QTS Courses
An honors thesis is required of all the students graduating with honors. Students ordinarily sign up for this course as a two-semester sequence. The first semester the student performs research under the supervision of a faculty member; the second semester the student writes an honors thesis.
This course uses the concept of social construction to analyze how gender organizes our social experiences. It shows how cultural understandings of gender, particularly those that permeate language, media representations, and socialization processes, impact how individuals understand the self, interpret the social world, and interact with social institutions. It encourages students to move beyond an understanding of gender as an individual attribute, and towards understanding gender as a broad and enduring social structure that operates at multiple levels.
Sociology of the Body examines the relationship between society and the human body, from broad issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality, to everyday trends such as dieting, body building, and tattooing.
The course focuses on the development of lesbian and gay community and politics in North America in the 20th and 21st centuries, starting with colonial America and ending up with transnational queer life in the post-Stonewall period. The course aims to develop an appreciation for sexual diversity in North American history.
This course provides an upper level introduction to LGBTQ issues in cinema, and includes films from the much acclaimed "New Queer Cinema" of the 1990s. Students will consider how gay and queer sexualities are produced in these films and what debates the films generated. We will study what it means to "queer" a film and the limitations of "positive images." We will also examine how alternative genders and sexualities are produced alongside ethnic, cultural, religious, and regional differences. Film studies background not assumed.
This course explores the relationship between economic processes (especially capitalism), social formations such as gender, race, ethnicity, nation and sexuality, and the production and consumption of culture, in the various senses of that complex term. We will read fundamental texts of liberal and marxist theory, various attempts to integrate marxist, feminist and anti-racist analyses, and theories that situate culture in relation to industrialization, globalization, and international divisions of labor.
Working with the assertion that "the personal is political" that emerged from Feminist of Color scholarship, this course will introduce students to transgender identity and politics through memoir, autobiography, and self-narrative. Students will learn how transgender people require a story that authenticates their identification in order to receive medical, legal, and social care. From questions about pronoun use to "When did you know" or "How do you know," transgender identity has a unique relationship with self-narrative and the biographical.
This class will engage with and challenge our taken-for-granted understandings by introducing a critical perspective on families. Approaching families as social institutions that are constructed, contested, and transformed in relation to larger social forces such as globalization and gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and class-based inequalities, we will explore families in their diversity and complexity.
Overview of human sexuality from development and interpersonal perspectives, topics to include reproductive physiology and health, sexual function and dysfunction, educational and intervention strategies.
