Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

WGSS 1006 First-Year Seminar: Feminist and Queer Science and Technology Studies

This course will introduce students to key concepts and ideas emerging from the fields of feminist and queer science and technology studies. Science and scientific practice are commonly understood to proceed from a neutral, objective perspective aimed at producing universal truths. Similarly, technological innovation is understood to be an unquestioned good for human development. Feminist and queer thinkers have critiqued these views along epistemological, methodological, and socio-political lines. They have consistently pointed to both the gaps in scientific knowledge production and the risks of uncritical technological development for reproducing marginalization and oppression. At the same time, feminist and queer thinks have critically imagined the possibilities of both science and technology as potential forces for addressing social injustice. We will survey a number of these interventions while considering how this work might inform our present contexts. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 1101 First Sem:Sex & Gender in the Gutter: An Intro to Gender and Sexuality Studies Through Comics

This freshman seminar serves as an introduction to some of the history and concepts important in the field of gender and sexuality studies through graphic storytelling. Topics include the history of feminism in the United States, violence against girls and women, queer theory, intersectionality, and transnational feminism. Please be advised that while we will read comics-most of these texts are not for kids. We discuss traumatic issues and will look at some disturbing images. Please spend some looking at descriptions of the required texts and think about whether or not this class is for you.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

WGSS 1102 First Year Seminar: Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism

This course examines settler colonial societies through the lens of gender and sexuality. Central questions of the course include: How is colonialism a fundamentally gendered process? What is settler colonialism and how is it different from/similar to extractive or franchise colonialism? How does the political, legal and social construction of indigeneity intersect with other social categories such as race, gender, class and sexuality? How have social movements mobilized against land dispossession globally in ways that incorporate diverse understandings of gender? Looking at various global case studies, we will examine how indigenous feminist scholars and organizers think about and respond to resource extraction, economic exploitation, gender violence, and land theft. Drawing on anti-colonial, queer, indigenous feminist, two-spirit, transnational feminist and anti-capitalist traditions, we will compare settler colonial regimes and modes of organizing across economic, cultural, political, and environmental spheres. This course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC BU: BA, ETH EN: S

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 1500 Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

This course will provide an introduction to the foundational concepts, histories, and theories that form the interdisciplinary field of women, gender and sexuality studies. Topics may include the history of feminist movements, masculinity, intersectionality, intimate partner violence, and queer and trans identities and politics. All sections will include periodic testing with in-class exams that may include several unit/module exams or a midterm and final exam.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring, Summer

WGSS 1996 Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Elective

Credit 0 units. EN: H

WGSS 2060 Introduction to Queer Studies

This course offers an introduction to the topics, questions, and approaches that characterize the rapidly growing field of lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans/queer studies. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we will explore such topics as the relation between gender and sexual identity, the history of same-sex relations, homophobia and heterosexism, queer cultures, and LGBTQ politics, particularly in the United States. Our focus will be on asking whether and how LGBTQ functions as a coherent category of analysis or identity, and we will pay particular attention to differences (of race, age, gender, sexual practice, class, national origin, temperament, and so on) that are contained within and that often disrupt that category. This course is not open to students who have taken L77 203 or L77 3031.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 2070 Sexuality and the State: Introduction to Sexuality Studies

Taking Michel Foucault's idea of biopolitics as a starting point. This course examines the ways in which sexuality has been produced and regulated by the state. Drawing on history, theory, and literature, we will look at contemporary examples of the relationship between the state and sexuality. What assumptions lie behind our ideas of sexuality? How are bodies linked by the prevailing logic of sexuality? How does sexuality inform the way that we see bodies as gendered, raced, or able-bodied. In addition to looking at the relationship between sexuality and capitalism, religion, and nation, this course asks how these ideas are embodied in particular raced and gendered ideologies.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 2080 Constructions of Black Womanhood and Manhood in the Black Community

This course introduces students to everyday and representational experiences of Black women and men. We will explore different understandings of Black gender through engaging scholarly work and creative texts/performances/visual representations. How is the construction of gender informed by race and other categories of difference (e.g., sexuality, class)? How might we gain a better understanding of how gender is (re)constructed within American society? What role does gender play in Black community politics and issues? This course is for first-year and sophomore students only.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 2101 Sophomore Seminar: Globalization and Its Disguises

The metanarrative of globalization and global inter-connections privileges the story of markets, growth, and mobility. That story is relentlessly optimistic, and simultaneously, devoid of an understanding of gender, sexual difference or race. In this course, we take a different approach. We discard the more conventional metrics of globalization by focusing instead on another equally global story: the manner by which human beings have been gendered and racialized over time. Doing so allows us to revisit globalization through its own deceptions, its interconnected secrets. We confront a different set of questions: how has intimacy shaped global mobility, what is the relationship between caste and MAMAA, between custom and the movement of capital, between slums and scale, between outsourcing and incarceration, how does the normative family propel global racial regimes? Most crucially, how and why is the emotional and intimate story of globalization concealed? The seminar class utilizes a wide array of sources, historical documents, scholarly critiques, novels and film and largely considers the longer, global history of India as the case study. Our specific focus will be on the secretive interconnections of slavery, seclusion, settlers, servitude, surrogacy, and scholarship, as we take a deep dive into the disguises, and the more hidden aspects, of globalization.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: BA, HUM, IS EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 2210 Gender and Texts

Discussion of canonical and non-traditional texts, most by women. Emphasis on how these texts represent gender, how literature contributes to identity-formation, and how women have used the written word to change their social and imaginative conditions.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 2230 Undergraduate Teaching Assistant

In this course an advanced undergraduate can assist a faculty member in the teaching of an introductory level Women and Gender Studies course. Students can enroll in one course only after having obtained permission from a faculty member who is willing to supervise. Students will not engage in any grading but may serve in a variety of other capacities - as discussion leaders, in providing logistical support, or in otherwise assisting with the transmission of course material.

Credit 1-3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 2900 Directed Research in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Introduces first-years and sophomores to research by engaging them in ongoing faculty research projects within the department. Under the direction of a faculty mentor, students take part in tasks that contribute to the mentor's research. Through this hands-on experience, students learn about the research process and build foundational research skills that can benefit their future academic experience and development. Faculty mentors provide regular guidance, training, and feedback to support students' understanding and growth. Students are registered by the department after approval from the faculty member leading the research project. The course may be taken for 1-3 credit hours based on the weekly hours required. Credit/No Credit only

Credit 3 units.

WGSS 2910 Peer Counseling Training: Sexual Assault and Rape Anonymous Helpline

SARAH (The Sexual Assault and Rape Anonymous Helpline) is a confidential student-run helpline serving the Washington University in St. Louis community 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. An institutional resource of the university, SARAH offers peer counseling and resource referral on topics including (but not limited to) sexual assault, sexual harassment, intimate partner and sexual violence, relationships, and mental and sexual health. The training and dialogue course will provide students with skill development and preparation to become peer counselors who will take over-the-phone calls, which may entail crisis counseling. Prerequisite: Must be selected as a member to enroll in this course. The curriculum includes 100 hours of training instruction and additional hours of evaluation and preparation. For further information, contact the RSVP Center at 314-935-3445.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 2996 Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Elective

Credit 0 units. EN: H

WGSS 2999 Independent Study: Internships

This course number is to be used for internships only.

