This course is designed to introduce students to social, cultural, historical, and political perspectives on gender and its construction. Through discussion and writing, we will explore the intersections among gender, race, class, and sexuality in multiple settings and contexts. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to a variety of questions, we will consider the distinctions between sex and gender, women's economic status, the making of masculinity, sexual violence, queer movements, racism, and the challenges of feminist activism across nations, and possibilities for change.

This course is designed to introduce students to social, cultural, historical, and political perspectives on gender and its construction. Through discussion and writing, we will explore the intersections among gender, race, class, and sexuality in multiple settings and contexts. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to a variety of questions, we will consider the distinctions between sex and gender, women's economic status, the making of masculinity, sexual violence, queer movements, racism, and the challenges of feminist activism across nations, and possibilities for change.

The course explores comparative racial and ethnic politics in the U.S. during the twentieth century. We will analyze the creation and maintenance of structural inequalities through laws and policies targeted at persons of color in the areas of healthcare, transportation, immigration, labor, racial segregation, and education. Through readings, lectures and films, we will discuss critical histories of community struggle against social inequality, registering the central impact that race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship have had on efforts toward social justice.

This course is designed to introduce students to social, cultural, historical, and political perspectives on gender and its construction. Through discussion and writing, we will explore the intersections among gender, race, class, and sexuality in multiple settings and contexts. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to a variety of questions, we will consider the distinctions between sex and gender, women's economic status, the making of masculinity, sexual violence, queer movements, racism, and the challenges of feminist activism across nations, and possibilities for change.

In 2014, Time magazine declared the "Transgender Tipping Point" as a popular moment of transgender people's arrival into the mainstream. Using a queer and trans* of color critique, this course will unpack the political discourses and seeming binaries surrounding visibility/invisibility, recognition/misrecognition, legibility/illegibility, belonging/unbelonging and aesthetics/utility. How might we grapple with the contradictions of the trapdoors, pitfalls, dark corners and glittering closets that structure and normalize violence for some while safeguarding violence for others?

Yue Opera, an all-female art that flourished in Shanghai in 1923, resulted from China's social changes and the women's movement. Combining traditional with modern forms and Chinese with Western cultures, Yue Opera today attracts loyal and enthusiastic audiences despite pop arts crazes. We will focus on how audiences, particularly women, are fascinated by gender renegotiations as well as by the all-female cast. The class will read and watch classics of this theater, including Romance of the Western Bower, Peony Pavilion, and Butterfly Lovers.

This survey course will review the complex interaction of gender and violence as a personal and institutional issue in Spain from Medieval times to the present. What are the ideological and sociocultural constructs that sustain and perpetuate violence against women? What are the forms of resistance women have put into play?

With the onslaught of American, French, Haitian, and South American revolts and revolutions, the Atlantic world, much of Europe, and its colonial/industrial empire were thrown into a period of refiguring the concept of the raced, national, and gendered subject. This course considers what new forms of gender, sex, sexuality, and being were created, practiced, or thought, however momentarily, in this tumultuous age. Specific attention is given to conceptions of nonbinary being (of all varieties). Authors may include E. Darwin, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Lister, M. Shelley, Byron, Jacobs.

In this space, we center the radical potentials of mothering/parenting alongside reproductive justice. We'll discuss how mothering/parenting operates in relation to the state, medical structures, borders, and other apparatuses. This course also considers what practices make mothering/parenting and reproductive justice as a space of potential liberation. What and who constitutes a mother/parent? How can the practice of parenting and reproductive justice be a liberatory practice?

We will read a number of key feminist texts that theorize sexual difference, and challenge the oppression of women. We will then address queer theory, an offshoot and expansion of feminist theory, and study how it is both embedded in, and redefines, the feminist paradigms. This redefinition occurs roughly at the same time (1980s/90s) when race emerges as one of feminism's prominent blind spots. The postcolonial critique of feminism is a fourth vector we will examine, as well as anti-racist and postcolonial intersections with queerness.