Class Schedules

Could it be possible that your own gender, race, class, and sexuality as well as your questions about them, are intimately related to global politics and culture? How does your life connect to those of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the Love Canal protesters, voting and reproductive rights activists, the Narmada Dam resisters, the Nike shoemakers, the diasporic Asian gay filmmaker, Hurricane Katrina activists, and male feminists? We will explore how different histories of women’s and gender studies intersect to expand this matrix of identities. We will debate and critique diverse identities—from Latina to Norse, from Black to Indigenous, from the First to the Fourth World. We will study how feminists and their allies have fought economic exploitation, challenged racial discrimination, protested gender oppression, redefined environmental and industrial relations, and gained strength from political and cultural coalitions. The goals of the course are to understand the fundamental concepts and theories in WGSS, to learn about the history of minority experiences around the world, and to relate the concepts and experiences to our own practices of positive social change, and greater justice and equity. This course invites you to analyze and situate your identities, your commitments, and your responsibilities in relation to the academic and other bodies of knowledge that form the foundation of a liberal arts education.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course investigates the ways in which gender identities and relationships between “men” and “women” have been articulated, constructed, and refashioned throughout the Muslim World. Starting with problematizing fixed notions of gender and sexuality, we map prominent attitudes through visiting a diverse array of sources from the Qur’an, Sunna, and legal documents to historical and anthropological case studies, literature, and film from across the region. Exploring notions of femininity and masculinity, as well as attitudes towards same-sex relations and transgendered populations, we witness their implications in case studies and stories, from a divorce court in Iran to a matriarchal utopia in India.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In less than ten years we have gone from Laverne Cox gracing the cover of Time Magazine, declaring that we have reached the “transgender tipping point,” to a broad based anti-trans culture war. From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, CeCe MacDonald to Chelsea Manning, Transparent to Pose, trans people have experienced unprecedented media coverage over the past ten years. And yet, alongside this positive media coverage, trans exclusion has emerged as a key component of the global rise of white nationalism, and we see legislatures across the country foment fear of the transsexual child predator, pass bills to restrict trans kid’s participation in sports, and limit gender affirming medical care for youth and adults. Even more concerning, The National Coalition of Antiviolence Projects reports that 2021 saw a record number of murders of transgender individuals, in particular trans women of color. In all of these instances, it’s useful to consider how and why the specter of transness is raised. What social and political work does that figure do? This course investigates the ways that ideas about normative and non-normative gender are produced in the context of white supremacy and capitalism, recognizing that discourses about gender, race, class, sexuality and nation are co-constitutive and historically contingent. Foregrounding intersectionality, we begin with situating the production and policing norms around gender and sexuality as a key tactic of settler colonialism, and then we move forward in time through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to think about how norms around racialized gender and sexuality have been policed, resisted, and transformed in various historical moments.This course will examine transness as practices of gender transgression, rather than solely an identity category, practices that are historically and geographically contingent. In doing so, we will ask: What has gender non-conformity meant in various historical moments? How do race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability structure trans lives and communities? How have key institutions within the US constructed ideas about gender normativity and policed gender transgression? How has that policing impacted and shaped trans life? What is the relationship between feminism and trans people and trans liberation? How have trans people envisioned and fought for social justice? What space can trans embodiment and politics open up for new ways of living, relating, and imagining otherwise?

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course introduces students to debates, methods, and conceptual frameworks in race and gender, as represented in performance. It engages students in an interdisciplinary exploration of key terms - such as corporeality, embodiment, intersectionality, and performativity - that remain central to the fields of gender and sexuality, critical race theory, and performance. Through drafts and revisions of written work, critical dialogues and oral presentations in small groups, peer feedback, and analytical reading, students will engage in questions around identity formation, structural inequality, and the politics of citizenship.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course we will examine the roles, identities, and representations of women in the Tanakh/ Old Testament, New Testament, and Jewish and Christian apocrypha.  We will explore how biblical writers used women "to think with," and we will consider how gender is co-constructed alongside religious, social, and sexual identities.  We will ask the following sorts of questions: What opportunities for social advancement and leadership were open to women in ancient Israelite, early Jewish, and early Christian communities, and how did these opportunities differ from those open to women in other religious formations in the ancient Mediterranean?  How did biblical regulations of bodies, sexuality, marriage, and family life shape women's lives? What are the social and material effects of biblical representations of women? And how might current feminist theories inform our interpretation of biblical texts about women?

