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Learn about the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies department and how the University of Massachusetts functions. Gain organizational and public relations skills in doing outreach to students at UMass. Develop ideas for programming and work on implementation of new programs. Develop promotional materials including social media, posters, and other printed matter. Students will attend monthly meetings of leadership council, participate in outreach projects with other students, and develop individual projects.

Traditionally, feeling has been regarded as private, internal, and subjective, a barrier to the production of knowledge. By contrast, in this seminar we will foreground feminist/queer/critical race approaches in order to ask: what does thinking with feeling allow us to know? Together, we will chart the multiple genealogies of affect theory; consider the role of feeling and affectivity in the production of race, gender, dis/ability, nation, and discipline; and attend to the structures of feeling that undergird existing scholarship.

In this course we will explore the potential that love has for transforming relations with others, and with ourselves. Drawing from feminist scholars and culturemakers, we will focus on both politics and imaginaries in order to come to an appreciation of the critical and utopian potentials that love and radical self-care hold.

This course offers an introduction to some of the basic concepts and theoretical perspectives in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Drawing on disciplinary, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies, students will engage critically with issues such as gender inequities, sexuality, families, work, media images, queer issues, masculinity, reproductive rights, and history. Throughout the course, students will explore how experiences of gender and sexuality intersect with other social constructs of difference, including race/ethnicity, class, and age.

While mainstream discourse tends to frame "transgender" as a perpetually new phenomenon, this survey of transgender studies will contextualize present-day conversations in a longer intellectual history. We will be guided by questions like: What does trans mean and how has its meaning been shaped by regimes of gender, racism, colonization, ableism, and medical and legal regulation? What have emerged as the main concerns of transgender studies/activism and how has trans studies interacted with more established academic fields?

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary feminist study of sexuality. Its primary goal is to provide a forum for students to consider the history of sexuality and race in the U.S. both in terms of theoretical frameworks within women's and gender studies, and in terms of a range of sites where those theoretical approaches become material, are negotiated, or are shifted. The course is a fully interdisciplinary innovation.