* WGSS 0031a / AMST 0031a, LGBTQ Spaces and Places  Scott Herring

Overview of LGBTQ cultures and their relation to geography in literature, history, film, visual culture, and ethnography. Discussion topics include the historical emergence of urban communities; their tensions and intersections with rural locales; race, sexuality, gender, and suburbanization; and artistic visions of queer and trans places within the city and without. Emphasis is on the wide variety of U.S. metropolitan environments and regions, including New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, the Deep South, Appalachia, New England, and the Pacific Northwest. Enrollment limited to first-year students.   HU
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

* WGSS 0032a, History of Sexuality  Maria Trumpler

Exploration of scientific and medical writings on sexuality over the past century. Focus on the tension between nature and culture in shaping theories, the construction of heterosexuality and homosexuality, the role of scientific studies in moral discourse, and the rise of sexology as a scientific discipline. Enrollment limited to first-year students.   WR, HU
TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm

WGSS 741a / AMST 7740a / FILM 6810a, The Photographic Memory Workshop  Laura Wexler

This seminar considers landmark examples of photography’s cultural work in producing, cementing and erasing individual and collective memory.  Topics to be considered include but are not confined to “memory, post-memory and counter-memory”; “the biopolitics of images”; “the visuality of violence”; “photography’s place and space”; and the “potential history of photography.” Students are invited to develop and present their own case studies on topics of interest. Readings encompass: The Unseen Truth by Sarah Lewis; Camera Geologica by Siobhan Angus; The Unintended by Monica Huerta; Race Stories by Maurice Berger; Through a Native Lens by Nicole Dawn Strathman; When a Photograph is Home by Leigh Raiford; From These Roots by Tamara Lanier; and Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography by Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler. Guest lectures and travel to exhibitions are anticipated.
T 9:25am-11:15am

WGSS 1109a / AMST 1109a / HIST 2140a, US LGBTQ History & Queer Futures  Staff

This interdisciplinary course offers a critical overview of queer history in the United States from the colonial era to the present, exploring the lives and experiences of LGBTQ individuals and emphasizing the broader historical evolution of ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender that constitute the ever-changing landscape of queer history. Through an intersectional lens, students analyze how gender, sexuality, race, and class have shaped LGBTQ identities, cultures, and political movements. Drawing heavily from primary sources including historical texts, literature, visual culture, and popular media, we investigate how queer lives and experiences have been represented, constructed, and contested across time.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

WGSS 1125b / AFAM 1615b, “We Interrupt this Program: The Multidimensional Histories of Queer and Trans Politics”  Roderick Ferguson

In 1991, the arts organizations Visual AIDS and The Kitchen collaborated with video artist and filmmaker Charles Atlas to produce the live television broadcast "We Interrupt this Program." Part educational presentation, part performance piece, the show was aired in millions of homes across the nation. The program, in The Kitchen’s words, “sought to feature voices that had often been marginalized within many discussions of AIDS, in particular people of color and women.”This course builds upon and is inspired by this aspect of Atlas's visionary presentation, an aspect that used the show to produce a critically multicultural platform that could activate cultural histories and critical traditions from various communities. In effect, the course uses this aspect as a metonym for the racial, gender, sexual, and class heterogeneity of queer art and organizing. It conducts its investigation by looking at a variety of primary materials that illustrate the heterogeneous makeup of queer and trans politics. The course also draws on more recent texts and visual works that arose from the earlier contexts that the primary texts helped to illuminate and shape.   HU  RP  0 Course cr
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* WGSS 1135a / AMST 3325a / ER&M 3556a, Latina.x.e Feminist Archives  Deb Vargas

The course introduces students to Latina/x/e feminist archives. We focus on historical and contemporary writings by and about Chicana, Puerto Rican, Central American, and other Latina/x/e feminist writers and activists. The course draws from interdisciplinary scholarship addressing the intellectual landscape of Latina/x/e and critical race feminist theories and social movement activist organizing. While this course approaches Latina/x/e feminist theories and activism as often having emerged in relation to U.S. nation-making projects we will consider this work with the understanding that projects of Latina/x/e feminism should be understood as cross-border, transnational, and multi-scaler critiques of nation-state violence.  HU
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 1145b / LING 1460b / PSYC 3129b, Language and Gender  Natalie Weber

