Courses

GNSE 12103 Treating Trans-: Practices of Medicine, Practices of Theory | Instructor: Paula Martin
Crosslists: ANTH/CHDV/HIPS/HLTH/HMRT
Medical disciplines from psychiatry to surgery have all attempted to identify and to treat gendered misalignment, while queer theory and feminisms have simultaneously tried to understand if and how trans- theories should be integrated into their respective intellectual projects. This course looks at the logics of the medical treatment of transgender (and trans- more broadly) in order to consider the mutual entanglement of clinical processes with theoretical ones. Over the quarter we will read ethnographic accounts and theoretical essays, listen to oral histories, discuss the intersections of race and ability with gender, and interrogate concepts like "material bodies" and "objective science". Primary course questions include: 1. How is "trans-" conceptualized, experienced, and lived? How has trans-studies distinguished itself from feminisms and queer theories? 2. What are the objects, processes, and problematics trans- medicine identifies and treats? How is "trans-" understood and operationalized through medical practices? 3. What meanings of health, power, knowledge, gender, and the body are utilized or defined by our authors? What relations can we draw between them?
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12104 Foundations of Masculinity Studies | Instructor: Omar Safadi
Crosslists: SOCI
In recent years, the term “toxic masculinity” has been used in contexts from the #MeToo movement to the rise of Donald Trump, from Gillette advertisements to the behavior of men on the reality show The Bachelorette. Why is the conversation around “toxic masculinity” taking place in the United States at this moment? In this course, we will go beyond banal statements like “toxic masculinity” and “men are trash” to critically ask, What role does masculinity play in social life? How is masculinity produced, and are there different ways to be masculine? This course provides students with an intensive introduction to the foundational theory and research in the field of masculinities studies. We will use an intersectional lens to study the ways in which the concept and lived experience of masculinity are shaped by economic, social, cultural, and political forces. We will examine how the gendered social order influences the way people of all genders perform masculinity as well as the ways men perceive themselves and other men, women, and social situations. Verbally and in writing, students will develop an argument about the way contemporary masculinity is constructed and performed.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 15002 Gender and Sexuality in World Civ I | Instructors: Various
The first quarter of the GNSE Civ sequence offers a historical examination of bodies, sex, and gender. Through a series of readings that include historical primary sources and examples of cultural production from antiquity to the present, we will investigate how bodies across a variety of cultures become sexed and gendered. In particular, we will ask how the very categories of sex and gender not only produce social meaning from bodies and their anatomical differences but may also be complicit in acts violence, oppression, and colonization. Thematically we will pay attention to the emergence and critique of the distinction between sex and gender; resistances to the gender binary; the relationship between gender, power, and authority; feminism and critiques of Western feminism; the category of woman as an object of scientific knowledge; and the flourishing of and violence against trans life. Finally, while we will be dealing with historical accounts in this course, the aim is to understand how the regulation of bodies in the past has informed and may challenge our understanding of the diversity of embodied experience in the present.

GNSE 20001 Theories of Sexuality and Gender | Instructors: Kristen Schilt and Charles DeCock
Crosslists: SOCI/CHDV
This is a one-quarter, seminar-style course for undergraduates. Its aim is triple: to engage scenes and concepts central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality; to provide familiarity with key theoretical anchors for that study; and to provide skills for deriving the theoretical bases of any kind of method. Students will produce descriptive, argumentative, and experimental engagements with theory and its scenes as the quarter progresses.
PQ: 3rd or 4th year status and previous coursework in GNSE. This course is required for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20002 The Body In Chinese Daoism And Buddhism: A Comparative Approach | Instructor: Ronghu Zhu
Crosslists: EALC/RLST
What can the body tell us about religion? How do people use their bodies in ritual? Can the body escape death? What happens to the body after death? In this course, we explore how medieval Chinese Daoists and Buddhists imagined, disciplined, and transcended the body. Through close readings of primary and secondary sources, we will look at practices such as food and sexual abstinence, visualization, body sacrifice, mummification, and the gendered quest for immortality or enlightenment. Along the way, we will notice both similarities and differences between these traditions, helping us better understand the rich diversity of Chinese religious experience. No prior background required; all materials available in English.

GNSE 20132 Gender, Race, And Horror | Instructor: AE Stevenson 
Crosslists: CMST/MADD
This course will contend with the ways that horror as a film genre constructs and deconstructs notions of gender and race in society. We will attend to texts across decades and subgenres that will illustrate how gender and race are made and regulated through notions of confusion, fear, and repulsion. By attending to these universal human feelings, students will learn how emotions are evoked through the construction of the text, its portrayal of the disruption of gender norms and its construction of racial boundaries. Students will learn the necessary vocabulary and methodologies to be able to critically analyze (audio)visual texts. In order to do this, students will be guided through how to construct argumentative critical papers through proper utilization of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. By the end of the course, students will be well versed in cinematographic terms such that they will be able to critically analyze texts to understand the impact of perspective, interpretation, and judgment. This course is meant to help students navigate and make sense of an increasingly scary world by learning to appreciate fear as a necessary human expression. Finally, and most importantly, students will be able to engage with the age-old notion of terror to be able lead a more ethical and intellectually richer life.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20135 Divas, Idols, Material Girls: Gender And Sexuality In Music Videos | Instructor: Paula Harper
Crosslists: MADD/MUSI
The stark black and white of Madonna’s “Vogue” and the pinks and sparkles of “Material Girl.” The explosive surprise releases of Beyoncé's BEYONCÉ and Lemonade visual albums. The lavish cinematic spectacle of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” and the fanbait intertextuality of SM Entertainment’s Aespa. Since MTV’s advent in 1981, hit music videos have made a number of pop songs inextricable from iconic imagery and choreography; ubiquitous digital devices and the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok have only increased pop music’s audiovisuality. Looking at and listening to female pop icons raises fraught questions of agency, representation, race, sexuality/sexualization, bodies, commodification, and capital. In this course, students will gain a vocabulary for talking about both the audio and visual parameters of music video, and they will use this vocabulary to engage with critical frameworks for examining meaning, circulation, and reception in contemporary music videos. Assignments across the course will allow students to experiment with a range of writing and media genres, including critical close readings, micro-reception histories, thinkpieces, podcast episodes, and video essays.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20137 Horror, Abjection, And The Monstrous Feminine | Instructor: Hoda El Shakry 
Crosslists: CMLT/ENGL/MADD
This course explores cinematic and literary works of horror (the uncanny, gothic, sci-fi, paranormal, psychological thriller, killer/slasher, gore) from around the world. As a mode of speculative fiction, the genre envisions possible or imagined worlds that amplify curiosities, dreads, fears, terrors, phobias, and paranoias which simultaneously repel and attract. Horror frequently explores the boundaries of what it means to be human by dwelling on imaginaries of the non-human and other. It often exploits the markers of difference that preoccupy our psychic, libidinal, and social lifeworlds—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, but also the fundamental otherness that is other peoples’ minds and bodies. Interrogating the genre’s tension between desire and fear, our course will focus on the centrality of abjection and the monstrous feminine—as both thematic and aesthetic tropes—to works of horror. Films and fiction will be paired with theoretical readings that contextualize the genre of horror while considering its critical implications in relation to biopolitical and geopolitical forms of power. Content Warning: Course materials will feature graphic, violent, and oftentimes disturbing images and subjects. Enrolled students will be expected to watch, read, and discuss all course materials.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20167: Black Feminisms: Combahee to Chicago in Theory & Practice | Instructors: Cathy Cohen and Tracye Matthews 
Crosslists: CHST/PLSC/RDIN
This course is an exploration of the theoretical ideas and political actions that underpin contemporary Black feminisms beginning in the 1960s to the present. Students will interrogate the many facets of Black feminist thought and practice by engaging diverse forms of expression including books, articles, film, poetry, storytelling, and music. As we examine course materials we will constantly grapple with a set of questions including what makes these texts, articles, and films feminist, and how have these theories been put into action across time, communities, and geography.   While the course will be broadly focused, we will repeatedly turn our attention to Black feminist theory and practice rooted in Chicago.  Throughout the quarter we will engage a diverse set of course materials enhanced by conversations with guest speakers such as Barbara Ransby, Beth Richie, Charlene Carruthers, Essence McDowell, dream hampton, Moya Bailey, and Tobias Spears. The class will conclude with a half day symposium on Black Feminisms in Chicago where students will present their final projects.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20168/30168 Gender, Sexuality, and Christianity | Instructor: Erin Walsh
Crosslists: CLCV/MDVL/RLST
Throughout the centuries, how have appeals to biblical literature and Christian teaching served to challenge, preserve, or subvert normative expectations for gender expression and sexuality? This course exposes students to the foundational texts and pivotal debates that continue to shape our politics and society. We will begin with how the writers of New Testament literature set trajectories for subsequent struggles over biblical interpretation and the organization of Christian communities. Students will learn how ancient medical views of the gendered body shaped this literature. We will examine how discourses around martyrs, ascetics, and saints provided avenues for late antique and medieval Christians to imagine the transgression of social norms. Moving to the pre-modern and modern periods, the class will explore the ever-changing relationship between political power and ecclesial authorities, with an eye to debates regarding marriage and procreation. We will approach texts through a historical lens while paying attention to the philosophical, theological, and ethical issues involved. Readings will be drawn from all over the globe, reflecting the multilingual, multicultural, and multivocal nature of Christianity from its origins to the present day. We will engage modern theorists to place contemporary approaches in conversation with the historical archive to better understand discourses around virginity, sexuality, and identity. No prior knowledge required. 
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 21001 Cultural Psychology | Instructor: Richard Shweder
Crosslists: AMER/ANTH/CHDV/PSYC
There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of "normal" psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a single or uniform fundamental psychology for all peoples of the world. Research findings in cultural psychology thus raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. In this course we analyze the concept of "culture" and examine ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.

