Gender and Sexuality Studies

At the close of the 1920s, 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 Kenyan settler children 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 said about children, done to children, and required of children was central to the success of imperial projects. In this seminar, we will explore materials from across the globe to understand the diverse roles, both intentional and unintentional, of children in imperial processes. In addition to the white sons and daughters of European settler colonists in Africa and Southeast Asia, we will also look at the contrary things that were said about and done to Indigenous children and children of mixed parentage at different historical and political moments of empire. We will learn 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 around the world 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. Conceptually, we will use approaches from child development, sex-gender studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory. Questions 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? Materials for this course will include fiction, memoirs, scholarly texts, ethnographic accounts, historical documents, visual images, and map making. Course work will include weekly writing, seminar discussion, group research projects, and use of digital platforms. Biweekly in fall, students will have individual conferences with the instructor to review submitted assignments, discuss course materials, and receive necessary support for adjustment to college. In alternate weeks, students will meet for collaborative group conference projects. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

“The future belongs to the ghosts,” remarked the philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1996, as his interlocutor, Bernard Stiegler, phrases the main idea behind that statement: “Modern technology, contrary to appearances, increases tenfold the power of ghosts.” With the advent of the internet, various forms of social media, and the ubiquity of filmic images in our lives, Derrida’s observations have proven to be quite prophetic, such that they call for a new field of study—one that requires less an ontology of being and the real and more a “hauntology” (to invoke Derrida’s punish term) of the spectral, the virtual, the phantasmic, the imaginary, and the recurrent revenant. In this seminar, we consider ways in which the past and present are haunted by ghosts and vexed by spectrality. Topics to be covered include: specters and hauntings, figures and apparitions, history and memory, trauma and political crisis, fantasy and imagination, digital interfaces, haunted data and archives, and visual and acoustical images. We will consider a range of films and video, photography, literary texts, acoustic reverberations, internet and social media, and everyday discourses and imaginings. Through these inquiries, we will be able to further our understanding of the nature of specters and apparitions in the contemporary world in their many forms and dimensions. Students will be invited to undertake their own hauntologies and thus craft studies of the phenomenal force of specters, hauntings, and the apparitional in particular social or cultural contexts.

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; marriage across 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 lecture will examine the makings and meanings of kinship connections at multiple levels, from small communities to global movements. Topics will include the adoption and fostering of children, both locally and transnationally, in Peru, Chile, Spain, Italy, Ghana, the USA, 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. We will look at the ways in which 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.

Javanese shadow theatre, Bedouin love poems, and American community life are but a few of the sociocultural worlds 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 research is generally considered one of the best ways to form a nuanced and contextually rich understanding of a particular social world. To gain an informed sense of the methods, challenges, and benefits of such an approach, students will try their hands at ethnographic research and writing. In fall, each student will be asked to undertake an ethnographic research project in order to investigate the features of a specific social world—such as a homeless shelter, a religious festival, or a neighborhood in Brooklyn. In spring, students will craft a fully realized piece of ethnographic writing that conveys something of the features and dynamics of that 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 ethnographic projects, such as interviewing others, the use of field notes, the interlacing of theory and data, the role of dialogue and 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.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood Around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This seminar in art theory and curatorial practice will explore ecological aesthetics in the era of anthropogenic climate change. The course’s guiding question will be: What forms might an aesthetic experience of nature take when it no longer privileges the human observer but, rather, cultivates an equality and reciprocity between all forms of life? Possible answers will be drawn from recent work in critical theory, Black studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, continental philosophy, and science and technology studies. Case studies on the work of selected contemporary artists will complement the theoretical frameworks under consideration. The course’s topics will include: post-Enlightenment aesthetics of nature, biopower, vitalism, post- and antihumanisms, plant philosophies, bacteria and fungi studies, and deep time. The course will also incorporate a curatorial practicum that will allow students to participate in the production of an on-campus exhibition exploring ecological themes. In addition to exercises on exhibition writing, model making, and art installation, we will meet with artworld professionals working at museums in the New York area.

The visual arts and architecture constitute a central part of human expression and experience, both growing from and influencing our lives in profound ways that we might not consciously acknowledge. We will explore intersections between the visual arts and cultural, political, and social history with the goal of using art-history methods and theories to deal critically with works of art. This course is not a survey; rather, it will include a limited number of artists and works of art and architecture, which students will learn about in depth through formal analysis, readings, discussion, research, and debate. We will endeavor to understand each work from the point of view of its creators and patrons and by following its changing reception by audiences throughout time, including the ways in which those changes evoke political and social meanings. To accomplish this, we will need to understand some of the languages of art. The course, then, is also a course in visual literacy: the craft of reading and interpreting visual images on their own terms. We will also discuss a number of issues of contemporary concern; for instance, the destruction of art, free speech and respect of religion, the art market, and the museum.

