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 We will read a variety of texts, personal narratives, historical documents, and cultural criticism, to name a few across a range of disciplines.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.

What are the connections between biology (male, female, trans, inter-sex), gender, (butch, femme, girlie-boy, masculinefeminine) and sexual orientation (gay, straight, queer, bisexual)? How do we value desire in our own bodies and decide when to place them in proximity to others'? How do we perform our gender while sitting in the audience watching everyone else perform? And how are our performances altered by the tensions between sexual majorities and sexual minorities? We'll read such authors as Judith Butler, Shyam Selvadurai, Susan Faludi, Leslie Feinberg, Robert Bly, and Li Young Li. We'll watch films such as Brokeback Mountain, Fire, Boys Don't Cry, Go Fish andThe Laramie Project. Students will write art critiques, film reviews, critical arguments, and personal essays.

By working through a selection of works by prominent modern and contemporary women playwrights and women directors writing and producing from Asia, America, Africa, Europe, as well as across these regions and continents, this course introduces students to a constellation of world dramatic literatures and theatre productions that is central to the making of a distinct transnational aesthetic and variable formations of cross-cultural consciousness throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Readings include Qiu Jin, Yuan Changying, Bai Fengxi, Huang Shuqin, Tai Lihua; Lorraine Hansberry, Cherrie Moraga, Nelly Sachs, Joan Schenkar; Efua Sutherland, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tess Onwueme, Susan Pam-Grant; and Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robbins, Cicely Hamilton, Caryl Churchill, Simone Benmussa, Elizabeth Mansfield, among others. A collection of visual materials is used.

The family is at the center of contemporary political debates involving social policies, gender roles, citizenship, marriage, and the role of the state. Politicians and commentators frequently invoke a mythical American family, one that is conflict-free, independent, and unchanging. These idealized depictions mask a far more complicated and richer historical reality of the development of family structures in the U.S. This course will examine both the diverse experiences of actual families in the American past, and changing ideologies about the family and its social role. We will examine, in particular, immigration, reproduction and childrearing, sexuality, work, leisure, and consumption. We will maintain a sustained focus on changing constructions of race, ethnicity, gender and class and the interactions of these social relations with social structures, including the labor and housing markets, immigration and naturalization law, and the educational system. Through this exploration, we will see both how social structures including the family shaped individuals' experiences, and how historical actors responded to and changed these structures. We will also gain a better understanding of what's at stake in today's debates about the family, and will conclude by asking how contemporary social policies could better address the needs of all families.

The “Korean Wave”, or Hallyu, films, dramas, music, and animations, along with art, fashion, and games, has become a formidable cultural and esthetic force in the world. Through the Korean Wave films, dramas, and other forms of media, this course highlights the issues of gender and globalization in modern Korean history, society and culture. With lectures, readings, and film viewings, this course will examine the themes of gender relationships and transnational/translocal globalization at the transformative nexus of Korea. The contemporary Korean society and culture, within and without the peninsula, are in a constant state of flux, osmosis and metamorphosis in terms of gender negotiations, education migrations, diasporic settlements, and family and generational conflicts/ compromises, amidst growing and enlarged opportunities for women and men toward self-actualization, including life style choices, citizenship, activism, travel, and leisure. Class discussion will include historical controversies and debates and reviewing and writing techniques, in addition to exploring historiography and filmography in the era of technological revolution. What do relationship, communication, commitment and marriage mean for modern Korean men and women? How did gender roles, politics of relationship and cultural expectations change for both men and women—from traditional patriarchy to colonial rule to military dictatorship to participatory democracy? How does the gender situation in Korea compare with other societies? For Korean and Asian women, how has the ideal woman evolved from Neo-Confucian virtuous woman to “wise mother and sweet wife” to new woman to modern career woman? Most of all, what does it mean to be a free, creative, imaginative, and independent human being in Korean society today?

This course examines the experiences and representations of Asian American women from the mid-19th century to the present.  It explores the lives and contexts of immigrant women and of women born in the U.S.  Questions of identity and power are at the heart of this course as we investigate the intertwined nature of race, gender, and nation.  We will also pay particular attention to the practice of history, seeking a better understanding of how scholars recover the history of a population rendered invisible by traditional methods and inquiries. Course materials include numerous primary sources in addition to scholarship from a variety of disciplines (history, literature, sociology, anthropology).

This course deals with the history of women in medicine and the historical and cultural treatment of women’s health problems. Health care research and the exclusion of women from research trials and protocols are also addressed. Reproductive issues, alternative approaches to treatment, medical problems, ethical issues, cancers, factors that contribute to post-traumatic stress disorders, health promotion behaviors, political issues, and routine medical recommendations are also discussed in depth. Students may take the course for a fifth credit by attending a discussion section every other week and observing seven facilities (i.e., birthing center, mammogram and ultrasound center, wellness center, hospital labor and delivery unit, Lamaze class, women’s self-defense class, etc.) that provide a variety of women’s health care.

