Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies is an interdisciplinary program focused on understanding the impart of gender and sexuality on the world around us and on the power hierarchies that structure it. In this class we focus mainly on the experiences, historical conditions, and concerns of women as they are shaped by gender and sexuality both in the present and the past. We will read a variety of texts, personal narratives, historical documents, and cultural criticism, to name a few across a range of disciplines. In so we will consider how larger structural systems of both privilege and oppression affect individuals' identities, experiences, and options, and simultaneously we will examine forms of agency and action taken by women in the face of these larger systems.

This course introduces students to critical approaches in feminist scholarship to the cultural, socioeconomic, and political situation(s) of women. Particular attention will be paid to the conceptual challenges and dangers posed by attempts to study women without taking account of relations between race, class, and gender in ideological and social formations. Readings will draw on work in various disciplines and will include literary texts and visual images.

In grappling with topics such as racial and sexual identity, religion, marriage, cultural and family dislocation, or violence and abuse, American women writers have represented gender as shaping and conditioning our responses to the world. We will read major texts by authors such as Kate Chopin, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, Joan Didion, Valerie Solanas, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Bharati Mukherjee, Dorothy Allison, and Jane Smiley. Discussing the social and cultural contexts from which these texts emerge, their assumptions about the position of women, the formal narrative traditions that these authors inherit, and-often-their ambivalence toward feminist self-making will allow us to consider the fundamental question of whether gender is a useful category for the study of literature.

Sexual desire is a series of scripted performances, a set of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Through a critical discussion of “these pleasures which we lightly call physical,” to borrow a phrase from the French novelist Colette, we might discover a deeper appreciation for the strange narrative of someone else's desire, and perhaps even the strange narrative of our own. We will begin with the theory that desire has a history, even a literary history, and we will examine classic texts in some of its most influential modes: Platonic, Christian, romantic, decadent, psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer. This course is an introductory survey of European dramatic texts from Plato and Aristophanes to Jean Genet and Caryl Churchill; and it is also a survey of the most influential trends in modern sexual theory and sexual politics, including the work of Freud, Foucault, Barthes, and various feminists and queer theorists. Topics for discussion will include Greek pederasty, sublimation, hysteria, sadomasochism, homosexuality, pornography, cybersex, feminism, and other literary and performative pleasures, and the focus will always be on expanding our critical vocabulary for considering sex and sexual desire as a field of intellectual inquiry.

This course features stories about women in the Hebrew Bible. Through literary readings of these texts we attempt to understand the portrayal of women (characteristics and roles assigned by male writers); the social reality represented; and the role of narrative in the promotion of ideologies. All texts in English translation. Hebrew texts optional.

Melodrama has often been dismissed as overwrought with emotion, moralizing, and sensationalism. Film studies, however, has reconceptualized melodrama as an intriguing "mode of excess" which powerfully and profoundly affects film audiences. In this course will examine how and to what purposes melodrama has been used in the U.S. context. We will look at different aspects of melodrama-its inheritance from 19th century stage melodrama, its pictorialism, acting style, music; its uses of paranoia, entrapment, and fast-paced action. We will consider the form and function of melodrama in different periods-1950s America, the early 20th century, the Jazz Age, the economic Depression of the 1930s, World War II, the contemporary moment. And we will ask questions such as: How does melodrama position and affect its spectators? How does it allow space for the representation of marginalized voices (of women and African Americans, for example)? How does it allow us to understand the nation? How does it address questions of social justice? How has melodrama been viewed and appropriated by oppositional audiences and fan cultures? What are the implications of film style for melodrama, and why is music so important to the genre? Screenings will include films by Griffith, Vidor, Cukor, Hitchcock, Ophuls, Sirk, Ray, Spielberg, and others and will be guided by readings in film history and film theory.

This course is designed to offer a series of discussions about the following problems: 1) the historically specific modes of sexism and racism in social spaces which are related to Japan and other areas in Asia and Europe. 2) the mutual implication of sexism and racism in various contexts including those of colonialism, imperialism and nationalism. 3) the roles of gender and race in the production of knowledge about East Asia in general. 4) the conceptions of gender and race in the social formations particular to East Asia. The assigned readings include both English and Japanese materials. However, those who will register in ASIAN 388 are exempt from reading the materials in Japanese.

