Upcoming Courses: Spring 2025
The WGSS Curriculum is divided into categories.
- Feminist and Queer Theories (WGFQ)
- Methods for Knowledge Production (WGKP)
- Gender and Violence (WGGV)
- Transnational Perspectives (WGTP)
- Historical Perspectives (WGHP)
- Free Electives (WGSS)
WGSS and will Core Courses
WGSS 200 Intro: WGSS (Singh)
TR 12:00-1:15 pm; 1:30-2:45 pm
FSSA, IFPE, AISO
An introduction to the broad, interdisciplinary field of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Special attention will be paid to the meaning and history of the terms "gender" and "sexuality" and to the political movements mobilized around those terms. Students will read both contemporary and historical materials and both primary and secondary sources.
WGSS 201 will Colloquium (Gonzales)
TR 3:00-4:15 pm
IFWC
This course explores the link between knowledge/power and between theory/practice by examining and applying foundational terms and concepts central to social justice work. Prerequisite: will Program. 1 unit.
WGSS 301 will Senior Seminar (Ooten)
W 12:00-1:15 pm
This community-based learning course enables students to connect WGSS theory and praxis, a central tenet of the will program, and reflect on their WGSS learning. Prerequisite: will Program.
WGFQ
RHCS 103 Rhetorical Theory (Cavenaugh) Special Contract WGFQ
TR 12:00-1:15 pm; 1:30-2:45 pm
Introduction to theoretical study of rhetoric where we learn to think about language, speech, argument, and symbolic action at large as social forces, influencing how we perceive ourselves and others, how we understand our relationship to local and global communities, and how we address important issues in politics, law, and culture. Applies to majors/minors and general electives.
SOC 379 Sexualities & Pop Culture (Troia) WGFQ
MW 3 :00-4 :15 pm
What can we learn from studying how sexuality is portrayed through our favorite forms of pop culture? How can representations of sexuality in pop culture shape our daily lives? This course utilizes a sociological perspective to better understand how social norms about sexuality are produced and challenged through popular culture. We will examine how ideas about sexual (non-)conformity are portrayed through film, television, news media, advertising, and digital media. This course focuses on how sexuality intersects with gender, race, and class to shape how sexual identities, relationships, desires, and behaviors are represented through mainstream and alternative media over the past century.
WGSS 202 Feminist and Queer (Skerrett) WGFQ
MW 3:00-4:15 pm
IFPE
Explores a range of queer theoretical approaches. Special attention will be paid to intersectionality, the social construction of identities, and how these constructed identities impact knowing, ethical reasoning, and conduct. Engagement of the theoretical underpinnings of political, ethical, or cultural issues.
WGGV
HIST 214 Scottsboro Trials (Yellin) WGGV
TR 10:30-11:45 am; TR 1:30-2:45 pm
This course's goal is to use an important event in United States history—the Scottsboro Trials of the 1930s—as a means to introduce students to the historian’s craft. It satisfies the FSHT general education requirement. As a WGSS elective, the course's focus on a case in which nine black men were accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931 involves historical examination of the intersections of race, gender, and class in the United States. Study of the internationally famous case's legal, social, and cultural meanings reveals how these social categories have operated as markers of identity and sources of social disruption and protest.
THTR 370 Staging Gender (Holland) WGGV
TR 1:30-2:45 pm
AILT, IFPE
This a discussion-based seminar course. We will read and discuss plays that directly engage with gender-based violence. We will see interviews with the playwrights, directors, and actors as they discuss what drew them to create these works and how they dealt with the challenges of writing and staging gender violence? How do they avoid tropes that could be, in their very re-presentation, an act of violence? How do they eliminate the voyeuristic spectacle of violence? How do they practice self and collective care, while dealing with such troubling material? We will also look at a variety of critical frameworks for analysis include feminist theory, queer theory, and anticolonial critique in order to help us understand how gender-based violence is rooted in patriarchy and intersects with other oppressive systems (heterosexism, racism, colonialism and class). We will also look at the social and historical contexts of the plays, as well as differences in genre, performance style and creative processes, as they affect meaning. Lastly, we will look at movements and initiatives that strive to intervene to eliminate gender based violence
WGHP
CLSC 308 Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in Greece and Rome (Damer) WGHP
MW 3:00-4:15 pm
FSSA
Structure of Greek and Roman societies based on analysis of their constructions of ethnicity, gender, and class.
HIST 399 Women + Gender in Africa (Summers) WGHP, WGTP
MW 12:00-1:15 pm
African women’s experiences, ideas, initiatives... what sort of a history of Africa do we get when we focus on these? This course will draw on primary and secondary works to explore how African women’s various ideas and experiences of gender and gendered institutions challenge assumptions and Western-based models of universal gender norms, or of the continent’s issues in both past and present. We will look at contentious microhistories of individuals, larger scale explorations of social and economic change centered on the complexities of women’s actions and roles, and provocative investigations into women’s institutions such as female husbands and kings, Queen mothers, women’s initiation age grades and societies, concubinage, market women’s unions, Christian marriage, domesticity, gendered development, and more. We will also contextualize such initiatives in discussions of manhood, marriage, men’s work, husband’s roles, and changing sexual expectations. This long and complex history of women and gender in Africa provides a rich background for understanding current developments, politics and policies around issues such as misogyny, sex, and gender-based violence. And it celebrates women’s efforts to survive, thrive and innovate.
