Summer 2021 Course Offerings

Summer Registration is Open!

Summer Term 1

LGBT 200 Introduction to LGBT Studies
Section WB11. GenEd: DSHS, DVUP.
Instructor: Damien Hagen

This course is an interdisciplinary study of the historical and social contexts of personal, cultural and political aspects of LGBTQ life in North America. Over the course of the semester, we will cover LGBTQ history, identities, media representation and creation, Queer Theory, and policy issues. The course will trace how cultural and historical ideas of gender and sexuality have been shaped and how they continue to shape our lives today. This course serves as both a broad survey of topics relating to LGBTQIA individuals' lives, as well as an introduction to the academic field of Queer Studies.

WMST 250 Introduction to WGSS: Art and Culture
Section WB11. GenEd: DSHU, DVUP.
Instructor: Michelle Rowley

This course 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. An examination of women’s creative powers as expressed in selected examples of music, film, art, drama, poetry, fiction, and other literature. Explores women’s creativity in relation to families, religion, education, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and within a cultural tradition shaped by women. 

WMST 298D Bodies in Contention
Section WB11. GenEd: DSHS, DVUP, SCIS.
Instructor: Sydney Lewis

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.

WMST498M Advanced Special Topics in WGSS; Women and the Civil Rights Movement
Section WB31 June 1 - June 18 2021
Instructor: Elsa Barkley Brown

Also offered as HIST360 and AASP498I.
Twentieth-century U.S. civil rights movement from the vantage point of women, considering both women's involvement in the legal campaigns and political protests and the impact of civil rights struggles on women's condition, status, and identity.

Summer Term 2

LGBT 327 LGBT Film and Video. 
Section WB41. GenEd: DSHU, DVUP.
Instructor: James Goodwin
Compressed term - July 12 to July 30

Disclaimer: Sexually explicit and/or emotionally difficult content. This course explores how gender expression, sexuality, trans* discourses, race/ethnicity, class, & the body intersect. To explore these intersections, we will closely examine FIVE important LGBT films: Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016); Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989); Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996); Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990); & Harry Dodge & Silas Howard’s By Hook or by Crook (2001). ASSIGNMENTS: vigorous participation in the course’s discussion boards, 2 short close readings, & 1 longer comparative analysis.

LGBT 398G/ WMST 379J Special Topics: Black Trans Studies
Section: WB21. GenEd: DVUP.
Instructor: Amira Lundy-Harris

This course will introduce students to significant strands of thought in the field of Black trans studies. As Susan Stryker argues, "the field of transgender studies...represents a significant and ongoing critical engagement with some of the most trenchant issues in contemporary humanities, social science, and biomedical research." Centering Black trans studies offers a framework for entering conversations on some of society’s most critical topics.Students will use Black trans studies as a lens to explore topics including: Black feminist thought, medicine, sports, trans activism, policing and prisons, family and community, and media representation.
*This special topics course wIll not be offered in Fall or Spring of AY 21-22*

WMST 400 Theories of Feminism.
Section WB21. Instructor: Clara Montague
(This course fulfills the same requirement as WGSS 302 Feminist, Critical Race, and Queer Theories in the Fall)

Students will explore a range of texts and multimedia sources that conceptualize individual and collective identities across both time and place. While tracing the intellectual and institutional histories that have given rise to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, we will also consider how theory travels far beyond the university. Ongoing dialogues between scholars, practitioners, and activists have fundamentally transformed the way we think about foundational categories, including gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, religion, and nation. Using an interdisciplinary approach, WMST 400 will examine these shifts by drawing on theories and methods from a range of fields, including philosophy, sociology, history, economics, literature, and political science. In so doing, we will examine the ways in which feminist, critical race, and queer theories are distinct and yet interconnected. Rather than pursuing a single, universal truth, our engagement with theory in WMST 400 will allow space for tension, messiness, and even contradiction. We will explore key texts from the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies canon, but students are also invited to bring their unique skills, interests, and experiences into our class community. WMST 400 foregrounds scholarly analyses of structural inequality as well as strategies for challenging oppression through research, policy, and social movements. Students will work together to understand and make constructive use of the ideas posited by feminist, critical race, and queer theories.