Literary history tells us that various literary genres--regionalism, realism and naturalism, among others--jockeyed for place in American fiction at the turn of the 19th century. Cultural histories of the era tell us that social ideals about what constituted the "real" as well as the "American" were debated by Americans in this period, a period that witnessed such sweeping changes as, for instance, the rise and consolidation of Jim Crow, the widespread implementation of the policy of Manifest Destiny, the rise of women's movements, and multiple effects of the growth of the industrial economy and the shift from rural to urban life. This course puts these two accounts--the literary and the historical--into conversation in order both to examine the varied styles and issues that comprised the American literature at the turn of the 19th century and to query the larger question of the fiction's impact on society. Authors under consideration may include: Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett , Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Sui Sin Far, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Sarah Winnemuca, and Zitkala-Sa.

How does Antigone speak to a German philosopher and what happens when a feminist thinker listens in? When does a melodrama offer the frame for a rethinking of race and gender? How will a feminist scholar learn ethics from the work of translation? In the last thirty years, literature, philosophy and film have sounded a call and furnished a context for important works of feminist inquiry. In this course we will read feminist texts together with their important literary and philosophical informants. How do Ancient Greek tragedy, Idealist philosophy, poetry, contemporary fiction and film figure in recent feminist thought? In what ways is 'theory' written through attentive and subversive reading?

Prerequisites: one course in Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and permission of a faculty member in Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies.

Required for Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies majors and limited to Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies majors. Although the topic/focus of this course will surely vary with the instructor, it will always be treated as a broad capstone course for majors.

This course will examine the contentious debate on what makes women have any, few, and many children. it will cover theories of population growth and changing fertility in both historical and contemporary populations. Demographic concepts like ‘the demographic transition’ and ‘natural fertility’ will be discussed. Primary attention will be given to ‘socio-cultural’ and ‘gender-based’ explanations of reproductive behavior. The course will also look at theories about the place of the state in women’s lives.

Why are some technologies such as cars and computers associated with men and masculinity? How did sewing machines and vacuums become gendered female? How do technological artifacts and systems constitute, mediate, and reproduce gender relations and gender identities? How do technologies uphold gender hierarchies and thus social inequalities? This course explores the relationship between gender and technology in comparative cultural, social, and historical perspective. Specific themes addressed include: work, labor, gender, and technology; the gendered dimensions of industrial technologies; consumption and gender; technologies of (gendered) identity; the intersection of race, class, and gender with technology; and gender, sex, and technology. Most of the course material focuses on western Europe and the United States since the mid-eighteenth century, but the issues raised in this class will prepare students to think about gender and technology in other contexts including our own.

Every day we are barraged with cultural messages telling us to eat better, get more exercise, stop smoking, practice safe sex. These messages make us insecure about our bodies: Am I thin enough, ripped enough, sexy enough? They are also contradictory: Fish makes you smarter; mercury in fish makes you sick. Many of these messages use the language of science and medicine: There are obesity epidemics and chocolate addictions. Our bodies are described and treated like machines: transplant surgeons talk about our spare parts; computer programmers describe their brains as wetware. This course examines how bodies are studied, represented, depicted, and constructed in science, technology, and medicine, as well as how cultural and political concerns express themselves on and through bodies.

This course will consist of comparative analysis of films on female and male genital cutting. The deconstruction of the cinematographic discourse will be dealt with on both thematic and technical levels. Theoretical references will include Derrida’s Circonfession along with works by Freud, Jean-Luc Nancy’s, etc.

In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon defines parody broadly as “repetition with critical difference, which marks difference rather than similarity.” Taking a cue from Hutcheon, we will consider parody as a form of intertextuality that is not necessarily used in the service of ridicule. Rather, we will examine a number of recent imitative texts in order to distinguish the rich variety of political agendas and aesthetic rationales for postmodern parody. Reading canonical texts (Oedipus Rex, Hamlet) alongside some of their revisions (Oedipus at Palm Springs, Stage Blood), we will map the ways in which parody has been the defining theatrical form of the American avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. Individual authors and theatre collectives include Charles Busch, Christopher Durang, Five Lesbian Brothers, Charles Ludlam, Christopher Marlowe, Chuck Mee, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Split Britches, Gertrude Stein, Mac Wellman, Tennessee Williams, and The Wooster Group.

