WGSS 529a, Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights  Ali Miller

This course explores the application of human rights perspectives and practices to issues in regard to sexuality, gender, and health. Through reading, interactive discussion, paper presentation, and occasional outside speakers, students learn the tools and implications of applying rights and law to a range of sexuality- and health-related topics. The overall goal is twofold: to engage students in the world of global sexual health and rights policy making as a field of social justice and public health action, and to introduce them to conceptual tools that can inform advocacy and policy formation and evaluation. Class participation, a book review, an OpEd, and a final paper required. This course follows the Law School calendar. Enrollment limited. Permission of the instructor required. Also SBS 585; GLBL 529; WGSS 529.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

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 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 666b / AMST 778b / ANTH 666b / ER&M 762b, The Study of Privilege in the Americas  Ana Ramos-Zayas

Examination of inequality, not only through experiences of the poor and marginal, but also through institutions, beliefs, social norms, and everyday practices of the privileged. Topics include critical examination of key concepts like “studying up,” “elite,” and “privilege,” as well as variations in forms of capital; institutional sites of privilege (elite prep schools, Wall Street); living spaces and social networks (gated communities, private clubs); privilege in intersectional contexts (privilege and race, class, and gender); and everyday practices of intimacy and affect that characterize, solidify, and promote privilege.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

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 9:25am-11:15am

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?
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 696b / AMST 696b / ENGL 906b / ER&M 696b / HSHM 782b / RLST 630b, 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.
HTBA

WGSS 700b, Feminist and Queer Theories  Evren Savci

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.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 704b / AMST 704b / ENGL 886b, War and Everyday Life  Sunny Xiang

This course thinks together two spatiotemporal phenomena that appear opposed: war and everyday life. Why is war generally thought of as an exceptional phenomenon, a climactic event that disrupts the quotidian rhythms of the everyday? And why does everyday life so often appear parceled off from war, a placid domestic realm that soldiers depart from and return to? The study of war is often a masculine, muscular endeavor. This course's turn to the methodologies that are guided by feminist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist critique allows us to better contemplate how militaristic logics shape everyday life and how anti-militarism might be lived at the level of daily practices. This notion of everyday militarisms is both the impetus and the frame for our engagement of the special collections at Yale Library. As an impetus, lived experience of militarism requires us to account for our specific institutional location. What has Yale's role been in war-making and empire-building? How might we analyze our own experiences at Yale and in the historical present with these flashpoints in mind? An attunement to the more quotidian aspects of militarisms also provides an alternate frame for rethinking wartime events that may at the outset seem extraordinary or exceptional. What might it mean to understand nuclear bombs, forced migrations, and environmental disasters as ordinary crises? What do people's day-to-day experience of such crises look like? To approach such questions from different angles and at different scales, we need to consult primary source materials in tandem with an array of interdisciplinary scholarship. Considered together, these course materials help us contemplate why everyday wars tend to go undetected—whether because of new kinds of weapons, war crimes that pass as governance, the time lag of slow violence, or the representational norms of popular culture. Of course, the militarization of daily life looks different depending on one’s geographical, historical, social, and disciplinary orientation. So, even though the course tries to assemble a range of materials and examples, it reflects the instructor's orientation as an Americanist scholar of twentieth-century transpacific culture and politics. But the assessment of everydayness is a matter of perception and perspective in a more general sense as well. How does militarism hide in plain sight, and for whom is it hidden? Throughout the term, the power relations embedded in discerning and analyzing everyday militarisms require us to bring an added layer of critical self-reflection to all our research endeavors.
M 9:25am-11:15am

WGSS 724b / AMST 724b / PLSC 868b, Gender and Sexuality in American Politics and Policy  Dara Strolovitch

This seminar familiarizes students with foundational work on and approaches to the study of gender and sexuality in American politics and public policy. It explores empirical work that addresses these topics, a range of theoretical and epistemological approaches to them, and the social scientific methods that have been used to examine them. It explores the history, findings, and controversies in research about gender and sexuality in American politics and political science, examining work within several subfields of American politics (e.g., political development; public law; political behavior; legislative studies; public policy; interest groups and social movements), important work from other disciplines, and research that does not fit neatly into traditional disciplinary categories, paying particular attention to the implications of this “messiness” for the study of gender, sexuality, and politics. We are attentive to the complicated histories of science and social science when it comes to the study of gender and sexuality and to the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with other politically relevant categories, identities, and forms of marginalization, such as race, ethnicity, class, and ideological and partisan identification.
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 730b / HIST 943b / HSHM 736b, Health Politics, Body Politics  Naomi Rogers

A reading seminar on struggles to control, pathologize, and normalize human bodies, with a particular focus on science, medicine, and the state, both in North America and in a broader global health context. Topics include disease, race, and politics; repression and regulation of birth control; the politics of adoption; domestic and global population control; feminist health movements; and the pathologizing and identity politics of disabled people.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 734b / AMST 780b / HIST 734b, Class and Capitalism in the Twentieth-Century United States  Jennifer Klein

Reading course on class formation, labor, and political economy in the twentieth-century United States; how regionalism, race, and class power shaped development of American capitalism. The course reconsiders the relationships between economic structure and American politics and political ideologies, and between global and domestic political economy. Readings include primary texts and secondary literature (social, intellectual, and political history; geography).
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 783a / FREN 958a, 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 have the option to put the French corpus in dialogue with the literature of other countries. Conducted in French.
M 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?
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 900a or b, Colloquium and Working Group  Dara Strolovitch

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
HTBA

WGSS 908b / ENGL 908b, Queer and Trans Archives  Juno Richards

This course offers an introduction to archival theory and methods, with a particular emphasis on the archival turn in queer and trans studies now. Most broadly, we survey major currents in the theorization of the archive, moving through the material afterlives of slavery and colonialism to draw out questions of recovery, reparation, erasure, ephemerality, bureaucracy, and over-abundance. More specifically, the arc of the course branches into three major currents. The first highlights queer and trans authors whose collections are housed in the Beinecke Library, including Richard Bruce Nugent, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and James Baldwin. The second current turns to queer and trans archives that have been digitized, including a wide range of periodicals, photographs, scrapbooks, and newsletters now available online. Finally, a third current tracks fictional and cinematic works that reimagine or incorporate the archive as an object of knowledge, including Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989) and Shola von Reinhold’s Lote (2020).
W 1:30pm-3:20pm