When we encounter dancing, what are we seeing, experiencing, and understanding? How do current representations of dance reflect, perpetuate, and/or disrupt familiar assumptions about personal and social realities? Embedded historical ideas and enforcements based on race, economic class, gender, social/sexual orientation, nationality/regional affiliation, and more are threaded through our daily lives. Performing arts inside and outside of popular culture often reinforce dominant cultural ideas and feelings. Can they also propose or inspire alternatives? In fall, we will view samples of dancing in film, video, digital media, television programs, and commercials, as well as live performance. These viewings—along with reading selected texts from the fields of dance and performance, literary criticism, feminist theory, queer theory, and cultural studies—will form the basis of class discussions and exercises. In spring, we will shift focus to viewing still images and live action with readings from additional fields, including art criticism and neuroscience, as well as fine-tuning approaches to writing about our subject matter. Students will complete several class assignments each semester, as well as develop one or more substantial lines of inquiry for conference work. Conference projects may draw upon multiple disciplines, including those within humanities and creative arts. The central aim of this course will be to cultivate informed discussion and to produce new knowledge, increasing both individual and collective capabilities. We will use academic research, along with personal experience, to advance our recognition of dance as an elemental art form and as a potentially important orientation in adjacent studies. In both fall and spring, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences.

What factors determine the status of women in different societies and communities? What role is played by women’s labor, both inside and outside of 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 the 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 witch 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 upon immigrating; the American labor movement and the complicated role 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 diverse 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 for the course will include regular essays that synthesize class materials with written texts. Possibilities for conference work include traditional conference papers, group conference papers, “dialogue” papers, and on- or off-campus service projects.

This course will take an industrial approach to the study of global film and film history, highlighting box-office hits, fans, stars, workers, and dream factories from multiple (trans)national contexts. Foregrounding questions of labor, technology, circulation, and genre, we will examine popular cinema as an industrial film form with a particular emphasis on melodrama, comedy, and the musical. This seminar is framed by some of film history’s most persistent questions: What is “popular” culture? What is a “mass” medium? Is cinema a universal language? Can art be separated from commerce? Proceeding chronologically from the 1920s through the present, we will first explore “classical Hollywood cinema” as an exportable style and mass reproducible system. Next, we will follow the rise of other “-ollywoods” around the world, contextualizing and comparing several major film industries and their popular cinemas. Ranging from Western Europe to the Soviet Union and the Global South, topics will include the studio lot as dream site, urban film cultures, vernacular modernism, colonial film production and cultural imperialism, cine-workers as global workers, divisions of voice labor in Hollywood vs. Bollywood, the transnational feminization of film handiwork, and the relationship between new film industries and new media from polyglot talkies to Nollywood video-films.

What happened to women in the silent-film industry? How did typewriters invert the gender of writing? Can patriarchal aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” filmmaking? Should dead stars and inventors be revived as feminist icons? How do we excavate invisible women’s histories? This course offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film and media history. Readings will cover a wide range of feminist film and media scholarship, from psychoanalytic feminist film theory to cyberfeminism and feminist media archaeology. The focus will be primarily on European and US film and media, but conference projects may exceed these bounds. In fall, we will study film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. Weekly screenings will highlight a mix of obscure and canonical narrative, experimental, and documentary films from the silent era to the end of the 20th century. In spring, we will zoom out from film to explore the relatively new field of feminist media studies. Starting in the Enlightenment, we will trace an alternative cultural history of modern gendered media, media machines, and media workers, using formative feminist conceptual frameworks to study spindles, novels, “female thermometers,” fictional androids, telegraphic romances, and computers. In place of a weekly screening, students will examine primary sources across multiple media through a mix of reading, viewing, and listening assignments.

Since the Lumière brothers filmed their female employees leaving the factory in 1895, the “working girl” has become a fixture of global cinema. This lecture approaches this archetypal modern character as a foundational figure for film history and an important vernacular link for national film industries competing with Hollywood. We will begin by asking: What is a working girl? How has the category changed over the course of the 20th century as it has circulated around the globe, despite its fraught ideological construction? And how can we turn the category into a tool for intersectional feminist film history? With these questions in mind, we will launch our investigation in the United States and Europe and then move on to the Soviet Union, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Mexico, Senegal, and Cameroon. We will read classic film theory, short fiction, and local histories of film culture and gendered labor alongside films about shopgirls, dancing girls, telephone girls, factory girls, office girls, laundresses, and maids. Topics to be discussed will include working girls as moviegoers, cultural imperialism and vernacular modernism, migration and mass reproduction, sex work, workplace romance, and contradictions of capital and care. In this class, students will conduct comparative, multimedia analyses of film texts and read global film history through the globalization of modern gendered labor. 