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Since the 1960s historians have revisited early American history to identify populations on the margins and historical actors whose stories and experiences were neglected in the traditional canon of history. Historians of women made some of the first forays into this important work of recovery. Building up the foundations produced by women's historians, the field of gender and sexuality studies have flourished and enriched the narratives of American history. This course examines American peoples and cultures from the 16th through early 19th centuries to uncover the ways in which gender and sexuality shaped the formation of an early American society. Particular attention will be given to the way that ideologies of gender and sexuality shaped early concepts of race and the development of North American political institutions.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course examines traditions of 20th century African American women's activism and the ways in which they have changed over time. Too often, the narrative of the "strong black woman" infuses stories of African American women's resistance which, coupled with a culture of dissemblance, makes the inner workings of their lives difficult to imagine. This course, at its heart, seeks to uncover the motivations, both personal and political, behind African American women's activism. It also aims to address the ways in which African American women have responded to the pressing social, economic, and political needs of their diverse communities. The course also asks students to consider narrative, voice and audience in historical writing, paying particular attention to the ways in which black women's history has been written over the course of the twentieth century.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course brings together discourses that have remained somewhat parallel and unrelated--Whiteness Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Before and during the pandemic, these intertwine in similar but also radically different ways. The course is based on the premise that “Whiteness,” as an academic/social framework, stems from and is intertwined with social and political identity-based movements (feminist, critical race, indigenous, etc.). This course explores where and how the notion of 'whiteness' converges and diverges from post-colonialism. The goals are to learn how “Whiteness” is a category to define identity and to analyze experiences in literature and in our lives, to understand what “Post/Colonialism” is as a historical experience for so many of us and as a field of study, to intersect the two and interpret literature and culture, and to move towards decolonial knowledge and praxis by reflecting on the ways in which we are positioned at the intersection of these histories. Literature by James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Gordimer, Zadie Smith; music by Pete Seeger and Macklemore, critiques of White nationalisms, and films by Hector Babenco and James Cameron are included.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The objective of this course is to explore the role that women have played in the development of African history and to understand the major issues that define their experience as women from this region of the world. This course introduces students to the ways in which gender is studied in African history and to the major "break-through" works on women in African history. An important component of this course is the study of life histories of women from various geographical regions of the continent.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Understanding the conditions we live in through a greater awareness of systems and ideologies, both dominant and marginalized, could help us to place individuals’ and communities’ beliefs and actions in context, provide a deeper knowledge of how power works, and become aware of counterhegemonies. Antonio Gramsci, whom Mussolini incarcerated and who died in prison, offers us a modern theory of hegemony that not only addresses hierarchies but also analyzes how constructs become naturalized. Authors and creators include some among Gramsci, José Carlos Mariátegui, Walter Benjamin, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri Spivak, Paolo Freire, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Arundhati Roy, Chela Sandoval, Cathy Cohen, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Silvia Federici, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Trinh Minh-ha, and others. The materials for this course includes essays, poems, fiction, film, art, and music, and will focus on intersections of feminist, postmodern, socialist, indigenous, queer, critical race, critical Whiteness, and post/neocolonial, and neo/liberal frameworks. The space-time of one semester will be insufficient to conduct a deep and careful study of all this. This course is Part 1. Part 2 will be in Spring 2025, with authors not covered in Part 1. Being familiar with theory, being able to read slowly, being willing to discuss carefully, and being patient with building knowledge collectively are highly desirable prerequisites. Students may take either or both.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Much about the mainstream narratives of queerness and gender transgression have been determined by powerful, cis-dominated institutions, still even to this day: the media, schools, police, the law, doctors and psychiatrists. These are institutions structured by a racialized, heteronormative gender binary, and for whom trans people pose a problem to be managed. Oral history offers the possibility for queer and trans people to tell their own stories, and, in doing so, give more nuanced, complex analysis of identity, activism, and of the intersectional operations of systems of power. Oral history also makes room for the complex interplay of joy, playfulness, grief, anxiety, and connection that makes queer and trans life so valuable. In this course, students will have hands-on experience building an archive of queer and trans oral histories in the context of the pandemic and uprisings for racial justice. In this community-engaged course we will work closely with the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota, learning about oral history methodology, interview techniques, and having the opportunity to conduct oral history interviews and contribute to an online archive of queer and trans oral history. In particular, this semester, students will have the opportunity to work on an ongoing collaborative research project entitled "The Long Fire at Lake and Minnehaha," which uses oral history and archival research to grapple with the layers of history at the Lake/Minnehaha intersection in South Minneapolis, from the legacies of colonialism, to the intersecting systems of racialized capitalism that unevenly expose some members of the community to homelessness, policing, and violence, to the narratives of racialized gender that animate these struggles over space.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Explorations of the relationship between women and violence typically take place from the perspective of women as victims. However, how does the discourse change when the traditional paradigm is inverted and we explore women as perpetrators of violence? This seminar examines representations of women who kill in Latin American and Latino narratives (including novels, short stories, films, and newspapers). Drawing on feminist theory, media studies, criminology, and literary criticism, we will seek to understand the ways women's violence has been read and framed in contemporary society as well as how their violence intersects with discussions of nationalism, race, class, and gender. This course satisfies the Area 2 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 307 or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course explores how philosophers, creative writers, artists, and filmmakers have taken everyday life as a point of departure for critical reflection and creative practice. Grounded in cultural studies and feminist approaches to knowledge production, we will examine the everyday as a lens into a wide range of topics, including power, the body, race, gender, sexuality, capitalism, and colonialism. While surveying a wide range of approaches, the course will focus on the emerging genre of Autotheory, which blends critical theory with autobiography and memoir, leading to new insights and modes of resistance. In doing so, we will derive inspiration from contemporary writers, filmmakers, and artists who break with traditional approaches to academic writing and research by using the everyday as raw material. Students will have the opportunity to carry out a creative research project in the form of a written essay, film, or other multimedia form.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course will deal with aspects of human anatomy and physiology of special interest to women and/or those who identify as women, especially relating to sexuality and reproduction. Biological topics covered will include menstruation and menopause, sexuality, conception, contraception, infertility, abortion, pregnancy, cancer, and AIDS. Advances in assisted reproductive technologies, hormone therapies, and genetic engineering technologies will be discussed. Three lecture hours each week.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Natural science and mathematics

