Class Schedules

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:
Humanities

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:
Writing WC
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

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

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

This course is an introduction to the range and importance of 20th century as well as current feminist and queer theories and practices to our understanding of positive social change. It will analyze feminist and queer histories of resistance and alternatives to economic and political control, in the U.S. and elsewhere. The framework for the course is the intersection of gender and sexuality with race, class, nationality, and dis/ability; it will address such issues as economic marginalization, social movements, the institutions of family and marriage, migration and the role of the state/nation among others. Depending on the instructor, the course generally focuses on either LGBTQI studies or on transnational perspectives of these issues.

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

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course examines the history of childhood and youth in the United States. The historical voices and perspectives of childhood that we study will pay close attention to the significance of race, ethnicity, class,\\ gender, sexuality, time periods, and social settings. Some questions we will consider relevant to the study of history: Do children have agency? What is the role of children as subjects in history? How has childhood been socially and historically constructed? Why are children such galvanizing social and political symbols? How is identity shaped in childhood and what impact does this have on adult society at certain historical moments?

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course examines the ways in which gender and sexuality are understood in modern visual culture. It also covers a wide range of feminist approaches in the 20th and 21st century art and as they have been articulated in theory. Students explore social constructions of gender and sexualities, their visible and invisible representation, and discuss the impact of feminism and the changing role of women in society. The course will also cover some of the most recent global feminist trends and new directions in the feminist theory. Feminist work from Africa, India, Asia and Eastern and Central Europe and various marginalized cultural centers in Western Europe and the United States will be addressed.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course examines the ways in which gender and sexuality are understood in modern visual culture. It also covers a wide range of feminist approaches in the 20th and 21st century art and as they have been articulated in theory. Students explore social constructions of gender and sexualities, their visible and invisible representation, and discuss the impact of feminism and the changing role of women in society. The course will also cover some of the most recent global feminist trends and new directions in the feminist theory. Feminist work from Africa, India, Asia and Eastern and Central Europe and various marginalized cultural centers in Western Europe and the United States will be addressed.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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

What is “health” in both a globalized world and a world shaped by legacies of colonialism, transatlantic enslavement, climate change, and forced migration? Is “healthy” a politically neutral and universally accessible classification? How do we understand disability - chronic or short term - as not just a biological experience, but a social one shaped by gender, sexuality, race, and empire? In this interdisciplinary class we will look at case studies to try to answer these questions. Some case studies include, but are not limited to, public health and labor migration between the US/Mexico border, medical racism and biological warfare, US imperialism in the Pacific Islands, the War on Gaza, detentions and quarantine in Guantanamo Bay, and South African apartheid. Through these examples, we will discuss the ways that health, medicine, and disability become used to uphold US/European power and white supremacy, and become the gauge for deciding who is worth the classification of “human” and who is deemed not worthy of life.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In this seminar, we will consider how epistemicide and its originary instantiation in formalized educational institutions and academic disciplines both contained the core of empire’s brutal logics and the kernel of empire’s impending collapse. Studying across intellectual traditions and genres, we will develop vigorous dialectic inquiry into this extraordinary contradiction. And we will study some of the vital educational traditions that precede empire, that have continued uninterrupted, and that exceed dialectic relations to modernity through resurgence, the fantastic, and more.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will read some of the best novels of the twentieth century—classics of queer literature. We will study how queer writers navigated censorship and discrimination and created radical visions of love, hope, and joy. E.M. Forster wrote a novel about queer love to be published only after his death; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a trans character who lives for hundreds of years; and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room takes us to a Parisian gay bar. These queer masterpieces (among others!) paved the way for a dynamic canon of queer literature and theory, and our class will seek to understand the enduring impact of these texts. Students will read deeply and undertake a semester-long zine project.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

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 offers an intersectional analysis of LGBTQ+ policy in the United States. We will explore key achievements such as federal marriage equality, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and expanded anti-discrimination protections, while critically examining their impacts on historically marginalized groups—including queer people of color, transgender, gender nonconforming, disabled, and low-income individuals. Additionally, the course acknowledges the recent major setbacks in LGBTQ+ rights policy, drawing on readings from queer liberation scholars and political scientists to evaluate current gains and challenges, and to envision what full equality might look like for LGBTQ+ people.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In this course, students will explore how stories of past and present Christians and the theologies they produced contribute to the histories of gender and sexuality, particularly in the United States. We will pay special attention to the development of and intersections among queer theory, queer and trans activism, queer biblical interpretation, and queer theology in the U.S. from the late twentieth century on. Students will learn how the development of queer biblical interpretation and theology grew out of the intellectual and activist work of feminist, womanist, and mujerista scholars, theologians, ethicists, and pastors. In readings, class discussion, online forums, and written and creative work, students will be invited to explore the social construction of gendered identities and sexualities over time, from antiquity to the postmodern, and the intersections of these identities with religion, race, ethnicity, class, and dis/ability. Although the majority of the class will be devoted to historical scholarship and theological writing that insists on the inclusion of diverse sexualities and genders in the Christian past, present, and future, we will also examine the role that some forms of American Christianity play in the exclusion of LGBTQ+ people, the enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality, the “naturalization” of a gender binary, and the reification of patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and transphobic cultures.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