This course will explore how French and francophone writers in the postwar era have used literature as a means of writing their identities, memories, and life narratives. We will study how writers made use of both traditional genres of life writing, such as autobiography, diaries, and memoirs, alongside more experimental and hybrid forms of narrative. We will see how authors constructed their identities on the page through the lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, or history. Theoretical readings on memory, trauma, and testimony will allow us to explore the fraught relationship between fact and fiction when writing the self. Topics will include the representation of childhood and the family, women’s autobiography, confessional narratives, witnessing and testimony, intellectual development, language and learning, authenticity and documentation, and the relationship between self and other. Students will read both excerpts from longer texts and several works in their entirety. Authors studied may include Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Hervé Guibert, Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, Annie Ernaux, Patrick Modiano, Nina Bouraoui, Emmanuel Carrère, Marie NDiaye, and Édouard Louis. Several autobiographical films might also be screened to help understand the relationship between memory and media. In conference, students may undertake a critical or creative autobiographical project of their own or study other aspects of modern and contemporary French and francophone literature and culture. Alongside the study of literary texts, we will review some key lessons in French grammar and composition.

“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 will be focused not only on history—what we consciously and unconsciously carry within us—but 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 more effectively and persuasively. Rather than a representative survey of cultural history (which is, in this wonderfully diverse country, impossible), this course will take 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 will ponder sexuality, region, religion, immigration, and migration, among other themes; it will be based on a spine of political history. The expectation is that students will come with some knowledge and will be attentive to what they do not know and will go find out about it! Class will revolve around close readings of stories, cultural criticism, speeches, novels, and memoirs—mostly, but not exclusively, published—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 fall, we will cover the late 18th century to the late 19th century; in spring, we will move from the turn into the 20th century to near its end. Texts will include short stories, poetry, memoirs, letters, and (in spring) film. Fall examples 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 both a reader and a writer. The subject of conference work can range widely within US cultural and political history: in fall, up to 1890; in 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. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences may be weekly or biweekly.

A friend put her arms around Edna Pontellier, feeling her shoulder blades, in Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel, The Awakening. Why? To see if her wings were strong. “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings,” she told Edna. “It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.” In this course, we will read the work of US women writers who soar “above the level plain of tradition and prejudice” and study women artists, workers, and activists of all kinds over two centuries. Historians will help us understand the worlds in which these women lived and, hence, the strength they must have used to offer their voices. We will focus on women both inside and outside the worlds of privilege in which Edna lived. In fall, the focus will include the life of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife; the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, an early African American poet; the cultural criticism of abolitionist activists like Harriet Jacobs and Lydia Maria Child; the essays of early critics of gender convention like Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller; and resistance among women workers and the women who wrote about their “mighty hunger and thwarted dreams.” We will also read Julia Ward Howe’s unfinished mid-century novel, The Hermaphrodite, in which she explores the constraints of the gender binary, and consider the lives and resistance of Native American women. In spring, we will look at the work and life of recent immigrants like Jewish American Anzia Yezierska, Harlem Renaissance writers like Nella Larsen, struggling white Midwestern radicals like Meridel Le Sueur, early environmentalist activists like Josephine Johnson, closeted radical women in lesbian pulps like that of Patricia Highsmith, early Civil Rights activists like Ann Petry, and powerful cultural critics like Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros, among others. We will analyze political cartoons and manifestas from the women’s liberation movement and watch a few notable films directed by women. Taught mainly through primary sources, this course will bracket those novels and stories with scholarship to provide a sense of historical context. Themes will include race, class, ethnicity, immigration and migration, sexuality, and, of course, gender. This is not a classic survey but, rather, readings in the cultural history of the nation framed with political and social history. Assessments will be oral as well as written, with an emphasis on developing analytic and historical arguments. There will be opportunities to explore individuals and groups, based on student interest, through historical research.

World War II led to destruction of such magnitude that the international order shifted fundamentally and new terms had to be coined to describe its violence. This course will examine the events that led to the war, the war itself, and its aftermath. It will begin with a chronological outline of the Great War, the interwar years, and the war itself and then shift to explore key themes such as The Holocaust, military life, women at war, the changing meaning of race and ethnicity, occupation, etc. This course will discuss battles and leaders, but its main focus will be on the impact of the war on culture, politics, and society. Students will be asked to think seriously about how these global events were experienced by what Stalin called “the little screws of history”—i.e., “ordinary people.” This course is really about them. Issues such as total war, genocide, occupation, the terrifying new technologies of the war, and soldier’s life in the different armies will be examined. We will also look at how, after the devastation of the war, people tried to make sense of what had happened. Politicians reacted by creating new laws and institutions, while artists painted, sculpted, and made films and authors turned to the page to understand what they had seen and done.

