Announcing Spring 2026 Courses in WGSS & LGBT

Complete WGSS/LGBT courses and descriptions

We know that making your schedule can be stressful, so we put together a list of full descriptions for all of our upcoming courses with WGSS and LGBT codes including crosslisted courses in other departments. Courses listed here are organized into core and elective to aid students who may be looking to plan the upcoming semester with a WGSS major or minor in mind. For more information about how core and elective courses fit into a WGSS major or minor, check out our Undergraduate Programs. To see a full list of courses offered in previous semesters as well as a full list of core and elective courses, including those that may not be listed with a WGSS or LGBT course code, take a look at our Courses Page.   

Lower-Level Core

Lower Level Core courses fall in the 100-200 level. Courses in this category can be applied to count towards the Lower-level core requirements for the WGSS Major or Minor.

WGSS 105/AMST 298D Introduction to Disability Studies

Neel Ahuja, ONLINE

Explores theories of disability justice as they intersect with feminist and antiracist struggles. Analyzing how disability has been an important aspect of institutions and social experience in the United States and beyond, the course considers how disability activists have responded to ableism by developing art, political strategies, and subcultures that promote a more just society built for a wider variety of human bodies.

WGSS/CMSC115 Gender, Race, and Computing

Alexis Lothian

Race and gender have shaped computing from its earliest histories to contemporary debates over algorithms, surveillance, and AI. We will examine how racism and sexism have operated in the development and everyday use of digital technology, while studying how feminist and racial justice movements have developed critiques and alternatives. This class is for anyone who wishes to better understand the relationships between computer science, structural power, and social justice. 

LGBT 200: Introduction to LGBT Studies

Chand

An interdisciplinary study of the historical and social contexts of personal, cultural and political aspects of LGBT life. Sources from a variety of fields, such as anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, and women's studies, focusing on writings by and about LGBT people.

WGSS 200 Gender, Power, and Society

Sydney Lewis

Examines constructions of race, class, sexuality, ability, and gender relations from a social science multi-disciplinary perspective. The course interrogates the ways that systems of hierarchy and privilege are created, enforced, and intersect through the language of race, class, sexuality, and national belonging. The course will provide students with the skills to examine how systems of power manifest in areas such as poverty, division of labor, health disparities, policing, violence. In addition to examining the impact of systems of power, students will reflect on their own location within the exercise of racialized, and gendered power relations. This course encourages students to understand and critique these systems both personally and politically.

WGSS 205/AMST 298J Reproductive Justice

Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner

This course, taught by Dr. Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, offers an exploration of reproductive justice through the lens of Indigenous feminist epistemologies, focusing on the sacred and sovereign relationships between bodies, land, and plants. Organized around the life stages of birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, elderhood, and death, students will engage with key concepts in reproductive justice, including forced sterilization, abortion rights, family separation, eldercare, and climate justice, through an anti-colonial framework.

Each week, the course integrates land-based knowledge, connecting plant medicine to reproductive decisions and care practices across life stages. Students will learn to apply Indigenous feminist principles to contemporary reproductive justice issues, understanding how settler colonialism seeks to control both the reproduction of bodies and the land. By the end of the course, students will have gained a holistic understanding of reproductive justice as a practice of sovereignty, grounded in community, tradition, and environmental stewardship.

WGSS 250 Intro to WGSS: Art & Culture

Montia Daniels or Shameem Razack 

Provides students with a critical introduction to the ways that art and art activism have served as a conduit to understanding and challenging systems of inequity and practices of normativity. Interrogating the categories of gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, the course will provide students with an examination of how artists have responded to pressing social justice issues of their eras. While the course centers visual art, students will also engage genres such as music, plays, literature, digital and performance art as arenas of social change.

WGSS 290 Bodies in Contention

Jessica Lee Mathiason - TuTh, 11:00 - 12:15 PM or 12:30-1:45 PM, SQH 1121

 Anthropologist Eileen Anderson-Fye defines embodiment as “how culture gets under the skin.” We will begin by examining the ways in which scientific knowledge about the human body has been shaped by cultural ideas of gender, race, sexuality, and ability, and how feminist approaches to science offer alternative modes of knowledge production. We will use the feminist bioethical frameworks we learn throughout the semester to evaluate a series of case studies in gendered and racialized medicine in the fields of genomics and assisted reproduction. In particular, we will consider how feminist concepts of personhood, agency, and duty of care impact patient access to health care treatment and legal protection over their body and its constituent parts. In addition to traditional written assignments, students will design their own activist oriented group projects and engage in classroom debates on current bioethical issues such as genetic testing, tracing ancestry using DNA reports, and the e-patient movement.  