WGKP
LLC 397 ST: Middle East in Film & Cinema (Shalash) Special Contract WGKP
MW 12:00-1:15 pm
In this interdisciplinary course, students will survey a number of films from the contemporary Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and examine how Arabs and Middle Easterner film represents issues of otherness, the West, politics, religion, history, gender and sexuality, race, violence, censorship, to mention a few, in film and cinema. Students will watch a variety of genres (films, documentaries, comedies, talk shows) that originate in the Middle East before coming to class. Students will also connect films to class readings to help them understand local, regional, and global themes. Students are encouraged to watch, rewatch, take notes, and analyze different elements in those films, connect them to larger societal issues, and be ready to have debates and discussions in class.
RHCS 105 Media, Culture, & Identity (Suglo/Sun) Special Contract WGKP
MW 10:30-11:45 am; TR 10:30-11:45 am; 1:30-2:45 pm
FSSA
Basic theoretical frameworks and concepts in media studies. Through close analysis of a variety of texts including, but not limited to, films, music, television programs, newspapers, magazines, and websites, explores the ways in which culture is produced and consumed. Case studies and other examples will provide entry points into thinking about how culture shapes and also is informed by individual and collective identities.
SOC 401 Capstone (Richards) Special Contract WGKP
T 1:30-4:00 pm
Senior capstone experience to complete sociology major. Builds upon what students have learned about sociology as a discipline: its central themes, theoretical perspectives, research methods, and substantive research findings. Examines various topics and issues that comprise subject matter of sociology and reflects on its major contributions.
WGSS 365 Gender, Sex, & Law (Skerrett) WGKP
MW 1:30-2:45 pm
IFPE, IFWC
Laws both define and regulate social and individual lives based on gender and sex. In this course, students read landmark U.S. judicial decisions and model legislation concerning gender and sex, in order to critically explore their influence on civil and political rights in the United States. Prerequisite: WGSS 200 or permission of instructor.
WGTP
GERM 451 Deviant Bodies/ German Culture (Weist) WGTP
MW 3:00-4:15 pm
Analysis of literary, theatrical, and clinical representations of physical, sexual, and psychological deviance in German culture with a focus on the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. Prerequisites German 321.
HIST 199 Changing South Africa (Summers) Special contract WGTP
MW 3:00-4:15 pm
AIHS, FSHT
How have South Africans tried to re-make South Africa? This course focuses on activism and explores the trajectory of South Africa from the 1400s to the present, drawing on primary and secondary works to understand how South Africans worked individually and collectively, successfully and unsuccessfully, to make change. We will also consider how the histories themselves were and are political acts. What was conquest, settlement, and frontier life? How did people pursue their own ideas within segregated institutions? How did racism shape capitalist economic development? Was ethnicity a valuable cultural resource or a racist imposition? How did South Africans make and then end apartheid? What have been the challenges of the “rainbow nation”?
HIST 399 Women + Gender in Africa (Summers) WGHP, WGTP
MW 12:00-1:15 pm
African women’s experiences, ideas, initiatives... what sort of a history of Africa do we get when we focus on these? This course will draw on primary and secondary works to explore how African women’s various ideas and experiences of gender and gendered institutions challenge assumptions and Western-based models of universal gender norms, or of the continent’s issues in both past and present. We will look at contentious microhistories of individuals, larger scale explorations of social and economic change centered on the complexities of women’s actions and roles, and provocative investigations into women’s institutions such as female husbands and kings, Queen mothers, women’s initiation age grades and societies, concubinage, market women’s unions, Christian marriage, domesticity, gendered development, and more. We will also contextualize such initiatives in discussions of manhood, marriage, men’s work, husband’s roles, and changing sexual expectations. This long and complex history of women and gender in Africa provides a rich background for understanding current developments, politics and policies around issues such as misogyny, sex, and gender-based violence. And it celebrates women’s efforts to survive, thrive and innovate.