This course will consider how the struggle for imperial dominance has involved the production of various ways of knowing, where the conflicts over political, material, and geographical dominance relies upon and gives rise to epistemological conflicts as well. We will begin the course with general concerns about the production of knowledge in relation to empire. First, we’ll consider how the historical process of imperial expansion has been driven by the desire to document the colonial Other; from sources as disparate as travel narratives, ethnographies, census reports, photography displays, tour guides, and the like, part of the temptation of colonial expansion has been the consolidation of power through the production of knowledge, with these forms emerging as instruments of classification and subjugation, as well as ways of translating and relaying the evidence of cultural difference from colony to metropole and back again. The course will then turn to a more concrete example of this epistemological struggle, by looking closely at the production of knowledge surrounding the U.S. expansion into the Pacific and the Atlantic after 1898. We’ll be looking at the surge of epistemological changes that mark the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in the U.S.: the emergence of the disciplines of Anthropology and of American literary study, the changing classification strategies for museum and library collections, the proliferation of photographic technology, and the great captivation with the displays at the Worlds Fairs are just a few of the interpretive shifts that accompany the U.S. entry into the global colonial stage. We’ll consider as well, however, precisely how the logic of American exceptionalism called upon the interests of knowledge production as justification for its colonial expansion. Readings will include works by Michael Elliott, Carol Duncan, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Amy Kaplan, Renato Rosaldo, and Lisa Lowe, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci, Albert Memmi, Paolo Friere, Mary Louise Pratt, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gauri Viswanathan.

Does a close investigation of French culture sustain its reputation for sexual provocation? From the medieval querelle de la rose to the recent bestseller La vie sexuelle de Catherine M., the boundaries between representing sex and philosophizing about it are more or less constantly permeable. We’ll look at a few particularly fraught moments in this history of permeability, beginning with the medieval dirty stories known as fabliaux and the debates that grew out of the Roman de la rose; Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir; Cocteau’s Le livre blanc; Ganet’s Miracle de la rose; Bataille’s Erotisme; Duras’ Les yeux bleus cheveux noirs; and films by Patrice Chereau, Cyril Collard, Catherine Breillat, and Francois Ozon. Conducted in French.

Violence is committed against women worldwide at an alarming rate. This course focuses on the historical and current reasons for and impact of violence against women both domestically and internationally. The impact of legislative, public, social, or religious policies on the incidence of such violence is considered. Violence against women is committed to protect women's virginity, because women are viewed as property, for political reasons, as hate crimes, and in the name of culture, religion, and tradition. The types of violence discussed in this course include: rape, child sexual abuse, homicide, battering, hate crimes, gay bashing, kidnapping, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, forced prostitution, female genital mutilation, honor killings, public beating, lashing, stoning, torture, female infanticide, trafficking of women, forced abortions, acid attacks, and sati (self-immolation). Each student is required to evaluate the impact of one current policy and critique the potential value of one pending policy relating to violence against women.

This course is a one-semester survey of women’s role in science and engineering from antiquity to the 2000’s with special emphasis on the United States in the 20th century. Readings will include biographies and autobiographies of prominent women scientists, educational writings, and other primary sources as well as recent historical and sociological studies. By the end of the semester we should have attained a broad view of the problems that have faced women entering science and engineering in the past and those that still remain. There are no formal prerequisites for the course, although some knowledge of women’s history and the history of science would be helpful. The course welcomes the participation of students from scientific and non-scientific backgrounds alike

Violence is committed against women worldwide at an alarming rate. This course focuses on the historical and current reasons for and impact of violence against women both domestically and internationally. The impact of legislative, public, social, or religious policies on the incidence of such violence is considered. Violence against women is committed to protect women's virginity, because women are viewed as property, for political reasons, as hate crimes, and in the name of culture, religion, and tradition. The types of violence discussed in this course include: rape, child sexual abuse, homicide, battering, hate crimes, gay bashing, kidnapping, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, forced prostitution, female genital mutilation, honor killings, public beating, lashing, stoning, torture, female infanticide, trafficking of women, forced abortions, acid attacks, and sati (self -immolation). Each student is required to evaluate the impact of one current policy and critique the potential value of one pending policy relating to violence against women