GNSE 22200 Haunting And/As/Of Power | Instructor: Tanima Sharma
Crosslists: ANTH/RDIN
Haunting is a liminal category that signifies presence despite absence, unfinished pasts in the present, or ruptures within what is considered human, scientific, normal and real. In this course we will examine multiple hauntings–as metaphor and as experience–situating them in a global context within the afterlives of racial and caste capitalism, gendered dispossession, empire, and neoliberalism. Mediated through ethnographies, social theory, literature, film, psychoanalysis and historical archives, we will encounter vampires, witches, zombies, jinn, ghosts, transgender monsters, the paranormal, aliens, and other friendly or vengeful spirits in order to understand how they story memory, time, space, embodiment, transgression, violence, and desire. How can the spectral be deciphered? What does being haunted feel like? How does haunting as an analytic foreground the sensuous, affective, intimate and overwhelming dimensions of self and other, of structures of power, and of the limits of the knowable? We will answer these questions and more through the work of David McNally, Tithi Bhattacharya, Silvia Federici, Susan Stryker, Christina Sharpe, Avery Gordon, Stefania Pandolfo, Emily Ng, and Susan Lepselter, among others.

GNSE 22295 Contemporary Social Problems: Morrissey's America | Instructor: Rene Flores
Crosslist: SOCI
What are the most pressing social problems in the U.S.? What do we know about them and what can we do to address them? We will use the life and music of Morrissey, the controversial former frontman of The Smiths, as a lens through which to explore our country’s most critical social issues. An outspoken defender of animal rights and disaffected youth’s preeminent lyricist, Morrissey has also increasingly flirted with nationalist policies. As such, he embodies the tensions, complexities, and ambiguities around critical topics that characterize our time. Guided by sociological theory, we will examine the latest social science evidence on race, immigration, gender and sexuality, health, poverty, segregation, crime, and education as they are key sites in which social inequality is produced and reproduced today. Finally, we will discuss potential solutions to these problems.

GNSE 23174 Sex, Gender, and Kinship: Colonial Perspectives | Instructor: Deirdre Lyons
Crosslists: ANTH/HIST/RDIN/SOCI
This course analyzes the contested relationships between gender, sexuality, kinship, and western colonialism from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Drawing on historical case studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, this course will cover a broad range of empires and colonies to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between colonization and ideologies and practices of gender, sex, and kinship. Analyzing case studies predominately from the Atlantic World (with attention to colonies elsewhere), we will explore topics such as the emergence of colonial gender ideologies, gender and colonial governance, family life and kinship strategies, the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with race and class, queerness and queer lives, the politics of sex work and reproduction, and gendered migrations across empires.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23175 Sexuality in U.S. History Post 1900 | Instructor: Red Tremmel
Crosslists: HIST
In this course we will study the history of changing sexual practices, relations, politics, and cultures in the region of North America now comprising the United States and 574 sovereign tribal nations. Moving through various contexts, such as urban drag balls, medical schools, federal agencies, strip clubs, military projects, homophile and other liberatory movements, as well as popular culture, we will use primary and secondary sources to develop a research-based understanding of how sexual discourses are produced, revised, and remixed among and across generations.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23178 The Queer Enemy and the Politics of Homophobia | Instructor: Omar Safadi
Crosslists: HMRT/PLSC/RDIN
How is the queer enemy politically constructed? And what are the uses and effects of this enemy in contemporary politics? This course investigates queer sexuality as a specific kind of threat and homophobia as a specific mode of political antagonism. Key to understanding this specificity is the examination of other kinds of political enemies. Across categories of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and empire, the course theorizes the queer enemy in a comparative perspective. Engaging scholars like Monique Wittig, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Jean Paul Sartre, we compare homophobia with other forms of political enmity like misogyny, anti-Black racism, and anti-Semitism. After investigating antagonism across categories of political difference, we delve into the specificities of homophobic antagonism in the second half of the course. Here, we explore how the queer threat is framed: through metaphors of civilizational destruction but also through anti-sodomy and anti-disclosure laws. We also trace how the normalization of the queer enemy has produced new enemies. Through notions of “Pinkwashing” and the “Gay International,” we further examine how queer liberation is made to stand in for colonial domination. But we also read critiques of the “gay=colonialism” equation, asking how homophobia mediates anti-colonial politics. Finally, we conclude the course with Michel Foucault’s seminal essay and relate the question of the queer enemy to the threat of new human relations. 
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23180 Global Maternal and Child Health | Instructor: Erick Amick
Crosslist: HLTH 
This course provides a foundation in global perspectives on maternal and child health research, practice, and policy. The course will cover a range of maternal and child health topics to examine critical challenges facing women, children, providers, and policymakers in some of the world's most vulnerable communities. Students in this course will: 1) understand the status of maternal and child health in a variety of communities and contexts, using key health and development indicators; 2) critically analyze past and present public health programs and policies utilized to address maternal and child health needs in diverse communities; 3) assess the economic, political, social, and cultural factors that affect maternal and child health programs and outcomes.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23185 Exploring Gender Biases from Social, Developmental, and Cognitive Perspectives | Instructor: Molly Tallberg 
Crosslist: PSYC
Women are underrepresented across political leadership, business, and certain STEM domains. While these gender gaps have improved over the last 50 years, they remain persistent, particularly in positions of power and those that grant high socioeconomic status. This course will explore how these gender biases come to be, and how they influence the world around us. Where do these gender biases come from? When in life do their consequences emerge? What impact do these biases have on individuals, communities, and institutions? What can be done to prevent gender biases from developing? How do they intersect with race, and how do they operate outside of the gender binary? This course will address these timely questions, integrating literature from across the psychological sciences to explain the cognitive biases, social landscapes, and developmental trajectories that give rise to gender inequality.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors

GNSE 23702 Sexual Health | Instructor: David Moskowitz
Crosslist: HLTH
Sexual health is a growing component of public health outreach. The goal of this course is to provide students with a foundational understanding of sexual health from a public health perspective. Through participation in this course, students will increase their knowledge about the history of sexual health promotion in the public health sphere. They will delve into sexual and gender identity construction and explore identity-behavioral expressions. They will critically examine and discuss common sexual health issues addressed by public health practitioners, their epidemiology, and their underlying social determinants; a global health lens will be applied to such examinations. Additionally, recognition of the key methodological considerations in the measurement of sexual behavior and sexual health outcomes will be elucidated (including strengths and limitations of various methodological approaches –quantitative, qualitative, clinical, and biomedical). By the completion of the course, students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and application of key theoretical foundations of sexual health promotion and sexual health behavior change and be able to promote sexual health messages through marketing and dissemination. From a policy perspective, student can expect an increased knowledge about issues related to social and legislative policy analyses, their applications, and implications.

GNSE 24900 Nabokov: Lolita | Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
Crosslist: ENGL/FNDL/REES
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita.” Nabokov’s “great American novel" is often misread. Vanity Fair, for example, made the grand pronouncement that it was the 'most convincing love story' of the 20th century. And in the 21st century, the name Lolita is invoked, with a calculated slyness, as shorthand for a cunning debauchery, the sexual tutelage of prepubescents and adolescents, the girl as seducer. In this text-centered and discussion-based course, we look into the psychosexual profile of the ostensible first person narrator in order to overrule his graphomania and to better contemplate the work of the novel as art beyond his grasp, concerning ourselves with the novel’s language in all its complexities: as failure, as mania, and as conjuration.