Course Materials

This is an introductory course that will use a global/comparative approach to introduce students to the ways that historians think about gender. We will examine historical narratives and theories by exploring scholarly monographs and articles, historical novels, podcast episodes, visual art, and debates on social media and in popular culture. This course will emphasize critical reading skills and will also introduce students to the basic tenets of historical research and writing.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is a historical survey of theories and methodologies used in feminist and queer studies. Course material highlights the unique and intertwined knowledges feminist and queer scholars have produced; these include the re-makings of liberal, Marxian, antiracist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, and their uses in humanities and social science methods. The course centrally examines how feminist and queer studies transform societies and are transformed through struggle over their gender/sexual identities, racial formations, and global/transnational locations. The course considers how feminist and queer studies have arisen in close relationships-of union, tension, and antagonism-and how feminist and queer work today may link. Prerequisite(s): Intermediate level courses require sophomore standing or permission of the instructor, and at least one introductory-level women's, gender, and sexuality studies core course.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Analysis of contemporary feminist theories regarding gender identity, biological and socio-cultural influences on subjectivity and knowledge, and relations between the personal and the political.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This class is an introduction to feminist psychological theory and research dedicated to understanding and critiquing biological, psychological, social, and cultural meanings and implications of gender and its intersections with class, race, physical ability, sexual orientation, etc. Examples of research and theory will come from a wide variety of areas in psychology and related disciplines, and will address such issues as socialization and social development, stereotypes, bodies and body image, social relationships, identity, language, violence, sexuality and sexual behavior, well-being, work, etc. We will also learn about the historical, cultural, and epistemological underpinnings of psychological research on gender. Counts as a UP3 course. Prerequisite(s): PSYC 100 or permission of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Do men have gender? How does the performance of masculinity intersect with patriarchy? In what ways do patriarchy and masculinity relate to religious traditions, practices, and expressions? In this course, we consider how religious discourses have shaped and been shaped by different understandings of masculinity. We will take as our starting point contemporary discussions of “muscular Christianity” or “getting buff for Jesus” in the U.S. today before shifting into a theoretical discussion of gender, power, and the construction of masculinity through Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity and Jack Halberstam’s work on female masculinity. In the latter half of the course, we will take a comparative approach, examining how differing understandings, ideals, and embodiments of masculinity are negotiated across religious traditions.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Endarkened Feminist Epistemology (EFE) is an approach to research that honors the wisdom, memory, spirituality, and critical interventions of transnational Black women’s ways of knowing (Dillard, 2016). A framework created by scholar Dr. Cynthia Dillard, it articulates how reality is known from the vantage point of transnational Black women - transnational recognizing the connections between African descended women throughout the diaspora as well as the continent. Through reflecting on course readings, writing, and sacred practice, this class will explore EFE’s claims and methodologies, as well as center other transnational Black women whose work helps us make connections between history, spirituality, and our collective positionality within academia.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course explores the history and politics of, and theoretical approaches to, gender and sexuality in relation to the racial politics of mass incarceration, or what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the "carceral geography" of the United States. By engaging recent work in queer and trans studies, feminist studies, and critical prison studies, we will consider how prisons and policing have shaped the making and remaking of race, gender, and sexuality from slavery and conquest to the contemporary period, and consider how the racialized harm of the criminal punishment system is often enacted through the policing of gender and sexuality. We will examine how police and prisons have regulated the body, identity, and populations, and the larger social, political, and cultural changes connected to these processes. While we will focus on the carceral system itself, we will also think of policing in a more expansive way by analyzing the racialized regulation of gender and sexuality on the plantation, in the colony, at the border, in the welfare office, and in the hospital, among other spaces, historical periods, and places. This is a community engaged course, and in the second half of the semester, students will work closely with the organization REP MN on a community-engaged project.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

