2024-2025 Catalog

GNSE 20001. Theories of Sexuality and Gender. 100 Units.

This is a one-quarter, seminar-style course for undergraduates. Its aim is triple: to engage scenes and concepts central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality; to provide familiarity with key theoretical anchors for that study; and to provide skills for deriving the theoretical bases of any kind of method. Students will produce descriptive, argumentative, and experimental engagements with theory and its scenes as the quarter progresses.

Instructor(s): Red Tremmel     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Prior course experience in gender/sexuality studies (by way of the general education civilization studies courses or other course work) is strongly advised. Instructor Consent required.
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20290, CHDV 20001

GNSE 10428. Medieval Desire. 100 Units.

In medieval literature, various modes of desire intersect in surprising ways: spiritual devotion unfolds through sensual longing, and personal pleasure intertwines with sacrificial love, producing structures of desire that are conflicting, disorienting, and not so dissimilar from our own. In this course, we will survey a range of late medieval genres to unpack the richly imaginative and experimental discourses of desire housed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. Readings will include dream-vision poems like Pearl, where we will consider the overlaying of economic, domestic, and apocalyptic fantasies; to the hagiographical Book of Margery Kempe, where we will think through the entanglement of gender, embodied spirituality, and erotic encounter. We will interrogate how medieval texts trouble modernity's construction of "sacred" and "secular" desire as constitutive opposites, coming up with our own terms to better describe the interplay between these categories. How do medieval texts blend seemingly different modes of desire-holy and profane, specific and ambiguous, linear and asynchronic-to construct, obscure, and defamiliarize their objects of desire? What claims to selfhood, language, and knowledge are made by these hybrid models of desire and the multiple meanings they allow? Familiarity with medieval literature or Middle English is neither required nor expected. (Poetry, Pre-1650)

Instructor(s): Kashaf Qureshi     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MDVL 10428, ENGL 10428

GNSE 12116. The "Bad Moms" Renaissance. 100 Units.

From the murderous matriarch to the overbearing stepmother, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary representations of mothers reveal the anxieties, fantasies, and social ideals of reproduction, family, and gender in the period. This course argues that what makes a mom "bad" in these texts is bound up in the racial, gendered, and sexual imagination of early modern England. We will read a broad range of early modern texts from epic poetry to prose fiction, from midwifery manuals to the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In doing so, we will confront past (and present) understandings of motherhood, care, femininity, and family structures. (Pre-1650, Drama)

Instructor(s): Sarah-Gray Lesley     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 10103

GNSE 12121. Contemporary Feminist Politics: From the Sex Wars to Beyonce. 100 Units.

This course offers a survey of feminist politics and texts on feminist action from the 1980s to now. We look to texts and media from feminist scholars, activists, and scholar-activists in order to tackle questions of what feminism is and should be in theory and practice. This course will focus on key contentions and debates amongst feminists on questions of politics and culture, demonstrating that disagreement is characteristic and generative for feminist politics. With this in mind, we will cover topics such as the Sex Wars, the rise of Third Wave Feminism, #MeToo, and Beyonce in order to trace the contours of disagreement in our feminist present. Readings include works from bell hooks, Susan Faludi, Roxane Gay, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Butler. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

Instructor(s): Rhiannon Love Auriemma     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): PLSC 12121

GNSE 12123. Global Perspectives on Reproductive Justice Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

The US Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization has sharpened our awareness of the perils that besiege our reproductive futures. This course offers a deep dive into comparative reproductive justice theory and practice rooted both in unique cultural particularities and in globally resonant issues and challenges. While exposing students to the foundational texts shaping the reproductive justice movement, the course shall engage critically with the possibilities and limitations of a rights based framework and the challenges and liberatory potential of a justice based approach to reproductive decision-making. Drawing from literature and media from across the world, the course shall provide global perspectives on issues as varied as contraception, assisted reproductive technology, mass sterilization, and family leave, along with scholarship and resources from the US. While engaging critically with theory, the course shall also provide practitioners' perspectives through guest lectures by ethnographers, lawyers, and healthcare professionals working in the field. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

Instructor(s): Malavika Parthasarathy     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 22123, HLTH 22123, HMRT 12123

GNSE 12124. Queering God. 100 Units.

Can God be an ally in queer worldmaking? Is God queer? What does queerness have to do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam? This course introduces students to foundational concepts in queer and trans studies by focusing on queer Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies. We will analyze the ways that contemporary artists, activists, and scholars are using theology to reimagine gender and experiment with new relational forms. Our readings will include a variety of genres: memoir, letters, scriptural interpretation, and a novel. There will be no presumption of previous acquaintance with any of the readings or topics discussed, or indeed with any academic theology or queer theory at all.

Instructor(s): Olivia Bustion     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 26105, CMLT 26105

GNSE 12125. Living Queer: Experiences, Encounter, Affinities. 100 Units.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore representations and expressions of queer and trans lives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Assembling a diverse archive of artistic works and cultural artifacts (fiction, memoir, film, lyric poetry, anthology, activist ephemera) together with foundational works in the study of sexuality and gender, we will ask: How do hegemonic institutions, discourses, and definitions - from medical models of pathology to hostile bureaucratic infrastructure - shape the expressive forms available to queer and trans people? And how does the literary, artistic, and activist work of queer and trans people work in turn to reshape those very expressive possibilities? How can individual experiences of isolation and marginalization form the basis of a community or subculture? How are erotic creativity, imaginative life, and political action linked? Our readings will introduce a range of critical and creative methods - such as oral history, ethnography, autobiography, performance - that scholars and artists have used to theorize and represent queer life. Through short "micro-assignments," we will try out these methods for ourselves. By interweaving the creative work of queer and trans people and communities with practical experiments in research and making, we will aim to broaden our collective understanding of what it might mean to "live queer." (Previous experience in gender and sexuality studies is not required for this course.)

Instructor(s): Sarah McDaniel     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 12125

GNSE 12127. Indigenous Feminisms of Latin America. 100 Units.

This course examines how early modern visual and textual sources partook in the formation of gender and race differences in the Americas. We will explore colonial documents drawing on the work of contemporary Indigenous Feminist thinkers, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorena Cabnal, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Yásnaya Aguilar, among others. Reading the colonial archive while thinking about contemporary Indigenous perspectives can help us bridge the past to the present and discuss issues concerning the underrepresentation of Indigenous women in the archive, language politics, communal identities, and Indigenous epistemologies while being particularly attentive to the rhetorical strategies deployed by colonial texts. Along the way, we will have in perspective how contemporary indigenous women resist, negotiate, and denounce the state, corporate, and patriarchal establishments. In this course, students will engage with primary sources of the colonial period in Latin America as they engage in debates surrounding gender and race in our present moment. Understanding these debates and the history surrounding them is crucial to participating in informed discussion, research, and activism regarding issues of colonialism, race, and gender discrimination of today. Students will participate in class discussions, write weekly responses, lead, and moderate academic-style presentations, and produce a final research paper.

Instructor(s): Andrea Reed-Leal     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Taught in Spanish.
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 23325, SPAN 23325, RDIN 23325

GNSE 12128. (In)Visible Women from Dante to Elena Ferrante: Bodies, Power, Identity. 100 Units.

In this course, we approach the two most studied phases of Italian history, the Renaissance and the Twentieth century, by placing gender, sexuality, and otherness at the center of the picture rather than at its margins. Readings are mostly from works of literature, including Dante's and Michelangelo's poems, Machiavelli's plays, and Elena Ferrante's most famous novel, but also critical texts by Freud, Barthes, and Butler. We will examine how literature and art reflect and challenge ideas about gender roles, bodily ideals and sexualization, misogyny, marriage, and polyamory. Additionally, we will explore portrayals of religious, ethno-geographic, and gender "Others" in texts by Jewish writer Sarra Copia Sulam, and highlight the pioneering contributions of women to science, focusing on Caterina Sforza, Isabella Cortese, and Margherita Sarrocchi, who advanced experimental practices in medicine, alchemy, and cosmetics. Through class discussions and assignments, we'll examine themes in both women- and male-authored texts and adopt an interdisciplinary and transmedia approach to cultural tradition. Topics will intersect with the events and social upheavals of two of the most remarkable periods of Italian history, drawing from texts, visual art, and material culture. Taught in English. Students seeking credit for the Italian major/minor can complete part of the work (readings and writing) in Italian. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

Instructor(s): Beatrice Fazio     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 23325

GNSE 12129. Production and Reproduction: Women in Modern China, Japan, and Korea. 100 Units.

The course introduces both women's history and theories concerning production and reproduction in modern China, Japan, and Korea. By bringing both production and reproduction into the discussion, the course extends the definition of "work" from workplaces to households, from formal work settings to informalities. We will read and analyze women's economic engagements in different contexts and localities (e.g. factories, households, political mobilizations, global trade, and sex work) together with scholarships from socio-economic historians, anthropologists, and feminist scholars. Historians have provided a broad chronological framework and empirical studies, such as the birth of feminist movements in twentieth-century East Asia, the pattern of gendered and highly specialized economic development, and women's work as handicraft makers, factory employers, and sex workers. Anthropologists have established such analytical categories as "skill," "practical knowledge," and "gynotechnics" that were largely overlooked when discussing women's work. Recent Marxist feminist scholars have extended Marxist examination of value to female labor, and contributed to our understanding of social reproduction by theorizing capitalism and its supporting system. With different concepts and frameworks, students are encouraged to reassess the complex meanings of differences outside of contemporary Western feminist theories.

Instructor(s): Yuanxie Shi     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 14750, HIST 14602

GNSE 12130. Is Religion Bad for Women? 100 Units.

Some scholars working in the study of gender and sexuality view religion as the conservative enemy of progress, irreconcilably antagonistic to the flourishing of any non-normative gender or sexuality. At the same time, some religious practitioners view feminism as a Western or liberal invention, an imposition that attempts to manage the lives of religious subjects. Still others find feminism and religious commitment mutually reinforcing, and have developed feminist, womanist, and queer rituals and theologies. This course examines contemporary texts, ethnographies, memoirs, and films that grapple with these tensions. In so doing, the course also helps students develop familiarity with foundational categories both in religious studies and in the study of gender and sexuality. Further questions to be explored include: Does religion facilitate or oppose the flourishing of women, queers, and people of color? Is religion a guardian of tradition that resists politically progressive aims, or do religions offer resources for interrogating secular liberalism? The course primarily considers Islamic, Christian, and Jewish traditions. Prior coursework in religious studies or gender and sexuality studies is helpful but not necessary.

Instructor(s): Hannah Jones     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 24002, GLST 24002, RDIN 25002

GNSE 12131. The Gay Men's Novel. 100 Units.

This course focuses on the history, concerns, aesthetics, movements, and culture of the gay men's novel, without the boundaries of time period, nation, or original language. The goal for students is to think in-depth about the relationship between sexual identity and narrative form, to learn about gay men's literary lineages and movements, and to think through queer theoretical concepts through fiction authored by gay men.

Instructor(s): Gabriel Ojeda-Sague     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 12131

GNSE 12132. Gender, Sexuality, and Medicine. 100 Units.

How do gender and sexuality shape experiences of medicine? How does medicine shape experiences of gender and sexuality? This course critically examines gender, sexuality, and medicine as intertwined entities whose intersections teach us much about identities, institutions, and inequalities both historical and contemporary. Doubling as an introduction to medical sociology, this course considers medicine as an institution that produces knowledge, regulates bodies, shapes identities, and distributes access to health resources in ways that are uneven across, and significant for, categories of gender, sexuality, and other forms of social difference. We analyze these functions of medicine through some of its most prominent intersections with gender and sexuality in the United States, including the medicalization of homosexuality and gender variance, the medical regulation of reproduction from forced sterilizations to the rise of hospital births, the feminist health movement, intersex and gender-affirming medical practices, and the role of gender and sexual difference in medical research. Course materials consist primarily of ethnographic and popular sources. A major focus of the course is connecting personal experiences and popular sources to scholarly perspectives.

Instructor(s): T. Hurley     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20611, HLTH 22132, HMRT 28725

GNSE 12133. Consent in American Life. 100 Units.

Consent brims with possibility. It is an ethic, a legal principle, a physical act, and a measuring stick of social capacity and interaction. It can express enthusiasm or ambivalence or a range of other conflicting emotions, and enable human flourishing or suffering. This course explores the history of consent in the United States across these vast terrains, and seeks to understand how gendered and sexual bodies have served as the anchor for consent despite its many meanings, ambiguities, and contradictions. We will examine debates over consent-and consenting or non-consenting bodies­-in various realms of life: sex, marriage, labor, medicine, consumption, visual culture, and the social sciences, among others. We will consider how and why consent differs from its conceptual cousins, such as choice or free will, and discuss the historical, ethical, and political challenges of studying and writing about consent.

Instructor(s): Evelyn Kessler     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 18503, HLTH 22133

GNSE 12134. Geographies of Race and Gender in Medieval and Early Modern Italy. 100 Units.

This interdisciplinary course takes you on an engaging journey through literary masterpieces, historical texts, maps, and artistic representations (13th-17th century). Students will explore how early modern ideas on race and gender were constructed, challenged, and redefined by literary texts and other mediums, and within various spatial contexts-encompassing real and imagined geographies, Mediterranean and Atlantic trade routes, and urban social spaces. We will read poetry, essays, travelogues, and analyze the context within which a given literary work is entangled. Drawing on theories from cultural, gender, and critical race studies, this course reveals how early modern texts, art, intellectual debates, and politics shaped notions on gender, cultural identity, and racial categories, and why these ideas intertwine with concepts of "place" and "space." Understanding the historical construction of race and gender not only empowers students to apply historical knowledge to current issues, but also equips them with the critical thinking skills to question and deconstruct stereotypes and harmful narratives.

Instructor(s): Beatrice Fazio     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors
Equivalent Course(s): MDVL 12134, RDIN 12134

GNSE 12135. Reading the Rom-Com: Renaissance and Modern. 100 Units.

This course challenges the common assumption that modern romantic comedies are not worthy of academic study by examining early modern iterations of the genre--from William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew (1590) to Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677). In turning to these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, we will consider how this often trivialized genre encodes, theorizes, and problematizes issues of gender, sex, class, race, and desire through its familiar formula of "simply" getting some people to fall in love. (Drama, Pre-1650)

Instructor(s): Sarah-Gray Lesley     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 10402

GNSE 12136. Eating in Early Modern England: Gender, Race, Food. 100 Units.

The relationship between the construct of idealized femininity and food consumption has a long and troubled history; this course looks at this relationship through premodern Anglophone Literature. From Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, this course situates discourses about "proper" gender performance and "proper" eating habits alongside those of race, religion, sexuality, commodity trade, and colonization to reveal the messy and complicated sociopolitical history of the dinner table.(Fiction, Pre-1650)

Instructor(s): Sarah-Gray Lesley     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 10406

GNSE 12137. Feminism and the Politics of Abortion. 100 Units.

This course surveys feminist politics on abortion both historically and in the contemporary moment, with particular attention to abortion activism just before the Roe decision until the post-Dobbs present. We will draw on investigative journalism, academic research, and activist literature/movements to conceptualize both the feminist politics of abortion and resistance to government restrictions on access to reproductive healthcare. The course emphasizes the multifaceted ways feminists (both in the US and elsewhere) have conceptualized abortion and reproductive politics as well as frameworks of care, solidarity, and resistance. The course takes special interest in the ever-evolving post-Dobbs landscape by incorporating both current events and histories of the anti-abortion movement of the United States.

GNSE 12138. Tutorial - Feminist Science and Technology Studies. 100 Units.

Feminist science and technology studies (STS) is a rich body of literature that grapples with essential questions about the gendered and political nature of scientific knowledge. This course engages deeply with a range of literature that explores different possibilities for studying the co-construction of race and gender in and through science. We will discuss, among other topics, feminist epistemologies of science, racializing technologies, uses of DNA science, analyses of reproduction, various approaches to new materialisms, and speculative thinking about how science can be practiced differently. In this course, we take an expansive view of the field of feminist STS to consider what does, or does not, cohere about feminist STS as a field of study. We will read work from a wide range of scholars, from foundational scholars such as Donna Haraway and Londa Schiebinger to critiques of the field from Katherine McKittrick and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and others in between.

Equivalent Course(s): HIPS 29651

GNSE 12159. Reading as a Writer: The Bad Girls Club. 100 Units.

Jezebels, witches, femme fatales, nasty women, sirens, madwomen, and murderesses: the world over, these women of many names-whom we'll collectively refer to as the Bad Girls Club-have alternately inspired the disdain and delight of multitudes. Whether jailed, expelled, excommunicated, or burned at the stake, their (anti)heroic antics have challenged, critiqued, or, some might say, corrupted the laws, mores, and sensibilities of societies. If it is true that polite, well-behaved women rarely make history, then what do impolite, badly-behaved women teach us about the construction of (his) story? In this course, we'll examine literature from around the world featuring members of the Bad Girls Club, who in opposing complimentary constructions of femininity, femaleness, and power invite introspection on the gendered nature of story and storytelling. In short critical papers, we'll analyze the tropes, features, and conventions of literature featuring these bad characters, and in short exercises, you'll write stories, poems, and essays inspired by them.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 12159

GNSE 12160. Beyond the Binary: Gender and Sexuality in Modern and Contemporary Art. 100 Units.

In recent years, cultural understandings of gender and sexuality have undergone seismic shifts around the world, accompanied by new theorizations that emphasize fluid, non-binary, and trans identities. Where did we come from and where are we going? This course proposes to explore issues of gender and sexuality as they have been taken up by artists and art historians from the mid-nineteenth century through the present day, with an emphasis on historiographic and global frameworks. The course will be organized thematically around key topics. We will begin with a week devoted to historiography that introduces foundational theorists such as Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, and Griselda Pollock, followed by weeks on subjects such as craft and decoration, collecting and consumer practices, and exhibition strategies. Examples and readings will span different time periods and geographies. For instance, the week on craft and decoration will investigate gendered uses of African textiles in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil, feminine notions of the "decorative" in late nineteenth-century Europe, and queer textile artists in the late twentieth-century United States. Rather than considering these issues in a vacuum, we will investigate how gender and sexual identities intersect with other identities and will examine practices of making, consuming, and display, including some--such as interior decoration--that fall outside of a typical art historical framework.

Instructor(s): S. Strother     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 17414

GNSE 12161. Topics in EALC: Queer Literature and Politics in Contemporary East Asia. 100 Units.

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of queer literature from East Asia in English translation. This course will focus on such contemporary fiction, exploring how "queer" interfaces with issues of identity and subjecthood; desire, embodiment and reproduction; creativity and labor, and more. To this end, beyond issues of fictional representation, we will work to parse the relation between queer as an identity or subject position (queer people/characters) and queer as a set of interpretive strategies and ethical orientations to cultural texts (queer critique). In the first half of the quarter, we will examine some of this recent fiction alongside queer literary criticism and theory, and hold in-class workshops to conceptualize together the "queer" in queer literature and learn about the current situation of queer activism and cultural production in East Asia. In the second half of the quarter, we will read further East Asian literature through several thematic clusters - family, fandom, desire, etc. - while applying the interpretive approaches we learned in the first. The course may include readings by authors such as Wang Xiaobo, Park Sang Young, Murata Sayaka, Li Kotomi and Chi Ta-Wei among others. No prior knowledge is required; all readings will be in English.

Instructor(s): N. Ogonek     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 10722

GNSE 12162. Queer Singing, Queer Spaces. 100 Units.

Queer practice and identity have long been expressed through/as song. According to Ovid, it was the great singer Orpheus who first introduced same-sex relationships to the people of Thrace; in early modern Europe, men performing the role of Orpheus on the operatic stage were often eunuchs with non-normative bodies singing in a vocal range traditionally associated with the feminine. Beyond fabled musicians, though, carnal technologies of the voice have continually been implicated in historically and geographically situated paradigms of queerness. Likewise, many of the spaces in which queer peoples have found community or refuge have been associated with music or singing. What might it suggest that in the twentieth century, generations of queer communities formed around listening to and ventriloquizing the voices of Judy Garland, Maria Callas, and Madonna? How might exclusively queer spaces, like the hijra communities of the Indian subcontinent, effect the production of voice and performance of music for its inhabitants and outside observers? For which audiences are young trans* people on YouTube documenting their vocal progressions over the course of their transitions? Why have both European and Chinese operatic traditions abounded with cross-dressing for most of their histories? In this course we will investigate the broad relationship between practices of the voice and the body and consider why so many of our cultural understandings of queerness are accompanied by singing.

Instructor(s): Devon Borowski
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 22620

GNSE 13001. Introduction to Gender Studies. 100 Units.

This course invites students to take an empirical and theoretical approach to understanding gender. Drawing on scholarship from across the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities, we begin the course by learning about the questions, methodologies, foundational concepts, research findings, and theoretical frameworks that comprise the field of gender studies. Next, we delve into the diverse ways that gender emerges and operates in our everyday lives, including our own embodiment. We then identify the historical and socioeconomic forces that animate, construct, regulate, and transform gender from one generation to the next. And we end by analyzing the relationship between gender and systems of power. All of our inquiries will consider the complex ways that gender operates at the intersection of sexuality, race, class, age, ethnicity, religion, ability and other emerging categories of difference. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

Instructor(s): Red Tremmel     Terms Offered: Autumn

GNSE 13002. Introduction to Sexuality Studies. 100 Units.

Introduction to Sexuality Studies: This course introduces students to foundational concepts and emerging questions that animate the interdisciplinary field of sexuality studies. Using an intersectional and transnational lens, we will examine research, films and artistic practices to better understand the social, historical, and cultural dimensions of sex, sexuality, and the erotic. Zooming in and out, from the personal to the global and back again, students will gain a new understanding of how sexual fantasies, arousals, desires, and relations mutually constitute economic, political and ecological systems.

Instructor(s): Red Tremmel     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 13003. Sex, Power, Culture. 100 Units.

Taking a historical and interdisciplinary approach that focuses primarily on the US context, this course invites students to identify and analyze the cultural, socioeconomic, and political forces that shape and are shaped by sex, sexuality, and the erotic. We will zoom in on a diverse array of topics, including hook-up culture, porn, the feminist sex wars, reproductive justice, liberatory sexual political movements, and an array of relationship formations such as monogamy and relationship anarchy to ask, what might we know about power by studying sex? And what might we know about sex, by studying power?

Instructor(s): Red Tremmel     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HLTH 20303

GNSE 15002-15003. Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations I-II.

This two-quarter sequence aims to expand students’ exposure to an array of texts—theoretical, historical, religious, literary, visual—that address the fundamental place of gender and sexuality in the social, political, and cultural creations of different civilizations. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies.

GNSE 15007. Gender and Sexuality in World Civ III: Sex and Mysticism. 100 Units.