GNSE 26994 Anticolonial Worlding: Literature, Film, Thought | Instructor: Hoda El Shakry 
Crosslist: CMLT/ENGL/HMRT/NEHC/RDIN/REES
This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the aesthetic and political dimensions of anticolonial projects during the twentieth century as well as their impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was marked by imperial violence and political crises that fueled coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and much of the Global South, that included anticolonial festivals, cultural exchanges, and transnational congresses. We will consider how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, race, gender, and language politics to critique colonial powers and envision a more just world. Engaging anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance.

GNSE 10144 Jane Austen and Literary Style | Instructor: Heather Keenleyside 
Crosslists: ENGL/FNDL 
Jane Austen was a master stylist. This is one of many reasons why her novels have had such a lasting cultural impact. But what specifically are we talking about when we refer to Austen’s “style”? This course attempts to answer this question by exploring the development of Austen’s style across three of her major novels: the early Northanger Abbey (1803), the middle-period Sense and Sensibility (1811), and the late Persuasion (1818). Throughout, we will learn to describe, analyze, and interpret one of her trademark formal techniques, free indirect discourse. We will also address the question of literary style alongside a host of related topics: narration, characterization, focalization, and voice. Select secondary readings may include works by narratologists, philosophers, and literary critics.

GNSE 12149 Prostitution and Sex Work in the Asia Pacific | Instructor: Le Vi Pham
Crosslists: EALC/GLST/HIST
This course examines the varied forms of prostitution and sex work in different societies in East Asia and the Asia Pacific region from the early modern period to the present. Paying close attention to the shifts in the organization of prostitution and sex work, state regulation and societal attitudes, the class explores how prostitution and sex work relates to broader questions of gender, sexuality, labor, family, and the state. This class is both thematic and loosely chronological. We cover prostitution, courtesans and social status in Qing China, Chosǒn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan, state-regulated prostitution in modernizing states in the early twentieth century, military prostitution and sexual violence during WWII and in the postwar period, as well as contemporary forms of sex work and queer sex work in the Asia Pacific. Through an examination of how prostitution was historically situated and regulated in the Asia-Pacific region, we will also engage with theoretical and contemporary debates about sex work. What counts as sex work? Should sex work be considered work or sexual violence? In other words, can sex work be interpreted as exercise of agency by women or is the work inescapably sexually violent and exploitative such that the “choice” to sell sex can never be freely made? How should the state regulate sex work?
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 13000 9 Weeks, 9 Professors, 9 Conversations about Gender and Sex | Instructor: Red Tremmel
This course offers students an opportunity to be in conversation with a diverse group of University of Chicago scholars whose work uses gender and/or sexuality as critical lenses for understanding the world. Each week, we’ll dive into the work of a different scholar, from fields such as anthropology, sociology, history, medicine, law, and comparative literature. On Tuesdays, we’ll explore materials they’ve chosen for us: texts, films, archives, or gallery exhibitions. On Thursdays, we’ll host them in our classroom for open and candid conversations about these materials, their research, career paths, and the questions that keep them up at night. Throughout the quarter, students will gain a richer understanding of how gender and sexuality function as interdisciplinary tools for analysis—and how they shape scholarly inquiry across academic and professional contexts. Students will have opportunities to reflect on their learning through short writing assignments, presentations, and creative projects that connect course themes to their own intellectual interests.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 15003 Gender and Sexuality in World Civ II | Instructors: Various
The second half of the civ sequence will extend our earlier interrogation of bodies, sex, and gender into an examination of sexualities and socialities. Through an encounter with theoretical texts, literature, and art, we will investigate a series of important critiques of biopower, or statist strategies for regulating bodies and controlling populations. These interventions include critiques of nationalism, colonialism, capitalism, and heteronormativity, all of which, as we will see, contribute to our understanding of sexuality. Throughout the course, feminist and queer critique will fundamentally frame our analyses of power, desire, and sexuality. PQ: GNSE 15002.

GNSE 20151 Hooking Up, Shacking Up, Breaking Up: Public Policy and Intimate Relationships | Instructor: Karlyn Gorski
Crosslists: CHDV/PBPL/SOCI 
Every aspect of our lives is shaped by policy choices, including our most intimate relationships. In this course, we will examine the sociological and policy dimensions of different aspects of intimate relationships, including campus hookup cultures, relationship formation, housing policy, marriage, parenting, breakups and divorce. Each week, students will be responsible for reading an assigned book related to these topics, and class meetings will be dedicated to discussing the texts in depth. Students should be aware that texts will engage with themes of assault, abuse, and intimate partner violence. Together, we will examine how macro-level policy decisions shape pivotal intimate moments throughout the lifecourse.
This course counts as a Problems class for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20153 Practicum: Women and Society | Instructor: Maria Bautista
Crosslist: LACS/PBPL
Although the inequities between men and women have diminished during the last decades, large gaps are still evident and resistant to change. Throughout this course, we will explore the origins of these disparities which are all fundamentally rooted in the patriarchal nature of society. Understanding how patriarchy came to be the dominant order requires a multidisciplinary and historical approach. The first lectures will cover debates in biology, human evolution, history and archeology that explain the deep roots and the spread of this order throughout the centuries. The next set of lectures will cover how current cultural practices and social norms facilitate the reproduction of the patriarchy and will also examine alternative ways in which societies have organized themselves where women have powerful roles or live in matriarchies. The class will also capture how women from the Global South contest this order within their societies and on their own terms. Finally, we will evaluate policies that have aimed to close the gap between men and women around the world. A central theme of the course is that to understand how to craft effective policies one needs to understand the mechanisms which created patriarchy and led it to persist. The students will offer presentations that will revise these policies from a critical perspective based on the material we covered throughout the quarter. The final lectures will include a variety of guest speakers.
This course counts as a Problems class for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20166 Feminism In Modern China: Genres And Media | Instructor: Paola Iovene
Crosslist: EALC
This class offers an overview of the history of feminism in China, with a focus on the genres of writing (manifestos, pamphlets, essays, poetry and fiction) and media (journals, posters, zines, digital platforms, hashtags) through which feminist ideas emerged and circulated from the late 19th century to this day. Topics to be discussed include: feminism and the public sphere, feminism and nationalism, the question of women's literature, feminism in the socialist revolution, family laws, feminism and trans and queer rights. No prior knowledge of Chinese is required.
This course counts as a Problems class for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20169 Sex, Money, and Power: Ethnography and Social Theories | Instructors: Jennifer Cole, Julie Chu
Crosslists: ANTH/CHDV
If the Epstein files in the U.S. have established anything without a shadow of a doubt, it is that sex, money and power continue to be intimately linked with, and to structure, aspects of the contemporary social order. This class mobilizes foundational social theories and ethnographies for understanding how these entangled dynamics shape different worlds of desire, embodiment, and value. At the same time, we probe the dark side of money, sex and power — the shadowy zones of illicit exchange, conspiracy theories, and political horror that shape historic and contemporary conditions of inequality and resistance. We pay particular attention to the intersections of anthropology and feminist studies, especially where they take up shared objects of analysis, including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value and agency. Throughout the course, our discussions will encourage a reflexive examination of the way these fields of inquiry approach sex, money, and power both as (1) scholarly contributions in academic settings and (2) as political interventions in the larger world (e.g., pay equity, #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics, the Manosphere, anti-gender campaigns, tradwives, etc.). Requirements: Active participation in class discussion based on weekly readings, occasional in-class writing, and a final exam.
This course counts as a Problems class for GNSE majors.

GNSE 21285 Toni Morrison, Beloved and A Mercy | Instructor: SJ Zhang
Crosslists: ENGL/RDIN
“How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together." Beginning with Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture, this class will read (for many reread) two of Toni Morrison’s novels that pose the house and household as a “site of memory” in which to dramatize gendered histories of race in North America. Our class will annotate together Beloved and A Mercy with the essays, films, poetry of various scholars, in addition to some of Morrison’s literary critical and historical writings. Our in-depth reading of these two works will provide a foundation for engaging in ongoing debates about race and writing in literary studies, black feminists critiques of the classroom, and histories of race-based slavery in North America. If, as Morrison contends, “language” teaches us “how to see without pictures” and that “language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names,” we will aim to hold language close as we consider “what moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”

GNSE 21400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality | Instructor: Linda Zerilli
Crosslists: CCCT/ENGL/PLSC
Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the proliferation of “new social movements” such as feminism and gay liberation, this seminar explores the key debates around which gender and sexuality were articulated as tenacious but open structures of power subject to political critique and social transformation. The relatively stable yet dynamic character of what Gayle Rubin in 1975 famously called “the sex/gender system” raises basic questions of structure and event: (1) how are systemic relations of domination and rule historically constituted and sustained over time?; and (2) how can that which is regularly reproduced be not only momentarily interrupted, but fundamentally altered through both quotidian and extraordinary forms of action and worlding? The unexpected character of the new social movements called for a radical rethinking of structures and their transformation. Haunted by unpredictable forms of resistance, heteropatriarchal structures challenged theorists and activists to forge new frameworks of critique that refigured basic concepts of power, subjectivity, and agency. These frameworks are examined with an eye to how racialized sexuality and gender are created and contested in the context of modern biopolitical capitalism and its constitution of naturalized conceptions of rule. Undergraduate enrollment is by consent only.

