WGSS 520b / AMST 520b / ER&M 520b / HSHM 757b, Applied Research in Feminist Science and Technology Studies  Kalindi Vora

In this seminar, participants conduct applied research on projects with the primary investigator/instructor. Structured as a lab, we learn research methods, design research activities including building bibliographies for scholarly review, and collecting data through surveys and interviews. Topics vary but are linked to active research by instructor in feminist science and technology studies. Permission of instructor is required. Undergraduates may enroll by permission of instructor.
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WGSS 570b / SOCY 605b, LGBTQ Population Health  John Pachankis

Sexual and gender minority individuals (e.g., those who identify as LGBTQ) represent a key health disparity population in the United States and worldwide, but high-quality evidence of this problem has historically been slow to accumulate. This course engages students in critically examining today’s rapidly expanding empirical knowledge regarding sexual and gender minority health by considering challenges to, and opportunities for, conducting this research with methodological rigor. Students consider social and ecological influences on sexual and gender minority health, including migration, community, and neighborhood influences. Social institutions, including religion, school, family, and close relationships, are examined as sources of both stress and support. Given the relevance of individual and collective identity and stress as mechanisms through which stigma impacts sexual and gender minority health, the empirical platform of the course is complemented by intersectionality theory, critical postmodern work on identity fluidity and multiplicity across the life course, and minority stress conceptualizations of health. Students apply lessons learned in the course to evaluating and developing policy and health care interventions for this increasingly visible segment of the global population. Also SBS 570.
Th 1pm-2:50pm

WGSS 600a, Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies  Joseph Fischel

Introduction to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies as a field of knowledge and to the interdiscipline’s structuring questions and tensions. The course genealogizes feminist and queer knowledge production, and the institutionalization of WGSS, by examining several of our key terms.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 607b, Feminist and Queer Ethnographies: Borders and Boundaries  Eda Pepi

This seminar gives students a storm’s eye view of contemporary crises, where borders are as volatile as the ring of a wedding bell or the birth of a child. Feminist and queer ethnographies explore the geopolitical lines and social divides that define and confine us. Manifesting through laws, social norms, and physical barriers, borders and boundaries shape our identities, turning the intimate act of living into a fiercely political one. We consider them as lived experiences that cross militarized lines—as the everyday realities of families, detention centers, workplaces, universities, and even nightclubs. Our readings trace the fluidity of borders, the extension of the global north's influence, and the internal colonialism that redraws the landscapes of nations. Contemporary ways of bridging time and space are profoundly gendered, sexualized racialized, and class-specific, capable of materializing with sudden intensity for some and remaining imperceptible to others, morphing from ephemeral lines to seemingly permanent barriers. The course is an invitation to think beyond the map—to understand borders as something people live, challenge, and transform. Our intellectual battleground is the liminal space where geopolitics meets the raw human struggle for recognition, peeling back the layers of political theatre to witness the making and unmaking of our borderlands. Anchored by a “radical hope for living otherwise,” the seminar also aims to expand the intellectual horizons necessary for dreaming of, and working towards, the world to come.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 608a, 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.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 620a / AMST 619a / ER&M 620a / HSHM 792a, Enduring Conditions: Chronic Illness, Disability, Care, and Access  Kalindi Vora

This interdisciplinary course brings together scholarship on access and care that bridges concerns in the fields of disability studies and humanistic approaches to chronic illness. Scholarly texts are drawn from the fields of critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, anthropology and sociology of medicine, history, and feminist science and technology studies (fSTS). Seminar participants also engage with the arts and media as critical sites for understanding culture work bringing together knowledge in disability and chronic illness spaces. To embrace community-based research and knowledge sharing, the course features regular guest lectures from grassroots disability justice organizers and culture workers. The course is offered in a hybrid format. To consider what disability studies and work on chronic illness can build together, we explore the work of Moya Bailey, Aimi Hamraie, Jina B. Kim, Sami Schalk, Akemi Nishida, Ryan Cartwright, and Arthur Kleinman, among others. Permission of instructor is required. Undergraduates may also enroll with permission of instructor.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 652a / AMST 652a, Queer Repertoires and the “Great American Songbook”  Karen Tongson

Queer Repertoires is a critical writing and intensive reading workshop using the “Great American Songbook” (in some of its canonical, as well as wildly innovative reimaginings) alongside recent and key texts about popular music, sound, sexuality, and race to explore other ways of approaching “academic writing,” broadly conceived. The class is suitable for students interested in queer studies, sound studies, musical theater studies, and popular music studies, as well as students who are interested in exploring other styles and methods of public writing with scholarly/research-based foundations. From Water Pater's “Preface to The Renaissance” declaring that “all arts aspire to the condition of music,” to Roland Barthes' claim in “The Grain of the Voice” that writing about music inspires an endlessly evasive and “predicative” language, aesthetes, philosophers, and critical theorists have struggled to find methods for writing about music, while playing with musicality in their own language. Meanwhile, American studies has engaged with popular music not merely as another archive constitutive of what constitutes “the American,” but also as a theoretical apparatus and set of stylistic techniques. This course encourages your experiments in critical writing about music, race, and sexuality in and beyond academic contexts. Seminar participants are expected to write short weekly assignments and to create playlists, while also exploring other multimedia modes (including audio storytelling) to workshop with the group on a rotating basis.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 661a, Queer Theology  Linn Tonstad

In the United States, queer theory emerged out of the Reagan years, the devastation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the combined impacts of neoliberalism and gentrification (politically, geographically, and socially) on queer communities. In spring 2022, we encounter each other in the midst of two pandemics: COVID-19 and the one that is not over. This course thinks and reads queer theology with attention to the many challenges highlighted by the two pandemics, HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, focusing on how flesh is thought and represented. Readings take up questions of ethics and moralization; stigma and fear of the other; togetherness and the risk of difference; pleasure, wisdom, foolishness, and loss; negativity, sodomy, and divine violence; race (especially anti-blackness) and gender; and the genres of queer theological writings. Prerequisite: at least two graduate-level seminars in religion, philosophy, or WGSS, or permission of the instructor.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 665b / CPLT 665b / ENGL 5865b, African Feminism and African Women Writers  Helen Yitah

This course looks at how major African women writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Ba, Bessie Head, Nawal El Saadawi, Grace Ogot, and Chimamanda Adichie have represented African feminist concerns and aesthetics in their works. We explore some of their interrogation of sexism and patriarchal social structures, the thematization of gender relations, a rethinking of marginality, and the presentation of alternative frames of reference for (re)defining female subjectivities and identities by reading selected works through the lens of African feminist thought, including Molara Ogundipe-Leslie’s stiwanism, Catherine Acholonu’s motherism, Obioma Nnaemeka’s nego-feminism, and Mary Kolawole’s and Chikwenye Ogunyemi’s versions of womanism.
W 9:25am-11:15am

WGSS 667b / FREN 900b / HIST 667b, History of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Europe  Carolyn Dean

An introduction to the various lines of inquiry informing the history of sexuality. The course asks how historians and others constitute sexuality as an object of inquiry and addresses different arguments about the evolution of sexuality in Europe, including the relationship between sexuality and the state and sexuality and gender.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 677a / PHIL 677a, Feminist Philosophy: Theories of Sex, Gender, and Sexual Orientation  Robin Dembroff

This course surveys several feminist frameworks for thinking about sex, gender, and sexual orientation. We consider questions such as: Is there a tenable distinction between sex and gender? Between gender and sexual orientation? What does it mean to say that gender is a social construction, or that sexual orientation is innate? What is the place of politics in gender and sexual identities? How do these identities—and especially resistant or transgressive identities—impact the creation and revision of social categories?
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 691a, Reimagining Gender Equality in International Human Rights Law  Claudia Flores, Graeme Reid, and Ali Miller

In this seminar, Professors Claudia Flores, member of the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, Graeme Reid, the UN's independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and Alice Miller, co-director of Global Health Justice Partnership explore the development, current state, and future prospects of gender equality within international human rights norms and legal framework. The seminar delves into the historical development, transnational contestations, and contemporary debates surrounding gender inclusivity and equality, with a particular focus on tensions between universal human rights standards, and claims to traditional values and cultural norms.
T 10:10am-12pm

WGSS 696a / AMST 696a / ENGL 906a / ER&M 696a / HSHM 782a / RLST 630a, Michel Foucault I: The Works, The Interlocutors, The Critics  Greta LaFleur