Blaxploitation films of the 1970s are remembered for their gigantic Afros, enormous guns, slammin' soundtracks, sex, drugs, nudity, and violence. Never before or since have so many African American performers been featured in starring roles. Macho male images were projected alongside strong, yet sexually submissive female ones. But how did these images affect the roles that black men and women played on and off the screen and the portrayal of the black body in contemporary society? This interdisciplinary course explores the range of ideas and methods used by critical thinkers in addressing the body in art, film, photography and the media. We will consider how the display of the black body affects how we see and interpret the world by examining the construction of beauty, fashion, hairstyles and gendered images as well as sexuality, violence, race, and hip-hop culture. Film screenings at Cornell Cinema and the Africana Center.

“My existence is a scandal,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram the effect of his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their valorization of aestheticism and all that was considered artificial, unnatural, or perverse, the so-called “Decadent” writers of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional ethical moorings. We will discuss literary and visual texts by Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, J.-K. Huysmans, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater, Reneé Vivien, James McNeill Whistler, and Aubrey Beardsley, with a particular focus on Oscar Wilde. Students may read French and German texts in the original or in English translation.

This course examines the intersections of gender, sexuality, space, and popular culture. Ranging across media—film, literature, television, and music—the class analyzes how these different forms represent and constitute gendered and sexed bodies. How does the Lifetime channel, for example, represent itself as a woman's space? Spike as a man's space? Are these distinctions breaking down, resulting in more hybrid genres? How do race, ethnicity, age, and class figure in? We connect media to sites of production, distribution, and consumption, such as the theater, the home, and cyberspace with particular emphasis on the affective and often passionate realm of consumption. Questions of access are considered: which technologies have provided access to marginalized groups, and on what terms? What are the political possibilities of popular culture, and what are the intersections of politics and pleasure?

In this seminar focusing on sassy or subdued heroines of Hollywood's 1940s films and current films, we will work to define romantic comedy and melodrama as genres; as vehicles for female stars; as ways of viewing the world. Psychoanalytic and feminist analyses of these films will help us pose questions about gender and culture, about gendered spectatorship, about the relation of these films to American culture, about Hollywood's changing constructions of “woman,” the “maternal,” and the “feminine,” and about representations of desire, pleasure, fantasy, and ideology. Required weekly screenings of such films as Gilda, The Lady Eve, Reckless Moment, Notorious, The Women, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours, First Wives' Club, All About My Mother, Silence of the Lambs, Far From Heaven, and The Deep End. For permission to add this course, please contact instructor at ldb4@cornell.edu.

Discusses French Impressionist art as the product of nineteenth-century public life and political revolutions. Alongside the political events that shaped Impressionism, we will examine gender construction and performance as preoccupations of the era. We look at subversive themes such as female criminality, café-concert and brothel societies, clandestine prostitution, and class-regulated leisure. Students consider the bourgeois formation of public/private and male/female spaces within Parisian commodity culture and spectacle, including the department store as a space of female empowerment and coercion. Woman as spectacle is discussed through the Parisian exhibition of Sarah Baartman, or the “Hottentot Venus,” and the harem fantasies portrayed by Impressionists in Algeria. New technologies of vision-the camera, panorama, kaleidoscope-are considered alongside voyeurism and nineteenth-century concepts of the gendered gaze embodied by the flâneur and flâneuse. We include Degas and his brothel monotypes and pastels of women shoppers as well as Zola's novels Nana and Ladies' Paradise. Other artists discussed include Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh. In addition to paintings, we look at fashion plates, advertisements, posters, and postcards.

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

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 course material focuses on western Europe and the U.S. since the mid-18th century, but the issues raised in this class will prepare students to think about gender and technology in other contexts including our own.

Gender Studies for the ancient Greek and Roman world have focused either on a social history of women or on difference. This seminar will combine both approaches with specific emphasis on images (visual and textual) or women and the methods of their interpretation. We will discuss representations of women from all social classes, the public and private life of women, concepts of the female body as well as female figures (heroines and monsters) in myth.

This course will examine queer Latina and Latino literature, film, and art. Beginning with John Rechy's stunning novel about sex work, City of Dreams, and continuing with the theoretical and literary transformations wrought by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, this course explores the relationship between sex, desire, revolution, and belonging in the work of Luz Marie Umpierre, Rafael Campos, Luis Alfarro, Marga Gomez, Laura Aguilar, Frances Negron-Mutaner and many others. We will also take up the theoretical terrain outlined by Jose Munoz, Maja Horn, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejaranno. This course will entail extensive reading and two longer papers. For permission to add this course, please contact instructor at mpb23@cornell.edu.

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.

