Women's and Gender Studies (WGS)
WGS 301 Introductory Topics in Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
WGS 301.11 United States Women, Sexuality, and Gender to 1865 3 Hours
WGS 301.12 Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture 3 Hours
American writing by gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer authors and/or with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer themes.
WGS 301.13 Mexican American Women, 1910-Present 3 Hours
Examines the history of Mexican and Mexican American women in the United States from the twentieth century to the present.
WGS 301.14 Performance, Feminism, and Social Change 3 Hours
Exploration of the ways that engaged performance and feminist practice generate space for social change, including the basic principle that social transformation requires individual awareness, and that awareness necessitates a rigorous examination of race, gender, class, and sexuality.
WGS 301.16 Introduction to Black Women's Studies 3 Hours
Interdisciplinary examination of the complexities of black womanhood in America through an investigation of history, identity, popular culture, and black feminism/womanism, as well as social and political activism.
WGS 301.17 Black Queer Art Worlds 3 Hours
Exploration of over two decades of work produced by and about black queer subjects throughout the circum-Atlantic world. Provides an introduction to various artists and intellectuals of the black queer diaspora, as well as an examination of the viability of black queer aesthetic practice as a form of theorizing.
WGS 301.19 Diversity in American Families 3 Hours
Examination of the diversity of American families and current debates on family life from a sociological perspective with an emphasis on how diverse family forms came to exist and what these changes mean for adults and children in contemporary society. Study of recent trends in several aspects of family life, including dating and courtship, cohabitation, marriage, divorce, parenthood, family structure, and work-family balance. Overview of theoretical perspectives on family life with a focus on gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality.
WGS 301.20 Fertility and Reproduction 3 Hours
Explores the when, why, how, and with whom Americans bear children, and how the United States compares to other developed and developing countries in the world. Subjects include infertility and its treatments, the ethics of surrogacy and international adoption, voluntary childlessness, the rapid rise of nonmarital childbearing in the United States and other countries, the politics of childbirth, the risks of maternal morbidity and mortality in developed and developing countries, and the declining populations and rapid aging of rich countries including Japan, Italy, and Spain where many women have stopped having children.
WGS 301.21 Gender, Race, and Class in American Society 3 Hours
Use of the sociological perspective to analyze how the structure of American society, individual life, and group life chances are shaped by broader structures of privilege and disadvantage based on gender, race, and class. Examination of these in institutional arenas such as work, the family, education, health, the criminal justice system, sexuality, popular culture, and more.
WGS 301.24 Race, Immigration, and Family 3 Hours
Introduction to family systems in the United States in a post-WWII framework with a central focus on Asian Americans. Students will investigate how gender, race, and ethnicity intersect and inform our understanding of the institution of the family.
WGS 301.25 The Revolution Will Be Dramatized 3 Hours
WGS 301.26 Toni Morrison and August Wilson 3 Hours
WGS 301.27 Women, Gender, Literature, and Culture 3 Hours
An introduction to literary analysis focusing on women's and gender studies.
WGS 301.28 History of Human Sexuality 3 Hours
The history of human sexuality is approached from four angles: sexual behaviors; sexual consequences; sexual regulation, and sexual science.
WGS 301.29 Latina Performance: From Celia to Selena 3 Hours
WGS 301.3 Introduction to Latinx Body Art 3 Hours
Examine the social, historical, economic, and commercial contexts influencing the production, display, and circulation of Latinx body art.
WGS 301.30 Latina and Latino Media and Popular Culture 3 Hours
Explore Latina/o media and popular culture from 1950 to the present.
WGS 301.31 Introduction to Gender and Sexuality 3 Hours
Explore social, emotional, cognitive, and physical aspects of gender and sexuality within the contexts of individual human development, families, and cultures.
WGS 301.32 Rights in Modern America 3 Hours
WGS 301.33 Female Voices in China 3 Hours
Introduction (in translation) to the most important texts and other sources by, for, and about women in Chinese intellectual, political, social, and cultural history.
WGS 301.34 Introduction to African American Women's History 3 Hours
WGS 301.35 Introduction to Yoruba Religions 3 Hours
Introduction to the cosmological world of the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria, covering history, societal organization, myths, legends, customs, and cultural traditions.
WGS 301.36 Police, Prisons, and Inequality 3 Hours
Explore the ethical issues related to inequality and the United States criminal legal system. Examine the experiences of the poor, Indigenous people, immigrants, racial minorities, women, sexual minorities, and gender-nonconforming people.