Can you have sex with God? And, if so, what then does sex mean? What, as a matter of fact, might spiritual sex mean for the cultivation of virtues like celibacy or virginity? While early Christianity and the Christian Middle Ages are often characterized by a disciplined asceticism, erotic desire was just as central to cultivating mystical love for God. In fact, the significance of the language of love, passion, loss, nuptial bliss, jubilation, and the body has rendered the Christian mystical tradition a useful resource for contemporary-and especially psychoanalytic-theories of sex, gender, and sexuality. This course will look both to the past and the present in order to explore the workings of pre- and postmodern desire and to draw connections between Christian mysticism and theories and practices of sex. Working across historical periods, we will read exemplary pieces of Christian mystical literature, psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary literature that draws from the medieval past.

Instructor(s): Kris Trujillo     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring
Prerequisite(s): Admission to Paris Gender & Sexuality study abroad program for the Autumn 2024 section. Priority for the Spring 2025 section will be given to students who have been enrolled in GNSE 15002 and 15003.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 15007, RLST 27607

GNSE 15008. Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations III: Feminism/Anti-Feminism in Korea. 100 Units.

This course will explore contending strands of feminist thought and practice in modern Korea. Building on previous coursework on feminism and the postcolonial critique of Western feminism, we will consider how various Korean expressions of women's equality developed in historically contiguous and critical relation to other global feminist ideals and movements (e.g., "The New Woman", "revolutionary motherhood", Women of Asia, #MeToo, radical militant feminism, transfeminism, etc…). We will engage a diverse range of historical, literary, and ethnographic sources that probe feminist, proto-feminist, and anti-feminist ideas throughout different periods from Japanese colonialism to the North-South division to the neoliberal South Korean present.

Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Priority will be given to students who enrolled in GNSE 15002 and 15003
Note(s): This course counts as the third quarter of Civ for students who have completed the first two quarters of the sequence (GNSE 15002 and 15003). Priority will be given to students who enrolled in GNSE 15002 and 15003. If there is space, the course will be open to any student during add/drop.
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 15008

GNSE 15009. Gender and Sexuality in World Civ III - Queer Capitals: Cities, Literature, Performance Arts. 100 Units.

This course explores the vibrant queer cultures of major global cities from the 19th century to the present. Each week delves into the distinctive histories and cultural dynamics of a different city, including Berlin, Madrid, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, New York, Chicago, and Manila. Our study will encompass a range of topics such as drag culture, gay cruising, the history of medicine and forensic science, queer spaces, police power, homophobia and transphobia, racism, multiculturalism, AIDS activism, and the politics of same-sex desire. We will examine how these themes are depicted and interrogated through literature, cinema, and performance arts, offering insights into the lived experiences and social challenges of queer communities in urban settings. By the end of the course, students will be equipped with a comprehensive knowledge of global urban histories, an appreciation for the cultural innovations and political involvement of queer communities to cities, and a critical perspective on the representations of queer living. Fiction by Christopher Isherwood, Klaus Mann, Jean Genet, Adolfo Caminha, Mikhail Kuzmin, Patricia Highsmith, and Otto Miguel Cione. Films include My Beautiful Laundrette (UK, 1985), Paris is Burning (USA, 1990), How to Survive a Plague (USA, 2012), and Dance of the 41 (Mexico, 2020), among others.

Instructor(s): Carlos Halaburda     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Priority given to students who enrolled in GNSE 15002 and 15003.
Note(s): This course counts as the third quarter of Civ for students who have completed the first two quarters of the sequence (GNSE 15002 and 15003). Preregistration priority will be given to students who enrolled in GNSE 15002 and 15003. If there is space, the course will be open to any student during add/drop.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20059, ENGL 15009, GLST 25009

GNSE 15134. Body Genres. 100 Units.

This course analyzes the concept of physical responses to aesthetic production, specifically framed by the concept (following Carol Clover, Linda Williams, and Richard Dyer) of the "body genre" in literature and film. We will analyze body genres such as the tearjerker, horror, comedy, pornography, and other affective responses to aesthetic production such as disgust, shock, and cringe as they are theorized by scholars in literary studies, film studies, affect studies, audience studies.(Theory)

Instructor(s): Gabriel Ojeda-Sague     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 12134, ENGL 12134

GNSE 16004. Jewish Civilization III - Mothers and Motherhood in Modern Jewish Culture. 100 Units.

Jewish Civilization is a three-quarter sequence that explores the development of Jewish culture and tradition from its ancient beginnings through its rabbinic and medieval transformations to its modern manifestations. Through investigation of primary texts-biblical, Talmudic, philosophical, mystical, historical, documentary, and literary-students will acquire a broad overview of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness while reflecting in greater depth on major themes, ideas, and events in Jewish history. This Jewish Civilization III course will focus on mothers and motherhood in modern Jewish culture. From sentimentalized keepers of Jewish tradition to objects of ridicule burdened by stereotypes of overbearing, guilt-inducing behavior, Jewish mothers hold a prominent role in Jewish self-representations. Writing alongside or against these stereotypes, Jewish mothers themselves have struggled with the obligations and expectations of Jewish motherhood. Engaging with a variety of literary, theological, historical, and pop culture texts, this class explores Jewish feminisms in relation to motherhood, Jewish fictions of motherhood, and the role of motherhood in Jewish religious life and thought. This course includes material from a variety of different contexts for modern Jewish life, but places particular emphasis on American Jewish history and culture.

Instructor(s): Jessica Kirzane     Terms Offered: Spring. Not offered in 2024–25
Note(s): Students who wish to take this course for Civilization Studies credit, must also take Jewish Civilization I and II. The course may also be taken as an independent elective.
Equivalent Course(s): YDDH 21724, RLST 22013, JWSC 12004

GNSE 17915. Women's Work. 100 Units.

As a haptic art, an art experienced through touch as well as the other senses, architecture operates at multiple scales: that of hand, building, city. The scale of the hand gives the most direct access to architecture and its furnishings: think of a handrail, a chair, a textile, a brick pattern, a wood detail. This is the realm of craft in architecture and was, for decades, the realm inhabited and ruled by women practitioners. Women designed furniture, made drawings, wove textiles, produced pottery and glasswork as a means of expression within the male world of architectural practice. As an introduction to the study of architecture, craft entails applying principles of proportion, scale, tactility, precision, materiality, and assembly; in this way, craft is a microcosm of architecture. Through a series of projects and readings centered around the craft arts and the women who advanced them, this studio course will introduce students to small-scale making and translate that process to larger scales. Students will undertake two investigations: the first a series of small craft objects and a set of orthographic drawings describing the making process, the second a spatial analysis and workspace for a craft practitioner.

Instructor(s): K. Mills     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting July 31, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 17915, ARCH 17915

GNSE 19960. Comedy from the Margins. 100 Units.

This course examines the centrality of normativity to our conceptions of funniness, reading theories of comedy alongside stand-up, sitcoms, dramedy, and romantic comedy. We will ask: in what ways do comedic formulas establish ideas of the "normal" in order to subvert (or perhaps reinforce) them? How, does comedy about the "strange"-as the foreign, the queer, the excessive or the abject-reframe structures of sociality often taken for granted, forcing us to grapple with questions of citizenship and belonging, gendered and sexual norms, racialization and power? In addition to theories of comedy and joke theory, students will analyze theoretical works on race, gender and sexuality alongside popular television series, talk shows, and comedy specials. Possible texts and comics include: Chewing Gum, Fleabag, Insecure, Reservation Dogs, Ramy, Atlanta, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, Julio Torres, Hasan Minhaj, Ali Wong, Jacqueline Novak, Dave Chappelle, Hannah Gadsby, and Ronny Chieng. (Theory, 1830-1940)

Instructor(s): Shirl Yang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 39960, CRES 19960, ENGL 19960

GNSE 20001. Theories of Sexuality and Gender. 100 Units.

This is a one-quarter, seminar-style course for undergraduates. Its aim is triple: to engage scenes and concepts central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality; to provide familiarity with key theoretical anchors for that study; and to provide skills for deriving the theoretical bases of any kind of method. Students will produce descriptive, argumentative, and experimental engagements with theory and its scenes as the quarter progresses.

Instructor(s): Red Tremmel     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Prior course experience in gender/sexuality studies (by way of the general education civilization studies courses or other course work) is strongly advised. Instructor Consent required.
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20290, CHDV 20001

GNSE 20007. Africa in the Middle East and the Middle East in Africa. 100 Units.

From Mansa Musa's Hajj in 1324 to the contemporary Afrobeats scene in Dubai, African and Middle Eastern societies share long histories of interconnection. This course examines these interconnections from the early modern to the contemporary era through a series of case studies ranging from traditions of exchange on the Swahili Coast, to the Ottoman Scramble for Africa, to the creation of a long-standing Lebanese diaspora in West Africa and a more recent Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Students will examine debates that animate this field of scholarship including conversations about race; histories of slavery and its legacies; conceptions of indigeneity, nativism, and settler colonialism; religious encounters; gender and society; shared and divergent experiences of European colonialism and struggles for independence; and transnational collective-building projects such as Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism. In addition to scholarship based on textual analysis, students will develop skills to investigate cultural sources such as music, photography, film, fashion, literature, and sports. No prior coursework in Middle Eastern or African studies is required. However, a background in African Civ, Islamic History and Society Civ, or Islamic Thought and Literature Civ is recommended.

Instructor(s): K. Hickerson     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Assignments: Short papers; long paper; in-class presentation
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 20007, RDIN 20007

GNSE 20112. From the Harem to Helem: Gender and Sexuality in the Modern Middle East. 100 Units.

This course will provide a historical and theoretical survey of issues pertaining to gender and sexuality in the modern Middle East. First, we will outline the colonial legacies of gender politics and gendered discourses in modern Middle Eastern history. We will discuss orientalist constructions of the harem and the veil (Allouche, Laila Ahmed, Lila Abu-Loghod), and their contested afterlives across the Middle East. We will also explore colonial (homo)sexuality, and attendant critiques (Najmabadi, Massad). We will pay especial attention to local discourses about gender and sexuality, and trouble facile assumptions of "writing back" while attending to the various specificities of local discourses of everyday life across various sites of the Middle East. Eschewing reductive traps for more nuanced explorations of the specifics of life in Beirut, Cairo, Istanbul, or Tehran - as well as to rural areas - we will show how gender and sexuality are constructed and practiced in these locales. In addition to foundational scholarly texts in the field, we will also engage with an array of cultural texts (films, novels, poetry, comics) and - where possible - have conversations with activists who are working in these sites via Skype/teleconferencing.

Instructor(s): Stephanie Kraver     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 20034, GNSE 30112, NEHC 30034

GNSE 20119. Language, Gender, and Sexuality. 100 Units.

This course, based primarily on insights from the field of linguistic anthropology, focuses on the relationship, in theory and in practice, between language, gender, and sexuality. We begin with a brief overview of the field and some of its major theoretical developments. Then, we expand on themes of social change, desire and identity, difference, kinship, and the significance of global, transnational and postcolonial connections in our understandings of gender and sexuality. The practical component of the course includes critical analysis of language and other signs that are used to enact gender and sexuality (e.g., in drag shows, communities you belong to personally, online communities, and current events). Throughout this course, we will emphasize the importance of ethnographic approaches to languages and communication-a hallmark of linguistic anthropology that requires a reflexive and critical attentiveness to how researchers co-participate in everyday social interactions with their interlocutors. Beyond the categories of gender and sexuality as studied in Western academic contexts, this course invites students to pay close attention to how non-normative forms of alterity are produced and circulated in the Global South under conditions of political and economic inequality.

Instructor(s): Fadi Hakim     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): LING 22450, ANTH 22450

GNSE 20121. Women and Work in Modern East Asia. 100 Units.

Worldwide, women do about 75 percent of the world's unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly. Women's underpaid work at home and in industry subsidized the early stages of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain, early twentieth-century Japan, and contemporary China, and women's unpaid contributions to their households enable employers worldwide to keep wages low. We know, at least in outline, how women came to carry double burdens in Europe and North America, but little research has been done so far about this process in East Asia. In this course, we will discuss when and how China, Japan, and Korea developed a division of labor in which most wage work was gendered male and reproductive work was marked female. Are current divisions of labor between men and women rooted in local cultures, or are they the result of industrial capitalist development? How do divisions of labor differ between the three East Asian countries, and how did developments in one East Asian country affect others?

Instructor(s): Jacob Eyferth     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 24518, HIST 34518, EALC 24501, GNSE 30121, EALC 34501

GNSE 20124. Fictions of Patriarchy in German Literature and Thought. 100 Units.

In his 1861 study Mother Right, J. J. Bachofen argues that patriarchy is, at is most basic level, fictive. While the mother's connection to the child is materially perceptible-she gestates, births, and nurses her offspring-the father is a "remoter potency" whose relationship to his progeny, because it is always mediated through the mother, can never be known for sure. Paternity, Bachofen suggests, is a juridical invention rather than a naturally evident fact. Taking its cue from Bachofen, this course will investigate the relationship between notions of patriarchy and fictionality in German literature and thought. We will consider how philosophical texts use the figure of the father to ground their speculative claims, how literary narratives adapt changing ideas about the family and the state, and how concepts of patriarchy have structured thinking about fiction's function and effects. Readings from: Herder, Schiller, Fichte, Kleist, Bachofen, Hauptmann, Freud, Werfel, Heiner Müller, and Jelinek, among others.

Instructor(s): Sophie Salvo     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 23823, GNSE 30124, GRMN 33823

GNSE 20126. Shrews! Unladylike Conduct on Stage and Page in Early Modern England. 100 Units.

This course will move between three sites of inquiry to investigate the social and material history of an evergreen trope: the domestication of a refractory servant or wife. From rare book libraries and museum collections, we will track the common features of popular entertainments that traffic in this scenario. We will then bring our findings to bear in a theatre lab environment, where we will assay scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, The Tamer Tamed, and the City Madam. (Drama, Pre-1650)

Instructor(s): Ellen MacKay     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20360, ENGL 20360

GNSE 20127. Black Women Work: The labor of Black women in communities, families, and institutions. 100 Units.

This multidisciplinary course will explore the labor of Black women in three distinct arenas-communities, families, and institutions. Students will explore these areas through engaging with historical and contemporary narratives, research, and popular media, heavily drawing in a U.S. context, but not exclusively. Through an engagement of Black women in the U.S. labor force, this course will explore three questions. How has the labor of Black women contributed to the sustainability of communities, families, and institutions? What are the choices Black women make to engage and sustain their work? What is the future of the labor of Black women? Is the future one that is liberatory or not? Students will leave this course with an understanding of the ways intersectional experiences of oppression contribute to complex conditions and decision-making, that shape the labor of Black women, the function of certain labor decisions as sites of resistance, as well as the generative resources that support the professional success and well-being of Black women.

Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): SSAD 29600, RDIN 26600, SSAD 69600

GNSE 20128. Creating a Different Image: Black Women's Filmmaking of the 1970s-90s. 100 Units.

This course will explore the rich intersections between African American women's filmmaking, literary production, and feminist thought from the 1970s to the early 1990s, with an emphasis on the formation of a Black women's film culture beginning in the 1970s. We will examine the range of Black feminisms presented through film and the ways that these films have challenged, countered, and reimagined dominant narratives about race, class, gender, and sexuality in America. We will explore the power and limitations of filmmaking as a mode of Black feminist activism; the range of Black feminisms presented through film; and the specific filmic engagements of well-known Black feminist critics such as bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Michele Wallace. As many Black feminist writers were engaged with filmmaking and film culture, we will look at these films alongside Black women's creative and critical writing from the period. Approaching filmmaking in the context of Black feminist thought will allow us to examine the possibilities of interdisciplinary approaches to film studies broadly, as well as to think specifically about the research methods and theories that are demanded by Black women's filmmaking in particular.

Instructor(s): Allyson Field     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): This course is open to graduate and undergraduate students from across the disciplines; our conversations and presentations of the films will both depend on and be energized by different disciplinary perspectives.
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25. Please email Professor Field at anfield@uchicago.edu before enrolling. Course Description Continued: We will discuss the form, aesthetics, and politics of individual films and we will examine larger efforts by artists and activists to build a Black women’s film culture, asking such questions as: What does a film history of Black feminism look like, and what scholarly and creative methods does such a history demand? To begin to answer these questions, we will revisit the 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts—believed to be the first ever Black women’s film festival—organized by Michele Wallace, Faith Ringgold, Patricia Jones, Margo Jefferson, and Monica Freeman. The class will collectively participate in a homage series inspired by the 1976 festival, featuring work by filmmakers from the original festival such as Monica Freeman, Madeline Anderson, Michelle Parkerson, Ayoka Chenzira, Carol Munday Lawrence, Edie Lynch, and Camille Billops; as well as others including Julie Dash, Zeinabu irene Davis, Maya Angelou, and Yvonne Welbon. The weekly course screenings will be open to the public and students will gain experience in the public presentation of films by actively engaging in public-facing aspects of film exhibition (writing program notes, delivering introductions, participating in discussions, etc.). The class will culminate with a two-day symposium that will bring together around 35 Black feminist filmmakers and artists, including a number from the 1976 festival, to revisit the threads and legacies of the original event and discuss the present and future of Black women’s film practices.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 37415, KNOW 31025, CMST 21025, GNSE 30128, CRES 21025, HMRT 31025, HMRT 21025, HIST 27415, CMST 31025

GNSE 20129. Writing Gender. 100 Units.

In German, even if you are not writing about gender, you are always writing gender: the grammatical categories "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter" are implicated in every noun declension and personal pronoun. How have writers negotiated this in their constructions of gender identity? In this course, we will examine how gender has been thought within and beyond the masculine/feminine binary in German intellectual history. We will study historical conceptions of grammatical gender as well as recent attempts to make German more inclusive for genderfluid and trans people (e.g., neopronouns). Finally, we will consider how authors use literature as a space for gender exploration, such as in Kim de L'Horizon's recent award-winning novel Blutbuch. Readings and discussions in English.

Instructor(s): Sophie Salvo     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 35524, GNSE 30129, GRMN 25524

GNSE 20130. Queer Theory. 100 Units.

This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term "queer" and explore the contours of the field's major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory's emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis. Reading texts by key figures like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lorde, Bersani, Crimp, Warner, Halperin, Dinshaw, Edelman, Anzaldúa, Ferguson, and Muñoz in addition to prominent issues of journals like GLQ, differences, and Signs, we will approach these pieces as historical artifacts and place these theorists within the communities of intellectuals, activists, and artists out of which their work emerged. We will, thus, imagine queer theory as a literary practice of mournful and militant devotion, trace queer theory's relationship to feminism and critical race theory, critique the hagiographic tendency of the academic star system, and interrogate the assumptions of queer theory's secularity.

Instructor(s): Kris Trujillo     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 36855, CMLT 26855, ENGL 26855, CMLT 36855, GNSE 36855, ENGL 36855, RLST 26885

GNSE 20132. Gender, Race, and Horror. 100 Units.

This course will contend with the ways that horror as a film genre constructs and deconstructs notions of gender and race in society. We will attend to texts across decades and subgenres that will illustrate how gender and race are made and regulated through notions of confusion, fear, and repulsion. By attending to these universal human feelings, students will learn how emotions are evoked through the construction of the text, its portrayal of the disruption of gender norms and its construction of racial boundaries. Students will learn the necessary vocabulary and methodologies to be able to critically analyze (audio)visual texts. In order to do this, students will be guided through how to construct argumentative critical papers through proper utilization of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. By the end of the course, students will be well versed in cinematographic terms such that they will be able to critically analyze texts to understand the impact of perspective, interpretation, and judgment. This course is meant to help students navigate and make sense of an increasingly scary world by learning to appreciate fear as a necessary human expression. Finally, and most importantly, students will be able to engage with the age-old notion of terror to be able lead a more ethical and intellectually richer life.

Instructor(s): AE Stevenson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25507, CMST 35507, MADD 10507

GNSE 20133. Trans Genres. 100 Units.

This course explores genres of writing and cultural production concerned with transgender life and politics. Students will engage genre's relationship to gender, as they will read across memoir, fiction, poetry, and criticism. (Theory).

Instructor(s): C. Riley Snorton     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 22408, RDIN 20408

GNSE 20134. Special Topics in Criticism and Theory: Gender and Sexuality. 100 Units.

An introduction to classic texts in feminist and queer literary criticism. (Theory, 1840-1990)

Instructor(s): Sianne Ngai     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 22212, ENGL 22212

GNSE 20135. Divas, Idols, Material Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Music Videos. 100 Units.

The stark black and white of Madonna's "Vogue" and the pinks and sparkles of "Material Girl." The explosive surprise releases of Beyoncé's BEYONCÉ and Lemonade visual albums. The lavish cinematic spectacle of Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" and the fanbait intertextuality of SM Entertainment's Aespa. Since MTV's advent in 1981, hit music videos have made a number of pop songs inextricable from iconic imagery and choreography; ubiquitous digital devices and the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok have only increased pop music's audiovisuality. Looking at and listening to female pop icons raises fraught questions of agency, representation, race, sexuality/sexualization, bodies, commodification, and capital. In this course, students will gain a vocabulary for talking about both the audio and visual parameters of music video, and they will use this vocabulary to engage with critical frameworks for examining meaning, circulation, and reception in contemporary music videos. Assignments across the course will allow students to experiment with a range of writing and media genres, including critical close readings, micro-reception histories, thinkpieces, podcast episodes, and video essays.

Instructor(s): Paula Harper     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 14723, MUSI 27423

GNSE 20136. Generations, Gender, and Genre in Korean Fiction & TV Drama. 100 Units.

The seminar analyzes the issues of generations, gender, and genres that arise from a selection of popular literary and television dramas from modern and contemporary Korea. The selection for the course is marked by the creative contributions of Korean women as novelists, scriptwriters, directors, among others. It includes prose fiction by renowned authors such as Park Wan-sŏ (1931-2011), Han Kang (1970- ), and Cho Nam-joo (1978- ), as well as television series like Mr. Sunshine (2018; scripted by Kim Eun-sook), The Red Sleeve (2021; dir. by Chŏng Chi-in; adapted the 2017 novel by from Kang Mi-kang), and My Liberation Notes (2022; written by Park Hae-yeong). Through a blend of close textual analysis and historical contextualization, the course aims to uncover the ways in which the gendered and generational identities of these creators might have helped certain configurations of concerns, needs, and aspirations saliently emerge in response to social, cultural, historical, and political currents of their time. [Consent Required; No prior knowledge of the Korean language is necessary]

Instructor(s): K. Choi     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 33044, EALC 23044, GNSE 30136, MADD 13044

GNSE 20138. Gender Before Gender: Constructing Bodies in Ancient American Art. 100 Units.

In this course, we will seek to test the possibilities and limits of understanding gender and sex in premodernity through an inquiry into the artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Works of art constitute a primary means by which we can access ideas about what we call gender and sex. Based on what we can reconstruct from visual, textual, and archaeological sources, these cultures conceptualized and represented gender in ways that might seem unfamiliar, in the process putting into question our own preconceptions. Indeed, pre-modern works of art might not have served to simply record conventions of gender but also helped construct the very idea of a sexed body within a given cultural context. As we discover commonalities and divergences between these Indigenous American traditions, we will learn to think across cultural contexts and disciplinary divides, putting into question some of our own assumptions. We will see that gender is not an immutable construct but something actively brought into being in different ways in different times and places.

