Current Courses

Call Number: 00591

Day, Time, Location: Tu Th 10:10am - 11:25am, Location TBD

Instructor: Alexander Pittman

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: 00592

Day, Time, Location: Tu Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Marisa Solomon

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: 00594

Day, Time, Location: Mo 12:10pm - 2:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Casidy Campbell

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: 00896

Day, Time, Location: Mo 2:10pm - 4:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Sandra Moyano-Ariza

Love and sex have long been studied as historical constructs influenced by social, political, and economic dimensions. This course aims to expand this discourse by incorporating the often-overlooked lens of technological mediation. Beginning with the premise that romantic love is deeply shaped by the affordances of the technology of the time, a critical awareness of technological mediation in romance –especially of digital technologies, i.e. online dating, social media, or cybersex— allows for a deeper understanding of how social categories such as gender, race, class, ability, or sexuality are technologically-mediated, thereby informing our societal and cultural perceptions of love, dating, and sex. 

Sandra Moyano-Ariza is Term Assistant Professor of WGSS and Research Director at BCRW. Her research works at the intersection of pop culture, philosophy, and digital technologies, with interests in the fields of media studies and digital scholarship, contemporary feminist theory, critical race theory, posthumanism, and affect theory.

Call Number: 00595

Day, Time, Location: We 4:10pm - 6:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Lisa Duggan

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: 00596

Day, Time, Location: Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Neferti Tadiar

Historical, comparative study of the cultural effects and social experiences of U.S. imperialism, with attention to race, gender and sexuality in practices of domination and struggle.

Call Number: 10338

Day, Time, Location: Mo 4:10pm-6:00pm, 754 Schermerhorn Hall Extension

Instructor: Lila Abu-Lughod

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: 10879

Day, Time, Location: Fr 2:10pm - 4:00pm, 754 Schermerhorn Hall Extension

Instructor: Janet Jakobsen

Who is food for? The simple answer is that food is for everyone, yet a close look at the stories we tell reveals that, actually, food is not for everyone. In our novels, nonfiction, films and even in our manifestoes, some people eat and some provide food; some appetites must be unleashed and others, regulated and controlled; and some people—some people are food. Instead of a benign arena for the imagination and enactment of universal rights, food thus exposes “universal” “human” and “rights” as crucial and deeply contested terrains of raced and gendered power. This economy of exchange, of consumption and deprivation, of the satiation of some bodies through devourment of others, of the invisibility of some hungers and the criminalization of some appetites, are all aspects of our founding narrative. These relations define the past and have also come to define our time. In this seminar, will explore the ways that we imagine food and narrate acts of feeding and eating as a means of examining both the historical enactments and contemporary mechanisms of power.

Call Number: 00897

Day, Time, Location: Tu 12:10pm - 2:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Manijeh Moradian

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: 10349

Day, Time, Location: Tu 4:10pm-6:00pm, 754 Schermerhorn Hall Extension

Instructor: Julia Bryan-Wilson

Artists, Workers, and Witches: Reading within and around feminist critiques of the gendering of labor, this seminar looks at how artists, workers, and witches are celebrated—and reviled—for their ability to shape matter, generate value, and potentially re-direct power. We will examine historical and recent texts around the entanglements between gendered creative production, non-normative sexualities, and racialized persecution. We will consider influences and points of intersection/disjunction amongst Black feminist theorizations, Italian Marxisms, Latin American activisms, and Indigenous perspectives as we untangle knotted genealogies around issues such as transformation, animism, handicraft, enchantment, reproduction, alternative forms of knowing, queer and trans self-making, peasant/folk wisdom, outlawed healing traditions, criminalized spiritualities, women’s autonomy, and revolutionary cultural labor. Three “spirits of the forest” in particular will guide our inquiries: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia Federici, and Sylvia Wynter. We will take seriously strikes, hexes, and poetry as strategies for collective liberation in the face of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. 

Call Number: 00599

Day, Time, Location: Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Marisa Solomon

Far from obvious renderings of place, maps are spatial arguments about who belongs where and how living should be defined. This course approaches place as something that is contested daily in the U.S. through the struggle of who gets to lay claim to a way of life. From the landscapes of dispossession to the alternative ways marginalized people work with and against traditional geographies, this course centers Black place-making practices as political struggle. This class will look at how power and domination become a landed project. We will critically examine how ideas about “nature” are bound up with notions of race, and the way “race” naturalizes the proper place for humans and non-human others. We will interrogate settler colonialism’s relationships to mapping who is and isn’t human, the transatlantic slave trade as a project of terraforming environments for capital, and land use as a science for determining who “owns” the earth. Centered on Black feminist, queer and trans thinkers, we will encounter space not as a something given by maps, but as a struggle over definitions of the human, geography, sovereignty, and alternative worlds. To this end, we will read from a variety of disciplines, such as Critical Black Studies, Feminist and Intersectional Science Studies, Black Geographies and Ecologies, Urban Studies and Afrofuturist literature. (Note for Barnard students: this class will count as an elective for the CCIS minors/concentrations in F/ISTS, ICORE/MORE, and Environmental Humanities.)

Call Number: 00895

Day, Time, Location: We 11:10am - 1:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Neferti Tadiar

This advanced seminar examines important approaches, issues, perspectives, and themes related to planetary concerns of environmental crisis, climate change, life sustainability, and multi-species flourishing, with a focus on feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist, and queer perspectives. Topics for discussion and study include the global pandemic, histories of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, Prereqs: BOTH 1 WMST Intro course PLUS any WGSS 'Foundation' course, OR instructor permission.

Call Number: 00600

Day, Time, Location: Tu 6:10pm - 8:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Rebecca Jordan-Young

At once material and symbolic, our bodies exist at the intersection of multiple competing discourses, including the juridical, the techno-scientific, and the biopolitical. In this course, we will draw upon a variety of critical interdisciplinary literatures—including feminist and queer studies, science and technology studies, and disability studies—to consider some of the ways in which the body is constituted by such discourses, and itself serves as the substratum for social relations. Among the key questions we will consider are the following: What is natural about the body? How are distinctions made between presumptively normal and pathological bodies, and between psychic and somatic experiences?  How do historical and political-economic forces shape the perception and meaning of bodily difference? And most crucially: how do bodies that are multiply constituted by competing logics of gender, race, nation, and ability offer up resistance to these and other categorizations?

Call Number: 10337

Day, Time, Location: Tu 12:10pm - 2:00pm, 754 Schermerhorn Hall Extension

Instructor: C Riley Snorton

This is a course oriented to graduate students who are thinking about issues in teaching in the near and distant future and want to explore forms of pedagogy. The course will ask what it means to teach “as a feminist” and will explore how to create a classroom receptive to feminist and queer methodologies and theories regardless of course theme/content. Topics include: participatory pedagogy, the role of political engagement, the gender dynamics of the classroom, modes of critical thought and disagreement. Discussions will be oriented around student interest. The course will meet 4-5 times per SEMESTER (dates TBD) and the final assignment is to develop and workshop a syllabus for a new gender/sexuality course in your field. Because this course is required for graduate students choosing to fulfill Option 2 for the Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies at IRWGS, priority will be given to graduate students completing the certificate.

Call Number: 14187

Day, Time, Location: Tu 2:10pm - 4:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Patricia Dailey and C. Riley Snorton

The work of Sylvia Wynter presents readers with a multi-disciplinary corpus, spanning plays, critical essays, interviews, a novel, poetry, and dance. In addition to her overarching critique of the idea of “Man”, Wynter’s work invites us to rethink disciplinarity, genre, and how critical practice is defined. If we take seriously the creative component of Wynter’s work, the generative capacity and urgency of poesis, how then might we envision the contours and stakes of a “literary method” in the context of her work?  By what means might we read her work, the kind of knowledge it produces by means of the literary, and the alternatives it offers us for thinking through the question of literary method? What, in short, does reading literature do? Does it reproduce complicity with or challenge the kinds of structures Wynter critiques?