WGS 301.6 Ethnicity and Gender: La Chicana 3 Hours
WGS 301.7 Women's Reproductive Health for Nonscience Majors 3 Hours
Overview of contemporary women's reproductive health issues, with emphasis on historical, physiological, psychosocial, and cultural influences that affect the reproductive health of women during adolescence, the childbearing years, and midlife.
WGS 303 Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies 3 Hours
Explore concepts of gender and sexuality, race, class, religion, and nation; as well as skills in theory, history, and research methods relevant to LGBTQ studies. Survey the making of modern understandings of sexual and LGBTQ identities in the last one hundred years and the implications of this history for broader understandings of gender and sexuality.
WGS 305 Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
Introduction to the role of gender identity and representation in key social institutions and processes, including borders, displacements, and diasporas. Analysis of the social narratives of gender, race, and sexuality.
WGS 119S, 219S, 319S, 419S, 519S, 619S, 719S, 819S, 919S Topics in Women's and Gender Studies 1-9 Hours
This course is used to record credit the student earns while enrolled at another institution in a program administered by the University's Study Abroad Office. Credit is recorded as assigned by the study abroad adviser in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. University credit is awarded for work in an exchange program; it may be counted as coursework taken in residence. Transfer credit is awarded for work in an affiliated studies program.
WGS 322C Sociology of Gender 3 Hours
Inequality between the sexes; men's and women's changing roles in society.
WGS 322D Population and Society 3 Hours
The study of populations, including their growth, age structure, and patterns of fertility, mortality, and migration; the social causes and consequences of these phenomena.
WGS 322E Sociology of Masculinities 3 Hours
Sociological examination of the most important debates and discussions about men's experiences of masculinity in contemporary patriarchal societies. Exploration of social and individual meanings of masculinity, the dominant paradigms of masculinity that are taken as the norm, and the problems, contradictions, and paradoxes men experience in modern society.
WGS 322F The Sociology of Race and Work 3 Hours
Critical examination of work in the United States over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through a gendered, Asian American lens, using a comparative race perspective. Subjects include the sociological examination of concepts such as labor markets, globalization, care work, and gender/racial segregation in the workplace along with the ways race and gender shape how and where individuals are fitted into the workplace, how skills are evaluated, and how labor markets emerge.
WGS 322G Race and the Digital 3 Hours
Review of theoretical developments in the sociological study of "race, including an examination of processes of racialization and cultural texts, in order to better understand the ways in which identities are socially produced. Attention will be placed on forms of popular culture, black cultural production, and political action to question how such practices are shaped by migrations within the African diaspora.
WGS 322I Sociology of Sexualities 3 Hours
Review of sociological perspectives on sexuality. Examines how social institutions in United States society shape sexual values, beliefs, and practices. Subjects include changing cultural images of sexuality, sexual identities, and social movements.
WGS 322J Race, Gender, and Surveillance 3 Hours
Overview of theories in the sociology of social control, with a focus on risk, power, ethics, and surveillance. Examines historical transformations in social control and the distributions of power in the United States and global contexts, with attention to race, gender, and class. Subjects include: the transatlantic slave trade; prisons and punishment; the gaze, voyeurism, and reality television watching; the Internet; travel and state borders; privacy; and biometrics and the body.
WGS 322K Sex and Violence in Popular Culture 3 Hours
Overview of the cultural framing of sex and violence through realistic and hyper-realistic representations of sex, love, violence, and war in popular culture. Examination of the ethical implications, including the ways in which these representations rely on and further social inequalities and the sociological concepts, methods, and theoretical approaches to understanding sex and violence in popular culture.
WGS 323 Topics in Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies in the Natural Sciences 3 Hours
Examination of gendered constructs such as gender and sexual development, male and female differences and similarities, and feminist or alternative scientific epistemologies using approaches from the natural sciences.
WGS 323C Primate Social Behavior 3 Hours
Studies primate behavior and why primates do what they do, including basic theoretical principles and the models used to explain primate behavior.
WGS 323D Sex and Human Nature 3 Hours
Provides an introduction to the scientific study of sexual behavior, mate choice, and reproduction in humans from the perspective of evolutionary biology; examines a wide range of genetic, ecological, social, physiological, and behavioral aspects of human sexuality.
WGS 324 Topics in Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies in Communication 3 Hours
Multidisciplinary course examining issues of women, gender, and sexuality in media industries, texts, and audiences.
WGS 324C Gender and Media Culture 3 Hours
Critical analysis of media and its interrelation with issues of gender.
