Current Courses

Call Number: 00045

Day, Time & Location: Tu Th 2:40pm-3:55pm at To be announced

Instructor: Marisa Solomon

This course examines the conceptual foundations that support feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students.

Call Number: 00057

Day, Time & Location: Tu 10:10am-11:25am at To be announced

Instructor: 

Enrollment for this class is by instructor approval and an application is required. Please fill out the form here: 

https://forms.gle/bPsV7rcf5RWB35PM9

This introductory course for the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE) as well as Majors/Minors in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) is open to all students. We focus on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, the professor will frequently be joined by other faculty and guest speakers who bring distinct disciplinary and subject matter expertise. Some keywords for this course include hybridity, diaspora, borderlands, migration, and intersectionality.

Call Number: 00158

Day, Time & Location: Th 4:10-6:00 pm at To be announced

Instructor: Marisa Solomon

This course provides a theoretical itinerary to the emergence of contemporary queer theory and engagement with some contemporary legacies of the movement. The goal is not to be exhaustive nor to establish a correct history of queer theory but to engage students in the task of understanding and creating intellectual genealogies.

Call Number: 00744

Day, Time & Location: Tu 12:10pm-2:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: 

Comparative study of gender, race, and sexuality through specific historical, socio-cultural contexts in which these systems of power have operated. With a focus on social contexts of slavery, colonialism, and modern capitalism for the elaboration of sex-gender categories and systems across historical time.

Call Number: 10131

Day, Time & Location: Tu 4:10pm-6:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Elizabeth Povinelli

The Senior Seminar in Women's Studies offers you the opportunity to develop a capstone research paper by the end of the first semester of your senior year. Senior seminar essays take the form of a 25-page paper based on original research and characterized by an interdisciplinary approach to the study of women, sexuality, and/or gender. You must work with an individual advisor who has expertise in the area of your thesis and who can advise you on the specifics of method and content. Your grade for the semester will be determined by the instructor and the advisor. Students receiving a grade of B+ or higher in Senior Seminar I will be invited to register for Senior Seminar II by the Instructor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Senior Seminar II students will complete a senior thesis of 40-60 pages. Please note, the seminar is restricted to Columbia College and GS senior majors.

Call Number: 10045

Day, Time & Location: We 2:10pm-4:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Tara Gonsalves

This course considers formations of gender, sexuality, and power as they circulate transnationally, as well as transnational feminist and queer movements that have emerged to address contemporary gendered and sexual inequalities. Topics include political economy, global care chains, sexuality, sex work and trafficking, feminist and queer politics, and human rights. If it is a small world after all, how do forces of globalization shape and redefine the relationship between gender, sexuality, and powerful institutions like the state? And, if power swirls everywhere, how are transnational power dynamics reinscribed in gendered bodies? How is the body represented in discussions of nationalism and in the political economy of globalization? These questions will frame this course by highlighting how gender, sexuality, and power coalesce to impact the lives of individuals in various spaces including workplaces, the academy, the home, religious institutions, the government, and civil society, and human rights organizations. This course will enable us to think transnationally, historically, and dynamically, using gender and sexuality as lenses through which to critique relations of power and the ways that power informs our everyday lives and subjectivities.

Call Number: 10132

Day, Time & Location: Tu 2:10pm-4:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Julia Bryan-Wilson

Genealogies of Feminism: Course focuses on the development of a particular topic or issue in feminist, queer, and/or WGSS scholarship. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates, though priority will be given to students completing the ISSG graduate certificate. Topics differ by semester offered, and are reflected in the course subtitle. For a description of the current offering, please visit the link in the Class Notes.

Call Number: 00223

Day, Time & Location: We 11:10am-1:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Neferti Tadiar

This advanced seminar examines historical, social, cultural, and theoretical propositions for decolonizing praxis and their complex relations to feminist critique. How do we understand Western European colonialism and coloniality as modes, conditions, and institutions of power, dispossession, subjugation, and subjection continuing into the present? What are the methods, practices, and vision enacted and proposed by the colonized for undoing and radically transforming the determinate logics, instruments, and structures of colonialism as these persist in the present moment? We will consider how gender and sexuality as well as race – as technologies of social organization, codes of valuation, and modes of survival – shape colonialism and the struggles against it. We will inquire into their significance to projects of decolonization. How might decolonization envision and make possible other ways of life?

Call Number:

Day, Time & Location: Th 2:10pm-4:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: C Riley Snorton

Theoretical Paradigms in Feminist Scholarship: Course focuses on the current theoretical debates of a particular topic or issue in feminist, queer, and/or WGSS scholarship. Open to graduate students, with preference given to students completing the ISSG graduate certificate. Topics differ by semester offered, and are reflected in the course subtitle. For a description of the current offering, please visit the link in the Class Notes.

Call Number: 00093

Day, Time & Location: M W 4:10pm-5:25pm at To be announced

Instructor: Anne Higonnet

Human beings create second, social, skins for themselves. Across history and around the world, everyone designs interfaces between their bodies and the world around them. From pre-historic ornaments to global industry, clothing has been a crucial feature of people’s survival, desires, and identity. This course studies theories of clothing from the perspectives of art history, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, design, and sustainability. Issues to be studied include gender roles, craft traditions, global textile trade, royal sumptuary law, the history of European fashion, dissident or disruptive styles, blockbuster museum costume exhibitions, and the environmental consequences of what we wear today. Required 1 hour a week TA led section to be arranged.  