In this course, we'll be reading literature--primarily novels--produced by hemispheric American women writers of the mid- to late twentieth-century. We will look at how these writings articulate concerns with language, home, mobility, and memory, and at how the work is informed by the specificities of gender, race, region and class. Readings may include work by Leslie Marmon Silko, Sandra Cisneros, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jamaica Kincaid, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, Fae Myenne Ng, Carolivia Herron, Helena Maria Viramontes, and Shani Mootoo.

An advanced feminist theory/social theory/political theory/legal theory seminar for undergraduate, graduates and law students (prerequisites: at least one course in feminist theory and in American Government). The seminar will deal first with theoretical approaches to sexuality that build on and interrogate the post-structuralist approach that defines sexuality as a social construction, rather than an expression of a historical instinct. Then we will explore major works in the field that address issues in American politics such as the construction of “the family” in law; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights; the regulation of prostitution and public sex; eugenics and governmental population management initiatives; sex education, birth control, reproductive technologies and abortion politics; pornography, censorship, and public arts funding; public policy responses to sexually transmitted diseases and the AIDS crisis; and the “family values” dimension of welfare policy. Our reading list will include the works of Michael Foucault, Martha Fineman, Janet Halley, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Judith Walkowitz, Jeffrey Weeks, Linda Gordon, Mimi Abramowitz, Gwendolyn Mink, Dorothy Roberts, Zillah Eisenstein, Rosalind Petchesky, Nan Hunter, and Lisa Duggan

In this seminar students will investigate the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of feminism/post feminism and the accelerated technological developments of the last thirty years of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990’s, critics have identified numerous manefestations in the visual arts as cyberfeminist, yet this art sits uneasily between the poorly recorded histories of three fields: digital art, feminist and activist art. Artitistic production categorized as cyberfeminist includes zine illustrations, video games, interactive media and digitally and traditionally generated static high art. Because of this wealth and variety of expressions, the historization of cyberfeminist art is fraught with difficulties. The relation of cyberfeminism to previous feminists movements and other technologically-based art will be discussed. The course will focus on texts by Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray, Sadie Plant, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, and Rosie Braidotti as well as on the work of relevant women artists.

It is a truism that early modern society was a 'patriarchal' one in which men had authority -- but how did that authority operate and what were its limits? How did the exercise of power between men and women intersect with religious, literary, legal and political institutions? We will approach these questions chronologically, examining the impact of the Reformation, the English Revolution, the Enlightenment, the rise of middle class and polite culture. We will also explore them methodologically and generically, with an eye to how different kinds of evidence and sources can produce different kinds of conclusions. Historians' hypotheses will be tested by analysis of primary sources.

To graduate with honors, a major must complete a senior thesis under the supervision of a faculty member in Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and defend that thesis orally before an honors committee. To be eligible for honors, students must have at least a cumulative grade point average of 3.0 in all course work and a 3.3 average in all courses applying to their Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies major. Students interested in the Honors program should consult the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the spring semester of their junior year or very early in the fall semester of their senior year.