An introduction to linguistics through the lens of gender. Topics include: gender as constructed through language; language variation as conditioned by gender and sexuality within and between languages across the world; real and perceived differences between male and female speech; language and (non)binarity; gender and noun class systems in language; pronouns and identity; role of language in encoding, reflecting, or reinforcing social attitudes and behavior. This course was previously offered as PSCY 329.  SO
MW 1pm-2:15pm

* WGSS 1701a / FILM 2897a / GMAN 1701a, Gender and Sexuality in German Literature and Film  Lea Jouannais

In this course, we will explore the 20th-century German artistic, literary, and cinematic canon through the lens of gender and sexuality. Queer and feminist perspectives will play a central role in our discussions, while also providing students with a broader understanding of artistic movements in the German-speaking world. A chronological approach, spanning from the interwar period to the present day, will serve as a guide through key moments in German history. Our readings and analyses will include works by Irmgard Keun and Mela Hartwig in the interwar period, August Sander’s photographs, excerpts of Klaus Mann and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s texts, postwar literature with Ingeborg Bachmann, New German Cinema through the films of RW Fassbinder and Ulrike Ottinger; a novel by Elfriede Jelinek, the poetry of May Ayim, and contributions from contemporary German voices. This course is conducted entirely in German. It is recommended that students have completed one other L5 class, though exceptions are possible on a case-by-case basis.  Please contact Language Program Director Theresa Schenker with questions: theresa.schenker@yale.edu  L5, HU
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

WGSS 2165a / FILM 2167a / LAST 2165a / PORT 2165a / SPAN 2090a, Through the Lens of Memory: Other Perspectives on Dictatorships in Latin America and Iberia  Giseli Tordin

This course examines the cinematic portrayals of military dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Spain, and Portugal, exploring how film serves as both a historical document and a means to reinterpret and reconstruct the past. As a language course, it allows students to engage with multiple modes of meaning–linguistic, visual, auditory, tactile, gestural, and spatial–through which cinema conveys its narratives. Students analyze how films reconstruct memory, challenge hegemonic historiography, and reinscribe erased or silenced perspectives. The course reflects on the relevance of these works in contemporary struggles against violence and oppression, considering how they teach us to critically engage with power, resistance, and collective memory. It also focuses on women's cinematic productions and representations, examining how gender, race, and political resistance intersect in the visual representation of repression, violence, and memory. The course incorporates both Spanish and Portuguese, encouraging students to express their ideas and develop projects in either language. Languages: Portuguese and Spanish. Prerequisite: PORT 1400 (or equivalent) or SPAN 1400 (or equivalent).   L5, HU
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

* WGSS 2202b / AFAM 2339b / AMST 4461b / EDST 2209b / ER&M 1692b, Identity, Diversity, and Policy in U.S. Education  Craig Canfield

Introduction to critical theory (feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, trans studies, Indigenous studies) as a fundamental tool for understanding and critiquing identity, diversity, and policy in U.S. education. Exploration of identity politics and theory, as they figure in education policy. Methods for applying theory and interventions to interrogate issues in education. Application of theory and interventions to policy creation and reform. EDST 1110 recommended.  WR, HU
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 2204a / PLSC 2253a, Women, Politics, and Policy  Staff

This course is an introduction to the way gender structures how we interpret the political world, exploring topics such as women's access to power, descriptive and substantive representation, evaluation of the functioning of political institutions, and analysis of government policy It also serves as an introduction to reading and producing empirical research on gender in the social sciences.   SO  0 Course cr
HTBA

* WGSS 2205a / ER&M 1681a, Bodies and Pleasures, Sex and Genders  Eda Pepi

This seminar explores questions of embodiment -- its pleasures, perplexities, and pains - to interrogate sex, sexuality, and gender as analytical categories. Its aim is to evaluate formative concepts, theories, and debates within feminist, gender, and queer studies, critical race studies, and history. We will consider how terms like “women” and “men,” “femininity” and “masculinity,” “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality,” and “gender” and “transgender” have structured people’s experiences and perceptions of bodies – their own and others’.  We will interrogate the dynamic and often contested relationship between “gender” and sexuality,” and their constitution through other axes of power and difference, including race, class, and (dis)ability.  SO
F 1:30pm-3:20pm

* WGSS 2206b / ER&M 257, Transnational Approaches to Gender & Sexuality  Evren Savci