WGS 324D Race, Class, and Gender in American Television 3 Hours
Surveys history and contemporary debates regarding the construction of race, class, gender and sexual orientation in U.S. television from the late 1940s through the present day and related issues of television aesthetics, production practices, audiences, and advocacy.
WGS 324E Gender and Fan Culture 3 Hours
WGS 324F Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Sports Media 3 Hours
WGS 324G Gender and the News 3 Hours
Historical and contemporary exploration of gender and the news. Examination of the role of marginalized gender groups in producing news and the construction of gender within news texts.
WGS 324J Stardom and Celebrity Culture 3 Hours
Survey of the construction and meanings of stardom in film, television, and new media. Subjects include links with the media industries; stardom and race, class, gender, and sexuality; and new permutations of celebrity culture.
WGS 125 Special Topics in Women's and Gender Studies 1 Hour
Analysis of special topics in women's and gender studies through reading, discussion, and lectures.
WGS 129S, 229S, 329S, 429S, 529S, 629S, 729S, 829S, 929S Topics in Women's and Gender Studies 1-9 Hours
This course is used to record credit the student earns while enrolled at another institution in a program administered by the University's Study Abroad Office. Credit is recorded as assigned by the study abroad adviser in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. University credit is awarded for work in an exchange program; it may be counted as coursework taken in residence. Transfer credit is awarded for work in an affiliated studies program.
WGS 333D Introduction to Developmental Psychology 3 Hours
Physical, social, and cognitive development in humans.
WGS 333R Social Development in Children 3 Hours
Development of social behavior (for example, sex typing and aggression) and social relationships.
WGS 335 Topics in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies 3 Hours
The perspectives, experiences, and cultural contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, examined from different disciplinary and/or interdisciplinary perspectives according to the topic.
WGS 335.1 Confronting LGBTQ Oppression 3 Hours
Serves two primary functions: to increase participant's knowledge on the issues facing the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) community; and to learn facilitation skills in order to talk about these issues on campus. Enrolled students will become peer educators in a team, and will give workshops across campus around LGBTQ issues during the spring semester.
WGS 335.10 HIV and AIDS Activism and the Healing Arts 3 Hours
WGS 335.11 Beyonce Feminism and Rihanna Womanism 3 Hours
WGS 335.12 Transgender Feminisms 3 Hours
WGS 335.13 Queer Art and Activism 3 Hours
WGS 335.14 Sexuality in Global Perspective 3 Hours
Explore the ways in which sexuality intersects with money, intimacy, power, and labor in the context of global economic processes.
WGS 335.15 Queer Migrations 3 Hours
WGS 335.17 Disability, Race, and Sexuality in Literature and Culture 3 Hours
WGS 335.18 Twentieth-Century United States Lesbian and Gay History 3 Hours
Examines classic texts and recent and varied writings on LGBT history, focused on experiences, ideas, and conflicts that have shaped modern LGBT identities.
WGS 335.2 Facilitating Dialogues on LGBTQ Oppression: Peers for Pride in Action 3 Hours
The second part of the Peers for Pride facilitation program; serves as a way for students in the program to use the information and skills learned in "Confronting LGBTQ Oppression." Students will continue to fine-tune their facilitation skills and continue learning about LGBTQ people on the UT campus and beyond.
WGS 335.20 Sex and Sexuality in the Muslim World 3 Hours
WGS 335.22 Queer Visual Culture 3 Hours
WGS 335.23 Performing LGBTQ+ 3 Hours
WGS 335.24 United States Masculinities 3 Hours
WGS 335.25 Queering Black Religions 3 Hours
Explore the ways Africana religion practitioners disrupt and reframe dominant western discourses of gender and sexuality. Examine concepts of temporality, spirit manifestation, subjectivity, corporeality, and Africana religious epistemologies.
WGS 335.26 Queer Eastern Europe 3 Hours
Explore LGBTQI stories and political struggles in Eastern Europe with a focus on the region's queer culture: literature, cinema, and the arts.
WGS 335.28 Race, Gender, Sex, and Religion 3 Hours
Use an intersectional feminist framework to examine the construction and maintenance of normative categories of race, gender, sex, and sexuality within United States religious discourse.
WGS 335.29 Medical Rhetorics, Race, and Gender 3 Hours
Examine how health and illness are defined through rhetorics about and within medicine. Focus on race and gender, consider how communication and language shape understandings of health, access to health care, and experiences of illness and disability.