If the past is a foreign country, as a famously repeated quotation asserts, is it a country full of oppressed women who need to be liberated by the post-Enlightenment West? We can, with varying degrees of smugness, agree that it may have been dreadful to be a woman and/or a sexual minority at any time and place other than the here and now without knowing very clearly how to do use the insights of current feminist and queer theory in doing scholarship about, say, the Middle Ages. If we take seriously the contention that “homosexuality” as an identity was invented in the nineteenth century, how do we justify ourselves as scholars interested in doing queer work in earlier periods? Is it our task, then, to lovingly yet masochistically detail just how badly women and sexual minorities have been treated in history, or, alternatively, to wax nostalgic about a time when same-sex relations were all about “bodies and pleasures”? Certainly, a number of intellectual risks (essentialism being just one) attend upon this kind of critical practice, yet methodological alternatives to the ceaseless dialectical merry-go-round between oppression and resistance can be hard to come by. This is a class taught by a medievalist that has the rather overambitious goal of interrogating the possibilities and pitfalls of studying premodern genders and sexualities more generally. In it, we will find ourselves unable to study categories in isolation, “gender,” “sexuality” and “queerness” being just three, but we will also necessarily draw some boundaries around the potential vastness of this topic, focusing on literary criticism and on English literature. This course is going to be run as something akin to a workshop, with readings in contemporary literary criticism and theory, student presentations of work-in-progress, and a number of anchoring “primary” works, drawn largely from medieval sources but taught in translation. It would be best if students came prepared, on the first day, to discuss the specific nature of their own projects and intellectual questions, because the syllabus will remain something of a work in progress until our first meeting. No promises are made that the large questions being asked have pleasant resolutions or correct answers.

The course addresses the period of the lifespan referred to as adolescence, as seen from the perspective of the individual subject and the researcher. A case study approach is the primary vehicle for exploring theories and lived experience. Invited speakers will address the role of the individual subject and case methods in their current research when possible, and we will explore the topic of the course through many means: interviews, self-reflections, films, and books. Issues in adolescence will be addressed through theoretical lenses; thus the extent to which the course will examine topical issues in sexuality, dropping-out, suicide, eating disorders, work issues, etc. will be through theoretical analysis of these topics as they arise naturally in case studies and not as "stand-alone" topics outside of theoretical context. Since adolescent psychology cannot be addressed fully and in-depth in one short semester, topics and areas of emphasis will change each term the course is taught. This year, the emphasis will be on identity development. One question adolescents struggle with is the question of “Who am I,” and this course examines what comprises some aspects of adolescent identity from various theoretical perspectives, classical to present, and explores the “growing edges” of theories of adolescence. Primary source material is used extensively.

This seminar will introduce students to the topic of population and development in the broad context of Asia. Issues pertaining to Southeast Asia will be highlighted. We will discuss the linkages between population and development and consider both from a historical perspective, and we will assess recent social and demographic change in selected parts of Asia. Specific topic areas will include the potential links between development and mortality, fertility, migration, and urbanization. We will consider how these processes might affect overall population growth and distribution and why that might be important. We will also highlight related transformation of the family, the labor force, and the roles and statuses of women in each. Students will be expected to expand their reading and expertise in the areas that are of particular interest to them.

Does a close investigation of French culture sustain its reputation for sexual provocation? From the medieval querelle de la rose to the recent bestseller La vie sexuelle de Catherine M., the boundaries between representing sex and philosophizing about it are more or less constantly permeable. We’ll look at a few particularly fraught moments in this history of permeability, beginning with the medieval dirty stories known as fabliaux and the debates that grew out of the Roman de la rose; Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir; Cocteau’s Le livre blanc; Ganet’s Miracle de la rose; Bataille’s Erotisme; Duras’ Les yeux bleus cheveux noirs; and films by Patrice Chereau, Cyril Collard, Catherine Breillat, and Francois Ozon. Conducted in French

Violence is committed against women worldwide at an alarming rate. This course focuses on the historical and current reasons for and impact of violence against women both domestically and internationally. The impact of legislative, public, social, or religious policies on the incidence of such violence is considered. Violence against women is committed to protect women's virginity, because women are viewed as property, for political reasons, as hate crimes, and in the name of culture, religion, and tradition. The types of violence discussed in this course include: rape, child sexual abuse, homicide, battering, hate crimes, gay bashing, kidnapping, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, forced prostitution, female genital mutilation, honor killings, public beating, lashing, stoning, torture, female infanticide, trafficking of women, forced abortions, acid attacks, and sati (self-immolation). Each student is required to evaluate the impact of one current policy and critique the potential value of one pending policy relating to violence against women.

This seminar will explore the similarities and differences among different cultures’ assumptions about the work of women as well as women's experiences in varying work circumstances throughout history. Comparative examples will be taken from the United States, Europe, and the Third World.

