Search Results
Your search for courses · tagged with GWSS Elective · returned 37 results
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AMST 217 Race, Gender, and Sports in America 6 credits
How have American sports made visible discourses about race and gender? How do Americans who engage with sports—both as spectators and participants—imagine athletics when viewed through raced and gendered lenses? How do sports reflect assumptions about race and gender? Examining moments in the history of American athletics both from the distant and more recent pasts, students in this course will explore those issues while training a precise, critical eye on American culture and society. Key discussions will center on questions of the athletic body, integration, privilege and inequality, protest, power, and commercialism.
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AMST 396.00 Producing Latinidad 6 credits
As Arlene Dávila points out in Latinos Inc, Latinidad—the term that names a set of presumably common attributes that connects Latinxs in the U.S.—emerges in part from communities but, importantly, is developed heavily by the media, advertising, and other political and social institutions, including academia. In this course we consider how ideas and imaginings of who Latinxs are and what Latinidad is develop within political spaces (the electorate, the census), in local places, and through various media, including television, advertising, and music. We will consider how individual writers and artists contribute to the conversation. Throughout, we will engage with social and cultural theories about racial formation, gender, and sexuality.
- Spring 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies WR2 Writing Requirement 2
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Student has completed any of the following course(s): AMST 115 – Introduction to American Studies with grade of C- or better.
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ARTH 214 Queer Art 6 credits
Beyond surveying the rich history of arts by LGBTQA+ individuals, this course takes as its object of study the ways in which the arts have been used to question, undermine, and subvert the gendered and sexual norms of dominant cultures—in short, to queer them. In so doing, such visual and performative practices offer new, alternative models of living and acting in the world based on liberatory politics and aesthetics. This course will consider topics such as: censorship of queer artists; art of the AIDS crisis; activist performance; the sexual politics of public space; and queer intersections of race, class and gender in visual art among others.
Extra time
- Spring 2025
- IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
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Student has completed any of the following course(s): One Art History (ARTH) course with a grade of C- better.
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ARTH 240 Art Since 1945 6 credits
Art from abstract expressionism to the present, with particular focus on issues such as the modernist artist-hero; the emergence of alternative or non-traditional media; the influence of the women’s movement and the gay/lesbian liberation movement on contemporary art; and postmodern theory and practice.
- Fall 2024
- IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
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Student has completed any of the following course(s): One Art History (ARTH) course with a grade of C- better.
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BIOL 101 Human Reproduction and Sexuality 6 credits
The myths surrounding human reproduction and sexuality may outweigh our collective knowledge and understanding. This course will review the basic biology of all aspects of reproduction–from genes to behavior–in an attempt to better understand one of the more basic and important processes in nature. Topics will vary widely and will be generated in part by student interest. A sample of topics might include: hormones, PMS, fertilization, pregnancy, arousal, attraction, the evolution of the orgasm, and the biology of sexuality.
Sophomore priority
- Winter 2025
- No Exploration QRE, Quantitative Reasoning
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CAMS 258 Feminist and Queer Film Theory 6 credits
The focus of this course is on spectatorship—feminist, lesbian, queer, transgender. The seminar interrogates arguments about representation and the viewer’s relationship to the moving image in terms of identification, desire, masquerade, fantasy, power, time, and embodied experience. The course first explores the founding essays of psychoanalytic feminist film theory, putting these ideas into dialogue with mainstream cinema. Second, we consider the aesthetic, narrative, and theoretical interventions posed by feminist filmmakers working in contradistinction to Hollywood. Third, “queering” contemporary media, we survey challenges and revisions to feminist film theory presented by considerations of race and ethnicity, transgender experience, and queerness.
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CLAS 214 Gender and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity 6 credits
In both ancient Greece and Rome, gender (along with class and citizenship status) largely determined what people did, where they spent their time, and how they related to others. This course will examine the ways in which Greek and Roman societies defined gender categories, and how they used them to think about larger social, political, and religious issues. Primary readings from Greek and Roman epic, lyric, and drama, as well as ancient historical, philosophical, and medical writers; in addition we will explore a range of secondary work on the topic from the perspectives of Classics and Gender Studies.
