Gender Studies (GSC)
GSC 10001 Introduction to Gender Studies (3 Credit Hours)
This course provides students with an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of gender studies. It also serves as an introduction to gender itself—gender as identity, as a social/cultural formation, as a mode of self-expression, and as a critical lens through which to better understand the world.
We will explore how gender is experienced, produced, and performed at the intersection of culture, politics, and the body, always in conjunction with other factors of power and difference such as race, nation, sexuality, dis/ability, and socioeconomic class. We will ask how institutions like government, work, and family interact with gender in the U.S. and in local contexts around the world. We will think critically about how ideology (systems of ideas and knowledge) and representation (portrayals in media, political discourse, and everyday life) shape our understanding of gender.
The study of gender reaches into, across, and beyond academic disciplines. This course will explore how research on gender is done both within the interdisciplinary field of gender/women/sexuality studies and across many other fields, taking up debates and conversations about gender from history, sociology, anthropology, biology, literature, philosophy, political science, geography, and other disciplines that engage gender as a subject of knowledge.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKSS - Core Social Science
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 10100 Introduction to American Studies (3 Credit Hours)
This course explores the rich and varied field of American Studies, a field dedicated to understanding America's diverse cultures and the ways American national identity has been constructed and contested differently over time. Through lectures, readings, and discussion, we will consider questions such as: How have ideas about race, gender, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, and class shaped the making and meaning of America and Americans, and how have they evolved? What are the dominant myths and values that Americans seem to share? How has the American Dream been defined, and by whom? As a class we will consider the ways in which concepts of America and American are performed and how they have changed over time, across space, and within particular social, cultural, and political contexts. Assignments emphasize critical analysis of texts; requirements include papers, a midterm, and a final.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 10601 The Anthropology of Your Stuff (3 Credit Hours)
Have you ever pondered how people live(d) in a world without television, YouTube, smartphones, and automobiles? Why have bellbottoms come and gone twice in the last 50 years? Will we be forced to relive the fashion mistakes of the 1970s and 1980s? What new stuff will people invent and sell next? In asking and answering these questions, we must focus on one underlying query: What does our stuff really say about who we are and who we want to be? This course combines lectures, discussions, and interactive small group activities to explore the nature and breadth of peoples' relationships with their things. We will investigate why and how people make and use different types of objects, and how the use of these material goods resonates with peoples' identities in the deep past, recent history, and today. Since everyone in the class will already be an expert user and consumer of things, we will consider how people today use material objects to assert, remake, reclaim, and create identities, and compare today's practices to those of people who lived long ago. Class members will learn about how anthropologists, including ethnographers (studying people today) and archaeologists (studying past peoples) think about and approach the material nature of our social, economic, and political lives. We will discuss why styles and technologies change through time, and why, in the end, there is very little new under the sun in terms of human behaviors and the way people produce and consume goods. The topical breadth of this workshop encompasses most social science disciplines, including history, economics, psychology, and anthropology, and resonates with classics, art history, and gender studies.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 10602 Elements of Computing I (3 Credit Hours)
We will explore what computer science educators have identified as seven "big ideas" in computing: creativity, abstraction, data and information, algorithms, programming, the internet, and global impacts (AP Computer Science Principles). Our major learning objectives for this course include:
- Understand the basic concepts of computers, their components, and operation
- Understand how problems can be approached through computational principles and methods
- Define common computing and programming terms and concepts.
- Employ common programming patterns and abstractions to solve problems.
- Choose appropriate data structures to develop efficient applications.
- Discuss the trade-offs of different programming strategies and techniques.
- Trace the execution of programming code, recognize errors, and correct bugs.
- Construct Python code to solve problems and automate processes in different domains and disciplines.
- Increase self-efficacy in learning, using, and troubleshooting digital technologies
- Consider digital technologies in context of historical development and social consequence
- Reflect critically on how the affordances of digital information technologies shape our relationship to our selves, other people, and knowledge
In this course, we will begin to break into the "black box" of the computer. Computing is more than simply sending email, building webpages, and creating documents. This course is designed for students without prior programming experience and covers the fundamentals of computational thinking and programming in the Python programming language.
To be successful in this course you must: tinker, play, build, make, tweak, experiment, hack, and break things. You will push your boundaries and the boundaries of the technology, ask many questions of yourself and your peers, be confused and/or frustrated and/or lost, dig yourself out of those traps and think deeply about the digital tools that are part of digital and computing technology. This course is not about gaining mastery of particular tools, but rather building the skills and experience that will allow you to be comfortable and confident engaging with and evaluating new and familiar technologies.
GSC 13181 Social Science University Seminar (3 Credit Hours)
An introduction to the seminar method of instruction, grounded in the interdisciplinary field of gender studies, with a particular focus on the study of gender and sexuality in the social sciences. This course will develop writing skills among first-year students while introducing them to some central problems and issues within gender studies. Each seminar focuses on a particular social topic and includes readings from across social scientific disciplines -- including sociology, anthropology, geography, psychology, and political science -- as well as interdisciplinary gender studies scholarship that is in conversation with those fields. For a full description of this section of the course, please see the enhanced course information.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: USEM - University Seminar, WKSS - Core Social Science
GSC 13182 The Politics of Artificial Life: AI, Genetic Engineering, and Pandemics (3 Credit Hours)
By reading science fiction and political science, gender and feminist theory, economic history, and anthropology born of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), we will investigate the complex ethics and politics of making artificial forms of life through the interventions of human culture, science, and technology in the wider environment. We will focus on three critical 21st-century manifestations of human-made or artificial life: genetic engineering of children through CRISPR-Cas9 and other biotechnologies; making artificial intelligence as smart as or smarter than humans; and the spread and exacerbation of viral zoonotic epidemics through global systems of economics and politics. SF texts include novels by Shelley, Bram Stoker, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood.
GSC 13190 Scholars Seminar (3 Credit Hours)
This course provides a themed introduction to Philosophy. Themes and content vary by semester. See https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/1st-courses-in-philosophy/ for details regarding this semester's offerings.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKFP - Core 1st Philosophy
GSC 20042 Witches, Warriors, and Wonder Women: Women, Power, and Writing in History (3 Credit Hours)
Explore the remarkable histories of women who refused to conform or submit: witches, warriors, rebels, heretics, and others who embraced their power and changed their worlds. In this course, we will read texts written by, for, and about some of these incredible women in medieval and early-modern England and western Europe and the early American Colonies. We will analyze how these women's experiences with power were reflected in their own writing, or in texts written about them: how gender and power dynamics shaped their identities, what they pushed back against or supported, and how they negotiated their cultural roles. Through critical analysis and creative expression, students will sharpen their writing and analytical skills while engaging in thought-provoking discussions that matter far beyond the classroom. Prepare to encounter stories of resilience, defiance, and untold heroism as we uncover the hidden voices of women who shaped the course of history.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20101 Global Africa (3 Credit Hours)
Welcome to Global Africa. This course is an introduction to the history of the peoples of Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present day. We investigate the ways in which Africans shaped and were shaped by the transformative events of the period. At the turn of the twentieth century, European powers conquered and colonized much of the continent. Over the next sixty years, Africans lived and died under the yoke of European rule. They resisted and collaborated, rendering uncertain the power of colonialism and certain its ultimate collapse. By the 1960s, most Africans were free of foreign rule. Since then they of have endeavored to achieve political stability, navigate Cold War politics, harness development aid, and adapt to an emerging neoliberal economic order. In recent years, while some have ignited brutal wars and endured devastating famines, they have also inspired the world with their triumph over apartheid, emergent, vibrant democracies, and rich cultures. Together, we will explore these dramatic moments as well as the complex and painful forms of inequality that lay beneath - whether racial, gendered, sexual, or economic. We will approach these unsettling issues with respect for another and the past. To do so, we analyze a variety of texts from primary documents, fiction written by Africans, film, and graphic novels. We will also train ourselves to be historians of Africa, researching the lives and labors of everyday African peoples and using historical writing to understand their influence over the past and present.
Corequisites: HIST 22191
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 20102 Theories of Sexual Difference (3 Credit Hours)
An examination of the following questions: What kind of differences separate men and women? Are these differences natural or are they socially produced, and are these differences beneficial to us or are they limiting? What does equality mean for people characterized by such differences?
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKSP - Core 2nd Philosophy
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 20104 Greek Tragedy: Fate and Fury Onstage (3 Credit Hours)
God, Country, Notre Dame. This legendary World War II motto gives one possible answer to the question: what is worth dying for? Put another way, we might ask: what is worth killing for? The ancient Greeks believed in catharsis, the idea that watching actors play out the extremes of humanity onstage can cleanse us of negative feelings without having to actually experience or inflict pain ourselves. In this class, we will look at how the characters of ancient Greek tragedies shed light on various aspects of the human condition: through Orestes, we will consider how cycles of violence are perpetuated and broken; through Philoctetes, whether we can expect a person to adhere to a moral code in dehumanizing conditions; through Antigone, whether it is justifiable to break the law if the law itself is unjust; through Medea, how oppression based on gender, ethnicity, and social standing can harm not only the oppressed but also the oppressor. In addition to reading the plays in translation, we will watch two modern adaptations unfold onstage through viewings of Antigone and Medea, produced and recorded by the Royal National Theatre. From fate to free will, family curses to divine intervention, hubris to human error, grief to fury, this class will explore the complexities of the human existence and the question at the heart of it all: what do we live for?
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 20190 All About Eve (3 Credit Hours)
Although the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation and fall occupies only a brief passage in Genesis, this narrative has profoundly influenced interpretations of womanhood, marriage, and humanity’s quest for knowledge. Eve has been portrayed in diverse and evolving ways, reflecting the shifting attitudes toward gender, morality, and the nature of sin. Answers to the age-old question: “why did Eve eat from the tree” reflect vastly different world views. Did Eve seek to be more God-like, or was her “weaker” female mind deceived by the serpent’s rhetoric? This course explores portrayals of Eve across time in literature, art, and cultural discourse. Through this, the course examines how poets, artists, and thinkers have alternately condemned and revered the first woman, the so-called mother of all mankind. By the end of the course, students will grapple with questions central to Eve’s enduring relevance. Should Eve be honored as the ideal subservient wife, condemned as the seducing temptress whose choice– as Milton wrote of the first taste of the forbidden fruit– “Brought death into the world, and all our woe,” or lauded as a symbol of the environmental movement?
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 20213 The Fragmented Body: Feminist Philosophy of Disability (3 Credit Hours)
This course invites students into an in-depth theoretical exploration of the self as seen through the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and disability. Engaging with the foundational texts in queer studies by philosophers such as Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Eve Sedgwick, Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, and José Esteban Muñoz, etc., the course is designed to challenge and expand students' philosophical understanding of the self by introducing essential theoretical tools such as intersectionality, body, affect, disidentification, gender performativity and queer temporality, etc. This course welcomes all students from historically underrepresented, minoritarian, marginalized groups.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKSP - Core 2nd Philosophy
GSC 20222 Making the Monster: Magic, Medicine, and Murder (3 Credit Hours)
Monsters manifest in the earliest manuscripts containing English literature and continue to capture our collective imagination. Cultural conceptions of monsters may change over time, but monstrous entities never cease to appear in the writings of any given era. These creatures shapeshift from magical beasts to medical inventions to ravenous murderers across the centuries, and their depictions resonate differently depending on the historical context. This course explores monsters and monstrosity in British literature from the medieval period to the modern age. It not only investigates how monsters are represented but also interrogates the underlying anxieties that define their textual presence. What constitutes monstrosity? By what means are monsters created? In what ways do monsters reflect and reveal our deepest fears? What do we fear and why do we fear it?
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20223 Contemporary Literature and the Persistent Past (3 Credit Hours)
How do we think about the past? As a golden age we long to return to? Or a painful memory better off forgotten? Is it set in stone or open to revision? Together we'll read the novels, plays, and poetry of contemporary British and American authors who demonstrate just how crucial these questions can be. When, for example, books about slavery or the Holocaust are periodically banned from schools, it becomes clear that a) the past doesn't stay neatly behind us and b) people can find it difficult to cope with that. By studying literature, we can understand the stakes and implications of the various ways we currently cope with the persistent past, and develop a vision of how we might do better. In this writing intensive course you will produce a series of short analytical essays and a final creative project.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20250 Virgins, Wives, and Succubi: Women and Medieval Literature (3 Credit Hours)
Women have been associated with original sin since the temptation of Eve. They are redeemed through their connection with the Virgin Mary but condemned again by the conflicting demands of chastity and marriage. Christian misogyny merged with medical treatises during the Middle Ages to create a complex matrix through which female and male bodies were understood and women's and men's social expectations were constructed. This course investigates the ways in which Old and Middle English literature both reflects and resists the tropes that posited women as either properly chaste or overly sexed. It explores representations of women in writing and film and considers how medieval conceptions of women move forward into the modern era. What did it mean to be a woman in the Middle Ages? How have premodern ideas about gendered bodies and behaviors come to bear on contemporary ideology? To what extent does the modern era remain in the shadow of its medieval past?
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20303 Latinx Poetry Now (3 Credit Hours)
This literature course offers an opportunity to read, discuss, and write about a generous sampling of contemporary American poetry by living Latinx poets, utilizing as its principal text the anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. There will also be a special module on Latinx poetry inspired by Latinx art, with particular attention to the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibit: "Our America: the Latino Presence in American Art." We will also be relying significantly on a series of online resources, including video interviews with Latinx poets conducted here at Notre Dame. We will focus mainly on mid-career writers, discovering and examining some of the themes that characterize Latinx poetry. A number of the poets who we'll be reading will also be special guests, via ZOOM, at various points during the semester: we'll get to ask them questions, and watch and hear them read poems. We'll also encounter poems that challenge what one might expect when one hears the term, "Latinx poetry" (and we'll talk about that "x").
GSC 20429 Women in the Church (3 Credit Hours)
An examination of the role and representation of women in Christian texts and practices from the biblical period, through late antiquity and the middle ages, into the present. This course employs a variety of methods (theological, historical, socio-cultural, art historical) to explore diverse histories of women, such as female biblical figures, late antique women martyrs and monastics, medieval mystics, female saints, and the modern and contemporary lives of women. A special focus for Fall 2022 will be the intersection of women's bodies and the liturgical-ritual life of the Church through a global lens, including the experiences of women in the Christian East and Africa.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKDT-Core Devlopment. Theology
GSC 20466 Marriage and the Family (3 Credit Hours)
The family is the most fundamental institution of all known societies, and the study of families is a core area of sociological inquiry. The word "family" is one that is pervasive in society, but it can have multiple meanings in various contexts, and it is a more difficult concept to define than we may initially think. What "family" means changes over time and varies across cultures, and there is much continual debate about what a family should be. By the end of this course, you should have a much broader understanding of what a "family" is and the significance of families for our society. It is within the family that socialization occurs and the family is the site where we derive many of our personal experiences, which may give the impression that "family" is very personal. Yet, the institution of the family is fundamentally intertwined with larger institutions such as the economy, the workplace, and the state. Additionally, families can both reflect and reinforce societal inequities, such as those based on class, race, and gender. We therefore assess these linkages by taking a sociological approach to studying the family.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKSS - Core Social Science
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 20517 Decadent Modernity (3 Credit Hours)
As a term in European cultural history, decadence most often indicates a late-nineteenth-century movement in which writers and artists provoked the respectable middle class with racy, sordid, overblown and/or absurdist subject matter and methods. This course explores that environment but also takes a broader view, examining alternative visions of decadence over the last two centuries and more, where decadence becomes one way of viewing secular modernity more generally. Our materials include fiction, poetry, drama, philosophy, visual arts, cinema and criticism. Early on, we lay conceptual groundwork with texts by Freud and Nietzsche. Well-known authors (in addition to Freud and Nietzsche) include Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Virginia Woolf, and Patrick Süskind. We also read several lesser-known authors and study films by Ken Russell, Peter Greenaway and Sally Potter. Please note that our discussion matter is not for the prudish or faint-hearted. Bring a tolerance for the grotesque and a readiness to think carefully about authors who deliberately challenge deeply held Western attitudes concerning morality and values. Assignments include two written exams (one or more in take-home format), an interpretive paper, and bi-weekly reflective writings.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 20519 Blood, Guts, and Glory: The Anthropology of Sports (3 Credit Hours)
This course will examine the interactions of culture and biology within sports. The anthropology of sports can help us gain valuable insights into broader social and cultural phenomena, the role of ritual in society, and illuminate how sports have been used to bring people together, but also to exclude people. We will begin with studying the evolutionary origins and non-human examples of play. We will then move into the prehistoric and historic foundations for sport. We will also discuss how people change their bodies, in good ways and dangerous ways, for a greater chance at success, and how those bodies are often more harshly judged by society. Finally, we will explore the ways in which contemporary sporting and fan practices are culturally ordered and/or challenge social norms. Drawing on case studies from around the world, we will pay special attention to questions of gender, race, genetics, nationality, health, equality, and human variation. In addition, students will be encouraged to think critically about their own sporting experiences, both as active participants and as fans, and how sports impact their lives.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKIN - Core Integration
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 20520 Paleo Parenting (3 Credit Hours)
This course examines the origins, causes, environmental settings and cultural factors within which natural selective forces converged throughout human evolution to create the human infant, one of the most vulnerable, slowest developing, and energetically demanding mammal infants of all. We consider who the caregivers are, and how and why they might "share care" which was needed to keep our highly vulnerable infants and children alive, and to nurture them throughout their exceedingly long childhoods. Specifically, we trace the origins of modern parenting systems from their mammalian base paying especial attention to the transaction between infant care practices themselves and how they relate to, if not depend on, the emergence of other characteristics that define us as human. These include bipedalism, empathy, learning, food sharing, and a "theory of mind". Here we will examine not only the unique roles that mothers and fathers and other important caregivers (allomothers) play but the underlying biology that both inclines that care but also responds to it biologically. We also emphasize the manner in which social values, ideologies, cultural expectations, social roles, and economic pressures assert critical influences on caregiver physiology and behavior.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 20524 "La Beurgeoisie" Race, Class, and Sex in France Today (3 Credit Hours)
This course will focus on contemporary French-language texts that evoke immigrants and their offspring in France today. We will pay special attention to depictions of men and women of Maghrebian origin who have climbed the social ladder in various professions to gain notoriety and respect.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKLC-Core Adv Lang & Culture
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 20529 The Victorian Marriage Plot (3 Credit Hours)
While stories of falling in love and getting married have been told and retold throughout history, the mobility, technology, liberal theories, and modernizing economy of Victorian culture make Victorian marriage plots especially rich and strange. This class will explore the remarkable pressure put on stories of courtship and commitment in Victorian fiction, poetry, and prose. We'll examine how female writers try to reverse literary traditions which allow men to speak of love but require men to remain silent, and how male writers respond to new ideas about a less differentiated, more equal marriage partnership. We'll look at the literature shaped by the competing demands of Victorian domestic ideals, Victorian notions that companionate marriage was the best avenue to mature self-realization, and a persistent Victorian traditionalism that valued the practices of the past. We'll read plots of love, marriage, bigamy, divorce, artistic development, and vampires in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eye, Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. We'll get to know newlyweds, prostitutes, princesses, nuns, madwomen, and the occasional goddess in poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Augusta Webster, Adelaide Procter, William Morris and Michael Field, always focusing on the questions of how literature addresses the problems troubling modern marriage, and how literature imagines new possibilities for human connection.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20534 The Great Remembering: The Work of Women's Writing (3 Credit Hours)
When I say woman writer, do you think Jane Austen? The story of women's writing is a history of forgetting. A monumental tragedy that should remind us that the historical marginalization of women still shapes our social, literary, and political landscape. This course will begin a process of remembering by focusing on the figure of the woman who writes. Hers is a history of desiring change - in herself, her community, and her place in the world. But what happens when women write back to power? How did women writers conceive of the power of writing? In what ways was women's writing an act of self-assertion and political resistance? What role did women writers and characters play in the expansion of our idea of the social, literary, political possibilities of the work of writing? Writing oneself into existence is a multi-faceted process - it's energizing as well as traumatic, liberating as well as dangerous. The course will focus on literary representations of these experiences. Readings will include literary texts by Margaret Cavendish, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, and other multimedia texts such as films, podcasts, and songs.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20535 (Un)Sustainable Philosophies (3 Credit Hours)
One may reasonably argue that Earth has seen better days. Some biologists have estimated that three quarters of animal species will become extinct within the next three hundred years. Many climate models predict that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free within the next several decades. The oceans are filled with billions of pounds of plastic. Food and water scarcity, rising sea levels, and extreme weather patterns due to climate change will likely displace millions of people by 2050. Despite the doom and gloom, many scientists believe that all may not be lost if humans seriously engage in concerted, widespread efforts to minimize their impact on the environment by creating more sustainable ways of existing. The aim of this course is to ask how our ways of thinking about nature, material things, and ourselves supports and/or obstructs our ability to engage in more sustainable practices. Our questions will include, but are not limited to: What is nature and how are humans connected to, distinct from, or part of this nature? What does it mean to be sustainable? If our aim is to exist more sustainably, how should we think about nature to help achieve this end? What is waste, exactly? Whose way of life is being preserved by our present sustainability efforts in the West? How does gender, race, and culture shape how one is affected by (un)sustainable practices? To what extent are the formal structures of oppression conserved across sexism, racism, and environmental destruction? This course will draw heavily on ecofeminist philosophy to help answer these important questions.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKSP - Core 2nd Philosophy
GSC 20536 Cast Out! Identity, Belonging, and Religious Difference in American Literature (3 Credit Hours)
Many places of worship hang a sign of invitation: All Are Welcome! But what happens when an aspect of an individual's identity or beliefs comes into conflict with their religious community? Which differences are tolerated, and which are shunned? Who belongs, and who is cast out? From Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories to Kendrick Lamar's hip hop albums, the American literary imagination has long been interested in examining the conflicts between identity - race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability - and religion. Together we will read a variety of American literature, including poetry, science-fiction, drama, and literary essays, paying attention to religious outcasts, misfits, and minoritized peoples as they search for belonging within established communities, or attempt to forge new spaces for themselves. Readings will include James Baldwin, N. Scott Momaday, Tony Kushner, Octavia Butler, more contemporary writing by Molly McCully Brown and R.O. Kwon, as well as music, film, and podcasts.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20537 From Medieval Romance to Modern Dystopia (3 Credit Hours)
Despite our tendency to distinctly divide medieval and modern thought and practices, our literature reflects how deeply connected we remain to a medieval past. Medieval romance illuminates how our fascination with alternative realities and dystopian worlds has endured since the Middle Ages. This course examines the development of imagined worlds and the figures that inhabit them in medieval literature, then considers how these elements continuously manifest and metamorphose through the historical periods that follow, including our own. Where does our obsession with the otherworldly originate in medieval texts? What do our constructions of alternative places and peoples suggest bout the desires and anxieties of a particular historical moment? How does dystopian literature draw its inspiration from the medieval imagination?