Beginning with her essay “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’” this seminar takes seriously the question of normative forces at work under the rubric of aesthetics to better understand elements at work (poetics, performatives, epistemologies, concepts) and the philosophic, anthropo-centric, ecologic, and racialized topographies that appear. The seminar is divided into three parts: the aesthetic, the performative, and the poetic.

Above all, this course aims to generate readings of Wynter’s work and its complex attentions to multiple threads and tensions that constitute and animate modern knowledge.

Call Number: 10431

Day, Time, Location: Tu 10:10am - 12:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Claudia Breger

This introduction to German film since 1945 (in its European contexts) deploys a focus on feelings as a lens for multifaceted, intersectional investigations of cinematic history. We will explore how feelings have been gendered and racialized; how they overlap with matters of sex (as closely associated with political revolt in Western Europe, while considered too private for public articulation in the socialist East, especially when queer); and how they foreground matters of nation and trauma (for example via the notions of German ‘coldness’ and inability to mourn the Holocaust). Simultaneously, the focus on feelings highlights questions of mediality (cinema as a prototypically affective medium?), genre and avant-garde aesthetics: in many films, ‘high-affect’ Hollywood cinema intriguingly meets ‘cold’ cinematic modernism. In pursuing these investigative vectors through theoretical readings and close film analysis, the course connects affect, gender, queer, and cultural studies approaches with cinema studies methodologies. The films to be discussed span postwar and New German Cinema, East German DEFA productions, the ‘Berlin School’ of the 2000s, and contemporary transnational cinema.

Call Number: 00520

Day, Time, Location: Mo We 2:40pm - 3:55pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Tanvi Kapoor

This course examines gender and sexuality as an important lens for understanding the social and political processes of empire, anti-colonialism, and contemporary neoliberalism. By so doing, the course relates the perspectives of historians of gender—who have highlighted the importance of issues such as domesticity, female enfranchisement, religion and secularism, violence, economic injustice—with a study of the gendered controversies of the present.

Students will explore the relationship between ideological and material structures of power, as these have produced categories of distinction, e.g., race, caste, class, religion, and sexuality in global contexts with specific focus on interactions between empire, anti-colonialism, and today’s neoliberal regimes. That is, the course relates broad socio-political shifts as these have affected, and been affected by the politics of gender and intimacy.

Call Number: 11036

Day, Time, Location: Tu Th 8:40am - 9:55am, Location TBD

Instructor: Rhiannon Stephens

This course examines the history of gender, sexuality, and ways of identifying along these lines in Africa from early times through the twentieth century. It asks how gender and sexuality have shaped key historical developments, from African kingdoms and empires to postcolonial states, from colonial conquest to movements for independence, from indigenous healing practices to biomedicine, from slavery to the modern forms of work. It will also explore the history of different sexualities and gender identities on the continent. A key objective is to extend the historical study of gender and sexual identity in Africa beyond ‘women’s history’ to understand gender as encompassing all people in society and their relationships, whether domestic or public.

Call Number: 11003

Day, Time, Location: We 4:10pm - 6:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Mana Kia

What is the relationship between homoeroticism and homosociality? How does this relationship form conceptions of gender and sexuality in ways that might be historically unfamiliar and culturally or regionally specific? We pursue these questions through the lens of friendship and its relationship to ideas and expressions of desire, love, and loyalty in pre-modern times. We begin by considering the intellectual basis of the modern idea of friendship as a private, personal relationship, and trace it back to earlier times when it was often a public relationship of social and political significance. Some of these relationships were between social equals, while many were unequal forms (like patronage) that could bridge social, political or parochial differences.