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DANC 266 Reading the Dancing Body 6 credits
Dance is a field in which bodies articulate a history of sexuality, nation, gender, and race. In this course, the investigation of the body as a “text” will be anchored by intersectional and feminist perspectives. We will re-center American concert dance history, emphasizing the Africanist base of American Dance performance, contemporary black choreographers, and Native American concert dance. Through reading, writing, discussing, moving, viewing videos and performances the class will “read” the gender, race, and politics of the dancing body in the cultural/historical context of Modern, Post Modern and Contemporary Dance.
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ENGL 213 Being Queer in Nineteenth-Century America 6 credits
What forms of community, gender identification, and desire were imagined as possible in the literature and life writing of nineteenth-century Americans? How did race and class shift the terms of what could be imagined, and how did these possibilities change with the sexual taxonomies developed by scientists? This course will explore these questions by reading American literary texts from 1799 to 1899 alongside shorter works of history and theory. We will consider not only the discourse around wealthy, white “romantic friendships,” but also the ways that poor and non-white bodies were deemed queer in conduct manuals and scientific texts.
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ENGL 227 Imagining the Borderlands 6 credits
This course engages the borderlands as space (the geographic area that straddles nations) and idea (liminal spaces, identities, communities). We examine texts from writers like Anzaldúa, Butler, Cervantes, Dick, Eugenides, Haraway, and Muñoz first to understand how borders act to constrain our imagi(nation) and then to explore how and to what degree the borderlands offer hybrid identities, queer affects, and speculative world-building. We will engage the excess of the borderlands through a broad chronological and generic range of U.S. literary and visual texts. Come prepared to question what is “American”, what is race, what is human.
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ENGL 242 Queer Literature: The Pre-Stonewall Origins 6 credits
The LGBTQ+ movement turned on the Stonewall Riots of 1969. Prior to that, queer life was largely illegal and underground in the United States and most places globally. Queer content in literature was censored and banned. This course explores the strategies queer writers used to circumvent censorship and get published. Writers whose work we will read, discuss and analyze are: Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, Radclyffe Hall, Patricia Highsmith and James Baldwin.
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GERM 221 Modern Love: Sex, Gender, and Identity in Austria-Hungary around 1900 6 credits
We explore literature, music, and the fine arts of German-speaking countries around the topics of gender and sex(uality). We focus on the years between 1880 and 1920 in Austria-Hungary, but also venture into more recent times and other localities. How did images of men and women change over time? How did science factor into these images? What was/is considered “normal” when it comes to sex(uality) and gender, and what German-speaking voices have been pushing against those norms? How did these voices use literature, music, and the fine arts to reflect or criticize such norms? Taught in English.
Taught in English
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GERM 320 Life under Socialism: Culture and Society in East Germany 6 credits
What was life like under “actually existing socialism?” What films, books, music, and other media did people in the German Democratic Republic (or East Germany) consume and how did they cope with their country’s dictatorship? How can the experiences of people—particularly women—living in the GDR provide useful context for contemporary socio-political issues in the United States and beyond? We will discuss topics such as gender equality, education, health care, and queer life in the GDR. Taught in German.
- Winter 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IS, International Studies
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Student has completed any of the following course(s): GERM 204 – Intermediate German with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 4 or better on the German Language and Culture AP exam or received a score of 6 or better on the German: Language B IB exam or equivalent.
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GWSS 200 Gender, Sexuality & the Pursuit of Knowledge 6 credits
In this course we will examine whether there are feminist and/or queer ways of knowing, the criteria by which knowledge is classified as feminist and the various methods used by feminist and queer scholars to produce this knowledge. Some questions that will occupy us are: How do we know what we know? Who does research? Does it matter who the researcher is? How does the social location (race, class, gender, sexuality) of the researcher affect research? Who is the research for? What is the relationship between knowledge, power and social justice? While answering these questions, we will consider how different feminist and queer studies researchers have dealt with them.
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GWSS 212 Foundations of LGBTQ Studies 6 credits
This course introduces students to foundational interdisciplinary works in sexuality and gender studies, while focusing on the construction of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer identities in the United States. In exploring sexual and gender diversity throughout the term, this seminar highlights the complexity and variability of experiences of desire, identification, embodiment, self-definition, and community-building across different historical periods, and in relation to intersections of race, class, ethnicity, and other identities.
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GWSS 240 Gender, Globalization and War 6 credits
We are surrounded by images, stories and experiences of war, conflict, aggression, genocide, and widespread human suffering. In this course we will engage with the field of transnational feminist theorizing in order to understand how globalization and militarism are gendered, and the processes through which gender becomes globalized and militarized. We will examine hegemonic ideals of security and insecurity and track how they are gendered. You will learn to conduct and analyze in-depth interviews focusing on the militarization of civilians/ordinary people so as to understand how all our lives have been shaped by the acceptance and/or resistance to globalized militarism.