This introductory queer and feminist studies course will center the intellectual work of theorists within the traditions known as Black feminist theory and queer of color critique. The course will read scholarship by Gloria Anzaldúa, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Barbara Christian, Cathy J. Cohen, the Combahee River Collective, Roderick Ferguson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiya Hartman, E. Johnson Patrick, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, José Esteban Muñoz, Jennifer C. Nash, C. Riley Snorton, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams. The course will also explore documentary films by Marlon Riggs, fiction by Toni Morrison, creative nonfiction and poetry by Claudia Rankine, and the films Moonlight (directed by Barry Jenkins) and The Watermelon Woman (directed by Cheryl Dunye). Conference projects will emerge from archival research at the Sarah Lawrence College Archives. Students will meet every two weeks at the Sarah Lawrence College Library in one of four conference groups organized around overarching topics of concern and debate from the class, including: 1) critical fabulation, 2) institutionality and the academy, 3) violence, resistance, and care, and 4) emotion. Major writing assignments will include four brief “archival dispatches,” where students will report on their research findings to describe their intellectual, political, and emotional investments in the archives. For the course’s final assignment, students will develop an individual project proposal that envisions a future intellectual, activist, or artistic response to the archives.

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 alongside 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. Sources will include histories, sociological and anthropological studies, the writings of political activists, fiction, and film. 

“On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf observed, “human character changed.... All human relations shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” In her novels, essays, reviews, biographies, and polemics, as well as in her diaries, letters, and memoirs, Woolf charted and fostered the cultural and political forces behind those changes as they developed across the century. Over the course of that century, Woolf’s image also changed from that of the “invalid lady of Bloomsbury,” a modern, a madwoman, and, perhaps, a genius to that of a monster, a feminist, a socialist, a lesbian, and an icon. While focusing on the development of her writing, we will also consider her life and its interpretation, her politics and their implications, and the use of her art and image by others as points of reference for new work of their own. Her family, friends, lovers, and critics will all appear. We will also be reading her precursors, her peers, and those who—in fiction, theatre, and film—took up her work and image in the decades after her death. This course will serve as an introduction to 20th-century fiction, feminist literary study, lesbian/gay/queer studies, the study of sexuality, and the study of politics in literature. Conference projects might focus on one other writer, a range of other writers, one of these approaches to literary analysis, or another aspect of feminist or LGBT studies.

The television show Hoarders: Buried Alive...artist Andy Warhol’s junk collection, consisting of receipts, junk mail, and takeout menus...professional organizer Marie Kondo and her minimalist ideals...big-screen televisions, fast fashion, and floating islands of plastic trash contrasted with the promises of decluttering, downsizing, and shrinking homes. From fantastic depictions of people overwhelmed with their accumulation of things to popular self-help books that promise freedom and joy in the form of a clean home, this course will be concerned with the judgments we make about people and their relationship to their stuff. This course will begin to unpack “abject object orientations” by investigating figures like the archivist, the hoarder, the minimalist, and the collector. The course will ask how race, gender, sexuality, and class shape our judgments of people and their relationship to things. By looking to depictions of whom Scott Herring calls “material deviants” across performance art, film, and memoir, we will describe the cultural logics through which speaking of a person’s orientation toward objects becomes a way of making ethical claims about them. For major assignments, students will develop three total live performances, including two archival “show and tells,” and a final autoethnographic performance unpacking students’ own relationship to things. Archival “show and tells” will center an object from trips to the Sarah Lawrence Archives and can be either solo or group performances. Potential field-trip sites may include the Hudson River Museum, local thrift and resale stores, and the Yonkers Public Library Local History Room. No previous performance experience is required.

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury,” Audre Lorde writes. “It is a vital necessity of our existence.” Poetry, Lorde continues, helps to bring about an understanding of what is, as well as to imagine what might be. This understanding of literature as shedding new light on existence and as sketching new possibilities held a profound political importance for the tradition of Black women’s writing. This seminar seeks to study that tradition in the 20th century, from writing on the difficulties of Jim Crow, through mid-century responses to the Cold War and the heyday of Black Feminism, to the responses to neoliberal multiculturalism at the century’s close. We will consider Black women’s prose, poetry, drama, and more by authors such as Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and more. Course work will include short analytic essays and a longer research-based conference project. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