WGSS 291 Racialized Gender and Rebel Media

Will Mosley

Debate music, music videos, and public performance by radical (and not-so-radical) musicians in order to engage political, cultural, and aesthetic concerns. Although this course will engage multiple forms of social difference, most of the semester is devoted to art by race and gender minorities. Music artists may include Monaleo, Kaytranada, Nicki Minaj, Caroline Polachek, Chapell Roan, and Kendrick Lamar. We begin by examining and understanding defining key terms of the class – “racialization,” “gender,” and “rebel,”—in order to construct a shared vocabulary. Most of the semester will be spent debating how historically excluded subjects make strategic use of music albums, mixtapes, EPs, and videos. However, rather than assume that all work of media by women of color, queers, and other subjects is “rebelious” we will interrogate the different ways in which questions of representation, capitalism, and self-determination come into play. 

Lower Level Electives

WGSS 211/HIST 211 Women in American Since 1880

Robyn Muncy

An examination of women's changing roles in working class and middle class families, the effects of industrialization on women's economic activities and status, and women's involvement in political and social struggles, including those for women's rights, birth control, and civil rights.

WGSS 255/ENGL 250 Reading Women Writing

Tyra Griffin 

Explores literary and cultural expressions by women and their receptions within a range of historical periods and genres. Topics such as what does a woman need in order to write, what role does gender play in the production, consumption, and interpretation of texts, and to what extent do women comprise a distinct literary subculture. Interpretation of texts will be guided by feminist and gender theory, ways of reading that have emerged as important to literary studies over the last four decades.

LGBT 265 LGBTQ+ Literatures and Media

Dalton Greene

A study of literary and cultural expressions of queer and trans identities, positionalities, and analytics through an exploration of literature, art, and media. We will examine historical and political power relations by considering the intersections of sexuality and gender with race, class, nation, and disability. Topics include the social construction and regulation of sexuality and gender, performance and performativity, intersectionality, and the relationship between aesthetic forms and queer/ trans subjectivity. Our interpretations will be informed by queer and trans theories.

WGSS/AAAS 265 Constructions of Manhood and Womanhood in the Black Community

Ashley Newby Blended

Investigates the ways that African Americans are represented and constructed in public and private spheres and explores the social constructions and representations of Black manhood and womanhood from various disciplinary perspectives.

WGSS/CMLT 275 World Literature by Women

Rachel Waugh

Comparative study of selected works by women writers of several countries, exploring points of intersection and divergence in women's literary representations.

Upper Level Core

WGSS/LGBT 310 Transgender Studies

Will Mosley

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies, providing a history of the field and engaging current debates within it. Transgender Studies as a discipline has been at the forefront of producing the most cutting-edge scholarship that has expanded and transformed the very way we imagine gender and deepened our understanding of race, class, sexuality, ability and structural oppression.

Transgender movements across the world are resisting oppressive states and are intrinsic participants in various struggles for justice. In this course, we will engage with the most recent scholarship in Transgender Studies in the United States and through a transnational lens

WGSS 315 Intro to Fat Studies: Fatness, Blackness, and Their Intersections

Sydney Lewis 

The course examines fatness as an area of human difference subject to privilege and discrimination that intersects with other systems of oppression based on gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and ability. Though we will look at fatness as intersectional, this course will particularly highlight the relationship between fatness and Blackness. We approach this area of study through an interdisciplinary humanities and social-science lens which emphasizes fatness as a social justice issue. The course closes with an examination of fat liberation as liberation for all bodies with a particular emphasis on performing arts and activism as a vehicle for liberation and challenging fatmisia.

WGSS 379S AI Otherwise

Alexis Lothian

Media reports on new developments in artificial intelligence are frequently accompanied by references to science fiction. In this class we will examine a range of speculative narratives about AI, using our reading and viewing of fictional texts as a springboard to think through the intersection of politics and technology in the present. We will focus our attention on real and imagined relationship of AI to questions of sexuality, gender, labor, racial justice, and environmental justice. 