GSC 20538 Bad Behavior: Women Writers and the Making of Literary History (3 Credit Hours)
If the popular phrase, "well-behaved women seldom make history," holds true, then what forms of "bad behavior" have shaped the cannon of women's literature? How and why did particular women writers gain in acclaim and popularity as others faded from view? In this class, we will explore how the creation and violation of gender expectations has shaped nineteenth-century women's literature, its reception, and its modern reinterpretations. We will examine a wide range of literary figures, real and fictional alike, from pillars of propriety to unabashed rebels, from the nineteenth century and today. Readings will include work by Jane Austen, Anne Lister, Anne Bronte, Michael Field, Mary Seacole, and Virginia Woolf as well as contemporary television (Sally Wainwright's Gentleman Jack), graphic novels (Isabel Greenburg's Glasstown), and film (Park Chan-Wook's The Handmaiden).
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20539 Sociable Women and the 'Public' Sphere (3 Credit Hours)
German philosopher Jurgen Habermas' "bourgeois public sphere" imagined an institution that briefly held sway in eighteenth century urban European societies. In sociable spaces, such as coffee-houses or taverns, men of different allegiances gathered to discuss politics and worldly affairs. While women have been assigned a marginal position in the story of European sociability, literary texts offer a different reality. What were women's sociable spaces? What did it mean for a woman to be "sociable"? What was her stake in politics and worldly affairs? We will discuss how women writers and fictional heroines were redefining what constituted "public" and "private" while conducting politics in a distinct register. Whether it was the actress on the English stage, aristocratic women in French salons, the Bluestockings, or novelistic heroines shopping in London - the literary story of women's sociability is one that needs telling. We will read texts from authors such as Madame de Lafayette, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Virginia Woolf.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20540 How Fully Can We Feel in the Doing: Labor in American Literature (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, we will examine the role of labor in American literature from the decades before the Civil War to the late 20th century through the critical lens of Audre Lorde's theorization of the erotic. Through this theorization, Lorde identifies the intimate and varying relationships to power that are revealed when gender identity, race, sexuality, and class intersect with labor in U.S. American culture. We will critically examine what these classed, gendered, and raced aspects of labor reveal about American culture, ideology, identity, and future trajectories. We will interrogate, reflect, and deconstruct how writers affirm, challenge, and negotiate identity and conceptualize American society through representations of labor.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20541 Intersectionality in Health and Medicine (3 Credit Hours)
This course uses an intersectional lens to explore contemporary issues in health and medicine. In this course we will examine how race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and class shape and are shaped by health agendas, discourses, and practices. Topics covered include: embodiment and health experiences, medicalization and intersectionality, inequalities in health, healing cultures, reproductive justice, social movements, and structural and institutional intersections that affect health and illness.
GSC 20542 American Modernisms (3 Credit Hours)
): When discussions of modernism and modernity focus on the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries, they also often center on those qualities of the movement described in the work of early modernist literary critics, such as Harry Levin or Edmund Wilson. Such examinations emphasized the modern movement's experiments in form, structure, linguistic representation, characterization, etc., while paying much less attention to the role of the modernist movement in the larger context of a given culture. In this course, we will explore the significance of the modern movement from the perspective of specifically American culture, as well as the manner and meaning of American literary participation in the movement. To that end, we will consider not only the work of authors generally accepted as American modernists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway; we will also consider the role of authors such as Henry James and Edith Wharton, whose work bridges the late 19th-century and the modernism of the early 20th-century, and Theodore Dreiser , of the early Chicago Renaissance (1910-1925), as well as a number of authors from the Harlem Renaissance - all authors the consideration of whose work enlarges and expands traditional conceptions of American modernism. Along the way, we will examine pertinent issues such as social class, social mobility, gender relations, progressivism, primitivism, race and ethnicity, immigration, cosmopolitanism vs. regionalism, and the importance of the vernacular, especially as these inform the question of "Americanness" and its role in our understanding of American literature during this time. The overarching goal of our exploration will be the effort to arrive at a much more comprehensive, more nuanced perspective on the meaning and significance of the modern in American culture. In exploring these different vantage points in American literary modernity, we will seek to reimagine the contours of the modern in the American context from the perspective of "American modernisms," while drawing important conclusions about their significance within the larger modernist context.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20543 Medieval Women's Writing (3 Credit Hours)
This course will investigate constructions of gender and authority in women's writing from late medieval Europe (c. 1200-1430). We'll read works written for the court, from religious houses, and on the road to explore how these different social locations shaped authors' access to resources and informed their creative decisions. Reading selected critical essays will help us analyze these works through a feminist lens to understand how medieval women authors engaged with patriarchal literary traditions and social structures. All works will be read in translation; no prior knowledge of medieval literature is expected.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 20544 (In)Famous Women: Myth, Legend (0-4 Credit Hours)
(In)Famous Women: Myth, Legend
GSC 20601 The Anthropology of Your Stuff (3 Credit Hours)
Have you ever pondered how people live(d) in a world without television, YouTube, smartphones, and automobiles? Why have bellbottoms come and gone twice in the last 50 years? Will we be forced to relive the fashion mistakes of the 1970s and 1980s? What new stuff will people invent and sell next? In asking and answering these questions, we must focus on one underlying query: What does our stuff really say about who we are and who we want to be? This course combines lectures, discussions, and interactive small group activities to explore the nature and breadth of peoples' relationships with their things. We will investigate why and how people make and use different types of objects, and how the use of these material goods resonates with peoples' identities in the deep past, recent history, and today. Since everyone in the class will already be an expert user and consumer of things, we will consider how people today use material objects to assert, remake, reclaim, and create identities, and compare today's practices to those of people who lived long ago. Class members will learn about how anthropologists, including ethnographers (studying people today) and archaeologists (studying past peoples) think about and approach the material nature of our social, economic, and political lives. We will discuss why styles and technologies change through time, and why, in the end, there is very little new under the sun in terms of human behaviors and the way people produce and consume goods. The topical breadth of this workshop encompasses most social science disciplines, including history, economics, psychology, and anthropology, and resonates with classics, art history, and gender studies.
GSC 20642 Christianity, Violence, and Peace (3 Credit Hours)
“Peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice,” Salvadoran peacemaker and archbishop Oscar Romero’s statement is echoed by many other peacemakers from within and beyond the Christian tradition. Given this definition of peace, what does it mean for us to be peacemakers and justice-seekers in the world today? In this course, we will explore many issues of violence in our world, from the context of Palestine and Israel, military violence in Latin America, racism in the United States, to gender-based violence in our campus and society. We will also look at figures throughout Christian history, from early Christian martyrs for peace to proponents of just war theory to contemporary peacemakers, who offer us insights on what it means to build peace and justice in a violent world. In this course, we will both wrestle with the histories of violence found in scripture and church history, and consider what it means for us to take up the Christian call to be peacemakers in our own context.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKDT-Core Devlopment. Theology
GSC 20644 Feminist Philosophy & Science Fiction (3 Credit Hours)
The science fiction genre is rich with stories that explore classic philosophical questions, exploit timeless philosophical puzzles and paradoxes, or thematically engage large-scale philosophical movements and worldviews. In this class, we will examine the way in which several core problems of philosophy are raised in contemporary works of science fiction, and we will look carefully at more systematic discussions of those problems by well-known historical and contemporary philosophers. We will focus mainly on questions about human persons--for example, questions about the nature of the self and personal identity over time, the possibility of free action, artificial intelligence, the nature and significance of gender differences, etc. Course Requirements: Three or four short papers (4 pages max), a final exam, and class participation. Texts: Readings posted on Sakai, and maybe some films to be watched outside of class. SF readings will include authors such as Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. LeGuin, Cordwainer Smith, Roger Zelazny, Ted Chiang, and Greg Egan.
In this course we will examine some central feminist themes and issues by way of a philosophical examination of science fiction texts. Readings will include short science fiction stories, two or more science fiction novels, and a variety of texts in feminist philosophy and philosophy of gender.
Prerequisites: PHIL 14101 or PHIL 13195 or PHIL 13185 or PHIL 20101 or PHIL 20102 or PHIL 20103 or PHIL 20104 or PHIL 20105 or PHIL 10100 or PHIL 10101 or PHIL 10102 or PHIL 10103 or PHIL 10104 or PHIL 10105 or PHIL 10111 or PLS 20301 or MI 13185
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKSP - Core 2nd Philosophy
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 20650 From the "Sea in the Middle": Medieval Mediterranean’s Stories (3 Credit Hours)
The objective of this course is to explore the intricate tapestry of the multiethnic and multicultural Italian peninsula during the Late Middle Ages (12th-15th Centuries) and its interactions with Mediterranean societies. Throughout this course, we will dissect pivotal historical events, cultural and religious exchanges, geographical implications, and the traditions of the primary populations inhabiting the region. Our journey through this rich history will be guided by Italian authors of short stories, offering us a profound insight into this captivating fusion of civilizations.
During the Late Middle Ages, Italians, particularly Venetians, Pisans, Genoese, and Florentines, reigned as the foremost commercial and naval powerhouses in the Mediterranean. Eminent Tuscan literary figures and intellectuals such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Franco Sacchetti, and Giovanni Sercambi (to name just a few) demonstrated a remarkable ability to capture and expertly convey in their narratives the multifaceted sociological, political, religious, geographical, historical, and psychological intricacies characterizing this enduring cultural crossroads.
Within the intricate and interconnected Mediterranean environment, the short story indisputably emerged as the most prevalent and esteemed literary genre, transcending cultural and geographic boundaries. This genre encompasses a vast array of themes, meticulously portraying courtly love, chivalric values, the far-reaching impacts of the Crusades, the interplay among the three Monotheistic Religions, the tensions between nobility and bourgeoisie, varying perspectives on women and their societal roles from Spain to the Arabic domains, encounters – and sometimes conflicts – between distinct cultures, pivotal Mediterranean historical events, and the initial ventures into geographical exploration. As our course unfolds, we will discover that these themes represent only a fraction of the myriad facets that the short story has adeptly embraced and narrated for generations of avid readers.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 20656 Latinos, Literacy and Gender in American Schooling Contexts (3 Credit Hours)
This course explores topics related to language and identity in teaching, literacy research, theory, and practice. This course specifically foregrounds issues related to the Latinx experience in American schooling contexts with a focus on gender, and other identity markers that intersect with gender such as race, class, ethnicity, and (dis)ability. From an educational perspective, Latinx student populations in schools are increasing across the nation and yet far too often school curricula, quality bilingual and dual language educational offerings, and teacher preparation programs are slow to catch up to the demographic shifts. This course will further explore how Latinx identities factor into conceptualizations and practices of children's play, literacy activities, language use, and classroom behaviors of both teachers and students. By exploring culturally sustaining pedagogies and a "funds of knowledge" approach, we will seek to answer the following questions: How might we learn approaches to language and literacy education that narrow the achievement gap as they extend to the language and literacy development of Latinx learners? Moreover, what is the impact upon students when we view identity differences not as deficit, but as resource, thus creating schooling experiences that engage students, foster growth and inform equity? This course will engage students with children's literature, ethnographic exercises, linguistic autobiographies, as well as media and film depictions of contemporary issues facing Latinx students in schools.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKSS - Core Social Science
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 20680 Haunting in American Literature (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, we will examine writers who engage ghosts, haunting, and the supernatural to explore how oppressive systems of power, though pervasive, are rendered imperceptible due to their historical persistence. We will unpack how writers engage with ghosts and the supernatural to interrogate issues of power, gender, race, sexuality, and class. We will critically examine what these classed, gendered, and raced intersections reveal to us about American culture, ideology, history, identity, and future trajectories. We will interrogate, reflect, and deconstruct how writers affirm, challenge, and negotiate identity and conceptualize American society through their engagement with ghosts.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 20710 Code in Context: Computing & the Liberal Arts (3 Credit Hours)
This course combines hands-on introduction to the basic concepts and technologies of computing with critical discussion of the historical, social, and cultural dimensions of computing, data, and digital technology. The work of the course includes content discussions that foreground the cultural, social, and historical dimensions of computing technologies, along with exploration and foundational skill building with various computing tools and methods. By studying how computing technologies have developed over time, as well as how they work, we’ll consider what kind of technological future we want, and how to build it, via a critical examination of the technologies and platforms that shape our lives together. Along the way, we’ll explore what computer science educators have identified as seven “big ideas” in computing: creativity, abstraction, data and information, algorithms, programming, the internet, and global impacts (AP Computer Science Principles).
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKIN - Core Integration, WKST-Core Science & Technology
GSC 20818 Sex and Society (3 Credit Hours)
When people think about sexuality, they often adopt a biological view—seeing sexuality as “driven” by hormones and nature. This course adopts a different approach by viewing sexuality through the lens of sociology—as shaped by social processes, including social interaction, institutions, and ideologies. The course will focus on examining three sociological aspects of sexuality: 1) The social, historical, and cultural factors that shape sexual behaviors, desires, identities, and communities; 2) The ways in which sex and sexuality are constantly regulated and contested at multiple levels of society, including within families, schools, workplaces, and religious and political institutions; and 3) The sources, causes, and effects of sexual inequality. While our focus will be on sexuality, we will also study how other identities (including gender, race, class, religion, etc.) influence and affect it. Students will be encouraged to question their taken-for-granted assumptions about sex and sexualities and to formulate critical perspectives on issues pertaining to sexuality in today’s public discourses. This course is sex-positive in that it assumes that knowledge about sexuality is empowering, not dangerous. The readings and discussions will be frank, and students will be assisted in developing a language for and comfort level with discussing a wide range of sexual topics in a respectful and sociological way. In the process, students will be challenged to improve their critical thinking, researching, writing, and public speaking skills.
GSC 20902 Atlantic Slavery (3 Credit Hours)
This course will introduce students to the main topics, themes, and debates in Atlantic history, focusing on Spanish and Portuguese America and the Caribbean. It will begin with an overview of slavery and other legal and labor systems in West Africa and the Americas, and then examine how and why the Portuguese and Spanish entered into a slaving trade in West Africa, and what ensued from contact with the American hemisphere after 1492. We will end with abolition and emancipation in the Americas. Along the way we will examine the rise and fall of “Indian” slavery, the cultural meanings of Blackness, the labor and economic conditions in urban settings as well as on rural plantations, and the strategies that enslaved people used to negotiate living conditions and achieve freedom. We will also pay careful attention to different kinds of resistance, including the formation of stable palenques of those who escaped slavery and a variety of rebellions, including the successful Haitian Revolution. Weekly readings will include modern accounts and historical documents. Assignments will predominantly be medium-length (5-7 pages) essays using primary sources and one exercise using the TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database. We also hope to utilize the collections at the Raclin Murphy Art Museum.
Corequisites: HIST 22902
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 20950 Trivial Pursuits: The Aesthetics of Frivolity in Popular Literature (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, students will encounter a variety of popular literary texts and films that may be described as charming, adorable, folksy, kitschy, girly, boyish, or even geeky. The disarming triviality of these modes of aesthetic presentation can often obscure competing motives that blur the lines between popular media objects and propaganda literature. At the same time, the frivolousness and seeming insignificance of literary forms such as little poems, comic books, zines, chick-flicks, or fantasy novels can be deployed to resist mainstream aesthetics or normative politics. This course explores how gender, race, and class intersect with the construction of genres to influence how literary works are produced, marketed, read, and
critiqued. In this course, we will examine the historical and material conditions that influenced the production of genres or forms of literature. We will understand how these forms came to be labelled as aesthetically trivial, analyse how individual works conform with or subvert expectations of genre, and evaluate the impact of trivialisation on how we read these texts as the forms continue to develop.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 20961 Creating Criptopia: Disability and Queerness in Utopian Literature (3 Credit Hours)
In 1516 Sir Thomas More’s Utopia founded a new literary genre: utopian literature. Since then, many different versions of utopia have been imagined in both fiction and non-fiction literature. But where do queer and disabled people fit into these utopias? Too often, they don’t fit at all. Over the years, however, a few radical authors have envisioned the seemingly impossible: a utopia for the queer and disabled—a criptopia. In this course, we will engage with a variety of criptopian texts, using queer, crip, and disability theory to inform our pursuit of questions such as, What happens to the queer and disabled in traditional utopias? What defines a criptopia? How would our society have to change to become a criptopia? And is a truly inclusive utopia even possible, or do utopias necessarily create outsiders? At the end of the semester, students will put these questions to the test by designing their own inclusive utopias/criptopias. Can you envision a utopia with no outsiders?
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 23800 Sociology of Gender (3 Credit Hours)
What does it mean to explore gender through a sociological lens? Why does gender inequality persist in contemporary society? What can we do to advocate for social change? In this course we will discuss gender in families, politics, and history. The class will analyze gender at an individual, interactional, and institutional level. How gender intersects with race, class, and sexuality will be the bedrock of our learning together. The course will intellectually challenge students to continue becoming sociological scholars, educated activists, and justice-seeking individuals.
GSC 23902 Just Wage Research Seminar (1 Credit Hour)
This interdisciplinary research lab enlists students in the efforts of the Just Wage Initiative (JWI), a collaborative research and advocacy project of the Higgins Labor Program at the Center for Social Concerns. Students will help develop, refine, and update the Just Wage Framework, a multistakeholder online tool designed to advance a more inclusive and equitable economy. Students will also undertake research projects connecting their own intellectual interests and disciplinary expertise to the JWI's foundational question: What makes any given wage just or unjust? In addition, students will collaborate with the instructor and local, national, and international practitioners to envision and execute collaborative research and advocacy campaigns to promote a just wage economy. Extended weekly class sessions will feature visits by scholars and activists, as well as facilitate interactive group discussions and collaborative experiments.
GSC 24062 Envisioning Otherworlds: Literature in/and London (3 Credit Hours)
The fascination with imaginary worlds and the figures that inhabit them has remained vibrant throughout centuries of English literature and extends all the way back to its origins. London is an ideal city for pondering our proximity to the past with relics like the Tower of London inviting us to visualize England in another time and as another place. This course strives to bridge the distance between the modern era and those that have preceded it through the study of literary works from the British Isles within their Medieval, Renaissance, and Victorian contexts. What does the invocation of the otherworldly reveal about the anxieties and desires of a particular time period? How do we envision the historical periods before ours as otherworlds that are distanced by time and distinct from the world we know? In what ways does the past remain entangled with the present?
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 24602 Gender, Social Policy, and Inequality (3 Credit Hours)
In this module the student examines some of the major issues and challenges facing social policy, focusing on gender, motherhood and fatherhood. In This module the student is expected to apply the concept of gender to the comparative analysis of welfare state development in Ireland and abroad. The student is expected to contrast and compare contemporary perspectives on gender, patriarchy and inequality. As well as focusing on motherhood, fatherhood, and welfare state typologies the student is also expected to focus on the social citizenship issues of care, work and welfare.
GSC 30005 African Diaspora Women's Know (3 Credit Hours)
This course offers an interdisciplinary survey of African-American and other African descendant women’s Indigenous knowledge, development and maintenance of social structures, cultural preservation, and spiritual engagement within their respective communities. Unfortunately and unconscionably, Black women have been derogatorily referred to as “the mules of the world,” valued for their work and often not much else. They are venerated for their fertility and the central role they occupy as strong mothers and caregivers in the domestic sphere, yet concurrently they are often denied opportunity outside of the home. “Crossing over,” occupying a position in more than one realm, much as Sister Rosetta Tharpe moved between secular and sanctified music often became the modus for survival. They have been maligned as jezebels, or sapphires, lazy and usury, as witches, or relegated to menial, semi-skilled labor. This course aims to interrogate and dispel such tropes and caricatures by utilizing womanist and feminist theory to look closely at the role of Black women as agentive, sage, and entrepreneurial. Alice Walker coined the term womanist in the 1980s. As Walker outlines it, a womanist is a person who prefers to side with the oppressed: with women, with people of color, with the poor. These are women who occupy several subject positions in society. By harnessing their “intersectionality” of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational identity, we can interrogate the historicity and cultural specificity that they have faced in and outside of their communities. With particular emphasis placed upon the subordination that Black women face, and the effects of racism, colonialism, unequal forms of economic development, and globalization on Black Communities, the course aims to see and illustrate where and how Black women have risen above the limitations imposed upon them. To do this, students will engage in critical reading of a range of diverse texts—from memoir, essay, fiction, prose, cultural criticism, and sociopolitical analysis. We will look historically and currently at black women’s roles in the home, in their religious institutions, and in some of the workplaces they occupy as sole proprietors, cottage industrialists, and street vendors. For an undergraduate student body this course will pull excerpts from several core texts that would tend to be read in full if offered on the graduate level.