Credit 1-3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3000 Sexual Politics: Power, Policy, and Pleasure

This course critically explores the cultural politics of gender, sexuality, and pleasure, focusing on their impact on social policy and change across diverse global contexts. Students will engage with key theoretical frameworks—including feminist and queer theories, social construction, and racialized genders and sexualities, and theories of gender—to analyze topics such as reproductive rights, marriage equality, LGBT rights, heteronormativity, sex work, pornography, desire, alternative gender and sexual cultures, HIV/AIDS, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and social justice. Central questions include: What is sex? What is power? How are sex and power related? Why is sex political? How do sexual politics shape economies, labor, and our lives? Through interdisciplinary course materials, lectures, discussions, and group activities, students will:

• Identify complexities and differences between gender, sexuality, culture, and power.
• Analyze historical and contemporary relationships among gender, sexuality, culture, and politics.
• Examine the development of gender and sexual identities in various cultural contexts.
• Participate actively in informed discussions on gender and sexuality.
• Construct compelling arguments engaging with the cultural politics of gender and sexuality.

By the end of the course, students will be equipped to apply these concepts to their own lives and critically engage with current debates in sexual politics.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 3006 Strangers at the Gate: Race, Sex, and Immigration in America

This course examines the history of U.S. immigration through the intertwined lenses of race, gender, and sexuality. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Muslim Ban of the 21st century, U.S. immigration law has repeatedly codified who may enter, remain, and belong—and who is cast as perpetually foreign, “deviant,” or threatening. While the United States often celebrates itself as a “nation of immigrants,” its policies reveal deep contradictions in how citizenship and national identity are constructed. This course foregrounds the ways immigrants have been racialized, pathologized, and sexualized through law, medicine, and culture, paying particular attention to how notions of morality, disease, reproduction, and queerness shaped exclusion and belonging. We will also consider the strategies migrants and their communities have used to resist exclusion, forge alternative forms of belonging, and expand
definitions of citizenship. By situating contemporary debates on immigration, asylum, and detention within a longer history of racial and sexual governance, this course interrogates the ongoing struggles over who counts as “American,” and how the line between stranger and citizen is continually redrawn.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3020 Justice as Failure: Abolitionist Theory and Praxis

In this course, we will explore the links between prison abolition, feminist praxis, and the political organizing of queer and trans people of color. In particular, we will ask what it means to re-envision justice in a world without prisons and what the role of feminism, especially as practiced by queer and trans people of color, is in this kind of collective project. We will focus on developing a solid grounding in critical prison studies as an expansive, interdisciplinary field by reading foundational texts in the study of prisons. We'll take up analytic frameworks developed by prison abolitionists, paying special attention to the role Black and Asian American studies have played in shaping contemporary abolitionism. Our focus will especially be on the activist and academic work by and about QTPOC prison abolitionists in the United States.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, WI BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3025 On Love and Intimacy: Theorizing Kinship in the Multiple

Love and Intimacy are terms that have a lot of cultural cache. In this course, we will analyze the ways in which intimacy has been embedded within certain discourses of privacy, rights, and individuality. In addition to the couple form, we will examine friendship, celibacy, therapy and relationships people form with pets and with objects to flesh out intimacy's multiplicities to see how these forces impact these affective tides. This course will bring together history, critical theory, and film to think through various expressions of intimacy and what it means to relate to the other. Prerequisites: Any 100- or 200- level Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course or permission from the instructor.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H

WGSS 3030 Queering Citizenship: Gender/Abolition

Queering Citizenship: Gender/Abolition asks how the struggle for gender self-determination overlaps with struggles to refigure, transform, and abolish political institutions. We will ask: How have queer thinkers/social movements in the last four decades helped create collective forms of life and social organization beyond the state and the prison-industrial complex? Global resistance to citizenship, borders, carceral violence and gender injustice makes these question unavoidable for queer and feminist thinkers and activists. Through our study of queer theory and abolitionist politics, we will consider the costs of exclusion from, as well as inclusion in, citizenship regimes transnationally and state discourses of LGBT recognition. The course considers connections between heteronormativity and citizenship; carceral and gender violence; state support for the white, middle-class nuclear family; the policing of intimacy; queer liberation and abolition democracy; gender anarchy and political anarchism; and the surveillance of gender and the political economy of prisons and policing. In each of these areas, we will attend to the politics of transgender recognition; gay imperialism; campaigns to defund the police; legislative violence against transgender youth; and overlaps between global abolitionist movements and the struggle for bodily autonomy and sovereignty.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3045 Queer Theory

This course provides students with an interdisciplinary examination of the history, politics, and cultural expressions of gay and lesbian communities in American culture. It explores the ways lesbians, gay men, and bisexual and transgender people construct, participate in, and resist various constructions of gender and sexuality. We question desire and social/cultural power, the nature and power of social change, and so on. Particular attention is paid to examining the roots and effects of heterosexism and homophobia, the call for hate crime legislation, the ethics of outing and passing, the impact of AIDS, partnership recognition, and domestic violence in LGBT communities. Throughout the course, students are encouraged to examine the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class with sexual orientation.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3050 Sex, Gender, and Popular Culture

A critical survey of sex and gender in the production, reception, and content of contemporary popular culture. Possible topics include: television, film, advertising, popular fiction, music, comics, internet, foodways, and fashion. Themes include: the representation and stylization of sexed and gendered bodies; popular models of sexual and gendered social relations; production of normative and alternative sex and gender identities through media consumption; sex and gender in systems of popular cultural production.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

WGSS 3055 Making Sex and Gender: Understanding the History of the Body

This course provides an overview of history of the body in Europe and the United States from medieval to modern times using feminist and queer theoretical frameworks. We explore the shifting authority in defining a normal body as the fields of medicine and science become professionalized, the cultural interaction with science and medicine in the modern era, and how aesthetics and popular perception of science inform the notion of ideal body, gender, race, sex, and sexuality in the modern era.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3056 European Population Politics, 1900 - 2000

Credit 3 units.

WGSS 3068 Surveillance Tech and Sexuality

This interdisciplinary advanced course examines how members of marginalized communities and those constructed as deviants are surveilled, banished or restricted from space. We will explore how places are constructed as dirty, leading to over-policing, criminalization, and surveillance. Through the lens of Black and Latinx queer and feminist geographies, we will explore topics such as sexuality and place-making, transnational queer migrations, queer ecologies, surveillance and carcerality and the queering of public and private spaces. The course also examines the politics of space, how spaces are contested and deconstructed, and who is included or excluded within these spaces. We will learn from anti-colonial feminists about state processes of removing people from the land and historical and contemporary examples that fuel the legacy of gentrification, criminalization and land speculation. We will investigate how policing works with policy and private interests to change neighborhoods. Central to the course is an inquiry into what anti-carceral movements can learn from communities at the margins and how these insights can contribute to building geographies of freedom.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3070 Masculinities

This course critically examines the subject of masculinity through a number of themes including history, society, politics, race, gender, sexuality, art and popular culture. Interdisciplinary readings are drawn from the fields of sociology, anthropology, literature, history, art history and cultural studies. We will examine the challenges presented to 'masculinity' (and a variety of responses) by the late-twentieth century emergency of gender studies. Our goal is to come to a working definition of masculinity/ies and gain an understanding of some past, current and possible future masculine behaviors, mythologies, ideologies, experiences and identities. Previous coursework in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies strongly recommended but not required. Attendance on the first day is mandatory to reserve class enrollment.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3071 Feminism, Families, and Social Change

This course will offer a feminist analysis of how dynamics of gender, race and class shape U.S. family life. The major objective of this course will be to examine women's studies research and theory addressing the question: Is there a family crisis in contemporary American society?

Credit 3 units.

WGSS 3081 From Hysteria to Hysterectomy: Women's Health Care in America

This course examines issues surrounding women's health care in America. While the scope is broad, the major emphasis will be on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through an examination of popular writing, scientific/medical writing, letters, diaries, and fiction, we will look at the changing perceptions and conceptions of women's bodies and health in America.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 3083 Topics in Asian American Lit: Gender and Sexuality in American Literature

Topics in Asian American literature which will vary from semester to semester. This course satisfies the Global and Minority Literature Requirement.