Call Number: 12965

Day, Time & Location: M 2:10pm-4:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Eliza Zingesser

What did it mean to be queer in the francophone Middle Ages? Was there such a thing? The term ‘sodomy’ was used in the period to describe a wide variety of acts (not all sexual), and the term would seem to foreclose the possibility of female same-sex eroticism. In an era in which all non-procreative sex was conceived as sinful, does the opposition between homosexual and heterosexual still hold? Was male and female homosexuality conceived symmetrically? Topics include the construction of gender (binary vs. spectral, natural vs. cultural), gender variance (transgender and nonbinary people), sodomy and the contours of “sex,” and sadomasochism. Our readings will take us through a broad range of genres—from penance manuals to lyric poetry to romance. Texts include selected lais by Marie de France, troubadour songs, Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature, the Roman d’Enéas (a medieval French rewriting of the Aeneid that makes Aeneas gay), Heldris of Cornwall’s Le Roman de Silence and selected saints’ lives. Class taught in English, although some readings may be available only in modern French translation (reading knowledge of French required).

Call Number: 10795

Day, Time & Location: M 2:10pm-4:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Ruth Opara

This course offers a comparative exploration of women music practitioners from cross-cultural perspectives, examining their music, oral histories, and lived experiences as well as the impact of these experiences on their music-making in a global context. By tracing the journeys and analyzing the music of specific selected women musicians from various regions, the course investigates their participation in art music, traditional music, popular music, and sacred music from women’s perspectives. Engaging primarily with their music and interviews, the course particularly examines the comparative roles of women as active creators, performers, sponsors, and consumers of music, highlighting how their lived experiences shape their musical contributions. Students will be introduced to critical concepts for analyzing representations of gender, class, ethnicity, nationalism, race, and globalization in music while exploring these women’s sounds, identities, and performances.

Call Number: 13147

Day, Time & Location: Tu 10:10am-12:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Tey Meadow

Despite the ubiquity of sexual imagery in contemporary Western popular culture, most people regard sexuality to be an intimate topic that concerns the drives, experiences and pleasures of individuals. In this course, we will examine the social and pluralistic character of sexual desires, meanings, practices and politics. We will begin with some of conceptual foundations that ground contemporary sociological studies of sexuality. We will think together about how knowledge about the social sources of sexuality is produced and some of the methodological, epistemological and ethical quandaries faced by researchers--including the ways our own sexualities, desires, inhibitions and identities frame our work. We will then examine some of the key questions in the sociology of sexualities, including the complexity of classifying sexual identities, practices and populations, the relationship between institutional contexts and sexual behavior, and intersections with the sociology of race, gender, risk, health and regulation. In each of these discussions, students will explore the varied methodological approaches to these topics within sociology, as well as some of the disciplinary and cultural challenges to making sexuality a central object of intellectual inquiry.

Call Number: 13297

Day, Time & Location: M 2:10pm-4:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Tara Gonsalves

Since the 1980s, third wave feminists have expanded the feminist project to include perspectives from and attention to women outside the West. In more recent decades, a similar movement has happened among queer and trans theorists. In this course, we will engage this work, much of which has been published in the past decade and a half. We will start with provincializing central concepts of feminist and queer theory: gender and sexuality. Taking an intersectional approach that attends to race, class, nation, and other social divisions, we will read scholars who study gender/sexuality around the world, including in Latin America, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. The readings will draw our attention to the ways in which gender/sexuality are implicated in imperial and post-colonial projects as well as how gender and sexuality operate outside the West, both in practice and identity. Finally, we will consider the possibilities and limitations for studying gender/sexuality beyond our own societies. Critical approaches to gender and sexuality challenge conventional “born this way” narratives about gender and sexual identities as innate. This course will raise questions that will make us uncomfortable and, hopefully, transform our understandings of our own gendered and sexual identities and practices.

Call Number: 13790

Day, Time & Location: Tu Th 2:40pm-3:55pm at To be announced

Instructor: Miguel Angel Blanco Martinez

At the crossroads of social media, social movements, and the arts, the present course offers a comprehensive genealogy of recent cultural interventions embodying the most pressing issues for feminisms in Spain today. For this endeavor, the syllabus is organized around three thematic axes: memory, bodies, and territories. By deploying an open consideration of arts, activism, and their creators, the case-studies here introduced unfold a polyphonic nature in both content and form. In this light, problematics such as ecology, technology, love, violence, healthcare, labor, or collective trauma will be navigated through the genres of performance, essay, poetry, graphic novel, photography, documentary, music, or the videoclip. These will shape the singularities of the later socio-political cycle in the country, distinguished by the internationalist expansion of feminisms; an interconnected and intersectional approach to social justice; the emergence of a globalized and domestic far-right; and the shifting of the institutional left. Such a background will nurture a series of feminist interventions claiming radical imaginaries in the favor of the 99%.