This course will serve as an intensive introduction to contemporary approaches to theories of gender and sexuality, and their relationship to cultural production and politics. Students will develop a historically situated knowledge of the development of feminist and queer scholarship in the 20th and 21st centuries, and consider the multiply intersecting forces which shape understandings of sexual and gender identity. We will consider both foundational questions (What is gender? Who is the subject of feminism? What defines queerness?) and questions of aesthetic and political strategy, and spend substantial time engaging with feminist and queer scholarship in comparative contexts. Students will be introduced to debates in Black feminism, intersectionality theory, third world feminism, socialist feminism, queer of colour critique, and trans* theory. We will read both canonical texts and recent works of scholarship, and the final weeks of the course will be devoted to thinking with our theoretical and historical readings against a selection of feminist and queer literature and cinema. No prior familiarity with the study of gender and sexuality is necessary.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Shakespeare's description of his lover's eyes as 'nothing like the sun' is both an homage and a sendup of the 300-year-old Petrarchan tradition in which the male poetic persona remains forever enraptured by an unattainable female beloved, who never speaks. Beginning with a review of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence and selections from Petrarch’s sonnets to an elusive Laura, we will read a series of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century women writers who inserted their own voices into this evolving tradition by allowing “Laura” to talk back. These include Vittoria Colonna (and her interactive sonnets with Michelangelo), Veronica Gambara, and Gaspara Stampa; dueling personas in sonnets by French poets Pernette du Guillet and Maurice Scéve, and sonnets by more familiar Shakespearean contemporaries Lady Mary Wroth and Sir Philip Sidney (both of whom reflect back on Petrarch but from quite different viewpoints). In the final section of the course we will apply our newly acquired historical perspective to selections from a more recently available corpus of female-authored sonnets from the Harlem Renaissance. All continental works will be read in translation; no previous familiarity with the topic is required.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will encourage encounters with a number of concepts from a critical gendered perspective, including: sameness/difference, identity politics, race/gender, loyalty, security, queer ethics, and queerness in media.
Writing Intensive
Women in Western Thought is an introduction to (the history of) Western thought from the margins of the canon. The class introduces you to some key philosophical question, focusing on some highlights of women’s thought in Western thought, most of which are commonly and unjustly neglected. The seminar will be organized around a number of paradigmatic cases, such as the mind/body question in Early Modern Europe, the declaration of the rights of (wo)men during the French revolution, the impact of slavery on philosophical thought, the MeToo debate and others. By doing so, the course will cover a range of issues, such as the nature of God, contract theory, slavery, standpoint epistemology, and queer feminist politics. Students will engage with questions about what a canon is, and who has a say in that. In this sense, Women in Western Thought introduces you to some crucial philosophical and political problems and makes you acquainted with some women in the field. The long term objective of a class on women in Western thought must be to empower, to inspire independence, and to resist the sanctioned ignorance often times masked as universal knowledge and universal history. People of all genders tend to suffer from misinformation regarding the role of women and the gender of thought more generally. By introducing you to women who took it upon themselves to resist the obstacles of their time, I am hoping to provide role models for your individual intellectual and political development. By introducing you to the historical conditions of the exclusion and oppression of women (including trans and queer women as well as black women and women of color), I hope to enable you to generate the sensitivities that are required to navigate the particular social relations of the diverse world you currently inhabit. By introducing philosophical topics in this way, I hope to enable you to have a positive, diversifying influence on you future endeavours.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this course, we will get to know intersectional feminist philosophy through the lens of a Black feminist epistemology. What does this mean? That means that we will focus on how the contributions of Black feminist authors can bring out the specific political and philosophical nature of an intersectional theoretical framework.
Area: Humanities
This course examines the historical development of feminist and queer critique, focusing on how the concept of family life has been understood by generations of writers, activists, and theorists. We will read important early works on western forms of kinship and family structure, and investigate how contemporary developments in reproductive technology, queer marriage, and workplace integration have produced new imaginings of familial belonging and its alternatives.
Area: Humanities
This course aims to explore how gender and sexuality is situated in contemporary artistic practices in the geographical Middle East, through concepts of religion, war, revolution, resistance, nation-state, post-colonialism, and neoliberalism, especially as written and observed first-hand by artists, curators and scholars from the Middle East and North Africa region and their diasporas. Every week, under an overarching topic, notions of gender and sexuality will be questioned through works of selected artists across the region, as well as texts that provide the historical, theoretical, sociological and political background.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course develops an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to introduce students to ecofeminism through a special focus on its inflections in non-western contexts. Through class discussions and sustained writing engagement, we will develop an understanding of the history of ecofeminism, including theoretical debates linking gender perspectives with political mobilization, as well as ecofeminism's enduring influence on new intellectual and political movements.
Area: Humanities
Gender and Sexuality in the Global West. Topics change each semester. See class search for specific topic being taught each term.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What does it mean to love? From Antiquity to now, from Plato to Jeanette Winterson, writers have staged conversations on love and sex. In this way, they provide us with a “science of sex” (to use Foucault’s notion) that, though fully attuned to the power differentials that inhabit our most intimate physical experiences, gives free range to the imagination of desires. With Plato, the legend of Tristan and Isolde, and the study a few Renaissance love lyrics as a backdrop, we will delve into stories of desire that chart new configurations and break away from “normative heterosexuality.” Readings involve novellas by Balzac, George Sand, Colette; stories by Woolf, by Proust, and selected from Gender Outlaws as well as two films M. Butterfly and Call Me by Your Name. Meshing such stories with fundamental concepts in gender theory will enable us to chart ever changing configurations of desire from the double perspective of queerness and of sexual politics.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course focuses on the potential and limitations of the recent efforts of the international community to introduce a "gendered approach" to conflict resolution, peacebuilding and transitional justice. It examines the fundamental theoretical issues that underlie the "gendered approach" to transitional justice by following the evolution of the gendered approach to peacebuilding in three phases through case studies: The gender-blind phase (Human Rights Trials in Argentina), the gender-neutral phase (Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa) and the gender-sensitive phase (Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration of female combatants in Colombia). The limitations of the gendered approach in practice is explored through cases. For example, we examine the identification of gender-based crimes with sexual crimes in ICTY and ICTR. The LGBTI communities' inclusion to transitional justice as well as gender based harms that are not related to sexual violence are examined through the Colombia Peace Process. Ultimately, the course aims to address the prevailing question in the fields of peacebuilding and transitional justice today through the lens of "gender": Should transitional justice simply redress harms or should it aim to be transformative for the post conflict community? Should response mechanisms aim to restore relationships or should they aim to transform gender relations in communities? The final weeks of the class will be dedicated to the discussion of moral and practical implications of these questions for transitional justice.
Area: Humanities
The course examines claims that present women’s historic role as limited to confinement in the home, and bearing children. Students will gain an understanding of the complexity the world’s path to modernity and the important, and?until recently, silent?roles that women have played.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course examines the historical development of feminist utopia in theory and fiction. Readings will center Indigenous, Black, postcolonial, diasporic, and transnational perspectives that engage the topic of feminist utopia.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
While many recognize Zora Neale Hurston’s creative literary work, her methodological innovations are often overshadowed. This course will examine Hurston’s contributions to theorizing the African diaspora and creative use of ethnography.Dr. Amarilys Estrella, the 2020-2021 ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoc, will teach this course. For more info on Dr. Estrella, see https://history.jhu.edu/directory/amarilys-estrella/
Area: Humanities
This class will examine the U.S. government’s use of incarceration, parole, and house-arrest as default forms of social management, in lieu of social welfare policy. We will explore the origins of the “carceral state” and its impact on targeted communities. The class will focus on often neglected aspects of the ongoing crisis of mass-incarceration in the U.S., in particular its debilitating effects on single-mother households, children who grow up with incarcerated family members, and the extreme violence and deprivation of basic medical needs faced by incarcerated women and LGBTQI individuals. Topics will include black-feminism and “black matriarchy,” the relationship between domestic violence and mass-incarceration in communities of color, women and non-gender conforming prisoners, the “school-to-prison pipeline,” the psychological effects of policing on targeted communities, and the fiscal interests served by mass-incarceration. We will engage sociological, historical, and philosophical materials, as well as literature, film, and past and present social movements.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Introducing feminist approaches to ecology and nonhumans, this course considers the interconnections between heteropatriarchal domination and the domination of nonhuman animals and ecologies. What different sensibilities and ways of seeing sex and gender open up when attention shifts to nonhumans? What tensions within and between feminism, animal liberation, and ecological concern come to the fore when each approach is alongside the others? How does the study of nonhumans extend the promise of feminism, and vice versa? In responding to these questions, we will see the real breadth of issues that the theory and practice of feminism can address.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
If Shakespeare had a sister who went to London to be a writer, what would she write? Virginia Woolf’s account of the thwarted career of Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, Judith, in A Room of One’s Own frames our reading of plays and poetry by Shakespeare and contemporary women writers, including Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Aemelia Lanyer, and Mary Wroth. Working within a selected historical context, students will create fictional biographies of “Judith Shakespeare,” including her perspective on our identified authors and a sample or description of Judith’s own literary accomplishments. Secondary course readings will reflect contemporary economic, political, and religious contexts.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Presenting new scholarship and art, the WGS Graduate Colloquium will catalyze intellectual discussions in which gender and sexuality concerns play important roles. The seminar includes lectures by invited speakers and a film series. Graduate students are encouraged to develop critical and comparative approaches to the study of gender and sexuality—often in interaction with related issues such as race, class, violence, law, medicine, art, and emotionality. This seminar can be taken for credit or audit.
Area: Humanities