Credit 3 units.

WGSS 3090 Sex and Money: Economies of Desire

This interdisciplinary course explores the connections between sexuality and money. First, we investigate the role of money in sexual life that appears to exist outside of the market. How does heterosexuality reproduce capitalism, and are there sexual formations that escape capitalism's reach? Can there be meaningful consent so long as there is rent to pay? How do economics, race, and colonialism shape desire? What is the role of money in dating and marriage, and should these be understood as forms of legalized prostitution, as Marxist feminists and sex workers have long suggested? Next, we turn to sex work to explore how explicit economic exchange shapes sexuality. What power dynamics does money engender, and how do sex workers navigate and subvert them? Is sex work merely an extension of the work we do as women, as sex worker activists wrote in a 1977 manifesto? Finally, we close with the question of whether women have better sex under socialism. What economic systems make way for sexual liberation, and how might projects for economic justice center demands for better sexual futures?

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3135 The Racial and Sexual Politics of Public Health

Race and sexuality have long been concerns of public health. From hygienic campaigns against Mexican immigrants in early-1900s California to the 1991 quarantine of Haitian refugees with HIV at Guantanamo Bay, race and sexuality have proven crucial to how society identifies health and, by extension, determines who is fit to be a citizen. This interdisciplinary course interrogates the intersections of race, sexuality, and medicine, discussing how each domain has been constitutive of the other in the American context. Via feminist and queer theorizing, we will examine the political and economic factors under which diseases, illnesses, and health campaigns have impacted racial and sexual minorities over the last two centuries. An orienting question for the course is the following: How has the state wielded public health as a regulatory site to legitimatize perceived racial differences and to regulate ostensible sexual deviations? Through primary and secondary sources, we will likewise explore the various forms of health activism undertaken by these very same targeted populations. Themes to be addressed will include the medicalization of racial and sexual difference; activism both in and against health institutions; and the roles of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability in contemporary health issues. Case studies include the Tuskegee syphilis experiment; the sterilization of black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Native American women; the medicalization of homosexuality during the Cold War; and the role of mass incarceration in the diffusion of HIV. At a moment in time when access to health continues to be shaped by categories of social difference, understanding the role of public health in the normalization and subversion of racial and sexual hierarchies in the West is more pertinent than ever.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 3136 Community-Engaged Learning: Feminist and Queer Youth Studies

The categorizing of life experience into childhood and adolescence is a relatively new construct. The first part of this course will examine how the categories of early childhood and adolescence developed in social and medical discourses. The remainder of the course encourages students to draw connections between Feminist and Queer theoretical scholarship on children and the practice of designing and implementing programming for children. Students will examine the relationship between the course readings and their experience working with various agencies in St. Louis. Note: This is a community-engaged learning class, which means that it combines classroom learning with outside work at a community organization. In addition to regular class time, there is a service requirement, which will necessitate an additional four to five hours of time per week. Before beginning the community service component, students must complete required training and submit material for a background check.

Credit 4 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 3155 Gender, Health, and Society

In this class, we will identify and study a broad range of health issues and experiences within the context of gender and sexuality. The course will focus both on the health care system and lived, lay experiences of health and wellbeing. Topics will include discussions on mental health, reproductive issues, caregiving, and survivorship, as well as the politics of health and gender, the role of health and care in activism, gender differences in health status, and the impact of race and socioeconomic status on health. Prerequisties: any 100- or 200-level Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course or permission from the instructor. If you have taken L77 316 Contemporary Women's Health, you may not register for this course. Waitlists controlled by Department; priority given to WGSS majors. Enrollment capped at 20.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3165 Queer Histories

Queer history is a profoundly political project. Scholars and activists use queer histories to assert theories of identity formation, build communities, and advance a vision of the meanings of sexuality in modern life and the place of queer people in national communities. This history of alternative sexual identities is narrated in a variety of settings-the internet as well as the academy, art and film as well as the streets-and draws upon numerous disciplines, including anthropology, geography, sociology, oral history, fiction and memoir, as well as history. This discussion-based course will examine the sites and genres of queer history, with particular attention to moments of contestation and debate about its contours and meanings.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3170 Community-Engaged Learning: Gender and Incarceration

Since President Reagan declared the war on drugs in the 1980s, the numbers of women in prison have increased dramatically. Due to mandatory minimum sentencing requirements and increasingly harsh sentences for nonviolent offenses, the U.S. prison population has swelled to unprecedented numbers over the last few decades. While women are the fastest growing population in prison, men still make up the vast majority of prisoners, and the system is largely geared toward men and their needs. In this course, we will explore the historical treatment of and contemporary issues related to women and girls who get caught up in the criminal justice system. Through readings, films, reflective writings, and facility tours, we will explore the impact of incarceration on women and their families. Although our scope will be national, we will focus on the corrections system in Missouri. Note: This is a community-engaged learning class, which means that it combines classroom learning with outside work at a community organization. In addition to regular class time, there is a service requirement that will necessitate an additional four to five hours per week. There are several organizations with which we are partnering, and students will be assigned to one of these groups to work with for the entire semester. Moreover, there is a required all-day field trip to visit the women's prison in Vandalia, Mo., and the men's prison in Bowling Green, Mo. If students cannot commit to these out-of-class obligations, which are required to pass the course, they should not register for this course. Prerequisite: Intro to Women and Gender Studies or Intro to Sexuality Studies. Juniors and seniors only. Waitlists controlled by Department; priority given to WGSS majors.

Credit 4 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3175 Community-Engaged Learning: Documenting the Queer Past in St. Louis

Around the United States and the world, grassroots LGBTQ history projects investigate the queer past as a means of honoring the courage of those who have come before, creating a sense of community today as well aas building an understanding of the exclusions and divisions that shaped these communities and that continue to limit them. In this course, we participate in this national project of history-making by helping to excavate the queer past in the greater St. Louis region. Course readings will focus on the ways that sexual identities and communities in the United States have been shaped by urban settings since the late 19th century, with particular attention to the ways that race, class, and gender have structured queer spaces and communities. In their community service project, students will work with local LGBTQ groups, including the St. Louis LGBT History Project, to research St. Louis's queer past. Each student will also conduct an oral history interview with an LGBTQ community member. Note: This is a community-engaged learning class, which means that it combines classroom learning with outside work at a community organization. In addition to regular class time, there is a service requirement, which necessitates an additional three to five hours per week. Before beginning the community service component, students must complete required training. Prerequisite: Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Introduction to Queer Studies; or permission of instructor.

Credit 4 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 3176 Community Engaged Learning: Feminist and Queer Community Praxis

Using St. Louis as a lens, the course focuses on examining the imbrication of class, gender, race, and sexuality in the US and the variety of community efforts that use feminist and queer principles to enact social change. Course readings present theories of class, gender, race, and sexuality as well as visions of community response. Service work in community engagement placements enables students to ask how their understanding of social change is challenged when put into practice and how communities can and should shape academic discourse. Course assignments ask students to evaluate both academic and community praxis (theory in practice) with the goal of creating a more just and equitable St. Louis. Students can do engagement hours with a group with which they already have established a relationship, but must notify instructor when enrolling in the course. Course enrollment is limited to Juniors and Seniors. Course expects significant community work outside of class meeting hours and thus carries 4 credits.