WGSS 428J/698J/HLTH 498J/688J Health Inequality: Social Determinants and the Intersection of Medicine, Technology, and Humanities

Ruth Enid Zambrana

This course explores ways in which medicine as a complex historical system contributes to multifaceted disparities. Although medicine is both an art and a science, the nature of the medical care system and its maintenance of interconnected systems of inequality, such as payment systems' reliance on the pharmaceutical industry, corporate capitalism, and different forms of biases, affects the health and health care of communities, families and individuals in U.S. society. 

The aims of the course are fourfold: 1) to examine health inequities in the American health care system and its association with race, ethnicity, gender, age,  and geographic location; 2) to analyze social determinants associated with health care disparities, such as access, quality of care, and use of technology on health outcomes and quality of life;  3)  explore the lived experiences of health and medical conditions and healing through the use of humanistic sources; and (4) assess existing health policy and its legislative intent in relation to existing needs of under-served populations. 

The course provides students with the opportunity to understand how inequalities are produced and sustained using empirical articles, novels, films, and guest speakers who have been on the front lines in academic research settings, the federal government, and think tanks. The expectation is that students will be engaged in the national discourse “on health care for whom?”. Students will have the opportunity to think critically about how to uncover solutions to reduce health care disparities and inequity, and promote preventive and primary health care.

LGBT 488E Magical Black Femmes: Queering Black Feminity

Students will use cultural studies and arts and humanities approaches in order to grapple with the messy magic of black femme identity as a radical critique of sexuality, whiteness, gender and intersecting categories of oppression. The messiness of "femme" is revealed when each of those terms is put into question. Who or what constitutes queer? What constitutes feminine? How does one present feminine; is that merely an aesthetic choice? Does one have to be a woman to be feminine? For black femmes, whose femininity has been circumscribed and defined not only against butchness but also against white femininity, claiming "femme" can be a means to turn that "messiness" into "magic."

WGSS 488F Women Writing the Self in the Black Diaspora

In this broadly configured course, we examine the way that Black women write new narratives and possibilities for themselves in the midst of hierarchies and harms such as trans and homophobia, patriarchy, colonialism, ableism, and white supremacy. Multi-textual in content, we will examine visual art, songs, folklore, film, literature, policy and legislative reform as conduits for how Black women flip the script and imagine new possibilities for self and community. The texts we engage will reflect key moments, movements and events from the mid-twentieth century to the present day

WGSS 498Z/698Z/ AAAS 498B/ AMST 498Z Black Women's Art and Culture

Elsa Barkley Brown

Upper Level Electives

WGSS/CLAS 320/HIST 328W Women in Classical Antiquity

Chiara Graf

A study of women's image and reality in ancient Greek and Roman societies through an examination of literary, linguistic, historical, legal, and artistic evidence; special emphasis in women's role in the family, views of female sexuality, and the place of women in creative art. Readings in primary sources in translation and modern critical writings

WGSS/SOCY 325 The Sociology of Gender

Katharine Khanna

Institutional bases of gender roles and gender inequality, cultural perspectives on gender, gender socialization, feminism, and gender-role change. Emphasis on contemporary American society.

WGSS 379U/AAAS 398U/ENGL 368F/AMST 328B Angela Davis

John Drabinski 

This course explores the meaning and significance of Angela Davis' work for thinking through issues of race, nation, class, gender, carceral culture, and transnational solidarity. Her life and work is set between theorizing histories of race, racism, class, and gender and political organizing and public intellectual work. We will examine all of these aspects by reading her work from its beginning and up through contemporary commentary on incarceration, Palestine, and related issues. The centerpiece of this course will be her study of African-American music in its Black feminist iteration, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.
 

WGSS 471/HLTH 471 Women's Health

Katherine Sharp 

The women's health movement from the perspective of consumerism and feminism. The physician-patient relationship in the gynecological and other medical settings. The gynecological exam, gynecological problems, contraception, abortion, pregnancy, breast and cervical cancer and surgical procedures. Psychological aspects of gynecological concerns.

WGSS 498I/AAST 498G Asian American Women and Gender

Jennifer Cho

Examines Asian American identities through a transnational, gendered framework, and studies the impacts of exclusion and immigration laws and U.S. histories of (neo)colonialism and war on domestic, sexual, repr oductive, and economic labor of Asian American women. Also explores Asia n American feminism in context of Women of Color feminisms and queer of color critique.

WGSS 498Y/ENGL 439D/LGBT 448Y Dickinson, Erotics, Poetic, Biopics: Some (Queer) Ways We Read Poetry

Martha Nell Smith, Prereq: two English courses in literature or permission of the department. Contact the English Department for more information about this course.