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 course examines gender as a key category in Jewish religious thought and practice. Students examine different theories of gender and intersectional feminisms, concepts of gender in a range of Jewish sources, and feminist Jewish responses to those sources. Students work with the Judaica collection at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and consider material culture as a source for women's and gender studies.

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.

Students will learn about and experiment with a variety of possibilities for queer feminist knowledge-making. First, we'll engage with "transdisciplinarity" and "hybridity" as concepts and practices in activist-scholar projects of disciplinary disentanglement. Then, accompanied by the work of writers, artists, scientists, and organizers involved in queer feminist knowledge-making along and against the borders and boundaries of genre, time, and expectation, we'll experiment with methodological and representational eclecticism.

This seminar will offer close theoretical readings of a variety of anti-colonial, abolitionist, anti-imperialist, insurgent and feminist-of-color memoir, autobiographical and social justice texts. We will read works from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Assata Shakur, Patrisse Cullors, Grace Lee Boggs, Audre Lorde, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinna, Leila Khaled, Fannie Lou Hamer, Sarah Ahmed, Lee Maracle, Kai Cheng Thom, Angela Davis, Sojourner Truth, adrienne maree brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mary Brave Bird, Jamaica Kincaid, Gabby Rivera and Haunani-Kay Trask.

How is pop culture a site of social struggle? This course engages students in the scholarly field of feminist media studies in order to illuminate how popular culture indexes complex political terrains. With attention to intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability and disability, we will analyze representation across wide-ranging media forms. What can feminist theory tell us about media's production and reception? What can media theory tell us about feminist discourses, movements, and activism?

Pregnancy is a stunning feat of physiology. It is a conversation between two bodies -- parental and fetal -- whose collective action blurs the very boundaries of the individual. In this course we will explore such questions as: what is pregnancy, and how does the ephemeral, essential organ known as the placenta call pregnancy into being? How is pregnancy sustained? How does it end? We will consider the anatomy of reproductive systems and the hormonal language of reproduction.

This course brings seniors together to develop and carry out a capstone project related to their specific interests while exploring the relationships among theory, activism, research and practice in gender studies and/or critical social thought. Projects can take different forms. Seniors with diverse interests, perspectives, and expertise will have the opportunity to reflect on the significance of their education in relation to their current and past work, their capstone or senior projects, their academic studies as a whole or their engagements outside of academia.

The course is an overview of the social conditions of Latinx people within the US. It addresses laws, policies and institutions that shape the complexity of Latinxes' social location and activism as well as legal constructions of race, citizenship, nomenclature, border politics, public health, education, and labor. We will consider the intersections of class, gender and sexuality as well as inequality in relation to other persons of color. Students will develop a firm sense of the importance and breadth of the Latinx political agenda and acquire skills to think across social issues.

This reading- and writing-intensive course draws upon the intellectual traditions of African American, African, and African diasporic studies in order to explore the connections and disjunctures among people of African descent. While the course pays attention to national, regional, and historical contexts, it asks this question: what do African descended people have in common and when and how are their experiences and interests different? What can we glean from contemporary discourses grounded in the consideration of global black lives?