This graduate-level course presents students with the opportunity to develop a thorough, extensive, and deep (though still not exhaustive!) understanding of the oeuvre of Michel Foucault, and his impact on late-twentieth-century criticism and intellectual history in the United States. Non-francophone and/or U.S. American scholars, as Lynne Huffer has argued, have engaged Foucault’s work unevenly and frequently in a piecemeal way, due to a combination of the overemphasis on The History of Sexuality, Vol 1 (to the exclusion of most of his other major works), and the lack of availability of English translations of most of his writings until the early twenty-first century. This course seeks to correct that trend and to re-introduce Foucault’s works to a generation of graduate students who, on the whole, do not have extensive experience with his oeuvre. In this course, we read almost all of Foucault’s published writings that have been translated into English (which is almost all of them, at this point). We read all of the monographs, and all of the Collège de France lectures, in chronological order. This lightens the reading load; we read a book per week, but the lectures are shorter and generally less dense than the monographs. [The benefit of a single author course is that the more time one spends reading Foucault’s work, the easier reading his work becomes.] We read as many of the essays he published in popular and more widely-circulated media as we can. The goal of the course is to give students both breadth and depth in their understanding of Foucault and his works, and to be able to situate his thinking in relation to the intellectual, social, and political histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alongside Foucault himself, we read Foucault’s mentors, interlocutors, and inheritors (Heidegger, Marx, Blanchot, Canguilhem, Derrida, Barthes, Althusser, Bersani, Hartman, Angela Davis, etc); his critics (Mbembe, Weheliye, Butler, Said, etc.), and scholarship that situates his thought alongside contemporary social movements, including student, Black liberation, prison abolitionist, and anti-psychiatry movements. Instructor permission required.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 700b, Feminist and Queer Theories  Roderick Ferguson

This course is designed as a graduate introduction to feminist and queer thought. It is organized by a number of key terms and institutions around which feminist and queer thinking has clustered, such as the state, the law, religion, family and kinship, capitalism and labor, the body and language, knowledge and affect, globalization and imperialism, militarism and security. The “conversations” that happen around each term speak to the richness of feminist and queer theories, the multidimensionality of feminist and queer intellectual and political concerns, and the “need to think our way out of these crises,” to cite Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty. The aim is to leave students appreciating the hard labor of feminist and queer thought, and understanding the urgencies out of which such thinking emerges.
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WGSS 712a / AMST 866a / HIST 775a, Readings in the History of Sexuality  Regina Kunzel

Selected topics in the history of sexuality. Emphasis on key theoretical works and recent historical literature.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 757a / ANTH 753a, Feminist Anthropology  Eda Pepi

This seminar explores the impact of feminist theory on anthropology and interdisciplinary ethnography, charting its influence from the decline of structural functionalism to the embrace of poststructuralist and post-colonial perspectives. It engages feminist contributions on pivotal debates over the universality of women's subordination, the denaturalization of kinship, and the reframing of gender and sexuality as performative, highlighting the intersection of the “sex/gender system” with other analytical categories on a global scale. Through the feminist reevaluation of kinship studies, once the bedrock of anthropology, the course takes up how traditional analyses of biological, social, and societal reproduction that treat politics, economy, kinship, and religion as distinct cultural domains naturalize power and inequality. This paradigm shift inspired empirically informed interdisciplinary analyses across the social sciences and humanities—including in women’s studies, Black and Latina studies, queer studies, masculinity studies, affect theory, and science and technology studies. As such, the seminar is also an invitation to participate in both hopeful and skeptical new visions of anthropology—to dream of an “otherwise” future for our and other fields.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 779a / AMST 805a / HSAR 720a / RLST 699a, Sensational Materialities: Sensory Cultures in History, Theory, and Method  Sally Promey

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the sensory and material histories of (often religious) images, objects, buildings, and performances as well as the potential for the senses to spark contention in material practice. With a focus on American things and religions, the course also considers broader geographical and categorical parameters so as to invite intellectual engagement with the most challenging and decisive developments in relevant fields, including recent literatures on material agencies. The goal is to investigate possibilities for scholarly examination of a robust human sensorium of sound, taste, touch, scent, and sight—and even “sixth senses”—the points where the senses meet material things (and vice versa) in life and practice. Topics include the cultural construction of the senses and sensory hierarchies; investigation of the sensory capacities of things; and specific episodes of sensory contention in and among various religious traditions. In addition, the course invites thinking beyond the “Western” five senses to other locations and historical possibilities for identifying the dynamics of sensing human bodies in religious practices, experience, and ideas. The Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group meets approximately once per month at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays; class participants are strongly encouraged, but not required, to attend. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor; qualified undergraduates are not only welcome but encouraged to join us. There are no set prerequisites, but, assuming available seats, permission will be granted on the basis of response to three questions: Why do you wish to take this course? What relevant educational or professional background/experience do you bring to the course? How does the course help you to meet your own intellectual, artistic, or career aspirations?
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 782b / HIST 940b / HSHM 770b, Disability Histories: Research Seminar  Naomi Rogers

This course introduces students to the major issues in current disability history as well as theoretical debates in disability studies. We discuss cultural, social, and political meanings of citizenship; efforts to define and classify disabled bodies; contested notions of bodily difference; and the ways disability has and continues to be used as a metaphor for socially defined inferiority like gender, race, or sexuality. By the fourth week students have identified the topic for their research papers and discussed them in class. The next month is devoted to research and writing. We then start meeting again to read and discuss a draft of each paper.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 787a / AMST 787a, Transgender Legal History  Greta LaFleur

This course offers a graduate-level introduction to the histories of the regulation of gendered and sexual comportment in the United States from the colonial period through the present, understanding gendered and sexual comportment to be historical formations indelibly shaped by racialization, religion, immigration status, disability, and class and labor status (among others). Building on the work of trans studies scholars and legal historians (which are not, of course, mutually exclusive constituencies), this course offers a substantive introduction to trans and legal archives and the unique questions and methodologies that engagement with each of these fields demands. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Dean Spade, Emily Skidmore, Katrina Rose, Sonia Katyal, C. Riley Snorton, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Paisley Currah, Marie-Amélie George, Michael Silverman, Kendra Field, Kyle Kirkup, Kevin Barry, Elizabeth Glazer, Catharine MacKinnon, Siobhan Somerville, Stephen Robertson, Colby Gordon, Sahar Sadjadi, and many more, this course provides graduate students with an advanced introduction to four vectors of inquiry: First and foremost, the course grapples with historical and historiographical questions surrounding what might be included under the umbrella of trans history or histories. Second, the course introduces students to legal history as a field and a method. Third, the course explores the complicated patchwork of laws that, together, make up the legal histories of gendered and gender nonconforming experience. Finally, we consider the role of law and policy in the production of transgender as a framework for experience and site of legislation, regulation, protection, enforcement, etc. Students must be enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Yale University.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 800b / AMST 798b, Methods in Gender and Sexuality Studies  Eda Pepi

This seminar explores the dynamics of power and knowledge, the ethics of representation and accountability, and the nexus between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. It is designed for graduate students developing research projects that engage feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race methodologies, among others. The course adopts an epistemological approach that centers “encounter” across geopolitical scales and multiple disciplinary fronts in the humanities and social sciences. It posits that research methods, regardless of their origin, can adopt feminist, queer, decolonial/postcolonial, and critical race perspectives and potentially serve counter-disciplinary purposes. Although we cover a broad spectrum of methods—ranging from ethnographic, historiographic/archival, and geographic, to literary, media, and textual analysis, cultural studies, and political theory—our work does not unfold as a practicum. Instead of experimenting with a predefined “toolkit,” students critically engage book-length works that demonstrate counter-disciplinary methodologies, reflecting hermeneutically on how method and theory relate in these texts by drawing on Foucault's framework of “the archaeology of knowledge.”
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 857b / AMST 857b, Frailties  Scott Herring

An overview of the methodologies and interdisciplinary potentials of critical age studies. After beginning with a recent issue of Radical History Review on “Old/Age,” we spend our weeks discussing topics such as ageism and age discrimination; immigrant caregiving and servitude; black debility; creative iterations of queer and trans aging; age standardizations in the early twentieth-century United States; “deaths of despair” amidst “the new longevity”; feminist critiques of optimal aging; and junctures of disability and aging. The course brings together a range of thinkers including historians such as Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett; theorists such as Kathleen Woodward and Margaret Morganroth Gullette; disability justice activists such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha; and sociologists such as Mignon R. Moore. Two governing concerns that we answer as a class: How do considerations of age, aging, and gerontophobia featured in our readings amplify the contemporary investments of American studies? How can we chart political and aesthetic formations of the frail that offset their persistent nonrecognition?
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 900a or b, Colloquium and Working Group  Joseph Fischel

The course is made up of two components: the WGSS Graduate Colloquium, in which graduate students present ongoing research (meets every two to three weeks); and the WGSS Working Group, in which faculty present pre-circulated works-in-progress for critical feedback from the WGSS community (meets every two to three weeks).  ½ Course cr
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