GSC 30021 Women and American Politics (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, students will learn about the role of gender in American politics by examining women voters, candidates, and officeholders. The first part of the course will center around women voters, including both the struggle for suffrage and women’s voting choices today. The second part of the course will center around women who seek and hold political office, both how they gain political office and what they do once they gain it. Students will learn how gender affects the decisions that voters and members of both Congressional and state legislatures make. Students will be evaluated through one exam and two essays, as well as through their participation in the class.
GSC 30111 Disability at Notre Dame (3 Credit Hours)
Disability has long been constructed as the opposite of higher education. Universities are places that valorize, even demand, physical and intellectual ability. Disability, in turn, is often seen as something that does not fit within a university context, a problem that must be fixed. This antithetical relationship between disability and the university is rooted in history—eugenical curriculums, research programs that study disabled people—but it continues today. Despite a growing focus on diversity in university admissions and populations, disabled students enter higher education at a lower rate than non-disabled students and are less likely to graduate. In addition, universities perpetuate cultures of ableism in both faculty and students by prioritizing ability, perfection, and achievement. This course interrogates the relationship between disability and higher education with a special focus on our university, Notre Dame. Students will be introduced to fundamental principles in disability studies; explore the place of disability in higher education; and, drawing on scholarship in critical university studies, consider intersections between ableism, racism, and sexism in university contexts. Students will also think and learn about what inclusive and accessible education might look like. The course will conclude with a student-driven project designed to increase access, inclusiveness, and awareness about ableism and disability at Notre Dame.
GSC 30123 “That’s What She Said” The Story of Hu(Wo)man Evolution (3 Credit Hours)
If you were to perform a Google image search of “human evolution,” you would see endless pictures of men linearly evolving from apes to modern humans. These overwhelmingly one-sided depictions are because much of our human evolutionary story has been written by and about men to the exclusion of women. Consequently, many of the key theories explaining the unique suite of human features seem to assume that evolutionary forces act only upon men, and women are merely passive beneficiaries. Not only is this exclusion of roughly half the population sexist, it is also bad science – bad science that to this day has been repeated and perpetuated to justify the status quo. In this class, we will explore human evolution from a feminist perspective intellectually drawing upon human biology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, primatology, exercise physiology, and reproductive health to demonstrate that women were and still are a driving force in human evolution. Using non-traditional learning methods and assignments, we will cover: 1) foundational feminist human evolutionary theory, 2) the pervasiveness of estrogen, 3) physical/athletic performance and sexual division of labor; 4) the significance and frequency of alloparenting; 5) multiple orgasms and the control of women’s sexuality; 6) cooperation and competition among women; 7) concealment (or not) of human ovulation; 8) evolutionary reasons for the difficulty of human birth; 9) the physical and mental resilience of women; and 10) the crucial role grandmothers and menopause. It is my hope that this class not only provides an alternative perspective to current thinking in human evolution, but also encourages students to bring their experiences and perspectives to bear. Because who asks the questions matters, and a greater diversity of views can only improve and enrich our holistic understanding of human evolution.
GSC 30143 Fashioning Identities in Colonial America (3 Credit Hours)
Did Puritans really only wear black and white, or did they wear fashionable lace, silk ribbons and bright colors? Did early settlers wash their bodies to get clean? What role did fashion play in the making of the American Revolution? And how did slaves and Native Americans adorn their bodies? This course will address such questions by focusing on dress and material culture. We will consider the role of dress in the construction of colonial identities, and examine the ways that bodies operated as sites for negotiating class and ethnic encounters.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WKHI - Core History
GSC 30147 America's Culture Wars (3 Credit Hours)
This course explores how, since the 1970s, Americans have disagreed on fundamental ideas regarding sex, race, history, foreign policy, class, the economy, and religion. It comes to terms with why contemporary Americans can see reality in such radically divergent ways. Students will examine the way Americans of the last half century have fought over the "soul of the nation." Readings will address the liberal-conservative divide, fracture, and polarization. The course is organized into five sections: (1) Gender, Sexuality and Religion; (2) Art, Music, and Censorship; (3) the AIDS Crisis; (4) Race; and (5) Education.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 30150 Decolonizing Gaming: Critical Engagement Through Design and Play (3 Credit Hours)
This course aims to change the way you think not only about the way that we play games, but also about the way that video games teach their players to behave within their digital worlds. This course will encourage students to reflect on and utilize their lived experiences as players, and utilize these experiences to locate themselves within their analysis and writing as well as their design practices. This course will undertake an intensive, interdisciplinary focus on the history of video game development, representation in video games, and the languages that digital games work in as well as decolonial theory and diverse theories of design. This class will engage with a variety of scholarly texts, video games, media posts, videos, and design exercises, in order to illustrate the ways in which video games have shaped the ways we play, think, and behave within their spaces. Students will be required to write and design around these lessons and address and push back against the problematic behaviors and colonial narratives around violence, race, gender, sexuality, and relationship to the land that these gamic languages and lessons have created.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 30157 Queer Mediascapes (3 Credit Hours)
From early silent films to contemporary video games, media have not only been informed by but have actively shaped our culture, including how we think about sexual and gender minorities, who have always been present in screen cultures. This course examines GLBT/Queer representational practices across a wide variety of media forms. It will cover foundational understandings of both queer studies and media studies in order to provide students with the necessary tools to engage with a diverse array of media texts, including texts such as Life is Strange, The Last of Us series, The L Word, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Students will discuss and write about both primary sources and theoretical works that ask them to consider the politics of representation as well as the promises and perils of self-representation. This class will feature blog posts, lectures, class discussion, class activities, presentations, and frequent writing assignments to develop critical thinking and compositional skills.
GSC 30160 1970s America and the Rise of the Culture Wars (3 Credit Hours)
This course provides a multifaceted look at one of the most dynamic and pivotal eras in US history, the legacies of which we are still living with today. During the 1970s American society weathered tumultuous changes in politics, economy, and culture generated by unprecedented upheaval at home and abroad. Moving chronologically through the decade, we will assess large-scale forces that recalibrated American life, developments related to deindustrialization and globalization, for instance, as well as geopolitical contestations over oil, nationalism, and the Cold War. We will also pause to detail and analyze key turns in different sectors of American society. Topics addressed will include the energy crisis and environmentalism, stagflation and the ascent of Wall Street, working-class malaise and the decline of organized labor, Watergate and the fragmenting of American politics, the emergence of the culture wars and religious right, Title IX and feminist and civil rights activism, disco, punk rock, and the Hollywood Renaissance.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 30176 AIDS, Art, America (3 Credit Hours)
How has the HIV/AIDS crisis shaped U.S. political culture, public health, and artistic production since coming to public attention in the early 1980s? In this course, we explore the history of the AIDS crisis, including medical, religious, and moral constructions of the epidemic that arose amid heated culture wars debates over gender and sexuality. We look at competing strategies to define and combat the epidemic, from Christian Right leaders who have described AIDS as a divine punishment to public health workers and religious leaders who championed comprehensive AIDS education. We will be especially attuned to grassroots activism that emerged from the communities most affected by the AIDS crisis, including LGBT communities. We explore how AIDS activists drew upon the lessons of feminist, queer, and Black civil rights movements to fight for political and medical resources for people with AIDS. And we will see how art became central to these efforts by exploring how feminist and queer activists and other people with AIDS produced a vast (and still growing) archive of cultural production, including visual and performance art, film, and literary work, through which they processed the grief and trauma of this crisis while forging new political and artistic visions.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 30185 LGBTQ American History (3 Credit Hours)
How have LGBTQ people shaped modern America? And how has modern America shaped LGBTQ lives and experiences? In the popular imagination, the Stonewall Riots often mark the beginning of the modern gay rights movement and a turning point in the visibility and cultural acceptance of LGBTQ people. In this course, we will think about the longer and wider histories of LGBTQ people in the United States, tracking their cultural and political histories from the late 19th century to the historical present. We will also discuss theoretical approaches to studying the history of sexuality, including how sexual and gender categories (and people’s experiences of them) have changed over time and how they intersect with histories of race, class, religion, and region. In true American studies fashion, we will think with a wide range of primary texts—spanning across music, political zines, photography, film, law, and historical newspapers—and read interdisciplinary scholarship ranging from classics in LGBTQ history to more recent works that expand our archive of LGBTQ studies. Students will also pursue a historical research project on a topic of their own choosing, bringing their own interests and insights to the class.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 30188 Sport and Media (3 Credit Hours)
From the Olympics to Formula 1, sports are a central part of global culture and everyday life. Our experiences of sport, however, are largely shaped—and often even constructed—by media. Rather than simply presenting sport, media play an active role in producing the values, identities, emotions, and conflicts we associate with it. This course examines the historical roots and current conditions of the convergence of corporate sport and corporate media. We will analyze how media—from early 20th-century newsreels to live Twitch streams—do more than distribute sport content; they shape its cultural meanings and social impact. Centering sport media as both an industry and a cultural practice, we will explore how it intersects with issues of gender, race/ethnicity, labor, nationalism, and globalization. By analyzing the forces shaping sport media production and consumption, we will consider the meanings audiences make of those messages, we will consider the ways sport media production and consumption might be reimagined. Assignments in the course include a variety of reflection and application projects, as well as larger research project.
GSC 30225 Sinners, Saints, & Sorceresses: Women from the Middle Ages to the Present (3 Credit Hours)
A historical overview and critical analysis of the impact of selected, eminent women from the German-speaking world from the Middle Ages to the present including, among others, Hildegard von Bingen, Hannah Arendt, and Angela Merkel. The course analyzes how their contributions and actions have shaped cultural, political, scientific, and social discourse, structures, and institutions in Germany and beyond. While the emphasis is on German culture and society, the course work encourages students to explore and make connections to women from other cultures and societies who have shattered glass ceilings and made a mark on their world. Taught in English.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 30226 Women's Work (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, we’ll explore 'women’s work' in three senses. First, we’ll consider the history of gendered "separate spheres" in the United States, the way in which some kinds of labor – care work, teaching, and domestic chores, for example – came to be seen as properly the concern of women, while other kinds of work, like business careers and scholarly pursuits, became coded masculine. Second, we’ll understand ‘work’ in the sense of a work of literature: we’ll read popular novels by and about working women and probe how their fictional representations compare and contrast with women’s lived realities. Finally, we’ll take ‘women’s work’ as the starting place for you to engage in your own purpose-driven career discernment, taking gender as a key, always-present variable. Through partnerships with ND Women Connect and ThinkND, we’ll interview, read fiction alongside, and dialogue with ND alumni, probing how 21st century women (and men, too) are overcoming gendered barriers in the workplace and finding meaning in their work. We’ll approach stories – literary and personal – as a form of data and use that data collaboratively to interrogate the gendered working life.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 30232 Women in the Celtic World (3 Credit Hours)
This course proposes to discuss the lives of Celtic women. To some, this might seem like an impossible task: if one is able to surmount the initial difficulty of defining just what a ‘Celtic woman’ is, then there remains the intractably spotty historical record to contend with. In this course, we will examine the historiographical difficulties of defining the Celtic World. We will undertake a broad and varied examination of the women who appear in the texts of ancient historians, of the historically attested women of the medieval political and ecclesiastical realms, and of literary and legendary women whose lives are placed in an ancient Celtic past by the medieval and modern authors who created them. Finally, a study of women active in the ‘Celtic Revival’ intellectual movement will demonstrate the continued significance of the ancient and medieval Celtic past into the modern era.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WKHI - Core History
GSC 30256 Love and Sex at Notre Dame, 1972-2022 (3 Credit Hours)
Parietals, ResLife, and SYRs. ND’s Vagina Monologues and the “Gay? Fine By Me!” t-shirt campaign. Controversies over risqué dorm revues. 30+ years of queer student groups (forbidden, unofficial, and official) and the question of what is allowable at a Catholic university. ND’s never-quite-adopted “nondiscrimination policy.”
These and a host of other customs, traditions, events, and scandals comprise the history of love and sex, sexualities, and genders affecting Notre Dame’s undergraduate students. Today most of this history has been forgotten, misremembered, even mythologized. This seminar will continue the barely begun project of retrieving this history, focused on the fifty years after ND became coeducational in 1972.
Each student in this research seminar will work as both historian and informal archivist. Because relatively little has been published on this aspect of ND history, our class’s central texts must be primary sources. We will rely especially on old articles from the Observer, Scholastic, The Dome Yearbook, Irish Rover, and other ND student publications. Each student—acting as historian—will use these and other available sources to research and write one or more short, informative essays that uncover, analyze, and explain an important piece of ND’s past. Each student—acting as archivist—will also help build a “love and sex at ND” archival database for current and future researchers. Finally, each student will learn best practices for gathering and processing oral histories and then, using those practices, interview a current or past member of the Notre Dame community who might have useful memories or perspectives for the student’s research area. Most importantly, this project depends on today’s Notre Dame students applying their own experiences and ideas to their historical research and analysis. This is a student-directed project, written by and for today’s undergraduates with all their varying, generationally specific viewpoints. The larger purpose of this course is to give students the opportunity and tools to ask historical questions and argue about the answers, as all historians do, as they write this history for themselves.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 30277 Queer Histories of the Middle Ages (3 Credit Hours)
Welcome to Queer Histories of the Middle Ages. This semester we will be learning about how queer medieval people and communities have been studied by historians while also learning about the people and communities themselves. Throughout the course, we will center material and scholarship that is historical in scope. By this, I mean that the class concentrates on historical lived experiences of non-normative gender and sexuality as documented in scientific, legal, religious, institutional, and personal writing from approximately 500-1500 AD. The geographic focus will vary throughout the course, with most readings dealing with different regions of the Mediterranean and Europe. Our focus throughout this course will shift regionally and temporally to follow the existing scholarship while cohering around loosely organized themes, discussing trends in historiography (history writing) alongside the content of that history writing. As a class, we will work together to trace the threads of cultural continuity and discontinuity in the medieval past while attending to patterns of scholarship in the recent past and our own perspectives in the present.
This course is designed to provide an introduction to different approaches to writing queer histories of the medieval world. You do not need to have any previous knowledge of the period, although it may prove helpful. The readings will provide you with the necessary information relevant to the specific subject. We will further clarify complex ideas through discussion. By the same token, although a familiarity with modern queer theory may be helpful, students should not feel that they need any formal background in theories of gender or sexuality. We will find what we need as we go.
GSC 30297 Slavery in Global History (3 Credit Hours)
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to major themes in the global history of slavery with a specific focus on the location of slavery in the making of the modern world bringing together histories from the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds. The course will focus upon these themes through literature, economics, and politics. In addition, the course will also introduce students to recent museum exhibitions, art exhibitions, digital history projects, films, and documentary compilations that all together have transformed how the global history of slavery is understood.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 30309 Labor & America since 1945 (3 Credit Hours)
This course explores the relationships among and between workers, employers, government policymakers, unions, and social movements since the end of World War II, as well as the ways in which those relationships have shaped and been shaped by American politics and culture more broadly. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the globe's unequaled economic and political power, and its citizens parlayed that preeminence into a long postwar economic boom that created, however imperfectly, the first truly mass middle-class society in world history. At the heart of that new society was the American labor movement, whose leaders and members ensured that at least some of the heady postwar profits made it into the wallets of workers and their families - and not just the wallets of union members, as working Americans generally experienced great improvement in wages, benefits, and economic opportunity during the quarter-century ending in 1970. During those same years, civil rights activists challenged the historic workplace discrimination that kept African Americans at the bottom of the labor market, confronting the racism of employers, unions, and the government, and inspiring others, primarily Mexican-Americans and women, to broaden the push for equality at the workplace. Since that time, however, Americans have experienced a transformation in the workplace -- an erosion of manufacturing and the massive growth of service and government work; a rapid decline in number of union members and power of organized labor; and unresolved conflicts over affirmative action to redress centuries of racial and gender discrimination. Meanwhile, income inequality and wealth disparities have grown every year over the past three decades. What accounts for the decline of organized labor since 1970, and why have the people of the mythic land of milk and honey experienced declining upward mobility and widening gaps between the rich and everyone else? Are these phenomena linked? What has the decline of the labor movement meant for workers specifically, and the American economy and politics more broadly? How and why have popular perceptions of unions changed over time? What has been the relationship of organized labor to the civil rights movement, feminism, modern conservatism, and the fortunes of individual freedom more broadly? What is globalization, and what has been its impact upon American workers? Through an exploration of historical scholarship, memoirs, polemical writings, and films, this course will try to answer these questions and many others. It will also address the prospects for working people and labor unions in the twenty-first century. This course satisfies the university history requirement and is open to all students; no previous knowledge of the topic is required.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30316 Ireland is Women (3 Credit Hours)
This course will consider questions of gender, culture, and identity in looking at the history of women in Ireland. How has Ireland historically been figured female? We will consider the gendering of Ireland as a nation through the allegories of Éire and Hibernia, but also through the writing and representation of figures both real and mythic—from Cathleen Ní Houlihan to Maud Gonne and from Saint Brigid to the women of the Magdalene laundries. Along the way, we will examine related concerns including questions of masculinity, motherhood, class, race, and religion.
This course will cover a range of humanities disciplines and mediums, considering gender and representation in art, literature, music, film, and poetry. The course will utilize collections at Notre Dame's Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and Hesburgh Library's Rare Books & Special Collections. No background in Irish studies is required.
GSC 30345 Art, Gender, and Indigeneity in the Americas (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, we will engage with the academic fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Performance Studies, and Gender Studies. Inspired by groundbreaking work of Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists, we will explore how the body has constituted (and continues to constitute) a site for Indigenous peoples to explore gender identities and gendered community roles. Throughout the course, we will engage with cultural productions by Indigenous peoples in various media, including literature, music, theatre, public performance, and film to learn about the fight of Indigenous peoples to reclaim sovereignty over their own bodies. Using this survey of Indigenous ideas about gender as a frame of reference, students will critically explore their own ideas and beliefs. The course’s geographic focus is the Americas, from the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of the South American mainland.
GSC 30382 Gender and Social Change (3 Credit Hours)
This course examines how gender and sexuality are understood, constructed, and implicated in relations of social power in various regions of the world. It will integrate scholarship from anthropology and women and gender studies to explore how ideas of maleness, femaleness, trans, queer, and heterosexual are reproduced, contested, and transgressed within different social contexts and the everydayness of these categories. We will learn about cultural changes in conceptions of gender and sexuality in North and South America, SWANA (South West Asia/North Africa), Southeast and East Asia, Central and Southern Africa, and Europe. In the first half of this course, we will consider traditional themes in cultural anthropology, including kinship, morality, ritual, emotion, politics, and the circulation of goods and labor, to examine how different communities produce cultural knowledge about gender and sexuality. The second half of this course will address contemporary themes such as activism, violence, and gender and sexual oppression. Using our knowledge of anthropological theories developed in the first half of the course, we will take up topics of concern such as masculinity and violence, LGBTQ rights and pinkwashing, and gender and nationalism to understand how gender and sexuality are relevant to post-colonial contexts and settler-colonial resistance movements.
GSC 30459 Gender and Rock Culture (3 Credit Hours)
This course provides students with a broad, foundational understanding of the concepts, theories, and methodologies used in critical analyses of rock’s various gendered constructions. Rather than taking a musicological perspective, this course uses a socio-cultural approach to examine a myriad of gendered sites within rock culture, including performance, music video, and rock journalism. Therefore, music and song lyrics will not be our only or primary objects of study; our exploration of rock’s gendered culture will also include studies of the various roles, practices, technologies, and institutions associated with the production and consumption of rock music. In focusing on these various sites within rock culture, a synthetic, interdisciplinary approach is employed which draws on theories and methodologies formulated in such fields as popular music criticism, musicology, cultural studies, sociology, ethnography, literary analysis, performance studies, and critical media studies. In turn, the course is strongly informed by feminist scholarship and theories of gender.
GSC 30483 Comparative Feminist Politics (3 Credit Hours)
How can we understand global politics through a feminist lens? This course examines the gendered way in which politics takes place, with a focus on elections, voters and representatives, as well as broader consideration of the political structures and outcomes that occur in a gendered world. The class will explore rights, representation and the ripple effects of gendered systems on government and society. Featuring rich case studies from countries such as Tunisia, Sweden, Rwanda, the UK, Nepal, Liberia, the USA, and more, this course offers a comprehensive view of the nuanced intersections between gender and politics.
GSC 30531 Global Activism (3 Credit Hours)
Take action now! This course is about transnational networking, organizing, and campaigning for social change, with equal attention for conceptual and substantive issues. Conceptual issues include framing, strategies, tactics, and actors. The issue areas examined are labor, human rights, women's rights, the environment, peace and disarmament, and anti-globalization. The course zooms in on specific campaigns like global warming, violence against women, and ban-the-bomb. Counter-campaigns are also reviewed and readings on any given issue or campaign always include a critical or dissident voice.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30537 Fashioning American Identities (3 Credit Hours)
Did Puritans really only wear black and white, or did they wear fashionable lace, silk ribbons and bright colors? Did early settlers wash their bodies to get clean? What role did fashion play in the making of the American Revolution? And how did slaves and Native Americans adorn their bodies?
This course will address such questions by focusing on dress and material culture. We will consider the role of dress in the construction of colonial identities, and examine the ways that bodies operated as sites for negotiating class and ethnic encounters.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WKHI - Core History
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30541 Gender and Popular Culture (3 Credit Hours)
This course will explore how popular culture, constructed through as well as against folk and high cultures, operates at the intersection of gender with race, class, sexuality, and nationality in the United States. Approaching gender and popular culture from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, we will consider how culture in its commodified form has helped construct gendered identities, communities, and power structures in the United States. For example, we will examine how popular media texts may influence ideas about gender and how fans may transform and use mass culture texts for different purposes. Along the way, we will consider popular culture's ideological potential in relation to gender justice. Do negative representations harm the cause of women's and/or minority rights? What do the rise of the Internet and social media activism mean for the intersections of popular culture and social justice? Assignments include mini essays, a multimedia essay, and a final creative project accompanied by an analytical paper.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30548 Barbarians, Courtiers and Sinners: Fighting Words in “Renaissance” Ireland (3 Credit Hours)
This course explores the various literatures (especially poetry) that emerge at a time of dramatic change in early modern (16-17th-century) Ireland, including works originally written in Irish and English ranging from courtly poetry of praise and love for noble patrons to rather less savory verse justifications of colonial violence. In tandem with our reading of primary materials (read in English translation), we will examine the historiography of the period to grasp key debates and shifts in scholarly understanding; in so doing, we will take up long standing areas of debate regarding the characteristics of this colonial encounter, the degree to which comparisons are useful or apt, the nature of Irish literary culture, the characteristics of the age, and, if we're feeling cocky, the modern. While you need not know any Irish (Gaelic) to take this course, you should be prepared to conjoin history and theory, poetry and politics, through historicized close reading while working across genres to produce original criticism in the form of several papers whose topics you will develop yourself (with a creative option or two). In fact, that's the whole point: finding your own passion and doing work that only you can do! The course will count toward the IRLL major and minor, the IRST minor, the European Studies minor.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30569 Post Soviet Ru Cinema (in Eng) (3 Credit Hours)
No prerequisite. Freed from the constraints of Soviet-era censorship, between 1990 and 2005 Russian filmmakers exploited the unique qualities of the film medium in order to create compelling portraits of a society in transition. The films we will watch cover a broad spectrum: reassessing Russia's rich pre-Revolutionary cultural heritage as well as traumatic periods in Soviet history (World War II, the Stalinist era); grappling with formerly taboo social issues (gender roles, anti-Semitism, alcoholism); taking an unflinching look at new social problems resulting from the breakdown of the Soviet system (the rise of neo-fascism, the war in Chechnya, organized crime); and meditating on Russia's current political and cultural dilemmas (the place of non-Russian ethnicities within Russia, Russians' love-hate relationship with the West). From this complex cinematic patchwork emerges a picture of a new, raw Russia, as yet confused and turbulent, but full of vitality and promise for the future. Short readings supplement the film component of the course. Films will be available on reserve and via streaming video.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30582 Laboring Women in Early America (3 Credit Hours)
What did shopping, tavern-keeping, and midwifery have in common in early America? They could all be considered legitimate forms of women's and girls' labors both inside and outside of the home. We will consider work that was skilled or unskilled, free or enslaved, and paid or unpaid, and how changing definitions of "women's work" helped to shape boundaries of race and class. Servants were restricted from marrying and procreating while the value of enslaved women resided in both their work and their reproductive potential. Hence this course will also consider the dual facets of women's labor in work and their laboring in childbirth.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30593 Art, Vision, and Difference (3 Credit Hours)
Art and visual culture have shaped our conceptions of ourselves and others. In this course, we will explore trends in contemporary art in order to consider the role that looking and visual subjects play. By closely examining our relationship to art objects like paintings, sculptures, photographs, crafts, and videos, we will ask how art contributes to, reflects, or affirms specific stereotypes of places, roles, and values. Some topics we will discuss include the body, standards of beauty, and explorations of gender and sexuality; craft and ornament; race and identity (and its popular manifestation in genres like hip-hop); performance art and multiculturalism; and the role of art in relation to issues of social justice and ethics. Most of our focus will be on contemporary American art and culture (post 1970), and many of the objects and paintings that we examine will explicitly challenge our conception of what constitutes "good" art. The artwork will often appear to be explicitly deskilled, unattractive, or otherwise antithetical to our understanding of aesthetics. We will consider why such approaches to art making might be adopted and, furthermore, why it is reasonable to alter our conception of "art" to accommodate such frameworks. While this course will be challenging, no prior art history knowledge is required; assignments will include exams and short papers.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30595 Captives & Slaves in the New World (3 Credit Hours)
This interdisciplinary course will foreground the lives of the enslaved in colonial America and the Caribbean (inc. Haiti). We will consider indigenous Native-American and West African practices pertaining to enslavement and captivity, as well as the development of hereditary slavery in the colonies. Throughout, we will maintain a focus on understanding the lived experience of individuals who were captured/enslaved, with special emphasis on gender and material culture.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30596 Gendered Bodies in the Islamic Tradition (3 Credit Hours)
This interdisciplinary course offers a topical survey of the relationships between biological sex, culturally bound notions of "masculinity" and "femininity," and the gendered body in the Islamic tradition. The primary aim of the course is to explore the intersection of religion and social constructions of gender and the body in a variety of historical and cultural contexts in the Muslim World. Students read and interpret religious texts and commentaries, literary and legal texts, women's writings, and media in English translation. Coursework focuses on increasing students' understanding of the diversity of scholarly views on women's bodies as sites of piety and sites of political and social contestation (reproductive rights, public vs. private space, etc.).
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30610 Campus Sexual Violence (3 Credit Hours)
Over the eight-week interactive seminar, students will learn to identify different forms of sexual violence; become familiar with campus and community support resources for survivors; and gain an understanding of research-based strategies for effective campus sexual violence prevention
GSC 30634 Consuming America (3 Credit Hours)
This course traces the rise of consumer society in the United States from the colonial era through the late twentieth century. It asks how Americans came to define the "good life" as one marked by material abundance and how transformations in buying and selling have shaped American culture, politics, and national identity. One of our aims will be to develop a usable historical definition of consumer society and to evaluate when such a society emerged in the United States. We will examine the role that consumption has played in defining and policing ideals of gender, race, sexuality, and class. We will also consider how Americans have used consumer practices and spaces to advance political claims and notions of citizenship. The course is organized around key turning points in American consumer capitalism: the consumer boom of the eighteenth century; the market revolution and feminization of consumption; the birth of the department store; the rise of mass consumption and commercial leisure; the development of modern advertising and sales; the spread of chain stores and shopping malls; and the globalization of American consumer culture. In addition to recent scholarship and text-based primary sources, we will analyze artifacts of consumer culture, such as advertisements, catalogs, product labels, broadsides, film, and television.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30636 Sex and Gender in Greco-Roman Antiquity (3 Credit Hours)
This course examines the differing roles and stereotypes, forms of behavior, and values associated with women and men in Greco-Roman antiquity. Special attention is given to the preoccupations of the Greeks and Romans with the categories of 'female' and 'male' and to the dynamics of relations and relationships between women and men. The course both deepens knowledge of Greco-Roman society and provides an informed background for contemporary gender debates.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30637 Sex and Power in Irish Literature: From Warrior Queens to Punk Poet (3 Credit Hours)
This class looks at how women's voices emerge in Irish literature/art from the bloodthirsty warrior queens and powerful sovereignty goddesses of medieval saga to today's activist punk poets and videographers, exploring both how women are represented by others and how they choose to answer back. We will consider key genres of Irish verbal art in a wide range of compositions from medieval to contemporary. We will be helped along by relevant literary, anthropological and cultural criticism. How do women speak? How do "women" speak? Are these works subversive of our expectations or conservative in their relation to the status quo? How can we acknowledge and deconstruct misogyny not as inevitable but as historically and contextually conditioned and subject to demystifying critique? What vantage can we gain on Irish literary history by asking these historical, theoretical and political questions? How do tradition and the canon look when we view them through a gendered lens? What kind of impersonations might we engage in when we read...and write? Genres considered include courtly love poetry, contemporary feminist verse, oral lament, modern love poetry, bardic verse, storytelling, early modern allegorical poetry, folk song, medieval allegory, and contemporary comic verse, all read in English. Your own work for the course will include papers of literary/cultural analysis, a presentation, and a creative writing option for those who want to flex those muscles.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30638 The History of American Feminist Thought (3 Credit Hours)
This course traces American feminism from the margins of democratic thought in the eighteenth century to the center of modern political discourse and culture. Drawing on primary sources and recent scholarly work, we will investigate how the goals and meaning of feminism have changed over time, as well as how the boundaries drawn around who could and could not claim the title of "feminist" have shifted. We will approach feminism as an argument--not a received truth--responsive to contemporary historical developments and marked by divisions of race, class, sexual orientation, age, and religion. Course readings are organized around major turning points in the American feminist movement and chart significant continuities and contradictions that have animated each new wave, including questions of gender difference, economic dependence, reproductive rights, marriage, subjectivity, and citizenship.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30642 From Humors to Hysteria: Human and Political Bodies in European History 1517-1918 (3 Credit Hours)
Between the early rumblings of the Reformations and the last cannon shot of World War I, Europeans profoundly changed how they conceptualized bodies as experience and metaphors. During these four centuries, Europeans grounded the ways in which they interacted with each other and the world in bodily imaginings. On an individual level, the living, human body provided a means of accessing and understanding the material or spiritual world. On a collective scale, the physical body, its adornments, and its gestures provided markers that Europeans used to fracture society along axes of gender, sexuality, class, race, mental aptitude, and even sacrality. Drawing in part from their myriad imaginings of the human body, Europeans constructed metaphorical political bodies. The body politic assumed diverse forms spanning from divine right monarchs to revolutionary republics to modern nation states. Our course will lay bare the human body as culturally constructed, while fleshing out how Europeans' evolving visions affected political imaginings.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30643 Sexual Morality and The Constitution (3 Credit Hours)
The "sexual revolution" began in the Western democracies sometime between the 1920s and the 1970s. This revolution saw great changes regarding the social acceptability of fornication, divorce, contraception, pornography, abortion, homosexual sex, and gay marriage. Free-market capitalism has been a major factor in this development due to its inventions, like electronic entertainment and the pill, destruction of the family as a self-sustaining economic unit (drawing men and women out of the family farm and the home shop and into the factories and offices of urban centers), and its tendency to enhance economic growth by promoting self-indulgence and weakening moral, religious, and aesthetic restraints on consumption and production. American courts played a significant role in this development by modifying constitutional provisions originally used to protect property rights and pursue equal protection for racial minorities. Popular resentment of religious imposition via the criminal law has also been a factor since opposition to sexual liberation has come mainly from religious communities. This course surveys the mutual influence of American constitutional law and the sexual revolution in America. Principal texts are: Geoffrey Stone, Sex and the Constitution (2017), selections from classical texts like Locke's Second Treatise and The Federalist, and selected Supreme Court cases on parental rights, property rights, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, parental rights, pornography, marriage and divorce, contraception, abortion, and gay rights.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 30646 Global Modern Contemporary Art (3 Credit Hours)
This course will study the history of art in the 20th and early 21st centuries from a global perspective, focusing on several cities and regions that were crucial to the development of modernism and postmodernism, including: Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Berlin, Zurich, London, Rome, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, New York City, Mexico City, Dakar, and Johannesburg. Spanning the decades 1907-2010, the course will examine a wide variety of figures, movements, and practices within the visual arts, situating them within the social, political, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments (e.g., abstraction, the readymade, conceptual, feminist, postcolonial) will be traced through the rise of mass-media technologies (such as photography, radio, video, and cinema) alongside the aesthetic accomplishments of the avant-garde. Exploring the forces of feminism, late-industrial capitalism, urbanization, and the global AIDS crisis, we will attempt to understand how artistic innovations fundamentally altered, negotiated, and framed the ways in which we understand and represent the world. The class will also participate in film screenings at the Browning Cinema, DPAC.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 30659 Gender at Work in US History (3 Credit Hours)
Gender has been fundamental to the organization of nearly all human societies, but what gender has meant in terms of identity, opportunity, and economic activity has varied widely across time and space. This course will explore gender at work in US history, taking a chronological approach to show gender's evolution and ongoing intersections with class, race, age, religion, region, and sexuality from 1776 to the near present. The term "gender at work" expresses a double meaning here -- first, it connotes that this is a labor history course, with an emphasis on the ways gender has operated at the workplace; second, it suggests the ubiquity of gender in shaping Americans' lives, experiences, and imaginations not only at the workplace, but also in formal politics, informal communities, and every space in between. By exploring the ways gender has been both omnipresent and contingent throughout US history, students should better understand -- and perhaps act upon -- seemingly intractable contemporary conundrums involving questions of equal opportunity and pay, household division of labor, work-life balance, and the proper relationships among employers, workers, households, and government.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 30662 Feminist Political Thought (3 Credit Hours)
Political theory is a subfield of political science that asks the big questions of
politics and power, and feminist political theory does so by focusing on the big questions of gender
identity and politics, sexual desire and power, women���s interests and equality, etc
GSC 30663 Crime, Heredity, and Insanity in American History (3 Credit Hours)
This course gives students the opportunity to learn more about how Americans have thought about criminal responsibility and how their ideas have changed over time. Historians contend that the 19th century witnessed a transformation in the understanding of the origins of criminal behavior in the United States. The earlier religious emphasis on the sinfulness of all mankind, which made the murderer into merely another sinner, gave way to a belief in the inherent goodness of humankind. But if humans were naturally good, how are we to explain their evil actions? And crime rates varied widely by sex and race; European women were said to have been domesticated out of crime doing. What do those variations tell us about a common human nature? The criminal might be a flawed specimen of humankind born lacking a healthy and sane mind. Relying in part upon studies done in Europe, American doctors, preachers, and lawyers debated whether insanity explained criminality over the century and how it expressed itself in different races and sexes. Alternative theories were offered. Environment, heredity, and free will were all said to have determined the actions of the criminal. By the early 20th century, lawyers and doctors had largely succeeded in medicalizing criminality. Psychiatrists now treated criminals as patients; judges invoked hereditary eugenics in sentencing criminals. Science, not sin, had apparently become the preferred mode of explanation for the origins of crime. But was this a better explanation than what had come before? Can it explain the turbulent debates in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries over variations in crime rates by race? Can it explain why men, not women, are still more likely to commit murder?
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 30664 Gender, Sexuality, and the State (3 Credit Hours)
This course provides an overview of the complex ways in which gender and sexuality are relevant to a study of the state, both domestically and on the international stage. This course will look at the gendered and sexual dynamics of war, state-building, nationalisms, international governance, as well as feminist and queer social movement responses to the state.
Pre-Requisites: either Introduction to Peace Studies or 1 course in Gender Studies or instructor permission
GSC 30665 Feminist, Queer, Crip: Introduction to Disability Studies (3 Credit Hours)
Disability is a key aspect of human experience, and this course will examine its importance and complexity from a feminist perspective. Students will investigate cultural meanings and representations of disability, social justice and human rights issues, and current bioethical debates about autonomy, care, and physical and mental difference. These will enable students to think critically about conventional conceptualizations of the body, mind, and self. Some of the topics covered will be disability and the family, the disability rights movement in America, the human-technology interface, and more.
GSC 30666 Women's Suffrage: Gender, Politics and Power (3 Credit Hours)
In 2020, the United States is commemorating the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which prohibited the denial of voting rights on the basis of sex. In this course, we will take the occasion of the centennial to explore the place of women's suffrage in the development of American democracy and the political empowerment of women. We will examine such topics as the meaning of citizenship, the place of voting in the American democratic system, the woman suffrage movement and other feminist movements, the anti-suffrage movement and other conservative movements, and the participation of women in various political roles, including as candidates and office-holders. We will approach these topics with an explicitly intersectional lens, exploring the ways in which gender, race/ethnicity, and class, in particular, shape politics and power in the United States. Students in this course will also participate in a DPAC Learning Beyond the Classics film course (4-6 weeks) on women's suffrage.
GSC 30667 Rethinking Crime and Justice: Explorations from the Inside Out (3 Credit Hours)
This course begins with a study of the U.S. criminal legal system - its history, its goals, its effects, and how it is embedded in larger systems of power linked with race, gender, and economics. Our greater purpose, however, is to get at deeper concerns about violence, harm, and justice: what we want a justice system to accomplish, why punishment is at the center of our current system, and our own responsibility for that system that operates in our names. As part of the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, the course involves inside students (who are incarcerated at the Westville Correctional Facility in Westville, IN) and outside students (who are enrolled at Notre Dame, St. Mary's, and Holy Cross) learning with and from each other and breaking new ground together. Each week, campus students travel to Westville for class with the incarcerated students; all are responsible for the same reading and writing assignments, and all participate together in class activities and discussions. Together, we will examine myths and realities related to crime and punishment, explore the effects of the criminal legal system and its policies, and develop ideas for responding more effectively to violence and harm in our communities. Apply online via the CSC website: socialconcerns.nd.edu.
GSC 30668 Gender and Medicine in America (3 Credit Hours)
This course examines gender and medicine in America from the colonial era to the present. We will explore how gender has shaped medical ideas and practices and how women have participated in health care as providers, consumers, patients, and reformers. We will pay particular attention to how gender has intersected with race, class, ethnicity, and ability to affect health outcomes and highlight the experiences of black, Native, immigrant, working-class, and disabled women.
GSC 30669 Data Feminism (3 Credit Hours)
Feminism isn't only about women, nor is feminism only for women. Feminism is about power - about who has it and who doesn't. And in today's world, data is power. Data can be used to create communities, advance research, and expose injustice. But data can also be used to discriminate, marginalize, and surveil. This course will draw intersectional feminist theory and activism to identify models for challenging existing power differentials in data science, with the aim of using data science methods and tools to work towards justice. Class meetings will be split between discussions of theoretical readings and explorations of data science tools and methods (such as Tableau, RStudio, and Python). Those readings may include chapters from texts that include Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein's Data Feminism (2020), Virginia Eubanks's Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (2018), Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), and Sasha Costanza-Chock's Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (2020). This course will also examine the data advocacy and activism work undertaken by groups like Our Data Bodies, Data for Black Lives, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and Chicago-based Citizens Police Data Project. Over the course of the semester, students will develop original research projects that use data to intervene in issues of inequality and injustice.
This course is not about gaining mastery of particular data science tools or methods, therefore familiarity with statistical analysis or data science tools (R, RStudio, Python, etc.) is NOT a prerequisite for this course.
GSC 30670 Gender Justice and the Environment (3 Credit Hours)
This course will take an intersectional approach to environmental justice and thought, sparking conversations about ways in which networks of oppression have been embedded in environmental policy and the construction of "nature," a term which we will productively interrogate. We will collectively think through, alongside readings as well as both documentary and creative film viewings, possibilities for renewal through both theoretical shifts, policy, and activism. We will be encountering work in feminist science studies, ecofeminism, queer and trans studies, native studies, black studies, and environmental studies. We will discuss a good deal of theory which will generate diverse lines of thought that we can harness to think through the ideas that drew each of us individually to this class and build upon ideas that germinate through the encounters with this theory, as well as the policy, activist texts, poetry, and film we will look at.
GSC 30671 Sport and Big Data (3 Credit Hours)
Sport is one of the most enduringly popular and significant cultural activities in the United States. Data has always been a central part of professional sport in the US, from Henry Chadwick's invention of the baseball box score in the 1850s to the National Football League's use of Wonderlic test scores to evaluate players. This course focuses on the intersecting structures of power and identity that shape how we make sense of the "datification" of professional sport. By focusing on the cultural significance of sport data, this course will put the datafication of sport in historical context and trace the ways the datafication of sport has impacted athletes, fans, media, and other stakeholders in the sport industry. The course will also delve into the technology systems used to collect and analyze sport data, from the TrackMan and PITCHf/x systems used in Major League Baseball to the National Football League's Next Gen Stats partnership to emerging computer vision and artificial intelligence research methods. Readings for this course will draw on texts like Christopher Phillips' Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (2019), Ruha Benjamin's Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (2019), Jamie Schultz's Qualifying Times: Points of Change in Women's Sport (2014), and Thomas Oates' Football and Manliness: An Unauthorized Feminist Account of the NFL (2017). Class meetings will be split between discussions of conceptual readings and applied work with sport data and technology systems. Coursework may include response papers, hands-on work with data, and a final project. Familiarity with statistical analysis, data science, or computer science tools and methods is NOT a prerequisite for this course.
GSC 30673 Transformative Justice (1 Credit Hour)
As calls to defund police and abolish prisons have gone mainstream in the United States, many who encounter those demands struggle to imagine alternatives to our punitive criminal legal system, especially when it comes to violent crime. This one-credit course serves as a hands-on introduction to transformative justice -- a feminist political framework for responding to violence without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. We will learn about the history and philosophy of transformative justice (TJ) as it has developed in Black, immigrant, and Indigenous communities over many generations. We will read theoretical works, case studies, and personal narratives from scholars, practitioners, and community organizers seeking to solve the problem of violence without creating more violence. Most importantly, we will cultivate skills to build restorative and transformative responses to violence, abuse, and harm in our own relationships and communities. Our virtual class sessions will include a mix of discussion and activities, with an emphasis on collaboration and skill-building.
GSC 30674 Revisiting Rebecca (1 Credit Hour)
Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca, published in 1938, has frequently appeared on lists of the "best" British fiction and continues to inspire film and television adaptations, most recently, the October 2020 Netflix release starring Lily James, Armie Hammer, and Kristin Scott Thomas. The novel, as well as its media adaptations, evoke multiple genres: Rebecca is at once a romantic Cinderella story, a melodrama, a Gothic thriller, a murder mystery, and an exploration of the psychological nuances of female power and sexuality. This one-credit winter session course will explore du Maurier's novel; Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film; radio and television adaptations produced in the U.S., the U.K., and India; the 1983 opera; and the current Netflix production to assess how these narratives have spoken to issues of sexuality, class and gender across multiple cultures and time periods. Class meetings built around synchronous discussions will analyze the material, social, cultural, and ideological factors involved in adapting a narrative into different media frameworks.