Instructor(s): C. Brittenham     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor required; email Professor Brittenham a paragraph-long description about what you bring and what you hope to get out of this seminar.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25731, ARTH 35731, GNSE 30138, LACS 35731, LACS 25731

GNSE 20139. Midwives, Healers, and "Abortionists" 100 Units.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries in the US, most births moved from the home (where they were often attended by midwives) to the hospital (where they were almost always attended by male doctors). In recent decades, demand for midwives has reemerged across the political spectrum. Some see midwives as a bulwark against contracting reproductive rights and autonomy; some see them as protection from government overreach and regulation, or as a return to a lost traditional or religious past; many see them as an answer to a medical system that has failed to meet the needs of mothers and babies. This course will follow the history of midwives, women healers, and abortion providers from antiquity through the Middle Ages and to the present, with a focus on the political, legal, and religious context of midwifery in twentieth and twenty-first century US. Topics include witchcraft accusations of midwives and healers; the importance of Black midwives in the antebellum south; the role of race and gender in laws against practicing midwifery; convergences and divergences between the natural birth movement and the reproductive rights movement; and the prevalence of homebirth among Christian momfluencers.

Instructor(s): P. Heffington     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 27808, HLTH 27808

GNSE 20141. Queerness in the Shadow of Empire: Sexualities in the Modern Middle East. 100 Units.

Critics, from both the Right and the Left, claim that liberal sexual regimes are Western, imperial impositions onto Muslim and Middle Eastern societies. On the other hand, LGBTQ+ advocates claim that the restriction of sexuality is itself a colonial legacy. This class will delve into this debate by examining cutting edge empirical and theoretical work on Queer lives in the modern Middle East.

Instructor(s): E. Abelhadi     Terms Offered: Autumn. Distribution: C;3
Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent
Note(s): Distribution: C;3
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 28055, GNSE 30141, RDIN 28055, NEHC 38055, RDIN 38055, NEHC 28055, CHDV 38055

GNSE 20142. From Bollywood to Made in Heaven: Marriage and Sexuality on Indian Screens. 100 Units.

From reality shows like Indian Matchmaking and Made in Heaven to the meme of the "Big Fat Indian Wedding" to the preoccupations of Bollywood films like DDLJ and Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahani and crossover ones such as Monsoon Wedding, marriage is an obsession in South Asian culture. Focusing on Hindi cinema, this course will explore the socio-political dynamics of this cultural focus on marriage and couple formation. With examples ranging from classical Hindi films from the 1950s-60s to the star-studded melodramas of 1970s and 1980s and the "new Bollywood" era (post-1991), this cinema exhibited and analyzed the central dynamics of marriage: sexual compatibility, fidelity, reproductive futures, and so on. Debates around class, caste, diaspora, and sexuality are equally anchored in issues of marriage and couple formation. In this course, we ask why it is that marriage-its success and failure-has been so central to Indian on-screen identities. Even as screens multiply-on computers, cell phones, and in the multiplex-marriage continues to dominate. No prior knowledge of Indian languages is required, but you must enjoy watching and talking about movies and popular culture.

Instructor(s): Rochona Majumdar     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 36616, HIST 26616, CMST 20122, SALC 20122, GNSE 30142, CMST 30122, SALC 30122

GNSE 20143. Feminism(s) and Anthropology. 100 Units.

This course examines the fraught yet generative relation between various movements of feminism and the discipline of anthropology. Both feminism(s) and anthropology emerged in the 19th century as fields invested in thinking "the human" through questions of alterity or Otherness. As such, feminist and anthropological inquiries often take up shared objects of analysis--including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value and power-even as they differ in their political and scholarly orientations through the last century and a half. Tracking the emergence of feminisms and anthropology as distinct fields of academic discourse on the one hand and political intervention on the Other, we will pursue the following lines of inquiry: 1) a genealogical approach to key concepts and problem-spaces forged at the intersection of these two fields 2) critical analysis of the relation of feminist and postcolonial social movements to the professionalizing fields of knowledge production (including Marxist inspired writing on women and economy, Third World feminism and intersectionality, and feminist critiques of science studies) and 3) a reflexive contemporary examination of the way these two strands of thought have come together in the subfield of feminist anthropology and the continual frictions and resonances of feminist and anthropological approaches in academic settings and in the larger world (e.g., #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics).

Instructor(s): Chu, Julie Cole, Jennifer     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): 3rd and 4th year undergraduates only. Graduate students must have consent of one of the instructors.
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 22103, ANTH 32910, ANTH 25211, CHDV 32103, GNSE 32103

GNSE 20144. Wives, Widows, and Prostitutes: Indian Literature and the "Women's Question" 100 Units.

From the early 19th century onward, the debate on the status of Indian women was an integral part of the discourse on the state of civilization, Hindu tradition, and social reform in colonial India. This course will explore how Indian authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries engaged with the so-called "women's question." Caught between middle-class conservatism and the urge for social reform, Hindi and Urdu writers addressed controversial issues such as female education, child marriage, widow remarriage, and prostitution in their fictional and discursive writings. We will explore the tensions of a literary and social agenda that advocated the 'uplift' of women as a necessary precondition for the progress of the nation, while also expressing patriarchal fears about women's rights and freedom. The course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Basic knowledge of Hindi and/or Urdu is preferable, but not required. We will read works by Nazir Ahmad, Premcand, Jainendra Kumar, Mirza Hadi Ruswa, and Mahadevi Varma in English translation, and also look at texts used in Indian female education at the time.

Instructor(s): Ulrike Stark     Terms Offered: TBD
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor based on demonstrated knowledge of Hindi
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 27904, GNSE 47900, SALC 43800

GNSE 20145. Women in 20th-Century Architecture. 100 Units.

From the Renaissance to the present day, architecture has been a blatantly male-centric field. This course invites students to consider women who overcame systemic barriers to become figures of agency in 20th-century architecture. We will examine the lives and works of women who have managed to attend architecture schools, despite historical gender-based exclusion or restriction on enrollment, as well as those who found impactful ways to play architectural roles without academic training. We will pay particular attention to how these protagonists add necessary complexity to the modernist canon. The course will start with a first module on positionality (women as architects, women as clients, and women as residents) followed by a second module with a biographical scope (Minnette De Silva, Eileen Gray, bell hooks, and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy).

Instructor(s): J. Huet     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 17781, ARCH 17781

GNSE 20147. Gender Archaeology. 100 Units.

How have archaeologists approached the study of gendered practices, and can their work contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions of gender across the social sciences and humanities? How can we use material objects and things to examine or explain gendered identities, especially in the deep past? In this course, students will engage with a range of research, from different disciplinary perspectives, to explore how gender is situated in archaeological theory and praxis and its political implications. Through multiple case studies, the course will interrogate how archaeologists study, analyze, and interpret material remains to examine gendered ideologies and material practices and their intersections with other social constructs: class, sex, race, ethnicity. Coverage is cross-cultural and aims to expose students to the diversity and variability of gendered and sexual experiences of different people across time and space. Topics include but are not limited to: embodiment and expression, gender roles, sexuality, parenthood and childhood, masculinity, biopolitics, and feminist theory.

Instructor(s): Alice Yao and Katie Kearns
Equivalent Course(s): CLCV 23024, CLAS 33024, GNSE 30147, ANTH 30012, ANTH 20012, SIGN 20147

GNSE 20149. Gender and Sexuality in Latin America. 100 Units.

Bringing together Latin American social, feminist and queer theory, we will explore four pivotal moments in history-Spanish conquest, independence, industrialization and revolution-in order to interrogate why social conflicts were often mediated through competing definitions of masculinity and femininity as well as how debates about legitimate sexual practice and reproduction ultimately underpinned larger concerns over racial purity, economic inequality, class struggle and the prerogatives of the state. Our readings will span a variety of perspectives and theoretical orientations in order to shed light on the intellectual and social diversity unique to the Latin American context.

Instructor(s): M. Hicks     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 27418

GNSE 20150. Queer Theories/Queer Practices. 100 Units.

An introduction to key texts in queer theory (Foucault, Crimp, Sedgwick, Butler, Wittig, Bersani, Edelman, Muñoz, Roderick Ferguson, Heather Love), with attention to the AIDS crisis as key context for the emergence of queer theory. Alongside these works, we will examine a range of queer aesthetic practices (Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Zoe Leonard, Alison Bechdel) and some of the political practices in and around the Gay Liberation Movement and ACT UP. (Fiction, Poetry, 1830-1990, Theory)

Instructor(s): Jonathan Flatley     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 25204

GNSE 20151. Hooking Up, Shacking Up, Breaking Up: Public Policy and Intimate Relationships. 100 Units.

Every aspect of our lives is shaped by policy choices, including our most intimate relationships. In this course, we will examine the sociological and policy dimensions of different aspects of intimate relationships, including campus hookup cultures, relationship formation, housing policy, marriage, parenting, breakups and divorce. Each week, students will be responsible for reading an assigned book related to these topics, and class meetings will be dedicated to discussing the texts in depth. Students should be aware that texts will engage with themes of assault, abuse, and intimate partner violence. Together, we will examine how macro-level policy decisions shape pivotal intimate moments throughout the lifecourse.

Instructor(s): Gorski, Karlyn     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20614, PBPL 24530, CHDV 24530

GNSE 20152. Indigenous Feminisms. 100 Units.

Indigenous women, queers, trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit people have been at the forefront of Indigenous resistance struggles, most recently at Standing Rock, at Mauna Kea, and in protests against Line 3 and Line 6 pipelines in the upper midwest and Canada. Their voices, along with Indigenous queer and feminist scholars in academia, have been working to understand the interrelatedness of gendered violences, land dispossession, and cultural appropriation. This class will consider how Indigenous feminist, queer, and Two Spirit scholars have theorized gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism alongside queer and feminist of color critiques toward accountable visions of resistance. We will read works by Indigenous feminist scholars, writers, poets, and activists from the nineteenth-century to the twenty-first to consider how Indigeneity challenges how gender and sexuality are experienced in the context of ongoing settler colonialism.

Instructor(s): Jodi Byrd     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 33101, ENGL 23101, GNSE 30152, RDIN 23100, RDIN 33100

GNSE 20153. Practicum: Women and Society. 100 Units.

Although the inequities between men and women have diminished during the last decades, large gaps are still evident and resistant to change. Throughout this course, we will explore the origins of these disparities which are all fundamentally rooted in the patriarchal nature of society. Understanding how patriarchy came to be the dominant order requires a multidisciplinary and historical approach. The first lectures will cover debates in biology, human evolution, history and archeology that explain the deep roots and the spread of this order throughout the centuries. The next set of lectures will cover how current cultural practices and social norms facilitate the reproduction of the patriarchy and will also examine alternative ways in which societies have organized themselves where women have powerful roles or live in matriarchies. The class will also capture how women from the Global South contest this order within their societies and on their own terms. Finally, we will evaluate policies that have aimed to close the gap between men and women around the world. A central theme of the course is that to understand how to craft effective policies one needs to understand the mechanisms which created patriarchy and led it to persist. The students will offer presentations that will revise these policies from a critical perspective based on the material we covered throughout the quarter. The final lectures will include a variety of guest speakers.

Equivalent Course(s): PBPL 28498, LACS 28498

GNSE 20416. Radical Style: Politics and Writing in the 1960s and 1970s. 100 Units.

From the iconic militant images of the Black Panthers sporting afros and slinging rifles to the street theater of the Yippies, the melodrama of bra-burning, and the parodic extremity of Valerie Solanas' SCUM manifesto, the moment of the 1960s and 1970s is as synonymous with certain kinds of style as it is with radical politics. Often, the former to the detriment of the latter: the more style, the less substance: for example, the counterculture's tuning in and dropping out depoliticized the student movement and the Black Panthers' star power is "radical chic" that undermined the seriousness of their willingness to use revolutionary violence. Why did political activists write and perform their politics this way? What made these politics radical - that is, what is it about them that rethought something from its roots or foundations? Does radical style always suggest a radical politics? This class mixes cultural history, political theory, and literary approaches to the moment of the new social movements of the 1960s. We'll read the serious political texts that invented modern ideas of race, sex, gender, and class politics as having style of their own, and we'll read them alongside the film, poetry, theater (street and otherwise) that made characterized the 60's. We'll also make good use of archives in Chicago, which was one of the primary centers for New Left political activity, and students will have a chance to do firsthand archival research. (1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Dana Glaser     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 10416, RDIN 10416

GNSE 20555. The Sociology of Work. 100 Units.

From the Great Depression to the Great Resignation, paid work has played a central role in American life. The average American spends 1/3 of their life at work - making it an area of the social world heavily examined by politicians, journalists, and social scientists. In this course, we will look at the structural and interpersonal dynamics of work to consider the questions of what makes a "good job" in America and who gets to decide? Our topics will include low-wage work, the stigma of "dirty jobs," gender and racial inequality at work, physical and emotional labor on the job, side hustles and the gig economy, and life after retirement. Students will be required to write a 15 page research paper that draws on interview data they will collect over the quarter. No prior background in doing interviews is required!

Instructor(s): K. Schilt     Terms Offered: Winter. Not Being offered in 2024/25
Equivalent Course(s): PBPL 20555, SOCI 20555, CHDV 24711

GNSE 20620. Literature, Medicine, and Embodiment. 100 Units.

This class explores the connections between imaginative writing and embodiment, especially as bodies have been understood, cared for, and experienced in the framework of medicine. We'll read texts that address sickness, healing, diagnosis, disability, and expertise. The class also introduces a number of related theoretical approaches, including the medical humanities, disability studies, narrative medicine, the history of the body, and the history of science. (Theory)

Instructor(s): Julie Orlemanski     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HLTH 26020, ENGL 10620

GNSE 20700. Topics in EALC: Poets/Teachers/Fighters: Writing Women in China and Beyond. 100 Units.

This course offers a survey of women's writing in late Imperial and modern China, exploring the ways in which women (and men) reimagined the collectivity of women and the concept of "women's literature" in order to stake out a position in the cultural sphere. How did Chinese women use literature to redefine what it meant to be a woman, and what was their role (both of women and of literature) in the major social and political upheavals and in the revolutionary movements of their day? Readings include essays, poetry, diaries and fiction by women writers from the 12th to the 21th century in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. All assigned readings are in English translation, but students who read Chinese are encouraged to read the original texts.

Instructor(s): P. Iovene     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Not offered in 2023-24.
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 10701

GNSE 21001. Cultural Psychology. 100 Units.

There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of "normal" psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a single or uniform fundamental psychology for all peoples of the world. Research findings in cultural psychology thus raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. In this course we analyze the concept of "culture" and examine ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.

Instructor(s): R. Shweder     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Undergraduates must be in third or fourth year.
Note(s): CHDV Distribution: B, C
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 31000, CHDV 21000, GNSE 31000, ANTH 24320, PSYC 23000, ANTH 35110, PSYC 33000, AMER 33000, CRES 21100, CHDV 31000

GNSE 21285. Toni Morrison, beloved and a mercy. 100 Units.

How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together." Beginning with Morrison's 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture, this class will read (for many reread) two of Toni Morrison's novels that pose the house and household as a "site of memory" in which to dramatize gendered histories of race in North America. Our class will annotate together Beloved and A Mercy with the essays, films, poetry of various scholars, in addition to some of Morrison's literary critical and historical writings. Our in-depth reading of these two works will provide a foundation for engaging in ongoing debates about race and writing in literary studies, black feminists critiques of the classroom, and histories of race-based slavery in North America. If, as Morrison contends, "language" teaches us "how to see without pictures" and that "language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names," we will aim to hold language close as we consider "what moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company." (1830-1990, Fiction)

Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 21285, GNSE 31285, RDIN 21285, ENGL 31285, RDIN 31285

GNSE 21303. Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation. 100 Units.

Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the 200 years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries - not to mention a thriving "Janeite" fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. For example, feminist scholars have long been fascinated by Austen for her treatments of feminine agency, sociality, and desire. Marxists read her novels for the light they shed on an emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of industrialization. And students of the "rise of the novel" in English are often drawn to Austen as an innovator of new styles of narration and a visionary as to the potentials of the form. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen's completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include pieces by Sara Ahmed, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams. (18th/19th, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Open to MA and PhD students; 3rd- and 4th-year undergrads
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 41360, GNSE 41303, ENGL 21360, MAPH 40130

GNSE 21304. Medieval Romance. 100 Units.

Medieval romance is one of the main ancestors of fantasy and science fiction. This course examines the speculative work of fantasy in medieval romance's explorations of aesthetics, desire, and politics. (Pre-1650; Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Mark Miller     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20304, GNSE 41304, ENGL 40304

GNSE 21370. Ships, Tyrants, and Mutineers. 100 Units.

Since the Renaissance beginnings of the "age of sail," the ship has been one of literature's most contested, exciting, fraught, and ominous concepts. Ships are, on the one hand, globe-traversing spaces of alterity and possibility that offer freedom from the repression of land-based systems of power. And they are Michel Foucault's example of the heterotopia par excellence. From Lord Byron to Herman Melville to Anita Loos, the ship has been conceived as a site of queerness and one that puts great pressure on normative constructions of gender. At the same time, the ship has been a primary mechanism for the brutality of empire and hegemony of capital, the conduit by which vast wealth has been expropriated from the colony, military domination projected around the world, and millions of people kidnapped and enslaved. Indeed, the horror of the "Middle Passage" of the Atlantic slave trade has been a major focus of inquiry for theorists like Paul Gilroy and Hortense Spillers, interrogating how concepts of racial identity and structures of racism emerge out of oceanic violence. In the 20th and 21st centuries, science-fiction writers have sent ships deep into outer space, reimagining human social relations and even humans-as-species navigating the stars. While focusing on the Enlightenment and 19th century, we will examine literary and filmic texts through the present that have centered on the ship, as well as theoretical texts that will help us to deepen our inquiries. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Open to open to 3rd and 4th years.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 41370, GNSE 41370, MAPH 41370, ENGL 21370

GNSE 21400. Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality. 100 Units.

Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the proliferation of "new social movements" such as feminism and gay liberation, this seminar explores the key debates around which gender and sexuality were articulated as tenacious but open structures of power subject to political critique and social transformation. The relatively stable yet dynamic character of what Gayle Rubin in 1975 famously called "the sex/gender system" raises basic questions of structure and event: (1) how are systemic relations of domination and rule historically constituted and sustained over time?; and (2) how can that which is regularly reproduced be not only momentarily interrupted, but fundamentally altered through both quotidian and extraordinary forms of action and worlding? The unexpected character of the new social movements called for a radical rethinking of structures and their transformation. Haunted by unpredictable forms of resistance, heteropatriarchal structures challenged theorists and activists to forge new frameworks of critique that refigured basic concepts of power, subjectivity, and agency. These frameworks are examined with an eye to how racialized sexuality and gender are created and contested in the context of modern biopolitical capitalism and its constitution of naturalized conceptions of rule.

Instructor(s): Linda Zerilli      Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Undergraduates by Consent Only
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 21400, PLSC 31410, GNSE 31400, PLSC 21410, CCCT 31400

GNSE 21404. More than Human Ethnography. 100 Units.

In this course we explore the fields of more-than-human and 'multispecies' ethnography. We examine theoretical antecedents promoting the inclusion of non-human actors in ethnographic analysis and read examples of such work, including foundational texts on more-than-human engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Deborah Bird Rose, Kim Tallbear, Eduardo Kohn, and Anna Tsing among others. We consider the role other species, 'actants' and assemblages played in early social science work and contemplate recent studies of "becoming with" animals, plants, fungi, bacteria-encountering complex symbioses, examining naturalcultural borders, and querying the role of decolonial thought and queer ecologies in the 'more-than' turn. Multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional method; we couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, physicists, and philosophers. The is a discussion-based seminar with significant time devoted to logistical elements of 'more than' work-to querying how such studies are conducted in practice. The final paper takes the form of an exploratory essay based on observations collected during previous weeks.

Instructor(s): Wilhoit, Mary     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 31404, KNOW 32404, ANTH 33807, ANTH 21426, MAPS 31404

GNSE 21424. Evil Women in Greek Tragedy. 100 Units.

This course examines the portrayal of female villains in Greek tragedy. We will read plays by the three major tragedians, focusing on their depictions of Clytemnestra, the Furies, Phaedra, Medea, and Helen, as it relates to questions of gender, mythmaking, power, and reception. We will discuss the societal dynamics and generic norms through which those characters emerge and we will explore their intertextual journey through myth and literature, ancient and modern. Key questions of the course include: What makes a woman evil? How is the evil female constructed through the writing, visuals, and performance of tragedy? What does it mean to present an evil female in a genre where all writers and actors are male? To what extent does tragedy shape and reflect the patriarchal structures of the Athenian society? All readings will be in English.

Instructor(s): Christina Filippaki     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CLCV 21424, GNSE 31424, CLAS 31424

GNSE 21650. Kafka's The Trial. 100 Units.

This very close reading of Kafka's arguably most well known unfinished novel means to move away from megalithic glosses of Kafka as a writer of allegory-of bureaucratic oppression, social alienation, and a world abandoned by God, etc.-instead to look deeply at Kafka's precision, and strategic imprecision, of language, language as trauma, wound, and axe. Knowledge of German is not necessary.

Instructor(s): M. Sternstein     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): open only to Fundamentals majors. all other majors need consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): REES 22009, FNDL 21650

GNSE 21706. The Power and Politics of Description: Ethnography, Documentary and Modernist Literature. 100 Units.

The work of description-the way that writers convey the characteristic features and significant details of people and places in language-can contain and confirm biases and anchor stale tropes of identity, but can also refuse, exceed, play with, and subverting readerly expectations. Descriptions made for the purposes of political consciousness-raising, journalistic documenting, or narrative storytelling bring into sharp relief senses of ourselves in relation to perceptions of "otherness" along lines of place, race, class, and gender. In this class, we will read literary and photographic works by authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, James Agee and Walker Evans and focus on how they experiment with methodologies of description and representation of people borrowed from anthropology, photography, and documentary journalism, as well as literary techniques like stream-of-consciousness narration and first-personal disclosure-to productively account for the limitations of their individual perspectives and authorial voices as a narrative and poetic tool. Particular attention will be paid to how gender and sexuality, race and racialization, and embodiment impact these accounts of social worlds, relations, and cultures, and person.

Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 31700, ENGL 31700, RDIN 21700, GNSE 31706, ENGL 21701

GNSE 21720. Science fiction against the state. 100 Units.

This course reads science fiction and other texts (including theory, essays and zines) that imagine what it might mean to live against, beyond or without the state, and thus beyond or against the law, the police and capitalism. We will engage with these other worlds in an attempt to formulate our own visions of other possible forms of communal life and relation. We will pay particular attention to questions of liberatory struggle; borders, policing and imprisonment; race, gender, family and social reproduction; and environment and ecological relations. We'll also spend some time thinking about actually existing forms of living against the state (including encampments, blockades, autonomous zones). SF authors may include Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Tade Thompson, Octavia Butler, and ME O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Other authors may include Saidiya Hartman, Fredy Perlman, James Scott, Orisanmi Burton, Joy James and David Graeber.