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GWSS 243 Women’s and Gender Studies in Europe Program: Situated Feminisms: Socio-Political Systems and Gender Issues Across Europe
This course examines the history and present of feminist and LGBTQ activisms across Western and East-Central Europe. We study the impact of the European colonial heritage on the lives of women and sexual/ethnic minorities across European communities, as well as the legacies of World War II, the Cold War, and the EU expansion into Eastern Europe. Reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues, “anti-genderism,” sex work, trafficking, and issues faced by ethnic minorities are among topics explored. These topics are addressed comparatively and historically, stressing their ‘situated’ nature and considering their divergent sociopolitical national frameworks.
Acceptance in OCS Women's & Gender Studies in Europe Program
- Fall 2024
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IS, International Studies
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Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Women's and Gender Studies in Europe program.
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GWSS 244 Women’s & Gender Studies in Europe Program: Ethics and Politics of Cross-Cultural Research
This course explores the following questions: What are the ethics and politics of cross-cultural research? What is the relationship between methodology and knowledge claims in feminist research? What are the power interests involved in keeping certain knowledges marginalized/subjugated? How do questions of gender and sexuality, of ethnicity and national location, figure in these debates? We will also pay close attention to questions arising from the hegemony of English as the global language of WGS as a discipline, and will reflect on what it means to move between different linguistic communities, with each being differently situated in the global power hierarchies.
Acceptance in OCS Women's & Gender Studies in Europe Program
- Fall 2024
- IS, International Studies SI, Social Inquiry
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Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Women's and Gender Studies in Europe program.
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GWSS 267 Pagans, the Proletariat, Pussy Riot, and Putin: Gender and Sexuality in Russia 6 credits
Gender and sexuality has been reinvented and reinscribed for centuries in Russia. Beginning with the role gender in Slavic mythology and ancient Rus, this course examines how gender and sexuality evolve— or are reconfigured— in accordance with changing sociocultural, economic, and political norms (and vice versa). Considering how Western history and Cold War narratives position both gender and Russia, this course looks at gender and sexuality as ideological projects from the development of a national identity in the Russian Empire, to the New Soviet Woman. Most critically, it examines how gender and sexuality are weaponized by the Putin regime today.
- Winter 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IS, International Studies
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GWSS 325 Women’s & Gender Studies in Europe Program: Continental Feminist, Queer, Trans* Theories
Addressing the impact of Anglo-American influences in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, this course examines European, including East-Central European, approaches to key gender and sexuality topics. It raises questions about the transfer of feminist concepts across cultures and languages. Some of the themes explored include nationalism and gender/sexuality, gendered dimensions of Western and East-Central European racisms, the historical influence of psychoanalysis on Continental feminist theories, the implications of European feminisms in the history of colonialism, the biopolitics of gender, homonationalism, as well as Eastern European socialist/communist theories of women’s emancipation.
Acceptance in OCS Women's & Gender Studies in Europe Program
- Fall 2024
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IS, International Studies
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Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Women's and Gender Studies in Europe program.
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GWSS 398.00 Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Popular Culture 6 credits
This capstone seminar reads representations of racial, gender, and sexual minorities in popular culture through the lenses of feminist, critical race, queer, and trans theories. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in the late 1980s to describe an approach to oppression that considered how structures of power act multiply on individuals based upon their interlocking racial, class, gender, sexual, and other identities. This seminar takes up the charge of intersectional analysis—rejecting essentialist theories of difference while exploring pluralities—to interpret diversity (or lack thereof) in forms of art and entertainment, focusing on film, TV, and digital media.
- Spring 2025
- WR2 Writing Requirement 2
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HIST 229 Working with Gender in U.S. History 6 credits
Historically work has been a central location for the constitution of gender identities for both men and women; at the same time, cultural notions of gender have shaped the labor market. We will investigate the roles of race, class, and ethnicity in shaping multiple sexual divisions of labor and the ways in which terms such as skill, bread-winning and work itself were gendered. Topics will include domestic labor, slavery, industrialization, labor market segmentation, protective legislation, and the labor movement.