RELG 303 Women, Gender, Sexuality, & Islam (Hanaoka) WGTP
MW 12:00-1:15 pm
“Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Islam,” explores Islam and Muslim traditions through the prisms of women, gender, and sexuality, exploring how authority and power interact with these phenomena. We will ask these types of questions? How is authority gendered in Islam in its social, religious, and domestic dimensions? Where do the utopian ideals of equality create dissonance with the lived reality of gendered societies and communities? Are these issues of women, gender, sexuality, and authority unique to Islam, or do they manifest across a variety of religions and communities across time and place? We will analyze the matrix of power, gender, and authority within Muslim traditions over time and place. We will also pay close attention to the diversity and differences within Islam and Muslim communities and the specific contexts of how power and authority function in Islam vis-a-vis women, gender, and sexuality. This course grounds all discussion of texts, traditions, and practices in their appropriate historical contexts and analyzes the historical factors, social processes, and theological principles that have shaped approaches to Islam. It also pays close attention to the diversity within Islam and the historical bases for the transformation of core ideas over time and place. Topics include: gender and Islam; gender and the Quran; women and authority; activism in North America; same-sex intimacy in Islam; the transgender experience in Islam; gender and family life; marriage and divorce; gender and Islam in Iran; women, gender, Islam, and the Middle East.
WGSS Electives
ANTH 328 Anthropology of Human Rights (French) WGSS
MW 10:30-11:45 am; 12:00-1:15 pm
Examines the origins of human rights discourse and practice in the 20th century and the elaboration and dissemination of human rights concepts in the post-World War II period, including analysis of institutional grounding in United Nations and non-governmental organizations. Considers human rights from a cross-cultural, anthropological perspective. Prerequisite(s): Anthropology 101, Global Studies 290, Political Science 240, Political Science 250, Political Science 260, Sociology 101, or Leadership Studies 101.
ARCH 310 Archaeology of Death (Baughan) Special Contract WGSS
F 12:00-2:40 pm
From pyramids and pyres to simple pine caskets, the different ways people treat the dead and mark graves can reflect how human societies are organized and individual identities defined. Unlike most other archaeological contexts, burials are intentional deposits that reflect conscious decisions as well as embedded cultural traditions and, often, religious beliefs. Students in this course will learn and assess different approaches archaeologists use to discover, analyze, and interpret mortuary evidence. They will also apply basic methods of ‘above-ground’ cemetery archaeology and genealogical research to help recover buried history and contribute to public scholarship, with a collaborative community-engaged project focusing on a historic African American cemetery in the Richmond area.
ENGL 347 Politics, Social Change and Modern Drama (Outka) Special Contract WGSS
T 3:00-5:40 pm
A literary exploration of modern and contemporary drama as a vehicle for social change. Prereq: one 200-level ENGL with a minimum grade of C.
LDST 369 Culture & Resistance (Bezio) Special Contract WGSS
MW 12:00-1:15 pm
AILT, FSLT, IFPE
LDST 386 Leadership in a Diverse Society (Hoyt) WGSS
TR 9:00-10:15 am
The goal of this course is to understand how diversity affects social relations with an emphasis on leadership. To this end, we will examine diversity, primarily through the lens of social psychology, by examining individual and collective dynamics in pluralistic settings. We will examine the phenomena and processes associated with one’s beliefs about members of social groups (stereotypes), attitudes and evaluative responses toward group members (prejudice), and behaviors toward members of a social group based on their group membership (discrimination). On the flip side, we will examine how stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination shape the experiences of members of low-status or minority groups. We will focus primarily on large societal groups that differ on cultural dimensions of identity such as gender, sexuality, and race & ethnicity. We will also address approaches to ameliorating these problems and will apply the theoretical and empirical work to current events and relevant policy issues. Same as PSYC 359.
LING 203 Introductory Linguistics (Bonfiglio) Special Contract WGSS
MW 3:00-4:15 pm
FSSA
General, historical and/or descriptive linguistics. Prerequisites: Completion of Communication Skills II-Language requirement.
RELG 210 Sex & Salvation: 19th Century America (Winiarski) WGSS
TR 3:00-4:15 pm; 4:30-5:45 pm
FSHT
Course about alternative/sectarian/utopian religious movements in nineteenth-century American and the challenges that presented to mainstream Victorian models of gender, sexuality, and the family.
SOC 279 Sociology of Families (Mowery) WGSS
TR 10:30-11:45 am
SOC 320 Race, Class and Schooling (Richards) Special Contract WGSS
MW 1:30-2:45 pm
Deepens students' understanding of the various ways in which race and class inequality manifest in schools and shape the educational experiences of students.
THTR 312 ST: Politics, Culture & Creative Expression (Herrera) WGSS
Class time to be determined
Department Approval is required.
VMAP 279 ST: Art of Queering (Keaton) WGSS
TR 12:00-2:00 pm
This special topics course is both an art survey and an art studio. Central to our exploration is the concept of "queering" as a verb—an active process of subverting or troubling norms, reshaping perceptions, and opening to plural and sometimes contradictory meanings. Students will explore the works and creative practices of queer artists whose work challenges and redefines the boundaries of their mediums and the context in which they exist.
Through discussions and analyses, we will examine the themes of performance and ritual, archives and ancestors, form and transformation, and resistance and rebellion. In response to these ideas, students will create their own artwork, fostering a deeper, more embodied engagement with the material. By the end of the course, students will gain a richer understanding of queer artistic expression and develop their unique creative voices through the act of queering.
Updated 10/23/2024