Explores social problems, movements, and change related to gender in specific cultural, historical, political contexts. Advances a questioning of one’s position in gendered, relations of power in a constantly changing world.

Explores and evaluates feminist theories in a socio-historical context. Raises questions about their implications for different methods of inquiry and about the nature of knowledge and rational thought.

Inquiry into status of women in society with emphasis on socialization, structural and institutional relationships, and continuities and discontinuities in women’s roles across the life cycle.

At the heart of any inquiry, there is a question to be answered or explored. At the heart of this course will be the question: What is American and how does our popular culture construct ideologies of race and gender to create American identity, individual identity and our own notions of race and gender?  This course will set out to explore, deconstruct, evaluate, and critique the issues of race and gender in current popular culture. Our discourse will also include questions like why are certain races or genders privileged? How are our ideas of race and gender constructed? How are issues of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia cloaked under the guise of entertainment? Primarily focusing on film and television, we will also examine media and advertising and learn to view popular culture as a medium of literacy and negotiation. 

This course aims to provide students with the critical tools for analyzing films and understanding cinema from feminist, critical race, and queer perspectives. We will begin by examining the birth of cinema, as a technology and industry, during the age of high imperialism (the effort on the part of western nations to divide up and rule the rest of the globe). This course will thus treat cinema as a primary means through which current ideas about race, sexuality, and gender have been socially constructed. However, this has not only happened in normative and problematic ways; cinema has also served as a crucial site for the production of oppositional theories and practices of gender, race, and sexuality. Topics to be covered will include: theories of spectatorship and the gaze; feminist film theory; third cinema; queer cinemas; cinema and capitalism; colonialism and postcoloniality; cinema and the production of raced bodies; US empire and globalization.We will approach course materials using a multi-tiered approach: representation in film imagery and narrative content; spectatorship and ways of seeing; the filmmaking process itself; the political economy of cinema. Texts will cover key issues and concepts in critical media studies, and film history and theory. Films will encompass a variety of genres and national contexts; we will examine the role not only of feature films, but also of genres such as motion study, public service announcement, and ethnography, in forming our identities and our political beliefs.Class time will be divided between lecture, discussion exercises, and film screenings.This course is designed for students with some familiarity with women’s and gender studies, cinema studies, and/or art, media and literary analysis. However, it is also designed to give students with little or no prior experience with this particular topic a broad exposure to key texts in critical cinema studies.

How do Shakespearean plays contribute to and challenge shifting conceptions of masculinity operating in the early modern period?  This course will explore representative Shakespearean texts in the context of contemporary descriptions of masculinity by figures like Thomas Wyatt, Thomas Hoby, Robert Burton, and Edmund Spenser.  From the identification of Roman virtu with masculinity in the Roman plays to the courtships of the comedies, masculinity – its successes and especially its failures – are a central pre-occupation of Shakespearean drama. Moreover, since governing the individual body was understood as crucial to securing social order in the early modern period, studying individual gender construction offers a way of understanding similarities and differences between Shakespeare’s world and our own.  The course will place the plays in critical and historical context using a variety of additional readings. We will discuss how gender functions as an analytic category in plays from all genres and periods of Shakespeare’s work, including but not limited to Othello, As You Like It, and The Winter’s Tale. 

A study of Asian, African, Latin American, and Eastern European families and children, focusing on family structure, gender roles, and socialization practices within their socioeconomic, historical, and cultural context.

Overview of health status of immigrant and refugee populations. Focus on migration, resettlement, adaptation, epidemiological, behavioral, cultural, socioeconomic, legal and political factors impacting health, and interventions to address needs. The purpose of the course is to familiarize students with significant health and health service issues which currently (and will for the foreseeable future) challenge the lives and adaptation of immigrants and refugees to US host society.

This course seeks to introduce students to women's experiences in the past as a vital component of the making of the United States. In addition, we will explore the history (historiography) of the study of women. Students will read and analyze both primary accounts -- letters, diaries, slave narratives, and novels -- and recent secondary studies that use methods of social history and gender analysis to reconstruct our understanding of American history. During the semester, we will have both lectures, class discussions, and class presentations including a final group project.

This course examines the history of U.S. women and their bodies. Topics that we will explore include sexuality, nutrition, menstruation, birth control, abortion, HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, heart disease, domestic violence, and menopause. We will look at how women’s experiences of their bodies have changed over time and differed according to race, class, region, and sexual preference. We will also explore how and why women’s bodies have become sites of political struggle and resistance. Crosslisted with WGS.

This course will examine the diversity of U.S. women’s reproductive experiences over the course of the twentieth century. Topics that we will examine include pregnancy, sterilization, contraception, childbirth, adoption, and infertility. Students will read historical accounts that explore the lives of ordinary women, utilizing oral history, archival research, and public policy analysis. The course will end with a brief exploration of women’s postwar political organizing surrounding reproductive issues. Crosslisted with WGS and AFS.

The well known feminist, Gloria Steinem, coined the phrase “The personal is political.”  In this course, we will explore how women’s lives, even their bodies and cycles, have been caught in the intersection of the political and the personal.  Over the semester, students will survey the historical, philosophical, political, social and religious attitudes toward women and women’s reproductive abilities/freedom with an emphasis on cultural comparisons.  Through readings, discussions and group activities, students will trace the attitudes and trends that gave rise to social reform movements and survey the contemporary controversies that still surround reproductive rights in the US.  From there we will compare the US with contemporary Europe and expand our view to survey cultural differences in attitudes and practices in selected developing nations (in South/Central America, Africa, Middle East).  Special attention will be given to how “Western” attitudes and foreign policies have impacted these countries, particularly as they relate to women’s health issues, family planning and cultural practices.

Evaluation of effects of biological sex and gender role socialization on personality and behavior through examination of empirical research.