GSC 30675 Critical Internet Geographies (3 Credit Hours)
In 1996, John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyperspace" framed "the frontiers of Cyberspace" as an apolitical, borderless space where "our identities have no bodies." The invention of the World Wide Web and the continued evolution of internet technologies have drastically changed the norms for communication and community formation. However, internet technologies and platforms have also amplified and magnified deeply-embedded structures of discrimination and oppression. From the Ku Klux Klan's creation of the Aryan Nations Liberty Net in the 1980s to the 21st-century #GamerGate campaign's targeted harassment of women in the video game industry. At the same time, internet technologies and platforms have supported and facilitated the work of activists, advocates, and grassroots organizers. This course moves beyond techno-optimism to critically examine the historical, cultural, social, and political significance of "the internet," from alternate internet histories to contemporary debates around regulation and access. Class meetings will be split between discussions of conceptual readings and applied work with internet technology systems. Readings for this course will draw on texts that include Janet Abbate's Inventing the Internet (1999), Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White's Race After the Internet (2012), Safiya Umoja Noble's Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018), Charlton McIlwain's Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (2020), Marisa Elena Duarte's Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country (2017), Jessie Daniels's Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (2009), Andre Brock Jr.'s Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020), and edited collections Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2010) and #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020). Coursework may include response papers, hands-on work, and a final project. Familiarity with data science or computer science tools and methods is NOT a prerequisite for this course.
GSC 30676 Football in America (3 Credit Hours)
Football is one of the most enduringly popular and significant cultural activities in the United States. Since the late 19th century, football has occupied an important place for those wishing to define and understand "America." And Notre Dame football plays a central role in that story, with larger-than-life figures and stories, from Knute Rockne's "Win one for the Gipper" line to the "Four Horsemen" backfield that led the program to a second national championship in 1924. The mythic proportions of the University's football program cast a long shadow on the institution's history, cultural significance, and traditions. This course focuses on Notre Dame football history as an entry point into larger questions about the cultural, historical, and social significance of football in the U.S. Who has been allowed to play on what terms? How have events from Notre Dame football's past been remembered and re-imagined? How has success in Notre Dame football been defined and redefined? In particular, the course will focus on how Notre Dame football became a touchstone for Catholic communities and institutions across the country navigating the fraught terrain of masculinity, immigration, whiteness, and religious practice. This course will take up those questions through significant engagement with University Archive collections related to Notre Dame football, working toward increased levels of description and access for these materials. This course will include hands-on work with metadata, encoding and markup, digitization, and digital preservation/access through a collaboration with the University Archives and the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. Readings for this course will include chapters from texts such as Murray Sperber's Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football (1993), TriStar Pictures' Rudy (1993), Steve Delsohn's Talking Irish: The Oral History of Notre Dame Football (2001), Jerry Barca's Unbeatable: Notre Dame's 1988 Championship and the Last Great College Football Season (2014), David Roediger's Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White (2005), David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), and Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (1995). Class meetings will be split between discussions of conceptual readings and applied work with library and information science technologies and systems. Coursework may include response papers, hands-on work with data, and a final project. Familiarity with archival methods, library/information science, data science, or computer science tools and methods is NOT a prerequisite for this course.
GSC 30677 Contemporary Art: Art Now (3 Credit Hours)
This course offers students an introduction to the theories and practices of contemporary art with a focus on artwork since 1980. We will investigate its varied, multi-faceted terrain, and examine key themes and ideas that have been explored in recent years. These include such topics as the artist as curator, the museum reconsidered, art and politics, the emergence of DIY approaches, and the rise of interest in new media and materials. Special attention will be paid to the way that new media and formats, like digital photography, sound, and installation, have changed the scope and reception of art now.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 30678 Gendered Bodies in the Islamic Tradition (3 Credit Hours)
Gendered Bodies in the Islamic tradition is an interdisciplinary course that offers a topical survey of the relationships between biological sex, culturally bound notions of "masculinity" and "femininity," and gender in the Islam. Through readings and media, we will explore the pivotal role of religion in defining and constructing notions of gender performativity and sexuality. In addition, we will examine the historical construction of complex and intersecting identities and conceptions of gender and sexual difference.
GSC 30679 Disability in American History and Culture (3 Credit Hours)
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 26% of Americans (about 61 million people) have a disability—a physical, intellectual, sensory, or self-care impediment that affects major life activities. This course considers this population, their stories and experiences, as well as how disability—as a social, cultural, legal, and political construct—has shaped the nation and its history. A particular focus of the course will be on disability and social justice. Throughout American history, and still today, disabled people have been denied basic civil rights, such as voting, marrying, holding property, and living independently. This course will examine how these restrictions developed and changed over time as well as how disabled people have fought for greater access and equality. Coursework may include response papers, primary source analysis, and a final project.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 30680 Baseball in America (3 Credit Hours)
Baseball is one of the most enduringly popular and significant cultural activities in the United States. Since the late 19th century, baseball has occupied an important place for those wishing to define and understand "America." Who has been allowed to play on what terms? How have events from baseball's past been remembered and re-imagined? What is considered scandalous and why (and who decides)? How has success in baseball been defined and redefined? Centering baseball as an industry and a cultural practice, this course will cover topics that include the political, economic, and social development of professional baseball in the United States; the rise of organized baseball industry and Major League Baseball; and globalization in professional baseball.
GSC 30682 Social History of American Medicine (3 Credit Hours)
This seminar explores the dynamic and complex history of medicine in the United States, from colonial times to the present, with a focus on how race, gender, class, and geography have shaped medical practices, healthcare institutions, and public health policies. Medicine in America has never operated in a vacuum—it has both shaped and been shaped by broader social structures. The course critically examines how medical authority was established and legitimized, often at the expense of marginalized communities, and how those communities have responded and resisted. We will investigate the professionalization of medicine, the role of public health, the ethical dilemmas surrounding medical experimentation, and the evolution of biomedicine and the pharmaceutical industry. Through historical analysis, case studies, and discussions, students will develop a deeper understanding of how historical developments in medicine continue to inform contemporary debates on healthcare access, inequality, and medical ethics.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 30700 Global Women's Health (2 Credit Hours)
Women's health is a multidimensional paradigm. In this course you will discover a global perspective on selected topics in women's health. Women's health conditions, programs, and services in developed and developing countries will be explored. You will discuss global women's health issues within context of race, ethnicity, culture, class, and societal roles. The combination of lecture, media viewing, guest-speakers, readings, class discussions, other learning activities, and assignments are anticipated to prompt your critical thinking. You will also discover topics that you might explore for your future development as scholar, researcher, and global health leader and advocates.
Pre-Requisites: upperclass men/women (undergraduates junior/senior)
GSC 30701 Women & Inclusive Leadership (1.5 Credit Hours)
INTRODUCTION:
The course is rooted in the conviction that all professionals flourish when business reflects a commitment to gender equity. Students will be provided with insights from scholarly research and corporate practice with a focus on practical strategies that will help them to work more comfortably and productively in inclusive work settings and to become more effective equity champions. Course topics will include employee voice and engagement for women and men, across generational cohorts, with a focus on aligning values with meaningful work. The course will be conducted in a seminar format involving discussion of readings and one another's perspectives, experiences and insights. We will also engage and learn from outside speakers, including MBA student leaders who have instituted changes to the ND MBA curriculum to raise the profile of inclusive leadership at Mendoza.
COURSE OBJECTIVES:
To enhance awareness of and sensitivity to issues of gender equity and inclusion in the workplace.
To more deeply appreciate the strength of gender balanced teams and organizations.
To better understand personal, interpersonal, organizational and societal barriers to gender equity and inclusion.
To explore personal strategies for navigating barriers to equity and inclusion.
To explore best practices in organizational efforts to foster equity gender and inclusion.
GSC 30702 Women & Health in Global Context (3 Credit Hours)
This course is designed to introduce students to a wide range of health issues affecting women globally, with particular emphasis on Africa, Asia, and the United States. The topics will focus on a woman's life, from infancy and childhood, through adolescence and reproductive years, to old age. We will examine the physiological, social, psychological, economic, cultural, political, behavioral, and environmental factors that influence women's health, and the role of poverty, discrimination, and unequal health access. Topics such as determinants of women's health, reproductive health, sexual health, cardiovascular health, maternal health, cancers of the reproductive tract, mental and emotional health, substance use and abuse, and various forms of violence against women will be discussed. At the end of the course, students should have a solid grasp of key issues affecting the health of women in different cultural contexts globally, and how women can be empowered to take actions that positively influence their health.
GSC 30750 Italian Women Writers: Female Voices in Modern and Contemporary Italy (3 Credit Hours)
This course offers a deep dive into the remarkable, yet frequently marginalized, works of women authors in Italian literature from the nineteenth century to contemporary times.
How have these writers influenced discourses surrounding women’s emancipation and pressing social issues? What do their contributions reveal about women’s struggle to establish their voices, and claim their identity and power? Through our exploration of novels, poems, and short stories, we will uncover the unique perspectives and influences of these authors, highlighting how they have actively shaped the cultural landscape.
The course will be conducted entirely in Italian, providing an immersive experience as we study works that have redefined the Italian literary canon.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WKLC-Core Adv Lang & Culture
GSC 30816 Women's Voices in Luso-Afro-Brazilian Literature (3 Credit Hours)
This course is an introduction to contemporary literature written by women in Portugal, Brazil, and Lusophone Africa. We will start by asking the question “What is women’s literature?” and throughout the course we will discuss a variety of literary genres that will aid in our discussions about the portrayal of women’s lives, aspirations, and concerns in literature. We will examine the formal structure of crônicas, short stories, novels, and poetry and will evaluate how women from different cultures portray their role as individuals as well as in family and society. The course will also examine how their fictional works voice similar or differing concerns depending on the writers’ race, class, landscape, and origin. Some of the writers we will study include Natália Correia, Maria Judite de Carvalho, Clarice Lispector, Conceição Evaristo, Cíntia Moscovich, Lídia Jorge, and Paulina Chiziane. Taught in Portuguese.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WKLC-Core Adv Lang & Culture
GSC 30951 Just Wage Research Lab (3 Credit Hours)
This interdisciplinary research lab enlists students in the efforts of the Just Wage Initiative (JWI), a collaborative research and advocacy project of the Higgins Labor Program at the Center for Social Concerns. Students will help develop, refine, and update the Just Wage Framework, a multistakeholder online tool designed to advance a more inclusive and equitable economy. Students will also undertake research projects connecting their own intellectual interests and disciplinary expertise to the JWI?s foundational question: What makes any given wage just or unjust? In addition, students will collaborate with the instructor and local, national, and international practitioners to envision and execute advocacy campaigns to promote a just wage economy. Extended weekly class sessions will facilitate visits by scholars and activists, interactive group discussions, and collaborative experiments.
GSC 30952 Dancing in the Street: Music and Social Change in the USA (3 Credit Hours)
In 1964, when Martha Reeves sang, "Calling out around the world/Are you ready for a brand new beat?/Summer's here and the time is right/For dancing in the street," was she beckoning listeners to join a party or the civil rights struggle? Or both? From spirituals sung by enslaved workers to protest anthems shouted at union rallies, music has provided the soundtrack to social justice causes throughout American History. Whether performed by rank-and-file reformers or famous recording artists -- from Frank Sinatra to Nina Simone to Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, and beyond -- popular music has accompanied and sometimes fueled transformations in American politics, culture, and social life. In this course students will explore American popular music in its many forms -- blues, country, jazz, folk, rock, punk, disco, hip hop, tejano, and more -- to understand its power and limits as both a force for social change and a window into major themes of the American experience.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 31459 Gender and Rock Culture Lab (0 Credit Hours)
Lab Screening for Corequisite GSC 30459
Corequisites: GSC 30459
GSC 33020 Medieval Women’s Mysticism (3 Credit Hours)
How did the medieval Church’s great women mystics create a space where they could connect with God? Despite enclosure in convents, many medieval nuns held religious authority and contributed to the life and literature of the Catholic tradition. Paradoxically, the convent was a privileged space of female culture, where women authors and mystics flourished. This course will explore the spaces, both architectural and spiritual, where medieval nuns explored their relationship with God and wrote to help the souls of others. Focusing on Germany and on remarkable women such as Hildegard of Bingen, students will contextualize medieval women's mysticism in its historical milieu, including the realities of female enclosure, the daily round of convent life, and liturgical worship. We will compare mysticism in the convent to the writings and social context of women mystics in the city or at noble courts. In Spring 2025, this course will make a class trip to Germany during Spring Break to visit the sites of medieval convents and continuously active communities of nuns. Students must apply to the instructor to participate in this course.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 33025 The European Fairy Tale Tradition (3 Credit Hours)
Fairy tales are a staple of popular culture with roots in the folklore tradition. In this course we will investigate the enduring transnational popularity of the fairy tale and the extent to which they reflect child-rearing, political or social norms. We will read and analyze classic European fairy tales in their historical and cultural context, as well as discuss the theoretical function and meaning of fairy tales. Taught in English. No German language ability required.
GSC 33607 LGBT in the 20th Century USA (3 Credit Hours)
This course traces the changing history of sexual and gender identities in the USA between roughly 1890-present. We begin with the early 20th century’s “invention” of the binary hetero or homo sexual identity -- a rigid dualism that (from today’s point of view) would structure even the most radical challenges to normative gender and sexual identities through until the last decades of the twentieth. We conclude by briefly considering the sources and extent of radically “queer” challenges to gender and sexual binaries, beginning in the 1990s. As much as possible, we will draw on the words and images of those who struggled to define themselves -- their art, music, film, literature, interviews, oral histories, memoirs and autobiographies. The class will analyze these using various existing historical and other disciplinary frameworks. In addition, students will deepen our historical knowledge by sharing their own research on a topic of their choice (1890-2015). Our learning will be discussion-based and collaborative.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 33657 The Samurai in Classical Japanese Literature (3 Credit Hours)
The sword-wielding samurai warrior is perhaps the most familiar icon of pre-modern Japan, one that continues to influence how the Japanese think of themselves and how others think of Japan even in modern times. Who were the samurai? How did they see themselves? How did other members of Japanese society see them in the past? How did the role and the image of the samurai change over time? To answer these questions, we will explore the depiction of samurai in various kinds of texts: episodes from quasi-historical chronicles, 14th-century Noh plays, 17th-century short stories, and 18th-century Kabuki and puppet plays. While some of these texts emphasize themes of loyalty, honor, and military prowess, others focus on the problems faced by samurai in their domestic lives during times of peace. The last part of the course will be devoted to the most famous of all stories, The Revenge of the 47 Samurai. Students will read eyewitness accounts of this vendetta, which occurred in 1702, and then explore how the well-known Kabuki/puppet play Chushingura (A Treasury of Loyal Retainers 1748) dramatizes the conflicting opinions surrounding it. All readings will be in English translation and no previous knowledge of Japan is required.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 33663 Anthropology of Everyday Life (3 Credit Hours)
Have you ever pondered how people live(d) in a world without television, YouTube, iPhones, Lady GaGa, and cellphones? Why have bellbottoms come and gone twice in the last 50 years? Will we be forced to relive the fashion mistakes of the 1980s? What new stuff will people invent and sell next? In asking and answering these questions, we must focus on one underlying query: What does our stuff really say about who we are and who we want to be? This course combines lectures, discussions, and interactive small group activities to explore the nature and breadth of peoples' relationships with their things. We will investigate why and how people make and use different types of objects, and how the use of these material goods resonates with peoples' identities in the deep past, recent history, and today. Since everyone in the class will already be an expert user and consumer of things, we will consider how people today use material objects to assert, remake, reclaim, and create identities, and compare today's practices to those of people who lived long ago. Class members will learn about how anthropologists, including ethnographers (studying people today) and archaeologists (studying past peoples) think about and approach the material nature of our social, economic, and political lives. We will discuss why styles and technologies change through time, and why, in the end, there is very little new under the sun in terms of human behaviors and the way people produce and consume goods. The topical breadth of this workshop encompasses most social science disciplines, including history, economics, psychology, and anthropology, and resonates with classics, art history, and gender studies.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKSS - Core Social Science
GSC 34050 Social Justice Movements: Global and Local (3 Credit Hours)
Across the globe, people stand together in struggles to create a better world. Social justice movements refer to forms of collective action that seek to challenge oppression and transform society. The overall objective of this module is to provide students with a theoretically informed understanding of these movements, and historical and contemporary attempts to achieve social change. Case studies of particular social justice movements are interspersed with an examination of some important cross-cutting issues. Examples of social movements covered may include anti-capitalist, feminist, and civil rights movements, as well as more recent social movements such as the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, Occupy and the Climate Justice movement. Examples of cross-cutting issues addressed include the role of the media, the relationship of the movement to the state and mainstream politics, and the explosion of digital activism in recent years. We will explore the forms of oppression, inequality and injustice that motivate each movement, as well as the strategies deployed in order to achieve change. We will consider the often revolutionary ideas developed within each movement, the potential for these ideas to bring about a new social order.
GSC 34150 Film and Television Herstory: British Women Behind and in Front of the Camera (3 Credit Hours)
This course explores the contribution of female film and television creatives in Britain. From the recent global successes of directors such as Emerald Fennell and Molly Manning Walker to the long-standing triumphs of producer Tessa Ross, women in the British Film and Television industry exemplify the, often overlooked, significant \ contributions made to global screen culture by women. Early screenwriters such as Alma Reville and Muriel Box carved a space for women in the film industry, while British women particularly thrive in television today. Showrunners such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Micaela Coel wittily confront issues faced by contemporary women in their critically acclaimed series. The intersectional identity markers of these various female creatives enable important discussions about what stories get made, whose stories are told and by whom. The course develops these discussions through considerations of race, class and gender in on-screen representations as well as the festival as a site for emerging female voices. In doing so, it critiques globally exported notions of British femininity. Engaging with the local cinema culture, this class will include field trips to popular London cinemas, exhibits and events, guest speakers from the film and television industries, and a trip to the London or Glasgow Film Festival.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 34200 Queer Theatre & Performance (5 Credit Hours)
This module will introduce students to a wide range of lesbian, bisexual, gay, trans*, 2-spirit, and queer (LGBT2Q) theatre and performance. Students will engage with critical theory, play texts, various genres of performance, and some film and video to interrogate what LGBT2Q theatre and performance are and how they have developed in the English-speaking world. Looking at texts from the 1960s to the present, the changing status of LGBT2Q identities and queer performance practices will be examined in relation to the local context of their production and in relation to the international character of queer discourses. Special attention will be paid to the intersections of sexual identity and race, class, gender and nation.
GSC 34505 Bloody Women: Representation of Female Figures from Ancient Greek Theatre in British Culture (3 Credit Hours)
The ancient Greeks have been acknowledged for their important contribution to many aspects of contemporary life. Notably for this course, the theatre of Ancient Athens and the plays that originated there have internationally provided inspiration for numerous playwrights, writers and artists throughout time. This class will hone in on the impact that these plays have had on British culture, particularly in response to the female characters. Following the abolishment of theatre censorship in 1968 and introduction of the 1969 Divorce Act, one can see a significant shift in approach to these figures, for example, the portrayal of Medea moves away from a witch-like figure representation and becomes more vulnerable on stage and screen. This class will discuss, in detail, the leading female figures in five Athenian tragedies, and compare them to their contemporary adaptations in British art, film, literature, television and theatre. Students will delve into how the characters are reshaped for a late 20th and early 21st Century audience, taking into consideration contemporary events; the changing role of women in society; the adapter's own experiences; and the changing opportunities to connect with an audience. A key component of the course will be class visits to engage with materials key to the development of these creative outputs, and talks which will give students an enhanced experience of the subject. This class will involve the discussion of sensitive and potentially triggering themes and situations, such as rape, murder, abuse and incest.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
GSC 34569 Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Revolutionaries and Dictators, 1959-Present (3 Credit Hours)
This course explores the history of gender and sexuality in Latin American revolutions/dictatorships. It explores the relationship between politics and gender norms, and how cultural understanding of gender and sexuality in Latin America changed in the 20th century through dictatorships and revolutions.
GSC 34570 Clothing & Gender Construction (3 Credit Hours)
This course proposes an approach to the history of clothing and fashion from a gender perspective. It emphasizes the way in which the constructions and norms about gender identities and roles determine what we consider appropriate or inconvenient, in terms of appearances. It is expected that at the end of the course the student body critically analyzes and communicates orally and in writing the different contemporary clothing expressions associated with genre. This learning will be developed through debates, written productions, group projects and evaluated through essays, research projects and oral presentations.
GSC 34571 Gender, Race and Diversity in the Digital Age (5 Credit Hours)
This module examines how gender, race and other forms of diversity have emerged as key debates in digital media. In the 1990s there was a broad consensus, at least in Europe, concerning race and gender: anti-racism and gender equality were an integral part of policies. While there were still many issues to be addressed, there was a general normative agreement that racism, gender discrimination, and other forms of discrimination were unacceptable. How is it that from this consensus we have now reached a situation that some describe as a culture war? What is the role of digital technologies and media in intensifying or abating tensions? How is it that from the techno-optimist discussions of the 2010s we are now routinely witnessing racist, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ and other toxic contents online? And what do we need to do to address this? This course seeks to pry open some of these issues through: (i) contextualising historically debates and approaches to gender, race, sexuality and other identities and movements around them; (ii) adopting a socio-technical lense, that understands digital technologies not as neutral platforms but as powerful actors in these debates; and (iii) anchoring these debates to specific policy decisions that have important ramifications.
