Spring 2024 LGBT/WGSS Courses
November 18, 2024
Exciting new courses join old favorites in Spring 2025 slate of WGSS courses
With registration in full swing, WGSS is excited to show off courses available to students in Spring 2025. Whether you're looking to knock a few General Education requirements off your list or you want to dive deep in to Feminist and queer theory, WGSS has a class for you.
For a breakdown on how courses offered in the spring will fit into a major, minor, or certificate in a WGSS program, and for a list of all courses including senior seminar courses and graduate level courses, please visit the Courses page.
WGSS/CMSC 115: Race, Gender, and Computing
Dr. Jessica Mathiason/ Dr. Jennifer Manly - MW 10-10:50, F 10-10:50 or 11-11:50 - IRB 2207
DSSP, DVUP
Race and gender have shaped computing from its earliest histories to contemporary debates over bias in search algorithms, surveillance, and AI. As computational processes shape ever more dimensions of everyday life from the personal to the global scale, understanding how they operate and how power operates within them grows ever more important. Combating racism and sexism is not as simple as ensuring the pool of programmers and engineers is more diverse; structures of power are embedded in digital technologies as they are in all aspects of our society, and we must learn to perceive their operation if we hope to transform them. We will examine how racism and sexism operate in the field of computer science and in everyday uses of digital technologies, while studying how feminist and racial justice movements have created alternative approaches. This class is for anyone who wishes to better understand the relationships between digital technology, structural power, and social justice.
LGBT 200: Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies
Dr. Sayan Bhattacharya - MW 10-10:50 PM, ASY 2309, Friday Discussion sections vary
DSHS, DVUP
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: Intro to WGSS: Gender, Power, and Society
Montia Daniels - MWF 10-10:50 am - SQH 1101
DSHS, DVUP
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.
FULL WGSS 205: Reproductive Justice: a Feminist Apothecary
Dr. Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner - TuTh 203:15 pm - SQH 1101
DSHS, DVUP
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
8 sections - Zenzele Isoke (MW 11-11:50, discussions vary), Jocelyn Coates (TuTh 11-12:15, MW 2-3:15pm), Taylor York (Virtual MWF 12-12:50 pm FULL)
DSHU, DVUP
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/AASP 265: Constructions of Manhood and Womanhood in the Black Community
Dr. Michelle V. Rowley - TuTh 12:30 - 1:45 pm - SQH 1101
DSHS, DVUP
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 280: Gender & Science in Film and Media
Dr. Jessica Mathiason - MW 3:00 - 3:50 pm - SQH 1121
DSHU, DVUP
Isaac Azimov once said of science fiction that it is the genre that “deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.” With this definition in mind, we will embark on a critical exploration of sci-fi film and other media, using it as a lens for analyzing society’s deepest fears and most furtive hopes. Our investigation will center on the liminal space between hegemonic culture and its prescribed excesses. These liminal spaces—between self and other, disability and enhancement, cultural hybridization, and gender crossing—shift in response to real-world sociopolitical tensions. We will consider feminist and anti-racist media scholars’ concerns over representation, authorship and ideology alongside questions of technological change. Students will use analytical and creative assignments to explore not only how the scientific imaginary serves as fertile ground for feminist, disability, and anti-racist critique, but also provides a locus for alternative futures
WGSS 290: Bodies in Contention
Dr. Jessica Mathiason - MWF 2:00 - 2:50 pm - SQH 1121 & Online
DSHS, DVUP, SCIS
Explores the contributions of feminist scholarship in framing and resolving contemporary controversies concerning gendered bodies. It includes the ways in which knowledge about the human body has been shaped by cultural ideas of gender, race, sexuality and ability.
WGSS 302: Feminist, Critical Race, and Queer Theories
Dr. Sydney Lewis - TuTh 3:30 - 4:45 pm - SQH 1101
Introduces students to some of the major concepts in feminist, critical race, and queer theories. It examines the questions: What is theory? What forms does theory take? What is the relationship between theory and practice? What is the role of theory in political and social action? In art? In personal life? What does it mean to do theory?
FULL WGSS 315: Intro to Fat Studies: Fatness, Blackness, and their Intersections
Dr. Sydney Lewis - TuTh 11-12:15 pm - SQH 4116
DSHU, DVUP
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 319E: Making Race and Gender in Reality TV
Dr Eva Hageman - MW 4-5:15 pm - SQH 1101
You want to be on top?! Why do we love, and love to hate the representations we see on reality TV? What does the intersection of reality TV with race, gender, class, and sexuality help us to understand about broad US culture? This course examines the representation and production of race and gender in reality TV and considers how our production practices reflect and resist racialized notions of the world around us. Drawing on work from a variety of fields, this class will consider the production, consumption, and distribution of ideas about race and gender in reality television. In doing so we will critically engage how our media consumption and production practices reflect racialized notions of the world around us. The course is scaffolded in a way to help students develop skills in critical analysis and various media production. Students explore the course material in a hands-on way while also working toward the development and completion of a final media project.
AMST498D/LGBT 448L: Black Queer Studies
Dr. Sydney Lewis - TuTh 2-3:15 pm, SQH 2120
Black Queer Studies is an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to LGBTQ+ Studies and Black Studies. In this course, we will center Blackness to meditate upon the overlapping and interwoven categories of race, gender, and sexuality with the goal of decoupling whiteness from LGBTQ+ studies and decoupling heterosexuality from Black studies. We will look at texts from literature, film, history, and the social sciences in order to trace topical trajectories of Black queer thought. Throughout we will consider how Black queer liberation can, and has, provided tools and a guide for our collective liberation.
WGSS 498B: Poetics of the Black Feminist Imagination
Dr. Zenzele Isoke - Tu 3:00 - 5:30 PM - SQH 4116
This course is a survey of the poetry of black feminist writers across the African diaspora. We will read black feminist poetry as auto/theory, anti-colonial philosophy, and feminist manifesto. Students will learn the art and craft of writing poetry, as well as produce an original chapbook of poetry. Featured poets include Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton, Toi Derricotte, Marlene Norbese Phillips, Latasha Nevada Diggs, Bessie Head, Natalia Molebatsi, Warsan Shire, Upile Chisala and more. Featured topics include mother/daughter relations, black lesbianism, child sexual violence, anti-colonial struggle, girlhood, black trans childhoods, transnational solidarities, and cultural resistance. For more information, please email Dr. Isoke.