Instructor(s): Hilary Strang     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 41720, ENGL 21720, MAPH 41720, ENGL 41720

GNSE 21721. Women Who Wrote In Yiddish. 100 Units.

This course explores memoirs, plays, essays, poetry, novels, and journalistic writing of women who wrote in Yiddish, as well as a discussion of the context in which they wrote and their reception and self-perception as "women writers." Among the writers whose work may be represented in this course are Glikl, Yente Mash, Kadya Molodwsky, Chava Rosenfarb, Yente Serdatsky, Rosa Palatnik, Anna Margolin, Celia Dropkin, Rokhl Korn, Beyle Shaechter-Gottesman, Gitl Shaechter-Viswanath, Bella Chagall, Blume Lempel, Esther Kreitman, Debora Vogel, Rokhl Brokhes, Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn, Malka Lee, Ida Maze, Roshelle Weprinski, Miriam Karpilove, Zina Rabinovitz, Rokhl Szabad, Rokhl Faygnberg, Paula Prilutsky, Shira Gorshman, Esther Shumiatsher-Hirshbein and Freydl Shtok. Many of these writers have been underexamined in the history of Yiddish literary studies and this course will bring renewed attention to their work. This course will be taught in English with readings translated from Yiddish.

Instructor(s): Jessica Kirzane     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): YDDH 31721, YDDH 21721, JWSC 27651, GNSE 31721

GNSE 21810. The Werewolf in Literature and Film. 100 Units.

Human transformation into animals (and into wolves in particular) is a recurring trope in many cultures' storytelling. Authors have used the story device to explore the nature of humans and animals, human fear and vulnerability, psychological problems and mental illness, gender and sexuality, social/racial hierarchy, marginalization, identity, and our own capacity for violence and savagery. In this course we will examine werewolves in literature and film from several cultures (French, English, German, Finnish, Blackfoot, Japanese) in English translation, primarily from the late 20th century onward. We will focus on how the aforementioned themes are used and developed in each work and the overarching patterns of werewolf stories. Students will write a final analytical paper or produce a creative project.

Instructor(s): David Delbar     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 21810, ENGL 21810

GNSE 22000. Introduction to Black Studies. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the study of Blackness from multiple perspectives: racial, political, cultural, and intellectual. We will adopt a global perspective to our study that highlights differential histories and experiences of Black people in various areas of the world. Attentive to the origin of the discipline in political struggle, we will constantly question the ties of Black studies scholarship to the communities whose struggle it is founded on. With a consideration of the adjacent histories of racialization and other forms of oppression, this course invites students to consider the relation between Blackness and other social categories such as gender and class. We will ask questions such as: What are the methods and approaches to the study of Blackness? How has the history of African and African diasporic people shaped the contemporary world? How can we build a world founded on freedom for all? Assigned materials include academic texts, fiction, and other media such as film & music. Select topics include the histories of enslavement and colonization, revolution, Black feminism, and Afrofuturism. Students will work on weekly reflections, a mid-term paper and a final team project. For the sake of a collaborative pedagogy anchored in the work of social movements, students are encouraged to imagine together the best form this course can take and to enact course practices and changes that keep us all true to the radical vocation of Black Studies as a discipline.

Instructor(s): Kevin Irakoze     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 22000

GNSE 22035. The Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Pastoral Epistles. 100 Units.

In the early second century there were bitter battles over the legacy of Paul and his preserved letters in terms of gender, sexuality, family life, asceticism, church administration, and theological vision. We can see these well by reading the narrative text The Acts of Paul and Thecla alongside the "Pastoral Epistles" (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus), the former championing a female, cross-dressing ascetic Christ-missionary and the latter, in pseudepigraphical epistolary texts written in the dead Paul's name, insisting on patriarchal family life and women's adherence to traditional roles. In this course we shall read both sets of texts carefully in Greek, noting points of similarity and contestation, and test various models of how these sources-each of which seeks to "fix" the Pauline legacy in its own way-are related to one another. Time allowing, we shall also look at the later reception of the cult of Saint Thecla and late antique interpretations of "the apostle," Paul, on these issues of sexuality and gender roles, and their perduring influence in contemporary debates.

Instructor(s): Margaret Mitchell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): At least one year of Greek, or equivalent.
Note(s): This course meets the HS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 22035, GNSE 42035, RLST 22035, GREK 27423, BIBL 42035, HCHR 42035, GREK 37423

GNSE 22123. Sociology of the Family. 100 Units.

The family is a key social institution in all human societies, although its structure and functions vary over time and place. Families are responsible for producing, raising and socializing children into social roles. Families are often the site of religious practice, responsible for much of what is produced and consumed, provide shelter, transmit resources across generations and within them, inculcate members, especially the young, with values and beliefs, provide companionship and entertainment, and the location for much of the sexual activity that takes place. Changes in the structure of the economy, social policies, and social organization all affect the family, with demographic forces also playing a key role. We will discuss these issues through the lens of the classic and recent literature on the family as seen from a sociological perspective.

Instructor(s): L. Waite     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20123, PBPL 20123, CHDV 20123

GNSE 22151. Pacific Worlds: Race, Gender, Health, and the Environment. 100 Units.

This discussion-based course will introduce students to both classical and recent scholarship in Pacific World historiography. By adopting micro-historical, comparative, and transnational methods, students will examine the formation of three overlapping "worlds": The Antipodes, Polynesia, and the northeastern Pacific. Analyzing the myriad intersections of race, gender, health, and the environment, we will explore a range of large-scale historical processes that shaped and reshaped the Pacific between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. These processes include European exploration, settler colonialism, and indigenous sovereignty; sex, depopulation, and race science; labor, migration, and urbanization; industrialization and environmental exploitation; and imperial expansion and citizenship. The course is intended for students with an interest in the Pacific Islands, Australasia, and the North American West, as well as those interested in race, gender, health, or the environment within indigenous, immigrant, or settler colonial contexts. Required readings - which will consist of book chapters and academic articles - will be used to contextualize and critically analyze a variety of primary sources during each class session.

Instructor(s): Christopher Kindell     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course counts towards the ENST 4th year Capstone requirement. Restricted to 3rd and 4th year students.
Equivalent Course(s): ENST 20151, HIPS 20151, CRES 20151, HIST 25030, HLTH 20151, GLST 25151

GNSE 22156. Staging Identity in the Eighteenth Century. 100 Units.

This course will consider connections between theatre, performance, and identity in the eighteenth century, a time when selfhood is everywhere depicted as both metaphorically and literally theatrical. We will ask: How does actual theatrical practice shape the way that identity was understood in this period?  What components of identity, particularly in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality, are privileged or destabilized by the eighteenth-century stage? Course reading will focus primarily on Restoration and eighteenth-century British drama, but may also include short works of eighteenth-century fiction and philosophy, as well as selected secondary readings in theatre history, performance studies, and gender and sexuality studies. The final syllabus will be shaped by what's on in London in the fall; we will hopefully be able to attend a performance or two, and consider how recent playwrights look back to the eighteenth century in their own work.  (1650-1830, Drama)

Instructor(s): Heather Keenleyside     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the London Program (study abroad) is required.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20156

GNSE 22163. Reading as a Writer: Obscenities. 100 Units.

Obscenity" is a term for what is repulsive, abhorrent, excessive, or taboo in a society; and yet many artworks once considered to be obscene are now celebrated as landmarks of world literature, from the ancient poetry of Sappho to modern novels like Ulysses. In this course, we will study literary works that have been banned or censored as "obscene" to examine our own perspectives, attitudes, and assumptions as literary artists. How does obscenity shape our understanding of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, or public and private speech? What are the uses of obscenity in constructing new possibilities for literary expression? Authors studied will include Toni Morrison, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Vladimir Nabokov, Hilda Hilst, and Allen Ginsburg; and we will supplement these readings with works of literary theory, psychoanalysis, and case law. Students will produce their own original poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to reimagine what is permissible-and possible-in language and society for contemporary literary artists.

Instructor(s): Chicu Reddy     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 12163, PARR 33000

GNSE 22182. Early Modern Loss and Longing. 100 Units.

This course examines depictions of early modern desire and loss in genres including the essay, lyric, drama and fiction. The class will also have substantial engagement with affect theory as well as period theorizations (Neoplatonic accounts of desire, humoral accounts of melancholy, etc.) (Med/Ren, 18th/19th).

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20182, MAPH 40182, GNSE 42182, ENGL 40182

GNSE 22207. Caste, Reproduction, and Citizenship in India. 100 Units.

This undergraduate and graduate level seminar will center on caste and reproduction in understanding notions of citizenship in India. The course will systematically engage with ideas of belonging to the post-colonial nation-state, particularly as experienced from following standpoints-gender, caste, indigeneity, and class. Understanding how citizenship is constituted, performed and negotiated in India, especially in relation to the biological and political reproduction of "good citizens", reveals the scopes and limits of citizenship as governance. The course is premised on the centrality of reproduction to governance in the largest democracy of the world. Drawing on a set of interdisciplinary literature, the readings are organized around feminist theorizations of the State, governance, and citizenship to locate the body within the body politic. The aim is to develop critical thinking on how the politics of reproduction is deeply imbricated with the reproduction of democratic politics; a politics that is entangled with knowledge, expertise and constructed human difference. In so doing, the course brings together reproductive governance with articulations of social justice in India.

Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 32203, CHDV 32203, CHDV 22203, SALC 35704, ANTH 32203, GNSE 32207, RDIN 22203

GNSE 22225. Race in African History. 100 Units.

This course examines the category of race in African history from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era. It references the legacies of earlier identity constructions in the creation of these categories, as well as analyzing its transnational and trans-imperial dimensions. The class combines intellectual, cultural, and social history to illuminate the actors, encounters, and debates animating this dynamic field of study-moving beyond assumptions of African societies as spaces of ethnic-and not racialized-identities to examine the construction of difference through transnational history of science, gender and sexuality studies, histories of slavery, Middle Eastern colonial projects, as well as the invention of the category of "native" in European colonial discourse. Are categories of differences primarily due to European colonialism, as many claim? Or are they embedded in a more complex configuration coming from settler colonial projects, national liberation struggles, and postcolonial nativist discourses? Students examine case studies from across the continent-from Ghana to Sudan to South Africa-paying close attention to experiences of Asian, Arab, and mixed-race peoples navigating colonial and postcolonial African states; while keeping an eye on how debates about difference, diaspora, and nationalism in North America and Europe inform discussions of race in Africa, and how Africans shape discourses of race in colonial metropoles and the United States.

Instructor(s): K. Hickerson     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Students who have not take African Civiliizations I, II, and III are asked to read African History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007) in preparation for this course.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 20205, HIPS 20205, RDIN 20205

GNSE 22260. Housekeeping: Domestic Drama and Material Culture. 100 Units.

The theatre represents a new and wildly successful commodity in the early modern English market. Yet it is often kept separate from other fashionable goods of the period by virtue of its intangible form. This course overturns the orthodoxy that an early modern play was a co-imaged event and the early modern theatre was an "empty space" by attending to the Renaissance theatre's frequent recourse to household stuff. We will read plays designed for private performance, that use the fixtures of the household to build theatrical worlds. We will investigate dramatists who liken the playhouse to key venues of commodity culture, including the pawnshop, the Exchange (the precedent of the shopping mall), and the fairground. We will draw from Henslowe's Diary to recover the business of theatrical property-making and the allure of a company as disclosed by its holdings. All the while, we will question how the fiction of emptiness takes hold in theatre history, and how plays that depict a furnished world are relegated to second-class genres like domestic tragedy and city comedy. (Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Ellen MacKay     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 40250, ENGL 40250, ENGL 20260, TAPS 30362, TAPS 20362

GNSE 22266. Coming of Age: Autobiography, Bildungsroman, and Memoir in Victorian Britain and its Empire. 100 Units.

In this course, we will consider the broad generic category of "coming of age" stories that characterized the literary writing of the nineteenth century. Across several different kinds of writing, a focus on the growth and development of the child into adulthood became an obsessive focus. We will read autobiographies by Mill and Martineau, Bildungsroman by Bronte and Eliot, memoirs by Dickens but also lesser known figures: working class autodidacts, women in childbirth, colonial subjects. We will, along the way, learn more about Victorian childhood, the emergence of developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, and the socio-psychological "invention" of adolescence. (1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Elaine Hadley     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20266

GNSE 22295. Morrissey's America: Contemporary Social Problems. 100 Units.

What are the most pressing social problems in the U.S.? What do we know about them and what can we do to address them? We will use the life and music of Morrissey, the controversial former frontman of The Smiths, as a lens through which to explore our country's most critical social issues. An outspoken defender of animal rights and disaffected youth's preeminent lyricist, Morrissey has also increasingly flirted with nationalist policies. As such, he embodies the tensions, complexities, and ambiguities around critical topics that characterize our time. Guided by sociological theory, we will examine the latest social science evidence on race, immigration, gender and sexuality, health, poverty, segregation, crime, and education as they are key sites in which social inequality is produced and reproduced today. Finally, we will discuss potential solutions to these problems.

Instructor(s): R. Flores     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20295

GNSE 22320. Critical Videogame Studies. 100 Units.

Since the 1960s, games have arguably blossomed into the world's most profitable and experimental medium. This course attends specifically to video games, including popular arcade and console games, experimental art games, and educational serious games. Students will analyze both the formal properties and sociopolitical dynamics of video games. Readings by theorists such as Ian Bogost, Roger Caillois, Alenda Chang, Nick Dyer‐Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Soraya Murray, Lisa Nakamura, Amanda Phillips, and Trea Andrea Russworm will help us think about the growing field of video game studies. Students will have opportunities to learn about game analysis and apply these lessons to a collaborative game design project. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in digital media or game cultures will make for a more exciting quarter. This is a 2021-22 Signature Course in the College. (Literary/Critical Theory)

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda     Terms Offered: Autumn Summer
Equivalent Course(s): SIGN 26038, CMST 27916, ENGL 12320, MADD 12320

GNSE 22333. Cassandras: Truth-Telling in Times of Crisis. 100 Units.

In public life, why and how are some people accepted as truth-tellers while others are not? Is truth simply a problem of and for "correct" reasoning? What assumptions about argumentation and evidence go unexplored in this way of framing the problem? What if truth were a problem of truth-telling instead? When and how do social, racial, and gender hierarchies authorize received understandings of a (credible) truth-teller? What is credible telling usually thought to sound like? What are the conditions for listening and hearing the truth? To think through these questions, we take as a lens the archetype of Cassandra, the babbling prophetess of classical Greek myth and tragedy doomed not to be believed. Cassandra has served as a resource and source of inspiration for a range of critical thinkers, including but not limited to theorists, feminists, poets, and novelists. What is a "Cassandra"? Does her "deranged" way of seeing the world - her prophetic speech - disorient or destabilize? We will consider how, in her different representations, Cassandra places questions of language, patriarchy, and sexual violence at the center of general discussions of credibility and critique. Readings range from ancient Greek thought to 21st century theory.

Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 22333, CCCT 32333, PLSC 22333, GNSE 32333, PLSC 32333, CCCT 22333

GNSE 22360. Working 9 to 5. 100 Units.

Freedom" under capital, Marx wrote, contains a fundamental contradiction. The worker is free to sell their labor because they have escaped medieval serfdom - but they are also "free" of land, property, tools, or machinery to create their own wealth: "And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire." Since at least the eighteenth century, British and American literature has explored, and is often structured by, this conflict. On the one hand, the novel tells the story of the sovereign individual, guiding their own fortunes and producing order out of a fantasy "state of nature." On the other hand, radical and proletarian writers have deployed the novel - and later, the screen - as a genre of class struggle, critiquing the violence of capital and how that violence intersects with the violences of racism, patriarchy, and imperialism. This course will read widely in literary and filmic representations of work and workers from the co-emergence of the novel and modern capital in the early eighteenth century through the present. Primary readings/viewings include Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Attaway, Tomás Rivera, Jamaica Kincaid, Colin Higgins, Mike Judge, and Barbara Kopple. Secondary readings will include literary criticism, Marxist and feminist theory, and histories of race, organizing, and solidarity. Open to graduate students and third- and fourth-year undergrads. (18/19/20th)

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open to MA and PhD students; 3rd- and 4th-year undergrads
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 22360, ENGL 42360, MAPH 42360, GNSE 42360

GNSE 22423. Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Spain. 100 Units.

How did men and women understand their roles in early modern Spanish society as dictated by their gender? Could individuals challenge, or even transgress, the societal-and, therefore, gendered-norms by which they were bound? How were the ideals of femininity and masculinity constructed in artistic and literary production? To what extent were gender and sexuality fixed or fluid in the early modern imaginary? These are but a few of the questions that will be addressed in this course, as we examine the complexities and nuances of gender and sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish culture. We will engage primarily with literary sources, such as poetry, narrative, theatrical works, and autobiographical writings from key literary figures (Garcilaso de la Vega, Teresa de Ávila, María de Zayas, Lope de Vega, to name a few). Moreover, we will examine visual art as well as medical and moral treatises in order to gain as comprehensive as possible an understanding of the notion of gender and sexuality during this time period. In addition to expanding their knowledge of Spanish literature and culture, this course will allow students to continue enhancing their Spanish linguistic competence.

Instructor(s): Lizette Arellano
Note(s): Taught in Spanish. Course not offered in 24-25
Equivalent Course(s): SPAN 22423

GNSE 22440. Women in Italian Organized Crime Through Cinema. 100 Units.

In this course, we will study filmic representations of women in Italian organized crime, and the implications these portrayals have on the understanding of gender and the mafias through Italian cinema. Sociological and psychological studies have underscored the importance of female roles in relation to mafia organizations, notwithstanding the rigid patriarchal structure that allows only male affiliation. One of the main goals of this class is for students to gain an understanding of different Italian mafias and to get a deeper comprehension of the construction of gender in a selection of films centered around these organizations. We will also discuss how movies contribute to the perception of organized crime. This class will draw on a variety of fields, including sociology, gender studies, and film studies.

Instructor(s): Veronica Vegna      Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Taught in English. Students seeking credit for the Italian major/minor must complete a substantial part of the course work (e.g., readings, writing) in Italian.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 22440, ITAL 22440

GNSE 22509. Intersections of Gender and Race Throughout the Modern Middle East. 100 Units.

This course will explore how parts of the modern Middle East confronted notions, questions, and definitions of race and gender. Organized thematically and covering a region that spans from North Africa to Iran, we will use the analytics of race and gender in an intersecting way to explore topics in the Middle East such as: structural racism, colonialism, slavery, local nationalisms, whiteness, racism in nation building, eugenics, scientific racism, and global solidarity movements. In so doing, our course will reveal that race is an operative category in the study of Middle East history, the historical racial logics operating in various Middle Eastern countries, and how race and gender intersect at the site of individual as well as the effects of this. This course is designed for anyone interested in race theory, gender theory, intersectionality, and Middle East history. By the end of this course, students will have the tools to think in a multidimensional way about aspects of Middle East history that do not often receive such an intersectional treatment. Additionally, they will develop the methodological tools to discern local race and gender logics that might be different than what they're most familiar with. Finally, through coming to understand their relationship to the knowledge of our course, students will also be able to use the course as a springboard for continued learning in other courses that treat race, gender, and the Middle East.

Instructor(s): Chelsie May     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 22500, CRES 12500

GNSE 22520. Economics of Gender in International Contexts. 100 Units.

In this class, students will engage basic issues, conflicts, and innovative field research in economics of gender in international contexts. In particular, we will review theoretical foundations, data and methods of research, and a review of recent work in international research related to economics of gender. At the end of the course, you will have a suite of research approaches, topics, and methods, to investigate gender differences in a variety of economic outcomes and contexts.

Instructor(s): A. Gonzalez     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): ECON 10000 or ECON 20000 or ECON 20010 or PBPL 22200. STAT 22000 also recommended.
Equivalent Course(s): ECON 14520

GNSE 22604. Race, Justice, and the Assemblage of American Moralities. 100 Units.

This course explores the racial and moral imperatives that are encapsulated within concepts of "Americanness" and the theoretical notions that define the discursive, historical, and sociopolitical boundaries of American identities. How have claims to American identity relied on created religious or religiously-inflected Others? Together, we will consider how the human phenomena of religion and race have developed across our histories in concert with one another. How do racial and moral imperatives the define discursive, historical, and sociopolitical boundaries of American identities? We will examine how these formations have been deployed, defined, and bent to fit particular historical and cultural contexts while continuing to inform each other in a variety of permutations, especially in the United States. How do race and religion also intersect with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and politics? Our theoretical grounding in migration, encounters, and transnational mobilities will provide insight into how race is imagined on and into differently minoritized people while considering what it means to be participants in the project of racecraft today. Our readings will include historical materials, literary texts, theological reflections, and examples from popular culture that meditate on these topics.

Instructor(s): Samah Choudhury     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 32604, RAME 32600, RDIN 22600, GNSE 32604, AASR 32600, ISLM 32600, RLST 26337, AMER 22600

GNSE 22690. (re)Queering the American Musical. 100 Units.

In this combined studio and seminar course, we explore a selection of musicals (tentatively including Fun Home, Falsettos, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, A Strange Loop, and Indecent) considering their dramatic structure, character construction, performance norms, and musical conventions. In what sense(s) are these works "queer"? Students will investigate course materials through readings, discussions, staging experiments, and a choice of either a final paper or an artistic project. Open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Previous experience in theater, music, and/or film analysis or production is preferred but not required; an interest in detailed textual analysis, rigorous discussion, and focused creative engagement is essential. Team-taught by Leslie Buxbaum (Professor of Practice in TAPS), Erin McKeown (Visiting Gray Center Fellow and composer of the musical "Miss You Like Hell"), and David Levin (Professor in TAPS, CMS, Germanics, and Sr Advisor to the Provost for Arts) as part of their collaborative Gray Center fellowship "An Un-dosical" which seeks to explore the norms of the American musical.

Instructor(s): L. Buxbaum, E. McKeown, D. Levin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 32622, GNSE 32690, TAPS 22690, MUSI 22622, TAPS 32690

GNSE 22705. Abortion: Morality, Politics, Philosophy. 100 Units.

Abortion is a complex and fraught topic. Morally, a very wide range of individual, familial, and social concerns converge upon it. Politically, longstanding controversies have been given new salience and urgency by the Dobbs decision and the ongoing moves by state legislatures to restrict access to abortion. In terms of moral philosophy, deep issues in ethics merge with equally deep questions about the nature of life, action, and the body. In terms of political philosophy, basic questions are raised about the relationship of religious and moral beliefs to the criminal law of a liberal state. We will seek to understand the topic in all of this complexity. Our approach will be thoroughly intra- and inter-disciplinary, drawing not only on our separate areas of philosophical expertise but on the contributions of a series of guest instructors in law, history, and medicine. (A)

Instructor(s): Jason Bridges, Dan Brudney     Terms Offered: Not offered in 2024-2025
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third or fourth-year standing. Students should opt into a discussion section that fits their schedule.
Note(s): Philosophy majors: this course fulfills the practical philosophy (A) requirement.
Equivalent Course(s): PHIL 22702, HMRT 22702, BPRO 22700, HLTH 22700, HIPS 22701

GNSE 22800. Japanese Lit/Film: Manliness. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): JAPN 32800, EALC 32800, GNSE 32800

GNSE 22805. Cinematic Sicily: Exploring the Island and its Otherness through Film. 100 Units.