Examination of transnational debates about gender and sexuality as they unfold in specific contexts. Gender as a category that can or cannot travel; feminist critiques of liberal rights paradigms; globalization of particular models of gender/queer advocacy; the role of NGOs in global debates about gender and sexuality.  WR
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 2207b / PLSC 2322b, Gender, Justice, Power, Institutions  Jiya Pandya

Welcome to Gender, Justice, Power & Institutions, a mouthful of abstractions that we work together to comprehend and critique throughout the semester. An aspiration of this course, as political as it is pedagogic, is that students approach their world-building projects with an enriched understanding of the ways gender, justice, and power shape and are shaped by institutions, inequality, and theory. Part I opens up some preliminary considerations of our course terms by investigating the case of abortion, abortion rights, and reproductive justice.  The topic is politically loaded, philosophically complex, and emotionally challenging; the point is not to convince you of the permissibility or impermissibility of abortion, but to explore how the contested case configures, imbricates, and puts pressure on our course terms. In Part II, we examine the historical and conceptual coordinates of the courses first three titular terms: is gender a subjective identification, social ascription, or axis of inequality? Is justice a matter of redistribution, recognition, resources, capabilities, or something more hedonic? Where is power located, or where does it circulate? Who are what leverages power? In Part III, we consider ways gender, justice, and power travel within and across several institutions: heterosexuality, the university, the trafficking/anti-trafficking industrial complex, the prison, and the bathroom. Part IV closes out the course by focusing on the reconfiguration of democratic institutions in late modernity; or, can institutions "love us back" under the the political economy we shorthand as "neoliberalism"?   SO  0 Course cr
HTBA

* WGSS 2209b / CLCV 2199 / CPLT 2390b / HELN 2160b, Dionysus in Modernity  George Syrimis

Modernity's fascination with the myth of Dionysus. Questions of agency, identity and community, and psychological integrity and the modern constitution of the self. Manifestations of Dionysus in literature, anthropology, and music; the Apollonian-Dionysiac dichotomy; twentieth-century variations of these themes in psychoanalysis, surrealism, and magical realism.  HU  Tr
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 2212a, Monogamy and its Discontents  Staff

While monogamy is central to Michel Foucault’s formulation of normative sexuality that arose in the 19th century (the Malthusian couple as adult, monogamous, heterosexual, married, and reproductive), little attention has been paid to it as a particular historical form of intimacy. We investigate this structure of intimacy through theoretical, historical, ethnographic, literary, and visual materials and think about the various meanings of monogamy historically as well as transnationally. Monogamy is entangled with relations of private property, with colonial civilizational narratives, with scientific theories about human nature. Polygamy in return has historically been understood as religious and/or cultural difference, and as a remnant of pre-modernity. The course weaves together theoretical readings that equip students with the tools to understand some key concepts that we need for our discussion, such as private property; the private family; colonialism and (cultural) imperialism; law and liberalism; and bourgeois morality with readings that more directly address some of the key ways in which monogamy is imagined, understood and framed. We discuss the turn to a recent rise in nonmonogamy in the “West” as a radical and “liberated” alternative to life-long or serial monogamy, at times featuring a critique of the private family, which constitutes a curious contrast to the nonmonogamy of religious and cultural Others of the West. Understanding the contemporary discourses and industries (books, podcasts, therapists’ youtube channels) around polyamory and nonmonogamy as a 21st century strategic unity, we analyze how liberalism has framed our understanding of sexual liberation and discuss alternative approaches to freedom.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

WGSS 2230a / ANTH 2530a, Evolutionary Biology of Female Bodies  Claudia Valeggia

Evolutionary, biosocial, and situated perspectives on the female body. Physiological, ecological, social and cultural aspects of the development of female bodies from puberty through menopause and aging, with special attention to lived experiences. Variation in female life histories in a variety of cultural and ecological settings. Examples from both traditional and modern societies.  SC  0 Course cr
TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm

* WGSS 2233a / FILM 3417 / HELN 2380a, Weird Greek Wave Cinema  George Syrimis

The course examines the cinematic production of Greece in the last fifteen years or so and looks critically at the popular term “weird Greek wave” applied to it. Noted for their absurd tropes, bizarre narratives, and quirky characters, the films question and disturb traditional gender and social roles, as well as international viewers’ expectations of national stereotypes of classical luminosity–the proverbial “Greek light”–Dionysian exuberance, or touristic leisure. Instead, these works frustrate not only a wholistic reading of Greece as a unified and coherent social construct, but also the physical or aesthetic pleasure of its landscape and its ‘quaint’ people with their insistence on grotesque, violent, or otherwise disturbing images or themes (incest, sexual otherness and violence, aggression, corporeality, and xenophobia). The course also pays particular attention on the economic and political climate of the Greek financial crisis during which these films are produced and consumed and to which they partake.  HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* WGSS 2235a / AMST 2233a / ER&M 3536a / HIST 2196a, Another “Other” – Introducing Critical Theories and Histories of Disability  Jiya Pandya

What is disability? How has its definition changed over time? How do people “become” disabled and how does one inhabit a disabled body? In what ways has the disabled body become a site for enacting imperial, national, and resistant politics? Where and how are alternate, radical visions of health being developed? This introductory course in Disability Studies poses answers to these and other related questions through an overview of key texts and debates in the growing field of disability studies. Students will learn about the transnational history of disability and disability rights, think about the intersections of disability, race, sexuality, gender, and citizenship, and engage with questions of accessibility and activism that already exist in spaces around you. This course, composed of three modules on “disability,” “disidentifications” with disability, and “disability justice” and “health liberation,” is meant to be both an academic overview of a field and a toolkit for advocacy. As we reckon with the longer impacts of COVID-19 and process what it means to live life during and after a global pandemic, it makes most sense for us to turn to those who have reckoned with what it means to live in “crisis,” to inhabit a body that is almost-always at “risk,” and to build creative forms of care and community. We will spend significant time with disabled writers, artists, and scholars who offer insight and memory about interactions with and between medicine, war, design, technology, sexuality, race, and imperialism. none
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* WGSS 2238b, Foucault and the Sexual Self  Igor De Souza

This course explores the main ideas and influence of Foucault's History of Sexuality. Alongside the methods and conclusions of the HS, we examine the implications of the HS for feminist studies and queer theory, and the approach of the HS towards ancient Greek sexuality.  HU
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

* WGSS 2239b / AMST 2239 / EDST 1235b, Education and the Culture Wars  Talya Zemach-Bersin

Examination of the historical development and politics of the “culture wars” with a focus on how battles over the “soul of America” have focused on the American education system. Conflict over "American values” issues like abortion, gay marriage, and religion are compounded by legal battles over federal funding and school choice. Study of interdisciplinary readings from law, politics, history, and cultural studies. EDST 1110 recommended.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

* WGSS 2251a / ENGL 3751a, Experiments in the Novel: The Eighteenth Century  Jill Campbell

The course provides an introduction to English-language novels of the long eighteenth century (1688-1818), the period in which the novel has traditionally been understood to have "risen." Emphasizing the experimental nature of novel-writing in this early period of its history, the course foregrounds persistent questions about the genre as well as a literary-historical survey: What is the status of fictional characters? How does narrative sequence impart political or moral implications? How do conventions of the novel form shape our experience of gender? What kind of being is a narrator? Likely authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.  WR, HU
MW 1pm-2:15pm

* WGSS 2271a / SOCY 3707a, Prison Nation, Race, Gender, Crime, and Abolition Politics  Staff

Mass incarceration and police violence are pressing human rights issues in the contemporary Americas. The US carceral state is sweeping, with nearly 2 million people currently incarcerated on any given day and a targeted policing apparatus that brings people under the penal net. At the same time, countries in Latin America have high rates of incarceration and often even higher rates of police violence than the US. These dynamics are deeply racialized and shape individuals, families, and communities. But that is not the full story. Liberatory movements have resisted and surged against this subjugation for decades. In this course, students will comparatively study the development of the contemporary carceral state and the political struggles waged against it. Students will read across the social sciences, Black studies, history, and law, as well as performance, memoir, and testimony. By examining the carceral state in this way, students will gain a critical lens on longstanding debates related to race and racism, justice and injustice, and reparation and abolition, in both the US and Latin America. While the course is not exhaustive, it is meant to equip students with a working framework on the critical debates in the field. This course is not open to students previously enrolled in SOCY 105/WGSS 106.  SO
W 9:25am-11:15am

WGSS 2272a / AMST 2272a / ER&M 2682a / HIST 1183a, Asian American History, 1800 to the Present  Staff