WGS 335.3 African Queer Studies 3 Hours
Examines the development of African queer studies as the interdisciplinary study of sexuality on the African continent, and its impact on the academic and activist realm. Focus on intersectional feminist and queer theory and how this field offers tools that can be used to rethink issues of oppression and domination in relationship to race, nation, sex, gender, and sexuality on the African continent. Of particular interest will be LGBTQ activism and the ways in which queer Africans engage and shape their sexuality, and create forms of belonging in their countries and their communities.
WGS 335.30 Queer of Color Critique 3 Hours
WGS 335.32 Queer/Trans Performance 3 Hours
Explore the ways performance serves as an alternative space of expression and worldmaking, a site of activism and resistance, and a creative outlet for queer and trans people in specific socio-cultural contexts.
WGS 335.6 Gender Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema 3 Hours
Studies Latin American cinema as a device of gender system formation and reinforcement, and as criticism of patriarchal hegemony; discusses questions related to sexuality depicted in Latin American films. Subjects covered include: maternity, prostitution, machismo, children's sexuality, homosexuality, heterosexuality, and gender violence in films from the 1930s to present. Conducted in Spanish.
WGS 335.7 Queer Study in Low Culture 3 Hours
Examines representations of sexual and gender non-conformity in popular culture since the mid-twentieth century in the United States.
WGS 335.9 Movements for Sexual and Reproductive Justice 3 Hours
Charts the historical development of various struggles for sexual and reproductive justice in the United States since the nineteenth century.
WGS 335C Queer Media Studies 3 Hours
Critical analysis of queer media. Read key queer (media) theory texts and explore dominant strategies used by the media industries, as well as those utilized by LGBTQ+ independents/subcultures, paying close attention to contested discourses of identity, politics, activism and desire. Explore historical shifts in the representation of LGBTQ+ individuals.
WGS 335D Queer Television 3 Hours
WGS 335J Latinx Sexualities 3 Hours
Examine Latinx sexualities from a historical perspective to comprehend the social, cultural, political, and economic factors, which have shaped these experiences.
WGS 335L The Black Figure in American Art and Popular Culture 3 Hours
Examine how popular culture and artistic practices facilitate or challenge social constructions of "Blackness" in the United States.
WGS 335P Preserving Austin's Queer History 3 Hours
Explore Austin's queer history since World War II and write on the practice of oral history and LGBTQ oral history in particular. Build the foundation for an ongoing Austin LGBTQ Oral History Project to be housed at the Briscoe Center for American History.
WGS 340 Cross-Cultural Topics in Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
Multidisciplinary course examining experiences and issues of gender in different cultures.
WGS 340.1 Contemporary Latinx Visual and Performance Art 3 Hours
Explore contemporary visual and performance art by Latinx artists working since the 1970's to the present. Examine artists who began to engage with and in civil rights discourse to intervene through their art-making practices; and to align with contemporary trends in the art world that began to expand in the 1970's, such as performance art, installation art, video art, and, later, digital art.
WGS 340.11 Veiling in the Muslim World 3 Hours
WGS 340.13 Law and Society in Early Modern Europe 3 Hours
Research seminar on how historians have explored the significance of law, criminal and civil, in the lives of early modern Europeans. Topics include infanticide, fornication, drunkenness, theft, debt, slander, and family disputes.
WGS 340.20 Violence in Contemporary Mexican Culture 3 Hours
Studies the representation of violence in contemporary literary and cultural production in Mexico in order to understand social, political, and cultural implications of current violence there. Taught in Spanish.
WGS 340.25 Gender, Sexuality, and the Family in Indian Religions and Cultures 3 Hours
A comprehensive historical overview of gender issues as they are represented in the textual traditions of South Asia.
WGS 340.27 Islamic Law 3 Hours
Designed to give students a foundation in the substantive teachings of the shariah, which comprises not only what we normally think of as law, but also ethics and etiquette.
WGS 340.29 Contemporary African American Women's Fiction 3 Hours
WGS 340.30 Goddesses in World Religions and Cultures 3 Hours
Historical and cross-cultural overview of the relationship between feminine and religious cultural expressions through comparative examinations and analyses of various goddess figures in world religions.
WGS 340.35 South Asian Migration to the United States 3 Hours
Examine the South Asian diaspora in the United States.
WGS 340.37 Tolerance in Dutch Culture 3 Hours
The historical roots of Dutch "tolerance" and how it plays a role in current Dutch culture and attitudes towards religious, gender, and sexual differences, as well as drug use, prostitution, and euthanasia. Exploration of the stereotypes and the actuality of these Dutch attitudes and policies from an international comparative perspective.
