.

GNSS 1961X. Black Women Ruin Everything: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Future (Ends) of the World.

This seminar is grounded in three premises. The first is that “the world” is founded on anti-blackness (though not anti-blackness alone). The second is that Black feminists write with an awareness of this fact and a desire to imagine the world otherwise. The third is that as a result Black feminism is a form speculative fiction. This course considers how contemporary afrofuturist texts written by Black feminists critique the gendered anti-blackness that effects black peoples’ life chances. It also considers how these texts go beyond imagining a future predicated on enrolling Black being into existing hierarchies of Man. Put otherwise, this course will investigate how Black feminist writers have used “speculative fiction" to image not only their own freedom but also the freedom of all beings arranged within the social and political hierarchies built upon their supposed abjection.

GNSS 1961Y. Gaps and Silences: In and Out of the Archives.

This research seminar examines archives and considers how classification systems are central in addressing knowledge gaps, gendered and racialized silences created by colonialism, slavery, wars, and displacement. We will engage with archival theories informed by Black, Indigenous, and Asian American studies, feminist and postcolonial theories, and visual studies. What is archival metadata and what role does it play in historical research? How might we imagine new links between descriptive information, records, affect, and embodied knowledge found in and out of archives? Our discussions will be guided by concepts including “critical fabulation” (Hartman), “queering archives” (Arondekar), “imagining the impossible,” (Gilliland & Caswell), and “silences and silencing” (Trouillot). For the final assignment, students will create their own digital archival project. It will be based on their research interests and direct engagement with the Pembroke Center Archives focused on women and feminist theory.

GNSS 1961Z. Black Trans Studies.

This course introduces students to significant strands of thought in the field of Black trans studies. Some suggest that the scope of Black trans studies is too narrow; this course seeks to illustrate otherwise. As Susan Stryker argues, “the field of transgender studies, far from being an inconsequentially narrow specialization dealing only with a rarified population of transgender individuals, or with an eclectic collection of esoteric transgender practices, represents a significant and ongoing critical engagement with some of the most trenchant issues in contemporary humanities, social science, and biomedical research.” Black trans studies offers a framework for approaching some of society’s most critical topics. We’ll explore intellectual genealogies that give rise to Black trans studies, trans narratives and the racialized history of medicine, coalition and community building, violence and policing, representations of Black transness, and debates about today’s movement priorities.

GNSS 1962A. Asian/American Feminisms: Power, Expressive Culture, and the Cold War.

The course follows Asian and Asian American feminist thinkers navigating history and its uses – particularly the present history of the Cold War. Reading interdisciplinary Asian/American feminist theory and expressive culture, this course marks the Cold War as more than just the historical period between the end of WWII and the fall of the USSR (also cast as the preeminent dominance of US democratic and imperial order as the good life). Rather, we will unpack the Cold War as an interpretive framework, a lineage of powerful institutions, a persistent emotional landscape, and (in short) a knowledge project that continues to shape and direct political life, imaginative capacities, and formations of power inhering in race, gender, nation, sexuality, ability, class. Assessing this global knowledge project, we’ll ask after the resources of Asian/American feminist visions of time, power, and liberatory potentiality.

GNSS 1962B. Woman*, Life, Freedom: Global Feminist Liberation Movements.

This course puts its keywords—woman*, life, freedom—in conversation to explore how an avowal of woman and life has been and will remain prerequisites to liberation, particularly in our tumultuous present. We start by looking at the roots of the revolutionary slogan of the uprising that overtook Iran following the 2022 death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini while in state custody, to understand its indebtedness to Kurdish women’s struggle against authoritarianism in Turkey; ISIS extremism in Iraq/Syria; and now, resistance to patriarchal fundamentalism and military oppression in Iran. In studying the slogan’s centering of women/counter-hegemonic bodies and desires, and broadening our scope to the global stage, we will ask: Which genealogies of feminist, queer, and liberationist thought/practice does this slogan allow us to ascertain? What are the throughlines of our contemporary sociopolitical practices of liberation, particularly among Global South, women*-led movements?

GNSS 1962C. Art of Survival.

We will explore the art of continuing to exist despite accident or ordeal. What creative strategies make life livable within sickness, incapacity, and loss? How does survival (or its absence) alter time and space, producing its own aesthetic preoccupations and concerns? Our arts of survival focus on racial and sexual difference as determining factors in living and dying, while considering the labors of sustenance, the affects of suffering, the aesthetics of ruination, and the (im)possibility making the unbearable bearable. Students will develop a comprehensive view of interdisciplinary art practice (including performance, installation, sculpture, memoir, fiction, and poetry) while exploring their own arts of endurance, memorialization, and medicine.

GNSS 1962D. Visual Art and Black Feminist Theory.