This course will read Romanticism as a precursor to our own era of postmodernism. The starting point will be the French Deconstructionist reading of Friedrich Schlegel and his short-lived journal, Athenaeum (1798-1800). As Maurice Blanchot argues, among the many contradictions “out of which romanticism unfolds—contradictions that contribute to making literature no longer a response but a question,” perhaps most significant is that “romantic art, which concentrates creative truth in the freedom of the subject, also formulates the ambition of a total book, a sort of perpetually growing Bible that will not represent but, rather, replace the real.” We will take Blanchot’s insight as our guide in reading an otherwise disparate collection of texts ranging across Romantic time and space. From Germany, besides Schlegel’s aphorisms, we will read Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816) and The Golden Pot (1814); from Great Britain, Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Byron’s Don Juan (1819), and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); from Poland, Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1814); from Russia, Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (1836) and Eugene Onegin (1833), Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1841), and Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842); and from the United States, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Along the way, we will periodically depart from the 19th century to emphasize the ways that Romanticism underpins what we take to be our own postmodernist thought. As a response to Don Juan, we will read Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia. Together with Frankenstein, we will read Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story; and will end on a ship-faring note, as we juxtapose Moby Dick with Maggie Nelson’s gender- and genre-bending The Argonauts (2015).

Julian of Norwich is the earliest known woman to author a text in English. In 1373, at the age of “thirty and a half,” Julian fell severely ill. On the brink of death, she experienced a series of visions, which she recorded as her “short text” or Shewings. Sometime after her recovery, she chose a life of solitude as an anchorite; and for the next 40 years, Julian contemplated and elaborated on her visionary experiences. The result is her “long text,” A Revelation of Divine Love, which has been called “the most important work of Christian reflection in the English language.’ The journey of this course will begin with Julian’s Shewings and end with her Revelation—her writings serving as a lens to various traditions of medieval mysticism. Along the way, we will encounter the “intellectual” and “erotic” threads of mysticism woven throughout Jewish, Christian, and Islamic spirituality—from the philosophy of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Solomon ibn Gabirol (Avicebron), and Augustine of Hippo to the poetry of Ibn Arabi, Dante, and Jewish mystics. Next, we will examine how monks and mendicants such as Richard of St. Victor, William of St. Thierry, and Bonaventure understood the intersection of human and divine love, how the knowledge of self leads to the knowledge of God. We will then pause at the fraught waystation of mysticism and heresy to examine how Meister Eckhart’s and Marguerite Porete’s teachings of the soul’s total union with God were met with institutional hostility and violence. Finally, we will land once again in medieval England. After surveying Julian’s English contemporaries, we will embark on a sustained close reading of her Revelation of Divine Love—now with preparation to see how she understood the purpose of her visionary experiences: “Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherfore showed he it thee? For love.”

This course will examine representations of pregnancies—both planned and unplanned—in the history of the anglophone novel. From the origins of the English novel in the 18th century through to today, pregnancies signify inheritance, adherence or deviance from gender norms, and metaphorical links between childbirth and birthing a novel. Over the course of the semester, we will consider why this is so. What can fictional pregnancies reveal about the novel as a literary form and about our changing cultural and medical understanding of sex and reproduction? This course will approach the topic of the pregnancy plot from three different perspectives: narratological, historical, and political. In terms of narrative, we will ask how the pregnancy plot emerged as a defining feature of the English novel and how representations of pregnancy have changed over time with changing ideas of gender and sexuality and new reproductive technologies. How does a pregnancy, especially an unwanted pregnancy, drive forward the plot and illuminate character, especially as it relates to gender? What role does the pregnancy plot play in relation to the more widely discussed marriage plot, and how does one narrative strand influence the other? Novels we will consider include works by Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Maggie Nelson. Focusing on works from the 19th through 21st centuries, we will look at historical changes in how people understood and experienced conception, gestation, termination, and labor and delivery. From a political perspective, we will examine contemporary theories of reproductive justice to consider the past from the vantage of our present moment.

Variance, correlation coefficient, regression analysis, statistical significance, and margin of error—these terms and other statistical phrases have been bantered about before and seen interspersed in news reports and research articles. But what do they mean? How are they used? And why are they so important? Serving as an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and reasoning central to the understanding of data, this course will focus on the fundamental methods of statistical analysis used to gain insight into diverse areas of human interest. The use, misuse, and abuse of statistics will be the central focus of the course; and specific topics of exploration will be drawn from experimental design theory, sampling theory, data analysis. and statistical inference. Applications will be considered in current events, business, psychology, politics, medicine, and many other areas of the natural and social sciences. Statistical software will be introduced and used extensively in this course, but no prior experience with spreadsheet technology is assumed. Group conferences, conducted in workshop mode, will serve to reinforce student understanding of the course material. This course is recommended for any student wishing to be a better-informed consumer of data, and strongly recommended for those planning to pursue advanced undergraduate or graduate research in the natural sciences or social sciences. 