In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon defines parody broadly as “repetition with critical difference, which marks difference rather than similarity.” Taking a cue from Hutcheon, we will consider parody as a form of intertextuality that is not necessarily used in the service of ridicule. Rather, we will examine a number of recent imitative texts in order to distinguish the rich variety of political agendas and aesthetic rationales for postmodern parody. Reading canonical texts (Oedipus Rex, Hamlet) alongside some of their revisions (Oedipus at Palm Springs, Stage Blood), we will map the ways in which parody has been the defining theatrical form of the American avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. Individual authors and theatre collectives include Charles Busch, Christopher Durang, Five Lesbian Brothers, Charles Ludlam, Christopher Marlowe, Chuck Mee, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Split Britches, Gertrude Stein, Mac Wellman, Tennessee Williams, and The Wooster Group.

"My existence is a scandal," Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram the queer effect of his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. How did Modernist fiction excite an aesthetic and erotic shock of the new through a valorization of style? Our discussion will explore psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, and queer perspectives on novels and stories written between 1890 and 1940 by various innovative prose stylists in English—writers such as Wilde, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Ronald Firbank, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes.

This course is designed to offer a series of discussions about the following problems: 1) the historically specific modes of sexism and racism in social spaces which are related to Japan and other areas in Asia and Europe. 2) the mutual implication of sexism and racism in various contexts including those of colonialism, imperialism and nationalism. 3) the roles of gender and race in the production of knowledge about East Asia in general. 4) the conceptions of gender and race in the social formations particular to East Asia. The assigned readings include both English and Japanese materials. However, those who will register in ASIAN 388 are exempt from reading the materials in Japanese.

A study of the relation between historical experience and literary texts. We will examine from the perspectives of both historical and literary analysis the rise of women writers, the novel’s preoccupation with conflicts between men and women, the cultural uses of feminism and antifeminism, and the impact of the new woman. Bringing traditional literary text—novels and poetry—into dialogue with “nonliterary” writings like journalism, political treatise, social reform manifestos, and etiquette books, we will draw on the methods and theories of cultural history and literary criticism to ask how gender relations and the history of women bear on the plots, discourses, and images of literary texts. A tentative reading list would include Susannah Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, Lydia Maria Child’s The Mother’s Book, Catherine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domesticity, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Herman Melville’s Pierre, poems by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

In this seminar students will investigate the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of feminism/post feminism and the accelerated technological developments of the last thirty years of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990’s, critics have identified numerous manefestations in the visual arts as cyberfeminist, yet this art sits uneasily between the poorly recorded histories of three fields: digital art, feminist and activist art. Artitistic production categorized as cyberfeminist includes zine illustrations, video games, interactive media and digitally and traditionally generated static high art. Because of this wealth and variety of expressions, the historization of cyberfeminist art is fraught with difficulties. The relation of cyberfeminism to previous feminists movements and other technologically-based art will be discussed. The course will focus on texts by Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray, Sadie Plant, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, and Rosie Braidotti as well as on the work of relevant women artists.

Independent reading course for graduate students only on topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses; permission of instructor required. Students develop a course of readings in consultation with a faculty member in the field of Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies who has agreed to supervise the course work.

An advanced feminist theory/social theory/political theory/legal theory seminar for undergraduate, graduates and law students (prerequisites: at least one course in feminist theory and in American Government). The seminar will deal first with theoretical approaches to sexuality that build on and interrogate the post-structuralist approach that defines sexuality as a social construction, rather than an expression of a historical instinct. Then we will explore major works in the field that address issues in American politics such as the construction of “the family” in law; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights; the regulation of prostitution and public sex; eugenics and governmental population management initiatives; sex education, birth control, reproductive technologies and abortion politics; pornography, censorship, and public arts funding; public policy responses to sexually transmitted diseases and the AIDS crisis; and the “family values” dimension of welfare policy. Our reading list will include the works of Michael Foucault, Martha Fineman, Janet Halley, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Judith Walkowitz, Jeffrey Weeks, Linda Gordon, Mimi Abramowitz, Gwendolyn Mink, Dorothy Roberts, Zillah Eisenstein, Rosalind Petchesky, Nan Hunter, and Lisa Duggan