This course explores portrayals of Sicily in Italian films and their relationship with the social, cultural, and political realities of the island. Students will analyze how these films construct the "otherness" of Sicily, enforcing or challenging stereotypes and preconceptions about the island and its people. This course will also examine Sicily's criminal underworld and its impact on society, as well as women's emancipatory efforts and achievements against patriarchy and misogyny. The class will reflect on the historical and cultural context in which the films were made, giving students a deeper understanding of the ways in which cinema shapes our perception of Sicily in relation to the rest of Italy. The course will include films from different genres and references to TV series set in Sicily. Vocabulary to discuss formal cinematic elements will be provided throughout the quarter. Films will be available with subtitles in English and Italian.

Instructor(s): Veronica Vegna
Prerequisite(s): ITAL 20300 or consent of instructor
Note(s): Course not offered in 24-25.
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 22800

GNSE 22806. An Indigenous People's History of Hawaiʻi. 100 Units.

What you know about Hawai'i is most likely untrue. An archipelago in Oceania's sea of islands, Hawai'i has been locally constructed and globally consumed as a tropical paradise for pleasure and play, attracting tourists, settlers, corporations, and military forces to its shores. It is a fantasized paradise produced through the dispossession, elimination, appropriation, and exploitation of Indigenous people, institutions, worldviews, and practices. This course tells a truer story about Hawai'i. Because ideas and narratives crafted about the history, politics, economics, law, ecology, and society of Hawai'i are dominated and often distorted by non-Indigenous writers, we turn to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholars to learn from their subjugated knowledge. The course examines interdisciplinary research, from the 19th century to the present, and excavates the truths advanced through it: the development of the Hawaiian Kingdom and its government, political order, economy, and society; the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian government and US military occupation and annexation of its territory; legal constructions of race and techniques of gender and sexuality in the territorial period; the creation of the State of Hawaii amid World War II and the Cold War; the birth and evolution of the modern Hawaiian sovereignty movement; and contemporary Kanaka Maoli struggles with federal recognition, militourism, and technoscientific development.

Instructor(s): Uahikea Maile     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 37212, RDIN 22800, ANTH 32800, GNSE 32806, ANTH 22800, RDIN 32800, HIST 27212

GNSE 22822. Women and Horror in Contemporary Latin America. 100 Units.

In this seminar, students will explore questions relevant to both horror studies in general and contemporary Latin American horror specifically from a feminist perspective. What does horror as a genre contribute to the representation and exploration of women's experiences of terrifying events in Latin American history and politics? How can we understand the gendered dynamics of Latin American culture and politics through horror? What do gendered themes in Latin American horror say about societal attitudes, oppression, and struggles for equality? How does the representation of Latin American women in horror texts contribute to or subvert forms of oppression? This interdisciplinary course will transverse the region as well as genres, covering such texts as the short stories of Amparo Dávila (Mexico) and Mariana Enríquez (Argentina); novellas by Carlos Fuentes (Mexico) and Felisberto Hernández (Uruguay); and films such as As boas maneiras (Brazil, 2017).

Instructor(s): Laura Colaneri     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Discussion will be in Spanish, with readings in both English and Spanish. Course not offered in 24-25
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 22821, SPAN 22821

GNSE 23002. Workshop: Regulation of Family, Sex, and Gender. 50 Units.

This workshop exposes students to recent academic work in the regulation of family, sex, gender, and sexuality and in feminist theory. Workshop sessions are devoted to the presentation and discussion of papers from outside speakers and University faculty. The substance and methodological orientation of the papers will both be diverse. Continuing students only.

Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 33002

GNSE 23142. Religion and AIDS. 100 Units.

The AIDS crisis was not an epoch that we survived. It is a battle that we are still fighting…when Americans talk about AIDS they are rarely just talking about a scientific problem or a pharmaceutical solution. They are instead offering a sociology of suffering and a plan for spiritual warfare." - Kathryn Lofton Is it possible to understand current debates over public health or the role of religion in the public sphere without first examining religious responses to the AIDS crisis? This course focuses on the emergence of the AIDS epidemic during the peak of the American culture wars. As such, students will analyze the fraught intersection of political power structures, medical epistemologies, and religious views on bodies, sex, and public morality. Through a varied catalog of disciplinary frameworks, e.g., history, theology, medical ethics, sociology of religion, and history of medicine, students will weigh the accuracy of Lofton's claim that for Americans, AIDS is more than just a disease. Thus, we will scrutinize moral rhetoric surrounding contraception and its public availability. We will discuss the extent to which religious philanthropy, especially on the international stage, reshaped approaches to global health. Finally, we will revisit the role of religious communities in providing both care for the sick and theological responses to suffering. Prior knowledge of religious studies and/or medical history is not required for the course.

Instructor(s): Mark M. Lambert     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 28007, HIPS 26301, HLTH 26301, SOCI 20563, CCTS 21014, PBPL 25301, CHST 26301, RLST 26301, HMRT 26301

GNSE 23145. Queer South Asia. 100 Units.

This course explores representations of queerness, same-sex love, sexualities and debates around them by introducing students to a variety of literary texts translated from South Asian languages as well as films, geographically ranging from India and Pakistan to Sri Lanka. We will also read scholarship that will help us place the production and reception of these primary sources in historical, political, cultural and religious contexts. In particular, we will examine questions of history and continuity (recurrent themes and images); form and genre (differences of representation in mythological narratives, poetry, biography, fiction, erotic/legal/medical treatises); the relationship of gender to sexuality (differences and similarities between representations of male-male and female-female relations); queerness as a site for exploring other differences, such as caste or religious difference; and questions of cross-cultural and transnational dialogue and cultural specificity.

Instructor(s): Nisha Kommattam     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 26113, CRES 26115, HMRT 26113, SALC 26113

GNSE 23146. Religion, Sex, and Law in American History. 100 Units.

Religion and law both offer frameworks for how we ought to live and behave, and often these frameworks become entangled in ways that affect who we are, what we can do, and with whom we can do it. To make things even more complicated, religion is also an object of the law-the law tries to adjudicate the rights of religious Americans under a system of religious freedom, with varying degrees of success. Often, the tension between law and religion comes to a head on issues of sex. The collision of religion, sex, and law presents a whole host of problems and questions: How have religion and law historically related to each other when it comes to sex? How has religion shaped the law on issues of sex, and vice versa? What is, or should be, the role of the law in adjudicating issues of sexual morality and religion? In this class, we will begin with the question: how do religion and law shape our lives? Through attention to issues of sex and gender, we will explore what it means to live within the institutions of law and religion and how those institutions interrelate. The class will focus on topics such as: marriage, anti-miscegenation laws, reproductive justice, sexual education, and religious freedom. This class is intended to be interdisciplinary and assumes no prior knowledge. This class is especially suitable for students interested in religious studies, law and letters/pre-law, gender studies, and history.

Instructor(s): Erin Simmonds     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 28009, RLST 26910

GNSE 23150. Dark Stairways of Desire": Lusting beyond the Norm in Contemporary Catalan Literature. 100 Units.

Although we can find a significant number of authors exploring queer desire and identities throughout the history of Catalan Literature (from lesbian scenes in Joanot Martorell's "Tirant lo blanc" to expanding gender identities in Maria Aurèlia Capmany's "Quim/Quima"), more recent Catalan Literature is blooming with queerness and non-normative lust. This course will give an overview of contemporary Catalan works influenced by feminist and queer debates from the seventies on. Beginning with renowned poet Maria Mercè Marçal's only novel, "The Passion According to Rennée Vivien," winner of several of the most prestigious literary awards for Catalan Literature, we will go on to discover 21st-century works by Eva Baltasar and Anna Punsoda. We will also read poems, short stories and excerpts from authors such as Maria Sevilla, Mireia Calafell, Raquel Santanera, Sebastià Portell, Sil Bel and Ian Bermúdez, among others.

Instructor(s): Bel Olid     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): CATA 21950, GLST 21950, SPAN 21950

GNSE 23151. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender politics in the United States. 100 Units.

This courses surveys academic research on sexuality and gender in American politics. Drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives, it focuses on key arguments and debates about how politics shapes and is shaped by sexuality and gender relations. We will pay particular attention to the development of sexuality and gender identity as analytic and political concepts; the role of the State and political institutions to the formation of sexuality and gender; the relationship between social movements, counter-movements, and political parties; the political behavior and attitudes of LGBT people; and the ways in which intersectional inequalities structure LGBT politics.

Instructor(s): Proctor, Andrew     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): PLSC 33805, PBPL 23805, HMRT 33805, SOCI 30342, MAPS 33805, PLSC 23805, GNSE 33805

GNSE 23152. History of Sexuality and Sin. 100 Units.

Since Foucault's groundbreaking work on the History of Sexuality, we have become attuned to the effects of power and the political implications of the science of sexuality. While Foucault's text has offered a critical avenue to examine the secular state's administrations of sexuality, it begins with Christianity's techniques of power based on the confession of one's sex. The Christian formulation of the relationship between 'sex' and 'sin' is essential to understanding the techniques of power that connect sexuality, legality, criminality, normality, and transgression in modern secular contexts. In this class, we will begin with the critical questions of the History of Sexuality, then turn to primary texts in order to examine the way 'sex' and 'sin' became conceptually connected in Christianity, and finally interrogate the effects of this relation for medieval and modern politics. Over the course of these readings, we will trace the relation between the concepts and their effects to discern the histories of sexuality that lie at the root of contemporary debates on freedom, power, resistance, and desire. No prerequisites.

Instructor(s): Maureen Kelly     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 24806, HIPS 24803, RLST 24803, MDVL 24803

GNSE 23154. Is It Ethical to Have Children in the Climate Crisis? 100 Units.

Climate change is not just an urgent environmental crisis for scientists, engineers, and policy makers: it is a moral problem that also informs individual and intimate aspects of human life, including choices about reproduction and parenting. For example, a 2018 survey published in the New York Times found that young adults in the U.S. are having fewer children than they would otherwise prefer, in part due to concerns about climate change and overpopulation. In this course, we examine the moral dimensions of having and raising children in an era shaped by climate change, looking closely at two main questions: 1) Is it ethical to have children in light of the world that the next generation will inherit, which may include more extreme weather events, unvoluntary human migrations, diminished access to resources, and heightened insecurity? 2) Is it ethical to have children in the context of the affluent West, where consumptive human populations disproportionately contribute to the effects of climate change that impact the world's most vulnerable? We will examine various points of view on these questions, engaging material from the disciplines of environmental studies and ethics, science and technology studies, and religious and philosophical ethics. Responses from feminist, queer, Indigenous, Black, and religiously diverse authors (and intersections therein) will shape our course readings and discussions.

Instructor(s): Kristi Del Vecchio     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 24000, ENST 24000, HIPS 24100, RLST 24000, CCTS 21023, HLTH 24000

GNSE 23156. Empowering the Solo Voice: A Feminist Exploration of Francophone Theater Performance. 100 Units.

In this course, we will delve into the world of contemporary Francophone theater, focusing on the genre of solo performances, or "seules en scène''. We will examine the lineage, history, and practice of this genre, with a special emphasis on feminist playwrights and performers, such as Typhaine D, Jalila Baccar, Fanny Cabon, and Florence Foresti. We will study the underlying components of solo performances and learn how to integrate them into different modes, including storytelling, one-woman or one-man shows, and standup. The selected plays will illustrate how the art of the solo voice can empower under-represented communities and minorities to share powerful narratives and create a new space for visibility and listening. The class will combine history, practice, and creative writing, and will afford students the opportunity to apply this knowledge in a series of live performances that will allow them to creatively connect to the issues raised in the readings and draw from their own experiences, inspirations, and questions. Students will develop creative and critical tools to fully explore the solo voice as a form of artistic expression, honing their talents in writing, devising, composing, producing, and creating work. Performance recordings will be obtained and shared with the class to further enhance the learning experience. One of the unique opportunities of this course is the opportunity to work with texts obtained directly from the playwrights.

Instructor(s): Khouloud Gargouri     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25.
Prerequisite(s): Reading knowledge of French.
Note(s): Class will be conducted in English with a separate discussion section available for students seeking credit for the major/minor. Readings will be in French and in English.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20235, FREN 24724

GNSE 23157. Alone in the Mountains: Tales of Freedom and Violence in Contemporary Catalan Literature. 100 Units.

From witches to "goges" ("water women"), Catalan folklore shows a tradition of women living on their own in the mountains, liberated from societal conventions. These women are portrayed as fascinating yet threatening figures. This ancient imagery has permeated contemporary literature, manifested in novels that depict women who remove themselves from "civilization" to inhabit rural areas of Catalunya, seeking freedom and having to confront at the same time societal norms, abusive partners or even their own personal demons. The mountains, far from ideal and peaceful, are an untamed and often brutal space in which human lives hold no greater value than those of goats, mushrooms, rivers. In this course we shall engage with four novels authored by women: "Solitude (1904) by Victor Català, "Stone in a Landslide" (1984) by Maria Barbal, "When I Sing Mountains Dance" (2019) by Irene Solà, and "Alone" (2021) by Carlota Gurt. Through the analysis of these literary works, we aim to delve into Catalan culture and explore its literary archetypes, while establishing significant connections among these texts and their place in modern and contemporary literature.

Instructor(s): Bel Olid     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Taught in English, but students seeking credit for the HLBS major/minor must do part of the readings and written work in Catalan or Spanish as necessary for their degree.
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 23500, CATA 23500, SPAN 23501

GNSE 23158. Que otros sean lo Normal": Pertinencia y otredad en la literatura trans en español. 100 Units.

¿Qué nos dicen de una sociedad sus alteridades? Es decir, ¿cómo nos informa de la norma lo que queda fuera de ella? A partir de la lectura y análisis de obras escritas por autores trans, conoceremos más a fondo la actualidad de algunos países hispanohablantes, centrándonos en un elemento básico de cualquier identidad: el género. El curso está organizado a partir de la lectura y visualización de materiales reales y con actividades orales y escritas dirigidas a ampliar el conocimiento de la literatura contemporánea en español (y las sociedades en las que florece), y también a reforzar las habilidades de expresión oral y escrita de les participantes.

Instructor(s): Bel Olid
Note(s): Taught in Spanish. Course not offered in 24-25
Equivalent Course(s): SPAN 22770, GLST 22770

GNSE 23162. Histories of Women in Science. 100 Units.

In the mid-1980s, only two female students drew women when asked what a scientist looked like and none of the male students in the study did. Only 8% of STEM workers in 1970 were women; in 2019 that number was still only 27%. This would seem to suggest that the history of women in science is a recent one. Yet historians of science have foregrounded women's involvement in fields ranging from early modern medicine to twentieth century astrophysics. This class introduces students to these histories, investigates how and why science came to be a gendered as male, and asks to what extent gendered values continue to inform modern conceptions scientific achievement or value. In so doing, this course also introduces students to feminist science studies and challenges students to reflect upon their own (gendered) experiences of science. Students are strongly encouraged to develop final research projects that draw upon their own interests, scientific expertise, and linguistic competencies. No prior experience with history is required for this course, although an enthusiasm for history is advised.

Instructor(s): Kristine Palmieri     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 27806, PHSC 27010, KNOW 37011, CHSS 37011, GNSE 37011, HIPS 27011, ASTR 23700

GNSE 23164. Feminist Documentary Filmmaking. 100 Units.

This course examines the ways that women-identifying documentary makers have given cinematic form to feminist thought. Drawing from film and media theory and history, we will focus on the formal and narrative techniques that have been employed by filmmakers to reflect on questions pertaining to gender and sexuality, with an emphasis on the specific ways that non-fiction filmmaking expanded feminist theoretical frameworks and research methodologies. Considering topics such as cinematic realism, film spectatorship, viewing pleasure, counter-cinema, and theories of intersectionality and diaspora, we will ask questions such as: What are the stylistic devices that feminist documentary films have mobilized, and for what purposes and ends? What is documentary's relation to the history of fiction film, particularly of Hollywood cinema? How have women documentary makers understood cinema's role in social processes of transformation? What are the possibilities and limitations of collaborative methods, appropriation strategies, and oppositional techniques? We will watch films with a critical eye and engage closely with academic and popular writings to survey the aesthetic, social, and political genealogies operating in the history of feminist documentary production. In this discussion-based course, we will cover a variety of non-fiction film and media forms: film diaries, docu-fictions, home-movies, video essays, auto-ethnographies, ethno-fictions, collage, and found-footage films.

Instructor(s): Cinta Peleja     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28205, MADD 18205

GNSE 23165. Sexuality in U.S. History to 1900. 100 Units.

In this course we will study the history of changing sexual practices, relations, politics, cultures, and social systems in the region of North America now comprising the United States and 574 sovereign tribal nations. We begin in the pre-colonial period and end in the late twentieth century, focusing on how gendered, racial, economic, religious, medical, and commercial discourses shaped and were shaped by sexual ones. Moving through various contexts, such as occupied indigenous territories, the secret parties of enslaved people, scientific societies, urban drag balls, medical schools, liberatory movements, and popular culture, we will use primary and secondary sources to develop a research-based understanding of how sexual discourses are produced, revised, and remixed among and across generations.

Instructor(s): Red Tremmel     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 27807

GNSE 23167. Black Girlhood. 100 Units.

First popularized on social media in 2013, the phrase "Black Girl Magic" has expanded far beyond its initial use as a twitter hashtag. It can be seen on (a bunch of different objects and the cover of many children's books and poetry anthologies). However, the visibility of the phrase did not come without controversy. Some critics argued that rather than being an uplifting rallying cry for positive depictions of black girlhood, it instead reinforced dehumanizing stereotypes of the "strong black woman". This debate leads us to question: How do black girls tend to be depicted both popular media and in literature? How might these depictions differ depending on author, type of media, or social context? What do they say about the ways that black girls experience childhood, gender, and friendship? To engage with these questions, this course will explore literary works including The Bluest Eye, Betsey Brown, and Abeng, along with television shows such as Lovecraft Country to examine 20th and 21st century depictions of black girlhood. We will also think with theoretical works of black feminism and black girlhood studies.

Instructor(s): Danielle Jones     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20422, RDIN 20400, ENGL 30422, GNSE 33167, RDIN 30400

GNSE 23168. Sex and the Ethnographic Tradition. 100 Units.

This course examines the role sex has played in the formation of ethnographic knowledge, with particular attention to how studies of sex have challenged static notions of identity and illuminated the complex relationship between social behavior and gendered sense of self. We will consider interest in sex as a motivating factor in the ethnographic enterprise and, reading studies on everything from desire, kink, and play to procreation, heritance and power, will examine complex and social construction of sexed, gendered, and raced selves and Others. How has ethnographic research contested the ubiquitous salience of male/female dichotomies, of patriarchy, and of the cross-cultural, trans-historical applicability of concepts like 'third gender? We will also take a methodological eye, querying how sex has moved from a supposedly 'taboo' category of social inquiry to a focal topic in ethnographic work of all kinds. This is an introductory graduate level course with select spots for advanced undergraduates.

Instructor(s): Wilhoit, Ella     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 35503, GNSE 33168, MAPS 35503, ANTH 25222

GNSE 23169. Queer/Trans/Media. 100 Units.

This seminar stages a sustained dialogue between theories of queer, trans, and media, exploring how each of these disciplines animate and challenge one another. This course explores the possibilities of an expanded understanding of queerness, following queer scholar Eve Sedgwick's claim that "work around 'queer' spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all." More recently, queer scholars like David Eng have read "queerness as a critical methodology based not on content but rather on form and style" while trans scholars like Toby Beauchamp similarly engage "the transgender of transgender studies as a mode of critique" and "not as a predetermined category into which identities or bodies are slotted." What might it mean to consider "queer" and "trans" not as a field with a delimited object of study (sexuality or gender), but as an analytic, a methodology, a critical sensibility, a conceptual strategy, a reading practice, a politics, an aesthetic, etc. Throughout the course, we explore often-unconventional pairings of media objects and scholarly readings to work through these challenging questions. Ultimately, this course is designed to help students read for the similarities within the aesthetic forms of film/media and queer/trans theories to understand their force of expression.

Instructor(s): Basil Dababneh     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 20602

GNSE 23172. Transatlantic Feminism. French, Francophone, and North American perspectives (20th-21st c.) 100 Units.

This course explores modern and contemporary feminism through a transatlantic lens. We will consider three major moments and sites of a multi-centered conversation. First, we will explore the modernist desire for cosmopolitanism which drew writers across the Atlantic (Simone de Beauvoir's adventures in the US; Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein's lives in Paris). In the central part of the quarter, we will focus on the period between 1960 and 1990 which witnessed intense conversation and contestation between a French paradigm of "écriture féminine" (Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig), and the rivalling practices and theories in America (from Adrienne Rich and Mary Daly to Judith Butler). Finally, we will explore the ways in which recent feminist writers have accounted for race, class, and disability (from Maryse Condé to Liliane Giraudon). The course will explore various media (novels, poetry, theater and performance, film), and various ways to engage critically and creatively with this history of transatlantic feminism.

Instructor(s): Léon Pradeau     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Taught in English but reading knowledge of French is required. Students taking this class for French credit must have taken FREN 20500, 20503 or a literature course taught in French, and will complete assignments in French.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 24725, CMLT 24725

GNSE 23173. Discourses of Femicide in Contemporary Latin America. 100 Units.

Femicide, or the gender-motivated killing of women and girls, has garnered increasing attention in twenty-first century Latin America, which has some of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world. Latin American activists, performers, writers, and filmmakers have attempted to reckon with the impacts of femicide in the cultural sphere, seeking to not only identify the social, historical, and political roots of gender violence, but also advocate for justice and mourn those they have lost. This course will discuss prevailing discourses of femicide in the region, addressing the roles of activism, journalism, literature, and film in both shaping and responding to these discourses. Texts will include memoirs like Cristina Rivera Garza's El invencible verano de Liliana (2021), documentaries like Lourdes Portillo's Señorita extraviada (2001), as well as fiction, such as Roberto Bolaño's "La parte de los crímenes" from the novel 2666 (2004).

Instructor(s): Laura Colaneri     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): SPAN 20300 or consent of instructor.
Note(s): Taught in Spanish.
Equivalent Course(s): SPAN 27025, LACS 27025

GNSE 23174. Sex, Gender, and Kinship: Colonial Perspectives. 100 Units.

This course analyzes the contested relationships between gender, sexuality, kinship, and western colonialism from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Drawing on historical case studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, this course will cover a broad range of empires and colonies to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between colonization and ideologies and practices of gender, sex, and kinship. Analyzing case studies predominately from the Atlantic World (with attention to colonies elsewhere), we will explore topics such as the emergence of colonial gender ideologies, gender and colonial governance, family life and kinship strategies, the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with race and class, queerness and queer lives, the politics of sex work and reproduction, and gendered migrations across empires.

Instructor(s): Lyons, Deirdre     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 29109, ANTH 39109, SOCI 30346, ANTH 29109, HIST 39109, RDIN 39109, GNSE 39109, MAPS 39109, HIST 29109

GNSE 23175. Sexuality in U.S. History Post 1900. 100 Units.

In this course we will study the history of changing sexual practices, relations, politics, and cultures in the region of North America now comprising the United States and 574 sovereign tribal nations. Moving through various contexts, such as urban drag balls, medical schools, federal agencies, strip clubs, military projects, homophile and other liberatory movements, as well as popular culture, we will use primary and secondary sources to develop a research-based understanding of how sexual discourses are produced, revised, and remixed among and across generations.

Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 27809, GNSE 33175, HIST 37809

GNSE 23176. Philosophy of Sex. 100 Units.

What is good sex? Is sexual objectification harmful? Do we have a right to sex? What is sexual consent? This course invites students to engage with these questions and many others within the literature on the philosophy of sex. The centrality of sex and sexuality in human life makes it an apt, albeit complex object of philosophical inquiry. And, whereas many thinkers advance that our sexual lives hold a major influence on most other domains on our existence, we spend little time with intellectual inquiry about sex. In this course, we will engage with some classic texts alongside some of the most exciting recent writings in the philosophy of sex. We will explore such themes and topics as the erotic, sexual desire, perversion, consent, sexual orientation, pornography, prostitution, and sex equality. We will explore these themes through various perspectives, including metaphysics, ethics, and politics. Some of the authors we will read include Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Martha Nussbaum, Timo Airaksinen, Jean-Luc Marion, Raja Halwani, Amia Srinivasan and Manon Garcia among others. This course is discussion based and is open to undergraduate students of all levels. (A)

Instructor(s): Kévin Irakóze     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): This course is discussion based and is open to undergraduate students of all levels.
Equivalent Course(s): PHIL 26208

GNSE 23177. Gender, Violence, and the Carceral State. 100 Units.

What is the relationship between gender-based violence and the carceral state? This course will explore the role of gendered violence in the formation, expansion, and legitimation of the carceral state. It will look at how state institutions, like policing, criminal courts, and prisons react to, utilize, and, in some cases, perpetrate gendered violence. This course is organized thematically, using theoretical texts, empirical sociological work, and on-the-ground communiques to illuminate the gendered facets of carceral institutions. Ultimately, we will consider how normative gender regimes may shape the carceral state, and vice versa.

Instructor(s): A. Fox     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20601

GNSE 23178. The Queer Enemy and the Politics of Homophobia. 100 Units.

How is the queer enemy politically constructed? And what are the uses and effects of this enemy in contemporary politics? This course investigates queer sexuality as a specific kind of threat and homophobia as a specific mode of political antagonism. Key to understanding this specificity is the examination of other kinds of political enemies. Across categories of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and empire, the course theorizes the queer enemy in a comparative perspective. Engaging scholars like Monique Wittig, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Jean Paul Sartre, we compare homophobia with other forms of political enmity like misogyny, anti-Black racism, and anti-Semitism. After investigating antagonism across categories of political difference, we delve into the specificities of homophobic antagonism in the second half of the course. Here, we explore how the queer threat is framed: through metaphors of civilizational destruction but also through anti-sodomy and anti-disclosure laws. We also trace how the normalization of the queer enemy has produced new enemies. Through notions of "Pinkwashing" and the "Gay International," we further examine how queer liberation is made to stand in for colonial domination. But we also read critiques of the "gay=colonialism" equation, asking how homophobia mediates anti-colonial politics. Finally, we conclude the course with Michel Foucault's seminal essay and relate the question of the queer enemy to the threat of new human relations.

Instructor(s): Omar Safadi     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 23178, RDIN 23178, PLSC 23178

GNSE 23179. In a Queer Time and Place. 100 Units.

In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called "temporal turn" in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory's bold interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, and the times and spaces of sex and intimacy. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freeman, Halberstam, Keeling, Muñoz, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others. Instructor consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities.

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open enrollment for all graduate students, as well as 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students with majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All others, please email amalinowska@uchicago.edu to request permission to enroll.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 47716, ENGL 27716, GNSE 40450

GNSE 23180. Global Maternal and Child Health. 100 Units.

This course provides a foundation in global perspectives on maternal and child health research, practice, and policy. The course will cover a range of maternal and child health topics to examine critical challenges facing women, children, providers, and policymakers in some of the world's most vulnerable communities. Students in this course will: 1) understand the status of maternal and child health in a variety of communities and contexts, using key health and development indicators; 2) critically analyze past and present public health programs and policies utilized to address maternal and child health needs in diverse communities; 3) assess the economic, political, social, and cultural factors that affect maternal and child health programs and outcomes.

Instructor(s): E. Amick     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HLTH 23810, PBHS 33800, GNSE 33800

GNSE 23181. Histories of Abortion and Forced Sterilization in the United States. 100 Units.

In the United States, the politics of pregnancy and reproductive autonomy have historically been and continue to be categories of significance, meaning, and contention. In this course, we will explore a subsection of these broader categories, examining the relation between abortion and forced sterilization, the state, and women of color. The course will zero in on the experiences of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women, African American women, Puerto Rican women, and Native American women, considering their struggles against the state and for reproductive justice.

Instructor(s): Caine Jordan     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 21600, HIST 27810, HLTH 21600, HIST 37810, CHDV 21600, RDIN 31600, GNSE 33181

GNSE 23182. Creative Forces: Cultural Feminisms in Postcolonial India. 100 Units.

In this course, we will study some of the most significant feminist interventions that were made through a range of cultural practices in postcolonial India, and in the Indian diaspora. Struggles for women's rights, demanding political empowerment and economic equality, or carrying out demonstrations for better access to health and education have a long history in South Asia. We will focus particularly on the cultural practices that have constituted waves of feminist thoughts over the last seven decades. We will explore how concerns around justice, social responsibility, and freedom of expression are mediated through literature, cinema, music, and self-fashioning. Keeping cultural productions as our archive, we will ask - what are the various meanings of feminism in postcolonial India? What were the political, economic, and social concerns that the artists and activists chose to highlight while addressing gendered inequalities? What are the intersections of caste, class, and sexual orientation that complicate our understanding of feminist representations? How were inequities sought to be negotiated creatively at different historical contexts? Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will often find ourselves moving between genres, themes, and disciplines to locate marginal voices responding to contemporary anxieties. By working at the intersection of cultural history, anthropological and sociological scholarships, and media studies we will gain an understanding...

Equivalent Course(s): SALC 35700, SALC 25700, GNSE 33182

GNSE 23183. Labor and Resistance at the Margins: Race, Gender, and "Dirty" Work. 100 Units.

Over 100 years ago, Black feminist scholar Anna Julia Cooper challenged narrow definitions of work---which excluded much of the household labor relegated to women---and argued for work to be more broadly defined as "all human exertion." In this class, we put gender in conversation with race, ethnicity, class, power, and labor to answer the following questions: 1) What is labor? What types of labor do we deem "dirty" work? 2) Who does the dirty work and the care work that keeps society going? What social, economic, and political constraints influence the type of work we do? 3) How do we practice resistance in our work? While global perspectives on labor are welcome and incredibly useful, this course and its readings mainly discuss labor and work within the U.S. context.

Equivalent Course(s): SSAD 22755, RDIN 22755, GNSE 33183, SSAD 42755, RDIN 42755

GNSE 23185. Exploring Gender Biases from Social, Developmental, and Cognitive Perspectives. 100 Units.

Women are underrepresented across political leadership, business, and certain STEM domains. While these gender gaps have improved over the last 50 years, they remain persistent, particularly in positions of power and those that grant high socioeconomic status. This course will explore how these gender biases come to be, and how they influence the world around us. Where do these gender biases come from? When in life do their consequences emerge? What impact do these biases have on individuals, communities, and institutions? What can be done to prevent gender biases from developing? How do they intersect with race, and how do they operate outside of the gender binary? This course will address these timely questions, integrating literature from across the psychological sciences to explain the cognitive biases, social landscapes, and developmental trajectories that give rise to gender inequality.

Equivalent Course(s): PSYC 27200

GNSE 23403. Cybernetic Futures in Digital Media. 100 Units.

Cybernetic Futures in Digital Media" explores the intersection of cyberpunk aesthetics, feminist theory, and digital media. Cyberpunk, characterized by its high-tech, dystopian visions and advanced cybernetics, serves as the course's foundation. We will examine its impact on fine art, moving images, creative writing, and video games. The course will focus on evolving gendered embodiments in cyberpunk, from "masculine" identities centered on military strength to androgynous portrayals exploring emotional depth and resilience. We will analyze these themes and explore how cyberpunk and digital feminisms shape contemporary digital and artistic thought.

Instructor(s): Crystal Beiersdorfer     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 13403

GNSE 23507. American Religion, Gender, and Race. 100 Units.

This seminar looks at the impact of religious identity on their understandings and performance of racial and gendered identities. This graduate-level course delves into the impact such intersectional identities have on one's movement within personal, political, and community spheres. We will pay particular attention to American religious denominations. Students can also expect to read and reflect on foundational works in the sociological study of religion.

Instructor(s): Painia, Brianne A.     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 23507, GNSE 33503, MAPS 33504, MAPS 23504, SOCI 30334

GNSE 23602. Critical Security Studies. 100 Units.

This graduate-level elective course is designed to introduce students to approaches to global politics beyond the traditional mainstream canon, surveying a range of perspectives that fall under the heading of 'critical.' The main goal is to develop an understanding of what is at stake, politically, with some of the main concepts, theories, methodological approaches, and empirical objects within the study of international relations (IR) and international security. The course is divided into two sections. First, we begin by considering what makes a critical approach critical-that is, how is it set apart from conventional approaches? In particular, we will explore how critical approaches encourage us to question our assumptions, first, about what security, power, sovereignty, and other core concepts mean in global politics, and second, about who or what (individuals, groups, nonhuman animals, states, the planet) can be agents of global politics. Some examples of approaches we cover are: theories from the Global South, approaches to human security, global feminisms, securitization theories, ontological security, emotions and affect, the visual turn, new materialisms, and post-colonial perspectives. In the second half of the course, we apply these approaches to a range of issues, including nuclear weapons, borders and immigration, drone warfare, terrorism, and climate change.

Instructor(s): Kara Ann Hooser     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): PLSC 23600, GNSE 43602, INRE 23600, INRE 43600

GNSE 23645. Body and the Digital. 100 Units.

As digital technology advances, the separation between IRL and URL blurs. Participants enrolled in this course will explore techniques that will help them create thought-provoking work, strengthen their ability to give critique, and build an understanding of how the corporeal interacts with the digital. Throughout this course, students will offer and receive constructive feedback during instructor-led critiques on peers' works. By the end of this course, students will feel comfortable utilizing different processes of development to create digital artwork.

Instructor(s): Crystal Beiersdofer     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20701, MADD 23645

GNSE 23702. Sexual Health: Identity, Behavior, and Outcomes. 100 Units.

Sexual health is a growing component of public health outreach. The goal of this course is to provide students with a foundational understanding of sexual health from a public health perspective. Through participation in this course, students will increase their knowledge about the history of sexual health promotion in the public health sphere. They will delve into sexual and gender identity construction and explore identity-behavioral expressions. They will critically examine and discuss common sexual health issues addressed by public health practitioners, their epidemiology, and their underlying social determinants; a global health lens will be applied to such examinations. Additionally, recognition of the key methodological considerations in the measurement of sexual behavior and sexual health outcomes will be elucidated (including strengths and limitations of various methodological approaches -quantitative, qualitative, clinical, and biomedical). By the completion of the course, students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and application of key theoretical foundations of sexual health promotion and sexual health behavior change and be able to promote sexual health messages through marketing and dissemination. From a policy perspective, student can expect an increased knowledge about issues related to social and legislative policy analyses, their applications, and implications.

Instructor(s): David Moskowitz     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HLTH 23700, GNSE 33702, PBHS 23700, PBHS 33700

GNSE 23725. La querelle des femmes. 100 Units.

La condition des femmes dans une société centrée sur l'homme est remise en cause en France au XVIIe siècle : naissent les premiers salons présidés par des femmes, qui défendent leur éducation intellectuelle et remettent en question le mariage ; la séparation cartésienne entre corps et esprit permet de prôner l'égalité des sexes. Ce proto-féminisme affronte aussitôt une forte réaction, qui s'exprime notamment par la satire, comme ses adhérentes sont traitées de « précieuses » et de « femmes savantes », dans le théâtre de Molière comme ailleurs. Dans un premier temps, nous écouterons les voix majeures de ce mouvement (telles que Madeleine de Scudéry, la salonnière dite Sapho), et examinerons ses diverses interprétations (notamment en longeant ensemble La Galerie des femmes fortes en Special Collections). Ensuite, nous ferons l'analyse des stratégies anti-féministes pour le miner. Enfin, la querelle de 1694 autour d'une satire misogyne de Boileau nous servira de conclusion pour un chapitre dans la longue histoire du féminisme et de sa réaction.

Equivalent Course(s): FREN 23725

GNSE 23809. Pain, Truth, and Justice. 100 Units.

Why should the truth hurt? Does pain guarantee the truth told? Is pain the price of exposure to the truth? Does that make punishment just? In this course, we will take a historical and philosophical approach to examine the relations between pain, truth, and justice. In the premodern period, we will draw from Genesis, Sophocles' Oedipus, Augustine, Tertullian, martyrdom accounts, and public penance in medieval Christianity. To study the theme in the early modern nation-state spectacles of punishment, colonial contexts, and contemporary scenes of justice, we will turn to the writings of Foucault, Fanon, and others. Over the course of the historical and philosophical examinations, we will trace the themes of body, affect, and performance; truth, law, and ritual; power, religion, and the nation-state. In the end, we will turn a critical eye to contemporary cultural discourses and representations of pain, truth, and justice in the arts, law, literature, philosophy, and politics. No prerequisites.

Instructor(s): Maureen Kelly     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MDVL 23809, CLCV 23809, RLST 23809

GNSE 24006. Embodiment and the Senses. 100 Units.

This course approaches bodies as points of insight into governance, the varied experiences of being governed, and efforts to evade and reconfigure institutional expressions of authority. First, we will examine bodies as targets of governance, objects to be reformed, regulated, contained, disciplined, educated, incarcerated, treated, trained, and "cared" for. Next, we will consider how bodies accrue power as sites of resistance, refusal, and critique. Certain bodies in certain places elicit discomfort, unsettling familiar divisions such as of private and public space, of developed and backward, of religious and secular, of reason and madness, of citizenship and (often racialized) non-citizenship. Finally, we will ask how bodies and sensory practices figure in ethical projects of crafting exemplary kinds of subjectivity or collectivity. In this way, the course will introduce students to anthropological approaches to embodiment as well as related questions of bio-politics, gender and race, political subjectivity, care and self-making, post/colonialism, sensory politics and the aesthetic. Along the way, students will gain a new appreciation of the political potency of bodies and bodily practices near and far-from Lenin's preserved body to Trump's "small" hands, reproductive labor to sex work, dirty protest to women's marches, indigenous eco-rituals to queer intimacies.

Instructor(s): Mareike Winchell
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 20006, RLST 26006

GNSE 24026. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Feminist Biography. 100 Units.

The personal is political - that slogan of Women's Liberation - has long been understood, among other things, as a call for new forms of storytelling. One of those forms, feminist biography, has flourished in publishing since the 1970s, and it continues to evolve today, even as the terms of feminism and of biography are continually re-negotiated by writers and critics. In this workshop, we read some of those writers and critics. And we read illustrative examples of contemporary feminist biography (and anti-biography) in various nonfiction genres, including magazine profile, trade book, Wiki article, audio performance, personal essay, cult pamphlet, avant-garde art piece. Mostly, we try out the form for ourselves, in our own writing. Each workshop writer will choose a biographical subject (single, collective, or otherwise), and work up a series of sketches around that subject. By the end of the quarter, workshop writers will build these sketches into a single piece of longform life-writing. The workshop will focus equally on story-craft and method (e.g. interview and research techniques, cultivating sources); indeed we consider the ways that method and story are inevitably connected. This workshop might also include a week with an invited guest, a practicing critic or biographer.

Instructor(s): Avi Steinberg     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 24026, CRWR 44026, GNSE 44026

GNSE 24125. Oral Performance and Gender from the Middle Ages to Slam Poetry. 100 Units.

Italian culture has been continuously enriched by oral artistic practices. While the written page has allowed these practices to endure over time, they were also, and often primarily, transmitted through the bodies of performers. Is it possible to reconstruct the voices beyond the page? How does thinking about performance enhance our understanding of the artistic product and, moreover, of the society where this product originated? What are the political implications of the binary division between the written page and the human voice? Why are oral practices largely excluded from the literary canon? Is there a correlation between marginalized oral practices and queerness? The content of this course will consist of various Italian oral practices, ranging from the courtly lyric poetry of the Middle Ages to the contemporary spoken word scene. Additionally, the course will focus on female and queer voices, with the goal of tracing a parallel between the ephemerality of performances and the marginalization of communities. The course will integrate artistic content with theoretical material on the topic of voice, as well as insights from feminist and queer studies, media studies, and performance theory. At the end of the course, students will produce their own creative project with the purpose of answering the following question: how does thinking about performance from a practical point of view help to inform our understanding of performance from a theoretical perspective?

Instructor(s): Alessandro Minnucci     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Class will be conducted in English with a separate discussion section available for students seeking credit for the Italian major/minor. Readings will be in Italian and in English.
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 23125, MUSI 23125, TAPS 20223

GNSE 24205. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Queering the Essay. 100 Units.

In Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Queering the Essay, we'll approach the essay as a vehicle for queer narratives, as a marker of both individual and collective memory, and as a necessary compliment to the journalism and scholarship that have shaped queer writing. Through readings and in-class exercises, we'll explore tenets of the personal essay, like narrative structure and pacing, alongside considerations of voice and vulnerability. After a brief historical survey, we'll look to contemporary essayists as our guides--writers like Billy-Ray Belcourt, Melissa Faliveno, Saeed Jones, Richard Rodriguez, and T. Fleischmann-- alongside more familiar writers like Alison Bechdel and Maggie Nelson. And through student-led workshops, we'll wrestle with concerns that often trouble narratives of otherness: What does it mean to write a personal narrative that has a potential social impact? How can we write trauma without playing into harmful stereotypes? How can our writing work as--or make demands toward--advocacy, rather than voyeurism?

Instructor(s): Victoria Flanagan     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 24025, GNSE 44205, CRWR 44025

GNSE 24220. Anxious Spaces. 100 Units.

This course explores built (architectural), filmic, and narrative spaces that disturb our bearings, un-situate us, and defy neurotypical cognition. In the sense that "angst" is a mode that can be understood as both stalling and generative, we analyze spaces and representations of spaces such as corridors, attics, basements, canals, viaducts, labyrinths, forests, ruins, etc., spaces that are 'felt' as estranging, foreboding, in short, anxiety-provoking, in order to understand why-despite or because these topoi are hostile-they are produced, reproduced, and craved. We will pay special attention to abject spaces of racial and sexual exclusivity, sites of spoliation, and of memory and erasure. Among our primary texts are films by Kubrick, Tarkovksy, and Antonioni, and Chytilová, short fiction by Borges, Kafka, Nabokov, and selections from the philosophical/theoretical writings of Bachelard, Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Foucault, Kracauer, and the edited volume, Mapping Desire, Geographies of Sexuality.

Instructor(s): Malynne Sternstein     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 34220, ARCH 24220, REES 34220, REES 24220

GNSE 24426. The Witch Craze in 17th-Century Europe: Scotland, Poland-Lithuania, Russia, and Moravia. 100 Units.

In this course, we look carefully at the reasons for and repercussions of the "witch craze" in the long 17th-century, focussing on primary texts such as trial reports, legal literature, pamphlets, woodcuts, scholarly dissent, and other paraphernalia. The course follows a sweep of the craze from Lancashire in Scotland, where trials began in the 1590s, to Poznań in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to the Russian village of Lukh on the outskirts of Moscow, where between 1656 and 1660 over twenty-five individuals, most of them male, were tried and several executed, and finally to Northern Moravia under Habsburg rule where inquisitor Hetman Boblig presided over the burning of almost 100 "witches." In each region, trials followed different customs-Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic-and answered to different legislative discourse-ecclesiastical, laic, secular-yet all can be said to be the product of a common desire and collective fear. To supplement our understanding of the multifaceted anxieties that are expressed in works such as King James' Daemonologie (1597), and to ask more questions of the intersectional phobias around gender, sexuality, religion, and class (rural-urban; colony-metropole), we take up theory from Foucault, Federici, and Mbembe, and others.

Instructor(s): Malynne Sternstein     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 22315, GNSE 34426, HIST 32315, REES 24426, REES 34426

GNSE 24511. Kawaii (cuteness) culture in Japan and the world. 100 Units.

The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as "cute" or "adorable") has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today's conception of kawaiihas become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called "Pink Globalization". With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

Instructor(s): Nisha Kommattam     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 14510, EALC 24520, CMLT 24510, ENGL 24510

GNSE 24526. Forms of Autobiography in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. 100 Units.

This course examines the innovative, creative forms autobiography has taken in the last one hundred years in literature. We will study closely works written between 1933 and 2013 that are exceptional for the way they challenge, subvert and invigorate the autobiographical genre. From unpublished sketches to magazine essays and full-length books, we will see autobiography take many forms and engage with multiple genres and media. These include biography, memoir, fiction, literary criticism, travel literature, the graphic novel and photography. Producing various mutations of the autobiographical genre, these works address some of the same concerns: the self, truth, memory, authenticity, agency and testimony. We will complement discussions of these universal issues with material and historical considerations, examining how the works first appeared and were received. Autobiography will prove a privileged site for probing constructions of family narratives, identity politics and public personas. The main authors studied are Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, Marjane Satrapi and W.G. Sebald. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Christine Fouirnaies     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 24526, ENGL 34526, GNSE 34526

GNSE 24602. Ghosts & the Fantastic in East Asia. 100 Units.

What is a ghost? How and why are ghosts represented in particular forms in a particular culture at particular historical moments and how do these change as stories travel between cultures? This course will explore the complex meanings, both literal and figurative, of ghosts and the fantastic in traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tales, plays, and films . Issues to be explored include: 1) the relationship between the supernatural, gender, and sexuality; 2) the confrontation of death and mortality; 3) collective anxieties over the loss of the historical past 4) and the visualization (and exorcism) of ghosts through performance.

Instructor(s): J. Zeitlin     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 24603, SIGN 26006, MAPH 34602, EALC 10600

GNSE 24700. Introduction à la littérature féminine au Maroc. 100 Units.

Depuis les années 1980, la littérature féminine au Maroc connaît un essor remarquable qui se traduit dans le renouvellement du paysage littéraire et la diversité des thèmes abordés. En mettant la femme marocaine et ses expériences au centre de l'acte littéraire, les écrivaines marocaines ont brisé les tabous et insufflé une dynamique sociale et politique à l'échelle du pays. Ce cours introductif donnera un aperçu des écritures féminines au Maroc à partir de questions majeures telles que la représentation du corps et de la sexualité, le rapport à la maternité et à la transmission, le poids des traditions et des injonctions sociales, les combats politiques, les droits des femmes ainsi que les luttes contre la discrimination et la violence. Parmi les autrices étudiées figurent Fatima Mernissi, Fatna El Bouih, Leila Abouzeid, Siham Benchekroun et Yasmine Chami. This is an introductory-level course. Taught in French.