When it comes to gender and English, people often think about third-person pronouns (they, she, he, ze, etc.), what others call you. In contrast, Japanese language speakers choose from a variety of first-person pronouns, what you call yourself. Some follow societal norms while others subvert them. This course examines how individuals and media creators make such linguistic choices (not just pronouns, but other expressions as well), and how these choices are fluid and based on such diverse factors as age, region, trend, rhetoric, and ideology. A very basic knowledge of Japanese is required, but all readings will be in English. Prerequisite: JAPA102 or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Are we living in revolutionary times?  How do we know? This course takes a journey through the last 50 years of some large upheavals across the world-in language, politics, economics, culture, and media-to find some answers of how we are similar and different.  It uncovers how and why the struggles, in theories and practices, for power and representation have created the conditions in which we exist today. We travel through all kinds of 'post' and 'neo'-liberalism, humanism, feminism, nationalism, and colonialism-and how they intertwine in our own lived experiences.  Some topics: protest against gender, sexual, race, economic, and linguistic bio-regimes, revolts of the colonized and marginalized, and resistant/ liberatory creations in art, technology, and media. Authors include Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Michel Foucault, Theresa Cha, Silvia Federici, Noam Chomsky, Ta-Nehisi Coates, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, and Gayatri Spivak, among others.  At the end of the course, we will all know a little more about where we stand. People from all disciplines welcome. Prerequisite(s): Sophomore or junior standing or permission of instructor, and at least one course in the department (core course recommended, cross-listed accepted).

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

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS). This resolution acknowledged the inordinate impact of armed conflict on women and girls, as well as the crucial role that women can and do already play in conflict prevention, conflict resolution, peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts. It urged states and other actors to increase the participation of women - and to incorporate gender perspectives - in all peace and security efforts. Since 2000, there have been nine additional resolutions that together have created the Women, Peace and Security agenda, a global framework for advancing gender equity in all areas of international peace and security. This course will explore feminist scholarship on armed conflict, peace and security leading up to the adoption of UNSCR 1325, as well as the 20 years of research, policy and practice on Women, Peace and Security. We will focus on the contributions and limitations of the WPS agenda as well as on new themes and issues that have emerged over time. This fall, which marks the 25th anniversary of Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, students in the course will have the opportunity to travel to New York City for three days of meetings at the United Nations focused on the development and implementation of the WPS agenda. Travel details, including cost, are currently being worked out but will be available to students before the start of the course.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course provides an interdisciplinary mechanism for exploring Indigenous feminisms and queer Indigenous studies. We will explore Indigenous histories through women’s, feminist, two-spirit, and queer writings that raise critical questions about normative gender and sexuality, nationhood, colonization, and decolonization. We will also explore the following topics: the relationship between mainstream feminism and Indigenous feminism; gender and sexual violence; settler colonialism and decolonization; law and restorative justice; sexuality; two-spirit, queer, and gender non-conforming subjectivities and politics; sexual and reproductive health; activism; the environment, embodiment, and materialisms; culture and tradition; erotics; biopolitics; Indigenous epistemologies; and sovereignty and governance.

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

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This is an advanced psychology course on the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexually and gender diverse (LGBTQ+) people. The course is designed to engage students in a critical examination of health and healthcare disparities among LGBTQ+ populations, and evidence-based health models that explain the root causes and drivers of disparities. Students will also learn about and gain experience in behavioral interventions: how these are researched, developed, and implemented to target disparities, and promote the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ populations. Class time will consist of didactic instruction, large and small group discussions, application activities, and student presentations.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course examines visual methods, particularly those employed by Black women artists and thinkers work in visual practices as forms of resistance, survival, and world-building. Through critical engagement with photography, film, installation art, and experimental media, we explore how Black feminist visual strategies challenge dominant regimes of representation while imagining otherwise possibilities. The course traces visual genealogies that refuse the violence of hypervisibility while simultaneously confronting erasure, navigating what Saidiya Hartman calls "the visual field of black captivity and its afterlife." Students will analyze works by artists who transform the very grammar of visuality, developing critical frameworks to understand how Black feminist aesthetics rework time, space, and embodiment. Through both analytical and creative projects, we will consider how these visual practices serve as methods of theorizing that expand beyond conventional academic boundaries, offering provocations for imagining and enacting more liberatory futures.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials