UW Bothell Course Descriptions
UW Tacoma Course Descriptions
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GWSS 200 Introduction to Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (5) SSc, DIV
Major conversations in the field of gender, women, and sexuality studies. Examines how difference and inequality are produced and enforced along lines of gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, citizenship status, and more. How queer and feminist theories and practices have shaped conversations about identity and power in the United States and transnational contexts. Course overlaps with: BISGWS 301.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 200
GWSS 202 Introduction to Critical Feminist Data Studies (5) SSc, DIV
Historical and contemporary data - re-examines their purposes at micro, meso, macro, and global scales. Reading narratives presented by the data and contextualizing them as historical and current sites of power.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 202
GWSS 206 Philosophy of Feminism (5) SSc, DIV
Philosophical analysis of the concepts and assumptions central to feminism. Theoretical positions within the feminist movement; view of the ideal society, goals and strategies of the movement, intersections of the sex-gender system with other systems of oppression. Offered: jointly with PHIL 206/POL S 212.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 206
GWSS 230 Feminism and Democracy in Transnational Perspective (5) SSc, DIV
Explores feminist approaches to democratic theory and practice. Examines the following questions from a transnational perspective: What are feminist critiques of the gendered and racialized marginalization and subordination that often mark democratic politics? How do feminists from across the globe analyze issues such as citizenship, participation, and justice? What are models of more egalitarian polities and how might they be fostered? Recommended: GWSS 200.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 230
GWSS 235 Global Feminist Art (5) SSc/A&H, DIV
Introduces feminism as a way of thinking about visual art practice in terms of social hierarchy, aesthetic form, and ideology. Explores how feminist artists working in diverse locations and cultural traditions challenge, at the local and global level, artistic conventions and representations of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality. Offered: jointly with ANTH 235.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 235
GWSS 241 Hip Hop and Indie Rock (5) SSc/A&H, DIV
Introduction to pop music studies. Examines how archives, oral histories, and new media transform stories about music. Traces rhythms, tempos, and genres including blues, gospel, estilo bravio, punk, son jarocho, and disco that influence hip hop and indie rock, contextualizing their relation to gender, race/ethnicity, class, locality, and nation.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 241
GWSS 244 Indigenous Feminisms (5) SSc, DIV
Reconceptualizes and examines the formation of feminisms within a transnational indigenous framework. Topics include indigenous knowledge production, sovereignty, analyses of genders and sexualities, violence, poverty, the politics of reproduction, cultural identities, media, and environmental and social justice.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 244
GWSS 251 Introduction to Gender and Popular Culture (5) SSc/A&H, DIV
Introduction to critical examination of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality in music, film, television, and the internet. Explores cultural meanings and social uses of popular culture by various communities in local and global contexts. Analysis of commercial and independent pop culture. Examination of popular culture forms varies depending on instructor.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 251
GWSS 255 Masculinities: Contestation, Circulation, and Transformation (5) SSc, DIV
What does it mean to be a man? What is men's relationship with power structures such as patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism? Explores aspects of men and masculinity through the theoretical lenses of intersectionality, queer, transgender, transnational, and decolonial studies.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 255
GWSS 256 Feminist Exploration Series (2-5, max. 6) SSc
Explores special topics developed and presented by an upper division Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies major under the supervision of a faculty member. Prerequisite: GWSS 200. Credit/no-credit only.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 256
GWSS 257 Psychology of Gender (5) SSc, DIV
Major psychological theories of gender-role development; biological and environmental influences that determine and maintain gender differences in behavior; roles in children and adults; topics include aggression, cognitive abilities, achievement motivation, affiliation. Course overlaps with: TPSYCH 400. Offered: jointly with PSYCH 257.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 257
GWSS 258 Body Politics (5) SSc/A&H, DIV
Introduces foundational concepts in feminist inquiry via a focus on the body as a social-historical-environmental situation, in terms of gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, and health. Explores how something as intimately experienced as the body is shaped by political, economic, cultural, and scientific structures. Uses diverse material and methods to examine the ways bodies are made through medicine, media, ecology, labor, and violence.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 258
GWSS 262 Gender and Sport (5) SSc, DIV
Considers the relationship between sports and society. Focuses on how sports shape cultural ideas of masculinity and femininity. Examines how assumptions about professional and amateur athletes reflect and challenge social norms about gender, sexuality, race, and class. Other topics include student athletes, the business of sport, and non-normative athletic bodies.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 262
GWSS 264 Introduction to Queer Cultural Studies (5) SSc, DIV
Examines the cultural practices in literature, film, and art that articulate and give meaning to bodies, sexualities, and desires. Teaches critical thinking about identity, power, inequalities, and marginality. Offered: jointly with ENGL 256.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 264
GWSS 272 Introduction to Gender and Fandom (5) SSc/A&H, DIV
Examines gender, race, and sexuality in transformation of cultural products by online fandoms, in both domestic and transnational contexts, across a wide variety of media.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 272
GWSS 290 Introductory Special Topics in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (5, max. 15) SSc, DIV
Focuses on issues relevant to gender, women, and sexuality in contemporary and/or historical frames.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 290
GWSS 299 Women Studies Colloquium (2) SSc
Introduces the discipline of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies to new and potential majors and minors. Credit/no-credit only.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 299
GWSS 300 Gender, Race, and Class in Social Stratification (5) SSc, DIV
The intersection of race, class, and gender in the lives of women of color in the United States from historical and contemporary perspectives. Topics include racism, classism, sexism, activism, sexuality, and inter-racial dynamics between women of color groups. Prerequisite: GWSS 200. Offered: jointly with AES 322.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 300
GWSS 301 Intersectionality (5) SSc, DIV
Uses current discourses, visual art, and popular culture, to explore dimensions of embodiment and intersectionality, asking: How do race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation affect the body? As a concept that emerged from Black feminist thought, intersectionality analyzes multiple structures and vectors of social stratification as they converge on the lives of women of color. Recommended: GWSS 200 or other GWSS course.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 301
GWSS 302 Feminist Theories and Methods (5) SSc
Explores tools for conducting research, using feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist frameworks. Focus on qualitative research methods includes ethnographic interviews, discourse and visual analyses, radical archival research. Students craft viable research questions; identify and access relevant resources; and plan, organize, and write complex and nuanced research proposals. Course equivalent to: T WOMN 302. Prerequisite: either GWSS 200 or GWSS 206/PHIL 206/POL S 212.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 302
GWSS 305 Gender and Feminism in an International Context (5) SSc, DIV
Critical feminisms from global theoretical perspectives. Introduces how gender is constructed through global power relations and operates differently across scales including the body, city, nation, and globe. Examines how gender intersects with other social phenomena including race, class, and nationality. Explores how women are situated and represented differently. Recommended: GWSS 200.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 305
GWSS 310 Women and the Law (5) SSc, DIV
Examines how law addresses women, how the courts have made attempts to address women of color, poor women, lesbians, and women with disabilities. Topics include constitutional construction of equality, employment discrimination, reproductive rights, regulation of sexuality, families and motherhood, sexual harassment, violence against women, and international women and human rights.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 310
GWSS 313 Gender and Politics (5) SSc, DIV
Focuses on the concept of gender as a fluid, performative, and normative aspect of people's lives that regulates access to policies, representation in government, daily encounters with others, interests and issues, and politics that form around this identity and experiences. Examines how gender identity shapes social movements, activism, advocacy, policymaking, elections, cultural norms, distributions of power and resources, rights, and the law. Offered: jointly with POL S 313.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 313
GWSS 315 Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Medicine: From the Plantation to the Clinic (5) SSc, DIV
Interdisciplinary humanities-based approach toward the intersection of gender, race, and medicine. Scientific constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. Examines the role medicine has played in social orientations to race, gender, and sexuality. Legacy of slavery, and medical institutions. Recommended: courses and topics related to American Ethnic Studies, Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, Pre-Med, Public Health, Anthropology, Sociology, and Nutrition.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 315
GWSS 320 Black Feminist Thought (5) SSc, DIV
Examines development of U.S. Black women's feminist consciousness from mid-nineteenth century to the present through essays, speeches, and creative work. Examines important contributions of Black feminist thought to the fields of Black studies and Women's and Gender studies through concepts developed by Black feminist scholars.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 320
GWSS 321 History of African American Women and the Feminist Movement (5) SSc, DIV
"Feminist Movement" from early nineteenth century to present. Treats relationship between black and white women in their struggle for independence, at times together and at times apart. Discusses the reasons, process, and results of collaboration as well as opposition. Examines recent and contemporary attempts at cooperation. Offered: jointly with AFRAM 321.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 321
GWSS 325 Black Feminist Art and Performance (5) SSc/A&H, DIV
Explores how black artists from around the world create work that engages with feminist concerns about identity and power. Covers artists working in a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, new media, dance, and performance. Assignments are built to develop skills in experiencing and interpreting art, and provide creative outlets of producing knowledge about that art. Recommended: GWSS 200 or GWSS 235/ANTH 235.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 325
GWSS 328 Gender and Sexuality in China (5) SSc, DIV
Explores gender and sexuality in China's process of modernization, from the late Qing dynasty through the building of the Republic, Communist revolution, and post-Mao economic reform. Examines, through historical, anthropological, and cultural studies scholarship, the centrality of these social constructs in terms of family, state, labor, body, and ethnicity. Offered: jointly with ANTH 328/JSIS A 328.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 328
GWSS 330 LGBTQ+ Politics in Transnational Perspective (5) SSc, DIV
Queer politics and its varied landscape of activism and advocacy. Using an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach, students analyze various aspects of LGBTQ+ politics with a focus on questions of movement geographies, coalition, transnational activism, community-building, and intersections with other progressive movements. Recommended: GWSS 200.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 330
GWSS 332 Black Feminist Geographies (5) SSc, DIV
Stereotypes about blackness, gender, and sexuality are enmeshed with how we think, feel, and move about the landscapes we move through - and black people are often seen threatening presences that "need" to be policed, contained, and completely erased. This course considers how black feminist approaches to geographic space reveal ways that these restrictive understandings of blackness, gender, and sexuality are refused and redefined. Offered: jointly with GEOG 332.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 332
GWSS 333 Gender and Globalization: Theory and Process (5) SSc, DIV
Theoretical, historical, and empirical analysis of how current processes of globalization are transforming the actual conditions of women's lives, labor, gender ideologies, and politics in complex and contradictory ways. Topics include feminist exploration of colonialism, capitalism, economic restructuring policies, resistance in consumer and environmental movements. Offered: jointly with JSIS B 333.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 333
GWSS 334 Gender, Sex, and Religion (5) SSc, DIV
The Bible and its interpreters invented the gender categories and hierarchies that readers take for granted. Employs academic approaches that illuminate the construction of those categories and explores the debates within Judaism and Christianity as well as within academia today about gender, sex, sexuality, and religion. Offered: jointly with RELIG 334; Sp.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 334
GWSS 335 Sex, Gender, and Disability (5) SSc, DIV
Examines ways that disability, sex, and gender are connected as socially constructed categories. Topics include the ways in which the sexuality of people with disabilities is experienced and represented, the intersection of disability and gender inequality, and how the field of disability studies relates to and can transform other theoretical approaches to gender and sex. Offered: jointly with CHID 335/DIS ST 335.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 335
GWSS 339 Social Movements in Contemporary India (5) SSc, DIV
Covers issues of social change, economic development, and identity politics in contemporary India studied through environmental and women's movements. Includes critiques of development and conflicts over forests, dams, women's rights, religious community, ethnicity, and citizenship. Offered: jointly with ANTH 339/JSIS A 339.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 339
GWSS 341 Native Women in the Americas (5) SSc
Historiography, sociology, biography, autobiography, and fiction about native women in the United States and Canada. Offered: jointly with AIS 341.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 341
GWSS 345 Women and International Economic Development (5) SSc, DIV
Questions how women are affected by economic development in the Third World and celebrates redefinitions of what development means. Introduces theoretical perspectives and methods to interrogate gender and development policies. Assesses current processes of globalization and potential for changing gender and economic inequalities. Offered: jointly with ANTH 345/JSIS B 345.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 345
GWSS 350 Women in Law and Literature (5) SSc/A&H, DIV
Representations of women in American law and literature. Considers how women's political status and social roles have influenced legal and literary accounts of their behavior. Examines how legal cases and issues involving women are represented in literary texts and also how law can influence literary expression. Offered: jointly with CHID 350.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 350
GWSS 351 Women of Color as Cross-Cultural Artists (5) A&H/SSc, DIV
Provides a historical context for artistic forms produced by racialized women. Examines the cultural production of Chicanas and Latinas in relation to that of Native American, African American, East and South Asian American , and Arab American women as well as those women of mixed heritage in the U.S.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 351
GWSS 353 Feminist Anthropology (5) SSc, DIV
Explores the history and contemporary practice of feminist ethnography at the interdisciplinary intersection of anthropology and gender studies. Examines how the inclusion of women, as subjects and researchers, has influenced anthropological knowledge production, and how the cross-cultural imperative of anthropology has influenced understandings of gender, sexuality, and race. Offered: jointly with ANTH 353.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 353
GWSS 355 Men and Masculinity (5) SSc
Critical study of systematic responses of men to feminist movements, including conservative, pro-feminist, men's rights, mythopoetic, and religious responses. How men of color and gay men view these various men's movements and their issues. Special attention given to philosophical problems such as nature of oppression, human nature, justice, and masculinity.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 355
GWSS 357 Psychobiology of Women (5) NSc, DIV
Physiological and psychological aspects of women's lives; determinants of biological sex; physiological and psychological events of puberty; menopause; sexuality; contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation; role of culture in determining psychological response to physiological events. Offered: jointly with PSYCH 357.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 357
GWSS 360 Social Reproduction Theory and Radical Politics of Care (5) SSc
Develops critical understandings of the current neoliberal conditions shaping social reproduction and care including the many ways everyday life and slow death are sustained by intersecting systems of power and changing relations between and within the Global North and South. Offered: jointly with CHID 360/LABOR 360.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 360
GWSS 370 Race, Gender, and Class in the Global Economy: Asian and Latina Workers (5) SSc, DIV
Examines the lives and labor of Asian and Latina workers through structures of opportunity and inequality to examine how race and gender mark specific forms of labor as feminized and racialized, and thus precarious and devalued. Contextualizes social, political, and economic implications of colonialism and imperialism, economic restructuring, global capitalism, immigration policies, and welfare reform in the United States. Recommended: either AES 150, AES 151, POL S 249/HSTCMP 249/SOC 266, or HSTAA 353/LABOR 353. Offered: jointly with AES 370/LABOR 370; WSp.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 370
GWSS 372 Transnational Fandom Studies (5) SSc, DIV
Fandom studies through the lenses of transnational feminisms and East Asian studies. Covers the requirements for a comprehensive analysis of historically situated contemporary media phenomena and the fan communities developed around them. Recommended: GWSS 200 and GWSS 272.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 372
GWSS 374 Introduction to Transgender Studies (5) SSc, DIV
What does it mean to look beyond a simplistic binary of "man" and "woman"? With definitions of sex and gender as a starting point, we blur these contested categories, complicating them with sexuality, race, class, ability, history, and location.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 374
GWSS 383 Social History of American Women to 1890 (5) SSc, DIV
A multi-racial, multicultural study of women in the United States from the seventeenth century to 1890 emphasizing women's unpaid work, participation in the paid labor force, charitable and reform activities, and nineteenth century social movements. Uses primary materials such as diaries, letters, speeches, and artifacts. Offered: jointly with HSTAA 373.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 383
GWSS 384 Social History of American Women in the Twentieth Century (5) SSc
Analyzes major themes in the history of women in North America from 1890 through the 1990s. Themes include family and community formation, social activism, education, paid and unpaid labor patterns, war, migration, and changing conceptions of womanhood and femininity in the twentieth century. Offered: jointly with HSTAA 374.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 384
GWSS 385 Women and Activism in the U.S., 1820-1990s (5) SSc
Analyzes how U.S. social reform movements between the 1820s and the 1990s shaped discourses of gender, race, class, nation, and citizenship. Social movements include temperance, anti-prostitution, prison reform, dress reform, reproductive rights, eugenics, suffrage/anti-suffrage, abolitionism, labor, the "mothers' movement," civil rights, LGBTQ movement, dis/abilities, and evangelicalism.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 385
GWSS 389 Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Media (5) SSc, DIV
Introduction to media representations of gender, race, and sexuality. Offered: jointly with AES 389/COM 389.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 389
GWSS 390 Intermediate Special Topics in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (5, max. 15) SSc, DIV
Exploration of various topics and issues relevant to the study of gender, women, and sexuality. Recommended: GWSS 200.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 390
GWSS 391 Collaborations in Feminism and Technology (5) SSc, DIV
Examines feminist theories of technology and social change, ways that activists have used technology to build coalitions across diverse contexts, and links between the "do it yourself" approach to social movement and open-source ethics in technology cultures. Course topics include: identity and subjectivity; technological activism; gender, race and sexualities; place; labor; ethics; and the transformative potentials of new technologies.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 391
GWSS 392 Asian American and Pacific Islander Women (5) SSc, DIV
Explores the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality in the lives of Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Examines how forces such as immigration, colonialism, sovereignty, labor, family, gender roles and relations, community, war, homeland politics, transnationalism, and social movements shaped and were shaped by these women. Offered: jointly with AAS 392.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 392
GWSS 405 Comparative Women's Movements and Activism (5) SSc
Comparative cultural, national, and historical study of women's movements and activisms. Critically analyzes multiple arenas of women's movements and resistance. Topics include feminist anti-racism, pre-nationalism and nationalism, economics, electoral politics, women's and human rights, and international/transnational feminisms. Prerequisite: either GWSS 305, or SOC 364.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 405
GWSS 409 Queer Health (5) SSc, DIV
Examines the relationship between Western biomedicine and Queer theory. Critically analyzes the modes of thinking, caring, being, and expressing that emerge as a result of the "merger" of these two fields with contradicting views of gender, sex, health, wellbeing, and sexuality. Offered: jointly with ANTH 409.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 409
GWSS 420 Gender and Sexuality in India (5) SSc, DIV
Traces histories and debates in feminist and queer studies in India. Approaches gender and sexuality as configurations -- multiple, contested, and always in flux. Explores how gender and sexuality are produced, experienced, and fought over at specific moments. Recommended: GWSS 200.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 420
GWSS 427 Women and Violence (5) SSc, DIV
Multi-disciplinary explorations of the continuum of violence which affects women's lives, ranging from experience in personal settings (family violence) to cultural or state policies (prisons, wars). Violence against women explored in the context of societal, political, and state violence.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 427
GWSS 429 Scandinavian Women Writers in English Translation (5) A&H, DIV
Selected works by major Scandinavian women writers from mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois realism to the present with focus on feminist issues in literary criticism. Offered: jointly with SCAND 427.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 429
GWSS 438 Jewish Women in Contemporary America (5) SSc, DIV
Examines how Jewish women's identities are socially constructed and transformed in contemporary America, using social histories, memoirs, and ethnographies to analyze scholars' approaches to Jewish women's lives. Topics include the role of social class, religion, migration, the Holocaust, and race relations in Jewish women's lives. Offered: jointly with JEW ST 438.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 438
GWSS 440 Reading Native American Women's Lives (5) SSc, DIV
Seminar based on social science writings, autobiographies, biographies, and fiction written by, with, or about indigenous women of the United States and Canada. Offered: jointly with AIS 440.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 440
GWSS 445 Feminist science (Fiction) Studies (5) SSc/A&H
This course addresses science fictional narratives to trouble and transform the human, the inhumane, the scientific apparatus, and the natural world. Students examine gender, race, sexuality, and ability, alongside relevant scientific documents and feminist theory, to better understand both science and fiction through feminist lenses. Recommended: Recommended: GWSS 200 or equivalent
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 445
GWSS 446 Global Asia (5) SSc, DIV
Explores how Asia has been constructed through transnational interactions such as imperialism, anti-colonialism, tourism, diaspora, and global capitalism. Topics include the cultural construction of similarity and difference, politics of representation, and political economy of global circulations of people and things. Prerequisite: one 200-level ANTH course. Offered: jointly with ANTH 442/JSIS A 452; W.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 446
GWSS 447 Economics of Gender (5) SSc, DIV
Microeconomic analysis of the sources of gender differences in earnings, labor force participation, occupational choice, education, and consumption. Economic theories of discrimination, human capital, fertility, and intrahousehold resource allocation. Economics of the family in developed and developing countries. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.0 in ECON 300. Offered: jointly with ECON 447.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 447
GWSS 448 Digital Capitalism and Data Colonialism (5) SSc, DIV
Covers key debates relating to digital capitalism and data colonialism. Draws on feminist approaches to consider how digital capitalism and data colonialism are reproducing intersectional inequalities. Explores multiple examples of digital technologies including digital labor platforms, biometrics, surveillance technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 448
GWSS 450 Language and Gender (5) SSc/A&H, DIV
Survey of the theoretical trends, methods, and research findings on the relationship between language and gender. Focus on power relations in gendered language use. Extensive study of research based on conversational analysis. Prerequisite: LING 200; either LING 201, LING 203, or ANTH 203. Offered: jointly with ANTH 450/LING 458.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 450
GWSS 451 Latina Cultural Production (5) A&H/SSc
Explores the expressive culture of Chicana/Mexican American/Latina women in the United States. Cultural and artistic practices in home and in literary, music, film, spoken word, performing and visual arts. Focuses on how Chicana/Latina writers and artists re-envision traditional iconography.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 451
GWSS 452 Advanced Gender and Pop Culture (5) SSc/A&H, DIV
How "the popular" as a gender, racialized, and class-based phenomenon is produced, circulated, consumed, and resisted in local, national, and transnational contexts. Readings from history, literature, and feminist interdisciplinary studies. Recommended: GWSS 200.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 452
GWSS 453 Lesbian Lives and Culture (5) SSc
An exploration and overview of lesbianism in historical, social, cultural, and interpersonal contexts. Prerequisite: either GWSS 200 or GWSS 206.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 453
GWSS 454 Women, Words, Music, and Change (5) A&H/SSc, DIV
Comparative analysis of use of myths, tales, music, and other forms of expressive culture to account for, reinforce, and change women's status and roles. Offered: jointly with ANTH 454.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 454
GWSS 455 Contemporary Feminist Theory (5) SSc, DIV
Raises the question of how political contexts condition the way some ideas become theory. Emphasizes the present crises in thinking about a transnational feminism. Prerequisite: GWSS 200.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 455
GWSS 457 Women in China to 1800 (5) SSc, DIV
Gender in Chinese culture, women's situations in the patrilineal family system, and the ways women's situations changed as other dimensions of China's political system, economy, and culture changed from early times through the nineteenth century. Offered: jointly with HSTAS 457.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 457
GWSS 458 Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood (5) SSc, DIV
Examines how motherhood is culturally constituted, regulated, and managed within various ideological and technological milieus. Uses ethnographies from anthropology and case studies from feminist legal theory. Topics include slave mothers, surrogate mothers, lesbian mothers, transracial mothers, co-mothers, teen mothers. Prerequisite: GWSS 200. Offered: jointly with ANTH 484.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 458
GWSS 460 Feminist Oral History Research Methodology (5) SSc, DIV
How to create feminist oral histories. Gain practical and technical skills. Includes preparing an interview guide, conducting interviews, learning to transcribe, contextualize, and move from the transcript to interpretation and analysis. Addresses issues of consent, research protocols, and archiving feminist oral histories.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 460
GWSS 462 Isak Dinesen and Karen Blixen (5) A&H
The fiction of Isak Dinesen (pseudonym for Karen Blixen) reevaluated in light of current issues in literary criticism, particularly feminist criticism. Close readings of selected tales, essays, and criticism. Offered: jointly with SCAND 462.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 462
GWSS 464 Queer Desires (5) SSc, DIV
Explores desire and the politics of sexuality as gendered, raced, classed, and transnational processes. Intimacies and globalization, normality and abnormality, and power and relationships are sites of inquiry into the constitution of "queerness." Students interrogate queer and sexuality studies, using varied media - films, activist writings, and scholarly articles.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 464
GWSS 466 Gender and Architecture (3) SSc/A&H
Examines gender in the experience, practice, and theory of architecture and urban space with a focus on modern typologies: skyscraper, home, convent, bachelor pad, street, and closet. Draws from architectural and art history, social studies, design practice and theory, comparative literature, film studies, and queer theory. Offered: jointly with ARCH 466.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 466
GWSS 468 Latin American Women (5) A&H/SSc, DIV
The elaboration of discourses of identity in relation to gender, ethnicity, social class, and nationality, by women writers from South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Testimonial literature, literature and resistance, women's experimental fiction. Prerequisite: either SPAN 303 or SPAN 316; SPAN 321. Offered: jointly with SPAN 468.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 468
GWSS 474 Trans/Gender Queries (5) SSc, DIV
Writings by and about people who fall outside common conceptions of "women" and "men." Looks beyond this dualism in contemporary and historical global concepts, locating the emerging field of transgender studies in feminist studies and asking what the category "transgender" enables and obscures.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 474
GWSS 476 Women and the City (5) SSc, DIV
Explores the reciprocal relations between gender relations, the layout of cities, and the activities of urban residents. Topics include: feminist theory and geography (women, gender, and the organization of space); women and urban poverty, housing and homelessness; gender roles and labor patterns; geographies of childcare; and women and urban politics. Offered: jointly with GEOG 476.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 476
GWSS 485 Issues for Ethnic Minorities and Women In Science and Engineering (3/5) SSc
Addresses issues faced by women and ethnic minorities in physical sciences and engineering. Focuses on participation, barriers to participation, and solutions to those issues for women and ethnic minorities in physical sciences and engineering. Course overlaps with: BST 205. Offered: jointly with PHYS 451.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 485
GWSS 486 Representing Beyond the Binaries: Mixing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Media (5) SSc, DIV
Cultural studies approach to examining the mixed formations that race, sexuality, and gender take in the contemporary United States media. Draws upon multi-disciplinary scholarship in examination of the media. Offered: jointly with AES 490/COM 490.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 486
GWSS 487 Advanced Psychobiology of Women (5) SSc/NSc
Intensive reading on current issues relevant to women's psychology and physiology. Prerequisite: minimum 2.0 grade in PSYCH 357/ GWSS 357. Offered: jointly with PSYCH 487; W.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 487
GWSS 489 Black Cultural Studies (5) SSc, DIV
Examines how images of blackness have been (re)constructed through identity formation and entrenched inequality. Topics include black women's bodies, black men's bodies, blackface minstrelsy, black queer studies, black power, and black hybridities. Offered: jointly with AES 489/COM 489.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 489
GWSS 490 Advanced Special Topics in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (5, max. 15) SSc, DIV
Seminar on topics relevant to the field of gender, women, feminist, sexuality, and nation in contemporary and/or historical contexts. Students have the opportunity to engage with theories and methodologies that shape the field. Recommended: either GWSS 200, GWSS 302, or previous coursework in feminist studies.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 490
GWSS 493 Senior Thesis (2-5, max. 15) SSc
Students conceptualize a topic, conduct primary and secondary research, and write a major paper or project that engages methodologies and theories in interdisciplinary women's studies. Students work independently with a faculty member.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 493
GWSS 494 Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Capstone (5) SSc
Provides graduating seniors with the opportunity to demonstrate facility with writing, critical thinking, documentation of scholarly work, research/gathering of information, and the ability to disseminate ideas to intended audiences via the creation of a capstone project. Prerequisite: GWSS 200; GWSS 302; a minimum grade of 2.0 in one additional graded 300-level GWSS course; and a minimum grade of 2.0 in one additional graded 400-level GWSS course.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 494
GWSS 495 Tutoring Women Studies (5)
Students train to serve as tutors in designated courses. Facilitate weekly group discussions, assist with writing assignments, explain course materials. Prerequisite: GWSS 200; GWSS 300. Credit/no-credit only.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 495
GWSS 496 Global Feminisms: International and Indigenous Communities (5-12, max. 24) SSc
Participation in academic study abroad programs related to Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, emphasizing globalization and study in international contexts or indigenous communities within the United States. Prerequisite: GWSS 200; GWSS 300.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 496
GWSS 497 Fieldwork in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (1-15, max. 15)
Internship in local feminist-oriented agencies or projects. Includes a seminar component linking internship to scholarly literature and small group discussion. Supports in-depth exploration of social issues and skill development. Prerequisite: GWSS 200 and GWSS 300/AES 322. Credit/no-credit only.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 497
GWSS 499 Undergraduate Research (1-5, max. 10)
Independent study and research supervised by a faculty member with appropriate academic interest. Prerequisite: GWSS 200; GWSS 300.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 499
GWSS 500 Feminist Social Theory (5)
Interdisciplinary feminist critiques of modern social theory's gendered, racialized, and sexed presumptions. Deconstructs social theory's liberal and Marxist traditions to address global and transnational feminist agendas. Considers Marxist feminism, feminist psychoanalysis, affect studies, decolonial and anti-colonial feminisms, queer theory; Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and women of color feminisms.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 500