WGS 340.4 21st Century Latinx Literature 3 Hours
Explore Latinx literature from the past two decades including both literary form and political engagement, with an emphasis on Latina, queer, and nonbinary writers.
WGS 340.40 Historical Imagining of Africa in Films 3 Hours
WGS 340.44 Gender Politics in the Islamic World 3 Hours
Study of the Islamic world and major sociological concepts such as gender, social organizations, culture, and politics. Examines how culture is mediated by politics, resulting in diverse interpretations of Islam and in different policies with respect to women's rights.
WGS 340.45 Feminist Interventions in Borderlands History 3 Hours
Provides an in-depth understanding of the social, economic, and spatial transformations of the United States/Mexico borderlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
WGS 340.46 Africana Women's Art 3 Hours
Analysis of the diverse modes of presentation, mediums, definitions, and influences of Africana women artists in the diaspora. Designed to use critical theory and art history found in oral and written literatures, music, films, and other formal and informal documents.
WGS 340.48 Diaspora Visions 3 Hours
An exploration of border crossing by cultures and groups including Yorubas, Jews, Armenians, Tibetans, Hamish, Pakistanis, and Indians and the production of images by immigrants, exiles, and nomads in alien lands.
WGS 340.49 Contemporary African Popular Culture 3 Hours
WGS 340.51 Medieval Women Mystics 3 Hours
The life and writings of Saint Birgitta of Sweden, fourteenth-century visionary, religious reformer, and pilgrim, examined and compared with her predecessor Hildegard of Bingen (Germany), her successor Margery Kempe (England), as well as Margery's mentor, Julian of Norwich. Social and historical contexts for all four of these women mystics will be explored in depth.
WGS 340.52 Sex and Power in the African Diaspora 3 Hours
Exploration of various experiences and theories of sex, intimacy, and desire alongside intellectual and artistic engagements with power hierarchies and spirituality across transnational black communities. Subjects include the concept of "erotic subjectivity" from various theoretical and methodological angles, principally within African diasporic contexts.
WGS 340.53 Women and Social Movements in the Twentieth-Century United States 3 Hours
Examines women's participation in well-known and lesser-known social movements during the twentieth century.
WGS 340.54 The Qur'an 3 Hours
Explore the history, language, style, and themes of the Qur'an.
WGS 340.56 Muslim Women in Politics 3 Hours
WGS 340.58 Queer Ethnographies 3 Hours
Anthropological analysis of gender and sexuality that critically evaluates formative concepts and theories that have been subject to recent debates within anthropology, gender studies, and queer theory.
WGS 340.60 Women and Resistance in Contemporary Eastern Europe 3 Hours
WGS 340.62 Gender and Art in the Muslim World 3 Hours
WGS 340.66 Holocaust Aftereffects 3 Hours
Explores the historical, political, psychological, theological, and cultural fallout of the Holocaust, as well as literary and cinematic responses in Europe and the United States.
WGS 340.67 Graffiti and Poster Art in the Islamic World 3 Hours
WGS 340.69 Black Women on Trial 3 Hours
Using press coverage of historical and contemporary court cases and trials of women ranging from Angela Davis to Marissa Alexander, explores how media shapes public and popular perceptions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the law.
WGS 340.7 Black Women and the State 3 Hours
Surveys black women's experiences living with and confronting state oppression around the world. Takes an historical, social, and theoretical look at the roots of this oppression and inequality, and how black women have chosen to respond to it locally and globally.
WGS 340.74 Bad Language: Race, Class, and Gender 3 Hours
WGS 340.75 Gender and Modern India 3 Hours
Examine gender and the shifting nature of modernity between precolonial and colonial periods in the Indian subcontinent.
WGS 340.77 Theorizing the Human 3 Hours
Trace the continuities and transformations in constructions of populations as more or less human, from settler-colonial conquest to the post-Trump era. Examine what logics mark racialized populations as disposable during the colonization of the Americas, and which systematically condition racialized subjects to a state of enduring siege.
WGS 340.78 Reproductive Justice and Race 3 Hours
Examine the links between reproductive care and social inequality, and explore reproductive outcomes for women in the context of social justice.
WGS 340.81 Iranian and Iranian-American Identity 3 Hours
WGS 340.82 Race, Capitalism, and the Environment 3 Hours
WGS 340.83 Black Middle Class 3 Hours
WGS 340.84 Fashion And Desire 3 Hours
WGS 340.85 Technologies of United States Empire 3 Hours
Investigate the various technologies that the United States has used to maintain imperial geographies at "home" and abroad. Focus on imperial entanglements of global capital, liberalism, and technological systems.
WGS 340.86 Julia Alvarez and Sandra Cisneros 3 Hours
WGS 340.87 Chicana Feminisms 3 Hours
WGS 340.89 Transnational Latinx Popular Culture 3 Hours
WGS 340.9 Black Women in America 3 Hours
Uses primary sources, historical monographs, and essays to provide a chronological and thematic overview of the experiences of black women in America from their African roots to the circumstances they face in the present era.
WGS 340.90 Latinx Short Story 3 Hours
WGS 340.91 Sexuality and Gender in Latin America 3 Hours
Explore gender as a broad analytical tool to understand key problems concerning social organization, power relations, and inequality in contemporary Latin America.
WGS 340.92 Italian Television Advertising 3 Hours
Analysis of Italian television commercials in order to identify changes that have taken place at the level of language, with some attention to socio-cultural dynamics.
WGS 340.94 African-American Women's Political Activism 3 Hours
Explore Black feminism and African-American women's political participation.
WGS 340.95 Policing Latinidad 3 Hours
WGS 340.96 Latinx Legend Tripping 3 Hours
Explore narrative folklore from diverse traditions across the United States based Latinx diaspora. Focus on supernatural legends and the creation of the female "monster".
WGS 340.97 Tejana Cultural Studies 3 Hours
Investigate the history of Tejanas to reaffirm and reclaim their place and role in the histories of Native Americans, women, Chican@/Chicanxs, Greater Mexico, and the United States. Explore how transborderism and transregionalism complicate this history. Contemplate how Tejanas' stories are fundamental to illuminating the struggles, resistance, and liberation of Chicanas, mestizas, and afromexicanas from precontact to decolonization.
WGS 340F Latina Feminism and Health 3 Hours
WGS 340L Black Queer Literature and Film 3 Hours
Analyzes written works, films, and videos by and about lesbians, bisexual, transgender, and gay black people, with an emphasis on understanding the historical and theoretical construction of sexual and gender identities and sexual/cultural practices in black communities.
WGS 340N Native American Women's History 3 Hours
Investigate the histories of Native American women to reaffirm and reclaim their place and role in the histories of Native Americans, indigenous peoples, women, Chican@/xs, Greater Mexico, and the United States. Contemplate how many understandings that center colonization, settler colonialism, genocide, race, and environmentalism are essential to examining Native American women's history. Explore the stories, struggles, and ideas of community-building, sovereignty, and liberation as integral to their genders and sexualities as Native American, Indian, First Nations, indigenous, and red and brown women.
WGS 340S Topics in Cross-Cultural Feminisms 3 Hours
Examine experiences and issues of gender in different cultures.
WGS 340S.1 Gender and Translation in the Arab World 3 Hours
Examine complex politics and poetics behind the translation and marketing of Arab women's writing in the West.
WGS 340S.2 Black Women and Mass Incarceration 3 Hours
Examine the history of Black women and mass incarceration in America. Explore how race, class, and gender have historically influenced the production of crime and unfair criminal justice policies. Investigate why mass incarceration matters, what its historical legacy is, and how it impacts Black women today.
WGS 340S.3 Slavery and Its Legacies 3 Hours
Explore how slavery has evolved in the United States since the end of the Civil War.
WGS 340S.4 Black Digital Feminisms in Brazil 3 Hours
Explore online expressions of Black feminisms in Brazil, highlighting transnational resonances with other Black cultural movements while examining the socio-political particularities of Brazil's current digital landscape.
WGS 340S.5 The Politics and Art of Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising 3 Hours
Analyze the politics and art of Iran's 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising movement. Develop a digital humanities resource on the movement through collaboration.
WGS 340S.6 Central Americans in the United States 3 Hours
Examine the extensive and diverse histories, cultures, social and political movements of Central Americans in the United States, particularly through a Black, Indigenous, and Ethnic Studies framework.
WGS 340W Writing Slavery 3 Hours
Explores the controversial rewriting of slavery in a presentist context by contemporary authors. Addresses challenges that archival limitations and revisionist writings about slavery pose for academic disciplines, literary instruction, and/or pedagogy.
WGS 441 The Roots of Social and Economic Justice 4 Hours
WGS 345 Topics in Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
WGS 345.21 Male-Female Communication 3 Hours
Studies of speech patterns related to the concepts of male and female, including sexism in speaking, patterns of male and female speaking, patterns of listening to males and females, speech in courtship and family, speech and sexual discrimination in careers.
WGS 345.26 American Dilemmas 3 Hours
Examination of critical American social problems, including problems in the economic, political, and health care systems, as well as inequities based on income, gender, and race. Exploration of how these problems are a natural outgrowth of the existing social structure.
WGS 345.27 Southern Cultures 3 Hours
Investigation of multiple, fluid, and diverse southern cultures through topics such as NASCAR, biscuits and cornbread, mega-churches, beauty pageants, jazz, country music, southern hip hop, migrant farm cultures, matzo ball soup with collards, the Trail of Tears, Gullah, Tara, Graceland, and more. Includes discussion of stereotypes and the individual truths about women, men, and southern in the context of this discussion.
WGS 345.29 Witches, Workers, and Wives 3 Hours
Explores the role of families and concepts of gender as expressed in key economic, social, political, and cultural patterns in early modern Europe.
WGS 345.3 Women in Sickness and Health 3 Hours
Explores medical and biological views throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of women and women's health, the social context of those views, the development of medical practices, and the treatment of illness and debility.
WGS 345.31 Gender and Slavery in the United States 3 Hours
Examines the gendered experience of chattel slavery in the United States. Includes critical analysis of classic and contemporary texts, films, and songs that focus on slave labor, family, community, sexuality, and the economy.
WGS 345.36 Feminist Media Theory 3 Hours
Survey of basic theories related to the structure and process of film and video communication.
WGS 345.38 History of Sexuality in America 3 Hours
WGS 345.41 American Food 3 Hours
Studies diverse American food cultures from a humanities perspective, exploring connections between global, national, and local communities. Uses scholarship in the field of food studies as well as cookbooks, novels, poetry, photographs, songs, documentaries, and oral histories to investigate the past and present of American food communities.
WGS 345.42 Nature and Gender in America 3 Hours
Study of the connections between nature and gender in American national narratives. Explores how Americans of differing classes, races, genders, sexual orientations, and ages have shaped and experienced changing ideas of America, wilderness, domestication, and society over time and in different regions of the country.
WGS 345.44 Women Radicals and Reformers 3 Hours
Traces traditions of women's radical activism and reform beginning with the Enlightenment and the American Revolution and continuing to the present, with concentration on the twentieth century.
WGS 345.49 History of American Feminism 3 Hours
WGS 345.56 Gender And Sexuality in Performance 3 Hours
Consider what physical performance and dance tell us about gender, sexuality and the body. Previous knowledge of performance or gender studies is not required.
WGS 345D Punks and Divas in Southeast Europe 3 Hours
Examine popular music and its role in political struggle and collective identity formation in the Balkans. Analyze music genres in this region in the context of the historical changes it underwent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the fall of Communism and -- in the case of former Yugoslavia -- the formation of seven new nation-states through a series of bloody and brutal wars.
WGS 345E Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Literature and Culture 3 Hours
WGS 345G Virginia Woolf 3 Hours
Examines critical and fictional works of Virginia Woolf and the author's continuing legacy and influence. Explores the value and limitations of high modernism; English literary heritage and tradition; feminism; creative and critical definitions of gender and sexuality; intellectual activism, including Woolf's critiques of patriarchy, war, and fascism; and Woolf and imperialism and colonialism.
WGS 345I Toni Morrison 3 Hours
An examination of select novels by the Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist focuses on the positional uniqueness that womanism shares with a predominant feminism, which surfaces in historicized familial relationships.
WGS 345J Women's Autobiographical Writing 3 Hours
Examines the autobiographical impulse in women's writing by exploring the concept of the individualistic self versus the sense of self as a part of community and duty, and the way in which that communal self can both partake of humankind and participate in self-actualization.
WGS 345K American Literary Masculinities 3 Hours
Explores constructions of masculinity in American literature from a generally, but not exclusively, feminist perspective. Subjects include what masculinity has meant at different times in United States history, and how it has varied in meaning and significance according to broad categories of identity such as social class, race, region, and queerness.
WGS 345M Gender and Politics in a Comparative Perspective 3 Hours
Examine the patterns of women's representation over time, and in different regions of the world. Explore why gender equality in political institutions is important, tracing the evolution of feminism over time.
WGS 345N Women and Sports Media 3 Hours
WGS 345O Gender and Speculative Fiction 3 Hours
Examine how writers have used speculative fiction--including science fiction, utopia, and dystopia--as a tool to explore gender, race, sexuality, humanity, ethics, disability, and the environment.
WGS 345P American Women Writers 3 Hours
WGS 345Q Displacement and Resistance 3 Hours
Explore technologies of displacement, as well as tactics, digital media work, mapping projects, and activism that communities engage with to resist dispossession. Examine, locally and globally, the displacement and resistance effects of various events including infrastructure projects and gentrification.
WGS 345R Bradstreet and Wheatley 3 Hours
Explore the works of Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley.
WGS 345S Elena Ferrante: Politics and Passion 3 Hours
WGS 345T Race, Gender, and Political Economy in United States Literature 3 Hours
Explore the intersection of race, class, and gender relations, gender expression, and gender norms as constitutive of real and imagined political economies in literature and films by black, indigenous, and Latine authors and producers in the United States.
WGS 345U Women and Sport 3 Hours
Examine the role sport and exercise has played in the lives of women since ancient times with an emphasis on events influencing American women in sport, their fight for access to sport, and the International Olympic Games.
WGS 345W Women in Postwar America 3 Hours
WGS 346C Animals and American Culture 3 Hours
Explores the role of animals in American history, culture, and society.
WGS 346G American Popular Culture, 1682-Present 3 Hours
Explores the evolution of American popular culture and its relationship to national consolidation, and at times, disunion, over the last 330 years.
WGS 346J Gender and Labor in Global Asia 3 Hours
WGS 346K Women and the Holocaust 3 Hours
Introduction to both the history of Jewish and German women during World War II and the Holocaust, and to women's narratives and self-representations of this period. Historical sources, memoirs, films, and interviews will be used as source material.
WGS 346L Arendt and de Beauvoir 3 Hours
WGS 346M Social Dramas of Henrik Ibsen 3 Hours
A detailed introduction to Ibsen's social dramas (1877-1899), emphasizing their unity as a prolonged commentary on the society of his era and the variety of its human problems. Special emphasis on subjects such as: the family and the home; the public world of reputation, work, and citizenship; the predicaments of men and women in a male-dominated society; and the motives of our interventions into the lives of others.
WGS 350 Feminist Theory 3 Hours
Feminist theory with selections from women's and gender studies scholars. Recommended feminist theory course for women's and gender studies majors.
WGS 352R Rhetoric of Ethnic Studies 3 Hours
Study the histories of ethnic (and gender) studies in both higher education and K-12 institutions, and the rhetoric of attacks on, and defenses of, ethnic and gender studies through an examination of primary and secondary source materials.
WGS 356 Introduction to Feminist Research Methods 3 Hours
Introduction to feminist research methods across a range of traditional disciplines. Designed to prepare students to analyze research within gender studies and to develop their own research skills.
WGS 358Q Supervised Research 3 Hours
Supervised individual research on an issue in women's and gender studies.
WGS 360 Research and Thesis in Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
Individual project or paper to be completed under the direction of a women's and gender studies faculty member.
WGS 679H Honors Tutorial Course 6 Hours
Individual reading of selected works for one semester, followed in the second semester by the writing of an honors thesis.
WGS 379L Internship in Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
Experience working in the community or for a nonprofit agency.
WGS 379S Senior Seminar 3 Hours
Intensive study of selected topics in women's and gender studies.
WGS 481 The Roots of Social and Economic Justice 4 Hours
WGS 384N Internship in Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
Practical working involvement with participating nonprofit and research agencies.
WGS 390 Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
Introduction to the interdisciplinary women's and gender studies graduate program.
WGS 390W Writing Workshop 3 Hours
Introduction to feminist writing practice.
WGS 391 Feminist Theories 3 Hours
Selected readings of feminist theories from an interdisciplinary perspective.
WGS 392 Research Methods Seminar in Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
Introduction to select feminist research methods used in various disciplines and how these methods inform interdisciplinary perspectives in the student's own field of study in preparation for a report, thesis, or dissertation.
WGS 393 Seminar: Topics in Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
WGS 393L Topics in International Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
Explore intersectional and interdisciplinary topics in women's and gender studies. Conducted in languages other than English.
WGS 393S Topics in Specialized Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
WGS 394 Conference Course in Women's and Gender Studies 3 Hours
Individual directed readings and conferences on selected problems or topics in women's and gender studies.
WGS 195 Special Projects in Women's and Gender Studies 1 Hour
Interdisciplinary projects to support the women's and gender studies graduate student coursework.
WGS 698 Thesis 6 Hours
WGS 398R Master's Report 3 Hours
Preparation of a report to fulfill the requirement for the master's degree under the report option.