Queer, Trans, Sexuality Studies Requirements

Survey with emphasis on writers in their literary and historical contexts. Historical background to early 1950's.

Survey with emphasis on writers in their literary and historical contexts. From 1950s to contemporary.

Overview of human sexuality from development and interpersonal perspectives, topics to include reproductive physiology and health, sexual function and dysfunction, educational and intervention strategies.

Topic will vary.

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. We will learn about the different ways in which families reproduce the societies they are part of, through the literal reproduction of human beings and the provision of their everyday needs, as well as through the reproduction of social inequalities. We will also examine the labors this reproduction recruits, with an emphasis on the increasingly commodified and transnational flows of reproductive labor. At the end of this class, you will be familiar with the contents and discontents of the multiple family arrangements that characterize contemporary American society.

Explores theories and critiques of sexuality, gender, race and nation, as they have been organized under the concept of `queer theory.' Topics include: historical emergence of queer theory in relation to histories of feminism, lesbian & gay studies, and social activism; queer of color critique; transgender activism and studies; theories of sexuality; the critique of identity; sexual cultures; and similarities and differences within lesbian, gay, trans, and queer theories.

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. How has this biographical imperative of transgender subjectivity shaped theoretical, political, and aesthetic debates in Transgender Studies? Attentive to questions of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and ability, this course will study how "the story of self" reveals the bond between embodiment and subjectivity, the experiential and the social, inside and outside, and semiotics and materiality.

Focusing on contemporary migration across international borders, we explore how migration contributes to the production, contestation, and remaking of gender and sexual norms as these intersect with hierarchies of race, class, and geopolitics. We particularly examine how the selection, incorporation, and governance of migrants provide occasions for challenging, renegotiating, or affirming dominant gender and sexual norms; how migrants contest multiple exclusions and refashion identities, communities, and politics through gender and sexuality; and how transnational social fields, grounded in histories of empire and global capitalism, shape and are reshaped by these processes.

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. We will also take up numerous case studies, analyzing the discourses of class, gender, race and sexuality as they are deployed in and promoted by cultural texts that engage diverse issues of contemporary concern.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 examines the gendered constitution of race in the U.S., from 18th century naturalism and 19th century scientific racism, to 20th and 21st century eugenics, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, and "color blindness".

This course will examine the varied and evolving concerns of Chicanas as they forge new visions of feminism through the Chicano Movement of the 1960s; organizing among Chicana lesbian communities; Chicanas' entrance into academic, literary and artistic arenas; diverse community and national activist efforts in the 1980s; and current transnational initiatives.