Instructor(s): Khalid Lyamlahy     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): FREN 20500, 20503 or consent of the instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 24700

GNSE 24770. Sex, Crime and Horror in Argentine Literature. 100 Units.

This course examines the historical evolution of Argentine literature, cinema, and the visual arts through the study of three thematic currents that significantly influenced Argentina's cultural and socio-political experience with nation-building, modernization, and democracy: sex, crime, and horror. The primary objective of the course is to foster a critical exploration of how foundational works of Romanticism and Realism in the Río de la Plata, the Noir genre, and the Gothic tradition accounted for decisive changes in the social fabric of the country. Students will assess the role of sexuality, crime, and horror stories in the representation of momentous events in Argentine history, spanning from the revolutionary era in the nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Topics include the Wars of Independence, gaucho literature, indigenous resistance, the great migratory flows, the rise of the middle classes, Peronismo, Youth culture, military dictatorships, human rights violations, LGBT movements, and economic precarity in neoliberal times. Works by Esteban Echeverría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juana Manuela Gorriti, José Hernández, Lucio V. and Eduarda Mansilla, Eugenio Cambaceres, Leopoldo Lugones, Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan José Saer, Antonio Di Benedetto, Olga Orozco, Alejandra Pizarnik, Juan Gelman, Andrés Rivera, Silvina Ocampo, Horacio Quiroga, Rodolfo Walsh, Manuel Puig, Ricardo Piglia, Mariana Enríquez, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, María Luisa Bemberg,

Instructor(s): Carlos Halaburda      Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Reading proficiency in Spanish required.
Note(s): Class discussions and reading materials in Spanish.
Equivalent Course(s): SPAN 24770, GNSE 34771, LACS 24770, LACS 34770, RDIN 34770, SPAN 34770, RDIN 24770

GNSE 24903. Religion and Human Rights. 100 Units.

Religion played a crucial, but often overlooked, role in the development of post-World War II conceptions of human rights, providing principles and ideas that continue to influence contemporary human rights debates in the fields of law, public policy, and international relations. This no-prior-knowledge-necessary course explores the complex, sometimes fraught, relationship between religion and human rights from World War II to the present. We will begin by juxtaposing the role religious ideas played in the drafting of core post-war human rights documents (e.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, etc.) with the decision by drafters to omit direct references to the divine or the beliefs of specific religious communities. Using case study analysis and close reading of primary religious texts, scholarly commentary, and historical accounts, we will examine the ways in which individuals and groups from multiple religious (and non-religious) traditions both apply and push back against existing human rights norms. Throughout the course we will discuss the role religion might play in debates surrounding emerging, but still contentious, conceptions of human rights. This includes: universal healthcare, LGBTQIA+ rights, ever more complex manifestations of religious freedom, as well as whether human rights as conceived of in the mid-20th Century can be reconciled with decolonial and post-colonial perspectives.

Equivalent Course(s): DEMS 24901, GLST 24902, HMRT 24901, RLST 24901

GNSE 25020. Opera Across Media. 100 Units.

Open to all undergraduates. Over the course of the last hundred and twenty years, opera and cinema have been sounded and seen together again and again. Where opera is commonly associated with extravagant performance and production, cinema is popularly associated realism. Yet their encounter not only proves these assumptions wrong but produces some extraordinary third kinds-media hybrids. It also produces some extraordinary love affairs. Thomas Edison wanted a film of his to be "a grand opera," and Federico Fellini and Woody Allen wanted opera to saturate their films. Thinking about these mutual attractions, "Opera across Media" explores different operatic and cinematic repertories as well as other media forms. Among films to be studied are Pabst's Threepenny Opera (1931), Visconti's Senso (1954), Powell and Pressburger's Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Zeffirelli's La traviata (1981), De Mille's Carmen (1915), Losey's Don Giovanni (1979), Bergman's The Magic Flute (1975), and Fellini's E la nave va (1983). No prior background in music performance, theory, or notation is needed. Students may write papers based on their own skills and interests relevant to the course. Required work includes attendance at all screenings and classes; weekly postings on Canvas about readings and viewings; attendances at a Met HD broadcast and a Lyric Opera live opera; a short "think piece" midway through the course; and a final term paper of 8-10 pages.

Instructor(s): Martha Feldman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Open to all undergraduates
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 13020, TAPS 26516, ITAL 25020, MUSI 25020, SIGN 26058, CMST 24617

GNSE 25031. The Writing I. 100 Units.

How do personal and lived experiences shape our understanding of social and cultural phenomena? What is the role of the self in the practice of academic writing? In this course we will examine the self as a method through which we interpret the world and as a repository of knowledge. We will study different academic genres in which personal and lived experiences constitute an integral component of knowledge-making, such as autoethnography and autotheory, discussing their relation to feminist thought. We will also practice and share academic writing that engages the self as a method to understand, interpret and theorize the world around us. The readings will include Lauren Fournier, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Shushan Avagyan, Stephanie D. Clare, Donna Haraway, among many others. There will also be workshops/talks by practitioners of autoethnography and autotheory.

Equivalent Course(s): REES 25030, REES 35030, GNSE 35031

GNSE 25055. Uncertain Futures: A Sociology of Times to Come. 100 Units.

Between global militarism, intensive inequality, and climate catastrophe, the future looks uncertain. This class engages lay, scholarly and fictional futurisms-particularly emerging from Queer, Indigenous and Black traditions. We will read sociological and anthropological texts that consider how different communities envision the decades and centuries to come alongside speculative fiction that theorizes where earth and humanity are heading. Does humanity have a future? How does that future look? How do differing answers to these questions shape individuals' and communities' lives and decisions?

Instructor(s): E. Abdelhadi     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): C; 3
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 35055, CHDV 25055, CHDV 35055

GNSE 25118. Islam, Politics and Gender. 100 Units.

This course examines the relationship Islam and politics with a focus on gender and sexuality. For this class, politics is broadly construed, including religious law, family law, social issues, and war. Gender is an inextricable part of Islamic law, and the connection between Islam and the state pervades scholars' understanding and interpretation of political development in the Muslim world. While many texts and discussions will focus on women, gender is considered expansively. We will consider the role of sex in religious law, as well as sexual identity, gender identity, and sexual orientation. We will also incorporate areas outside of the Islamic "heartland" of the Middle East, such as Europe and Asia.

Instructor(s): Hannah Ridge, Pozen Center for Human Rights Postdoctoral Instructor     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 35118, GNSE 35118, HMRT 25118

GNSE 25180. Women Writing God. 100 Units.

This course examines imaginative works by women that take on the task of representing divine or supernatural being from the medieval era to the present. Drawing on the work of critics such as Luce Irigaray, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Judith Butler, we explore what strategies these writers employ to depict an entity simultaneously understood to be unrepresentable and to have a masculine image. Texts range from premodern mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. (Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Instructor consent required for first and second year undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20180, MAPH 40180, ENGL 40180, GNSE 45180

GNSE 25218. Reading Nonhuman Animals: A Challenge to Anthropocentrism. 100 Units.

How can we "read" a literary nonhuman animal? In what ways does literature deal with ethical and political issues concerning nonhuman animals? What does it mean to live in a multicultural and multispecies world? What does it mean to be "human"? In this course we will ask these and other related questions as they are presented and represented in Italian 20th century literary texts, read alongside philosophical writings, scholarly essays, and visual materials. While maintaining a focus on Italian literature, a comparative approach involving literary works of non-Italian authors will be key in understanding the pervasiveness of the problems that have caused our detachment from nature and our broken relationship with nonhuman animals. We will closely analyze and critically evaluate the works of several authors, including those by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Anna Maria Ortese, Elsa Morante, Italo Svevo, Alice Walker, and Franz Kafka, giving particular attention to techniques of close reading. A thematic approach will enable us to explore a large number of critical discourses, from the moral status of nonhuman animals to the long-held assumptions regarding the anthropocentric set of values that have defined (Western) culture. We will also take into consideration different theoretical frameworks such as posthumanist theory and gender studies in order to discuss and evaluate the selected texts from different perspectives and entry points.

Instructor(s): E. Tavella
Note(s): Taught in English. No previous knowledge of Italian is required. Course not offered in 24-25.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 25218, ITAL 25218

GNSE 25311. The Harem: Gender, Family and Power in Early Modern and Modern South Asia. 100 Units.

Even today, the word "harem" evokes orientalist imaginings of an exotic east. Popular images drawn from colonial-era representations continue to define our understanding of this complex institution. In this course we will work to complicate this understanding through considering the harem as a site of interplay between gender, family ties, and power. Taking into account influences from the larger Islamicate world as well as more local, Indic practices, we will historicize the harem, tracking its changes over the course of this long period, and critiquing its various (mis)representations. We will explore how the harem constituted a diverse space including not only elite women and their male relatives, but also other figures such as slave girls, eunuchs and guards. We will furthermore look at how this space was transformed in the era of European expansionism and colonial rule in the subcontinent, becoming a flash point over questions of social reform and Indian nationalism. Materials will include not just secondary literature but also excerpts from contemporary historical accounts, paintings, short stories, photographs, and films. No prior knowledge of South Asian history required.

Equivalent Course(s): HIST 26612, SALC 25311

GNSE 25403. The Bible in U.S. Politics: The Use and Abuse of Sacred Texts in the Public. 100 Units.

People across the political spectrum continue to cite the Bible to justify their viewpoints. Black Lives Matter protestors carried signs citing scriptural support for the rights of African Americans to life and justice, while some of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th first marched around their state capitols in recreation of biblical Israel's circling of the doomed city Jericho. How can the same book serve the political ends of such ideologically distinct movements? In this course, we will explore the variety of ways in which the Bible, especially the Christian New Testament, informs contemporary political discourse. We will discuss what the Bible is and where it comes from, and how an interpreter's social location and culturally and historical-bound assumptions shape their interpretation. We will build upon this foundation by examining several contentious political issues in which the Bible is commonly invoked, including abortion, sexuality, immigration, and gun rights. We will analyze the key passages used by supporters of various policy positions to support their claims, situating these texts in their original contexts and highlighting the historical distance that problematizes their use today. Prior familiarity with biblical literature is not required.

Instructor(s): Douglas Hoffer     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 25400, KNOW 25400, AMER 25400, FNDL 25405

GNSE 25474. Crossing Boundaries: Virtual Reality, Embodiment, and the Reimagining of Social Space. 100 Units.

In this course, we explore the potential for Virtual Reality (VR) experiences to push multiple boundaries: redefining bodies, crossing borders, and reimagining social spaces. In the first weeks of the course, as we think about bodies in the virtual space, we will be asking questions related to embodiment and representation: how does the process of avatar creation reinforce or dismantle assumptions about gender readability and performance? How do immersive experiences induce feelings of gender euphoria and dysphoria? The following weeks we will explore and discuss the way VR experiences can engage with the concept of physical borders-calling their existence into questions in some cases, making them particularly salient in others. We will discuss virtual travel, digital border-crossing, and explore art installations that reflect on migration experiences. The final weeks will build on our previous conversations, and together we will reflect on the fluid meaning of space in a virtual setting and on the creative possibilities that such fluidity entails: What does it mean to reimagine space beyond physical limitations? How do we understand the political salience of taking up space in digitally built social environments? The course combines readings and theoretical conversations with hands-on experiences in VR and explorations of virtual worlds. Previous experience with VR is not required. We will share a limited number of headsets that will be available for use in class.

Instructor(s): Caterina Fugazzola     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 25474, MADD 10474

GNSE 25506. Grandes voix féminines des Lettres africaines. 100 Units.

Ce cours s'intéresse aux œuvres des écrivaines francophones majeures de l'Afrique sub-saharienne dont Mariama Bâ, Aminata Sow Fall, Fatou Diome, Léonora Miano, Scholastique Mukasonga, et Véronique Tadjo. Il s'agit d'étudier les thématiques abordées par ces auteures et les techniques qu'elles utilisent non seulement pour représenter et repenser la condition de la femme africaine mais aussi pour contribuer activement aux débats socioculturels et politiques qui résonnent à travers le continent et sa diaspora. Dans ce cours, on analysera les questions d'engagement, de résistance et d'émancipation telles que mises en scène par des voix féminines africaines qui luttent contre les préjugés et opposent aux stéréotypes la diversité et le dynamisme de leurs créations.

Instructor(s): Khalid Lyamlahy     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25.
Prerequisite(s): FREN 20500 or 20503
Note(s): Taught in French.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 35506, FREN 35505, FREN 25505

GNSE 25560. Race, Religion, and the Formation of the Latinx Identity. 100 Units.

In this class, we will focus on the conditions of possibility, development, and problems surrounding the formation of the Latinx identity. We will pay special attention to how such an identity is expressed through and informed by religious experience, and to how religious experience is theoretically articulated in Latinx theology and religious thought. To pursue this task, we will devote the first part of the class to the examination of the conditions of possibility of latinidad by focusing on the formation of the Latinx self. What makes Latines, Latines? Is this a forcefully assigned identity or one that can be claimed and embraced with pride? Is there such a thing as a unified Latinx self or shall we favor approaches that stress hybridity or multiplicity? In the second part of the class, we will shift from self-formation to community-formation by examining the experience of mestizaje (racial mixing) and its theoretical articulation in Latinx theology. Is this concept useful to describe the Latinx experience or does it romanticize the violence of European colonialism? Lastly, we will return to the formation of Latinx identity considering the ambiguities of religious ethnic identity through the examples of tensions between Catholic and Evangelical Latinos, and those emerging from the experiences of Latinos converting to non-Christian religions. No prerequisites.

Instructor(s): Raul Zegarra     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 25560, KNOW 25560, LACS 25560, RLST 25560

GNSE 25724. Yes, but make it fashion!" Fashion, Culture, and Identity. 100 Units.

In this course, we will explore the role of fashion in socio-cultural life, and the ways in which fashion simultaneously expresses and is shaped by identity. How do communities on the margins challenge dominant ideas of beauty, modesty, freedom, desire, and fashion? Conversely, how does fashion on the margins become mainstream? Drawing on studies across disciplines and the world, we will use fashion as a lens to examine among other things, blackness, queerness, masculinities, caste, Islam, and occupation.

Instructor(s): Anindita Chatterjee     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 25724

GNSE 25910. bell hooks and Cornel West: Education for Resistance. 100 Units.

Cornel West and bell hooks are two of the most influential philosophers and cultural critics of the past half-century. Their writings-including their co-authored book-address pressing questions about politics, religion, race, education, film, and gender. In different ways, they each find resources for hope, love, and liberation in an unjust social order. In this course, we will read selections from their writings over the last forty years alongside the authors who influenced their thinking (including Du Bois, Freire, Morrison, King, and Baldwin). We will pay special attention to how hooks and West communicate to popular audiences, how they engage religious traditions (their own and others'), and the role of dialogue in their thought and practice. The goal of the course is not just to think about hooks and West, but to think with them about ethics, writing, American culture, and the aims of education. No prior familiarity with either author is required.

Instructor(s): Russell Johnson     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 22910, RLST 25910, FNDL 25911

GNSE 25997. Three Comedies of Sexual Revolution. 100 Units.

This seminar will discuss three comedies of sexual revolution from three different times and places. Aristophanes's Assemblywomen recounts how under the leadership of the able Praxagora the women of Athens take over the Assembly and legislate a new regime in which private property is replaced by communism and sexual equity is achieved in favor of the old and unattractive at the expense of the young and attractive. Machiavelli's Mandragola dramatizes the tricks by which young Callimaco manages with the aid of the trickster parasite Ligurio to have sex with Lucrezia, the beautiful young wife of the elderly lawyer Nicomaco, with the consent of both her and her husband, ushering in a new regime in which all are satisfied. In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure Angelo the interim duke of Vienna institutes a repressive sexual regime in which the brothels are closed and extramarital sex is a capital crime. What might we learn about sexual relations from these diverse plays? Why are they comedies?

Instructor(s): Nathan Tarcov & Glenn Most      Terms Offered: Spring. Spring 2024
Prerequisite(s): Undergraduates need the Instructor's permission to register.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 35997, GNSE 35997, PLSC 35997, SCTH 25823, CLCV 27623, CMLT 25823, SCTH 35997, CLAS 37623, PLSC 25997, FNDL 21772

GNSE 26003. Introduction à l'autobiographie. 100 Units.

This course traces the history of the autobiographical genre in France from the eighteenth century to the present. The study of key texts will be accompanied by an introduction to some critical perspectives. We will give special emphasis to questions of reference and authenticity, identity and subject formation, and gender and the family. Authors include Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Colette, Perec, and Sarraute.

Instructor(s): A. James     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25.
Prerequisite(s): FREN 20500 or 20503
Note(s): Taught in French. This is an introductory-level course.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 26003

GNSE 26034. Russian Poetry. 100 Units.

What should poetry do-should it have any tasks (personal, literary, political)? In this course, we read short texts that stun, adore, inspire, grieve, mobilize, berate, forgive or forget their addressees and subjects, that reach (or fail to reach) us, their almost-certainly unintended, contemporary readers. Meeting both canonical and forgotten authors across three centuries and many countries of Russophone writing, this course *has* a task: to find what the poems conceal and reveal about their worlds--and ours. If you love poetry, or you have some knowledge of Russian, or you have taken the Russia and Eurasia Civ Core sequence, this class is a good fit for you. The syllabus is finalized with students' preferences and curiosities in mind. Assignment options include creative projects, independent research, journaling or essays. Discussion of texts will focus on gender, religion, race, imperial subjectivity, and dissent.

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 26034, GNSE 36034, REES 36034

GNSE 26210. Witches, Sinners, and Saints. 100 Units.

This course examines representations of women's bodies and sexualities in early modern Iberian and colonial Latin American writings. We will study the body through a variety of lenses: the anatomical body as a site of construction of sexual difference, the witch's body as a site of sexual excess, the mystic's body as a double of the possessed body, the tortured body as a site of knowledge production, and the racialized bodies of women as sites to govern sexuality, spirituality, labor, and property in the reaches of the Spanish Empire.

Instructor(s): Larissa Brewer-García     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25.
Prerequisite(s): For undergrads: SPAN 20300 or consent of instructor.
Note(s): Taught in Spanish.
Equivalent Course(s): SPAN 36210, SPAN 26210, LACS 26212, GNSE 36210, CRES 36220, LACS 36212, CRES 26220

GNSE 26240. Black Experimentation in Dance. 100 Units.

In this course, experimentation is explored as a choreographic approach to dancing and making dances. Grounded in process, practice, inquiry, and improvisation, experimentation has a long history in Black expressive culture. This class pairs readings at the intersection of Black performance theory, feminist and queer of color theory, and Black dance studies with examples of dance performances and artists interrogating topics such as the problem of aesthetic categorization, navigating racial visibility/invisibility onstage, and the politics of Black dancing bodies. The class focuses on concert dance in the United States, but may cover examples from social dance, popular entertainment, performance art, and global contexts.

Instructor(s): Tara Aisha Willis     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 36240, TAPS 36240, TAPS 26240, CRES 26240

GNSE 26255. Get Cultured in Nine Weeks: Historical Perspectives on Art and Education. 100 Units.

Get Cultured in Nine Weeks: Historical Perspectives on Art and Education: What does it mean to 'get cultured'? Why-and how-do we do it? Does an education in the arts and letters make us more moral, more intelligent, more resistant to authority-or perhaps more submissive? These questions are at the center of debates about the place of cultural learning in the contemporary world, but our century was not the first to think critically about the social and political functions of this form of education. This course investigates how students, educators, writers, and artists conceptualized the aims and means of becoming cultured from the 1700s forward, focusing on European history and connecting it to the concerns of the present. We will pay particularly close attention to both formal and informal means of cultural education, and to the ways in which these practices have been understood to produce social structures of class, gender, and race. Readings will draw from the fields of history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and art history. At the end of the quarter, students will be asked to design their own fantasy syllabus for "getting cultured in nine weeks."

Instructor(s): Sophie Salvo and Alice Goff     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 36225, ARTH 26225, SIGN 26225, GRMN 26225, HIST 32510, GNSE 36255, HIST 22510

GNSE 26301. Women in French Literature. 100 Units.

TBD

Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 36301, FREN 26300

GNSE 26305. Moral Reasoning Between Church and State: The Case of Abortion. 100 Units.

What is the moral reasoning of those inspired by Christianity to overturn Roe v. Wade? Given constitutional blocks on the state's establishment of religion, how do Christians justify legislating religiously-grounded moral beliefs? How do these Christians imagine the role of the church in secular democratic space? What is the nature of their religious lives? Under what mandates do they operate? What scriptures do they read? What worship do they participate in? This course takes a close look at those vocationally-even, "spiritually"-called to severely limit women's reproductive rights. Specific attention will be given to how these communities understand God, scripture, gender, family, government, democracy, law, freedom, etc. While much of the course's attention will be given to arguments and rationales (including legal and judicial arguments and rationales), equal attention will be given to ethnographically understanding the lived experience of ardent pro-life advocacy. The course will conclude by examining religiously-inspired pro-choice alternatives to pro-life positions, with specific attention to how carefully pro-choice advocates attend to the arguments and worldviews of their pro-life counterparts. A wide range of texts and types of texts will be considered.

Instructor(s): Jonathan Tran     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course meets the CS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): THEO 36305, RLST 26305, GNSE 36305

GNSE 26313. Judaism, Medicine, and the Body. 100 Units.

For centuries the "Jewish doctor" has existed as an archetype, but is there such a thing as Jewish medicine? Does Judaism teach a distinct approach to the body, illness, and healing? And more significantly, why should religion have anything to do with one's health today? In this course we will grapple with our assumptions regarding modern Western medicine by discussing topics in Jewish medical thought and ethics. We will study how Judaism - its texts, history, laws, and traditions - intersect with issues of science, medicine, and the body. In particular we will think about how a Jewish approach to medicine, and more broadly a religious approach, might complicate contemporary assumptions about the body and healing. We will also consider how Jewish bodies have been imagined and stereotyped, and think about how that might affect Jewish approaches to disease and medical ethics. This course will thus offer students a way to think about alternatives to assumptions about medicine, the body, and ethics in the secular West, which will be explored both in class materials and in personal projects. No prior work in Jewish studies, medical ethics, or religious studies necessary.

Instructor(s): Ranana Dine     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 26313, HIPS 26313, CCTS 21022, KNOW 26313, JWSC 26313, HLTH 26313

GNSE 26504. Renaissance Demonology. 100 Units.