Thinking through the relationships and possible distinctions between erotic love, romantic love and amity (love between friends), we will draw on scholarly works from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, particularly philosophy, sociology, political theory, literature, history, and art history. We will attend to friendship’s work in constituting, maintaining and challenging various social and political orders in a variety of Asian contexts (West, Central, South and East Asian), with comparative reference to scholarship on European and East Asian contexts. Primary source materials will include philosophy, religious manuals, autobiographies, popular love stories, heroic epics, mystical poetry, mirror for princes, paintings, material objects of exchange, and architectural monuments, largely from Islamic and Asian contexts.

Call Number: 00524

Day, Time, Location: Mo We 4:10pm - 5:25pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Ding

Is there an essential difference between women and men? How do questions about race conflict or overlap with those about gender? Is there a normal way of being queer? Introduction to philosophy and feminism through a critical discussion of these and other questions using historical and contemporary texts, art, and public lectures. Focus includes essentialism, difference, identity, knowledge, objectivity, and queerness.

Call Number: 12191

Day, Time, Location: Tu Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm, Location TBD

Instructor: João Nemi Neto

This course explores queer representations in Brazilian cinema, music, television, visual arts, and literature, situating them within broader historical, cultural, and political contexts. It examines the development of LGBTQIA+ identities and movements in Brazil, from early forms of visibility and resistance to contemporary debates around rights, recognition, and inclusion. Particular attention is given to the intersections of sexuality with race, gender, class, and regional identities, as well as to the role of cultural production in shaping and contesting dominant narratives. The course also engages critically with questions of terminology, language use, and translation, highlighting how concepts related to sexuality and identity are constructed, negotiated, and sometimes contested in Brazilian contexts.

Note: This course is taught in Portuguese

Call Number: 11079

Day, Time, Location: Tu 10:10am - 12:00pm, Location TBD

Instructor: Tey Meadow

This course surveys the relationship between sociology as a discipline and the body of thought, action and critique that coheres under the term queer theory. Many people understand these two projects to be constitutionally at odds. Sociology as a discipline concerns itself with the empirical study of, as Norbert Elias wrote, “the problem of human societies.” How we do this is distinct. Sociologists have a defined set of technical skills that make use of social categories and classifications. We organize individuals by behavior and identity, document diverse cultural milieus, and even attempt to quantify the demographic details of sexual identities, practices and communities. Queer theory, on the other hand, emerged as a field of academic thought in the early 1990’s, at the apex of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The urgency of the political moment demanded new analytical tools for thinking about gender, sexuality, medicine and bodies. Queer theorists took to task the restrictive categories of gender and sexual life that relegated gay men and lesbians to sociological studies of “deviant” people and practices, in favor of rich and pointed critiques of the organization of culture, institutions and politics that renders some people and practices deviant in the first place. Queer theorists document their suspicion of methods, of categories, and of knowledge practices themselves. Social science is often the target of such critiques.

So, is there actually a way to do something we might call queer sociology? Or is it, fundamentally, an oxymoron? As what we think of as data becomes “bigger” and ever more categorically precise, what use has sociology for queer theory? How can a body of thought that operates from an anti-categorical impulse inform empirical work that seeks, at least in some part, to identify and observe particular types of people and particular forms of social life? In this course, we will read a set of foundational texts in the queer theoretical tradition alongside sociology that makes use of queer phenomena, frameworks and world-making projects. Expect to cover topics like ephemera, ghosts, messy affect, political lesbianism, perversion and a variety of other things you don’t typically see on a sociology syllabus. Each week, we will survey a select set of orienting ideas from queer theory–the heterosexual matrix, heteronormativity, antidisciplinarity, and homonormativity–and examine the ways in which sociologists of sexuality aim to empiricize them. Each week’s readings will include a theoretical piece that outlines a perspective on culture, and a piece of social science that makes use of that same idea. We will learn the concepts that structure queer thought, along with the techniques that structure social science, in an effort to understand the differing ways people observe the world, understand it, and write about it. We will read these with an eye towards making connections between these odd bedfellows, and forging an approach to “queer methods” that will inform students’ own sociological imaginations.