GWSS 501 Feminist Formations (5)
Examines the relationship among: (1) feminist thought, as it emerges in everyday spaces and grassroots movements; (2) feminism as an intellectual formation; and (3) Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies as an institutional site. Focuses on locations and conjunctures at which this relationship emerges, as well as how feminist knowledge travels and is transformed over time.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 501
GWSS 502 Feminist Queer and Trans Inquiries (5)
Foregrounding feminist frameworks, examines the theorization of gender and sexuality within queer and trans studies. Students explore the tools these fields have for understanding such formations at the conjuncture of race, ability, class, citizenship, and other social matrices, and learn to situate their analyses of gender and sexuality within genealogies of thought dedicated to dismantling hierarchies of oppression. Recommended: GWSS 500 and GWSS 501.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 502
GWSS 503 Feminist Research and Methods of Inquiry (5)
Explores appropriate research methodologies for interdisciplinary work. Asks how scholarship is related to feminism as a social movement and to the institutions in which we work. Focuses on how similar objects of study are constituted in different disciplines for feminist scholars.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 503
GWSS 504 Philosophies and Techniques of Teaching (5)
Acquaints students with professional and educational issues of college teaching. Students design a course, including a daily outline, reading materials, evaluation instruments, course activities, assessment plans. Includes weekly teaching exercises as well as videotaping an actual class. Prerequisite: experience as a TA or equivalent. Priority given to Women Studies graduate students.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 504
GWSS 505 Feminist Publishing (5)
Seminar on feminist academic publishing. Students revise a scholarly paper in preparation for submission to an academic journal and provide critical commentary on other students' scholarly work. Also addresses general and specific issues related to the profession of academic publishing.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 505
GWSS 510 Documentary Film/Video Research Methods in Native Communities (5)
Seminar exploring theoretical, methodological, and aesthetic issues when researching documentary film and video projects in Native American communities. Utilizes readings, screening, discussions, and a major research project to explore issues of documentary representation, ethics, and historiography. First part of a two-quarter documentary production sequence. Offered: jointly with AIS 501.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 510
GWSS 515 Black Feminist Creativity (5)
Explores how Black feminist thinkers use creativity to produce feminist thought. Focus on works of Black women and gender-marginalized visual artists, musicians, poets, and filmmakers in conversation with Black feminist cultural theorists. Emphasizes creative production as a primary mode of knowledge production. Requires foundational knowledge of Black feminisms. Recommended: coursework in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and/or Black or African American Studies.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 515
GWSS 520 Gender and Sexuality in India (5)
Traces genealogies and debates in feminist and queer studies in India. Approaches gender and sexuality as configurations -- multiple, contested, and always in flux. Explores how gender and sexuality are produced, experienced, and fought over at specific moments.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 520
GWSS 526 The Study of Lives in Feminist Research: Narrative and Visual Approaches (5)
Examines the study of others' lives by feminist researchers using ethnography, oral history, biography, photography, and documentary film. Explores the craft, goals, and ethics involved in these forms of representation. Includes workshop critique of research project in development.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 526
GWSS 528 Gender and Sexuality in China (5)
Explores gender and sexuality in China's process of modernization, from the late Qing dynasty through the building of the Republic, Communist revolution, and post-Mao economic reform. Examines, through historical, anthropological, and cultural studies scholarship, the centrality of these social constructs in terms of family, state, labor, body, and ethnicity. Offered: jointly with ANTH 528/JSIS A 528.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 528
GWSS 534 Gender, Sex, and Religion (5)
Delves more deeply into foundational texts of the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity, while paying closer attention to historiographic trends in the field of gender and feminist studies of religion. With JSIS C 334/GWSS 334. Offered: jointly with RELIG 534; Sp.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 534
GWSS 539 Social Movements in Contemporary India (5)
Covers issues of social change, economic development, and identity politics in contemporary India studied through environmental and women's movements. Includes critiques of development and conflicts over forests, dams, women's rights, religious community, ethnicity, and citizenship. Offered: jointly with ANTH 539/JSIS A 531.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 539
GWSS 541 Research Seminar: Feminist Geographies (5)
Explores major research themes in feminist geographies. Particular attention to the concept that gendered identities and spaces are discursively (re)produced. Emphasizes recent feminist scholarship that emphasizes difference, as well as the intersections between gender, "race," ethnicity, sexuality, age, nationality, class, and other social identities and divisions. Offered: jointly with GEOG 541.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 541
GWSS 542 Gender, Music, Nation (5)
Music criticism and music studies as a site of feminist intellectual practice. Explores the ways gender and race/ethnicity shape musical discourse as well as narrative constructions of nation in regional and transnational contexts. Considers the influence of feminist theory, queer studies, performance studies, and cultural studies on music scholarship.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 542
