ENGL 105.01 Gender and Writing: Twilight Lovers and Reform School Girls—The 20th Century Wayward Woman (also FGSS 106.01), 3 credits, J. Metzler

This course examines various constructions of femininity and female sexuality in the twentieth-century imagination. We will investigate myriad representations of “wicked” or “deviant” female and feminized bodies in film, literature, and popular culture and ruminate upon the cultural work these depictions do. Are these incarnations subversive or stereotypical? Progressive or reactionary? From Josephine Baker’s performance in Princess Tam Tam, to Nabokov’s Lolita to television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we will explore both iconic figures and fictional women behaving badly. Areas of study may include conceptions of race and exoticism, the femme fatale archetype, transgendered bodies, lesbian pulp fiction, the female juvenile delinquent, and representaions of the monstrous female body. Students will reflect upon these issues in numerous short responses and critical essays.

ENGL 105.03 Gender and Writing: Love and Learning—How Desire Works in School Narratives (also FGSS 106.03), 3 credits, P.Bailey

This course examines the relationship between the body, erotic desire, and education by investigating philosophical and literary works that ask whether desire makes learning easier or more difficult. What kinds and what degree of affection must exist between students to make them most receptive to teaching? How does single-sex schooling affect education? What kinds of desire should exist between learner and teacher? How should this desire be expressed? When or how does love make learning impossible? Answers to such questions wait in texts such as Plato’s Symposium, James’s The Pupil, Sparks’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless. Writing assignments include response papers and longer critical essays.

ENGL 105.04 Gender and Writing: Melville, Hemingway, Wright, and other “Manly” Male Authors (also FGSS 106.04), 3 credits, M. Garcia

This course will explore the work of American male authors writing in a masculine mode about “manly” characters. We will explore such themes as sexuality, male bonding, and father-son relationships as a way of understanding how these authors perform or define the masculine in relation to the ideals of a particular culture. Along the way, we may have something to say about the feminine as well. Readings may include Melville’s Billy Budd, Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation, and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. The course requires vigorous participation in class discussions and the major revision of earlier essays.

ENGL 158.3 American Literature and Culture: The Politics and Poetics of American Marriage, 3 credits, S. Cote

Why are the white wedding and the “band of gold” so alluring? Why do people still passionately believe that the trajectory of romantic love must end (or begin) with a contract? This course will examine the current debates that question, vex, or strengthen today’s conception of marriage. Paying special attention to gay marriage, we will consider the changing meanings of husband and wife through feminist, cultural, economic, social, historical, and queer studies angles. In addition to op-ed pieces and critical essays, texts will include novels such as Little Children, TV shows like Desperate Housewives, and Hollywood films like Father of the Bride. Writing assignments will ask students to analyze the motives, affects, and agendas that structure disparate positions on kinship, alliance, and married love.

ENGL 276 Desire (also FGSS 276 and COM L 276), 4 credits, E. Hanson

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 our own. We 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 include Greek pederasty, sublimation, hysteria, sadomasochism, homosexuality, pornography, cybersex, feminism, and other literary and performative pleasures, and the focus is always on expanding our critical vocabulary for considering sex and sexual desire as a field of intellectual inquiry.

ENGL 660 Cinematic Desire (also FGSS 661, AM ST 662, VIST 660, COMP LIT 662, FILM 661), 4 credits, E. Hanson

A survey of theories of desire and visuality, particularly psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, and queer film theory of the past 35 years.  The course will focus on films of the past decade in an effort to explore the significance of classic theoretical texts with regard to contemporary cinematic practice.  Students will be required to attend the weekly screening of films directed by Pedro Almodóvar, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noé, Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, François Ozon, and Wong Kar-wai.

FGSS 201 Introduction to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, 4 credits, K. McCullough

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.  

FGSS 202 Introduction to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (also VISST 203), 4 credits, D. Reese

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

FGSS 400 Senior Seminar in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, 4 credits, A. Villarejo

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

FGSS 429/629 The Sexual Politics of Religion (also RELST 424),4 credits. L. Ramberg

Drawing on feminist and queer theory and ethnographic studies of ritual and devotional practices around the world this course will consider the relationships among the social organization of sexuality, embodiment of gender, nationalisms and everyday forms of worship. In addition to investigating the norms of family, gender, sex and the nation embedded in dominant institutionalized forms of religion we will study such phenomena as ritual transgenderism, neo tantrism, theogamy (marriage to a deity), priestly celibacy and temple prostitution. The disciplinary and normalizing effects of religion as well as the possibilities of religiosity as a mode of social dissent will be explored through different ethnographic and fictional accounts of ritual and faithful practices in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

GOVT 462/762 Sexuality and the Law (also FGSS 461/762) 4 credits, A.M. Smith

An advanced feminist theory/political theory/ queer theory/legal theory seminar for graduate students and law students. 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 instincts. Then we will explore a series of major legal and political issues: the right to privacy with respect to contraception and abortion; the restriction of abortion rights; the exclusion of homosexual sodomy from the practices protected by the right to privacy; the racial regulation of marriage; same-sex marriage; Fineman's "sexual family" critique of family law; the moral regulation of poor women in early welfare law; the sexual regulation of poor single mothers in contemporary welfare law; the question of suspect class status for lesbians and gay men; and homosexuality and military service. Throughout the course, we will examine the extent to which sexuality is constructed in articulation with gender, class and race differences. Our reading list will include theoretical works (Foucault, Butler, Cohen and Martin), Supreme Court decisions; and critical commentaries by feminist legal theorists.  

LING 244 Gender and Language (also FGSS 244) 4 credits, S. McConnell-Ginet

This course explores connections between language (use) and gender/sex systems, addressing such questions as the following.  How do sex and gender affect the ways we speak, the ways we interpret and evaluate speech?  How do sociocultural differences in women’s and men’s roles affect their language use, their relation to language change?  What is meant by sexist language?  How does conversation structure the social worlds of women and men?  Readings draw from work in linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, literature, and general women’s studies and feminist theory. Throughout the course, we will examine the extent to which sexuality is constructed in articulation with gender, class and race differences. Our reading list will include theoretical works (Foucault, Butler, Cohen and Martin), Supreme Court decisions; and critical commentaries by feminist legal theorists.

THETR 326 Queer Performance (also FGSS 325), 4 credits, S. Warner

What constitutes queer performance? Is queer who you are or what you do? Is sexuality all we mean by queer? Has queer performance enhanced or eclipsed gay and lesbian theater? This course will investigate the polymorphously perverse relationship between queer theory and performance. Integral to our theoretical discussions will be questions of practice and production: Where is queer performance staged and how is it received? How is it produced, for whom, by whom, and with what funds? What is the relationship between politics and performance? Students will be expected to attend at least one performance outside of class and to collaborate on an in-class performance.