Gender Studies 333FA - Modern Families

This course examines the social construction of the family unit in the United States across a range of historical periods and cultural texts. Students will dismantle universalist notions of what constitutes a family (particularly the nuclear family), understanding it instead as a social unit articulated by issues of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality and (re)produced with spatial and temporal specificities. Engaging first with historical texts to understand kinship as a legal, political and economic project, we will then turn to cultural production to investigate the role that literature, film, television, and art play in reifying, challenging, and/or reproducing the family.