Credit 4 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3215 Bodies Out of Bounds: Feminist and Queer Disability Studies

For many, disability seems like a concept with a relatively stable definition and a fairly straightforward relationship to questions of health and well-being. But in the past few decades, scholars and activists have begun to challenge the notion that disability is a tragedy to be medically prevented or inspirationally overcome. These scholars have instead focused their attention on the social aspects of disability: how it came to be constructed as a category of identity, the physical and institutional barriers that have excluded disabled people from public life, and the distortion of disabled lives within the mainstream representation. More recently, writers have turned their attention to the way disability has been defined though norms of race, gender, and sexuality. These intersections will be the focus of this course. From the diagnoses of hysteria to debates over selective abortion and the recent proliferation of breast cancer memoirs, we will consider how the politics of disability has both complemented and complicated the usual goals of feminism. We will also explore some of the ways that disability studies as a discipline has redefined and in turn been shaped by the fields of queer theory, masculinity studies, and critical race theory. We will consider how deviant genders have been the target of medicalization, the relationship between corrective surgery and compulsory gendering, the desexualization and hypersexualization of disabled bodies, and the role that medicine has played in justifying colonial conquest and perpetuating racial inequalities.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3240 Girls' Media and Popular Culture

This course will analyze girls as cultural consumers, mediated representations, cultural producers, and subjects of social anxiety. Readings will cover a range of media that have historically been associated with girlhood, including not only film, television, and digital media but also dolls, magazines, literature, and music. We will explore what role these media texts and technologies have had in the socialization of girls, the construction of their gendered identities, and the attempts at regulation of their behavior, sexuality, and appearance. Although the course will focus on girlhood media since the 1940s, we will consider how constructions of girlhood identity have changed over time and interrogate how girlhood identity intersects with race, sexuality, and class. The course will examine important debates and tensions arising in relation to girls' media. We will evaluate concerns and moral panics about girls and their relationship to or perceived overinvestment in media and compare and contrast this with accounts of girls as active media consumers and producers. We will critically analyze how girls have been understood to negotiate agency in relation to commercialized culture -- how they have been represented as wielders of girl power, as passive or active consumers, as fans, and as media producers themselves. We will also analyze attempts to intervene in girls' media and popular culture and consider how these interventions have attempted to empower, inspire, or regulate girls or how they have worked to reinforce or challenge gendered understandings of childhood.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3256 Sex Trafficking

Sex trafficking is a complex social problem with multiple contributing factors largely rooted in intersecting inequalities. Both in the United States and on a global level, interrelated inequities in gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, power, class, opportunity, education, culture, politics, and race are among the social phenomena that contribute to sex trafficking/CSE victimization. In this course, we will examine the dynamics of sex trafficking on a local and global level from various feminist and political perspectives, with particular attention given to the sexed and gendered social and structural conditions that impact sex trafficking. This course will cover the extent and nature of the problem, as well as current debates in the field, including demand, prevalence, experiences of survivors, types of sex trafficking, methods of traffickers, the role of weak social institutions, cultural dynamics, and global power dynamics. The course will also examine international, federal, and state legislation as well as organizational and grassroots efforts to prevent and respond to sex trafficking victimization. The aim of this course is to provide students with a holistic understanding of sex trafficking drawing from interdisciplinary sources and presenting a variety of perspectives.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC BU: BA EN: S UColl: CD

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3340 Feminist Theory

This course begins by examining the 19th and early 20th century historical context out of which contemporary feminist theory emerged. We then turn to the 1960's and the emergence of the Second Wave of Feminism. We focus on some of the major theories that developed during the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's and the conflicts and internal problems these theories generated. We then examine some of the ways these problems were resolved in feminist theory of the 1990's. The last part of the course focuses on topics of concern to contemporary feminists -- such as the family, sexuality and globalism -- and the contributions feminist theory brings to these topics. Open to graduate students by enrolling in L77 WS 500; contact the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies office for details.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

WGSS 3405 Revolutionize It! the Radical History of Second-Wave Feminisms

In this discussion-based course, we explore the complex, contradictory and profoundly multiracial history of the so-called second wave of the feminist movement (1960s-1980s). We will focus on those activists who understood themselves to be radicals and revolutionaries -- women's liberationists, women of color (or third-world) feminists, and lesbian-feminists -- as they collaborated and collided with each other. Among the questions we will ask are the following: What happens to our understanding of the second wave when we center the activism of African-American, Latinx, indigenous and anti-capitalist feminists? What were the promises and the pitfalls of a politics of sisterhood? How did sexual desire and sexual conflict shape both notions of identity and the movement on the ground? We will also consider the legacy of second-wave feminism for the politics of our time, including #MeToo, reproductive freedom, and the struggle for trans liberation.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3446 No Boys Allowed: Girlhood and Programming for Girls in 19th and 20th Centuries, United States

This course takes an intersectional feminist approach to studying girlhood in 19th and 20th Century United States using fictional accounts of girlhood, conduct books for girls, the history of girls' education, psychological theories of girlhood, girls' toys, and the development of extracurricular programming for girls. Each topic will allow us to study the way stereotypical girlhood of a particular historical moment serves a political purpose in articulating American identity. At the end of the course students will understand how the concept of girlhood is socially constructed, which means that understanding historical context is a core component of the course. The title of the course is a play on words because in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, most schools and boys' clubs excluded girls. All are welcome to enroll in the course.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3470 Law, Gender, and Justice

This course explores how social constructions of gender, race, class, and sexuality have shaped traditional legal reasoning and American legal concepts, including women's legal rights. We will begin by placing our current legal framework, and its gender, race, sexuality, and other societal assumptions, in an historical and Constitutional context. We will then examine many of the questions raised by feminist theory, feminist jurisprudence, and other critical perspectives. For example, is the legal subject gendered male, and, if so, how can advocates (for women and men) use the law to gain greater equality? What paradoxes have emerged in areas such as employment discrimination, family law, or reproductive rights, as women and others have sought liberal equality? What is the equality/difference debate about and why is it important for feminists? How do intersectionality and various schools of feminist thought affect our concepts of discrimination, equality, and justice? The course is thematic, but we will spend time on key cases that have influenced law and policy, examining how they affect the everyday lives of women. Over the years, this course has attracted WGSS students and pre-law students. This course is taught by law students under the supervision of a member of the School of Law faculty.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC BU: BA EN: S UColl: ML, SSC

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3475 Queering the History of Health

This course identifies the key conceptual and methodological terrain pertinent to the historical development of the concepts of health disease, and ability. We will use an intersectional lens to trace various contingencies that produce a set of false binaries, including healthy, slender, responsible self v. the medically diseased, disabled, fat, and irresponsible other. Historically, these binaries have created and maintained social, political, and cultural inequalities and have been used as a powerful ideological weapon against queer and trans people of color, people with disabilities, people living with HIV/AIDS, fat people, and other people who do not/cannot embody normative race, gender, sexuality, and ability. However, as we will see, these inequalities, somehow counterintuitively, also enable a predisposition for a resistance, world-making, and political agency. While the course serves as an introduction to the key terms that surround the construction of health from the establishment of modern nation-states in the 19th century to the present, it is structured as a history of the present-it assesses how different notions pertinent to health shape our daily lives and inform the choices we make still today(?).