GSC 34572 Gender, War, and Violence (3 Credit Hours)
This module examines the gendered dimensions of war and violence. War and Violence trauma experienced by women and marginalised communities such as LGBT+ is often made invisible in national, historic and post conflict narratives. We will explore and critique some basisc gendered assumptions of war and violence. We will look at how wars, genocides and other forms of political/gendered violence have been narrated and represented? We will also consider different categorisations of gendered experience (home front/battle front, male/female, soldier/civilian); we will look at case studies from such diverse sites of war/violence as the Irish revolutionary struggle 1910-1922, the violence of institutionalisation ( Magdalen Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes etc) in 20th century Ireland, rape as a weapon of war, the 1990s Balkans wars, the post 2001 War on Terror, post-troubles Northern Ireland and the Peace Process, and the gendered nature of war and violence, especially sexual violence, in sites of on-going conflicts around the world.
GSC 35000 Internship (3 Credit Hours)
This course connects students with a community-based partner organization related to the student's interests in career development and social justice. In collaboration with the Director of Undergraduate Studies, students choose a community partner organization for which they serve as an unpaid intern. In fall/spring semesters, students perform 6-8 hours of internship service per week for their chosen internship site, completing a minimum of 80 total hours. During summer session, students work 5-8 weeks full time, as defined by the internship site. Work on-site is overseen by a designated agency supervisor; coursework is supervised and evaluated by the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Students are expected to complete a short set of readings before the internship begins. Additional assignments include: weekly journal entries; a final reflection paper that summarizes the internship experience and explores its connections to the student's Gender Studies education; an updated resume that includes the internship. This course may be taken during any of the three academic sessions in junior or senior year, and may be counted as an elective towards any Gender Studies undergraduate degree.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 35650 Latina/o Civil Rights Movement(s) (3 Credit Hours)
This course will examine the long history of struggle for civil rights by the Latina and Latino communities. Representing an estimated 65.3 million residents of the United States, the demographic is the largest minority group. However, their experiences represent a clear paradox. Despite their “American” identity, they remain “Others” to many in the United States. Beginning with the forceful incorporation of ethnic Mexicans in the mid-nineteenth century, this course covers the triumphs and failures of collective action by this community for various rights and access on their path to inclusion. These include workplace strikes for equal pay, unionization drives, walkouts against educational discrimination, interfaith alliances for immigration rights, and more. Through covering various topics, this course documents the strategies Latinas and Latinos utilized in their social movements and negotiates the consequences of those tactics and their lasting influence in their communities. In these struggles for equality, Latinas and Latinos advocated for educational reform, reshaped public space, and influenced the negotiations of their place in society.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 35906 Archives, Museums, and Power (3 Credit Hours)
Archives, libraries, and museums collect and curate material for both a specialized and a general public. They organize their holdings according to professional principles as well as their own internal dictates. Historians often present archives as a kind of "problem" -- they are not always organized in ways that make it possible to find the materials that a particular user wants, and they do not always contain materials that support all kinds of research. This is especially true for scholars who want to learn about the experiences of non-elite subjects: enslaved people, women, the poor, children, members of sexual minorities, and many others.
In class we seek to accomplish three things: (1) reveal the ways that archives and museums are historically created projects, reflecting particular understandings of the world; (2) critique the ways that they privilege and silence different perspectives and contemplate the ways that these patterns might be overcome (if they can be overcome); (3) investigate specific archives, museums, libraries and other collecting places, via site visits on campus and through the growing number of digital archives online. We'll include walking tours, the University cemetery, the ND sports archive, and other places you may not have considered as archives or museums as well. We will meet with librarians, curators, and archivists to understand their perspectives. Students will create their own projects to curate, collect, and describe materials.
This seminar will use the campus to think through many of these issues, by reading what historians have written in response to these challenges, and by visiting archives, libraries, and museums to see what their realities are. We will examine monuments and ask whose stories they can and should tell. We will also think about story-telling in history, especially about events and people that are overlooked or excluded from elite narratives. We'll end by choosing our own historical sites and crafting our own narratives, in a walking tour around campus.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 40001 Perspectives on Gender: Theory and Practice (3 Credit Hours)
This interdisciplinary seminar provides students with an overview of key concepts and terms in theories about gender and closely related topics. Students will read prominent feminist and queer theorists of gender, analyze their arguments, and learn to critique and apply them. We will explore contemporary theories, including those from outside feminist theory, that expand our understanding of gender beyond the binaries of male/female and masculine/feminine, consider conceptions of kinship beyond heteronormative models, and explore the ways gendered distinctions operate in dynamic interaction with other forms of difference such as race, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and religion. Our overriding project will be to understand what these theories mean in their specific sociohistorical contexts and to contemplate their potential implications for our own and others’ lives, and for culture and society at large. This seminar requires close reading and discussion of theoretically rigorous and critically sophisticated texts and thus requires the active participation of committed students.
Prerequisites: GSC 27999
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 40088 Children, Youth, and Violence (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, we will examine the particular social, cultural, and political positions occupied by children and youth in contexts of violence, and the practices in which they engage to survive. Children have inhabited a position in popular imagination as unmitigated victims of violence—as the refugees, the slaves, the kidnapped child soldiers—while youth have contrarily been portrayed as the willing perpetrators of violence: its rebels, gang members, and rioters. In this course we will investigate notions of child and youth autonomy, gendering, socialization, liminality and resistance through case studies ranging from the streets of Pakistan to the juvenile prisons of the US and the rebel camps of Sierra Leone.
GSC 40115 Why Arguing Is Good for You: Debating Love and Gender in Medieval French (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, students will examine how love and gender were debated in French and Occitan literatures from before 1500. Debates appear everywhere and they often convey the idea that arguing is intellectually, socially, and emotionally beneficial to those involved, which is why the course asks: How might arguing be good for you? Through the lens of debates on love and gender, we will survey some of the most important works of medieval French literature and explore a range of thought-provoking texts. Questions that we will examine include: What does a woman know that a man doesn't? Is it better for a man to be faithful while being cheated on or should he be promiscuous? What are the limits of mansplaining? Can a man convince a woman to love him through reasoning? Is the best type of man brave or wise, pushy or patient, braggy or humble? What are the terms of an open relationship? Where does happiness fit in with love and marriage? No prior exposure to medieval literature is required. This course is taught in French.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WKLC-Core Adv Lang & Culture
GSC 40143 Queer Plots: Narrative and Sexuality in 20th and 21st Century Fiction (3 Credit Hours)
How do you tell a story that is supposed to be unspeakable? In this course, we will investigate the ways in which gay, bisexual, and lesbian writers have transformed narrative conventions as they explore their experiences and their identities through fiction. Beginning with the short fiction of Oscar Wilde at the end of the 19th century and continuing through the modern and postwar eras into the contemporary period, we will look at gay, bisexual and lesbian British, Irish and American writers whose work engaged with or dramatically departed from the dominant conventions that typically shaped fictions of identity formation, of love and marriage, of sexual experience, of political protest, and of death and loss. We will also investigate the public responses to some of these fictions, and the changing discourses about gender identity, homosexuality, and sexual orientation that have shaped both the realities and the fictions of gay, bisexual, and lesbian writers over the past century. Students will write three papers and be responsible for one in-class presentation.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 40144 Women Filmmakers in Europe: A New Wave (3 Credit Hours)
Shortly after Agnès Varda had passed away on March 29, 2019, the subject made the headlines during the Cannes film festival. In the footsteps of Varda, of Akerman, of Wertmüller and Denis, there is a "New Wave" of women filmmakers in Europe (for example, Maren Ade, Frederikke Aspöck, Ester Gould, Barbara Eder, Agnieszka Smoczyńska, Ines Tanovic, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Céline Sciamma, Mati Diop, Alice Winocour...). This "wave" is not only reshaping a whole cinematic tradition and language, it is also profoundly transforming a highly masculine and macho film industry, not to mention... European societies as a whole. We will analyze works, working conditions and modes of production while discussing the lasting impact of the recent feminist movements on the industry. This will offer a window to a European culture and society in which until recently, the word "feminist" had tended to be outmoded...
GSC 40162 Gender, Development, and Global Policy (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, we will examine how policy frameworks around the world address patterns of gender difference and gender inequality. While policy experts often assume that gender and sexuality are stable, coherent categories of identity, scholars have long shown that both take socially and historically specific forms. In this course we will read a range of critical case studies that demonstrate the complicated ways that local and global beliefs about gender, sexuality, and development intersect in everyday life around the world. This course will help you approach "gender" and "sexuality"—two key terms in development discourse and global affairs—with an understanding of how these categories shape not just individuals but institutions, processes, and practices.
GSC 40197 Latinx Literature Now (3 Credit Hours)
In this course we will read novels and books of poetry published within the last five years. We'll engage with historical, contemporary, and speculative definitions of latinidad, taking up the ideas and provocations offered by the texts we'll read over the semester. In particular, we will focus on how latinidad works as both a conceptual category as well as an on-the-ground practice of living in community, an identity marker as well as a way of imagining the world. We will also think about how latinidad is inclusive as well as exclusive. We'll use the texts we read together to consider how race, ethnicity, migration, gender, sexuality, politics, and religion inform historical, present, and future meanings of latinidad. This semester, we'll read texts by Martín Espada, Jaime Cortez, Aracelis Girmay, Urayoán Noel, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Xavier Aquino Navarro, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Yesenia Montilla, Xochitl González, and Ada Limón.
GSC 40234 Medieval Romance (3 Credit Hours)
This course will introduce students to medieval romance, one of the most popular genres of medieval literature and one that gives us some of the best-loved literary characters of all time, including Lancelot and Guinevere. We will study the genre of romance, including Arthurian romance and other varieties, from the genre's inception. We will pay particular attention to the form of story-telling that it popularizes, the concept of love that it systematizes, the constructions of masculinity and femininity that it values, and the notion of heroism on which it depends. We will read many texts in their original Middle English, but no prior knowledge of Middle English or medieval literature is expected.
GSC 40304 Jane Austen and Her World (3 Credit Hours)
In this course we will read of all of Austen’s novels, supplemented by helpful contemporary texts, and critical commentary on the works. We will attend to Austen’s style (her elegance, her irony, her rudeness); her aesthetic principles; her political and social engagements, (her views on slavery and Empire, the “revolution in female manners” advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft, her critique of masculinity); the function of the marriage plot; and the relationship between the novel and the theatre. Students will gain an appreciation for the complexity of the work of one of the greatest novelists in the English language. They will also consider how these works respond to the historical moment in which they were written, and how and why these works resonate across time.
GSC 40305 Colonialism and Imperialism, Past and Present (3 Credit Hours)
This course introduces students to the histories of colonization and imperialism, looking at the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of foreign rule. We will look simultaneously at an analysis of these structures as well as at social movements' attempts to move beyond them. We will ask the question: is the world really postcolonial or do we live in a new, reconfigured form of empire? How do structures of empire and colony intersect with issues of gender, race, sexuality, and religion?
GSC 40375 Believing in Jane Austen (3 Credit Hours)
“Believing in Jane Austen” can mean several things. It can mean believing that her fiction has value today, 250 years after her birth. It can mean entering into her fictional worlds as if they were real—despite their sometimes unrealistic endings. It can evoke her representations of characters who hold beliefs of various kinds, with various degrees of intensity. And it can suggest larger questions of the relationship between literature and belief, both on and off the page. We will address these and other facets of the course theme by reading at least four of Austen’s novels along with writings by several contemporaries that can help us understand the nature and stakes of belief in her work. We will also approach the topic through a selection of film adaptations and possibly some of the (hilarious) fiction she wrote as a teenager. The assignments will be various and will build on class sessions devoted to discussing the craft of (believable) writing.
GSC 40445 Literature & Madness 1780-1900 (3 Credit Hours)
Sometimes called the ‘English Malady’, madness in the long 19th century was an unstable term, subject to shifting definitions, and encompassing many different mental states. This course examines the role of madness in the Anglophone literary tradition, and how that tradition intersects with medical accounts and psychiatric survivor experiences. There is much debate in the period over the behavioral and physiological indications of madness, and even whether it could be diagnosed at all. The scholarly fields of disability studies and mad studies ask important questions about the kind of cultural work that madness does. This course explores the language and cultures around madness, melancholy, hysteria, monomania and other conditions in the context of contemporary debates on gender, normalcy, and social order.
GSC 40495 Wilde World: Aestheticism through Modernism (3 Credit Hours)
This course will treat Oscar Wilde extensively, looking to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, several theatrical works, his short stories, and other writings before and after his period of imprisonment for “homosexual offenses.” In addition, we will explore his milieu in the decades surrounding his career, from productions by male and female writers and artists ranging from work by John Ruskin and Walter Pater through works of the Fin de Siècle to Modernism, such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Students will therefore come to see Wilde contextually in a maelstrom of Fin de Siècle and early 20th-Century developments, including women’s rights, the “Irish Question, and socialism/anarchism. Graded work will center on short papers and also regular reading journals (the latter of which are not graded individually but in the aggregate over the term.
GSC 40516 Decadent Modernity (3 Credit Hours)
As a term in literary history, decadence indicates a late-nineteenth-century movement in which writers and artists provoked the respectable middle class with racy, sordid, overblown and/or absurdist subject matter and methods. This course explores that environment but also takes a broader view, examining alternative visions of decadence over the last two centuries and more. Our materials include fiction, poetry, drama, philosophy, visual arts, cinema and criticism. Early on, we lay conceptual groundwork with texts by Freud and Nietzsche. Well-known authors (in addition to Freud and Nietzsche) include Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Virginia Woolf, and Patrick Süskind. We also read several lesser-known authors and study films by Ken Russell, Peter Greenaway and Sally Potter.
As noted in the pre-registration period, some of our discussion matter is not for the faint-hearted. Bring a tolerance for the grotesque and a readiness to think carefully about authors who deliberately challenge deeply held western attitudes concerning morality and values.
GSC 40522 Prisons and Policing in the United States (3 Credit Hours)
Scholars and activists use the concept of the "carceral state" to describe the official, government use of criminalization, surveillance, and mass imprisonment to exercise control over society. This course examines the histories, cultures, politics, and economics of the US carceral state. Reading feminist scholarship from across the disciplines, we will study its genealogy — beginning with the surveillance embedded in the earliest practices of slavery and settler colonialism, tracing its development through the 19th and early 20th centuries, and concluding with the rise of the modern prison industrial complex. We will then focus on contemporary case studies including the "war on drugs," immigrant detention, sex-crime regulation, and police violence. Finally, we will consider alternatives to prisons and policing, as we learn about academic research and activist movements working to end state violence, abolish prisons, defund police, and build opportunities for restorative justice. We will ask and address such questions as: How does the US carceral state function as a tool for social control? What histories, policies, and ideologies underlie the carceral state? How have individuals and organizations worked to reform, transform, or abolish the carceral state? How have media and the arts been used to normalize and/or critique the carceral state? And can we imagine a world without prisons or police?
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 40525 Women and Magazines (3 Credit Hours)
This course will explore women as producers (journalists, editors, illustrators) and consumers of modern periodicals including little magazines like The Little Review, slick magazines like Vanity Fair, fashion magazines like Vogue, women's domestic magazines like Good Housekeeping, feminist papers like Votes for Women or The Freewoman, and more. We'll pay special attention to modern women writers who made their living writing for magazines' Djuna Barnes, Rebecca West, or Jesse Fauset, for example, and explore the ways in which modern periodicals (both 'big' and 'little') considered the rise of modernism in relation to changing gender roles and feminist concerns. Since the periodical press has been called the medium that best articulates the unevenness and reciprocities of evolving gender ideologies, we'll consider changing articulations of 'modern' femininity in a wide range of periodical genres. We'll learn how to read modern periodicals from various angles, taking into consideration reception, circulation, seriality, temporality, illustration, and advertisement, and we'll meet the modern woman journalist and her close relations: 'sob sisters',' 'agony aunts', 'stunt girls'. We'll be exploring new digital archives for the most part to access these early twentieth century publications. We will also read one novel in installments throughout the semester to more closely participate in the serial reading practices that would have organized an early twentieth-century reader's relationship with her favorite publication. Assignments will include one group presentation and linked essay, one essay of 8-10 pages, and a few shorter exercises.
GSC 40531 Media and Identity (3 Credit Hours)
This course focuses on critical analyses of identities in media culture. Taking a cultural studies approach, we will interrogate theories and popular discourses of identity while exploring how identities are constructed, negotiated, resisted, and transformed within media culture. Our primary questions in this course are: What is identity? How do our identities inform our various relationships to media culture? And, how does media culture impact the construction of our identities? Our sites of analysis will be media representation (narrative, performance, aesthetics), media production (industrial and alternative), and media consumption (reception practices and audiences). We will examine a broad array of media forms, including film, television, the Internet, and popular music. Conventional demographic identities, such as gender, age, race, sexuality, class, and religion, are central to the course, although other identities, including geographic, lifestyle, and virtual identities, will be examined also. We will strive toward critical analyses that understand identities as socially constructed, not biologically determined, and intersectional, not autonomous.
Prerequisites: GSC 10001 or GSC 20001
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 40537 Gender, Sexuality, and Colonization in Latin America (3 Credit Hours)
In this seminar we will examine the historical construction of gendered and sexual roles in the Spanish colonial world. This will entail thinking about gender and sexuality in the societies which "encountered" each other in the New World, and also thinking about how that encounter produced new forms of gendered and sexual relations. Among the questions we'll consider: how was the conquest gendered? How did colonial society produce masculinities as well as femininities? What gendered forms of power were available to women? How did ethnicity and casta (a status attributed to mixed race peoples), as well as gender and class, determine people's sense of themselves and their "others"? What were normative and non-normative sexual roles in the pre-modern Americas, and how did a European Catholic conquest affect these?
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 40556 Gender and Modernity (3 Credit Hours)
This course will explore novels and short fiction (mainly British) written between 1880 and the middle of the 20th century, a period organized by dramatic shifts in cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. Experimental, middlebrow, and popular novels attempted to represent the modern through depictions of new sorts of subjects: New Women, suffragettes, flappers, sapphists, typists, war workers, and more. Attention to these figures will give us an opportunity to notice how modern fiction engaged the texture of modern life through representations of free love and divorce; of reproduction, birth control, and abortion; queer sexuality; domestic and paid labor; and more.
GSC 40567 Women's Voices and the Christian Tradition: Feminist and Multicultural Theologies (3 Credit Hours)
An exploration of how the voices and lives of women have contributed to the development and transmission of the living Christian tradition. After consideration of the impact of gender, intersectionality, and social location on theological method, the course will focus on the areas of theological anthropology, Christology/soteriology, the mystery of God, and women's spirituality. Readings will include selections from contemporary Christian theologians who identify their work as feminist, womanist/African American, Latina/Latine, mujerista, Asian and Asian American, queer, post-colonial or from the global South or “Third/Fourth World.”
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 40573 Girls' Media and Cultural Studies (3 Credit Hours)
This course introduces students to critical analyses of girls' media culture. During the first half of the semester we will focus on constructions of girls and girlhood in intellectual theory, popular discourse, and media texts (particularly U.S. film and television), paying attention to shifts in such constructions as a result of sociohistorical contexts and the rise of feminist ideologies. The second half of the semester will be devoted to exploring the media and cultural practices of female youth, examining the expansion of girls' culture beyond consumer-oriented activities, such as magazine reading and music listening, to those involving media production, such as filmmaking and blogging. In addition to problematizing girls' sex and gender identity through intersectional explorations of age and generation, and vice versa, we will pay special attention to how issues of race, class, and sexuality impinge upon the formation of girls' identities, female youth cultures, and the representation of girlhood in popular culture.
Prerequisites: GSC 10001 or GSC 20001
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 40579 Race, Law and Utopia in Atlantic America (3 Credit Hours)
Is it possible to think of the 21st century as a post-racial, post-feminist world? In her provocative 2012 study, Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender, Janell Hobson suggests that rather than having been eradicated, millennial hopes that the historical difficulties represented by race and gender have lost their significance in the present day are as far, if not even further away from the mark as they have ever been. For Hobson, policing the body, whether that be in terms of its race, its gender, or its sexuality, has remained paramount. "...[W]hile the early-twenty-first century discourse of 'postracial' and 'postfeminist' often declares the loss of meaning attached to race and gender," she argues, "...the global scope of our media-reliant information culture insists on perpetuating raced and gendered meanings that support ideologies of dominance, privilege, and power." In Hobson's view, the body and how it is imagined rests at the center of such ideologies, pointing also to a number of crucial questions that become particularly important when considering the significance of race and gender through the lens of modernity. How might a reconsideration of race point also to a rethinking of gender and vice-versa? What does race actually mean? How does/can it alter the way we understand gender? Is it possible to think race beyond the idea of race? What might a new conception of race actually look like, and how might this influence our thinking on gender? How are the problems of race and gender intertwined, and how is/has the body been imagined in and through them? What can such questions tell us about today's racial and gendered realities, both inside and outside the university, both in the past and the present? This course takes a step backward to investigate these and other like questions in the context of the utopic impulse and its emphasis on the imagination in several 19th-century American authors whose work may be viewed as participating in a broad yet under-acknowledged vision of race, gender and Atlantic modernity that seeks to interrogate hierarchies of race and gender as these have been constructed and maintained within dominant ideologies. Grounding our analysis in a number of 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century political philosophical texts on law and utopia and drawing on insights from critical race theory, gender studies, feminist theory, theories of law and literature, and utopian studies, our goal will be to gain a more nuanced understanding of our racialized past and its troubled link to questions of gender both then and now, so that we may better hope to imagine-and reimagine-the shape of our collective democratic future in the 21st century's global community.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 40580 Religion, Gender and Development (3 Credit Hours)
Is religion an obstacle or opportunity for women's empowerment? Religion is often seen as institutionalizing and perpetuating patriarchy and thus operating in contradiction to women's agency, rights, and equality. This course will grapple with the tensions and contradictions between the imperative of gender justice foregrounded in the Sustainable Development Goals and religions' competing conceptions of women's roles. The course will overcome some of this dichotomizing of secular and religious paradigms of development by looking at the theoretical and practical work of religious feminists. In responding to the question "is religion an obstacle or opportunity for women's empowerment?" we will debate why feminists and religious actors are hesitant to collaborate on development agenda and what does this indicate about the potential relations between development and religious reform.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 40583 Theologizing Women: An Exploration into Muslim and Christian Feminist Theologies (3 Credit Hours)
This course is an introductory course on Christian and Islamic theologies that are inspired by the lives of, constructed through the lens of, and informed by the intersectional struggles of Christian and Muslim women. The course is divided into three major units. The first unit will be dedicated to analyzing the connection between secular feminist epistemologies and theories with the rise of Christian and Islamic feminist theologies. The second unit will consist of an exploration of different themes in Christian feminist theologies (Christology(ies), Ecclesiology(ies), and interreligious dialogue). Finally, the third unit of the course will provide an inquiry into core topics in Islamic feminist theologies (Quranic hermeneutics, formation of tradition and authorities, and interreligious dialogue). The questions that the course aims to engage are: What are the major perspectives in Christian and Islamic feminist theologies? What makes a theology "feminist" and what make other theologies are not? How do women's lives inform the formation of a "feminist theology"? How do Christian and Islamic feminist theologies respond to the challenges of gendered, structural violence? The course aims to invite students to critically engage with the work of Christian and Muslim feminist theologians, especially those of colors. Furthermore, though some readings will seek to provide historical insight into the places of women in Early and Medieval Christian and Islamic traditions, this course significantly focuses on the work of contemporary Christian and Muslim feminist theologians with an eye towards intersectional forms of oppression (racial, gender, and class-based) suffered by Christian and Muslim women of colors.