This interdisciplinary course will examine queer/trans artistic and activist practices in global digital cultures. We will explore how queerness and transness are performed and constructed in digital media across different cultures and regions. How do queer and trans folx create an alternative space in order to survive and thrive in the hostile world? How do queer and trans DIY cultures shape the critical study of digital media today? Topics will include queer/trans politics of representation, the discourses of visibility and violence, the role of social media in trans and queer activism, and the digital culture’s relationship to trans and queer identity and knowledge production. Through critical analysis and hands-on projects, students will gain a deeper understanding of queer and transgender issues in the global media culture, reimagining their own individual and collective pasts, presents, and future possibilities.

Western philosophy originated in Ancient Greece more than 2,500 years ago, addressing fundamental questions about being and time, about the human condition, and about ethics and politics, science and religion. Despite the universal nature of these questions, for most of these 2,500 years philosophy was practiced (at least publicly) mostly by men. It was not until the 20th century that this convention began to be significantly challenged, both practically (by the fact that more and more women entered the forefront of philosophical work) and theoretically (by questioning the historical contents of this male-dominant tradition). This yearlong course will be a survey of continental philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries that, countering the aforementioned tradition, focuses exclusively on the work of women in philosophy. Among the authors we may read are Sarah Ahmed, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Karen Barad, Talia Bettcher, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Melany Klein, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones, Simone Weil, Sylvia Wynter, and Virginia Woolf. Some of these philosophers are feminist or consider sexual difference as philosophically pertinent, and some are not. One way or another, surveying their thought will be our means for acquiring a comprehensive view of key developments in continental philosophy in the last and present centuries, including phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, structuralism and poststructuralism, feminism, Black feminism, decolonial, and queer theories. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course (readings will not normally exceed 30 pages per week, but philosophical texts can be extraordinarily demanding). Students will be evaluated based on weekly reading assignments, participation in group work and group discussions during class, and timely submission of three short papers each semester, as well as demonstrable investment in conference work throughout the year. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and group conferences that may include academic skill development such as time management and effective communication, as well as research, reading, writing, and editing. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

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 angles of study add something to our understanding of sexual behaviors and meanings. From an intersectional perspective, in this course, we will study sexualities in social contexts across the lifespan, from infancy to old age. Race, ethnicity, gender, and social class, among other identities, impact sexuality both individually and structurally. 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.

How does the setting up of a textile factory in Malaysia connect with life in the United States? Or of ship building in Bangladesh? What was the relationship of mothers to children in 17th-century, upper-class French households? What do we expect of the same relationships today? In the United States? In other societies? Across rural and urban areas? How do contemporary notions of leisure and luxury resemble, or do they, notions of peoples in other times and places regarding wealth and poverty? What is the relation between the local and the global, the individual and society, the self and “other”? How is the self constructed? How do we connect biography and history, fiction and fact, objectivity and subjectivity, the social and the personal? These are some of the questions that sociology and sociologists attempt to think through. In this seminar, we will ask how sociologists, and social thinkers in general, analyze and simultaneously create reality. What questions do we/they ask? How does one explore these questions and arrive at subsequent findings and conclusions? Through a perusal of comparative and historical materials, we will look afresh at things that we take for granted; for example, the family, poverty, identity, travel and tourism, progress, science, and subjectivity. The objective of the seminar will be to enable students to critically read sociological texts and become practitioners in “doing” sociology (something we are always already involved in, albeit often unself-consciously). This last endeavor is both designed to train students in how to undertake research and intended as a key tool in interrogating the relationship of the researcher and the researched, the field studied, and the (sociological) text. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

This introductory course will offer a comprehensive foundation in spoken and written language, focusing on pronunciation, speaking, listening comprehension, reading, and writing. Intended for students with no prior knowledge of Spanish, the course will integrate classroom learning with language-lab exercises to reinforce and supplement material. Through a variety of activities, students will develop the skills necessary to engage in basic conversations, comprehend short texts, and express simple ideas in writing. By the end of the course, students will be able to understand basic spoken phrases, introduce themselves and talk about family and friends, express their needs in everyday situations, and write short personal essays. Additionally, the course will explore the rich diversity of Hispanic cultures through music, films, and poetry, strengthening students’ cultural knowledge and appreciation. Through the study of women poets like Angelamaría Dávila, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Cristina Peri Rossi, as well as urban and punk music movements, students will explore themes of resistance, identity, and cultural change. Group conferences will provide an opportunity to expand upon what we have learned in the classroom and provide a space to address any additional questions or concerns regarding the materials presented thus far. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, weekly individual meetings with a Spanish language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

Hidden in plain sight, conveniently co-opted for political and ideological reasons, or erased from historical and national literary textbooks, Afro-Latin American and Caribbean women have long endured a battle against an imposing silence. As an undeniable trace of their existence and agency, their writings reveal a creative intellect employed to partake in the conversations that their compatriots insisted on having without them. Aware of this dynamic, these women turned to literature to circulate their ideas and, in so doing, granted us a hemispheric conversation that complicates our understanding of women’s epistemology and positionality in Latin America and the Caribbean. This discussion-based seminar will delve into that dialogue. Throughout the semester, we will read and analyze enriching narratives originally written in Spanish by Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Some of these writers will include Salomé Ureña Díaz, Virginia Brindis de Salas, Luz Argentina Chiriboga, María Teresa Ramírez, Mayra Santos-Febres, and Mariángel Gasca Posadas. Through these case studies, students will learn about “artivisim” and come up with adequate creative and scholarly responses. To advance their critical-thinking skills in this target language, students will further hone their communication and comprehension skills through advanced grammar review and weekly conversation sessions in small groups with the language assistant. This seminar will contain an individual conference project.