This course argues that black women disturb, dissolve, and give definition to the concepts of gender and racialization that shape the modern human. We will closely analyze black feminist theory alongside a wide-ranging survey of significant painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and installation art made by black women in the 19th to 21st centuries. Theoretical concepts representing the singular modes of dispossession that ensnare black femininity, as well as black femininity's re/production of the modern world—concepts such as black flesh, ungendering, fungibility, black mater, plasticity—will be applied to analysis of artworks and the artworks will in turn flesh out these concepts. We will utilize close textual analysis, visual analysis, and art historical context to interrogate the ways that black female artists illuminate, critique, and intervene on hegemonic constructions of gender and sexuality and art historical ideologies.

GNSS 1970. Directed Research and Thesis.

Independent research under the direction of a faculty member, leading to a thesis. Required of honors candidates. Open to seniors only. Instructor permission required.

GNSS 1980. Directed Research and Thesis.

Independent research under the direction of a faculty member, leading to a thesis. Required of honors candidates. Open to seniors only. Instructor permission required.

GNSS 1990. Senior Seminar.

A research seminar focusing on the research and writing of the participants. Required of senior concentrators; open to other advanced students by permission.

GNSS 2000. Method, Evidence, Critique: Gender and Sexuality Studies across the Disciplines.

Gender and Sexuality Studies is by its very nature interdisciplinary. Can we speak of any single methodology that ties GNSS together? How might scholars working on gender/sexuality acknowledge disciplinary boundaries and use disciplinary training effectively? We will start with the premise that studies in gender and sexuality are tied together by questioning foundational assumptions within a given field of knowledge and taking account of our own subject positions vis-à-vis our objects of study. By studying canonical theoretical texts alongside disciplinary studies characterized by a feminist and/or queer focus, we will investigate how gender and sexuality are constructed in various contexts, what kind of work they do, and how standards of evidence are marshaled in particular disciplines. Particular attention will be given to the role of critique, affect, and materialisms, including the materiality of language, in gender and sexuality studies.

GNSS 2010D. The Power and Mystery of Expertise.

GNSS 2010E. Pembroke Research Seminar: The Question of Consent.

No description available. Instructor's permission required.

GNSS 2010G. Pembroke Research Seminar in Feminist Theory: Socialism and Post-Socialism.

An advanced feminist research seminar in feminist theory and gender studies. Presentations made by Brown faculty, Pembroke Center fellows, visiting scholars, and students. Offered in conjunction with the Pembroke Seminar. Enrollment limited to 8.

GNSS 2010R. Pembroke Research Seminar - Unwriting the Anthropocene: A Call to Experiment.

This seminar experiments with form to think about writing and poetics as modes of embodied experience. What are the ways to trace the presences and absences of the colonial Anthropocene? How do we write, visualize, engage with the disappeared and extinct, but also the processes of metamorphosis, metabolics, desire, and queer and trans ecologies that are entangled with anthropogenic crisis? How do the elements of environmental writing underscore the means by which to enliven forms of care, repair, and belonging towards a post-extractive world? We attend to Indigenous, Africana, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Global South perspectives, modes of narration, visuality and experimentation asking throughout how gender and sexuality shift what we know and how we write about it. Through refining our literary and visual arts, frequencies, and embodied engagements, we address collective practices that erode and unwrite the Anthropocene.

GNSS 2020D. The Power and Mystery of Expertise.

GNSS 2020E. Pembroke Research Seminar: The Question of Consent.

No description available. Instructor's permission required.

GNSS 2020G. Pembroke Research Seminar in Feminist Theory: Socialism and Post-Socialism.

An advanced feminist research seminar in feminist theory and gender studies. Presentations made by Brown faculty, Pembroke Center fellows, visiting scholars, and students. Offered in conjunction with the Pembroke Seminar. Enrollment limited to 8.

GNSS 2020R. Pembroke Research Seminar - Unwriting the Anthropocene: A Call to Experiment.

This seminar experiments with form to think about writing and poetics as modes of embodied experience. What are the ways to trace the presences and absences of the colonial Anthropocene? How do we write, visualize, engage with the disappeared and extinct, but also the processes of metamorphosis, metabolics, desire, and queer and trans ecologies that are entangled with anthropogenic crisis? How do the elements of environmental writing underscore the means by which to enliven forms of care, repair, and belonging towards a post-extractive world? We attend to Indigenous, Africana, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Global South perspectives, modes of narration, visuality and experimentation asking throughout how gender and sexuality shift what we know and how we write about it. Through refining our literary and visual arts, frequencies, and embodied engagements, we address collective practices that erode and unwrite the Anthropocene.

GNSS 2450. Exchange Scholar Program.

GNSS 2720. Graduate Independent Study.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Instructor's permission required.

GNSS XLIST. Courses of Interest to Concentrators in Gender and Sexuality Studies.