GNSE 21404 More Than Human Ethnography | Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
Crosslist: ANTH
In this course we explore the fields of more-than-human and ‘multispecies’ ethnography. We examine theoretical antecedents promoting the inclusion of non-human actors in ethnographic analysis and read examples of such work, including foundational texts on more-than-human engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Deborah Bird Rose, Kim Tallbear, Eduardo Kohn, and Anna Tsing among others. We consider the role other species, ‘actants’ and assemblages played in early social science work and contemplate recent studies of “becoming with” animals, plants, fungi, bacteria—encountering complex symbioses, examining naturalcultural borders, and querying the role of decolonial thought and queer ecologies in the ‘more-than’ turn. Multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional method; we couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, physicists, and philosophers. The is a discussion-based seminar with significant time devoted to logistical elements of ‘more than’ work—to querying how such studies are conducted in practice. The final paper takes the form of an exploratory essay based on observations collected during previous weeks.

GNSE 21721 Women Who Wrote in Yiddish | Instructor: Jessica Kirzane
Crosslists: JWSC/YDDH
This course explores memoirs, plays, essays, poetry, novels, and journalistic writing of women who wrote in Yiddish, as well as a discussion of the context in which they wrote and their reception and self-perception as "women writers." This course will be taught in English with readings translated from Yiddish.

GNSE 21882 Virginia Woolf: Love, Life, Writing | Instructor: Christine Fouirnaies 
Crosslists: ENGL/FNDL
How to write a life? Virginia Woolf grappled with this question, and so will we in this course. How, indeed, does one write, not only one’s own life, but the life of others, particularly when strong feelings are involved? We will study Woolf’s reflections on how to capture a life along with her attempts to do so, delving into her essays, novels, and life-writing (letters, diaries, and auto/biographical works). With the different literary genres, along with Woolf’s various engagements with other arts, we will see different approaches to re/creating personalities and inter-personal relationships emerge. To help us understand Woolf, we will examine her Victorian background, her Bloomsbury circle, and the Modernism with which she is associated. We will also engage with relevant theories of selfhood, sexuality, and auto/biography. At stake in our investigations is the role and critical potential of the personal in literary production. We will discuss this while taking up subjects such as familial relationships, the meaning of friendship, and the complexities of love. Throughout, we will consider Woolf’s relevance for today, and we will conclude with how Woolf’s own life has been taken up by others.

GNSE 22400 Women in Italian Organized Crime Through Cinema | Instructor: Veronica Vegna
Crosslists: CMST/ITAL
In this course, we will study filmic representations of women in Italian organized crime, and the implications these portrayals have on the understanding of gender and the mafias through Italian cinema. Sociological and psychological studies have underscored the importance of female roles in relation to mafia organizations, notwithstanding the rigid patriarchal structure that allows only male affiliation. One of the main goals of this class is for students to gain an understanding of different Italian mafias and to get a deeper comprehension of the construction of gender in a selection of films centered around these organizations. We will also discuss how movies contribute to the perception of organized crime. This class will draw on a variety of fields, including sociology, gender studies, and film studies.

GNSE 23141 Social Reproduction: Labour, Life, and World-making | Instructor: Tanima Sharma
Crosslists: ANTH/CHDV/GLST/RDIN/SOCI
Marxist feminists have defined social reproduction as the labour, with its attendant spaces and institutions, that is required for making and maintaining life in a capitalist world - from marriage to sexwork, schooling to child care, housing to healthcare, the affective to the intimate. This course explores theories, practices, histories and infrastructures of social reproduction in a transnational context, offering analytics for how life is constrained and sustained at different scales. It begins with an overview of early debates in social reproduction theory, and goes on to examine interventions from anthropology, geography, literature, history and political science that, both, focus on particular nodes that social reproduction feminists identify (such as domestic, education, service industry and healthcare spaces), as well as add other dimensions to the question of what sustains life in a capitalist world (such as fantasy and desire). Throughout our reading we will pay attention to how intersections of gender, sexuality, race, caste, class, and disability become integral to mobilizations of labour. The labour of social reproduction is often devalued and invisibilized, yet its life and world-making capacities can also offer contradictory and liberatory potentials for an everyday beyond capitalism. Thus the course also critically engages material that centres concepts of social reproduction to radically reimagine economies, bodies, the state, social relations, and futures.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23179 In a Queer Time and Place | Instructor Agnes Malinowska
Crosslist: ENGL
In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s bold interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, and the times and spaces of sex and intimacy. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freeman, Halberstam, Keeling, Muñoz, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others.
Instructor consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23616 Gods in the Machine: Artificial Intelligence and the Ethics of Love | Instructor: Kat Myers
Crosslists: MADD/RLST
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly governs knowledge, control, and connection. It reshapes the foundations of human life, including meaning, authority, and sociality. This course investigates the new gods of our technological age and asks what it means to live justly and love wisely in their presence. We begin by tracing the genealogy of artificial beings, from mythic automatons to the algorithmic visions of Silicon Valley. Theological longings have always fused with fantasies of artificial creation. We then examine the politics of AI today, including global surveillance, algorithmic governance, and automation. We assess how people grant trust to algorithms and how "black box" systems render seemingly divine judgments while reproducing human bias. Moving from public authority to private intimacy, we explore how AI feminizes digital assistants, outsources emotional labor, and shapes gender and sexual norms. We ask whether algorithms can love, if humans can love machines, and what defines consent when one party lacks embodiment or vulnerability. Finally, we explore AI’s symbolic, spiritual, and speculative dimensions. We consider narratives of technological salvation, representations of compassionate machines, and alternative visions of relationality. No technical expertise or prior background in religious studies or ethics is required. This course will meet in a seminar format.

 GNSE 24022 Opera Without Borders | Instructors: Martha Feldman and Judith Zeitlin
Crosslists: EALC/MUSI/TAPS
“Opera without Borders” explores how markers of race, indigeneity, and other identities blur historical time and disrupt geopolitical space on the operatic stage. How does opera operate in the new arenas of cosmopolitan citizenship during our present historical moment, when the unitary monoliths of nations, citizens, and identities are no longer firmly in place and means of travel and communication are quickly transforming? How and why have patterns of exploration, trade, and migration, forced and voluntary, colonial and decolonial, generated new operatic genres, new means of operatic production, and new kinds of opera producers (librettists, composers, directors, choreographers, dramaturgs, etc.)?  Among our cases are the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Orphan of Zhao (2012); the Paris Opera’s hiphop staging of Rameau’s Les indes galantes (2019); Schikaneder and Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791) reimagined as Impempe Yomlingo (2007-2011) by the township artists of Capetown; and circulations of Cantonese opera in Chinatowns from Vancouver and San Francisco to New York and Honolulu. 

GNSE 24299 Troubling Adolescence | Instructor: Paula Martin
Crosslists: ANTH/CHDV/HIPS/HLTH
Many theories of “adolescence” have often emphasized it as a development period of rapid change, risk taking, and experimentation. This course will take on some of key health-related concerns of adolescence, such as mental health (eg. depression, anxiety) and risk behaviors (eg. substance use, sexuality) asking after the phenomenological experience of such concerns as well as exploring their cultural specify. Furthermore, this course will review key historical and development frameworks for understanding “adolescence,” reading them alongside anthropological and queer theories of temporality. Ultimately, the course asks, how do the troubles of adolescence play out in different contexts? And what happens if we trouble the concept of adolescence itself?

GNSE 29975 The Commune: The Making and Breaking of Intentional Communities | Instructor: William Nickell
Crosslist: REES
Any class is an intentional community of sorts: people gathered together with a sense of collective purpose. But often the hopes of students are not met by the content or the methods in the classroom. Can we do better by making the process more intentional—clarifying and developing a collective sense of purpose at the outset? We will start by forming a collective plan on topics to be explored—anything from iconic American communities and Russian communes to memoir studies and economics. Possible projects include creating an intentional community in an off-campus location, designing a communal space, rewriting manifestos, or creating a new communal charter. We can cover anything from economics, space, and gender to the problem of leadership and secular belief systems. We may also want to utilize alternative modes of learning, besides reading and discussing texts, such as roleplaying. A few students in the class have some experience in intentional communities, and we will welcome their input and suggestions.
 

GNSE 10455 Madwomen | Instructor: Shrutakirti Dutta
Crosslists: COGS/ENGL
What is madness? What does it mean to go crazy? What does it mean to be driven crazy? This course examines different forms of madness, probes the relationship between race, gender, and disability, and explores the potential wisdom found in madness by looking to madwomen in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. We will both consider madness as an object within literary studies and the lived experience of the madwomen characters and authors through the lens of Mad studies and activism. Tentative readings include The Bell Jar (Plath, 1963), The Bluest Eye (Morrison, 1970), Freshwater (Emezi, 2018), excerpts from The Collected Schizophrenias (Wang, 2019), and others. Students will also be asked to engage spaces that center the Mad such as the Center for Mad Culture and Project LETS. This course will include writing components that ask students to read literary texts and/or cultural moments through mad methodology and a final essay in lieu of an exam.

GNSE 12121 Contemporary Feminist Politics: From the Sex Wars to Beyonce | Instructor: Rhiannon Auriemma
Crosslist: PLSC
This course offers a survey of feminist politics and texts on feminist action from the 1980s to now. We look to texts and media from feminist scholars, activists, and scholar-activists in order to tackle questions of what feminism is and should be in theory and practice. This course will focus on key contentions and debates amongst feminists on questions of politics and culture, demonstrating that disagreement is characteristic and generative for feminist politics. With this in mind, we will cover topics such as the Sex Wars, the rise of Third Wave Feminism, #MeToo, and Beyonce in order to trace the contours of disagreement in our feminist present. Readings include works from bell hooks, Susan Faludi, Roxane Gay, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Butler. 
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12146 Translating Gender Across France and Italy | Instructor: Fara Taddei
Crosslists: CMLT/ITAL/FREN
"Frenemies" since the Middle Ages, the literary traditions of Italy and France illustrate the productive tensions that can arise from cultural and geographic proximity. This course explores practices of rewriting, adaptation and intertextuality across the Alps through the lens of gender and sexuality. We will focus on two periods of literary flourishing: the early modern age, when Italy led Europe into the era we now call the Renaissance, and the dawn of literary modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when France stood out for its innovations. We will address topics such as: how do female authors adapt works originally written by men? How do treatments of gendered roles change when they move from one cultural setting to another? How does the rise of realist genres at the end of the 19th century impact the representation of sexuality and gender? how does the post-modern representation of love and femininity change across French and Italian works in the twentieth century? Authors and works may include fabliaux, chansons de geste, Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Orlando furioso, Émile Zola, Giovanni Verga, Grazia Deledda, Italo Calvino, Annie Ernaux. Theory readings include Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Simone de Beauvoir.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12150 The Queer Harlem Renaissance and Its Cinematic Afterlives | Instructor: Ren Willis
Crosslists: CMST/ENGL/RDIN
Historian Henry Louis Gates once described the Harlem Renaissance as “surely as gay as it was Black.” Since the 1980s, historians, literary critics, filmmakers, and activists have worked to recover and reconstruct queer themes, works, and figures of this prolific period of Black literary production, as well as critiques offered by Black writers who took up the problem of the color line alongside critiques of gender roles, heteronormativity, class and color politics, and reproductive issues. In this course, we will read queer(ed) works from the Harlem Renaissance and view cinematic reconstructions of the period in a series of four evening film screenings. Pairing these texts with contemporary scholarship in Black film studies and queer theory, together we will work through questions such as: what kinds of themes and motifs can we trace in works by Black artists of this period? How do we identify and interpret the diverse expressions of Black gender and sexuality present in Harlem Renaissance literature, including varying constructions of (and disillusionment with) femininity, masculinity, and gender nonconformity? How might we understand film as a form of archival practice that can produce new kinds of knowledge about Black queer cultural history? In taking up these questions, we will consider works by writers and filmmakers such as Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Richard Bruce Nugent, Dorothy West, Isaac Julien, Cheryl Dunye, and more.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12151 “Be Gay, Do Crime”: Queerness and the Left | Instructor: Madeline Adams
Crosslist: HIST
This course explores the long and often uneasy relationship between queer life and radical politics from the nineteenth century to the present. Focused on histories of Europe and North America while attentive to transnational movements and anti-colonial struggle, the course examines how queer people have participated in, shaped, and contested leftist political projects. We will also analyze how leftist movements have, in turn, imagined sexuality, gender, and family relations. Moving from nineteenth-century socialist and anarchist debates to twentieth-century gay liberation, Black radicalism, AIDS activism, and contemporary critiques of capitalism, students will consider how queer desires and kinship practices intersect with broader struggles for collective liberation.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 15008 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations III: Feminism/Anti-Feminism in Korea | Instructor: Angie Heo
This course will explore contending strands of feminist thought and practice in modern Korea. Building on previous coursework on feminism and the postcolonial critique of Western feminism, we will consider how various Korean expressions of women’s equality developed in historically contiguous and critical relation to other global feminist ideals and movements (e.g., “The New Woman”, “revolutionary motherhood”, Women of Asia, #MeToo, radical militant feminism, transfeminism, etc…). We will engage a diverse range of historical, literary, and ethnographic sources that probe feminist, proto-feminist, and anti-feminist ideas throughout different periods from Japanese colonialism to the North-South division to the neoliberal South Korean present. This course is open to all students with some seats saved for students who enrolled in GNSE Civ I & II. It can count as a Foundations course for GNSE majors who are not using it in the Core.

GNSE 15014 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations III: AIDS in the Archives | Instructors: Kris Trujillo and SJ Zhang
Course description TBD:
This course is open to all students with some seats saved for students who enrolled in GNSE Civ I & II. It can count as a Foundations course for GNSE majors who are not using it in the Core.

GNSE 18124 Poverty, Crime and Character | Instructor Jacob Biel
Crosslist: ENGL
From highwaymen and vagrants to thieves and murderers, this course will look at fictional representations of crime and criminology from the 18th century and the present. We will ask how changing concepts of character, literary and legal, shape a society’s understanding of what criminality is and how it should be managed. Looking first at how the early British novel asks us to think about literary and personal character by way of crime and confession, we will then turn to the 20th- and 21st-century afterlives of these 18th-century crime narratives, attending to how configurations of moral constitution and personal identity—especially relating to class, gender, and race—become intertwined in more recent fiction and film. Syllabus may include fiction by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Godwin, James Hogg, Richard Wright, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, and Jordy Rosenberg; films by Steven Spielberg, Bong Joon-ho, Horace Ové, Hirokazu Koreeda, and Richard Linklater; and theoretical texts by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Patrick Colquhoun, and recent criminologists.

GNSE 19501 Thinking Sex | Instructor: Red Tremmel
Few concepts seem more self-evident than sex—yet even fewer have been more intensely debated. Starting from the pre-modern period and moving to the present, the course aims to familiarize students with central debates in gender and sexuality studies, and to situate those debates in the wider context of the intellectual, activist, and artistic communities out of which they emerge. We will read widely: from foundational early writers (Wollstonecraft, Truth, Engels) to key twentieth and twenty-first century movements (radical, poststructuralist, decolonial, and intersectional feminisms; queer theory; gay and trans liberation). Major topics are likely to include intersectionality, biopower, body politics, normativity, sexual pleasure and violence, reproductive labor and politics, gender performativity and embodiment, technology, globalization, and agency. No prior coursework is required—only curiosity and a willingness to think critically about sex and gender.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 
This class will be required for the GNSE major starting with the class of 2030.

GNSE 20115 Women, Peace and Security | Instructor: Maliha Chishti
Crosslist: PBPL
This course focuses on critical feminist theorizing and scholarship on militarization, war and masculinities, and on feminist articulations of peace and (demilitarized) security. Students will learn about the transnational feminist research, policy and advocacy network known as the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and the important inroads this network has made in establishing international and national policies in the fields of gender, conflict, peace and development. The course highlights the background, history and policy significance of the historic Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, as well as subsequent and related UN resolutions. Students will also learn about alternative feminist approaches and visions for international peace and security, through powerful case study examples of feminist activism, solidarity and diplomacy.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20117 Feminist Theory and Political Economy | Instructor: Sarah Johnson
Crosslists: LLSO/PLSC
This course has two related aims: to consider how the regulation of economic life-from the household to the global economy-has figured as an object of analysis within feminist thought; and to examine how this analysis, together with the conceptual resources of political economy, has informed feminist theories of domination, freedom, equality, rights, and justice. Readings may include works by Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Iris Marion Young, Catharine MacKinnon, Nancy Fraser, and Aihwa Ong. The course includes a substantial research requirement, which invites students to draw upon the insights of these theorists as they use archival sources to conduct their own analyses of economic life. Enrollment is limited to third- and fourth-year students.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20121  Women and Work in East Asia | Instructor: Jacob Eyferth
Crosslists: EALC/HIST
Worldwide, women do about 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly. Women’s underpaid work at home and in industry subsidized the early stages of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain, early twentieth-century Japan, and contemporary China, and women’s unpaid contributions to their households enable employers worldwide to keep wages low. We know, at least in outline, how women came to carry double burdens in Europe and North America, but little research has been done so far about this process in East Asia. In this course, we will discuss when and how China, Japan, and Korea developed a division of labor in which most wage work was gendered male and reproductive work was marked female. Are current divisions of labor between men and women rooted in local cultures, or are they the result of industrial capitalist development? How do divisions of labor differ between the three East Asian countries, and how did developments in one East Asian country affect others?
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20130 Queer Theory | Instructor: Kris Trujillo
Crosslists: CMLT/ENGL/RLST
This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term “queer” and explore the contours of the field’s major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory’s emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis and later developments in the twenty-first century, especially the emergence of queer and trans of color critique. The course aims to place these theoretical texts within the context of the intellectual, activist, and artistic and literary communities out of which they emerged. Major topics to discuss will include queer grief and melancholia; coalition and community; desire, devotion, and affective attachment; queer theory’s ritual conventions; modes of queer critique; assumptions about queer theory’s secularity; and the significance, challenge, and critiques of queer and trans joy.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20161 Girlhood | Instructor: Heather Keenleyside
Crosslist: ENGL
This course focuses on narratives in which the category of “girl” or “girlhood” is under construction, or called into question. We’ll begin with a number of foundational works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Louisa May Alcott, Harriot Jacobs), and will move into novels, films, comics, and memoirs from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (likely to include texts by Zitkala-Sa, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Myriam Gurba, and films by Peter Weir, Todd Solondz, Celine Sciamma). Throughout, the course will draw on work from fields like sociology, history, and feminist and queer theory to consider changing conceptions of childhood, adolescence, and development, as well as the way that intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability shape categories and narratives of “girlhood.”
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23194 Judith Butler: Gender and Sexuality in Philosophy, Society, and Ethics | Instructor: Virginia White
Crosslist: FNDL/RLST
Judith Butler is among the most influential theorists and cultural critics of our time. Primarily recognized for their field-defining work in gender studies and queer theory, Butler’s philosophy and criticism ranges widely. Beginning with their early analysis of desire and recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology, Butler’s work draws widely from psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, literature, and critical theory, to illumine the gendered foundations of philosophical thought while critically assessing contemporary political, religious, and social crises. In this course, we will read three texts from Butler’s corpus: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, and The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind. We do so not merely to encounter Butler’s theories of gender, sexuality, and performativity, grievability and precarity, ethics and non-violence, but to learn from Butler’s philosophical method and their productive strategies for interrogating culture, politics, and the self. Our goal will be to hone each participant’s critical and theoretical skills with an eye toward sharpening our social-critical and ethical capacities. The course will proceed as a seminar. No prior familiarity with Butler’s work or gender and sexuality studies required.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23195 Queer Transnationalism | Instructors: Darrel Chia & Agnes Malinowska 
Crosslist: ENGL
This seminar explores 20th- and 21st-century queer and transnational literature and film as a field that emerges at the intersections of sexuality, race, migration, empire, and global capitalism. Moving beyond frameworks that center the U.S. or Western Europe as the default locus of queer experience, we examine how queerness is articulated, policed, and reimagined across multiple geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Throughout the quarter, we consider how global flows of labor, capital, and culture shape queer life; how states regulate bodies and intimacies; and how artists and writers imagine queer belonging, kinship, and futurity in a global frame. Theoretical readings will foreground debates around homonationalism, queer diaspora, transnational feminism, coloniality, affect, precarity, and the politics of visibility. Fiction and film may include works by Deepa Mehta,, Wong Kar-Wai, Stephen Frears, Shani Mootoo, Qiu Miaojin, Saim Sadiq, James Baldwin, Monica Truong, Maurine Lara, and Tomasz Jedrowski. Theorists include Gayatri Gopinath, Jasbir Puar, Danton Remoto, Martin Manalansan IV, Sarah Ahmed, Lee Edelman, Jose Esteban Munoz, David Eng, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, and Petrus Liu.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23619 Love | Instructor: Mahala Rethlake
Crosslist: RLST
Is love, really, all we need? In this course, we will consider the significance of love to the good life. We will begin by considering religious texts that place love at the center of ethics, including some from Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as key works by leaders in social movements in the United States (Martin Luther King Jr.) in India (Mahatma Gandhi), and in the feminist movement (bell hooks). Next, we will consider how a love-based approach to ethics relates to other canonical approaches to ethics, including those emphasizing duty, consequences, and virtue. With a more substantial sense of ethics in hand, we turn to deepen our understanding of love by overviewing key accounts in philosophical ethics, including love as union, valuing, emotion, and robust concern. We conclude by considering some implications of a love ethic, especially how this relates to loving those who we might not expect to love (i.e., the colleague, the stranger, and the enemy) and to the topics of artificial intelligence and the social and political realm. After taking this course, students will not only be familiar with key ideas and debates in the philosophy of love, but also how these relate to the ethical, the social, and the religious. Classes will involve a combination of lecture, discussion, and group work. Assignments include reading reflections, a presentation, and a final project. No prerequisites.

GNSE 23645 Body & the Digital | Instructor: Crystal Beiersdofer
Crosslists: ARTV/MADD
As digital technology advances, the separation between IRL and URL blurs. Participants enrolled in this course will explore techniques that will help them create thought-provoking work, learn how to create a research-based digital artwork, strengthen their ability to give and receive critique, and build an understanding of how the corporeal interacts with the digital. Students will offer and receive constructive feedback during instructor-led critiques on peers' works throughout this course. Students will also explore the intersection of gender and digital spaces through weekly readings and discussions. By the end of this course, students will feel comfortable utilizing different processes of development to create digital artwork and speaking about digital spaces, including how different social identities affect our relationship with them.

GNSE 25627 The Self as Other: Introduction to Freud | Instructor: Sophie Salvo
Crosslist: GRMN
This course is an introduction to one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century: Sigmund Freud. With his theory of the unconscious, Freud revolutionized how we understand what it means to be human. We do not act as rational, willful agents, he suggested, but are compelled through life by complexly organized desires and drives, much of which we are not aware of. Many of Freud’s terms—such as “Oedipus complex” or “superego”—have become so popularized that they are now part of common parlance, yet they are rarely understood as Freud meant. This course will take seriously the therapeutic imperative of Freud’s work and cover his major texts, including his early case studies on hysteria, his theories of psychosexual development and pathology, and his master narratives about the rise of civilization. We will read Freud in his context, learning about the history of psychoanalysis and life in early twentieth-century Vienna. No prerequisites required; this course is open to all students.

GNSE 25695 The Workplace and Family Policy | Instructor: Yukiko Asai
Crosslists: ECON/PBPL
The topics covered in the course will include: the demographic transition, human capital accumulation, gender wage and employment gaps, discrimination in the workplace, family leave and childcare policies, tax policies including subsidies like the Earned Income Tax Credit (ETIC), and related welfare policies. We will draw on the theory of static and dynamic labor supply, theories of labor demand, and labor market equilibrium to guide its investigation, and use empirical tools to answer research questions. For each topic covered in this course, I will introduce an elementary treatment of the canonical theoretical model and give examples of its empirical application. In studying empirical applications, we will often draw on analysis from international experience.

GNSE 25988 James Baldwin | Instructor: Korey Williams 
Crosslists: ENGL/FNDL
In our contemporary moment of rising inequality, James Baldwin has gained much purchase as a kind of prophet. But in his own time, Baldwin consistently called himself a witness, holding to his belief that an “artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian” who must “make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” All in all, his artistic mission was to express “what it is like to be alive.” Reading across both his fiction and nonfiction, we will consider Baldwin’s concept of the artist, exploring the affective life of inequality through what we might call his moral imagination.

GNSE 30132 Gender, Race, And Horror | Instructor: AE Stevenson
Crosslists: CMST/MADD
This course will contend with the ways that horror as a film genre constructs and deconstructs notions of gender and race in society. We will attend to texts across decades and subgenres that will illustrate how gender and race are made and regulated through notions of confusion, fear, and repulsion. By attending to these universal human feelings, students will learn how emotions are evoked through the construction of the text, its portrayal of the disruption of gender norms and its construction of racial boundaries. Students will learn the necessary vocabulary and methodologies to be able to critically analyze (audio)visual texts. In order to do this, students will be guided through how to construct argumentative critical papers through proper utilization of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. By the end of the course, students will be well versed in cinematographic terms such that they will be able to critically analyze texts to understand the impact of perspective, interpretation, and judgment. This course is meant to help students navigate and make sense of an increasingly scary world by learning to appreciate fear as a necessary human expression. Finally, and most importantly, students will be able to engage with the age-old notion of terror to be able lead a more ethical and intellectually richer life.

GNSE 31000 Cultural Psychology | Instructor: Richard Shweder
Crosslists: AMER/ANTH/CHDV/PSYC
There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of "normal" psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a single or uniform fundamental psychology for all peoples of the world. Research findings in cultural psychology thus raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. In this course we analyze the concept of "culture" and examine ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.

GNSE 32201 Haunting And/As/Of Power | Instructor: Tanima Sharma
Crosslists: ANTH/RDIN
Haunting is a liminal category that signifies presence despite absence, unfinished pasts in the present, or ruptures within what is considered human, scientific, normal and real. In this course we will examine multiple hauntings–as metaphor and as experience–situating them in a global context within the afterlives of racial and caste capitalism, gendered dispossession, empire, and neoliberalism. Mediated through ethnographies, social theory, literature, film, psychoanalysis and historical archives, we will encounter vampires, witches, zombies, jinn, ghosts, transgender monsters, the paranormal, aliens, and other friendly or vengeful spirits in order to understand how they story memory, time, space, embodiment, transgression, violence, and desire. How can the spectral be deciphered? What does being haunted feel like? How does haunting as an analytic foreground the sensuous, affective, intimate and overwhelming dimensions of self and other, of structures of power, and of the limits of the knowable? We will answer these questions and more through the work of David McNally, Tithi Bhattacharya, Silvia Federici, Susan Stryker, Christina Sharpe, Avery Gordon, Stefania Pandolfo, Emily Ng, and Susan Lepselter, among others.

GNSE 33175 Sexuality in U.S. History Post 1900 | Instructor: Red Tremmel
Crosslists: HIST
In this course we will study the history of changing sexual practices, relations, politics, and cultures in the region of North America now comprising the United States and 574 sovereign tribal nations. Moving through various contexts, such as urban drag balls, medical schools, federal agencies, strip clubs, military projects, homophile and other liberatory movements, as well as popular culture, we will use primary and secondary sources to develop a research-based understanding of how sexual discourses are produced, revised, and remixed among and across generations.

GNSE 33178 The Queer Enemy and the Politics of Homophobia | Instructor: Omar Safadi
Crosslists: HMRT/PLSC/RDIN
How is the queer enemy politically constructed? And what are the uses and effects of this enemy in contemporary politics? This course investigates queer sexuality as a specific kind of threat and homophobia as a specific mode of political antagonism. Key to understanding this specificity is the examination of other kinds of political enemies. Across categories of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and empire, the course theorizes the queer enemy in a comparative perspective. Engaging scholars like Monique Wittig, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Jean Paul Sartre, we compare homophobia with other forms of political enmity like misogyny, anti-Black racism, and anti-Semitism. After investigating antagonism across categories of political difference, we delve into the specificities of homophobic antagonism in the second half of the course. Here, we explore how the queer threat is framed: through metaphors of civilizational destruction but also through anti-sodomy and anti-disclosure laws. We also trace how the normalization of the queer enemy has produced new enemies. Through notions of “Pinkwashing” and the “Gay International,” we further examine how queer liberation is made to stand in for colonial domination. But we also read critiques of the “gay=colonialism” equation, asking how homophobia mediates anti-colonial politics. Finally, we conclude the course with Michel Foucault’s seminal essay and relate the question of the queer enemy to the threat of new human relations.

GNSE 33702 Sexual Health | Instructor: David Moskowitz
Crosslist: PBHS
Sexual health is a growing component of public health outreach. The goal of this course is to provide students with a foundational understanding of sexual health from a public health perspective. Through participation in this course, students will increase their knowledge about the history of sexual health promotion in the public health sphere. They will delve into sexual and gender identity construction and explore identity-behavioral expressions. They will critically examine and discuss common sexual health issues addressed by public health practitioners, their epidemiology, and their underlying social determinants; a global health lens will be applied to such examinations. Additionally, recognition of the key methodological considerations in the measurement of sexual behavior and sexual health outcomes will be elucidated (including strengths and limitations of various methodological approaches –quantitative, qualitative, clinical, and biomedical). By the completion of the course, students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and application of key theoretical foundations of sexual health promotion and sexual health behavior change and be able to promote sexual health messages through marketing and dissemination. From a policy perspective, student can expect an increased knowledge about issues related to social and legislative policy analyses, their applications, and implications.

GNSE 33800 Global Maternal and Child Health | Instructor: Erick Amick
Crosslist: PBHS
This course provides a foundation in global perspectives on maternal and child health research, practice, and policy. The course will cover a range of maternal and child health topics to examine critical challenges facing women, children, providers, and policymakers in some of the world's most vulnerable communities. Students in this course will: 1) understand the status of maternal and child health in a variety of communities and contexts, using key health and development indicators; 2) critically analyze past and present public health programs and policies utilized to address maternal and child health needs in diverse communities; 3) assess the economic, political, social, and cultural factors that affect maternal and child health programs and outcomes.

GNSE 39109 Sex, Gender, and Kinship: Colonial Perspectives | Instructor: Deirdre Lyons
Crosslists: ANTH/HIST/RDIN/SOCI
This course analyzes the contested relationships between gender, sexuality, kinship, and western colonialism from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Drawing on historical case studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, this course will cover a broad range of empires and colonies to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between colonization and ideologies and practices of gender, sex, and kinship. Analyzing case studies predominately from the Atlantic World (with attention to colonies elsewhere), we will explore topics such as the emergence of colonial gender ideologies, gender and colonial governance, family life and kinship strategies, the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with race and class, queerness and queer lives, the politics of sex work and reproduction, and gendered migrations across empires.

GNSE 50112 Sem: Health And Society | Instructor: Linda Waite
Crosslists: CHDV/SOCI
A long and healthy life is a widely sought after human goal. But not everyone has equal chances of achieving this goal. This course focuses on the role played by society in differential access to physical, psychological, cognitive health and well-being. We will discuss the role of parental characteristics and childhood circumstances in later-life health, differences in health and well-being for men and women, for racial and ethnic groups, by characteristics of our neighborhoods and communities, and by regions or countries. Each class meeting we will read and discuss three or four journal articles or sections of a book, with class participants presenting each reading, summarizing it, and then critiquing it. The class will then discuss. We will add to and subtract from the readings to match the interests of participants on each topic; the syllabus will list readings as a starting point for this process.

GNSE 30166 Feminism In Modern China: Genres And Media | Instructor: Paola Iovene
Crosslist: EALC
This class offers an overview of the history of feminism in China, with a focus on the genres of writing (manifestos, pamphlets, essays, poetry and fiction) and media (journals, posters, zines, digital platforms, hashtags) through which feminist ideas emerged and circulated from the late 19th century to this day. Topics to be discussed include: feminism and the public sphere, feminism and nationalism, the question of women's literature, feminism in the socialist revolution, family laws, feminism and trans and queer rights. No prior knowledge of Chinese is required.

GNSE 30169 Sex, Money, and Power: Ethnography and Social Theories | Instructors: Jennifer Cole, Julie Chu
Crosslists: ANTH/CHDV
If the Epstein files in the U.S. have established anything without a shadow of a doubt, it is that sex, money and power continue to be intimately linked with, and to structure, aspects of the contemporary social order. This class mobilizes foundational social theories and ethnographies for understanding how these entangled dynamics shape different worlds of desire, embodiment, and value. At the same time, we probe the dark side of money, sex and power — the shadowy zones of illicit exchange, conspiracy theories, and political horror that shape historic and contemporary conditions of inequality and resistance. We pay particular attention to the intersections of anthropology and feminist studies, especially where they take up shared objects of analysis, including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value and agency. Throughout the course, our discussions will encourage a reflexive examination of the way these fields of inquiry approach sex, money, and power both as (1) scholarly contributions in academic settings and (2) as political interventions in the larger world (e.g., pay equity, #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics, the Manosphere, anti-gender campaigns, tradwives, etc.).
 Requirements: Active participation in class discussion based on weekly readings, occasional in-class writing, and a final exam.

GNSE 31285 Toni Morrison, Beloved and A Mercy | Instructor: SJ Zhang
Crosslists: ENGL/RDIN
“How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together." Beginning with Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture, this class will read (for many reread) two of Toni Morrison’s novels that pose the house and household as a “site of memory” in which to dramatize gendered histories of race in North America. Our class will annotate together Beloved and A Mercy with the essays, films, poetry of various scholars, in addition to some of Morrison’s literary critical and historical writings. Our in-depth reading of these two works will provide a foundation for engaging in ongoing debates about race and writing in literary studies, black feminists critiques of the classroom, and histories of race-based slavery in North America. If, as Morrison contends, “language” teaches us “how to see without pictures” and that “language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names,” we will aim to hold language close as we consider “what moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”

GNSE 31400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality | Instructor: Linda Zerilli
Crosslists: ENGL/PLSC
Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the proliferation of “new social movements” such as feminism and gay liberation, this seminar explores the key debates around which gender and sexuality were articulated as tenacious but open structures of power subject to political critique and social transformation. The relatively stable yet dynamic character of what Gayle Rubin in 1975 famously called “the sex/gender system” raises basic questions of structure and event: (1) how are systemic relations of domination and rule historically constituted and sustained over time?; and (2) how can that which is regularly reproduced be not only momentarily interrupted, but fundamentally altered through both quotidian and extraordinary forms of action and worlding? The unexpected character of the new social movements called for a radical rethinking of structures and their transformation. Haunted by unpredictable forms of resistance, heteropatriarchal structures challenged theorists and activists to forge new frameworks of critique that refigured basic concepts of power, subjectivity, and agency. These frameworks are examined with an eye to how racialized sexuality and gender are created and contested in the context of modern biopolitical capitalism and its constitution of naturalized conceptions of rule. 

GNSE 31404 More Than Human Ethnography | Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
Crosslist: ANTH/MAPS
In this course we explore the fields of more-than-human and ‘multispecies’ ethnography. We examine theoretical antecedents promoting the inclusion of non-human actors in ethnographic analysis and read examples of such work, including foundational texts on more-than-human engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Deborah Bird Rose, Kim Tallbear, Eduardo Kohn, and Anna Tsing among others. We consider the role other species, ‘actants’ and assemblages played in early social science work and contemplate recent studies of “becoming with” animals, plants, fungi, bacteria—encountering complex symbioses, examining naturalcultural borders, and querying the role of decolonial thought and queer ecologies in the ‘more-than’ turn. Multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional method; we couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, physicists, and philosophers. The is a discussion-based seminar with significant time devoted to logistical elements of ‘more than’ work—to querying how such studies are conducted in practice. The final paper takes the form of an exploratory essay based on observations collected during previous weeks.

GNSE 31721 Women Who Wrote in Yiddish | Instructor: Jessica Kirzane
Crosslists: JWSC/YDDH
This course explores memoirs, plays, essays, poetry, novels, and journalistic writing of women who wrote in Yiddish, as well as a discussion of the context in which they wrote and their reception and self-perception as "women writers." This course will be taught in English with readings translated from Yiddish.

GNSE 33100 9 Weeks, 9 Professors, 9 Conversations about Gender and Sex | Instructor: Red Tremmel
This course offers students an opportunity to be in conversation with a diverse group of University of Chicago scholars whose work uses gender and/or sexuality as critical lenses for understanding the world. Each week, we’ll dive into the work of a different scholar, from fields such as anthropology, sociology, history, medicine, law, and comparative literature. On Tuesdays, we’ll explore materials they’ve chosen for us: texts, films, archives, or gallery exhibitions. On Thursdays, we’ll host them in our classroom for open and candid conversations about these materials, their research, career paths, and the questions that keep them up at night. Throughout the quarter, students will gain a richer understanding of how gender and sexuality function as interdisciplinary tools for analysis—and how they shape scholarly inquiry across academic and professional contexts. Students will have opportunities to reflect on their learning through short writing assignments, presentations, and creative projects that connect course themes to their own intellectual interests.

GNSE 34022 Opera Without Borders | Instructors: Martha Feldman and Judith Zeitlin
Crosslists: EALC/MUSI/TAPS
“Opera without Borders” explores how markers of race, indigeneity, and other identities blur historical time and disrupt geopolitical space on the operatic stage. How does opera operate in the new arenas of cosmopolitan citizenship during our present historical moment, when the unitary monoliths of nations, citizens, and identities are no longer firmly in place and means of travel and communication are quickly transforming? How and why have patterns of exploration, trade, and migration, forced and voluntary, colonial and decolonial, generated new operatic genres, new means of operatic production, and new kinds of opera producers (librettists, composers, directors, choreographers, dramaturgs, etc.)?  Among our cases are the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Orphan of Zhao (2012); the Paris Opera’s hiphop staging of Rameau’s Les indes galantes (2019); Schikaneder and Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791) reimagined as Impempe Yomlingo (2007-2011) by the township artists of Capetown; and circulations of Cantonese opera in Chinatowns from Vancouver and San Francisco to New York and Honolulu. 

GNSE 39975 The Commune: The Making and Breaking of Intentional Communities | Instructor: William Nickell
Crosslist: REES
Any class is an intentional community of sorts: people gathered together with a sense of collective purpose. But often the hopes of students are not met by the content or the methods in the classroom. Can we do better by making the process more intentional—clarifying and developing a collective sense of purpose at the outset? We will start by forming a collective plan on topics to be explored—anything from iconic American communities and Russian communes to memoir studies and economics. Possible projects include creating an intentional community in an off-campus location, designing a communal space, rewriting manifestos, or creating a new communal charter. We can cover anything from economics, space, and gender to the problem of leadership and secular belief systems. We may also want to utilize alternative modes of learning, besides reading and discussing texts, such as roleplaying. A few students in the class have some experience in intentional communities, and we will welcome their input and suggestions

GNSE 40459 In a Queer Time and Place | Instructor Agnes Malinowska
Crosslist: ENGL
In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s bold interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, and the times and spaces of sex and intimacy. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freeman, Halberstam, Keeling, Muñoz, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others.

Instructor consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities.

GNSE 30121  Women and Work in East Asia | Instructor: Jacob Eyferth
Crosslists: EALC/HIST
Worldwide, women do about 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly. Women’s underpaid work at home and in industry subsidized the early stages of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain, early twentieth-century Japan, and contemporary China, and women’s unpaid contributions to their households enable employers worldwide to keep wages low. We know, at least in outline, how women came to carry double burdens in Europe and North America, but little research has been done so far about this process in East Asia. In this course, we will discuss when and how China, Japan, and Korea developed a division of labor in which most wage work was gendered male and reproductive work was marked female. Are current divisions of labor between men and women rooted in local cultures, or are they the result of industrial capitalist development? How do divisions of labor differ between the three East Asian countries, and how did developments in one East Asian country affect others?

GNSE 36855 Queer Theory | Instructor: Kris Trujillo
Crosslists: CMLT/ENGL/RLVC
This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term “queer” and explore the contours of the field’s major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory’s emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis and later developments in the twenty-first century, especially the emergence of queer and trans of color critique. The course aims to place these theoretical texts within the context of the intellectual, activist, and artistic and literary communities out of which they emerged. Major topics to discuss will include queer grief and melancholia; coalition and community; desire, devotion, and affective attachment; queer theory’s ritual conventions; modes of queer critique; assumptions about queer theory’s secularity; and the significance, challenge, and critiques of queer and trans joy.

GNSE 40115 Women, Peace and Security | Instructor: Maliha Chishti
Crosslist: PPHA
This course focuses on critical feminist theorizing and scholarship on militarization, war and masculinities, and on feminist articulations of peace and (demilitarized) security. Students will learn about the transnational feminist research, policy and advocacy network known as the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and the important inroads this network has made in establishing international and national policies in the fields of gender, conflict, peace and development. The course highlights the background, history and policy significance of the historic Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, as well as subsequent and related UN resolutions. Students will also learn about alternative feminist approaches and visions for international peace and security, through powerful case study examples of feminist activism, solidarity and diplomacy.

GNSE 43195 Queer Transnationalism | Instructors: Darrel Chia & Agnes Malinowska 
Crosslist: ENGL
This seminar explores 20th- and 21st-century queer and transnational literature and film as a field that emerges at the intersections of sexuality, race, migration, empire, and global capitalism. Moving beyond frameworks that center the U.S. or Western Europe as the default locus of queer experience, we examine how queerness is articulated, policed, and reimagined across multiple geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Throughout the quarter, we consider how global flows of labor, capital, and culture shape queer life; how states regulate bodies and intimacies; and how artists and writers imagine queer belonging, kinship, and futurity in a global frame. Theoretical readings will foreground debates around homonationalism, queer diaspora, transnational feminism, coloniality, affect, precarity, and the politics of visibility. Fiction and film may include works by Deepa Mehta,, Wong Kar-Wai, Stephen Frears, Shani Mootoo, Qiu Miaojin, Saim Sadiq, James Baldwin, Monica Truong, Maurine Lara, and Tomasz Jedrowski. Theorists include Gayatri Gopinath, Jasbir Puar, Danton Remoto, Martin Manalansan IV, Sarah Ahmed, Lee Edelman, Jose Esteban Munoz, David Eng, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, and Petrus Liu.