GSC 40584 Liturgy and the Female Body (3 Credit Hours)
From antiquity to today, women have shaped and been shaped by liturgy. This course examines the relationship between ritual and the female body across history and Christian traditions, from the biblical period, through late antiquity and the middle ages, to the present. Topics covered include the female body in sacred space (veils, gender separation, etc.), bodily presence at worship and the issue of (im)purities (menstrual and postpartum blood), rites for childbirth and child loss, representations of the female body in liturgical texts and iconography, and women's ritual agency and authority in monastic communities and beyond. Our methods will be interdisciplinary and draw from liturgiology, theology, history and anthropology.
GSC 40585 Contemporary Concerns in Medicine (3 Credit Hours)
From anti-vaxxers to designer genes, this class explores some of the most important and challenging topics in medicine and society today. Students will gain an understanding of the ethical, social, and practical dimensions of a variety of healthcare and health policy issues. Students will also have the opportunity to engage directly with healthcare workers from around the US who will serve as guest speakers. Topics we will cover include the opioid and COVID-19 epidemics; stem cell research; brain death in pregnancy; and freedom of speech in clinical settings. This course is open to all and will be especially useful for those planning for careers in science, medicine, and public health.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 40586 Gender Troubles: Gender and Sexuality in Irish Fiction after Joyce (3 Credit Hours)
In this course we will look at the relationship between gender politics and national politics as it plays out in the development of Irish fiction after the era of James Joyce. Focusing on Irish novels and short stories which were groundbreaking and/or controversial in terms of their exploration of gender and sexuality, the course will also investigate the historical contexts in which they were produced and the controversies they produced. Our investigation will focus on the question of how the 'trouble' generated around these controversial explorations of gender and sexuality relates to other kinds of trouble that have shaped the history of twentieth century Ireland. We will begin with the reaction against government censorship in the Irish Free State during the 1930s and 1940s, follow the emergence of Irish women writers and Irish feminism from the 1950s to the 1980s, and conclude with the rise of openly LGBT Irish writers in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. Students will write three essays and participate in one in-class presentation.
GSC 40587 The Telling and the Untold: Literary-Critical Approaches to Narrative, Gender & Difference (3 Credit Hours)
How has literature participated in people’s efforts to develop, understand, inhabit, and critique a range of ideas and practices concerning gender, sexuality—in tandem with other axes along which human identity, affiliation, and difference have historically been organized? Conversely, how have these topics, and ideas about them, affected the creation and reception of literary texts? Literature, literary thinking, and the forms of reading and critique both endemic and errant to literary study have all been foundational to the formation of those sets of ideas commonly known as feminist theory and queer theory. And these discussions—along with often overlapping areas of inquiry having to do with race and ethnicity, religion, kinship, and intimate relations—constitute key elements of literary and cultural studies today.
In this upper-level seminar, we will read and discuss a range of literature, criticism, and theory, drawn mostly from the 20th century in the US, as we work together to generate accounts of what literary texts and literary-critical methods can contribute to our ideas about gender, sexuality, and other forms of social alliance and difference, and how these intellectual currents can shed new light on US literature. These discussions will help us develop fuller understandings of the roles narrative, language, and representation may play in processes of social formation and transformation more broadly. The readings in this primarily discussion-based class will consist of literary, critical, and theoretical texts. Assignments will include frequent reading responses, in-class writing prompts, research-based term papers, in-class presentations, and a contribution to a class anthology.
GSC 40588 American Migrant Communities (3 Credit Hours)
In this class, we will explore various American migrant communities and discuss the many facets and difficulties of American identity. What are the benefits and drawbacks of migratory movement? What should one's relationship be to assimilation? What does migration do to the idea of one's homeland? Although we will be working chronologically, our progress will be atypical. This circuitous route through the literature in this class will be a literary journey that echoes the various movements of people in the United States. Potential authors we read may include: Sui sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), Anzia Yezierska, Nella Larsen, Sanora Babb, William Saroyan, Carlos Bulosan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tomás Rivera, Arturo Islas, Julia Alvarez, Fae Myenne Ng, Chang-rae Lee, Janet Campbell Hale, and Tommy Orange.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 40589 Gender, Politics, and Power (3 Credit Hours)
The class begins by exploring the concepts of gender, politics, and power, and related concepts such as intersectionality, patriarchy, sexism, and stereotypes. With that foundation, we turn our attention to two arenas in which gender and politics interact in the US: social and political movements and women as political actors. We will examine how women negotiate movements and how gender shapes structure, tactics, and outcomes for both women's movements (e.g., suffrage, feminist, conservative, #metoo) and other movements (such as the Progressive and civil rights movements). Finally, we will consider the constraints, opportunities, and impact of women in political roles, such as voter, candidate, and office-holder, with special attention to the 2022 US midterm elections. While grounded in political science, the course engages substantially with philosophy, history, sociology, and economics as well.
GSC 40593 Reading Life-Writing in the 20th and 21st Centuries (3 Credit Hours)
Life-writing is a capacious term that can be used to describe a variety of private and public statements about the self. Some of these are easily recognizable as representations of subjectivity (for example, memoirs, diaries, letters, self-portraits, graphic novels) and some less so (for example, legal testimony, blogs & vlogs, social media posts, resumes, medical forms have been read as part of the complex project of articulating subjectivity). Life-writing also positions itself at the intersection of fact and fiction (in autofiction) or the convergence of critical and creative (in autotheory or autocriticism). This course will attend to a wide variety of forms of life-writing and visual self-representations in dialogue with auto/biographical theory and theories of the subject in order to trace shifting notions of what counts as a self. A broad range of critical approaches to subjectivity and definitions of the autobiographical project will assist us as we attempt to map changing notions of the self. Writings may include works by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel, Bobbie Baker, Maggie Nelson, works on life-writing drawn from auto/biography studies and theories of the self/subjectivity.
GSC 40601 Gender and Health (3 Credit Hours)
This course examines the intersection of gender, health policy, and health care organization around the world. Gender is frequently a central contributing (though sometimes ignored) factor to people's health. Men and women have different biologies, and it thus stands to reason that their lives—social, economic, political, and biological—would have an effect on their health. What causes men to have different illnesses than women? What places one gender at greater risk for illness than the other? How do men and women across the world experience health policies? Are they affected and constrained by similar factors? How do their work lives affect their experiences with health? How is the body medically produced? How do poverty and development play a role in people's well-being? Through an inquiry-based approach, these and other topics will be addressed in this class.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WRIT - Writing Intensive
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 40604 Archaeology of Death (3 Credit Hours)
Our species is unique because it is the only species that deliberately buries its dead. Mortuary analysis (the study of burial patterns) is a powerful approach that archaeologists use for the study of prehistoric social organization and ideology. This course explores the significance of prehistoric human mortuary behavior, from the first evidence of deliberate burial by Neanderthals as an indicator of the evolution of symbolic thought, to the analysis of the sometimes spectacular burial patterns found in complex societies such as ancient Egypt and Megalithic Europe. We will also examine the theoretical and practical aspects of the archaeology of death, including the applications of various techniques ranging from statistics to ethnography, and the legal and ethical issues associated with the excavation and scientific study of human remains.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 40609 Romantic and Victorian Disability (3 Credit Hours)
This course investigates the cultural and literary meanings attached to disabled bodies and minds in Romantic and Victorian Literature. We will explore topics such as communication, inclusion, medical attitudes, social stigma, life narratives, bodily representation, intellectual impairment, madness, deafness, community and collective culture, empowerment and disempowerment, deviance, and difference. The course is organized around broad themes. It includes disabled writers and provides an introduction to disability studies approaches to literary analysis.
GSC 40610 Theorizing Disability: The Romantics & Victorians (3 Credit Hours)
This course offers a theory-driven exploration of the literature on disability in the Romantic and Victorian eras. In this class, we will read Romantic and Victorian texts alongside modern disability theory (chapters and articles) to develop a disability studies lens as a critical approach. We will study Romantic and Victorian texts in dialogue and in topic groups. Key topics will include physical disability; deformity; communication disabilities; and dwarfism. Although intended as a companion course to Romantic and Victorian Disability, this class can be taken as a standalone. There is no overlap between the classes, and they can be taken in any order.
GSC 40623 The Sociology of Sexuality (3 Credit Hours)
When people think about sexuality, they often adopt a biological view - seeing sexuality as "driven" by hormones and nature. This course adopts a different approach by viewing sexuality through the lens of sociology - as shaped by social processes, including social interaction, institutions, and ideologies. It will focus on examining three aspects of sexuality: 1) The social, historical, and cultural factors that shape sexual behaviors, desires, identities, and communities; 2) The ways in which sex and sexuality are constantly regulated and contested at multiple levels of society, including within families, schools, workplaces, and religious and political institutions; and 3) The sources and effects of sexual inequality. While our focus will be on sexuality, we will also study how other identities (gender, race, class, religion, etc.) influence and affect it. Students will be encouraged to question taken-for-granted assumptions about sex and sexualities and formulate critical perspectives on issues pertaining to sexuality in today's public discourses. This course is sex-positive in that it assumes that knowledge about sexuality is empowering, not dangerous. The readings and discussions will be frank, and students will be assisted in developing a language for, and comfort level with, discussing a wide range of sexual topics in a respectful and sociological way. In the process, students will be challenged to improve their critical thinking, researching, writing, and public speaking skills.
GSC 40670 Gender and Sexuality in American Drama (3 Credit Hours)
Ever since Nora Helmer walked out on her husband and slammed the door in Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play A Doll's House, modern drama has been closely connected with the struggles to redefine gender and sexuality that have shaped the twentieth and twenty-first century. In this course, we will look at how this story plays out on the American stage, as we examine the works of American playwrights who have participated in the many long-running debates about gender and sexuality in modern and contemporary America. We will read both canonical modern playwrights - Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, etc. - and a variety of contemporary playwrights, including but not necessarily limited to Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, David Mamet, Sara Ruhl, Melissa George, and Susan Lori-Parks. Students will write at least two papers, keep a journal, and give at least one in-class presentation.
GSC 40702 Worldwide Women Writers in Paris (3 Credit Hours)
Women writers from around the world, from places as diverse as Algeria and Vietnam, Slovenia and South Korea, are currently exerting an influence on the Parisian literary landscape. These singular individuals hail from very different locations, but many of their experiences as French-language authors in the French capital are quite similar, particularly when it comes to perceptions of them as foreigners. Even if they often feel excluded and even ostracized, these writers continue to write, pouring their creative energies into innovative texts that are transforming the publishing world and adding layers of depth to what it means to be a Francophone author today. In this course, we will read a variety of publications by such women writers as Nathacha Appanah, Bessora, Hélène Cixous, Maryse Condé, Julia Kristeva, Anna Moï, Pia Petersen, Zahia Rahmani, Leïla Sebbar, Shumona Sinha, and Brina Svit. Our readings of primary texts will be complemented by a series of interviews with these authors (http://francophonemetronomes.com and an accompanying critical volume (Oxford University Press, December 2021). We will also address the process of literary and academic publishing in our discussions. Taught in French.
GSC 40710 Public Women: Gender, Celebrity, and History (1789-1914) (3 Credit Hours)
Britney Spears. Anna Nicole Smith. Janet Jackson. We thought we knew their tragic stories; we thought they only had themselves to blame. In recent years, however, we have reappraised these maligned women and the pervasive misogyny to which they were subjected in a supposedly post-feminist era. In this seminar, we will examine the gendering of celebrity in France and its former colonies over the course of the long nineteenth century, engaging with legacies of famous women from Marie Antoinette to Aïssa Maïga. Each week, we will study conflicting depictions of a public figure, seeking to understand the structures with which commentators controlled women’s narratives—and how women in turn developed their own strategies of resistance. Drawing from a range of sources including sculptures, choreographies, films, and autobiographies, we will engage with interpretive approaches that interrogate hierarchies of memory, history, and culture. Taught in French.
GSC 40713 Latin American Feminism, Women Writers, and the Feminist Novel in the Twentieth Century (3 Credit Hours)
The twentieth century was the century of women, feminism, and the feminist novel in Latin America. The history of Latin American feminism presents three milestones: first, the women's movements that demanded political and civil equality at the beginning of the century and culminated in the 1950s with what Julieta Kirkwood called "the years of silence"; second, the violent decades of the 1970s and 1980s, when women challenged their historic exclusion from political life, showed how authoritarian regimes replicated patriarchal oppression, and developed feminist theories and practices; and third, the 1990s, when women focused on the damaging effects of neoliberalism, which impacted the activism of women and the development of feminist ideas. This course, designed as a seminar for advanced students in Spanish, will focus on the feminist novel since the 1950s, when women ventured into a genre they had barely published in the past, and will trace its course through the multiple positions that Latin American feminism took during the twentieth century. This course will be taught in Spanish and requires the active participation of all students.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKLC-Core Adv Lang & Culture
GSC 40715 From Whispers to Worldviews: Gossip and the Social Network in Nineteenth-Century France (3 Credit Hours)
The nineteenth century saw the rise of print media and professional institutions. Old-fashioned whisper networks came to be viewed suspiciously as a dangerous, “feminine” pastime for those without lives of their own. Yet the enduring popularity of gossip—in society columns, romans-à-clef, communal laundry rooms, and political caricatures—meant that informal social networks thrived, fueled by a heightened interest in the private lives of famous people. The learning goals of this class extend beyond those of textual analysis and the researched argument to media literacy. Following several scandals across a variety of sources, we will study how information was transmitted via different genres, spaces, and voices in nineteenth-century France, looking at a range of texts from broadsheets to Offenbach operettas. While reinforcing social mores, gossip also provided a means of resistance to the status quo, a way for the marginalized to reframe official narratives and point to the humanity shared across classes and identities. Taught in French.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WKLC-Core Adv Lang & Culture, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 40759 In Some Glamorous Country: The New York School Poets (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, we will deploy critical and creative modes of inquiry as we undertake a survey of mid- to late twentieth-century American poetry arising from New York City, which in the postwar period became a nexus of literary and artistic experimentation. It is within this geographic and historical framework that the New York School of Poets coalesced around the core figures of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler. Focusing on this dynamic array of poets as well as their precursors (e.g., Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca), fellow travelers (e.g., Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Frank Lima), and subsequent "generations" of New York poets (e.g., Joe Brainard, Bernadette Mayer, John Yau), we will consider how lines of affinity and intimacy as well as the cultural reverberations of the city drew together writers so diverse in outlook and method that Ashbery remarked, "our program is the absence of any program." In this light, to figure out what it means to be part of the this anti-programmatic community, we will explore how the New York School intersected with the Beats, the Black Arts Movement, the Boston and San Francisco Renaissances, the Nuyorican Movement, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry—prompting us to consider how the concept of an avant-garde becomes, in this period, a ramifying network of friends, lovers, and intellectual rivals engaged in aesthetic cross-pollination. Our undertaking will be attentive to the intermedial dialogue between these poets and New York painters (e.g., Willem de Kooning, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher), methods of collaboration, the influence of postmodern theory, and how race, gender, sexuality, and place shaped what has been cited as one of the most enduringly influential bodies of literature in the postwar world. Assignments will engage students' critical and creative talents.
GSC 40782 Women in South America: Between Medicine and Feminism (3 Credit Hours)
The first waves of feminism in South America during the late 19th and early 20th century were led by many women in the medical profession. Julieta Lanteri and Sara Justo in Argentina, Ernestina López in Chile, or Paulina Luisi in Uruguay, to name a few, claimed for women’s rights in terms of health. At the same time, medicine emerged as a dominant and masculinized discourse within the nation-states that sought to control women’s and non-binary bodies and behaviors. In the 20th and 21st century, medical discourse was also in the center of feminist debates about motherhood, reproductive rights, obstetric violence, among others. This course will explore the connections between medicine and feminism through the life and works of women writers and activists from South America, from the late 19th to the 21st century. We will also read essays, journal articles, and medical treatises from the 19th and 20th century and debate on the role of medical knowledge in the context of recent feminist movements. Theoretical readings include Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, and numerous scholarly works on feminism, the history of medicine, and sexualities in South America (Salessi, Lavrin, Marino, Guy, Ben, among others).
The course will be taught in Spanish. Students should be able to read and write at the 4000 level (advanced intermediate / advanced).
GSC 40800 Trauma and Peacebuilding (3 Credit Hours)
In this course we will critically examine issues of trauma and healing as they emerge in conflict situations and as challenges to peacebuilding. The course will be structured in three parts. In Part one, we will examine how theorists from such different disciplines as psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and cultural studies have conceptualized trauma and the necessary steps to recovery. In part two, we will review recent anthropological accounts that have emerged from areas of extreme trauma. These accounts will provide the backdrop for assessing the adequacy of the dominant theories of trauma and healing models, especially when these models are taken into cross-cultural contexts. In part three of the course we will reflect on the implications of our examination of trauma and healing for peacebuilding on both the micro and macro levels. We will consider the challenges and possibilities for working with victims of trauma in various cultural situations as well as the reality of secondary traumatic stress experienced by practitioners. On the macro level, we will consider how trauma research might broaden our understanding of ideals of reconciliation, forgiveness and restorative justice, as well as the advisability of truth-telling commissions and war-crimes tribunals.
GSC 40853 Francophone Peace Studies: Worldwide Activism in Literature and Film (3 Credit Hours)
This course closely examines Francophone works of literature and film that grapple with the difficulties of promoting peace in various locations around the world today. Not only are activism and peacebuilding crucial questions in the creative texts we study, but they are also the focus of discussions that extend "beyond" the text, as we explore the efforts of writers and filmmakers to serve as advocates for positive change in very real ways. Various concepts of "engagement," as well as relationships between language and politics, are at the center of our reflections. There is a substantial theoretical component to this course, including works by French thinkers Pierre Bourdieu, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Serge Margel, alongside the writings of postcolonial critics and recent publications in the area of peace studies. The course is taught in French.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKLC-Core Adv Lang & Culture
GSC 40873 James Baldwin: from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter (3 Credit Hours)
The 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro encourages a new generation to explore the life and work of James Baldwin (1924-1987). Directed by Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro is a provocative documentary that envisions a book Baldwin never finished by providing insight into Baldwin's relationship with three men who were assassinated before their fortieth birthdays - Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In this course we will interrogate questions of race, sexuality, violence, and migration. Our current political moment encourages the examination of these issues while Baldwin's life and work provides the ideal vantage point for their investigation. Using I Am Not Your Negro as our starting point, Baldwin's life and work will allow us the opportunity to explore transatlantic discourses on nationality, sexuality, race, gender, and religion. We will also explore the work of other writers including Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
GSC 40970 Feeling Strange: Gender and Sexuality in the Global South (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, we explore questions of gender and sexuality across a range of cultural contexts to ask: what, if anything, makes social identities different in the global south and the global north? What might it mean to feel strange––and in whose eyes might someone appear strange? What do we even think strangeness is? We’ll explore how theories of gender and sex intersect with recent queer and trans fiction and nonfiction from the global south, and if they might offer theoretical frames of their own. Readings will include work from Agha Shahid Ali, Akwaeke Emezi, Ismat Chughtai, Carmen Maria-Machado, Virginia Woolf, and theory from Sara Ahmed, Paul B. Preciado, Susan Sontag, Alok Vaid-Menon, and others.
GSC 41531 Media and Identity Lab (0 Credit Hours)
Lab screening for GSC 40531
Corequisites: GSC 40531
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 43000 Interdisciplinary Seminar (3 Credit Hours)
Students in the Interdisciplinary Seminar read widely across feminist and queer scholarship in multiple fields, including the interdisciplinary field of Gender Studies, and consider how disciplinary norms and boundaries shape scholarly inquiry. Student research and writing for the course will synthesize disciplinary ways of knowing and produce original, interdisciplinary Gender Studies scholarship or creative work. The Interdisciplinary Seminar fulfills both the IS requirement for Gender Studies graduate minors and the capstone requirement for Gender Studies primary and supplemental majors. Although each iteration of the course focuses on a unique topic, all Interdisciplinary Seminars put multiple disciplines in conversation in order to deepen students' mastery of key Gender Studies concepts. Course descriptions for current and upcoming semesters can be found at https://genderstudies.nd.edu.
GSC 43001 The Cutting Edge in Latino Studies Research: Perspectives from Notre Dame (3 Credit Hours)
Notre Dame has been an incubator for state-of-the-art research in the interdisciplinary field of Latino Studies for several decades. This seminar delves deeply into newer research produced by scholars affiliated with the Institute for Latino Studies, the unit on campus that has fostered much of this work. Each week we will read recent research from an ILS-affiliated scholar and, most weeks, meet with the scholars themselves to discuss their research trajectories and current areas of research. Students will read and respond to research in a wide array of fields, prepare questions for visiting scholars, interview them in class, and respond to selected works in writing.
GSC 43209 Biopolitics (3 Credit Hours)
What is the relation between life and politics? In the late 18th century, a new technology of governance emerged. This technology, armed with a new science of statistics, focused on the management of life and death within the population–its rates of fertility, mortality, and illness. How could life expectancy be increased? How could rates of mortality be lowered? How could biological threats be eliminated? These questions of life and death were not only biological; life itself had emerged as a political problem. Michel Foucault called this new technology of power biopolitics. Since Foucault's formulation, the concept of biopolitics has demarcated an object of inquiry that has been taken up by scholars in a wide range of academic fields, including anthropology, sociology, literature, philosophy, and history. Through the lens of biopolitics, we will study a number of contemporary issues in which the politics of life and death are at stake, including humanitarianism, new medical technologies, public health interventions, disaster, incarceration, and global pandemics. In class, we will think through these topics together using examples drawn from visual and print media including film, journalism, literature, and photography.
GSC 43333 New Readings in Transgender Studies (3 Credit Hours)
In this seminar, students will engage with texts published within the last five years in the field of transgender studies. Along with academic writing, we will work with literature, memoir, film, and popular culture. Together, these texts expand our shared understanding of what trans* means; pose challenging questions about Western transgender studies and its canon; and link the field of transgender studies with global movements for justice. Students will have opportunities for collaboration and community engagement, and to create their own theory and creative work.
GSC 43339 Feminist Food (3 Credit Hours)
The goal of this class is to think philosophically together about a variety of food-related issues in a way informed by feminist perspectives. What we eat, how much we eat, how we think about the relationships between food and eating on the one hand and, on the other hand, health, beauty, cultural traditions, care for nonhuman animals, respect for agricultural workers, and concern for the environment—all of these are significantly impacted by social norms and power structures involving gender, race, and class. In recent decades philosophers have given a lot of thought to these topics. Feminists have also given a lot of thought to beauty ideals and body norms for women and their relationships to diet culture and disordered eating, and questions about how gender, race, and class affect what we eat, how we eat, and what we think of as healthy eating. All of these issues and more are among the topics to be explored in this class.
GSC 43363 Body Image (3 Credit Hours)
In this seminar, we will explore the biological, psychosocial (including peers and family), and cultural factors influencing body image. We will explore impacts of "fitspo" and body esteem messages, and examine alternative means of reducing risk of body dissatisfaction (e.g., self and identity; self-compassion; gratitude). Potential connections between body image and disordered eating will be examined, including analysis of "classical" and contemporary theoretical models. Both basic and applied (i.e., intervention) research will be incorporated, and a lifespan approach will be utilized, examining body image during childhood, adolescence and midlife.
GSC 43510 Economics of the Family (3 Credit Hours)
This course will use economic theory and empirical economic research to study the family. Topics will include household decision making; the determinants of marriage and fertility; how marriage, fertility, and family structure are related to other outcomes; and public policies that affect the family and family formation. Students will learn to read and evaluate empirical economic research. This is a writing-intensive seminar course.
Prerequisites: ECON 30331
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WRIT - Writing Intensive
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 43514 Women and the Body (3 Credit Hours)
The socio-cultural construction of the female body and the issue of "anatomy as destiny" through an examination of biological and sociological literature on this topic. We will address women's self-esteem and the factors that serve to enhance or detract from women feeling good about their physical bodies. We will also focus on differences across gendered bodies by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, health, and sexuality and discuss issues of power and authority over women's bodies.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 43524 How Did I Get Here and Where Am I Going? (3 Credit Hours)
Though sociologists are not fortune tellers, life course sociology has documented the human life course enough to reliably understand how and why people's lives are patterned in certain ways. This course seeks to understand how and why people change or remain the same throughout their lives. We will explore how lives are shaped by specific historical contexts, how individuals actively construct their life course within historical and social constraints, how our lives are intertwined (and how this shapes human action), and how the impact of life transitions on life trajectories is contingent on
the timing of a particular change in a person's life. We will investigate patterns common in the different stages of our life course as well as life course pathways related to family relationships, education, health and religion. Including all of these elements of life course sociology gives a fuller understanding of how individual lives are lived within our communities as well as global contexts, and also how lives are rooted in intersections of gender, class, race, sexual orientation and other statuses.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKSS - Core Social Science
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 43525 Philosophy, Gender & Feminism (3 Credit Hours)
This course will survey a variety of philosophical issues pertaining to gender and feminism. Topics we expect to cover include the metaphysics of gender (e.g., the sex-gender distinction, the nature of masculinity and femininity, gender essentialism vs. gender constructivism); implicit bias and hermeneutic injustice; sexual harassment, violence, and the nature of consent; gender, feminism, and religion; and intersectionality.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 43528 History of American & European Fashion (3 Credit Hours)
This seminar examines the rise of the modern fashion and garment industries in Europe and North America during the late 19th through the 20th century. While fashion is often viewed as a subject of interest only to women, this course contends that it has held significant meaning in the lives of both men and women, and of different classes and races. Clothing could signify who was praised as beautiful, modern, and respectable, or who was damned as immoral. We will trace such economic shifts as the movement from custom-made women's clothing to mass-produced ready-to-wear and the invention of the department store, and consider the impact of mass consumption on modern peoples. We will read how the aesthetics and practicality of women's and men's dress were criticized by reformers, and how American home economists taught the art of dressing according to standards of efficiency and beauty. We will address the impact of technological innovations, such as the removable collar and the stiletto heel, and of political concerns, such as the world wars and the Civil Rights Movement. We will pay particular attention to the dress revolutions of the 1920s and 1960s, and the question of whether they signaled concrete liberation or merely a fantasy of liberation. Fulfills University Requirement - History
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKHI - Core History
GSC 43529 Late Modernism and the (Neo)Avante-Garde (3 Credit Hours)
After a period dominated by radical experimentation among the historical avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century, the 1950s and 60s saw a resurgence, in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Latin America of provocative and multifaceted (neo)avant-garde movements. Providing a general art historical and thematic overview, this upper-division seminar will consider a wide variety of figures, movements, and practices within the visual arts-- from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, to Fluxus to Minimalism, to Performance Art to Installations, and more-- situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these developments will be traced through the mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their social and political presuppositions (from the old Left to the New Left, to the late modernist development of intersectional feminist theory and identity politics), and discussing their relation to pre-War counterparts and models. As such, central to these developments was the revival and renewed understanding of the radical legacy of European Dada, particularly that of Marcel Duchamp, as well as the ideas of the composer John Cage. One of the implications of the collective, heterogenous work that emerged in their wake, was a widespread challenge to the notion of medium specificity and of modernism in general, which gave rise to the very genesis of postmodernism and associated theoretical ideas.
GSC 43530 Unequal America (3 Credit Hours)
America is the richest country in the world and yet roughly three million American children now grow up in families surviving on just $2 a day. As America's richest 0.1% have seen their incomes more than quadruple over the last forty years, the incomes for 90% of Americans have barely changed. These financial disparities reflect deeper inequities in educational opportunity, incarceration rates, social status and more. In this course, we will examine the nature and consequences of American inequality. Through close reading and spirited discussion, we will address such questions as: What is the meaning of meritocracy in an age of profound inequality? What is the lived experience of American poverty and American privilege? How are race and gender inequalities (re)produced throughout the life course? And, finally, how do all of these issues manifest in the successes and struggles of students at Notre Dame?
GSC 43531 Islam and Feminism (3 Credit Hours)
What is Islam? What is Feminism? On their own, these two terms are debated enough. But what about their intersections? This interdisciplinary seminar will explore the complex, contested, and evolving relationship between Islam and Feminism through an intersectional, historically grounded, and power-conscious approach. We will trace historical shifts in gender norms within Muslim-majority societies, examine how diverse Muslim beliefs and practices intersect with contemporary rights debates, and study the important roles Muslim women have played in the history of transnational feminism. We will learn about contested readings of Islam’s key religious texts, the impact of colonialism and imperialism, and cultural hybridization on the so-called "Muslim woman question" This will be our opportunity to read pioneering works by Muslim women and queer authors and watch and discuss the coolest Muslim- and POC-led TV series in recent memory, _This is Lady Parts_.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 43532 Feminist Approaches to Critical Digital Studies (3 Credit Hours)
This interdisciplinary seminar will explore privilege, power, place, and concepts of labor within digital economies of communication and information exchange. As digital technologies continue to blur the boundaries between leisure and work, surveillance and data collection become invisibilized and normalized processes. This class will combine methodologies from feminist research practices and critical digital studies while exploring the rapid coevolution of labor and technology. By interrogating what constitutes “digital culture,” this course aims to introduce students to cultural studies through the lens of digital humanities and digital literacy. This course will provide an opportunity to learn and apply feminist media analysis to cultural texts.
GSC 43604 Gender and Archaeology (3 Credit Hours)
In this course, students will explore the potential for studying and reconstructing a prehistory of people through archaeology. We will consider the historical and theoretical foundations of creating an engendered past, the methodological and practical aspects of "doing" engendered archaeology, and the intersection between political feminism, archaeological knowledge production, and the politics of an engendered archaeology. Topics for consideration include feminist perspectives on science, anthropology, and archaeology; concepts of gender in prehistory and the present; women's and men's relations to craft production, state formation, and space; and the complex relationship between feminism, archaeology, and the politics of women and men in archaeology and the archaeological past. Under the broad theoretical, political and historical umbrella of feminism, archaeologists today are negotiating their own paths toward an engendered past from multiple directions, and this course will explore the diversity of these approaches toward creating a prehistory of people.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 43657 Feminist and Queer Prison Studies (3 Credit Hours)
Antiracist and decolonial feminist scholars and activists have long understood that sites of confinement--such as the prison, the asylum, and the detention center--produce and police genders and sexualities. This seminar introduces students to feminist, queer, and trans work in the field of critical prison studies, exploring gender and sexuality at shifting intersections with racism, ableism, militarism, capitalism, and the state. Our readings will integrate the work of free-world academics with theory, research, art, and personal narrative produced by prisoners and survivors. While we will read and discuss a variety of texts, our study will center Black, im/migrant, and Indigenous feminist scholarship and organizing in movements for abolition and transformative justice. Class activities will emphasize collaboration and skill-building.
GSC 43701 Gender and Material Culture (3 Credit Hours)
This interdisciplinary Seminar will use the lens of material culture to explore the intersections between gender, race, class. Material culture--the study of things and their meanings--offers a wide ranging and interdisciplinary set of methods for analyzing how objects become gendered, and in turn, how objects construct gender. The emphasis will be on objects used in North America (eg. the pink pussy hat of 2016), and the sources and methodologies will include surviving objects, archives, printed matter, and visual sources. Students will work on research papers that will allow them to explore objects and themes of particular relevance to their own research interests and fields of study.
GSC 43702 Love, Beauty, Objectification (3 Credit Hours)
Over half of the top twenty Instagram accounts belong to celebrities who are famous, in part, for their beauty; countless more belong to models, actors and actresses, fitness instructors, and others who also have achieved seemingly impossible levels of beauty. The film industry, the fashion and style industries (along with their advertising campaigns), other social media platforms—all of these and more daily bombard us with images defining what it is to be beautiful and promoting norms and ideals that most can achieve, if at all, only at considerable cost and often only with chemical or medical interventions. The toxicity of the contemporary cult of beauty for women in particular is well-documented and has lately been a major news item. But there seems to be no way to opt out. Being beautiful, we are told, is key to securing of the most important goods in life—love, success, self-respect, contentment, and so on. We are told in a myriad different ways that our value as a person is intimately connected with our efforts to stay fit, look young, and in other ways satisfy contemporary ideals of beauty. Some have argued that a single, relatively narrow set of beauty norms, shaped in part by racist and patriarchal ideologies, has risen to the level of a global ethical ideal - we have something like a duty to strive for beauty. This class will examine some of the most important issues in feminist philosophy that arise in connection with the cult of beauty described above, with special attention to closely related questions about love and (sexual) objectification. Here is a sampling of some of the topics on which our discussions will focus: We will talk about ways in which beauty ideals function as ethical ideals. We will talk about different theories of the relationship (or lack thereof) between disordered eating and beauty norms, and about how our own thoughts shaped by these norms can actually distort our perceptual experience of our own bodies. We will discuss the nature of sexual objectification and the complicated question of whether objectification should always be regarded as bad, or whether instead people might reasonably allow themselves to be objectified or even promote their own objectification. We will talk about how norms of feminine bodily comportment are shaped both by the prevalence of sexual objectification and the threat of sexual assault. We will discuss the different types of love, and the question whether it makes sense to talk about unjust patterns of love and sexual desire and, if so, whether that means that people might have a right to be (erotically) loved.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKSP - Core 2nd Philosophy
GSC 43703 Camp (3 Credit Hours)
This course examines theories and practices of camp. Camp has been described as a sensibility, an aesthetics, a mode of performance, and a mode of spectatorship and consumption. Camp embraces artifice, exaggeration, theatricality, and irony. Initially described as exclusively a gay male practice, theorists have since analyzed forms of “straight” camp, feminist camp, lesbian camp, Black camp, and more. What is camp? To whom does camp belong, and how do different demographics use it? Does camp have a politics? How has the meaning and import of camp changed over time? Is camp still necessary?
This interdisciplinary seminar will read essays and books on camp by Susan Sontag, Jack Babuscio, Richard Dyer, Pamela Robertson, Barbara Brickman, Quinn Miller, AJ Christian, and many others. We will consider camp in literary texts by Oscar Wilde, Christopher Isherwood, and Jacqueline Susann. We will consider camp in painting and photography, including historical styles such as Mannerism, and contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barkley Hendricks, and others. We will consider camp in relation to drag. We will consider camp films by Douglas Sirk and Busby Berkeley, films starring Mae West and Joan Crawford; and certain genres such as the musical and horror; camp TV such as Bewitched; and camp stars such as Lady Gaga and Beyonce.
Students from all disciplines are welcome, no prior knowledge of camp is expected.
GSC 43810 Latinx Art & Activism (3 Credit Hours)
This seminar examines the relationship between art and social movements in Latinx communities from the civil rights era to the present. The course will focus on graphic art media that negotiates relations of power, constructs multiple publics, and fuels many of the debates around the politics of identity. We will consider notions of authorship (collective/individual), activism, display, dissemination, consumption, collecting, and technology. Students will learn to think critically and empathetically about how these collective modes of art-making foreground the politics of representation: what we see, how we see, who gets to control our image, and how can printed multiples challenge those narratives. Students will enhance their skills in visual analysis and writing, gain experience in collaborative printmaking, and refine their ability to conduct original research.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 44535 Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury (3 Credit Hours)
The modernist feminist writer Virginia Woolf lived and worked with a loose collective of writers, painters, and social thinkers that we call the "Bloomsbury Group," though many members of the group disliked the phrase. We will look at the novels, essays, art, and political writings of some of the members of Bloomsbury - Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and others - to explore the complex moments of cross-fertilization, critique, and response that define their encounters. In addition, we will attend to a few areas that have dominated discussions of Bloomsbury modernism: ideas of nation, "civilization," and critiques of Empire; the formation of literary modernism's often tense relation to mass culture; the development of modern discourses of sexuality; the relationship between literature and the modern metropolis; and explorations of women's experience of modernity. Because members of the Bloomsbury Group worked in a number of fields beyond the literary - painting, economics, social thought, publishing, and interior design to name a few - students will find that they can easily develop projects that engage more than one area of interest.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 44550 Women's Movements in Modernty (3 Credit Hours)
As t-shirts on Paris runways bearing feminist slogans or contemporary demonstrators adorned with pink "pussy hats" or dressed in the red cloaks of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid Tale illustrate, cultural artifacts have played and continue to play a significant role in modern women's movements. This course is designed to unpack the long history of such feminist gestures by grounding itself in a close study of the literature and culture of twentieth-century British feminist movements with special focus on three distinct periods of activism: 1) the suffrage period (1905-1914) when women marched in the streets, smashed windows on Bond Street, and suffered imprisonment in their effort to gain the vote; 2) the interwar, post-franchise period (1918-1939) when organizations such as the Six Point Group turned from the struggle for the vote to address a new set of priorities for women's activism; 3) and the second-wave period from the 1960s and 1970s where renewed efforts to stich the "personal" to the "political" enhanced the public's understanding of the scope of feminist activism. In this seminar, students will explore a range of materials from each of these moments in modern activism and will have access to the rare artifacts emerging from women's movements housed at the Women's Library at the London School of Economics: letters smuggled from prison, women's war-time scrapbooks and diaries, records of interwar feminist groups, second-wave 'zines, and more.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WKAL - Core Art & Literature, WRIT - Writing Intensive
GSC 44700 Healers and Healing (3 Credit Hours)
This course examines the practice of folk medicine in Ireland, in the past and in the present. Irish popular tradition includes a great richness of material on this subject, encompassing a wide range of healing agents and media, from botanical remedies to prescribed rituals and actions, and from specific locations to particular individuals who were credited with special powers. The importance of ritual behaviour will be examined, as will the position of the healer in the community. The course will look at what we might learn about the dynamics of popular tradition, and the ways in which popular tradition functions, from an examination of folk healing practices. The remarkable resilience of many such practices will also be explored.
GSC 46000 Directed Readings (3 Credit Hours)
Reading and research on specialized topics that are immediately relevant to the student's interests and not routinely covered in the regular curriculum. Letter grade given.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 47000 Special Studies (3 Credit Hours)
Special studies are available with gender studies-affiliated faculty.
Course may be repeated.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 48000 Capstone Essay (3 Credit Hours)
In collaboration with the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Gender Studies, students choose a Gender Studies faculty member who will guide them through the semester-long composition of a capstone essay. The capstone essay is an original and professional piece of scholarly writing based on the student's interdisciplinary research in their primary and supplementary majors. The capstone essay may build upon, but cannot replicate, the work done for a senior thesis or paper in another major or course. This course fulfills the senior capstone project requirement for Gender Studies supplementary majors. It can only be taken in the fall semester of the senior year. In the spring semester of the junior year, interested students should speak to the Gender Studies academic advisor about planning their thesis topic and research and securing a faculty advisor. For the essay to be accepted by Gender Studies, the minimum page requirement is 20 pages.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 48001 Senior Thesis (3 Credit Hours)
In collaboration with the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Gender Studies, students choose a Gender Studies faculty member who will guide them through the year-long composition of a senior thesis. The senior thesis is a professional piece of scholarly writing featuring original research based on the student's interdisciplinary research in their gender studies major, ideally incorporating any additional fields of study they are pursuing. The Gender Studies senior thesis may build upon, but cannot replicate, the work done for a senior thesis or paper in another major or course. This course fulfills the senior capstone project requirement for Gender Studies majors. It is taken in the fall semester of the senior year (3 credits) and finished in the spring semester (3 credits). For the thesis to be accepted by Gender Studies, the minimum page requirement is 30-50 pages (excluding notes and bibliography). In the spring semester of the junior year, interested students should speak to the DUS about planning their thesis topic and research and securing a faculty advisor. In the fall semester of the senior year, students will identify (in consultation with the DUS and their thesis advisor) a second Gender Studies faculty member to serve as a research consultant. By the end of the fall semester, students submit to the DUS a working bibliography and a 1-2 paragraph summary of the project's direction to date (including total number of pages drafted); this prospectus is approved by both their thesis advisor and the second faculty member and is required for a passing grade on the fall semester. The thesis is due, approved by the thesis advisor, by the second Friday in April. Students are expected to submit their thesis to the Genevieve D. Willis Senior Thesis Prize Competition.
Satisfies the following University Core Requirements: WRIT - Writing Intensive
Course may be repeated.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.
GSC 48002 Senior Thesis (3 Credit Hours)
In collaboration with the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Gender Studies, students choose a Gender Studies faculty member who will guide them through the year-long composition of a senior thesis. The senior thesis is a professional piece of scholarly writing featuring original research based on the student's interdisciplinary research in their gender studies major, ideally incorporating any additional fields of study they are pursuing. The Gender Studies senior thesis may build upon, but cannot replicate, the work done for a senior thesis or paper in another major or course. This course fulfills the senior capstone project requirement for Gender Studies majors. It is taken in the fall semester of the senior year (2 credits) and finished in the spring semester (1 credit). For the thesis to be accepted by Gender Studies, the minimum page requirement is 30-50 pages (excluding notes and bibliography). In the spring semester of the junior year, interested students should speak to the DUS about planning their thesis topic and research and securing a faculty advisor. In the fall semester of the senior year, students will identify (in consultation with the DUS and their thesis advisor) a second Gender Studies faculty member to serve as a research consultant. By the end of the fall semester, students submit to the DUS a working bibliography and a 1-2 paragraph summary of the project's direction to date (including total number of pages drafted); this prospectus is approved by both their thesis advisor and the second faculty member and is required for a passing grade on the fall semester. The thesis is due, approved by the thesis advisor, by the second Friday in April. Students are expected to submit their thesis to the Genevieve D. Willis Senior Thesis Prize Competition.
Enrollment limited to students in the Gender Studies department.