Course Descriptions

This course offers an overview of whiteness studies in the United States, a subfield within critical race theory, focusing on concepts of consciousness, in/visibility, disavowal, and resentment drawing on texts from history, literature, sociology, philosophy, and political science. We’ll be examining how whiteness functions at the intersection identities including gender, race, sexuality, class, body ability, nationality, and age.

This is an advanced course in queer theory. Queer theory is a reflection on sexuality; its deep mutual structuring relation to gender; its interrelation with other vectors of identity such as race, class, and nation; and its production through cultural, historical processes and aesthetic, moral, and political practices. We will take sexuality as a historical and therefore transformable object, not as a natural phenomenon- -and we will ask as much about heterosexuality as we do about LGBT and queer sexualities.

Following the radical transformations to American sexual cultures and American politics during the 1960s and 1970s, fierce debates sprang up about the role of sexuality and the role of pornography in society. Questions about how porn should be regulated, whether it was harmful to women, and whether it was a manifestation of “liberated” sexuality permeated both the political right and the left.

Through feminist, sociological, and human geographical analyses, this course takes an interrogative tour through locations that have historically played vital roles in the development of the LGBTQ+ community. We will consider how these queer and trans spaces have made room for nonconforming identities to be constructed in relation to discourses of power and acts of resistance. Just as critically, we will also examine the equally vital role social space has in the maintaining, protecting, and broadcasting of these transformative and transgressive spatialities across Western culture into our current moment of late capitalism.

In this course, we will study a selection of literary and cinematic works to interrogate how 20th Latin American cultural production challenged normative conceptions of gender and sexuality. We will explore the continuities and innovations of some of the most important queer literary and cinematic works as responding to historical modes, both local and global, of institutional control over bodies and desires. Some questions we will address are: Can we speak of “queer” literature and film in Latin America? What are the ideological and political problems to which these works respond? What can these works tell us about the current politics of gender and sexuality in Latin America? How do Latin American queer artists negotiate their position vis-a-vis hegemonic discourses on sex and gender? Particular attention will be paid to how these works deal with notions of intimacy, identity, sexual liberation, performativity, community, futurity, globalization, and territory.

This class brings critical perspectives to heterosexuality, to unpack what it is and how it "works", from problems to pleasures, covering its history, practices, identities, and politics, using feminist, queer, critical race, and transnational theories. We will interrogate gender and heterosexuality, heterosexuality development, heterosexual identities, marriage and non-monogamy, casual sex, kink, porn, social media, and dating apps. Along with the readings and discussion, we will use web-based materials (i.e., websites; social media; Google/images, YouTube), films and activities.

In this class we will examine the links between science, technology, race and gender through the lens of society, politics, and culture. Topics will include the history of eugenics, assisted reproductive technologies, digital divide, and more.

This class will look at how U.S. immigration laws and policies are an extension of the U.S. government’s founding national security priorities rooted in genocide and slavery, and the civil and human rights issues that arise under the great discretion to monitor the private lives of immigrants based on their race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability status, socioeconomic class, and national origin.

This course examines the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911 from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives in the context of early Twenty-Century social & labor history, and through the theoretical lens of intersectionality (of gender, class, and race). Students will investigate the extent to which the memory and the significance of the fire have reverberated nationally and internationally in culture for over a century through theatre, performance, poetry, interviews, family memoirs, and lyrics; as well as in documentaries, art exhibits, archives, and other cultural products, including the annual commemoration of the fire in New York City. In the process, we will consider labor art as a means to raise consciousness about workers' struggles.

As part of the course requirements and final project, students will work individually OR in groups of two and engage in art-based activism to create posters and other cultural products that illuminate labor/immigrant issues involving labor, gender, class, and race (for instance, the outsourcing of production abroad, the existence of contemporary garment sweatshops, or recent practices against immigrants). NO formal art training is necessary to register.

This course engages literary and cultural production using Black Feminist poetic & aesthetic lenses. Students will examine a cross-genre selection of texts (theory, fine art, poetry & hip-hop) across artistic, cultural, and literary movements; further, students will emphasize and situate the historical and cultural contexts that create and make meaning of Black Feminist experience(s) and voice(s) as reflected in African Diasporic art, music, and poetry.