GWSS 545 Transnational Sexualities (5)
Focuses on transnational processes such as colonialism and globalization, imperialism, and consumerism. Analyzes attempts to both codify and undermine universal queer subjects. Participants theorize sexual practices, discourses, and histories through explorations of tourism, HIV/AIDS, immigration, and other interstices of transnational intimacies.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 545
GWSS 555 Feminist International Political Economy (5)
Provides overview of feminist engagements with international political economy. Topics include: feminist critiques of classical political economists; inter-war internationalisms, anti-colonial nationalisms and feminisms; feminist development studies; post colonial; ' third world' and transnational feminisms; feminist critiques of globalization, governmentality, and neoliberalism.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 555
GWSS 564 Queer Desires (5)
Explores desire and the politics of sexuality as gendered, raced, classed, and transnational processes. Intimacies and globalization, normality and abnormality, and power and relationships as sites of inquiry into the constitution of "queerness." Students interrogate queer and sexuality studies using varied media - films, activist writing, scholarly articles.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 564
GWSS 572 Transnational Chicana Feminist Theory (5)
Examination of the body of knowledge and scholarship produced under the rubric "Transnational Chicana feminist theory." Analyzes the ways Chicana feminist theory dynamically engages intellectual, poetic, and aesthetic traditions. Considers how Chicana feminist theory functions within and between disciplinary frameworks. Explores transnational roots and routes of Chicana feminist theory.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 572
GWSS 575 Feminist New Media Studies (5)
Examines the raced and gendered stakes in the construction of online lives as disembodied, and provides feminist frameworks for intersectional and transnational analyses of online engagement. Explores methodological variations and ethical stakes of critical theory, autoethnography, and creative academic work to clarify knowledge claims made by these analytical forms. Prerequisite: Graduate standing; otherwise, permission of the instructor
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 575
GWSS 577 Women of Color in Academia (5)
Through scholarship and identifications, "women of color" in academia are often positioned to question and redefine academia, education, and the established boundaries between academia and other communities. Discussion focuses on understanding institutional sites and forms of knowledge production and validation in academia in the United States.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 577
GWSS 580 Black Queer Sexuality Studies (5)
Historical formation and embodied experience of black queerness. Examines racialized sexuality as object of analysis, transformed over time within and across Black, Feminist, and Queer Studies.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 580
GWSS 581 Queer and Trans History (5)
Studies development of queer and trans history as subfields and interdisciplinary thought that has shaped them (critical race theory, queer theory, trans studies). Surveys foundational works of theory that have influenced historians (and other scholars) as well as important books and articles in the two interrelated historical subfields. Examines the role of intersectional analysis in the subfields as well as generative debates among historians. Offered: jointly with HSTCMP 581.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 581
GWSS 589 Gender, Race, and Communication (5)
Analysis of the role of media in the construction of reality, production processes, and their influence on media representation of women and people of color. Offered: jointly with COM 567.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 589
GWSS 590 Special Topics (1-5, max. 15)
Offered by visitors or resident faculty as a one-time in-depth study of special interest.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 590
GWSS 592 Feminist Writing Workshop (5)
Supports graduate students writing proposals, theses, and dissertations. Participants must have a feminist research topic and a commitment to share work and support peers. Students draft and revise a proposal, article, or thesis/dissertation chapter; and hone editing skills by reviewing peers' work. Exposes students to feminist intellectual fields, research methods, and writing genres while helping establish peer-review relationships.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 592
GWSS 595 Graduate Student Colloquium (2, max. 12)
Forum for graduate students to share their research ideas and progress, general examination preparation issues, and teaching concerns. Prerequisite: Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies graduate students only. Credit/no-credit only.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 595
GWSS 596 Preceptorial for Women Studies Graduate Students (5, max. 15)
Graduate student and faculty member work collaboratively in developing or revising course content and pedagogical approach on a specialized area.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 596
GWSS 597 Fieldwork in Women Studies (2-5, max. 15)
Supervised ethnographic and other on-site research by Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies graduate students. Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies graduate students only.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 597
GWSS 598 Directed Readings in Feminist Studies (*, max. 35)
Selected topics for individualized or small group study.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 598
GWSS 599 Graduate Research Colloquium (2, max. 6)
A colloquium in which Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies graduate students and faculty present and discuss their research at various points in its development. Credit/no-credit only.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 599
GWSS 600 Independent Study or Research (*-)
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 600
GWSS 700 Master's Thesis (*-)
Credit/no-credit only.
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 700
GWSS 701 Master's Practicum ([1-10]-, max. 10)
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 701
GWSS 800 Doctoral Dissertation (*-)
View course details in MyPlan: GWSS 800