Examines the changing economic roles of women and men in the labor market and in the family. Topics include: a historical overview of changing gender roles; the determinants of the gender division of labor in the family; trends in female and male labor force participation; gender differences in occupations and earnings; and the consequences of women’s employment for the family.

The course will focus on reading novels by Toni Morrison, including The Bluest Eye, Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003) and A Mercy (2008). The presentation of her novels in trilogy form and her contributions to the genre of historical writing will be given some consideration. We will explore the author's stylistic innovation and expansion of this genre. We will consider topics such as how to read novels critically. We will pursue our study with attention to major public works of Morrison, from her art project as a curator at the Louvre to the Toni Morrison Society’s “Bench by the Road” project and its 2008 conference in Charleston, South Carolina and upcoming Paris meeting in summer 2010.

The body can be everything and nothing. This course investigates the continuities and discontinuities in theories of embodiment and the social construction of body from the ancients to the present. Understanding the body as performative, we'll examine it through the practices of medicine and anatomy, aesthetics and the nude, manifestations of beauty and the grotesque. Criminal, sinful and saintly bodies; death, the macabre, and the mortal, divine body of Christ; the ambiguous gender of children; the formation of identity through portraiture; the science of sexuality and art of erotics as well as correspondences among bodies, domestic and public spaces, the macrocosm and microcosm will complete our study.

AIDS is one of the hallmarks of our contemporary world, and the loss endured due to this pandemic has been of epic proportions. In this seminar we will consider literary and other responses to this cataclysmic event. We will give particular attention to the following questions: How do artists rely on, dilate, or overhaul antecedent conventions to express AIDS loss? What are the insights and limitations of particular stylistic and formal choices? How do artists balance consolation in the face of compounded crises? How are their creative responses shaping our interpretation of the history and memory of AIDS? Authors may include: Melvin Dixon, Tony Kushner, Paul Monette, Jamaica Kincaid, Susan Sontag, Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, Larry Kramer, Thomas Glave, and Michael Cunningham.

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.

This graduate seminar investigates three key terms for twentieth-century aesthetic thought and performance theory: camp, kitsch, and trash. As we analyze the various meanings assigned to these terms (and the performances articulated under their banners), we will also consider histories of taste; the traffic between popular culture and “high art”; and the relationships among material artifacts, identity politics, and community formations. Issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality will be foregrounded. Authors include Adorno, Bourdieu, Broch, Butler, Debord, Greenberg, Ludlam, Newton, Sedgwick, Sontag, Waters, and Warhol.

Gender Studies for the ancient Greek and Roman world have focused either on a social history of women or on difference. This seminar will combine both approaches with specific emphasis on images (visual and textual) or women and the methods of their interpretation. We will discuss representations of women from all social classes, the public and private life of women, concepts of the female body as well as female figures (heroines and monsters) in myth.

The course will focus on reading novels by Toni Morrison, including The Bluest Eye, Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003) and A Mercy (2008). The presentation of her novels in trilogy form and her contributions to the genre of historical writing will be given some consideration. We will explore the author's stylistic innovation and expansion of this genre. We will consider topics such as how to read novels critically. We will pursue our study with attention to major public works of Morrison, from her art project as a curator at the Louvre to the Toni Morrison Society’s “Bench by the Road” project and its 2008 conference in Charleston, South Carolina and upcoming Paris meeting in summer 2010.

“My existence is a scandal,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram the effect of his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their valorization of aestheticism and all that was considered artificial, unnatural, or perverse, the so-called “Decadent” writers of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional ethical moorings. We will discuss literary and visual texts by Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, J.-K. Huysmans, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater, Reneé Vivien, James McNeill Whistler, and Aubrey Beardsley, with a particular focus on Oscar Wilde. Students may read French and German texts in the original or in English translation.

The body can be everything and nothing. This course investigates the continuities and discontinuities in theories of embodiment and the social construction of body from the ancients to the present. Understanding the body as performative, we'll examine it through the practices of medicine and anatomy, aesthetics and the nude, manifestations of beauty and the grotesque. Criminal, sinful and saintly bodies; death, the macabre, and the mortal, divine body of Christ; the ambiguous gender of children; the formation of identity through portraiture; the science of sexuality and art of erotics as well as correspondences among bodies, domestic and public spaces, the macrocosm and microcosm will complete our study.

This course explores queer fiction in the widest possible sense. We'll take a look at the complicated relationship between narrative and sexuality in modern French and Italian literature, with occasional detours into the Anglophone world. In the process, we'll pay special attention to canonical figures of modern homosexuality (e.g. Colette, Gide, Genet, Yourcenar, and Pasolini) and to writers less comfortably, which is to say more queerly, positioned within that cannon (e.g. Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, Pat Califia, Hervé Guibert, Pier Vittorio Tondelli). Readings and discussion in English

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.