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HIST 270 Nuclear Nations: India and Pakistan as Rival Siblings 6 credits
At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 India and Pakistan, two new nation states emerged from the shadow of British colonialism. This course focuses on the political trajectories of these two rival siblings and looks at the ways in which both states use the other to forge antagonistic and belligerent nations. While this is a survey course it is not a comprehensive overview of the history of the two countries. Instead it covers some of the more significant moments of rupture and violence in the political history of the two states. The first two-thirds of the course offers a top-down, macro overview of these events and processes whereas the last third examines the ways in which people experienced these developments. We use the lens of gender to see how the physical body, especially the body of the woman, is central to the process of nation building. We will consider how women’s bodies become sites of contestation and how they are disciplined and policed by the postcolonial state(s).
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PHIL 257 Contemporary Issues in Feminist Philosophy 6 credits
We will analyze different theories about the distinction between sex and gender. Then we will turn to contemporary issues in feminism for the remainder of the course. These issues include, but are not limited to, conservative feminism, reproductive justice, fetishes, disability, ethics of pronouns, whether men are oppressed, and responsibility for oppression. We will read selections from Oyèrónké Oyewùmí, Robin Dembroff, Karina Ortiz Villa, Robin Zheng, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Audre Lorde, and more. In addition, there will be room for student choice of topics.
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PHIL 275 Latina Feminist Philosophy 6 credits
Latina feminist philosophers have developed and continue to develop valuable philosophical contributions to feminist scholarship and the discipline of philosophy more broadly. This course sheds light on these contributions by exploring the major questions, concepts, and debates within the Latina (and Latinx) feminist philosophical tradition. We will specifically explore the relationships between race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and identity; lived experience, embodiment, and knowledge; and the possibilities for self/social transformation through the process of creative writing.
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POSC 276 Imagination in Politics: Resisting Totalitarianism 6 credits
Ideological fanaticism is on the rise today. Individuals prefer the incantation of slogans and clichés to autonomous thinking, moderation, and care for the diversity and complexity of circumstances and of human beings. The results are the inability to converse across differences and the tendency to ostracize and exclude others in the name of tribal and populist nationalism, as well as of racism. Hannah Arendt called totalitarianism this form of ideological hypnosis, which characterizes not only totalitarian political regimes, but can also colonize liberal-democracies. In this class we will read some of the works of Arendt to better understand the power of imagination to enhance critical and independent thinking and resist totalitarianism.
- Winter 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IS, International Studies
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POSC 324 Rebels and Risk Takers: Women and War In the Middle East 6 credits
How are women (and gender more broadly) shaping and shaped by war and conflict in the Middle East? Far from the trope of the subjugated, veiled, and abused Middle Eastern woman, women in the Middle East are active social and political agents. In wars and conflicts in the Middle East region, women have, for example, been combatants, soldiers, activists, spies, homemakers, writers, and political leaders. This course surveys conflicts involving Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and Iraq–along with Western powers like the U.S., UK, and Australia–through the wartime experiences of women.
- Fall 2024
- IS, International Studies SI, Social Inquiry
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PSYC 389 LGBTQ+ Psychology 6 credits
In this seminar, we will examine the psychology of LGBTQ+ people, focusing on topics such as LGBTQ+ identity development; predictors and consequences of anti-LGBTQ+ bias and discrimination; the health and well-being of LGBTQ+ people; and familial and relationship dynamics of LGBTQ+ populations. We will consider psychology's history of—and potential for—both contributing to and dismantling the inequities faced by LGBTQ+ populations.
- Spring 2025
- IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies SI, Social Inquiry
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Student has completed any of the following course(s): Psychology 110 – Principles of Psychology or GWSS 110 – Introduction to Gender, Women's & Sexuality or GWSS 200 – Gender, Sexuality and the Pursuit of Knowledge or GWSS 212 – Foundations of LGBTQ Studies with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 4 or better on the Psychology AP exam or received a score of 6 or better on the Psychology IB exam.
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RELG 218 The Body in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam 6 credits
Mind and body are often considered separate but not equal; the mind gives commands to the body and the body complies. Exploring the ways the three religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam think about the body will deepen our understanding of the mind-body relationship. We will ask questions such as: How does the body direct the mind? How do religious practices discipline the body and the mind, and how do habits of body and mind change the forms and meanings of these practices? Gender, sexuality, sensuality, and bodily function will be major axes of analysis.
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RELG 221 Judaism and Gender 6 credits
How does gender shape the Jewish tradition, and how have Jewish historical moments, texts, and practices shaped Jewish notions of gender? Taking Judaism as a test case, this course will explore the relationship between historical circumstance, positionality, and the religious imaginary. We will examine the ways that Jewish gender and theology inform each other. We will see how gender was at play in Jewish negotiations of economic and social class, racial and ethnic status, even citizenship. Following the threads of practice and narrative, we will think about how intersectional gender has shaped the stories Jews tell, and the stories that are told about them.
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RELG 227 Liberation Theologies 6 credits
Is God on the side of the poor? This course explores how liberation theologians have called for justice, social change, and resistance by drawing on fundamental sources in Christian tradition and by using economic and political theories to address poverty, racism, oppression, gender injustice, and more. We explore the principles of liberationist thought, including black theology, Latin American liberation theology, and feminist theology through writings of various contemporary thinkers. We also examine the social settings out of which these thinkers have emerged, their critiques of “traditional” theologies, and the new vision of community they have developed in various contexts.
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RELG 233 Gender and Power in the Catholic Church 6 credits
How does power flow and concentrate in the Catholic Church? What are the gendered aspects of the Church’s structure, history, and theology? Through readings, discussions, and analysis of current media, students will develop the ability to critically and empathetically interpret issues of gender, sexuality, and power in the Catholic Church, especially as these issues appear in official Vatican texts. Topics include: God, suffering, sacraments, salvation, damnation, celibacy, homosexuality, the family, saints, the ordination of women as priests, feminist theologies, canon law, the censuring of “heretical” theologians, Catholic hospital policy, and the clerical sex abuse crisis.
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RELG 265 Religion and Violence: Hindus, Muslims, Jews 6 credits
Why do religious people do violence—in their words and deeds, against themselves and others? Is violence a distortion of real religion? Is it the inevitable result of certain beliefs? Or are these the wrong questions? This course considers several case studies of religious violence drawn from different traditions and time periods, including ancient paganism, early Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and so-called cults. Our approach will be historical, literary, and comparative. We will seek to understand how violence can be meaningful as a religious act, and how adherents of the same religious tradition can have widely diverse views on violence and nonviolence.
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RELG 287 Many Marys 6 credits
The history of Christianity usually focuses on Jesus: the stories and doctrines that have revolved around him. This course will focus on Mary and the many ways she has contributed to the various lived traditions of Christianity. We will, for example, consider the mother of Jesus (Miriam, as she was first called) as she has figured in literature, art, apparition, and ritual practice around the world. We will also consider Mary Magdalene, her foil, who appears in popular discourse from the Gnostic gospels to The Da Vinci Code. Case studies, texts, images, and film will be our fare.
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SOAN 225 Social Movements 6 credits
How is it that in specific historical moments ordinary people come together and undertake collective struggles for justice in social movements such as Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Standing Rock, immigrant, and LGBTQ rights? How have these movements theorized oppression, and what has been their vision for liberation? What collective change strategies have they proposed and what obstacles have they faced? We will explore specific case studies and use major sociological perspectives theorizing the emergence of movements, repertoires of protest, collective identity formation, frame alignment, and resource mobilization. We will foreground the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, race, and class in these movements.
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SOAN 313 Woke Nature: Towards an Anthropology of Non-Human Beings 6 credits
The core of anthropological thought has been organized around the assumption that the production of complex cultural systems is reserved to the domain of the human experience. While scholars have contested this assumption for years, there is an emerging body of scholarship that proposes expanding our understandings of culture, and the ability to produce meaning in the world, to include non-human beings (e.g. plants, wildlife, micro-organisms, mountains). This course explores ethnographic works in this field and contextualizes insights within contemporary conversations pertaining to our relationship with nature, public health, and social justice movements that emerge within decolonized frameworks. The department strongly recommends that Sociology/Anthropology 110 or 111 be taken prior to enrolling in courses numbered 200 or above.
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SOAN 323 Mother Earth: Women, Development and the Environment 6 credits
Why are so many sustainable development projects anchored around women's cooperatives? Why is poverty depicted as having a woman's face? Is the solution to the environmental crisis in the hands of women the nurturers? From overly romantic notions of stewardship to the feminization of poverty, this course aims to evaluate women's relationships with local environments and development initiatives. The course uses anthropological frameworks to evaluate case studies from around the world. The department strongly recommends that Sociology/Anthropology 110 or 111 be taken prior to enrolling in courses numbered 200 or above.