An introduction to the history of East, South, and Southeast Asian migrations and settlement to the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. Major themes include labor migration, community formation, U.S. imperialism, legal exclusion, racial segregation, gender and sexuality, cultural representations, and political resistance.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

* WGSS 2297b / HIST 3718b, Gender Expression Before Modernity  Igor De Souza

What are the historical forms of gender non-conformity? This course investigates expressions of gender that were considered non-conforming within their historical contexts. Our point of departure is the idea that gender constitutes a “useful category of historical analysis” (Joan Scott). In this course we ask how deviant gender expression can be a category of historical analysis. How do we write history from the perspective of gender fluidity, non-binarism, and gender transgression? How can this history give us the tools to critique regnant norms of gender expression, then and now? How does this historical approach relate to trans* and non-binary people & movements today? The course is historically wide-ranging, from Antiquity to the Early Modern period, and geographically diverse, including Europe, the Middle East, and the colonial Americas. The breath of contexts enable us to consider broad patterns, continuities, and discontinuities. At the same time, we discuss the specificities of particular contexts, emphasizing the connection between gender fluidity/non-conformity, on the one hand, and local cultural norms around gender and sex, on the other. We investigate intellectual and cultural trends, as well as the lives of gender fluid/non-conforming individuals. We analyze sources drawn from law, medicine, religion, philosophy, visual arts & literature, biographies, and memoirs. All readings are in English translation. No prior background is required. However, it will be helpful to have taken either WGSS 291/HIST 287J or WGSS 306 before or in concurrence with this course.  HU
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

* WGSS 3305a / AFAM 3615a, Black Feminist Theory  Gail Lewis

This course is designed to introduce you to some of the major themes in black feminist theory. The course does so by presenting classic texts with more recent ones to give you a sense of the vibrancy of black feminist theory for addressing past and present concerns. Rather than interpret black feminist theory as a critical formation that simply puts race, gender, sexuality, and class into conversation with one another, the course apprehends that formation as one that produced epistemic shifts in how we understand politics, empire, history, the law, and literature. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the areas into which black feminism intervened. It is merely a sample of some of the most vibrant ideological and discursive contexts in which black feminism caused certain epistemic transformations.    SO
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

* WGSS 3312a / AMST 3302a / ER&M 3012a / HSHM 4930a, Technology, Race and Gender  Kalindi Vora

In this course, we discuss technology and the politics of difference through a survey of topics including artificial intelligence, digital labor (crowdsourcing), and robotics and computer science. Materials for study include humanistic and social scientific critique, ethnographies of technology, technical writing and scientific papers, as well as speculative art practices including design, visual art and fiction. What assumptions and politics of imagination govern the design and development of new technologies? What alternative imaginaries, politics, or even speculations, can be identified with a feminist analytic lens? The seminar also includes a practicum component where we practice the politics of speculation through writing and design projects. To do this we study everything from active STEM projects at Yale to speculative fiction and film to think about how structures of race, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, and religious difference inform how we "speculate" or imagine the future through the ways we design and build technological worlds in practice and in fiction.  HU, SO
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* WGSS 3321b / ANTH 3821b / MMES 3321b / SOCY 3433b, Middle East Gender Studies  Marcia Inhorn

The lives of women and men in the contemporary Middle East explored through a series of anthropological studies and documentary films. Competing discourses surrounding gender and politics, and the relation of such discourse to actual practices of everyday life. Feminism, Islamism, activism, and human rights; fertility, family, marriage, and sexuality.  SO
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

* WGSS 3334b / ARCH 3109b / ER&M 1638b, Making the Inclusive Museum: Race, Gender, Disability and the Politics of Display  Joel Sanders

BLM and COVID-19 have underscored the imperative for public institutions like art museums to reckon with a longstanding dilemma: museum architecture, working in relationship with the art it displays, perpetuation of white supremacy, heteronormativity, and ableism. This seminar uses the resources of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art to situate this contemporary challenge in a cultural and historical context by tracing the intertwined histories of art and gallery architecture from the 16th century to today. Looking back allows us to imagine alternative futures: we consider the work of contemporary scholars, artists, designers, and public health experts who are developing strategies for making 21st-century museums inclusive environments that promote multi-sensory experiences among people of different races, genders, and abilities. Instructor permission is required based on the submission of an Expression of Interest with the following info: Name, Class year, Major/Concentration, Email and a paragraph describing relevant experiences that would allow you to make a meaningful contribution to the class.  HU  RP
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* WGSS 3335b / AMST 3336b, LGBTQ Life Spans  Scott Herring