The growing recognition of Latin American comics as a subject of academic study in the 21st century has further diversified the medium in the region. This course will explore the representation of Indigenous identities and cultural narratives in contemporary Chilean comics, focusing on works published during the 2000s boom. This moment was driven by various factors, such as collaborative projects, the strengthening of distribution circuits, efforts by independent publishers, access to global comic industries, and state funding opportunities. Students will engage with frameworks from comics studies and critical theory to analyze how these graphic sources challenge hegemonic representations and contribute to broader discussions on Indigenous representation, cultural resistance, and transnational dialogues on race and ethnicity. Students will analyze comic genres ranging from historical fiction and fantasy to superheroes and horror. The course will examine how Indigenous cultures are represented within the framework of post-indigenism, as studied through Alemani’s research. Rather than merely recalling pre-Hispanic myths or questioning identity in response to colonial wounds, contemporary Chilean comics position Indigenous narratives within a globalized world through complex sequential narratives and hybrid aesthetics. Among other references, Chajnantor draws on Japanese manga to depict cultural aspects of the high plateau and the Atacama desert, while the Varua saga examines historical milestones and oral traditions to reconstruct Rapa Nui cultural memory. Adventure comics shape Mapuche superhero resistance in Guardianes del Sur, and manga-inspired robots depict a Selk’nam futurist society after settler colonialism in Mecha Selk’nam. The collaborative project Mitoverso creates a universe of superheroes inspired by folk stories, while Los fantasmas del viento articulates the intersection of Indigenous groups and European descendants in the Patagonian region. Throughout this course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop communication skills in Spanish and critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through a semester-long multimedia project that enhances multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research visit to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Society of Illustrators, Brooklyn Independent Comics Showcase, and The Drawing Center. All primary sources, class discussions, and assignments will be in Spanish.

What role does speculation play in subverting the past, rethinking the present, and building different futures within the Americas? The field of speculative fiction uses multiple forms of arts and media to craft fictional imaginaries that have become a vehicle to narrate historical horror by studying Merla-Watson and Olguín and to criticize versions of modernity imposed across the Americas by studying Colanzi. While these speculative imaginaries use the codes of fiction—such as space-time travel, horror, robots, alternative realities, zombies, and genetics—they also expand upon them to address struggles of the Americas’ history of colonialism, dispossession, and mestizaje. In this advanced seminar, we will engage in a cross-cultural trajectory of contemporary speculative fiction in multiple forms, such as literature, comics, film, and performance within the US-Mexico border, the Caribbean, and the Southern Cone. Topics studied may range from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands to her theory on Queer Futurities and from critical race theory to movies such as La Llorona, Juan de los muertos, and Sleep Dealer. This trajectory will also range from mainstream franchises, such as Marvel and Star Wars, to superheroes depiction in El Alto and Tierra del Fuego. We will focus on transdisciplinary works by Rita Indiana and Luis Carlos Barragán and artwork by Marion Matínez, Amalia Ortiz, and Edgar Clement. We will also reflect on Futurisms made by mestizos, Indigenous, and Afro-Caribbeans while assessing the scopes of climate change and environmental crisis within these communities. Throughout this course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop communication skills in Spanish and critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through a semester-long multimedia project that enhances multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research trip to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Center for Fiction, Feria Internacional del Libro de la Ciudad de Nueva York, and Museum of the Moving Image. Sources will be in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, while class discussions and assignments will be conducted entirely in Spanish.