What is "disability" and what does an understanding of disability tell us about human experience more generally? What is a "disability identity" and what implications might claiming that identity have for psychological well-being and social change? How do stereotypes of disabled people and expectations of "normality" affect everyone's lives (not just those with disabilities)? Why don't many Deaf people consider themselves "disabled?" What might we learn from shifting the "problem" of disability from the individual person to the social environment? How do sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression influence how different bodies are viewed, treated, educated, and experienced? This course will explore questions that emerge from thinking about the experience of disability (and its intersection with identities based on gender, race, class, and sexuality). Our work together will be grounded in critical disability and Deaf studies frameworks that are themselves informed by and in conversation with feminist, queer, and critical race theories and perspectives. Through a consideration of the socially, culturally, linguistically, and historically constructed meanings of physical, sensory, and cognitive "impairments," the course will rely on theoretical and empirical readings from psychology and related disciplines, personal essays, film/video, and guest visitors as we explore the social and psychological meanings of disability. Prerequisite(s): PSYC 100; and PSYC 201 or STAT 155

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Feminism means both understanding the construction of gender and sexuality in society and challenging the oppressive structures that constrain people of all genders. This class will focus on feminisms (theory and praxis) in the Americas, their histories, politics of liberation and resistance, struggles, and transnational collaborations and solidarity from the 2000s onwards. We will pay particular attention to their fight against gender-based violence. We will engage with memoirs, academic scholarship, and activist production. We will read Brenny Mendoza, Sara Ahmed, Rita Segato, Ochi Curiel, María Lugones, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, among others. The central questions we will address are: What constitutes transnational feminism(s)? How do members of communities in the Americas understand and articulate their relationships to feminism and feminist organizing? How do activists in specific cultural contexts resist multiple forms of gender-based violence?

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course is an upper-level primer in strategies for creating ensemble-devised works of theater. We will focus on creative processes that incorporate the following techniques: physical theater, group-generated scripts, chance, site-specificity, anti-hierarchical rehearsals, non-linear narrative, horizontal design, and ritual. The theme for Spring 2025 will be "Care," as explored through queer, feminist, disability, and performance studies. Potential theorists and writers we might look at include: Sarah Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, adrienne maree brown, The Care Collective, Emma Dowling, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, bell hooks, James McMaster, Mia Mingus Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Lynne Segal, and Dean Spade. In addition to theorizing care through embodiment, we will also examine how care maps onto narratives we already know in myth and fairy tales, and explore how to reclaim and manipulate those known narratives. We will create short and longer performance as (a) collective(s), and learn how to incorporate meaningful and potentially complex thoughts and feelings into live, aesthetically-informed performances. The class will culminate in a public showing of work created by the ensemble as well as a reflection paper.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Taking inspiration from a volume of pathbreaking feminist essays from South Asia, this course asks: can there be a history of sexuality in South Asia that does not start with the Sanskrit treatise kamāsūtrā (400-200 BCE) and end with the modern day kamasutra (India’s preferred condom brand)? Instead, we will investigate how new regimes of sexuality are produced, policed, and challenged in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. We will explore how laws, leisure, and sexual “deviance” shape our understandings and experiences of sexuality. How have social and political movements challenged existing ideas about licit and illicit sexuality? We will explore the production of sexuality across multiple sites—fields, factories, temples, theater, fiction, Hindi films and more. We will also engage with the worlds and work of social actors who have countered existing regimes of sexuality to produce new understandings of the relationship between the ethical, material, and affective dimensions of gender and sexuality. This course will not only introduce you to the history of sexuality in colonial and contemporary South Asia, but it will also animate debates about gender and sexuality in our current moment.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The relationship between academic theorizing and community organizing for positive social and political change is a vital, complex, and an ever-changing source of feminist inquiry. This course builds on that relationship by juxtaposing activist social work with theoretical writings on globalization, gender, race, class-relations, sexuality, community, democracy, and civil society, and exploring how these arenas inform and transform each other. The issues in this seminar are related ultimately to the student's "location," personally and professionally, at the threshold of the future, in search of a space of her/his own. One substantial research paper and a formal oral presentation on its ideas are the primary assignments. Prerequisite(s): At least three WGSS core courses and senior standing, or permission of instructor.  Preferred: a working relationship with a local women's or minority organization, established the spring or summer prior to enrollment in the course.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials