Program Courses for Spring Semester 2010

• ANTH 440: Gender and Culture. Karla Slocum.This course uses ethnographic examples from many countries and most continents to explore the ways that women’s and men’s lives are organized in a variety of contexts, including sexuality, parenting, military conflicts, and the labor market. We will understand the ways that what it means to be a man and a woman is constructed in different societies as well as the kinds of dynamics that shape and challenge the ways gender is understood, organized, and enacted in diverse realms of society.

• ART 53: First Year Seminar: Art and the Body. Cary Levine. From classical Greek nudes to the crucified Christ to magazine fashion models, representations of the human form have always signified essential norms, ideals and aspirations. This course will examine manifestations of “the body” in Western art. Focusing on depictions of the body in art as well as the useof the body as art, we will explore how such portrayals relate to broad social, cultural and political contexts. We will consider whether particular works of art reinforce or undermine traditional oppositions between normalcy and perversity, attraction and repulsion, masculine and feminine, gay and straight, nature and culture. Particular attention will be paid to art in which the body functions as a form of dissent, challenging conventions of gender, race or sexuality, or the proscription of certain bodily functions and substances.  TR 9:30 - 10:45 AM, Murphey 302


• ASIA 490.3, “Israeli Cinema: Nation, Gender, and Ethnicity”

• CMPL 490: Chaucer and Medieval Frame Tales. Shayne Legassie. The frame tale, or the "story within a story," is one of the most charming and enduring of the Middle Ages' contributions to world literature. Perhaps originating in India, the frame tale collection took Europe by storm in the late medieval period. Among the most famous examples of the frame tale collection is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. This course asks what is unique about Chaucer's contribution to the frame tale collection and what elements of it are common to all examples of this popular literary form? To answer those questions, we will place The Canterbury Taleswithin the context of two other medieval frame tale collections: Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron and The Arabian Nights. TR 3:30-4:45 PM



• COMM 652: Media and Difference. Rich Cante. This course examines critical and theoretical issues concerning the representation and study of various modes of difference, such as sexuality, race, and gender, in specific media texts.


• ECON 469: Asian Economic Systems. Steven Rosenfielde. The goal of this course is to acquaint students with the economic systems of Asia including Japan, China, the Koreas and Thailand. Our approach stresses culture, and thus culturally conditioned gender roles and their utilitarian economic consequences. Topics to be studied include concubinage in China and the sex trade in Thailand.

• ENGL 140/WMST 140: Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Culture and Literature. Wendy Weber. This course is a survey of gay and lesbian literature and the cultural diversity it represents. We will explore the ways in which this literature explicates its historical, social, political, and artistic contexts. The texts we will read are primarily 20th century American and British fiction.

• ENGL 363/WMST 363: Feminist Literary Theory. Ruth Salvaggio. Examines the importance of feminist theory across the curriculum. Topics include language and linguistics; psychoanalysis; anthropology, and myth; women's labor, production, and reproduction; history, political science, and religious studies; and literature, predominantly French and English. MWF 10:00-10:50

   

• ENGL 489: Literature, Medicine, and Disability. Neel Ahuja. This course will focus on major works of literature and film that depict illness, disability, and the practice of medicine. Virtually all humans experience a significant illness or disability during their lifetimes; yet the experience of health, illness, or disability is deeply shaped by economic, political and cultural factors. Drawing from representations of illness and disability from the United States, Trinidad, India, and several African countries, this course will help students analyze how identities and bodies are shaped by medical technologies and health institutions; how nation, class, race, sexuality, and gender relate to health inequalities; how the idea of a “healthy” body is shaped by historical and cultural factors; and how literature and patient activisms use representations of illness and disability in order to make political commentary. The course is suitable for beginning and advanced students in all majors. Students in public health and medicine are especially welcome.



• HIST 358: American Sexualities: An Introduction to Historical Methods. John Wood Sweet. An introduction to the history of sexuality in North America from the colonial period to the Sexual Revolution, this course will involve a combination of lectures and interactive discussions and well as recitations. We will explore the basic theories and methods historians have developed to analyze the social, cultural, and political dynamics of sex in past societies. A major goal of this course is to introduce students to the nature of history as an interpretive discipline. Readings and lectures will present a range of historical interpretations and methods as well as a variety of pertinent primary documents—including legal records, pamphlets, medical treatises, fiction, and films. Discussions will focus on analyzing assumptions, methods, and evidence. Written assignments will focus on substantive primary texts in order to give students opportunities to analyze and interpret evidence and develop their own conclusions. TR 11:00-12:15pm

• LING 302/WMST 302: Prerequisite, Linguistics 101 or consent of instructor. This course provides an overview of language and power studies. Issues: sexist and sex-neutral language; languages of subcultures defined by gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity; hate speech; "politically correct" language. BA-level social science perspective and cultural diversity requirement.
  

• POLI 265/WMST 265: Feminist Political Theory. Susan Bickford.  This course is an introduction to feminist political theory. In this course you will be "doing theory" yourself, as well as becoming familiar with a wide range of feminist theories.
  

• PUBH 423: AIDS Service: Principles, Practices & Politics. Ron Strauss. The course offers participants a unique opportunity to experience a multi-disciplinary approach to AIDS - its etiology, immunology, epidemiology and impact on individuals and society. How a society looks at AIDS determines not only how sick persons are treated but also the degree to which the rights of the individual are upheld. Permission of instructor is needed to register.



• RELI 244/WMST 224: Gender and Sexuality in Western Christianity. Randall Styers. First, the course will explore excerpts from the broad range of teachings concerning issues of gender and sexuality that have emerged in the Western Christian tradition. Second, in order to place these teachings in context, the course will also introduce major themes in the history of Western Christianity. Finally, the course will focus on questions of rhetoric, examining the specific types of argumentation used by various authors and the forms of evidence these authors cite in order to support their moral and social stances.
  

• SOCI 124/WMST 124: Sex and Gender in Society. Sherryl Kleinman. We will examine how gender is built into our institutions and lived out in our daily lives. The point of the course is to think about how what we often take for granted, such as our assumptions about gender, operate in our lives and in the lives of others. The course necessarily involves a degree of critical self-reflection--examining our motives, behaviors, feelings and reactions--and how these hurt or help others and ourselves. We will also critically examine how institutions, groups, situations and relationships constrain us on the basis of gender. The hidden or not-so-hidden inequalities that are part of this society, the cultural assumptions that reinforce those inequalities, and the ways that we, as individuals, live them out, are the concerns of the course. TR 12:30-1:45
  



• WMST 101: Introduction to Women’s Studies. Staff. An interdisciplinary exploration of intersections between gender, race, class, and sexuality in American society and internationally. Topics include: work; sexuality and sexual identity; gender relations and images of women and gender in literature, religion, art, and science; and the history of feminist movements. Course readings are drawn from the humanities and the social sciences. This course includes lecture and small discussion groups led by teaching assistants. 



• Also of interest:
  PUBH 420: Ron Strauss. This course offers participants a multi-disciplinary perspective on acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) — its etiology, immunology, epidemiology and impact on individuals and society. This is a one-unit course and so cannot be counted for credit towards the Minor in Sexuality Studies.