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3500 Trans Studies

This course surveys the interdisciplinary field of trans studies by emphasizing how trans identities, activism, and scholarship are intertwined with broader histories of gender, sexuality, race, disability, and class. Students will explore the vibrant intellectual, political, and cultural productions of trans people. The primary geographic focus for the course is the United States, but we will situate U.S. trans studies within broader conversations about gender variance transnationally. While attention will be paid to understanding how transphobia operates, the course emphasizes thinking through the possibilities afforded by trans histories of resistance and refusal.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3503 Global Italy: Migration and Multiculturalism in Literature, Cinema, and Media

Global Italy: Migration and Multiculturalism in Literature, Cinema, and Media

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 3510 Women and Social Movements: Gender and Sexuality in U.S. Social Movements

This course examines the history of grassroots activism and political engagement of women in the United States. Looking at social movements organized by women or around issues of gender and sexuality, class texts interrogate women's participation in, and exclusion from, political life. Key movements organizing the course units include, among others: the Temperance Movement, Abolitionist Movements, the Women's Suffrage Movements, Women's Labor Movements, Women's Global Peace Movements, and Recent Immigration Movements. Readings and discussion will pay particular attention to the movements of women of color, as well as the critiques of women of color of dominant women's movements. Course materials will analyze how methods of organizing reflect traditional forms of doing politics, and we will also examine strategies and tactics for defining problems and posing solutions particular to women.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3530 Neither Man Nor Woman: Transgender Ethnographies in Global Context

This seminar examines transgenderism and gender variance more broadly in a global context that includes, but does not privilege, Western analytical frameworks. We will read ethnographic accounts of gender diversity that complicate Western notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. In particular, we will interrogate the idea of transgenderism as a crossing from one gender to an opposite one (i.e. male to female or female to male), investigate the relationship between gender identity and sexuality, and examine the particularities of local gender forms in cultural context.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC EN: S

WGSS 3555 Caste: Sexuality, Race and Globalization.

Be it sati or enforced widowhood, arranged or love marriage, the rise of national leaders like Indira Gandhi and Kamala Harris, or the obsession with fair skin, caste shapes possibilities and perceptions for billions. In this class we combine a historical understanding of the social caste structure with the insights made by those who have worked to annihilate caste. We will re-visit history with the analytic tools provided by the concepts of compulsory endogamy, surplus woman, and brahmanical patriarchy, and we will build an understanding of the enduring yet invisible sexual-caste complex. As we will see, caste has always relied on sexual difference, its ever-mutating power enabled by the intersectionalities of race, gender and class. We'll learn how caste adapts to every twist in world history, increasingly taking root outside India and South Asia. We will delve into film and memoir, sources that document the incessant injustices of caste and how they have compounded under globalization. The class will research the exchange of concepts between anti-race and anti-caste activists: how caste has shaped the work of prominent anti-racist intellectuals and activists in the United States such as W.E.B. DuBois and Isabel Wilkerson and in turn, the agenda and creativity of groups such as the Dalit Panthers. Finally, the course will build a practical guide to engaging with and interrupting caste in the context of the contemporary global world today. Waitlists controlled by Department; priority given to WGSS majors. Enrollment cap 15.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM, IS EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3575 Confronting Capitalism: Feminism, Work and Solidarity

This course explores the relationship between gender, the ideological construction of work and workers, and feminist and queer mobilizations against labor exploitation. To examine how notions of the ideal worker shape and are shaped by gender, sexuality, and race, we will study various forms of work, including care work and reproductive labor; affective and emotional labor; migrant labor; service work; and sex work. Considering what is new and old about late (or neoliberal) capitalism, we will explore how the relationship between citizenship, the state and political economy has shifted over the last four decades. Across each of these registers, we will engage thinkers spanning Marxist feminist, radical feminist, liberal feminist, indigenous feminist, Black feminist, and disability justice traditions. We will ask how these interwoven genealogies grapple with U.S. imperialism and the relationship between race, class, and patriarchy, while mapping out various visions of solidarity economies, internationalism, and anti-work politics. Prerequisite: Intro to WGSS or permission of instructor.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3580 Scribbling Women: 19th-Century American Women Writers

In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher, William Tichnor, that America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash. In this class, we examine works of those scribbling women of the nineteenth century. We read one of the best selling novels of the century, one that created a scandal and ruined the author's literary reputation, along with others that have garnered more attention in our time than their own. In addition to focusing on these women writers, we also explore questions about the canon and American literature: What makes literature good? What constitutes American literature? How does an author get in the canon and stay there? Finally, in this writing intensive course, there are frequent writing assignments and a strong emphasis on the essential writing process of drafting and revising.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 3615 Topics in Women,gender, and Sexuality Studies: Spectacular Blackness, Race, Gender, & Visual Culture

Topic varies. See semester course listings for current offering.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Art: AH BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3620 Topics in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Topic varies. See semester course listings for current offering.

Credit 3 units. BU: BA

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3622 Women, Health, and Media

This course examines how gender and sexuality have been represented in a variety of media and genres that have played a role in truth regimes about about medicine and health and also looks at responses to such representations. This course predominately focuses on the United States, and will introduce students to varied interdisciplinary approach to the study of media.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3640 Gender, War, and Migration

This course will examine the forced transnational migration of war refugees and their resettlement in host societies. A central question that guides this course is: How does war impact and complicate belonging and influence the movement of people across borders and boundaries? With this question in mind, we will explore the dynamic relationships between specific groups of refugees and nation-states, while considering inseparable intersectional configurations of gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, class, age, and religion as lenses through which to consider ideas of personhood and notions of national belonging. In the first part of the semester we will focus on transnational displacement because of conflict and deterritorialization. We will utilize readings in feminist theory, post-colonial theory, and cultural studies to examine historical processes of dislocation and relocation. The second part of the semester will examine ethnographic case studies of resettled refugees in different sites and their day-to-day practices to understand how displaced people earn a place in host societies. We will also explore how identity categories influence the architecture of personhood in nation-states. Lastly, we will analyze the multi-layered ways in which diasporic subjects and nations rearticulate themselves virtually and digitally (via Internet and social media). We will combine diverse readings and theoretical engagements, lectures, documentary films, discussion, and class-based activities to interrogate notions of subjectivity, alterity, and belonging across time, place, and space. Pre-Requisite: L77 100B or consent of instructor.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3650 The Global History of HIV/AIDS

Most (if not all) of us have never known a world without HIV/AIDS. The potential risk of seroconversion has been integrated into sexual health education and popular media for more than three decades. At the same time, HIV has often been portrayed as either an issue of a minority (e.g., gay men, intravenous drug users, sex workers) or as existing over there in the Global South, overlooking the major crisis within the United States. This course tackles the history of HIV/AIDS as a global history of gender and sexuality between the Global North and the Global South. Throughout the course, we will consider major ethical questions regarding disease and control. Who gets to be a victim, and who is labeled a culprit? What actions should be pursued in the midst of an epidemic? Who controls the narrative about disease? We will look at international biopolitical practices by tracing the downward flow of researchers and specialists from the Global North to the Global South and the upward flow of scientific knowledge and capital. In this way, we will see how the Global South has played a crucial role in the perceptions, treatment, and profiting of HIV/AIDS in the United States and the Global North through the recent breakthrough in pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), sold on the market as Truvada/Descovy. The course has three thematic sections: Discovery and Reaction, Politics and Activism, and Research and Health.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC, SC Art: SSC BU: BA, IS EN: S

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3685 Gender Violence

This course explores the issue of violence against women within families, by strangers in the workplace, and within the context on international and domestic political activity. In each area, issues of race, class, culture, and sexuality are examined as well as legal, medical and sociological responses. Readings cover current statistical data, research, and theory as well as information on the history of the battered women's movement, the rape crisis center movement, violent repression of women's political expressions internationally, and the effect of violence on immigrant and indigenous women in the U.S. and abroad.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 3690 Community-Engaged Learning: Projects in Domestic Violence

In this course, students explore the links between the theories and practices of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies through a combination of research and direct community engagement. Course readings focus on the ways that poverty and violence -- along with race and gender expectations -- shape the lives of women. A required community service project for this course asks students to examine the relationship between the course readings and the lives of actual women in St. Louis. Over the course of the semester, students design and execute programming for women at a local community agency. This is a writing-intensive course. Majors and minors in WGSS receive first priority. Other students will be admitted as course enrollment allows.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC, WI EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3700 Gender and Social Class