Interdisciplinary survey of LGBTQ life spans in the United States concentrating primarily on later life. Special attention paid to topics such as disability, aging, and ageism; queer and trans creative aging; longevity and life expectancy during the AIDS epidemic; intergenerational intimacy; age and activism; critiques of optimal aging; and the development of LGBTQ senior centers and affordable senior housing. We explore these topics across multiple contemporary genres: documentary film (The Joneses), graphic memoir (Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home), poetry (Essex Hemphill’s “Vital Signs”), fabulation (Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments), and oral history. We also review archival documents of later LGBTQ lives—ordinary and iconic—held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as well as the Lesbian Herstory Archives.  HU
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

* WGSS 3340a, Feminist and Queer Theory  Caleb Knapp

Historical survey of feminist and queer theory from the Enlightenment to the present, with readings from key British, French, and American works. Focus on the foundations and development of contemporary theory. Shared intellectual origins and concepts, as well as divergences and conflicts, among different ways of approaching gender and sexuality.  WR, HU
W 9:25am-11:15am

* WGSS 3350a / AMST 3300a, The Invention of Love  Igor De Souza

This course proposes a historical, theoretical, and cultural investigation of what we call “romantic love,” the kind of love we tend to associate with courtship, with relationships that include a sexual-erotic component, and with marriage. We begin with Denis de Rougemont’s controversial thesis that romantic love was invented around the 1200s in the courtly culture of Southern France. We examine manifestations of romantic love in medieval Arab cultures as precedents to the invention of courtly love. In the second part of our course, we turn to modern humanistic theories about romantic love. Among the questions that critical theorists and philosophers have posed, we consider: How is love related to desire? Is sexual desire an indispensable component of romantic love? Is romantic love ultimately a selfish, exclusionary act, or is it about renouncing the self, losing the self in the other? In the third part of our course, we apply the insights of parts 1 and 2 to discuss case studies of romantic love in the contemporary United States. In this section, we explore reining assumptions between romantic love and: marriage; monogamy; dating; the digital environment; queerness; age; and transnationalism.
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

* WGSS 3419a / HIST 3419a, Modern South Asian Histories of the Body  Jiya Pandya

Beginning from the recognition that bodies are contextually specific and historically produced, we chart South Asia's history in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries from the vantage point of the body. Unpacking the body’s role as a site of power in imperial, nationalist, and postcolonial politics, we investigate how our narratives of history deepen when we make questions of race, caste, gender, sexuality, and disability central to our narratives. To understand some of the vast array of embodied practices under empire and in new national states, we consider the perspectives of multi-disciplinary scholars across a series of themes like violence, labor, war, and health. Together, we work to foster ethical engagement with historical subjects and to understand the lasting legacies of embodied histories on the social and political worlds of South Asia today.  HU
M 9:25am-11:15am

* WGSS 3831a / AMST 3831a / ENGL 3831a / ER&M 3831a, Texxture  Sunny Xiang

The term texxture was first used by queer studies scholars to describe a density of tactile information about an object’s provenance, composition, circulation, and use. This brilliant coinage offers an immanent theorization of texture as something like an x-factor—an excess and an essence, something magical yet practical, a strange intensity and the thing itself. Such ambiguities, however, also contribute to texture’s interpretive difficulties. For whether we have in mind a velvet armchair, a pair of distressed jeans, a handbound book, or a tablet computer, texture performs a dramatic revelation to the extent that it is also shadowed by deception and ambivalence. These paradoxes and cruxes inspire a range of inquiries for our class: What can the perception and creation of texture teach us about the sensorial and material politics of race, gender, empire, capitalism, and art? How might texture help us study the relation between desire and violence, especially at the interface of touch? What things, beings, events, places, emotions, and ideas appear to have a texture? What is texture’s route to intelligibility, and is there a scale or unit at which texture vanishes?  WR, HU
TTh 9am-10:15am

* WGSS 4403a / SPAN 3525a, Women Writers of Spain  Noel Valis

The development of women's writing in Spain, with a focus on the modern era. Equal attention to the sociohistorical and cultural contexts of women writers and to the narrative and poetic strategies the authors employed. Some readings from critical and theoretical works.  L5, HU
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

* WGSS 4409b / AMST 4409b / HIST 3166b, Asian American Women and Gender, 1830 to the Present  Mary Lui

Asian American women as key historical actors. Gender analysis is used to reexamine themes in Asian American history: immigration, labor, community, cultural representations, political organizing, sexuality, and marriage and family life.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* WGSS 4413a / TDPS 4016a, Feminist Theater and Performance Art  Elise Morrison

This course presents a range of works by feminist scholars, activists, writers, and performers who have used live, embodied performance as a means by which to critique and reimagine cultural representations of gender and sexuality. Students will utilize their performance making as a primary mode of researching and critically engaging with historical and contemporary examples of feminist performance work. Through readings, viewings, group discussions, and weekly performance etudes we will map out significant theories, debates, and performance strategies that emerged out of the feminist movement(s) of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.   HU
TTh 1:30pm-3:20pm

* WGSS 4416a / ER&M 3535a / FREN 4160a, Social Mobility and Migration  Morgane Cadieu

The seminar examines the representation of upward mobility, social demotion, and interclass encounters in contemporary French literature and cinema, with an emphasis on the interaction between social class and literary style. Topics include emancipation and determinism; inequality, precarity, and class struggle; social mobility and migration; the intersectionality of class, race, gender, and sexuality; labor and the workplace; homecomings; mixed couples; and adoption. Works by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux and her peers (Éribon, Gay, Harchi, Linhart, Louis, NDiaye, Taïa). Films by Cantet, Chou, and Diop. Theoretical excerpts by Berlant, Bourdieu, and Rancière. Students will have the option to put the French corpus in dialogue with the literature of other countries. Conducted in French.   HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* WGSS 4419a / HIST 3719a / HSHM 4330a, Gender and Science  Deborah Coen

Exploration of the dual potential of the sciences to reinforce received ideas about gender or to challenge existing sexual and racial hierarchies; the rise of the ideas and institutions of the modern sciences as they have reflected and shaped new notions of femininity and masculinity.   WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* WGSS 4430b / ANTH 441 / ANTH 4841b / MMES 4430b, Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East  Eda Pepi

This seminar explores the complex interplay between gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa. We examine how they are both shaped by and shape experiences of nationality, migration, and statelessness. Highlighting how gender and sexual minorities, and the gendered regulation of life, more broadly, both animate and contest colonial legacies tied to a racialized notion of “modernity.” Through ethnography, history, and literature, students confront a political economy of intimacies that continuously reshape what it means to be or not to be a citizen. Our approach extends beyond borders and laws to include the everyday acts of citizenship that rework race, religion, and ethnicity across transnational fronts. We discuss how people navigate their lives in the everyday, from the ordinary poetry of identity and belonging to the spectacular drama of war and conflict. Our goal is to challenge orientalist legacies that dismiss theoretical insights from scholarship on and from this region by labeling it as focused on exceptional cases instead of addressing “universal” issues. Instead, we take seriously that the specific historical and social contexts of the Middle East and North Africa reveal how connections based on gender and sexuality within and across families and social classes are deeply entwined with racial narratives of state authority and political sovereignty on a global scale.  SO
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

* WGSS 4435a / AMST 2253 / ENGL 2853 / HIST 3742a / HSHM 4180a / SOCY 3233, Queer Science  Juno Richards

Why are there so many studies involving trans brain scans? Can facial recognition technology really tell if you’re queer? Why is everyone so obsessed with gay penguins? For that matter, how did science come to be the right tool for defining and knowing sex, gender, and sexuality at all? How does that history influence our collective lives in the present, and what are some alternatives? This course gives students a background in the development of sex science, from evolutionary arguments that racialized sexual dimorphism to the contemporary technologies that claim to be able to get at bodily truths that are supposedly more real than identity. It introduces scholarly and political interventions that have attempted to short-circuit the idea that sex is stable and knowable by science, highlighting ways that queer and queering thinkers have challenged the stability of sexual categories. It concludes by asking how to put those interventions into practice when so much of the fight for queer rights, autonomy, and survival has been rooted in categorical recognition by the state, and by considering whether science can be made queer.  HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* WGSS 4438a, Subjectivity and its Discontents: Psychosocial Explorations in Black, Feminist, Queer  Gail Lewis

Questions of subjectivity stand at the base of much feminist, black, queer scholarship yet how subjectivity is constituted, whether it is fixed or fluid, how it links to narratives of experience, and how it can be apprehended in critical inquiry is often left implicit. Beginning with a brief consideration of psychoanalytic conceptions of ‘the subject’, ‘subjectivity’ and their relation to social formations, this course examines some of the ways in which subjectivity has been theorized and brought under critical scrutiny by black diasporic, feminist and queer scholars. It draws on work produced in reference to multiple sites, including the UK, the USA and the Caribbean within the fields of psychoanalysis, social science, the humanities and critical art practice. It aims to critique the divide between ‘interior’ psychic life and ‘exterior’ social selves, as well as considering the relation between ‘freedom’ and subjectivity, including the extent to which ‘freedom’ might require rejection of ‘subjectivity’ as a mode of personhood.  SO
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

* WGSS 4448a / HIST 3177a / HSHM 4480a, American Medicine and the Cold War  Naomi Rogers

The social, cultural, and political history of American medicine from 1945 to 1960. The defeat of national health insurance; racism in health care; patient activism; the role of gender in defining medical professionalism and family health; the rise of atomic medicine; McCarthyism in medicine; and the polio vaccine trials and the making of science journalism.  WR, HU
T 9:25am-11:15am

* WGSS 4459a / ANTH 4855a, Masculinity and Men’s Health  Marcia Inhorn

Ethnographic approaches to masculinity and men’s health around the globe. Issues of ethnographic research design and methodology; interdisciplinary theories of masculinity; contributions of men’s health studies from Western and non-Western sites to social theory, ethnographic scholarship, and health policy.  SO  RP
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

* WGSS 4465b / HIST 3747b / HIST 447J / HSHM 4670b, History of the Body  Ziv Eisenberg

What does it mean to have a “bad hair day?” How should you care for your skin? What happens when you eat a burger and drink wine? How are babies made? What happens when you die? The answers depend not only on who provides them, but also on where and when. This seminar examines historical production of systems of corporeal knowledge and power, as well as the norms, practices, meanings, and power structures they have created, displaced, and maintained. Structured thematically, the course familiarizes students with major topics in the history of the body, health, and medicine, with a particular focus on US history.  WR, HU
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

* WGSS 4490a, The Senior Colloquium  Joseph Fischel

A research seminar taken during the senior year. Students with diverse research interests and experience discuss common problems and tactics in doing independent research.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

* WGSS 4491b, The Senior Essay  Igor De Souza

Independent research on, and writing of, the senior essay.
HTBA

* WGSS 4518b / ANTH 4818b / ER&M 4518b and ER&M 6606b / SPAN 4618b, Multi-Sited Ethnography: Trans-Atlantic Port Cities in Colombia and Spain  Eda Pepi and Ana Ramos-Zayas

Critical to colonial, imperial, and capitalist expansion, the Atlantic offers a dynamic setting for adapting ethnographic practices to address questions around interconnected oppressions, revolts, and revolutions that are foundational to global modernity. Anchored in a Spanish and a Colombian port city, this course engages trans-Atlantic 'worlding' through a multi-sited and historically grounded ethnographic lens. Las Palmas—the earliest mid-Atlantic port and Europe's first settler colony in Africa—and Cartagena—once the principal gateway connecting Spain and its American empire—illuminate urgent contemporary issues such as climate, displacement, inter-regional subjectivities, and commerce. During a spring recess field experience (March 8–16, 2026), students immerse themselves for four nights each in Las Palmas and Cartagena, developing critical "tracking" skills that bridge ethnographic practice with cultural theory. Preparation for fieldwork includes an on-campus curriculum, organized around Cartagena and Las Palmas, and sessions with Yale Ethnography Hub faculty, covering different methodologies. As part of this broader programming, the curriculum delves into trans-Atlantic migrations from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa that have transformed port cities, labor and aesthetic practices, class-making racial formations, and global geopolitics. After recess, the course shifts toward independent work, as students synthesize field-collected data and insights into a collaborative multimodal group project and individual ethnographic papers.  Interested students must apply by November 1st via the course website. Students may withdraw by the university deadlines in April. Prerequisite: Conversational and reading proficiency in Spanish. Readings are in English and Spanish, with assignments accepted in either language.  HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm