This course examines the ways that narratives produced by women, queer, and Black subjects across the African Diaspora have been sites of conflict over gender, nationhood, generation, race, class, sexuality, and other differences. It uses the framework of the Black diasporic subject to examine how bodies and borders are imagined, valued, and crossed in trans-national contexts.

What is a politics of the trans ordinary, of everyday life for the singularity of trans life? This course will develop a method to explore different answers to this question. That answer, trans phenomenology, will be defined as a style of reasoning that examines the variety of ways that transness cannot be reduced to `crossing? gender or sex. Course materials will include theoretical accounts from mostly contemporary (1990-present) phenomenologies and literature (fiction and non-fiction).

How are transnational Asian and Asian American feminist scholars destabilizing and complicating fixed, U.S.-centric notions of identity, difference, history and politics? How does the history of U.S. imperialism and wars in Asia shape particularly gendered and sexualized transnational migration flows, neoliberal policies, global capitalist development, cultural practices and representation?

With Feminist Care Praxis, we explore how feminists, queer studies scholars, and others theorize and practice care. Embracing the term "praxis", which denotes the blending of theory and practice, this course examines these questions simultaneously. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and the expertise of varied practitioners, it will not only immerse students within scholarship on subjects such as care and mutual aid and familiarize them with grassroots activism and projects, but also provide students will a range of practical skills they can use in their own lives and communities.

This course will draw on interdisciplinary scholarship to examine childhood from a feminist perspective. We will examine how the meanings, definition, and value associated with childhood have changed over time, as well as the contentious political valences surrounding the figure of the child and childhood. We will also explore how feminists and queer studies scholars have theorized power, children, and the family, the entanglements of care and coercion in childrearing, and the gendered and sexed socialization of children.

How has motherhood become a highly contested site for racial politics? How are mothers pitted against each other in ways that undermine struggles for reproductive justice? The "mommy wars" were once shorthand for a mostly media-fueled catfight between middle class stay-at-home versus working mothers. These old mommy wars have not gone away, but they have been sutured to newly virulent debates focused on racialized discourses regarding tiger mothers, "anchor babies," birthright citizenship and family separations at the border.

Not available at this time

Not available at this time

Not available at this time

Not available at this time