Women, Gender, Sexuality 291G - S-Fem/QueerAppr/CritUnivStudy

The university is in crisis, or so we are often told. University budgets are shrinking while tuition and student debt are increasing exponentially, especially for women and students of color. And yet, we're here. As students, instructors, and staff we continue to look to the university as a productive space for thinking and working. And Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies is here as an academic field dedicated to a collective engagement with the way power constitutes bodies, desires, knowledge, and ways of being in the world. This undergraduate course will introduce students to the emerging field of critical university studies through a feminist, queer, and anti-racist frame. What, we will ask, does it look like to think in and about the university at this historical moment? What does it mean to consider the university's history in relationship to power and that nation-state? What are the gender, sexual, and racial politics of knowledge production? And what are we going to do about it?