In this course we analyze the complex concept of demonology according to early modern European culture from a theological, historical, philosophical, and literary point of view. The term 'demon' in the Renaissance encompasses a vast variety of meanings. Demons are hybrids. They are both the Christian devils, but also synonyms for classical deities, and Neo-platonic spiritual beings. As far as Christian theology is concerned, we read selections from Augustine's and Thomas Aquinas's treatises, some complex exorcisms written in Italy, and a recent translation of the infamous "Malleus maleficarum," the most important treatise on witch-hunt. We pay close attention to the historical evolution of the so-called witch-craze in Europe through a selection of the best secondary literature on this subject, with special emphasis on Michel de Certeau's "The Possession at Loudun." We also study how major Italian and Spanish women mystics, such as Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi and Teresa of Avila, approach the issue of demonic temptation and possession. As far as Renaissance Neoplatonic philosophy is concerned, we read selections from Marsilio Ficino's "Platonic Theology" and Girolamo Cardano's mesmerizing autobiography. We also investigate the connection between demonology and melancholy through a close reading of the initial section of Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" and Cervantes's short story "The Glass Graduate" ("El licenciado Vidriera").

Instructor(s): Armando Maggi     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Course taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 22110, CMLT 27602, ITAL 26500, RLST 26501

GNSE 26624. Repression, Resilience, and Gender Politics in Basque Cultural Memory. 100 Units.

This course aims to explore the resilient character of contemporary Basque artistic and cultural production, with a particular focus on the increasing presence of strong female voices. One of the goals will be to explore forms of Basque cultural resistance that question the silencing and homogenizing tendencies of political institutions and their cultural hegemony, thus shedding light on both the dialectic between culture and counterculture and the mechanisms and agents of artistic censorship that come into play. Significant attention will also be given to the narrative poetics of the post-ETA period, during which works by female authors have played a leading role in examining the gender policies that have governed the so-called Basque conflict. The link established between the female figure and the transmission of a "dangerous" memory must be interpreted in the light of the current historical moment characterized by the struggle for the telling of the past and the interrogation of gender. Thus, with a focus on memory and gender, and drawing upon a diverse range of materials -including literary texts, sculptural works, music, and films- the course will provide students with a broad overview of contemporary culture in the Basque Country.

Instructor(s): Amaia Elizalde Estenaga
Note(s): Classes will be conducted in Spanish, and prior knowledge of the Basque language or culture is not necessary.
Equivalent Course(s): SPAN 36624, BASQ 26624, BASQ 36624, GNSE 36624, SPAN 26624

GNSE 26700. Jeanne d'Arc, histoire et legende. 100 Units.

S'appuyant sur l'exemple de Jeanne d'Arc, ce cours s'intéressera à la manière dont nous transformons le passé à la lumière des besoins et des soucis du présent. Nous situerons Jeanne d'Arc dans son contexte historique à l'aide des documents légaux, littéraires, et ecclésiastiques. Nous considérerons ensuite les représentations multiples et variées de Jeanne au cours des siècles suivants, examinant par exemple des textes de Voltaire, de Michelet, d'Anouilh, et d'autres, ainsi que des films qui présentent la vie de Jeanne d'Arc.

Instructor(s): Daisy Delogu     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25.
Prerequisite(s): FREN 20500, 20503 or a literature course taught in French.
Note(s): Taught in French.
Equivalent Course(s): MDVL 26700, FREN 26700

GNSE 26994. Anticolonial Worlding: Literature, Film, Thought. 100 Units.

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the role of the cultural Cold War in shaping anticolonial aesthetics and politics during the twentieth century as well as its impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was characterized by an expansion of anticolonial festivals, exchanges, and congresses and marked by political crises and coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, Soviet and US imperial expansion, and the May 1968 student protests. We will explore how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, gender, and language politics. Exploring anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance.

Instructor(s): Leah Feldman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 26994, HMRT 26994, CMLT 36994, RDIN 26994, NEHC 26994, REES 26994, RDIN 36994, ENGL 26994, GNSE 36994

GNSE 27006. Research in Archives: Human Bodies in History. 100 Units.

How have we come to know and experience our bodies? This undergraduate seminar develops humanities research skills necessary to study the body in history. Spanning early modern cultural practices to modern medicine, science, and technology, this course explores how ideas and practices concerning the body have changed over time and how the body itself is shaped by culture and society. A major focus will be learning how to conduct different forms of historical research to produce cutting-edge humanities scholarship about the human body. Readings will introduce key themes and recent scholarship including work on disability, reproduction, race, gender, ethics, extreme environments, and identity. This dynamic research group will grapple with issues at the heart of our corporeal existence by combining perspectives from the history of science, medicine, and technology, cultural history, anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS).

Instructor(s): J. Bimm and I. Clever     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course partially fulfills the research seminar requirement for the IRHUM major.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 25513, IRHU 27006, KNOW 26076, HIPS 27706

GNSE 27300. Le Roman de la Rose. 100 Units.

The "Roman de la Rose" (mid-13th century), a sprawling, encyclopedic summa composed by two separate authors, was arguably the single most influential vernacular text of the Middle Ages. Whether they hated or admired it, subsequent writers could not escape the long shadow cast by this magisterial œuvre. And, as Kate Soper's recent opera adaptation of the "Rose" demonstrates, this labyrinthine work remains a source of creative inspiration. In this course we will read the "Rose" together. Each student will choose a critical lens (e.g. gender and sexuality, animal and/or ecocritical studies, ethics and philosophy, reception studies, manuscript studies, text & image, etc.) to structure their engagement with the text, and together we will collaborate to chart a rich and diverse set of interpretive paths through this complex work.

Instructor(s): Daisy Delogu     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): For French majors/minors, FREN 20500, 20503 or a previous literature course taught in French.
Note(s): All registered students will attend the cours magistral (taught in English). In addition, all registered students will select and attend either the French discussion section, or the critical theory section. Students are welcome to attend both.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 21700, FREN 31700, MDVL 21700, GNSE 37300, FNDL 21700

GNSE 27301. Harm Reduction and HIV Prevention in the Overdose Era. 100 Units.

We will discuss some of the debates around harm reduction, some of the cutting-edge harm reduction strategies, HIV prevention and the communities and populations most impacted by overdose and other related health conditions.

Instructor(s): Harold Pollack, John A. Schneider     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third and fourth-year standing.
Equivalent Course(s): BPRO 27300

GNSE 27332. Themes in the Anthropology of Islam: Debates, Tradition, Critiques. 100 Units.

The course begins by examining principal themes and debates the anthropology of Islam has engaged with in its attempt to undo Western universalist concepts such as secularism and the anthropological categories of culture and religion. We will learn to historicize these concepts and explore alternative frameworks anthropologists have offered for studying Muslim societies. We will turn an ethnographic lens towards studies on the Islamic Revival in Egypt, Turkey, Europe, and East Asia in order to study how Muslims cultivate piety, relate to the unseen, and retain cultural ties alongside their religious identities. In the process, we will learn the ways they trouble conventional notions around women's agency, ideas around modernity's "disenchantment," and secular conceptions of belief. We will then explore texts that indirectly problematize the anthropology of Islam's coordinates around orthopraxy, authority, and ritual. As we do so, we will interrogate the relationship between U.S. Blackness and Islam, religious piety and consumer capitalism, as well as transnationalism and incarceration. We will situate our readings and discussions within the broader political context of the Global War on Terror and secular governmentality, with a particular attention to questions of race, gender, and political struggle.

Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 24332, RDIN 24332, RLST 27332

GNSE 27508. Women and the Mafia in Contemporary Italian Cinema. 100 Units.

This course will examine how gender dynamics within mafia contexts have been represented in a selection of Italian films. Students will engage in cinematic analysis by drawing from sociological and psychological studies on female roles in relation to organized crime. Both these fields, sociology and psychology, have underscored the important part that women play in relation to the mafia, notwithstanding the rigid patriarchal structure that allows only male affiliation. Although focusing primarily on Sicilian mafia, this course will include information on other types of Italian mafia, namely Camorra, 'Ndrangheta and Sacra Corona Unita. Vocabulary in Italian to identify formal elements of the films will be provided throughout the course.

Instructor(s): Veronica Vegna
Prerequisite(s): ITAL 20300 or consent of instructor.
Note(s): Taught in Italian. Course not offered in 24-25.
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 27500

GNSE 27544. Unfinished Business: Revenge and Narrative Form. 100 Units.

What does it mean for something-a concept, an object, a historical inheritance-to "return with a vengeance"? Is revenge motivated by a desire for justice-a clear if ruthless commitment to equivalence-or does it demonstrate a drive towards excess? Does revenge restore order to a system of accounting, or does it compound wrongs that could never have been righted in the first place? Whom exactly is the post-breakup "revenge body" for? As these questions suggest, revenge possesses a special knack for confusing categories of self and other, and resurrecting uncertainties when it comes to cause and effect. Its resistance to closure makes it a complex model for social relation and narrative form. Revenge also has no respect for scale. Making no pretension to being impersonal or detached, revenge is linked to more minor forms like pettiness or grudges. Yet revenge plots often address scales far beyond the personal: events or contexts unfolding at the register of the historical, the intergenerational, the global. Revenge thus undoes unsustainable dichotomies between subject and object, social and individual, and more. We will explore revenge in novels and films alongside theories of revenge: psychoanalytic theories of fixation and the refusal to mourn, queer theorists and affect theorists writing on disaffection and alien affects, and even self-help writers counseling against the self-destructive, corrosive effects of not letting something go.

Instructor(s): Shirl Yang     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 27554, CRES 27554

GNSE 27606. Beyond Ferrante: Italian Women Writers Rediscovered and the Global Editorial Market. 100 Units.

In this class we read selected works from some of the most influential Italian women writers who are not named Elena Ferrante. Some of these writers contributed to the cultural and literary background that produced Ferrante as well. Others can be seen as Ferrante's peers and even heirs. The remarkable global success of Ferrante's work has created the so-called "Ferrante effect." Both in Italy and abroad, editors and scholars are finally paying attention to long overlooked Italian women writers. We will explore this trend of reissues, new publications, and new translations. How has the Ferrante effect recast our assumptions about literary value? Can restorative justice take place within the global editorial market? Is it legitimate to speak about an editorial affirmative action? What is the relationship between Italian periphery and the dominant literary empire? Among the authors we will read are classics--such as Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and Anna Maria Ortese--but also new and overlooked voices--such as Fabrizia Ramondino, Fausta Cialente, Paola Masino, Brianna Carafa, Claudia Durastanti, and Veronica Raimo.

Instructor(s): Maria Anna Mariani
Note(s): Taught in Italian. Course not offered in 24-25.
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 27600, GLST 27600

GNSE 27608. Women and Islam. 100 Units.

This course is an introduction to the field of women, gender and Islam. We will examine the literature on Islamic legal, historical, Quranic and sacred textual constructs of women as well as critically explore the lived realities and experiences of Muslim women living in Muslim-majority societies and in the west. In centering the work of Muslim feminist scholars, students will gain an understanding of the contemporary debates around women's rights, sexuality, roles, responsibilities and gender relations in the context of Islamic law and the hadith literature. The discursive constructions and social realities of Muslim women are critically examined through historic and literary representations, ethnographic accounts, human rights discourses, sexual politics and secular and Islamic feminism(s). Moreover, this course situates Muslim women as complex, multidimensional actors engaged in knowledge production and political and feminist struggles, as opposed to the oppressed, victim-centered images that have regained currency in the representation of Muslim women in the post 9/11 era.

Instructor(s): Maliha Chishti     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course meets the LMCS or SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 27601, GLST 27601, ISLM 37601, RLST 27601, GNSE 37608

GNSE 27702. Music and Love in South Asia. 100 Units.

This course explores the relationship between the musical arts and forms of love in South Asian history. We will trace the complex and ambivalent contours of love in several genres including premodern poetry, stage performance, and Bollywood movies. We will examine issues such as poetics and theology, opposition to orthodox social conventions, the intensity of emotion expressed through multiple senses, the social sites of forbidden love, women and gender as poets and performers, and the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.

Instructor(s): Anand Venkatkrishnan; Anna Schultz     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course meets the HS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 27703, MUSI 37702, GNSE 37702, MUSI 27702, RLST 27702, SALC 37703, RLVC 37702, HREL 37702

GNSE 27880. Gendering Arabs: Embodiment, Agency, Affect. 100 Units.

This course explores the diverse ways that gender and sexuality are represented in contemporary cultural texts-film, fiction, and art-from the Middle East and North Africa. These creative works will be paired with critical writings from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives (gender studies, queer theory, affect theory, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, Islamic studies, and activist literature). While we will attend to the layered histories and legacies of colonialism, orientalism, globalization, military occupation, and war, our goal is to center gender discourses and practices as they are negotiated, performed, and contested by artists, writers, and thinkers in and from the region. Our readings and films emphasize how questions of agency, affect, and embodiment shape the lifeworlds and creative imaginaries of cultural producers from the Middle East and North Africa.

Instructor(s): Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): NB: This course is designed for undergraduates and MA students. PhD Students will not be admitted.
Equivalent Course(s): ISLM 37880, RLST 27880, GNSE 37880, AASR 37880, CHDV 27880, ENGL 27880, ENGL 37880, CMLT 37880, CMLT 27880

GNSE 28103. Regendering the Medieval Body Politic. 100 Units.

TBD

Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 38103, FREN 38102, FREN 28102

GNSE 28122. Diasporic Practices in Contemporary Art. 100 Units.

The class will examine various phenomena of "Diasporic Practices in Contemporary Art", such as fragmented histories, the question of origin(ality), the limits of translation, social belonging and "the chosen family", and (over-)representation of origin. In class we will discuss readings by (a.o.) Grada Kilomba, Adrian Piper, Éduard Glissant, Langston Hughes, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Hito Steyerl. Students will be asked to present on contemporary artists highlighting their diasporic strategies, while also producing creative works through assignments that employ diasporic strategies and that will be discussed in class.

Instructor(s): J. Phillips     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): ARTV 10100, 10200 or 10300
Note(s): Please email Julia Phillips juliaphillips@uchicago.edu with a brief description of how your work relates to a diasporic experience and/or your personal investment in the subject (150-300 words).
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 24122, CRES 24122, ARTH 24122, ARTV 34122, GNSE 38122

GNSE 28230. Fashion and Change: The Theory of Fashion. 100 Units.

This course offers a representative view of foundational and recent fashion theory and history, with a historical focus on the long modern era extending from the eighteenth century to the present. While engaging the general aesthetic and commercial phenomenon of fashion, we will also devote special attention to fashion as a discourse preoccupied with the problem of cultural change-the surprisingly difficult question of how and why change does or does not happen. We will aim for a broader appreciation of fashion's inner workings, but we will also confront the long tradition of thinking culture itself through fashion, to ask whether and how we might also do the same. Open to third- and fourth-years with consent. (Literary/Critical Theory; 20th/21s

Instructor(s): Timothy Campbell     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 28230, GNSE 38230, ENGL 38230

GNSE 28600. Pasolini. 100 Units.

This course examines each aspect of Pasolini's artistic production according to the most recent literary and cultural theories, including Gender Studies. We shall analyze his poetry (in particular "Le Ceneri di Gramsci" and "Poesie informa di rosa"), some of his novels ("Ragazzi di vita," "Una vita violenta," "Teorema," "Petrolio"), and his numerous essays on the relationship between standard Italian and dialects, semiotics and cinema, and the role of intellectuals in contemporary Western culture. We shall also discuss the following films: "Accattone," "La ricotta," "Edipo Re," "Teorema," and "Salo".

Instructor(s): Armando Maggi
Note(s): Taught in English. Course not offered in 24-25.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 33500, ITAL 38400, CMST 23500, FNDL 28401, ITAL 28400, GNSE 38600

GNSE 28640. The Book of Ruth: Bible, Literature, Gender. 100 Units.

The Book of Ruth offers the most elaborate tale of a woman to be found in the Bible, but even this relatively detailed account is astonishingly laconic. The Book of Ruth is not really a book. It is only four chapters long - more of a short story, or a very short story, than a book. And yet, despite its ellipses, Ruth's cryptic tale is remarkable for its capacity to provide, with but few vignettes, a vibrant portrait of one of the most intriguing characters in the Bible. The first part of this course will be devoted to the biblical text itself. We will consider literary and feminist readings of the Book of Ruth while exploring broader issues of biblical poetics. Special attention will be given to questions of migration - to different accounts of the Book of Ruth as a paradigmatic tale of a migrant woman. The second part of the course will be devoted to the reception of the Book of Ruth - from the Midrash and the Zohar to modern literature. Among the modern and contemporary writers to be considered: S. Y. Agnon, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, and Michal Ben-Naftali. The discussion will also entail an exploration of adaptations of the Book of Ruth in art - from Nicholas Poussin to Adi Nes.

Instructor(s): Ilana Pardes     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): BIBL 38640, CMLT 38640, RLST 22640, FNDL 28640, GNSE 38640, CMLT 28640, JWSC 28640

GNSE 28705. Literature as Resistance: Reclaiming Italian Margins. 100 Units.

Resistance takes on many forms, some more explicit, some more elusive and covert; the act of writing is one of them. How has writing been used as an act of resistance in the Italian social landscape? How does literature present marginalized individuals with a way to resist cultural and physical oppression, and provide them with a means to promote social and cultural transformation? To answer these and other related questions, this course will explore the formation of counter-hegemonic discourse through the literary production of contemporary writers at the margins of Italian society.

Instructor(s): Elizabeth Tavella
Note(s): Taught in English. Course not offered in 24-25.
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 28705, CRES 28705

GNSE 28802. United States Labor History. 100 Units.

This course will explore the history of labor and laboring people in the United States. The significance of work will be considered from the vantage points of political economy, culture, and law. Key topics will include working-class life, industrialization and corporate capitalism, slavery and emancipation, the role of the state and trade unions, and race and sex difference in the workplace.

Instructor(s): A. Stanley     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Graduate students by consent of instructor
Note(s): Assignments: short papers and an in-class presentation
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 38802, ECON 18601, HIST 28802, GNSE 38802, LLSO 28802

GNSE 29000. The American Culture Wars. 100 Units.

Should we tear down statues of Confederate soldiers? Should religious institutions be exempt from public health regulations? How (if at all) should we regulate abortion? These questions are only the latest battlefields in the "culture wars," the long-running conversation-or, more often, shouting match-about how Americans ought to live. This seminar will explore how Americans have wrestled with questions of morality and national identity since the country's founding. Two questions will drive our discussion. First, why do certain issues become the subject of fierce cultural conflict? Second, do these conflicts enrich or undermine American democracy?

Instructor(s): William Schultz     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): DEMS 29000, AMER 29000, CRES 27000, HIST 27715, RLST 29000

GNSE 29003. Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts. 100 Units.

This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human-from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge.

Instructor(s): Alireza Doostdar and Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Enrollment by Consent Only (for both grads and undergrads). Students should send the instructors a paragraph explaining their interest and prior preparation or familiarity with the themes in the course.
Note(s): This course meets the LMCS or SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 49003, NEHC 49003, NEHC 29003, ANTH 49003, GNSE 49003, AASR 49003, CMLT 29003, CMLT 49003, ISLM 49003, ANTH 29003, RLST 29003

GNSE 29117. Theater and Performance in Latin America. 100 Units.

What is performance? How has it been used in Latin America and the Caribbean? This course is an introduction to theatre and performance in Latin America and the Caribbean that will examine the intersection of performance and social life. While we will place particular emphasis on performance art, we will examine some theatrical works. We ask: how have embodied practice, theatre and visual art been used to negotiate ideologies of race, gender and sexuality? What is the role of performance in relation to systems of power? How has it negotiated dictatorship, military rule, and social memory? Ultimately, the aim of this course is to give students an overview of Latin American performance including blackface performance, indigenous performance, as well as performance and activism.

Instructor(s): Danielle Roper     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25.
Prerequisite(s): Undergraduates must be in their third or fourth year.
Note(s): Taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): SPAN 39117, TAPS 38479, RDIN 39117, LACS 29117, GNSE 39117, LACS 39117, SPAN 29117, TAPS 28479, RDIN 29117

GNSE 29237. Black Social Thought. 100 Units.

This course will familiarize students with social science academic and lay intellectual theorists who speak to and about the political, economic, and gender ways of being within the African Diaspora. Most of the course will highlight the voices of Western scholars, pan-African international scholars and thought will be discussed as well.

Instructor(s): Painia, Brianne     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPS 30237, RDIN 32237, KNOW 30237, GNSE 30237, SOCI 30339, RDIN 22237

GNSE 29427. Fashion, Empire, Capitalism. 100 Units.

Clothing, famously termed the "social skin", mediates the space between individuals and societies. Whether articulating personal taste or reflecting a collective identity, dress can be a powerful symbol-both historically and in the contemporary world. Worn against the skin, clothing is both intimate and connects us to a global, multi-billion-dollar system that employs roughly one in every ten people worldwide. This course addresses the multivalent history of dress from early modern imperial encounters in the Atlantic World, to anti-colonial movements in South Asia, to the nineteen-forties American Zoot Suit Riots-demonstrating the ways that clothes are connected to gendered and racial categories, political projects, and the shape of global capitalism. Students will analyze case studies from Malabar to Manchester, colonial Lima to revolutionary France, nineteenth-century Zanzibar to nineteen-eighties New York. Examining the history of dress and its global interconnections necessitates an interdisciplinary approach; therefore, students will combine historical scholarship with theoretical frameworks from the anthropology of dress and methodologies from material culture studies to analyze sources ranging from museum objects to films, haute couture fashion to flip-flops. Finally, this course sheds light on historic interconnections and the development of fashion systems, asks what ways these continue to animate our contemporary world, and imagines new possibilities for the future.

Instructor(s): K. Hickerson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Assignments: material analyses, essays, and an original research project.
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 29427, HIST 29427

GNSE 29647. Tutorial: Mathematical Knowledge: Race, Politics and Materiality. 100 Units.

Mathematical knowledge is commonly treated as objective and neutral, even though it is produced through specific societal contexts and in turn impacts those same contexts. In this course we will take a thematic approach to studying how mathematical and quantitative knowledges are produced and used through political processes from which they cannot be separated. We will look at examples such as the connections between plantation slavery and the precise measurement of molasses barrels in the 18th century, the gendered nature of the prestigious Tripos exam in the 19th century, 20th century attempts to quantify and manage reproduction, and 21st century issues of algorithmic policing. We will consider multiple angles for approaching the study of mathematics by connecting mathematical knowledge to topics such as labor, racial sciences, pedagogy, material tools, masculinity, nation-building, and embodiment. This will allow us to move beyond simply considering representation (of women in STEM, for example) to think about how gender and race are part of the construction of mathematical knowledge. In particular, this course will encourage students to think creatively about other possibilities for how we could justly and effectively use mathematics in our lives. There are no mathematical pre-requisites; students with a variety of experiences with mathematics will be able to participate fully in this course.

Instructor(s): Abigail Taylor-Roth     Terms Offered: Spring. Offered in Spring 2024
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 25508, HIPS 29647

GNSE 29700. Readings in Gender Studies. 100 Units.

This is a general reading and research course for independent study not related to the BA thesis or BA research.

Terms Offered: Autumn,Spring,Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and director of undergraduate studies
Note(s): Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. May be taken for P/F grading with consent of instructor. With prior approval, students who are majoring in Gender Studies may use this course to satisfy program requirements.

GNSE 29800-29900. BA Seminar; BA Essay.

GNSE 29800 and 29900 form a two-quarter sequence for seniors who are writing a BA essay.