* WGSS 0028b / AMST 0028b / HIST 2140b, US Queer History  Talya Zemach-Bersin

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
TTh 4pm-5:15pm

* WGSS 0032a, History of Sexuality  Igor De Souza

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
HTBA

WGSS 2200b / AMST 2200b / HUMS 1650b / SOCY 2300b, Topics in Human Sexuality  Joseph Fischel

In 1970, Yale professors and sexuality scholars Lorna and Philip Sarrel introduced what came to be their wildly popular lecture, “Topics in Human Sexuality.” The course, offered at the height of the sexual revolution and shortly after Yale University admitted women undergraduates, was multipurpose: to teach students about pressing, contemporary social problems around sex, gender, and sexuality; to help students learn about their bodies, sexualities, and relationships; to direct students to resources and information about their sexual and reproductive health; and to advance the mission of a liberal arts education, namely, the cultivation of well-rounded, critically engaged, curious, participatory young citizens. This iteration of the course is inspired by the Sarrels’ ambitions, even if we are unlikely to realize them in full. The course is offered in the spirit of a critical sexuality education, critical as in 1) theory- rather than practicum-driven, but nonetheless 2) urgent. As political movements that endanger transgender children, suppress sexual expression, and rescind reproductive rights gain traction, the course offers candid, careful focus on: abortion, sexual education, queer and trans kids, pornography, university sexual politics, hooking up, and breaking up.  Along the way, we watch a season of Netlfix’s “Sex Education” together. The class (nonexclusively) focuses on social and political problems in the contemporary United States, and examines those problems by drawing upon scholarship in Gender & Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Sociology, Psychology, and Public Law.  HU, SO  0 Course cr
TTh 10:30am-11:20am

* WGSS 2205b / ER&M 1681b, Bodies and Pleasures, Sex and Genders  Regina Kunzel

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
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 2206a / ER&M 257, Transnational Approaches to Gender & Sexuality  Jiya Pandya

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
MW 1:05pm-2:20pm

* WGSS 2208b / TDPS 2021b, Performance And/As Gender  Westley Montgomery

This course introduces students to the field of gender studies through performance, and the field of performance studies through gender. We examine performances spanning several genres—performance art, ballroom, hyperpop, musical theater, and more. Grounding these case studies, we also read theory from an array of thinkers including J.L. Austin, Judith Butler, Tavia Nyong'o, Gayle Salamon and Nina Sun Eidsheim, to name a few.  WR
W 4pm-5:55pm

* WGSS 2218a / AMST 2218a, Sex, Gender, and American Moderns  Deb Vargas

What did being “modern” mean to those whose marginalized aesthetics negotiated sexual, racial, regional, national, and gender norms in the first half of the twentieth-century United States? This course functions as an intensive immersion into the creeds and concerns of recent scholarship regarding modes of U.S. modernity as the field overlaps with current forays into sexuality and gender studies. Via painting, photography, print culture, a “homosexual comedy,” oral history and other resources, we discuss the popularization of heteronormativity in US sex manuals; the emergence of LGBTQ subcultures within and without urban East Coast environments; queer feminist agency through experimental photography in Provincetown; slumming and sensationalism in the Chicago Loop; and modern crip intimacies in Connecticut. Students meet the artists of the PaJaMa collective; James Weldon Johnson’s Ex-Colored Man; avant-garde Pacific Rim poets such as José Garcia Villa; a Nepali American surrealist; and a bohemian of the Harlem Renaissance whose drawings are held at the Beinecke.    HU
HTBA

* WGSS 2221a, Neoliberalism and Sexuality  Evren Savci

Sexuality is often imagined as a private and intimate affair, experienced individually, marked by personal histories and preferences. This course argues otherwise. Specifically, we consider the intersections between the current dominant political economic mode, referred to as neoliberal capitalism, and sexuality as a field of power. We analyze how subjectivities are formed under this current system, how desires are produced and discourses incited, and how the particular moralization of economic behavior has implications for a range of issues including reproductive justice, definitions of kinship, sexual liberation movements, and contemporary states of war and emergency. Thinking of sexuality as a field of power that is predicated on notions of normality and abnormality enables us to see what other “undesirable” subjects are produced under conditions of neoliberal capitalist modernity with whom sexual others are always in kinship. Students previously enrolled in WGSS 030 are not eligible to enroll in this course.  SO
W 4pm-5:55pm

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 2:35pm-3:50pm

* WGSS 2232b / AMST 2232b / ER&M 3686b, Latine Queer Trans Life  Deb Vargas

This course provides an introduction to Latinx queer trans* studies. We approach the field of Latinx queer trans* studies as an ongoing political project that emerges from social justice activism, gay/lesbian/queer/trans studies, critical race feminism, cultural practitioners, among other work. We pay particular attention to the keywords “trans,” “queer,” “Chicanx,” and “Latinx” by placing them in productive tension with each other through varied critical genealogies.    HU, SO
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 2233a / FILM 3417a / 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-3:25pm

* WGSS 2235b / AMST 2233b / ER&M 3536b / HIST 2196b, 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 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.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

* 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
HTBA

* WGSS 2239a / AMST 2239a / EDST 1235a, 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 4pm-5:55pm

* WGSS 2291b / HIST 2787b / RLST 3470b / SOCY 3331b, Sexual Minorities from Plato to the Enlightenment  Igor De Souza

This interdisciplinary course surveys the history of homosexuality from a cross-cultural, comparative  perspective. Students study contexts where homosexuality and sodomy were categorized, regulated, and persecuted and examine ancient and medieval constructions of same-sex desire in light of post-modern developments, challenging ideas around what is considered normal and/or natural. Ultimately, we ask: what has changed, and what has remained the same, in the history of homosexuality? What do gays and lesbians today have in common with pre-modern sodomites? Can this history help us ground or rethink our sexual selves and identities? Primary and secondary historical sources, some legal and religious sources, and texts in intellectual history are studied. Among the case studies for the course are ancient attitudes among Jews, early Christians, and Greeks; Christian theologians of the Middle Ages; Renaissance Florence; the Inquisition in Iberia; colonial Latin America; and the Enlightenment’s condemnation of sodomy by Montesquieu and Voltaire, and its defense by Bentham.  HU
HTBA

* WGSS 2293a / CLCV 3691a / HELN 3000a / HIST 3242a, The Olympic Games, Ancient and Modern  George Syrimis

Introduction to the history of the Olympic Games from antiquity to the present. The mythology of athletic events in ancient Greece and the ritual, political, and social ramifications of the actual competitions. The revival of the modern Olympic movement in 1896, the political investment of the Greek state at the time, and specific games as they illustrate the convergence of athletic cultures and sociopolitical transformations in the twentieth century.  HU
W 9:25am-11:20am

* WGSS 2808a / EALL 2808a, Sexual Cultures in East Asia  Kyunghee Eo

This course explores how sex and sexuality have been discussed, regulated, and represented across East Asia and its diaspora, with particular focus on non-normative sexualities and gender variance. Course materials are organized in roughly chronological order, moving from scholarship on homoerotic practices in premodern East Asia; the introduction of modern sexological discourse in the early twentieth century; literary expressions of sexual deviance from the Cold War era (1945-1987); and LGBTQ subjectivities, cultures, and social movements since the 1990s. All class materials will be in English translation, and no previous knowledge of East Asian languages is required.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 3258a / PLSC 3258a / SOCY 3358a, Bodies, Labor, and Politics  Isabelle Aboaf

Work is never “just work.” It is a deeply political phenomenon, moralized and regulated by states and societies alike. For those occupations that feature the physical body – such as professional athletes, fashion models, or sex workers – these politics are especially heightened. This course asks how labor politics and power operate through at the most intimate level: the body. When can we consider a job to be truly “embodied” —and with what consequences? How do these professions complicate the very idea of what constitutes “work”? Why are certain forms of embodied labor considered valuable by the state, and others cast as disposable or dangerous? We think critically about concepts such as bodily autonomy, public health, and beauty, and ask how these can (or should) factor into laws that affect the workplace. Drawing on feminist political theory and labor studies, we examine more closely the politics of different kinds of embodied work. Across these cases, we examine the deeper ethical questions and political stakes underlying their regulation. As a Writing in the Discipline course, we also develop practical approaches to writing and demystify the process of producing evidence-driven academic arguments.  SO
TTh 2:35pm-3:50pm

* WGSS 3306a / AMST 3314a / ER&M 3514a, Gender and Transgender  Greta LaFleur

Introduction to transgender studies, an emergent field that draws on gender studies, queer theory, sociology, feminist science studies, literary studies, and history. Representations of gender nonconformity in a cultural context dominated by a two-sex model of human gender differentiation. Sources include novels, autobiographies, films, and philosophy and criticism.  RP
MW 1:05pm-2:20pm

* WGSS 3312a / AMST 3302a / ER&M 3512a / 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
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 3340a, Feminist and Queer Theory  Westley Montgomery

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
MW 2:35pm-3:50pm

* 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.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 3354b / HIST 3191b, Women, Gender, and Grassroots Politics in the United States after World War II  Jennifer Klein

American politics and grassroots social movements from 1945 to the present explored through women's activism and through gender politics more broadly. Ideas about gender identities, gender roles, and family in the shaping of social movements; strategies used on the local, regional, national, and international levels. Connections between organizing and policy, public and private, state and family, and migration, immigration, and empire.  WR, HU
M 4pm-5:55pm

* WGSS 3372a / AMST 3382a, Theory and Politics of Sexual Consent  Joseph Fischel

Political, legal, and feminist theory and critiques of the concept of sexual consent. Topics such as sex work, nonnormative sex, and sex across age differences explored through film, autobiography, literature, queer commentary, and legal theory. U.S. and Connecticut legal cases regarding sexual violence and assault.  SO  RP
W 9:25am-11:20am

* WGSS 3419a / HIST 3419 / HSHM 4040 / SAST 3680, Gender, Sexuality, and Feminism in Modern South Asian History  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
HTBA

* WGSS 4407a / ANTH 3808a, Feminist & 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.  HU, SO
T 4pm-5:55pm

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

This seminar invites students to explore how gender and citizenship intersect across the Middle East and North Africa, examining how these identities shape—and are shaped by—forces like nationalism, migration, capitalism, family, and religion. Drawing from ethnography, history, and literature, we trace how gender and sexuality simultaneously reify and trouble colonial legacies that uphold racialized ideas of “modernity.” And ask: How do global border regimes and the political economy of intimacies that sustain them reshape what it means to be—or not to be—a citizen? Our approach extends beyond laws to include everyday acts of citizenship across national and cultural divides. Readings highlight how people navigate their lives in the everyday, from the ordinary poetry of identity, love, and belonging to the spectacular drama of war and conflict.  SO
T 4pm-5:55pm

* WGSS 4463b / AMST 4462b / ER&M 4062b, 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.  SO
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 4465b / HIST 3747b / 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
HTBA

* WGSS 4490a, The Senior Colloquium  Dara Strolovitch

A research seminar taken during the senior year. Students with diverse research interests and experience discuss common problems and tactics in doing independent research.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm