Gender and Sexuality Studies

The gender and sexuality studies curriculum comprises courses in various disciplines and focuses on new scholarship on women, sex, and gender. Subjects include women’s history; feminist theory; the psychology and politics of sexuality; gender constructs in literature, visual arts, and popular culture; and the ways in which gender, race, class, and sexual identities intersect for both women and men. This curriculum is designed to help all students think critically and globally about sex-gender systems and to encourage women, in particular, to think in new ways about themselves and their work.

Undergraduates may explore women’s studies in lectures, seminars, and conference courses. Advanced students may also apply for early admission to the College’s graduate program in Women’s History and, if admitted, may begin work toward the master of arts degree during their senior year. The MA program provides rigorous training in historical research and interpretation. It is designed for students pursuing careers in academe, advocacy, policymaking, and related fields.

Gender and Sexuality Studies 2023-2024 Courses

Making the World Go Round: Children in the Machinery of Empire

Open, Lecture—Fall

In the 1920s, a Miss Wilson presented a paper at a London conference, addressing “The Education of European Children in Contact With Primitive Races.” In her talk, she described the life of rural white settler children in Kenya growing up with African playmates and expressed her concerns about the “morally deleterious” effects of such play on these future imperial leaders. This particular case illustrates discourse about the role of privileged white children in imperial regimes; but children of diverse social classes, races, and nationalities across the globe were all implicated in processes of imperial expansion and European settler colonization over (at least) the past three centuries. What was believed about children, done to children, and required of children was central to the political and economic success of empire. In this lecture, we will examine a series of cases in order to understand the diverse roles, both intentional and unintentional, of children in colonial processes. In addition to the white sons and daughters of European settler colonists in Africa and Southeast Asia, we will look at the contrary things that were said and done about mixed-race children (and their mothers) at different historical and political moments of empire. We will learn, too, about the deployment of “orphans” in the service of empire. In the metropole, particularly British cities, orphan boys were funneled into the military and merchant navy, while children of both sexes were shipped across the globe to boost white settler populations, provide free labor, and relieve English poorhouses of the responsibility of taking care of them. The ancestors of many contemporary citizens of Canada, Australia, and South Africa were exported as children from metropolitan orphanages. We will deploy approaches from sex-gender studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory. Questions that we will explore include: Why did settler authorities in Australia kidnap mixed-race Indigenous children and put them in boarding schools, when such children in other colonies were expected to stay with their local mothers out of sight of the settlers? How did European ideas about climate and race frame the ways in which settler children were nursed in the Dutch East Indies? How did concepts of childhood and parental rights over children vary historically, socioeconomically, and geographically? How did metropolitan discourses about race, class, and evolution frame the treatment of indigent children at home and abroad? The sources for this class include literature, scholarly articles, ethnographic accounts, historical documents, and film. Students will attend the lecture once a week and group conference once a week.

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Faking Families: How We Make Kinship

Open, Seminar—Year

In her study of transnational adoptees, Eleana Kim noted the profound differences between discourses about the immigration of Chinese brides to the United States and those describing the arrival of adopted Chinese baby girls: the former with suspicion and the latter with joy. Two ways that families form are by bringing in spouses and by having children. We tend to assume that family building involves deeply personal, intimate, and even “natural” acts; but, in actual practice, the pragmatics of forming (and disbanding) families are much more complex. There are many instances where biological pregnancy is not possible or not chosen, and there are biological parents who are unable to rear their offspring. Social rules govern the acceptance or rejection of children in particular social groups, depending on factors such as the marital status of their parents or the enactment of appropriate rituals. Western notions of marriage prioritize compatibility between two individuals who choose each other based on love; but, in many parts of the world, selecting a suitable spouse and contracting a marriage is the business of entire kin networks. There is great variability, too, in what constitutes “suitable.” To marry a close relative or someone of the same gender may be deemed unnaturally close in some societies; but marriage across a great difference—such as age, race, nation, culture or class—can also be problematic. And beyond the intimacies of couples and the interests of extended kin are the interests of the nation-state. This seminar, then, examines the makings and meanings of kinship connections of parent and spouse at multiple levels, from small communities to global movements. Our topics will include the adoption and fostering of children, both locally and transnationally, in Peru, Chile, Spain, Italy, Ghana, the United States, China, and Korea. We will look at technologies of biological reproduction, including the global movement of genetic material in the business of transnational gestational surrogacy in India. We will look at the ways marriages are contracted in a variety of social and cultural settings, including China and Korea, and the ways they are configured by race, gender, and citizenship. Our questions will include: Who are “real” kin? Who can a person marry? Which children are “legitimate”? Why do we hear so little about birth mothers? What is the experience of families with transgender parents or children? What is the compulsion to find genetically connected “kin”? How many mothers can a person have? How is marriage connected to labor migration? Why are the people who care for children in foster care called “parents”? The materials for this class include literature, scholarly articles, ethnographic accounts, historical documents, and film.

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Anthropology and Images

Open, Seminar—Fall

Images wavered in the sunlit trim of appliances, something always moving, a brightness flying, so much to know in the world.—Don Delillo, Libra

A few cartoons lead to cataclysmic events in Europe. A photograph printed in a newspaper moves a solitary reader. A snapshot posted on the internet leads to dreams of fanciful places. Memories of a past year haunt us like ghosts. What each of these occurrences has in common is that they all entail the force of images in our lives, whether these images are visual or acoustic in nature, made by hand or machine, circulated by word of mouth, or simply imagined. In this seminar, we will consider the role that images play in the lives of people in various settings throughout the world. In delving into terrains at once actual and virtual, we will develop an understanding of how people throughout the world create, use, circulate, and perceive images and how such efforts tie into ideas and practices of sensory perception, time, memory, affect, imagination, sociality, history, politics, and personal and collective imaginings. Through these engagements, we will reflect on the fundamental human need for images, the complicated politics and ethics of images, aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, dynamics of time and memory, the intricate play between the actual and the imagined, and the circulation of digital images in an age of globalization. Readings will include a number of writings in anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and critical theory. Images will be drawn from photographs, paintings, sculptures, drawings, films, videos, graffiti, religion, rituals, tattoos, inscriptions, novels, poems, road signs, advertisements, dreams, fantasies, phantasms, and any number of fabulations in the worlds in which we live and imagine.

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Ethnographic Writing

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Transnational migration, human-animal relations, and American community life are but a few of the cultural realities that anthropologists have effectively studied and written about. This is no easy task, given the substantial difficulties involved in understanding and portraying the concerns, activities, and lifeworlds other than one’s own. Despite these challenges, ethnographic writing is generally considered one of the best ways to convey a nuanced and contextually rich understanding of people’s experiences in life. To gain an informed sense of the methods, challenges, and benefits of ethnographic writing, students in this course will try their hands at a concerted work of ethnographic writing. Along with undertaking a series of ethnographic writing exercises, students will be encouraged to craft a fully-realized piece of ethnographic writing that conveys something of the features and dynamics of a particular world in lively, accurate, and comprehensive terms. Along the way, and with the help of anthropological writings that are either exceptional or experimental in nature, we will collectively think through some of the most important features of the craft of ethnographic writing from the use of field notes and interviews, the interlacing of theory and data, the author’s voice in ethnographic prose, and the ethical and political responsibilities that come with any attempt to understand and portray the lives of others. This seminar will work best for students who already have a rich body of ethnographic research materials to work with, such that they can quickly delve into the intricacies of writing about their chosen subject.

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Histories of Queer and Trans Art

Open, Lecture—Fall

Art and culture have long offered ways for people minoritized on the basis of gender and/or sexuality to both represent and come to understand who they are. But as representations of LGBTQ+ lives have coalesced around particular terms and, more recently, have left the largely coded language of the closet, they have come to embrace increasingly complex and intersectional forms of representation that often exceed—even as they rely on—our extant visions of queer and trans cultures, communities, and subjects. Beginning in the late 19th century—when the categories as we know them today began to coalesce—and focusing on, but not limited to, Western art, this course explores a set of histories both within and beyond the art historical canon.

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Monuments and Memory

Open, Lecture—Spring

This course looks at the shifting role of monuments in Western culture, from a public representation of the values of dominant culture to one that challenges what Kara Walker calls the “monumental misrememberings” attendant to most historical monuments. We will investigate the role that monuments play in forming—and disrupting—the stories that we tell ourselves about history. Attending to narratives of both domination and minoritization and foregrounding work by Black, Indigenous, and queer artists, this course reaches across continents and back centuries and will involve a field trip to experience monumental forms in and around the City of New York.

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Gender and History in China: Beyond Eunuchs and Concubines

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

This seminar is a sustained historical exploration of gender in the Chinese context, which is not only significant in its own right but also serves to complicate some of the common Euro-American assumptions about family dynamics, emotional life, and gender hierarchies. We will treat female and male as historically-constructed categories, examining how both have been tied to modes of power (familial, social, economic, and political); in other words, how men and women have been imagined and portrayed, made and mobilized, at different times. We will confront head on stereotypes about the passive Chinese woman and the Confucian family, asking where do we find, and how do we understand, women’s agency within the permutations of the Chinese family historically? We will interrogate imperial-era family conflicts and the practice of footbinding to highlight female agency within, and complicity with, the gender hierarchy. The appearance of feminism in the early 20th century and its subsequent fate will provide a window on how gender shaped revolution and how gender was, in turn, shaped by it. And rather than leave masculinity as an assumed constant, we will examine historical and cultural constructions of what it meant to be a man in China; located between the poles of the scholar and the warrior, Chinese manliness exhibits unfamiliar contours and traits. The course also covers same-sex desire in both traditional and modern China; for example, in the late imperial era, we will look at homoeroticism among fashionable elite men and at female “marriage resisters,” who dared to form all-women communities in a society where marriage was virtually universal. Class readings consist primarily of historical scholarship; however, (translated) primary sources pepper the course and include ritual prescriptions, (auto)biographies, essays, drama, and fiction that ground our inquiries in the authenticity of Chinese voices.

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Hormones, Food, and Sex

Open, Seminar—Fall

Hormones are released from diverse tissues, including the brain, ovaries, testes, stomach, intestines, and fat. These small molecules travel around the body via the circulatory system to influence the activity of distant cells involved in key biological processes. In this introduction to endocrinology, we will study the principles of hormone signaling by focusing on two overarching topics: 1) hormones that modulate food intake and utilization, and 2) hormones that control reproduction. The key molecules, cells, and tissues that play a role in endocrine-signaling pathways will be examined. We will study hormones that control appetite, satiation, fat deposition, and weight, as well as those that control many aspects of reproduction—including puberty, arousal, sex, gender identity, ovulation, pregnancy, and lactation. Readings will include textbook chapters, scientific articles, and popular science pieces.

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Early-Intervention Approaches for Young Children and Their Families

Intermediate/Advanced, Small seminar—Spring

This course will explore several early-intervention approaches for young children and their families, with a particular emphasis on the theory and technique of play therapy. While this course will focus most on child-centered play therapy (CCPT), we will also look at the methodology of other types of approaches and how those approaches address treatment issues. In addition, course material will highlight cultural considerations, therapeutic work with parents/caregivers, challenges in treatment, self-reflection, self-regulation, sensory processing, interoception, and analysis of case studies. Readings, class discussions, group play-based activities, and video illustrations will provide students with both a theoretical and anintroductory clinical basis for play-based therapeutic work with young children in early-intervention approaches.

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Political Economy of Women

Open, Seminar—Year

What factors determine the status of women in different societies and communities? What role is played by women’s labor both inside and outside the home? By cultural norms regarding sexuality and reproduction? By religious traditions? After a brief theoretical grounding, this course will address these questions by examining the economic, political, social, and cultural histories of women in the various racial/ethnic and class groupings that make up the United States. Topics to be explored include: the role of women in Iroquois Confederation before white colonization and the factors that gave Iroquois women significant political and social power in their communities; the status of white colonist women in Puritan Massachusetts and the economic, religious, and other factors that led to the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692; the position of African American women under slavery, including the gendered and racialized divisions of labor and reproduction; the growth of competitive capitalism in the North and the development of the “cult of true womanhood” in the rising middle class; the economic and political changes that accompanied the Civil War and Reconstruction and the complex relationships between African American and white women in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements; the creation of a landless agricultural labor force and the attempts to assimilate Chicana women into the dominant culture via “Americanization” programs; the conditions that encouraged Asian women’s immigration and their economic and social positions once here; the American labor movement and the complicated role that organized labor has played in the lives of women of various racial/ethnic groups and classes; the impact of US colonial policies on Puerto Rican migration and Puerto Rican women’s economic and political status on both the island and the mainland; the economic/political convulsions of the 20th century—from the trusts of the early 1900s to World War II—and their impact on women’s paid and unpaid labor; the impact of changes in gendered economic roles on LGBT communities; the economic and political upheavals of the 1960s that led to the so-called “second wave” of the women’s movement; and the current position of women in the US economy and polity and the possibilities for more inclusive public policies concerning gender and family issues. In addition to class participation and the conference project, requirements include regular essays that synthesize class materials with the written texts.

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First-Year Studies: Hollywood From the Margins

FYS—Year

In the last 10 years, a wave of online movements, sexual harassment cases, and studio worker strikes have exposed the systemic forces of exclusion and exploitation that shaped and still shape the US film industry. But how do we grapple critically with the ongoing material impact of Hollywood’s aura? What do we do with leftover myths and “beloved,” but horrifying, classics? Do we suppress them? Contextualize and critique them? Or disrupt their coherence and dismantle their authors by reappropriating them for art and other uses? This FYS seminar pairs 1930s-60s Hollywood films with novels, memoirs, essays, and experimental films about Hollywood to interrogate dominant narratives of film history and explore alternative modes to critique and reactivate classical Hollywood cinema. Course sessions will include a highly interdisciplinary introduction to the tools of film analysis, academic writing, and research, drawing on scholarship from across the humanities and a range of media—from films and texts to studio maps and fan magazines. During the first semester, we will reframe the history of the dream factory by deflating the romance of the male auteur and highlighting the role of marginalized labor on the studio lot. Starting with singular individuals with exceptional careers— like Dorothy Arzner, the studio system’s lone female director, and Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star—we will move on to culturally invisible studio workers: cutter girls, leader ladies, secretaries, extras, stunt doubles, custodians, and voice actors. During the second semester, our focus will shift from workers to spectator perspectives and experiences marginalized by the film industry, highlighting film criticism and experimental films by female, POC, and queer scholars and artists that propose subversive tools to change how we view and interpret classical Hollywood films. Topics to be discussed during the second semester include fan studies, gossip as film history, segregated storytelling, queer Hollywood “dream texts,” and “oppositional” Black looks. During the fall semester, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alternating with small group conferences dedicated to writing, hands-on research, and fieldwork: We will learn how to use the library, analyze media ephemera, explore SLC’s 16mm film collection, and take field trips to local film archives and museums. In the spring, conferences will continue to take place biweekly without the alternating group conferences.

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The Movie Musical

Open, Lecture—Spring

Long dismissed as shallow mass entertainment, the movie musical remains an understudied genre despite its century-long popularity, global scope, and recurring role in film history. This lecture course offers a layered cultural history of the movie musical from the 1920s to the present, approaching it as a uniquely intermedial, transnational perspective from which to study film. Students will learn to read movie musicals through a mixture of formal analysis and material history. We will read canonical scholars, as well as more recent multidisciplinary work on the movie musical as a site for ideological contestation; performance politics; and aesthetic, narrative, and technological experimentation. In particular, we will highlight the genre’s power for hiding labor behind spectacles of seemingly spontaneous mass performance and rehearsing modern social conflicts through heterosexual couple-driven, dual-focus plots (Jets vs. Sharks, town vs. city, etc.). Other topics include: the roots of the movie musical in vaudeville, minstrelsy, opera, and ballet; the musical’s relationship to new cinematic technologies, labor forms, and industrial practices; the musical’s relationship to questions of gender, sexuality, and race; and the musical as a globally circulating and mutating “mass” cultural form. While much of our focus will be on classical Hollywood (1920s-1960s), we will also watch films from France, the Soviet Union, England, East Germany, Mexico, India, and Australia.

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Feminist Film History

Open, Seminar—Fall

What happened to women in the silent-film industry? Why are there so few female voiceovers and so many plucky secretaries in classical Hollywood films? Should dead starlets be revived as feminist icons? Can dominant aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” or feminist filmmaking techniques? How do you uncover invisible or suppressed histories? This seminar offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film studies by retracing film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. While our focus will be on US and European films and scholarship from the Silent Era to the end of the 20th century, students are encouraged to pursue conference projects on feminist movements, films, and film theory from any era or any part of the world. Screenings will highlight a mixture of obscure and canonical films, and readings will cover a multidisciplinary range of feminist film scholarship—from psychoanalytic film theory to media archaeology and cyberfeminism. Topics to be discussed include women at the origins of film, women’s work onscreen and on the studio lot, the male gaze and spectacular female stars of classical cinema, fan culture and gendered genres, second-wave feminism and the French New Wave, race and Technicolor, lesbian representability, and feminist authorship as political practice.

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First-Year Studies: “We Carry It Within Us”: Culture and Politics in US History, 1776–1980

FYS—Year

“History is not merely something to read,” James Baldwin wrote in August 1965. “And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all we do.” This course is focused not only on history— what we consciously and unconsciously carry within us—but also on the acquisition of skills that will help you both as a college student and in life. Using the voices of the actors themselves, we will study the political and cultural work of Americans in order to read better, think better, write better, and articulate our ideas better. Rather than a representative survey of cultural history (which is, in this wonderfully diverse country, impossible), this course takes up the popular and the obscure, looking into the corners of American life for ideas, thoughts, and experiences of all kinds. Our focus will be on the themes of gender, race, and class but also will ponder sexuality, region, religion, immigration, and migration, among other themes. The course will be based on a spine of political history. The expectation is that you will come with some knowledge and will be attentive to what you do not know and then find out about it! Class will revolve around close readings of stories, cultural criticism, speeches, novels, memoir—mostly, but not exclusively, published sources—where authors work to change the minds of their readers. Those primary sources will be buttressed by articles and chapters from history textbooks. It will be challenging! This course will ask you to read more substantial work more carefully than perhaps you have before. We will discuss this work in seminar in both small groups and large; and at the end of each semester, there will be an oral exhibition pulling together the themes of the course in a meaningful way. This intellectual practice will ready you for your college career to come. In the fall, we will cover the period from the late-18th century to the late-19th; in the spring, we will move from the turn into the 20th century to near its end. Texts will include short stories, poetry, memoir, letters, and (in the spring) film. Examples in the first semester include Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the seduction novel Charlotte Temple by Suzanna Rowson, poetry by Phillis Wheatley, an unpublished novel on gender fluidity titled The Hermaphrodite by Julia Ward Howe, short stories by Herman Melville, Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott, and Ragged Dick, by Horatio Alger. The spring book list will reflect the interests of the students. Writing will be ample and consistent—thought pieces, along with short essays—with regular feedback so that you grow as a reader and writer. The subject of conference work can range widely within US cultural and political history: in the fall, to 1890; in the spring, all the way to the present. Along the way, we will try to make sense of the way we carry history, the way that it is present in all that we do. Conferences will be weekly until October Study Days, with the option of being biweekly thereafter.

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Gender and History in China: Beyond Eunuchs and Concubines

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

This seminar is a sustained historical exploration of gender in the Chinese context, which is not only significant in its own right but also serves to complicate some of the common Euro-American assumptions about family dynamics, emotional life, and gender hierarchies. We will treat female and male as historically constructed categories, examining how both have been tied to modes of power (familial, social, economic, and political); in other words, how men and women have been imagined and portrayed, made and mobilized, at different times. We will confront, head on, stereotypes about the passive Chinese woman and the Confucian family, asking where do we find, and how do we understand, women’s agency within the permutations of the Chinese family historically? We will interrogate imperial-era family conflicts and the practice of footbinding to highlight female agency within, and complicity with, the gender hierarchy. The appearance of feminism in the early 20th century and its subsequent fate will provide a window on how gender shaped revolution and how gender was, in turn, shaped by it. And rather than leave masculinity as an assumed constant, we will examine historical and cultural constructions of what it meant to be a man in China; located between the poles of the scholar and the warrior, Chinese manliness exhibits unfamiliar contours and traits. The course also covers same-sex desire in both traditional and modern China. For example, in the late imperial era, we will look at homoeroticism among fashionable elite men and at female “marriage resisters,” who dared to form all-women communities in a society where marriage was virtually universal. Class readings will consist primarily of historical scholarship; however, (translated) primary sources pepper the course and include ritual prescriptions, (auto)biographies, essays, drama, and fiction that ground our inquiries in the authenticity of Chinese voices.

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Women and Gender in the Middle East

Open, Seminar—Spring

Debates over the status of Middle Eastern women have been at the center of political struggles for centuries—as well as at the heart of prevailing Western media narratives about the region—and continue to be flashpoints for controversy in the present day. This course will explore the origins and evolution of these debates, taking a historical and thematic approach to the lived experience of women in various Middle Eastern societies at key moments in the region’s history. Topics to be covered include: the status of women in the Qur’an and Islamic law; the Ottoman imperial harem; patriarchy and neopatriarchy; the rise of the women’s press in the Middle East; women, nationalism, and citizenship; the emergence of various forms of women’s activism and political participation; the changing nature of the Middle Eastern family; the politics of veiling; Orientalist discourse and the gendered politics of colonialism and postcolonialism; women’s performance and female celebrity; archetypes of femininity and masculinity; and women’s autobiography and fiction in the Middle East. Throughout, we will interrogate the politics of gender, the political and social forces that circumscribe Middle Eastern women’s lives, and the individuals who claim authority to speak for women. The course will also briefly examine gender and sexuality as categories for historical analysis in the modern Middle East.

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Music and Identity: “Listening” to Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

Often defined as “the universal language,” music has long held a reputation for its ability to cross borders, both literal and figurative. Until the 20th century, however, little attention had been given to the ways in which judgments of “good” versus “bad” music were influenced by perceptions of race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity. Why, for instance, has Western classical music’s sensibility made it an ideal candidate for “all” cultures around the world, while other traditions remain localized to specific communities or dismissed altogether as “lesser”? In this course, we will begin by understanding the ways in which music shapes our world, as well as how music can be shaped by subjectivities and biases. Through case studies of classical, hip-hop, country, punk, K-pop, reggaeton, and other genres, we will examine the ways in which issues of identity in music impact both musicians and audiences. We will read texts from musicology and ethnomusicology, gender and women’s studies, and ethnic studies as examples of how scholars from multiple disciplines write and engage with themes of race, gender, and sexuality in conversation with music. The semester will culminate in the presentation of an interdisciplinary final project that explores themes of music and identity alongside the student’s own interests.

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Absences of the Archive: Queer Perspectives

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Sifting through the documents of an archive, you find that the trail has ended. Despite one’s best efforts, it seems that there are no answers to be found, no data to be studied, and no leads to pursue. At such a juncture, there are several possibilities for the next steps—including reconceptualizing one’s research questions, locating a new archive, or searching for related material. What would happen, however, if the absence in the archive were seen as a site of potentiality? What kinds of questions might emerge if we investigate not only the absence itself but why there is an absence? In this course, we will use texts from queer studies, women-of-color feminisms, and affect theory to unpack such omissions. We will look at examples of frustrated researchers and historians who refused to accept the archive as complete. Drawing upon their emerging methodologies, we will reconceptualize the archive alongside and against questions of objectivity in research and the politics of archiving. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which queer and minoritized populations evade the surveillance of archival practices. In conference work, students will develop research questions and apply new approaches to the archive in their own archival investigations.

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Feminist and Queer Waves: Reading Canon in Context

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

In Waves, we’ll move backward through feminist and queer time, as we revisit “classic” pieces within their original historical contexts. We will locate theory in place and time, naming how they respond to specific political, intellectual, and social exigencies. Our goal is to read these texts with close attention and care, asking how they reflect the urgent desires and needs of multiple overlapping communities. The texts represent a large breadth of topics, disciplines, and values of feminist and queer thought and are far from exhaustive history of any of these conversations. Likewise, our authors—folks such as Joshua Chambers-Letson, Saidiya Hartman, Martin Manalansan, Jennifer Nash, Claudia Rankine, Gayle Rubin, Eve Sedgwick, and Barbara Smith—each write from the specifics of their own experience, offering frequently contradictory arguments about the way the world does—and should—work. Together, we’ll build narratives about queer and feminist theoretical history that honor these complexities. We’ll build a co-authored public website that will house a timeline, theory cloud, and a digital exhibit of images from your archival research. You’ll be responsible for curating discussion for one class period. For your final conference work, you’ll conduct an independent project at either the Yonkers Public Library or the Sarah Lawrence College Archives, with an optional opportunity to help curate a final community event in spring 2024. As an interdisciplinary theory course, expect to draw on theory from gender and sexuality studies; LGBT studies; and Africana studies.

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Perverts in Groups: Queer Social Lives

Open, Seminar—Spring

Contradictory assumptions about the relation of homosexuals to groups have dominated accounts of modern LGBT life. In Western Europe and the United States, from the late 19th century onward, queers have been presented as profoundly isolated persons—burdened by the conviction that they are the only ones ever to have had such feelings when they first realize their deviant desires and immediately separated by those desires from the families and cultures into which they were born. Yet, at the same time, these isolated individuals have been seen as inseparable from one another, part of a worldwide network always able to recognize their peers by means of mysterious signs decipherable only by other group members. Homosexuals were denounced as persons who did not contribute to society. Homosexuality was presented as the hedonistic choice of reckless, self-indulgent individualism over sober social good. Nevertheless, all homosexuals were implicated in a nefarious conspiracy, stealthily working through their web of connections to one another in order to take over the world or the political establishment of the United States; for example, its art world, theatre, or film industries. Such contradictions could still be seen in the battles that have raged since the 1970s, when queers began seeking public recognition of their lives within existing social institutions, from the military to marriage. LGBT persons were routinely attacked as threats (whether to unit cohesion or the family) intent on destroying the groups they were working to openly join. In this class, we will use these contradictions as a framework for studying the complex social roles that queers have occupied and some of the complex social worlds that they have created—at different times and places and shaped by different understandings of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and nationality—within the United States over the past century and a half. Our sources will include histories, sociological and anthropological studies, the writings of political activists, fiction, and film.

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Feminist and Queer Activisms: Looking Beyond Stonewall

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course provides an opportunity for students to learn about the legacies of queer and feminist activism from an intersectional lens. Rather than centering on events such as the Stonewall Riots and the rise of second-wave feminism, we will explore activism through women-of-color theorists, queer-of-color activists, and transnational approaches to feminist and queer activism. In this course, activism will include not only sociopolitical movements but also art, music, and cultural works that raise awareness to queer and feminist lives. Topics of the course include: creating a rationale for a feminist movement, intersectionality and Kimberlé Crenshaw, queer activism before Stonewall, suffrage, the labor movement, neglected histories, STAR (Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera), ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), prison abolition, disability and collective access, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo. In conference work, students will develop a proposal for a queer/feminist activism project of their own design.

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Pretty, Witty, and Gay

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

Are you ready to review your cultural map? As Gertrude Stein once said, “Literature—creative literature—unconnected with sex is inconceivable. But not literary sex, because sex is a part of something of which the other parts are not sex at all.” More recently, Fran Leibowitz observed, “If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal.” We do not have to limit ourselves to America, however. The only question is where to begin: in the pantheon, in prison, or in the family; in London, Paris, Berlin, or New York; with the “friends of Dorothy” or “the twilight women.” There are novels, plays, poems, essays, films, and critics to be read and read about, listened to, or watched. There are dark hints, delicate suggestions, positive images, negative images, and sympathy-grabbing melodramas to be reviewed. There are high culture and high camp, tragedies and comedies, the good, the bad, and the awful to be enjoyed and assessed. How has modern culture thought about sexuality and art, love, and literature? How might we think again? Conference work may be focused on a particular artist, set of texts, or genre or on some aspect of the historical background of the materials that we will be considering.

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Brown Feeling(s): Situating the Work of José Esteban Muñoz

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013) was an author, professor, and alumnus of Sarah Lawrence College (class of 1989). As a theorist working at the intersections of Latinx studies, queer theory, performance studies, and affect theory, his scholarship serves as a foundation for what is now known as queer-of-color critique. Muñoz challenged norms of queer theory that failed to account for intersectionality and the lives of racially-minoritized communities. His writing draws upon examples from film, TV, music, performance art, and theatre to describe survival strategies, kinship formations, and the pursuit of utopia by queers of color. In this course, we will read Muñoz’s works in the context of a lineage of queer-of-color scholars. Texts will include “Ephemera as Evidence” (1996), Disidentifications (1999), “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down” (2006), Cruising Utopia (2009), and The Sense of Brown (2020, published posthumously). Additionally, we will immerse ourselves in the theoretical material of Muñoz’s inquiry by watching the films, listening to the music, and viewing the art that inspired his works. Lastly, we will investigate the ways in which Muñoz’s legacy continues in the decade since his passing. This course is recommended for students with an interest in queer studies or queer-of-color critique, as well as those interested in the application of visual and performing arts to queer theoretical writing.

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Cold War Black Feminism

Open, Lecture—Fall

When Black feminist writing boomed in the 1970s, the United States was squarely in the middle of the Cold War. Accordingly, Audre Lorde decried the United States invasion of Grenada, June Jordan railed against the Vietnam War, and Assata Shakur penned her autobiography in asylum in Cuba. Yet, Black feminism has primarily been considered a domestic affair. How might we better understand Black feminist literature by reading it in the context of the Cold War? This course aims to answer this question first by reading proto-Black feminist authors writing in the early Cold War and then returning to the famous authors of Black feminism to consider their portrait of international affairs. Authors may include Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and others. Along the way, we will read recent scholarship to understand the historical context in which those texts were written. In so doing, we aim to better understand the Cold War’s effect on Black feminism and what those canonical texts of Black feminism can tell us about American foreign policy. Short assignments may include brief historical essays, short close readings, and response papers.

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Ancient Eros: Love in Classical Literature

Open, Seminar—Fall

The theme of love in classical literature is a profoundly influential topic, appearing in genres as diverse as epic and lyric poetry, tragedy, philosophy, and even the earliest novels. The attitudes toward love expressed in these texts vary considerably: Sometimes, it is personified as a beautiful and playful god; often, too, it appears as a powerful, destructive force that can lead to irrational behavior and life-changing disaster. The literary motif of love is a catalyst, as well as a resolution of many narrative and poetic arcs; its transformative nature is deeply engaged with aspects of gender, sexuality, and identity throughout the Classical era. In this course, we will read a wide-ranging selection of ancient texts, as well as look ahead to the reception of the theme of Classical Eros in later art and literature. Along with readings, assignments will include regular low-stakes writing practice, a presentation to the class, and a major conference project. Conference work may take the form of a paper or a creative writing project. The reading list will be selected from the following works in English translation, sometimes comprising the entire work and sometimes parts TBD): Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Sappho; Euripides, Hippolytus, Euripedes; Symposium, Phaedrus, Plato; Argonautica, Apollonius of Rhodes; Idylls, Theocritus; Eclogues, Catullus, Vergil; Amores, Ovid; Golden Ass, Apuleius; Apology, Apollonius; late antique era love spells, letters, and curse tablets.

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Writing Women: Women Writers in the English Renaissance

Open, Seminar—Fall

Mary Herbert (née Sidney) was the most influential single figure in the English Renaissance literary world. As a translator, her psalms caught the attention of Queen Elizabeth I and her closet drama, Antonie, influenced Shakespeare; as an editor, she brought into print her brother’s posthumous Defense of Poetry, the greatest piece of early modern literary criticism; as a patron, she sponsored and encouraged some of the late Elizabethan world’s most talented poets. She remains understudied. This seminar, in part, looks to correct that imbalance, resituating Mary Herbert and women like her in the constellation of Renaissance writers. This term, we’ll examine the wide corpus of women’s writing (and writing about women) produced in Renaissance England and its New World colonies. While a few men will appear on the syllabus, women authors will account for the majority of primary texts. During the term, we’ll ask: How did early modern English women write their own experiences? How were women represented in popular drama? In poetry? What kind of legacy did those women leave Renaissance literature? Readings will begin with Anne Askew's Examinations (1546), a meditation on her faith written while awaiting execution for heresy, and continue through Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). During the term, we’ll encounter work by Jane Anger, Anne Bradstreet, Queen Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer, Dorothy Leigh, Mary Sidney, Lady Mary Wroth, and others—alongside some familiar texts, including Shakespeare’s narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Ben Jonson’s comedy Epicene, and John Knox’s polemic against his own queen. Such an assembly of authors ensures that we will read prose and poetry, meditations, court proceedings, and Queen Elizabeth’s own address to her troops as they steeled themselves against invasion. In conference, students may work on any aspect of any text on the syllabus or, with approval, on another early modern text consistent with the themes of the course.

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Colette, Duras, Ernaux

Open, Seminar—Spring

At first glance, the grouping of these three French female writers might seem just to be the arbitrary product of alphabetical order. They come from three different generations, after all, and their works perhaps present more aesthetic differences than similarities. Thus, part of our goal in this class will be to understand the unique role that each has played in the history of modern French literature. The preeminent woman of letters of the first half of the 20th century, Colette, depicted the social and sexual mores of her time in a sophisticated and wry prose. Marguerite Duras, one of the most significant writers and intellectuals of the postwar era, pushed the boundaries of the novel’s form through experimentations in dialogue, character, and narrative. Annie Ernaux, the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, has long dissected the nature of personal memory with an approach closer to sociology than creative literature. A separate aim of the course will be to understand the connecting threads between and among the three. Most significantly, we will see how Colette, Duras, and Ernaux all draw on the material of their own lives in their writing, blurring the line between autobiography and fiction. We will also explore a set of shared preoccupations in their work, including the tensions of domestic life, the enduring influence of maternal figures, the power of female sexuality and desire, the transformations of the aging body, the relationship between memory and history, and the determinative role of social class. We will ask, finally, why each of these authors has been regarded as “scandalous” in some way and also why each is having a “translation moment” of sorts in the present-day anglophone world. We will read full works in English translation; qualified students of French may read works in the original and do their conference work in French.

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Bedford Hills: African American Prison Literature

Open, Seminar—Spring

This class combines Sarah Lawrence students and students from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility; all class sessions and conference meetings will take place at Bedford. Consequently, all students must be at least 21 years of age.

From Frederick Douglass’ description of his time incarcerated, through Angela Davis’ representations of prisons in the 1970s, to Tayari Jones’ award-winning An American Marriage, the prison as an institution has long loomed large in the African American literary tradition. How, then, has incarceration shaped African American literature? And how has African American literature sought to represent the prison? This course seeks to answer these questions by proceeding chronologically, beginning with narratives of incarceration pre-Emancipation like those of Abraham Johnstone. We continue through accounts of convict leasing in the late 19th-century and mid-20th-century representations of incarceration by social realist authors like Richard Wright. We turn to Black feminist and Black arts representations of the prison by authors such as James Baldwin, Etheridge Knight, and more. And we end with the contemporary, considering how recent accounts of incarceration descend from a longer lineage of African American prison writing. Along the way, we will think closely about the relationship between legal citizenship, gender, race, sexuality, class and the prison. Additionally, throughout the course, short writing assignments aim to hone our skills as analysts.

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The Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones: Black Literature of the Ocean

Open, Seminar—Spring

From Olaudah Equiano’s 18th-century recounting of the Middle Passage through John Akomfrah’s 21st-century cinematic representations juxtaposing whaling with slavery, the Atlantic Ocean has loomed large in cultural production by Black artists, directors, and writers across the world. It is at once the site of the past trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing trauma of rising tides, of the freedom offered Black mariners like Frederick Douglass and transatlantic intellectuals like Richard Wright and Stuart Hall, and more. This course will seek to unpack this tangled knot, to understand what role the ocean has played in Black thought and to consider what Black thought might offer to the ongoing climate crisis by engaging with representations of the Atlantic in visual art, literature, and film by Black cultural producers across the world. Beyond those named above, authors and artists may include Zora Neale Hurston, C. L. R. James, Mati Diop, M. Nourbese Philip, Abdulruzak Gurnah, and others. Additionally, this course will fully participate in the spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

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Punk

Open, Large Lecture—Spring

This course will examine punk rock as a musical style and as a vehicle for cultural opposition. We will investigate the musical, cultural, and political conditions that gave birth to the genre in the 1970s and trace its continuing evolution through the early 2000s—in dialogue with and opposition to other musical genres, such as progressive rock, heavy metal, ska, and reggae. We will begin with the influence of minimalism on “proto-punk” artists like the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith, which will provide a foundation for seeing how minimalism—as well as modernism, atonality, and electronic music—continue to resonate in punk and rock music. We will examine the intellectual background of early UK punk, with readings by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and look at the theories of Gramsci and Foucault on the question of institutional power structures and the possibility of resistance to them. To deepen our understanding of punk style and the culture of opposition, there will also be readings by Theodor Adorno, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Julia Kristeva, and others. We will trace the splintering of punk into various sub-genres and the challenges of negotiating the music industry while remaining “authentic” in a commercialized culture. Another major focus will be the Riot Grrrl bands of the 1990s as a catalyst for third-wave feminism. Given the DIY aesthetic at the heart of punk and in addition to listening to, analyzing, and reading about the music, students who want to incorporate creative work will be given the opportunity to work with musicians and write some punk songs. In light of the abundant documentary film footage relating to punk culture, the course will include a film viewing every other week.

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Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

This reading seminar will consist of a close study of one book, A Thousand Plateaus, which was coauthored in 1980 by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari.A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of their magnum opus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia—the founding text of a movement of thought called “poststructuralism”—is among the most influential books of 20th-century philosophy. As its name suggests, the book presents a vision, or visions, of the world and of history as multilayered and multiplex rather than homogenous and linear. The book teaches us to look and to think of things and of ourselves from a variety of new and shifting angles, with the aim of providing means of resistance, empowerment, and sometimes escape against capitalism, fascism, and forces of normalization. To do this, Deleuze and Guattari draw on a broad range of philosophical, literary, and artistic texts and on modalities of experience that have traditionally been associated with madness. Their writing style is bold and dazzling, full to the brim with new terminologies (many of which have since become common tropes in the humanities and the social sciences); it is also challenging and dense. Engaging their work fruitfully requires a mind that is, like theirs, open and adventurous, willing to take risks and follow unpredictable turns. We will proceed in workshop fashion, reading 30-40 pages a week in advance of each class, writing short analyses throughout the semester, and coming to class prepared and eager to work together toward increased understanding. In addition to the prerequisite, students enrolling in this class should, more importantly, have a philosophical passion and commitment, a diligent work ethic, and a spirit of camaraderie, collaboration, and generosity.

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Sex Is Not a Natural Act: Social Science Explorations of Human Sexuality

Open, Lecture—Fall

When is sex NOT a natural act? Every time a human engages in sexual activity. In sex, what is done by whom, with whom, where, when, why, and with what has very little to do with biology. Human sexuality poses a significant challenge in theory. The study of its disparate elements (biological, social, and individual/psychological) is inherently an interdisciplinary undertaking; from anthropologists to zoologists, all add something to our understanding of sexual behaviors and meanings. In this class, we will study sexualities in social contexts across the lifespan, from infancy to old age. Within each period, we will examine biological, social, and psychological factors that inform the experience of sexuality for individuals. We will also examine broader aspects of sexuality, including sexual health and sexual abuse. Conference projects may range from empirical research to a bibliographic research project. Service learning may also be supported in this class.

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Intersectionality Research Seminar

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Year

This class is a hands-on introduction to conducting qualitative and quantitative psychological research on the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Although research is an indispensable part of scientific endeavors, the conduct of research itself is part scientific ritual and part art form. In this class, we will learn both the science and the art of conducting ethical research with diverse participants. What is the connection of race, sexuality, and gender within an American multicultural and multiethnic society? Is there a coherent, distinct, and continuous self existing within our postmodern, paradigmatic, etc. contexts? How is the sexual/racial/gendered implicated in the creation of this self-identity? Is there principled dynamic or developmental change in our concepts of self as human beings, sexual beings, and/or racial/ethnic beings? This course explores the analysis of race, ethnicity, and sexualities within psychology and the broader social sciences; how those constructs implicitly and explicitly inform psychological inquiry; and the effects of those constructs on the “psychology” of the individual in context. The course regularly moves beyond psychology to take a broader, social-science perspective on the issue of intersectionality.

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Social Movements and Powerful Art: Aesthetics of Authority and Resistance

Open, Seminar—Spring

Using US-based artist Sarah Sze’s remark, “Great protests are great art works,” as its inspiration, this seminar explores the relationship between art, collective ideas, and social change within the context of social movements. We begin by discussing the relationship between aesthetics and the social sciences, focusing on a sociological notion of art as a collective and inherently social process. Our study includes the work of social theorists Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Theodor Adorno, whose works not only illuminate how public culture communicates collective ideas but also how the latter is imbricated with existing power structures and social hierarchies. These critical frameworks will help us investigate the modern art world, exploring how artistic institutions and movements are sites that both perpetuate and resist authoritative ideologies. In the second half of the semester, students will use these frameworks to explore the role of culture and art within collective social movements. We will investigate several questions, including: What defines a social movement and what social conditions produce social movements? How are art and aesthetics used within social movements to communicate ideas and strengthen communities? In what ways do movements deploy art as a form of social resistance or authority? Our discussions will particularly attend to grassroots movements within historically marginalized communities. Throughout the semester, students will also learn about the benefits of visual methodologies and how social scholars use them to understand collective culture and social change. For conference, students will select a specific social movement, exploring how art is deployed within the movement for collective resistance or control. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) critical analysis of an artistic institution, comparative analysis of how different contexts of resistance deploy shared artistic mediums, or the use of art within a given movement over time. While class discussions will primarily focus on the United States, students are also invited to explore the relationship between art and social movements in other social locations.

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People of the Book: Jews and Literature

Open, Seminar—Fall

Across the ages, Jews have maintained an intimate relationship with the written word. From the destruction of the Second Temple through the chaos of modernity, reading and writing have grounded and animated Jewish life and practice. Together, we will embark on an examination of critical Jewish and human issues mediated through short stories, novels, and plays. By exploring the deep textual history embedded within Jewish culture, we will wrestle with topics as varied as romantic love and marriage, the encroachment of the secular world, cross-cultural conflict and exchange, and evolving concepts of gender and sexuality. Alongside our literary journey, we will engage with an array of artistic adaptations like music, film, and visual art. Accompanied by authors—including Yiddish luminaries Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Asch, American pioneers Philip Roth and Anzia Yezierska, and more recent visionaries Etgar Keret, Tony Kushner, and Dara Horn—we will interrogate the many ways that Jews both accommodated and broke convention.

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Documenting Jewish Lives: Past as Prologue

Open, Seminar—Fall

Time: a concept that has stymied many readers, authors, and thinkers alike. Measuring change over time, however, is central to Jewish thought and practice, as well as to the historian’s craft. From weeks to months, season to season, and across the stages of the lifecycle, Jews have historically engaged with time religiously, spiritually, philosophically, and practically. Human life, when mediated through the written word, leads to a rich portrayal of life's internal complexities and inconsistencies. In this class, we will attend to the poetics of time as it shapes human lives and to human lives as they shape the poetics of time. Specifically, we will explore Jewish lives, defined broadly, to examine the intricacies of everyday experience, innermost thoughts and feelings, and interactions with the Jewish and non-Jewish world. Beginning with Baruch Spinoza, the infamous Jewish maverick, and time-traveling forward through a selection of biographies, memoirs, and fiction to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the notorious Jewish jurist, we will pursue our quest to discern—and tell anew—what makes a Jewish life.

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Jews of New York

Open, Seminar—Spring

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” So wrote Sephardic New York Jew Emma Lazarus in 1883, putting her stamp on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and forever intertwining Jewish history with the professed American ideals of freedom, equality, and inclusivity. Whether as insult, compliment, or casual observation, the conflation of Jews and New York has become permanently entrenched in the American imagination. But how did we get from 23 Jewish refugees landing in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the New York City of Streisand, Sondheim, and Seinfeld? This course will explore 370 years of Jewish history steeped in the urban environs of the Empire State that millions elected to call home. From Lyman Bloomingdale’s retail empire to Mount Sinai Hospital’s pioneering medical research and from the groundbreaking literature of Chaim Potok to the feminist and queer activism of “Battling Bella” Abzug, the Jewish footprints on the streets and avenues of the city remain readily apparent. We will examine socialist Jews who demanded a brighter future for all, working-class Jewish women who rioted over the exorbitant price of kosher meat, and Jewish radicals who broadened the parameters of religious observance. Recognizing New York as the crucible of United States citizenship and a major center of the Jewish world, we will interrogate how—from generation to generation—the Jews shaped New York and New York shaped the Jews.

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Jewish Mystics, Rabble-Rousers, and Heretics

Open, Seminar—Spring

Does God exist? How should one read the Bible? Who should read the Bible? How can humans connect with the Divine? How does Judaism relate to social justice? How do we reconcile the dichotomy of reason and revelation? What makes one Jewish? What does it mean to live Jewishly? These questions—and still others—represent but a smattering of those with which the Jews whom we will study have grappled, both philosophically and practically, throughout history. From the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria to the musical spirituality of Debbie Friedman and with a host of radical thinkers, rule-breakers, and religious innovators in between, this class will explore the myriad ways in which Jewish luminaries have broken with convention and disrupted the status quo. These individuals provide a lens into the humanity that undergirds the Jewish thought and ritual that, on the one hand, we take for granted and that, on the other, shocks or even appalls us. Drawing from an array of historical sources—including philosophical treatises, religious texts, and literary classics—we will explore how those Jewish pathbreakers have engaged with these questions across the ages and, in turn, offer our own responses.

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Sociological Theory

Open, Lecture—Fall

By covering both “classical” and “contemporary” sociological theories, this course is designed to provide students with a well-rounded understanding of sociological thought and its evolution. The main objective of the course is to introduce theoretical perspectives within sociology and how those theories have shaped the boundaries of the discipline. We will begin by exploring the concept of “sociological imagination.” Building upon that preliminary understanding, we will examine certain core sociological concepts such as class, race, gender, culture, power, institutions, and identity. While recognizing the lasting impact of sociology’s pioneering theorists—Durkheim, Weber, and Marx—we will also explore approaches that critically engage and problematize aspects of the “canon.” Our examination extends to encompass contemporary perspectives, including feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and race critical theories. Incorporating these contemporary sociological approaches, we will gain multifaceted insights into the complex interplay between sociological constructs and broader societal contexts. As the course draws to a close, students are expected to leave with a deeper appreciation of the complexity of society and the expanded array of theories through which it can be examined. Group conferences will be centered on research on related topics of students’ interest, as well as engaging in creative group projects.

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Sociology of the Body

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

How are bodies produced in the contemporary world? To what degree are our bodies truly our own? Using Michel Foucault’s term “biopower” and his related work as its point of departure, this course will address the above questions as well as others related to the body in order to analyze and better understand how modern social institutions and relations regulate and attempt to control our bodies. Our examination and analysis will include the various modalities through which power is enacted at the macro level—including, for example, state surveillance, violence, and policy formation. We will also explore the relation between such forces and micro-level, everyday experiences throughout, deploying the concept of “embodiment” to understand how social power not only acts upon us but also becomes internalized within our very beings. This framework will help us better understand how social power is carried through the body and shapes our physicality, as well as the ways in which we move through the social world and interact with each other. Our analysis will enable us to examine biopower more critically with respect to constructions and interpretations of sex/gender, race, class, and sexuality at multiple social scales. For conference, students are expected to select a social context of their preference through which to examine the relationship between biopolitical forces and the embodied experiences of the individual(s). Students might also explore strategies of resistance—both individual and collective—to establish bodily autonomy and resist domination. In addition to social scientific studies, students may deploy ethnographic research, media analysis, and/or turn to personal (auto)biographies as bases of their research and analysis.

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Social Movements and Powerful Art: Aesthetics of Authority and Resistance

Open, Seminar—Spring

Using US-based artist Sarah Sze’s remark, “Great protests are great art works,” as its inspiration, this seminar explores the relationship between art, collective ideas, and social change within the context of social movements. We begin by discussing the relationship between aesthetics and the social sciences, focusing on a sociological notion of art as a collective and inherently social process. Our study includes the work of social theorists Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Theodor Adorno, whose works not only illuminate how public culture communicates collective ideas but also how the latter is imbricated with existing power structures and social hierarchies. These critical frameworks will help us investigate the modern art world, exploring how artistic institutions and movements are sites that both perpetuate and resist authoritative ideologies. In the second half of the semester, students will use these frameworks to explore the role of culture and art within collective social movements. We will investigate several questions, including: What defines a social movement and what social conditions produce social movements? How are art and aesthetics used within social movements to communicate ideas and strengthen communities? In what ways do movements deploy art as a form of social resistance or authority? Our discussions will particularly attend to grassroots movements within historically marginalized communities. Throughout the semester, students will also learn about the benefits of visual methodologies and how social scholars use them to understand collective culture and social change. For conference, students will select a specific social movement, exploring how art is deployed within the movement for collective resistance or control. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) critical analysis of an artistic institution, comparative analysis of how different contexts of resistance deploy shared artistic mediums, or the use of art within a given movement over time. While class discussions will primarily focus on the United States, students are also invited to explore the relationship between art and social movements in other social locations.

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Advanced Spanish: Latin American Female Artistic Productions

Advanced, Seminar—Fall

In this seminar, we will analyze how Latin American women reflected on traditional gender roles, heteronormative standards, intricate racial systems, class dynamics, technology, and environment concerns in their literary and cinematographic works. Through advanced grammar review and writing workshops, students will hone their communication, analytic, and essay-writing skills in Spanish. Readings include texts by Aida Cartagena Portalatín, Cristina Cabral, Gabriela Mistral, and María Fernanda Ampuero; films include La ciénaga, El último verano de la Boyita, and Fever Dream, among many others. Students will complete an individual project.

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Drawing the Body in the 21st Century

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

This drawing class creates works on paper in watercolor, ink, and collage using the human form while considering the ways in which the body has been depicted in art of the 21st century. Feminist artists and BIPOC artists have transformed the way we see and construct the world and how the figure is used in art. Borrowing a conceptual frame, in part from an exhibition curated by Apsara Di Quinzio at Berkeley Art Museum (2022), student assignments will include the following: returning the gaze, the body in pieces, absence and presence, gender alchemy, activism, domesticity and labor. In the first half of the class, students can draw directly with a model present in the classroom; the second half will introduce alternative substrates, including medical textbooks, fashion magazines, and collage. Artists will be introduced to the work of Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Luchita Hurtado, Sarah Lucas, Mary Minter, Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson, Karen Finley, Kara Walker, Rona Pondick, Simone Leigh, Zanele Muholi, Wangechi Mutu, Mary Kelly, Janine Antoni, Carolee Schneeman, Kerry James Marshall, Lyle Ashton Harris, Bob Flanagan, and Féliz Gonzalez Torres.

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Performance-Art Tactics

Open, Seminar—Fall

Experiment and explore contemporary performance art. Through surveying a range of important artworks and movements, we will review the histories, concepts, and practices of performance art. Born from anti-art, performance art challenges the boundaries of artistic expression through implementing as material the concepts of space, time, and the body. Examples of artists that we will review are John Cage, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Pope.L, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Janine Antoni, Suzanne Lacy, Aki Sasamoto, and Anna Halprin, to name a few. Reviewing dialogues and movements introducing performance art—such as sculpture, installation art, protest art, social media, video art, happenings, dada, comedy, sound art, graphic notation, scores, collaboration, and movement—students will be able to relate the form and function of performance art through research, workshopping ideas, experimentation, improvisation, and movement, thereby developing the ability to confidently implement any method of the performance-art genre.

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Performance Art

Open, Seminar—Spring

Since the early 20th century, artists have explored performance art as a radical means of expression. In both form and function, performance pushes the boundaries of contemporary art. Artists use the medium for institutional critique, social activism, and to address the personal politics of gender, sexuality, and race. This course approaches performance art as a porous, transdisciplinary medium open to students from all disciplines, including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, video, filmmaking, theatre, dance, music, creative writing, and digital art. Students learn about the legacy of performance art from the 1970s to the present and explore some of the concepts and aesthetic strategies used to create works of performance. Through texts, artists’ writings, video screenings, and slide lectures, students are introduced to a range of performance-based artists and art movements.

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First-Year Studies: Where Was It One First Heard of the Truth?

FYS—Year

In this omnibus nonfiction writing class, we will encounter and examine over the course of a year a range of literary, artistic, social, and historical phenomena—from plays by Shakespeare and poems by Whitman, to selections from autobiographies of Gandhi and Malcolm X and Virginia Woolf, to films and memoirs of identity and gender liberation, to a classic documentary about the terminal ward of a great Northeastern-seaboard hospital, to an oral history of a poor neighborhood in Mexico City, to artwork in New York museums and current art exhibits in Chelsea, to sports events and contemporaneous political conflicts, to masterworks of modernist nonfiction experimentation. In response to this range and overflowing variety of material, students will be asked to write accurately and cogently, in the tradition of various nonfiction genres, designed to capture one aspect or another of these encounters with reality. We will write impersonal work—reportage, reviews, journalistic profiles, editorials; and we will write highly personal pieces involving the life experiences of each of us in relation to what we encounter—personal essays, memoir fragments, hybrid pieces that experiment with form, that create their own genre, that allow us to fully explore our subjectivity and our unique points of view. We will work out the rhetorical and investigative techniques, whereby the truth of experience is represented on the page. We will also look at the many ways in which language can be used to distort, obscure, and evade the truth. We will think practically and will think philosophically about representing reality. We will develop our voices and our control of words, sentences, paragraphs, and larger units. Our biases will tend toward clarity of thought and beauty of expression. In this course, there will be weekly conferences for the first six weeks and biweekly conferences thereafter.

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Creative Nonfiction

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Fall

This is a course for creative writers who are interested in exploring nonfiction as an art form. We will focus on reading and interpreting outside work—essays, articles, and journalism by some of our best writers—in order to understand what good nonfiction is and how it is created. During the first part of the semester, writing will be comprised mostly of exercises and short pieces aimed at putting into practice what is being illuminated in the readings; in the second half of the semester, students will create longer, formal essays to be presented in workshop.

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