Using St. Louis as a lens, the course focuses in on the development of class in the US and attempts to trace historically how class, race, sexuality, and gender influence each other and how this mutual influence shapes our society through immigration, gentrification, welfare, and work. Course readings present classical understandings of class and asks how these understandings are challenged when these other categories of identity are made prominent. Attendance on the first day mandatory.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 3740 Imperialism and Sexuality: India, South Asia, and the World: Writing-Intensive Seminar

What is the connection between the appropriation of other people's resources and the obsession with sex? Why is 'race' essential to the sexual imperatives of imperialism? How has the nexus between 'race,' sexuality, and imperial entitlement reproduced itself despite the end of formal colonialism? By studying a variety of colonial documents, memoirs produced by colonized subjects, novels, films and scholarship on imperialism, we will seek to understand the history of imperialism's sexual desires, and its continuation in our world today.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, WI BU: HUM, IS EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 3910 Undergraduate Work in Women's Studies

Directed readings and research in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for undergraduates.

Credit 1-3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring, Summer

WGSS 3996 Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Elective

Credit 0 units. EN: H

WGSS 3ABR Women's Studies Coursework Completed Abroad

study transcript course

Credit 12 units.

WGSS 4005 Advanced Queer Theory: The Intimacy of Precarity

This seminar will use precarity to produce a map of some trends in queer theory today in order to outline the stakes of this current intellectual work and ask how we can use this work to rethink sexuality. In outlining the current stakes of precarity, this seminar will focus on two main threads of queer theory--queer of color critique and public feelings because both of these spaces have enabled complex theoretical and political discussions centered around precarity and both also introduce historical framings of queer theory. By orienting their contributions to queer studies around precarity, these scholars are asking both how one lives with this condition and what formations of knowledge have produced these conditions of liminality and vulnerability. Overall, this emphasis on precarity has made certain tensions surrounding the place of difference within queer theory visible and highlighted the role of structures, particularly neoliberalism, which is a particular nexus of collusion between the state and formations of capital, over the individual.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

WGSS 4006 Advanced Topics in Trans Theories: Femme

In the current moment, femme is used to index a variety of gender and sexual expressions. This course explores the aesthetics and politics of femme through the lens of trans theories. A quick search for femme in relation to gender and sexuality will show that one of its origin stories is within lesbian communities often in relation to the butch/femme relationship. The lipstick lesbian is the figure who emerges here as exemplifying a kind of adherence to traditional forms of femininity even while being queer. Trans women are often criticized for attachments to similar forms of gender expression. Femininity is often derided as unserious or, worse, hopelessly entangled in the dynamics of heteropatriarchy. To be feminine, then, is often taken as a sign of a retrograde politics or submission to normative ideals of gender. This course will take up this problem as a way of beginning to think through what interventions femme might make into our ordinary ways of understanding gender and sexuality.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 4015 Feminist and Queer Media Studies

This seminar serves both as an introduction to some of the foundational texts in feminist and queer media studies and a snapshot of recent scholarship in the field.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 4016 Queer of Color Critique

That sensation produces surplus, often uncontainable knowledge, is something that is beginning to be explored in various arenas of queer theory as an important component of queer of color critique. This seminar will explore different sensational arenas, the different possible critiques that they produce, and what this means for thinking about sexuality, gender, and queer theory. Throughout the course of the semester, we will explore sensation in multiple ways 1) as a diagnostic tool for understanding some of the different ways that race, gender, and sexuality intersect 2) as a way to trouble the dichotomy between interiority and exteriority to understand the ways in which orders of knowledge become imprinted on the body 3) as a mode of producing alternate forms of knowledge about gender, race, and sexuality. In addition to reading about different sensations and their relationships to politics and sexuality, this course will require students to think creatively as they attempt to write about sensation, sexuality, and politics. Ultimately, the purpose of this class is to examine sexuality and sensation as collections of embodied and politicized experiences. Prerequisite: Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (L77 100B) or permission of instructor.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 4017 Healing and Social Justice

What makes activism sustainable and accessible? Not just ideologically or politically, but physically, emotionally, and some would ask, spiritually? How do actors in social justice movements enact care for movement survival? Conversely, when might care serve to depoliticize or otherwise undermine political action? How do race, gender, sexuality, class and other aspects of identity shape the ways we approach these questions? Including the contested topics of burnout and self-care, questions of movement survival and activist sustainability touch on Marxist, Black, and Disabled feminisms, queer theory, the sociology of health and illness, critical theory, and other theoretical lineages. This course takes as its starting points Sarah Ahmed's concept of feminist killjoy survival kits, Black feminist epistemology, adrienne marie brown's Pleasure Activism, and the sociology of lay health experiences. Ultimately, this course will analyze, theorize, and critique care in activism and social movements. At the same time, it will create space to discern what our own visions of sustainable, politically committed wellbeing look like.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 4020 Transnational Queer Activism

This course explores the recent emergence of visible movements for sexual and gender minorities across the globe. The course begins with an overview of theories of collective action, putting canonical texts in social movement studies in conversation with postcolonial, queer, and transnational feminist approaches to activism and resistance. The aim is to lay a theoretical foundation for transnational analysis that does not center Western experience. The second part of the course moves through some key issues in LGBTI organizing that are overlooked when focusing on Euro-America, including: the importance of democratic transition for social movements; the prevalence of human rights as frames for sexual rights in the global South; limitations of the term homophobia when conceiving of hostility toward sexual minorities cross-culturally; and the role of colonialism and neo-colonialism in the globalization of LGBTI identities. Students will read texts attentive to the specificities of activism and resistance in the global South such as Out in Africa: LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa, Queer Activism in India, and Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State. Course materials will also include primary source material from translated interviews with Argentine transgender activists the months before the passage of the Gender Identity Law. Oral presentations will compare a case of LGBTI activism discussed in class to the work done by a St. Louis-based organization. By the end of the course, the students will be able to explain the important ways global Southern LGBTI movements differ from their Northern counterparts, contextualize news reports of events like the passage of the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda, and craft research contributions based on global Southern case studies.Prerequisite: Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (L77 100B) or permission of instructor.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC, SC Art: SSC EN: S

WGSS 4045 Queering Theory: Collaborating, Solidarity, and Working Together

This class aims to use theory to destabilize the concepts of race, sexuality, gender, disability, and academic methodology. This class will submerge you in some of the most influential texts in queer theory. The selected readings range across many disciplines, including biology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, and cultural studies. The core premise of this class is that to queer something is to destabilize it. Therefore, not all of the readings will specifically be about gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people. However, these readings will help any scholar in their future work in queer theory. Prerequsitie: Any 300 level WGSS class or equivalent or permission from instructor.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

WGSS 4085 Everyday Unruliness: Feminist and Queer Resistance

This course is interested in the ways ordinary people break rules, flout norms, and make trouble. We know that resistance manifests in social movements, militant activism, and direct confrontation, but it also comes through quieter acts of unruliness and noncompliance. Looking at power from below, readings focus on everyday interventions in systems of control. Garment workers threaten good pay or bum work, queers fail at reproductive heterosexuality, and shiftless people steal moments of leisure from a system that wants us either productive or dead. These acts may not be obviously political, but because people at the margins have so often been left outside (and also opt out) of formal politics, subtle resistance is particularly interesting for feminist and queer scholars. Everyday acts do threaten the status quo -- otherwise, why would they be so rigidly policed? But questions remain. Throughout the semester, we will ask the following: What counts as resistance? What are its ethics? When is a bad attitude an act of rebellion, and does it matter if that rebellion is conscious? Does survival constitute resistance for those not meant to survive? On the other hand, for those subjects whose active engagement sustains the status quo, is withdrawal the more radical choice? Does the refusal of sociality constitute a form of resistance? Or are there ways to forge communities of mutual care that erode the status quo rather than reproduce it? Prerequisite: L77 110B (Intro to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) or permission of instructor.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 4115 Gender, Religion, Medicine and Science