A three-part course, students will first use water-based media in both traditional and nontraditional ways to create evocative paintings on paper with pigments (both art and nonart) suspended in water. Watercolor is one of the oldest pigment-based media and continues to be used widely by artists, illustrators, designers, and architects in finished paintings or as preparatory studies and, thus, will be one focus of the class. This course will introduce some of the effects of layering, transparency, translucency, and absorbency inherent in the watercolor medium. We will use landscape, portraiture, and other subject matter to represent water, light, flesh, atmosphere, and solid earth. In conferences, students will be able to explore a specific theme or content. Students will also learn sustainable painting practices through organically created pigments. The second sequence of this course will use the human form while considering the ways the body has been represented and used in art of the 21st century. Feminist, Black, Indigenous, and artists of color have transformed the way we see and construct the world, as well as how the figure is used in art. Borrowing a conceptual frame, in part, from an exhibition curated by Apsara DiQuinzio at Berkeley Art Museum in 2022, course work prompts will include the following: returning the gaze, the body in pieces, absence and presence, gender alchemy. The course's third emphasis will be on the development and understanding of an artist's practice. Through studying visiting artists, the use of the watercolor blocks, and specific assignments, students will bring their practice out into the world. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

The traditional Western house is subdivided into smaller spaces and rooms through social means. Such rooms embody a situated hierarchy set forth by the notion of the “paterfamilias” and “dominus,” or traditional heads of the family. The division of rooms and their functions reiterate this nuclear-family structure, furthering the separation from the outside world and of everyone within the house. This partitioning of space further defines private and public; and the shelter, protection, and safety that the home provides “is inseparable from the immense economic, technological, and political structures that produce it.” Therefore, the house is also intertwined with the “framework of political organization” in its physicality and its imbued implication of “labor, work, and political action.” This course is titled from an extended essay by Virginia Woolf and a Dogma-presented architectural exhibition and corresponding exhibition catalogue on domestic space. Students will research the house, based on objects, aesthetics, and spatial tensions. These subjects are also connected to the financial aspect of the person or persons within the room and the house. The representation of these aspects will be key, as they bring up cultural norms and styles to counter these norms through design, making, and research. How do we represent the room today within political, economic, and social concerns? How do objects inform, shape, dictate, and influence our understanding of this room? What histories bring us to this point in time, where the room is prescribed to us through modernism? Lastly, how does this room relate to the rest of the house?

A three-part course, students will first use water-based media in both traditional and nontraditional ways to create evocative paintings on paper with pigments (both art and non-art) suspended in water. Watercolor is one of the oldest pigment-based media and continues to be used widely by artists, illustrators, designers, and architects in finished paintings or as preparatory studies and, thus, will be one focus of the class. This course will introduce some of the effects of layering, transparency, translucency, and absorbency inherent in the watercolor medium. We will use landscape, portraiture, and other subject matter to represent water, light, flesh, atmosphere, and solid earth. In conferences, students will be able to explore a specific theme or content. Students will also learn sustainable painting practices through organically-created pigments. The second sequence of this course will use the human form while considering the ways the body has been represented and used in art of the 21st century. Feminist, Black, Indigenous, and artists of color have transformed the way we see and construct the world, as well as how the figure is used in art. Borrowing a conceptual frame in part from an exhibition curated by Apsara DiQuinzio at Berkeley Art Museum in 2022, course work prompts will include the following: returning the gaze, the body in pieces, absence and presence, and gender alchemy. The course’s third emphasis will be on the development and understanding of an artist’s practice. Through studying visiting artists, the use of the watercolor blocks, and specific assignments, students will bring their practice out into the world.

Over the last 50 years, ecofeminist artists have used means such as photography, performance, and community engagement as a way to approach ecological crises, using the body as a site of resistance, kinship, and violence. Methods such as deep listening, endurance performance, slow cinema, foraging and gathering, cartography, and communal urban gardens are just a few of the approaches of ecofeminist artists. These artworks address ecological issues of sustainability, extraction, and marginalization that impress both upon vulnerable bodies and the nonhuman world. Many of these works fall within an economy of care, which we will examine as gendered and racialized work. This course is an art class, with an emphasis on reading and discussion. This course will research and discuss artists whose work combines feminist and ecological themes. We will look, listen, and read seminal works of artists, with a focus on primary sources such as artist and theorist writings, artwork, and interviews—and with a goal in mind to synthesize and respond to this subject in our own works. Each week will introduce a new topic or category of ecofeminist methodology. Each week will include a discussion board and a thematic exercise. The course will culminate in a final project.

Black study has been at the center of considerations surrounding kinship, gender, violence, literacy and language, revolution, property, technology, and alternative forms of thinking about the world for hundreds of years. What might we, as writers—regardless of our differing identities—learn from this tradition about how to articulate the relationships between “I” and “we,” form and freedom, aesthetics and social transformation? Many of our most influential contemporary writers draw from this tradition, from Toni Morrison to Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde to Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others. In this nonfiction writing course, we will learn to think beyond the given by studying the various innovations by Black writers with genres including, but not exclusive to, memoir, journalism, manifesto, hybrid forms, rap music, animation, and new media like digital games. Our focus will be especially strong on the 21st century, as we direct longstanding questions and writing techniques toward the many crises of our own moment. We will write across genres of nonfiction as we work to define them for ourselves, paying careful attention to rhetorical strategies and historical context in our attempts to represent reality. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.