Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS)

This course employs Indigenous, Black feminist, Chicana feminist, and decolonizing research frameworks to mediate and articulate ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies of research. These processes assist researchers in enacting and engaging critically conscious and humanizing research. We begin by "becoming" conscious through the specific naming of oppression(s) and the coming of voice. We then attempt to humanize ourselves as researchers through a process of self (re)discovery, recovery, remembering, and reflexivity as they relate to our approaches and attachments to various research projects and inquiries. Next, we interrogate ethical research engagements with vulnerable communities through the discussion and close reading of several research studies and perspective pieces. We then consider how these discussions show up in our writing, citations, and in our overall life's work towards a more just world.

This course traces concepts of gender in the West from Classical understandings of sexual difference that foreground gender hierarchy, to the multiple gender imaginaries formulated in the premodern period (one sex model, Galenic humors, Christian and Jewish interpretations), to Enlightenment period reconfigurations reliant on the conceptual frameworks of degeneracy, atavism, and race science, up to modern articulations of sex/gender/sexuality indebted to nineteenth and twentieth-century sexology and psychoanalysis. Contemporary articulations of sex and gender by feminist and trans studies writers will be woven into the course throughout the semester.

This course aims at introducing key historical and contemporary Latina/x feminist theories, including Chicana/x, Afro-Latina/x, and diasporic Latin American feminist theories. Given that these theories are informed by a strong tradition of "theory in the flesh," intellectual production informed by lived experience, this course highlights the relationship between experience and identity formation. Special attention will be given to writings underscoring the construction of identity at the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and nationality. In addition, the course considers how Latina/x aesthetic production is connected to self-formation, transformation, and resistance.