Have you ever wondered why some topics are argued using religion as a guide, while others may approach the topic from what is perceived as a strictly scientific point of view? This course explores how and why gender and sexuality tend to be at the center of debates that pit Medicine and Science against Religion. Using feminist and queer scholarship, this course explores five hundred years of rhetorical strategies related to defining, or regulating, gender and sexuality. We will consider how much debates have changed from sixteenth-century Europe to 21st century United States by asking when, why and how either Medicine & Science or Religion influenced social thought and laws. Finally, we will consider how, and if, contemporary debates on vaccines are either part of the long history of debating bodily autonomy (as is the case with the other topics addressed in class), or if the conflict between religion, medicine and science in the modern era is new and distinctly different from past rhetorical strategies. Prerequisite: Introduction to Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: ETH, HUM, IS EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 4135 The Politics of Pleasure

This 400 level seminar interrogates the concept of pleasure. Pleasure occupies a fraught space in feminist and queer theory. This course examines several ways that people have theorized pleasure as a space for politics, a space for conservatism, or a way to think about racialized difference. This course is not interested in defining what pleasure is, but it interrogates what the stakes of talking about pleasure have been within contemporary theory and culture. Beginning with an examination of pleasure in the context of early twentieth century sexology, this course looks at the sex wars of the 1970s, the turn toward pleasure as a space of protest, and ends by thinking of ways to imagine pleasure outside of current paradigms of sexuality. The course takes gender, race, and sexuality as central analytic components to understand how pleasure is defined and who has access to it. Either Introduction to Sexuality Studies or Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies are prerequisites.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 4141 Feminist and Queer Research Methodologies

What does it mean to do research through the lens of feminist and queer politics? This course surveys key methodological approaches to feminist and queer research. Interdisciplinary at its core, it draws from methodological traditions across the humanities and social sciences while focusing on forms of inquiry that resist these boundaries. We explore how feminist and queer politics inform the work of knowledge production. We ask how scholars, organizers and artists engage and repurpose various research methodologies and how they reflect on the politics of power, experience, domination, and resistance in the research encounter. We ask who research is for, parsing the political stakes of scholarship that archives the stories of collective resistance, survival, collaboration, and domination, at the same time as it authorizes hierarchies of expertise, builds institutional power, and (too often) extracts from those studied. What might a redistributive approach to feminist and queer research look like? This class is a writing intensive course. Waitlists controlled by Department; priority given to WGSS majors.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SC, WI

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 4142 Thesis Proposal Workshop

This 1-credit thesis proposal workshop will guide students on the conventions of proposal writing, as well as giving students an opportunity to get feedback on their ideas. The course focuses on five main components, each of which build upon each other: 1) outlining a proposed honors thesis topic and developing the research question; 2) understanding and drafting the literature review; 3) outlining and drafting the methods section; 4) detailing a timeline for thesis research; and 5) incorporating feedback from prior drafts and producing a full, edited honors thesis proposal for submission. The course will also address some of the nuts and bolts of research, from the IRB process to the logistics of gather data or exploring an archive. Finally, the course will encourage students to reflect on their own writing practices, from preliminary brainstorming around a research topic to building out a plan for data collection, interpretation, and argumentation. Requirement: Feminist/Queer Research Methodologies (concurrently during the same semester or completed in a prior semester).

Credit 1 unit.

Typical periods offered: Fall Half B

WGSS 4150 Feminist Literary and Cultural Theory

This course provides a historical overview of feminist literary and cultural theories since the 1960s and 70s, acquainting students with a diversity of voices within contemporary feminism and gender studies. Readings will include works of French feminism, Foucault's History of Sexuality, feminist responses to Foucault, queer (LGBTQ+) theory, postcolonial and decolonial feminism, feminist disability theory, and writings by US feminists of color (African-American, Asian-American, Latina, Native-American). The reading list will be updated each year to reflect new developments in the discipline. We will approach these readings from an intersectional and interdisciplinary perspective, considering their dialogue with broader sociopolitical, cultural, and philosophical currents. By the end of the course, students are expected to have gained a basic knowledge of the major debates in feminist literary and cultural studies in the last 50 years, as well as the ability to draw on the repertoire of readings to identify and frame research questions in their areas of specialization. The class will be largely interactive, requiring active participation and collaborative effort on the part of the students. Students will be encouraged to make relevant connections between the class readings, everyday social and political issues, and their own research interests. NOTE: This course is in the core curriculum for the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies graduate certificate. Prerequisite: advanced course work in WGSS or in literary theory (300 level and above) or permission of the instructor.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 4153 Decolonization to Globalization: How to End an Empire

The conventional markers of the twentieth century - imperialism, decolonization and globalization - are acutely compromised if we mobilize gender and sexuality as modes of analysis. In this course we bring questions of sexual difference and gender to the wider stories of colonialism, nationalism, decolonization, neocolonialism, US imperialism, neoliberalism, globalization, WoT, and majoritarianism. We engender the contradiction between enormous turning points and the lived experiences of billions. We probe how the non-profit industrial complex, development aid, and the normative family have shaped and given shape to the very idea of gender. Finally, we examine the capacious power of gender to interrupt the power of the state and to reorganize extractive relations of race and caste.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 4155 Contemporary Feminisms

The purpose of this course is to provide a framework, a map, within which students can locate feminist ideas. The course, which may be presented historically, explores and compares different types of feminism selected from, for example, the following feminisms: liberal; Marxist; socialist; radical; lesbian; black; existentialist; postmodern. The class considers how such feminisms analyze the nature and sources of women's oppressions, the worlds they envision, and the means they use to bring about change. Note: This course is in the core curriculum for the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies graduate certificate. Permission of instructor required. Prerequisite: Completion of at least one Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course or permission of the instructor.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

WGSS 4165 From Mammy to the Welfare Queen: African American Women Theorize Identity

How do representations of identity affect how we see ourselves and the world sees us? African American women have been particularly concerned with this question, as the stories and pictures circulated about black female identity have had a profound impact on their understandings of themselves and political discourse. In this course we will look at how black feminist theorists from a variety of intellectual traditions have explored the impact of theories of identity on our world. We will look at their discussions of slavery, colonialism, sexuality, motherhood, citizenship, and what it means to be human.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 4200 Feminist Political Theory

This course asks how feminist thinkers from various political and intellectual traditions critique,adopt and transform political theories of justice, citizenship, property and the state. To uncover how different feminist theories have been adopted in the struggle for political transformation and social justice, we will pursue two main lines of inquiry. The first asks how feminist thinkers from various traditions critique and engage the history of political thought within the social contract tradition. We will ask, in particular, how gender, race, slavery, colonialism and empire shape conceptions of citizenship and property. We will also examine transnational feminist critiques of the public/private division in the Western political theory canon as it impacts the role of women and the social construction of women's bodies. During the second half of the semester, we will ask how various transnational social movements have engaged and adopted feminist theories in efforts to resist state violence, colonialism, labor exploitation and resource extraction. In following these lines of inquiry we will draw from postcolonial, decolonial, liberal, Black, radical, Marxist and Chicana feminist perspectives. Part of our goal will be to uncover how various feminist theories treat the relationship between politics and embodied experience, how gendered conceptions of family life affect notions of political power and how ideas about sexuality and sexual conquest intersect with empire-building. Majors and minors in WGSS receive first priority. Other students will be admitted as course enrollment allows.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 4230 Black Sexual Politics

Borrowing from Patricia-Hill Collins perspective in Black Sexual Politics, this seminar examines the historic and popular understandings of black sexuality and how they maintain color line, as well as threaten to spread what Hill-Collins refers to as a new brand of racism. Particularly, this course engages questions about sexuality that have only begun to be discussed with African-American Studies and the larger public sphere. Taking the intersections of identities very seriously, this course interrogates the ways in which these constructions have affected black women, while also being attentive to how others are implicated within discourses of black sexuality. Similarly, we will also engage the various distortions of black men - depictions of the black and masculine as almost always violent, sexually and socially irresponsible, brutish, questionable, and unfaithful. Together we will use various critical texts and media to better understand the impact and the importance of visual and material images in the interplay of race, sex, and politics in contemporary America.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 4245 Transnational Feminisms

This course examines contemporary feminist movements and theories in a global context. Through engagement with key works of feminist and queer theory, political manifestos, and cultural production, we will explore how transnational feminist and queer alliances and coalitions have contested gendered, racialized and class-based forms of exploitation and violence, building alternative futures. We will interrogate the meaning of “global” and “transnational” as a descriptor for a variety of practices and processes from a geographically diverse set of places, and as an analytic to understand the gendered, racialized, colonial, and classed impact of these practices. We will trace how thinkers and activists from various locations and time periods have forged solidarities across physical and ideational borders. The thinkers/organizers/activists we read trace the role of difference in navigating global solidarity and resistance; the potentials and limitations of human rights frameworks in fostering political transformation; capitalism, anti-capitalist mobilizations, "women's" work and the building of alternative economies; movement-building in the age of social media and financialization; LGBTQ politics; and the politics of borders and migration. Our discussions will explore the gray areas existing in between and beyond binaries such as feminist/anti-feminist; local/global; home/away; Global South/North; and domination/dependency. Throughout the semester, we will ask how processes of knowledge production take shape within various (mutually non-exclusive) intellectual and political movements.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 4270 Thinking About Consent

Consent has become a dominant framework we use to think about sex and sexual violence. We often assume that consent is clear, unambiguous, and consistent. At the same time, popular representations of sex and sexual violence suggest that situations and experiences are often fuzzy, messy, or icky -- in other words, questions of consent do not always have the clear answers that we might like to imagine. In this course, we will use recent literary, film, and pop culture expressions of unpleasant, ambiguous, and ambivalent sex to explore and interrogate feminist and queer theories of consent, sexual harm, and autonomy. Works will include Kristen Roupenian's Cat Person, Patricia Lockwood's Rape Joke, and Kate Elizabeth Russell's My Dark Vanessa, along with work by Sara Ahmed, Wendy Brown, Octavia Butler, Angela Davis, Joseph J. Fischel, Ida B. Wells, and others. Topics include philosophies of consent; concepts of consent in queer, racialized, minoritized, disabled, and incarcerated communities; the experience of survivors; and alternatives to consent.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC BU: BA, ETH EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 4280 Sex and Gender in Public

This two-semester course is a research capstone class combined with hands-on workshops designed to help students produce a public project related to gender and/or sexuality studies. It is designed as a capstone that allows students to build on their coursework in WGSS, and it may speak to specific professional goals, but that is not a requirement. It is open to both majors and minors but required for students in the health or politics tracks. Topics covered will include exhibition, podcasts, website design, storymaps, comics, and community education. However, students are not limited to these methods in their final projects.

Credit 1.5 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 4350 Queer and Feminist Geographies

There is a tendency to see space and place as backdrops, mere stages where human social interactions simply play out. Yet when we fail to interrogate the processes behind the social production of space, we run the risk of naturalizing space as heteronormative and obfuscating its inherent exclusions. This upper-level seminar seeks to challenge such assumptions by treating space and place as dynamic formations that actively influence our identities, behaviors, and politics. Using queer and feminist perspectives within the realm of geography, we will explore how spaces, places, and boundaries are shaped, experienced, and contested through diverse gender identities and sexual formations. Questions driving our inquiry include: How do queer and feminist geographies intersect to shape landscapes- both urban and rural in the United States and abroad? What role do geographic spaces play in the construction of LGBTQ identities across different social milieus? And in what ways can queer and feminist perspectives contribute to decolonial and environmental justice movements? In addition to queer and feminist spatial theories, topics will include sexuality and place-making, transnational queer migrations, queer ecologies and environmental justice, and the queering of the public and private divide at the heart of spatial taxonomies in the West. By mobilizing queer and feminist forms of spatial analysis, this seminar will equip you with tools to identify the ways in which spaces, places, and boundaries can further social inequalities and the opportunity to theorize alternative geographies that promote inclusion and more just worlds.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 4370 Reformers and Radicals: Feminist Thinking Through History

Popular conceptions of the "self" have changed over time. In this course we'll collectively create an archive of that history. We'll read "self-help" books and widely circulating contemporary memoirs. We'll consult feminist theories on the self to understand how the philosophy and the history of the most elemental aspect of being human changes to shape wider social and political developments. Students will write creative stories in class to reflect on their own placement in the history of the "self." The course introduces students to historical methods: primary source research, archiving, databasing, contextualizing, cross-cultural analysis, and historiography.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 4390 The Arab & Muslim Americas: Feminist Perspectives

Migratory movements from the Middle East and North Africa into the Americas were precipitated by multiple and intersecting factors. This course will examine the historical and contemporary waves of Arab and Muslim migrants and refugees into the Americas from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It will explore how empire, globalization, and war influenced and continue to influence the flow of people across borders and impact policies and ideas of belonging in receiving nation-states. We will examine Arab and Muslim identity in light of gendered, ethnoreligious, class, and national affiliations and investigate the racialization of Islam and the gendered-Orientalist constructions of Arabs and Muslims in Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Honduras, Cuba) and the US. Utilizing interdisciplinary texts in Transnational Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies, and history, we will trace the ways that specific diasporic subjects have been incorporated into host nation-states and analyze, through a comparative framework, the receptions and rejections of Arabs and Muslims in the US and Latin America.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC, SC EN: S

Typical periods offered: Fall

WGSS 4440 Sex and Gender in Public

This two-semester course is a research capstone class combined with hands-on workshops designed to help students produce a public project related to gender and/or sexuality studies. It is designed as a capstone that allows students to build on their coursework in WGSS, and it may speak to specific professional goals, but that is not a requirement. It is open to both majors and minors. Topics covered will include exhibition, podcasts, website design, storymaps, comics, and community education. However, students are not limited to these methods in their final projects.

Credit 1.5 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WGSS 4500 Women, Law and Society

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC BU: BA EN: S

WGSS 4690 East Asian Feminisms

This course will study the beginnings and the transformations in feminist thought as found in East Asia. It will explore feminism as found in China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea focusing on the period from the late 1800s to the present. Emphasis will be on the diversity of feminisms both between and within these cultures.

Credit 3 units.

WGSS 4980 Supervised Reading and Research

This course is designed for students who are pursuing an independent study project as part of the Department Honors Program. Students must apply to the Department. May be repeated once. Prerequisite: Senior Standing and permission of the department.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 4991 Honors Thesis: Research and Writing

Enrollment in this course is limited to students accepted into the Honor's Program.

Credit 1-3 units. EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WGSS 4996 Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Elective.

Credit 0 units. EN: H

WGSS 4999 Independent Study

Directed readings and research in women and gender studies.

Credit 1-4 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring