Women's and Gender Studies

WMST V1001y Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies 3 pts. Lecture and discussion. Introduction to the ways in which femininity and masculinity have been represented in literature and constructed in culture. The new interdisciplinary scholarship on gender analyses is presented in works of literature, film, social science, and contemporary theory.

WMST BC1050x Women and Health 3 pts. An introduction to women's health across the life span; course emphasizes the scientific basis of present knowledge. Instructors integrate biology with sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, medicine, and women's studies to explore the diverse influences on women's health.

WMST BC3117y Women and Film 3 pts. A critical interpretation of film from a feminist perspective and explanation of the relationship of gender to the language of film.

WMST BC3121y Black Women In America 4 pts. An examination of the experiences of African American women from slavery through the present. Emphasis will be on the history and historiography of these experiences, as well as on critical issues facing African-American women today.

WMST V3125x or y Introduction to Sexuality Studies 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Sexuality is often taken to be a natural and unchanging element of individual life. In this course, we seek to examine ways in which sex is both social and political. That is to say, sexuality has different meanings in different contexts, and it has different effects in terms of power relations within the social order. To this end, we will examine how sexuality has been socially constructed, paying careful attention to the ways these ideas relate to other social forces such as gender, race, and class. We begin with a historical examination as to how sexuality has been defined as a natural component of self by early sexologists and eugenicists, paying careful attention to their contemporary legacies. We continue this historical overview through an examination of early scholars who increasingly argued that sexuality has a social basis, culminating in the theoretical analyses of Foucault. The first part of this course thus seeks to historically situate and denaturalize some of the basic concepts we tend to take for granted, including that of "sexuality" itself. In the second part of the course, we will consider the state of sexual politics within the contemporary United States, focusing upon key arenas of political struggle including sex education, prostitution, and homosexuality.

WMST BC3130y Discourses of Desire: Introduction To Gay and Lesbian Studies 3 pts. Who or what constitutes the subject of gay and lesbian studies? Explores historical, methodological, and epistemological crisis points of essentialism/constructionism; sexuality across cultures; gender versus sexuality; bisexuality and the binary regimes of hetero/homo and male/female; community; identity; the politics of liberation; the place of feminism in les/bi/gay studies.

WMST BC3132x Gendered Controversies: Women's Bodies and Global Conflicts 4 pts. A seminar investigating the significance of social, political, and cultural conflict centered on issues concerning women's lives.

WMST BC3134y Unheard Voices: African Women's Literature 4 pts. Themes include the politics of the canon in Africa, the problems of language, postcolonial counter-discourse, the African-American continuum, and Third World and Western feminism. Readings include novels, short stories, poetry, and drama by Elora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Nawal El Saadawi, Miriam Tlali, Bessie Head, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Tess Onwueme.

WMST BC3136x Asian American Women's Literature 4 pts. Explores selected texts written by Asian American women from diverse backgrounds, focusing on issues such as identity, gender, generation, race, class, region, and language.

WMST V3137x Feminist Sexual Politics in Historical Perspective 4 pts. Why, and in what ways, has sex been a central issue for feminism throughout its history? How have feminist attitudes towards sex changed over time, and how did attitudes vary amongst feminists themselves? What connections did feminists make between sexual reform, women's rights, and broader social, political, and economic change? And what are the legacies of past feminist sexual politics for the present day? This course addresses these questions by exploring the history of feminist sexual politics in Europe over the course of the "long nineteenth century," that is, between the years 1789 and 1918, and will focus on developments in Britain, France, and Germany. From the French Revolution to the achievement of women's suffrage, we will examine feminists' writings on and activism surrounding sex and sexuality to understand how definitions of "sex," "feminism," and "sexual politics" changed over time, and how issues of class and race shaped feminist sexual politics. We will also analyze contradictions, tensions and continuities within diverse feminist approaches to sexuality, and assess similarities and differences amongst feminists from different national backgrounds. Furthermore, by adopting a focus on feminism and sexuality, this course offers a unique lens on the major "world historical" events of modern European history.

WMST V3140x Race and Sexuality: Black Queers 4 pts. Prerequisites: Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: Women's and Gender Studies majors and concentrators should e-mail Professor Marcellus Blount (mb33@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Race and Sexuality seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. This undergraduate seminar draws upon feminist, African American, and queer theories and cultural practices to explore the relations of male masculinity and queer subjectivities. We will use literature and film, primarily, to provide a critique of normative notions of the binary oppositions of "black" and "gay" that oversimplify the complex social formations that structure racial and queer representations. We will attempt to find a way into discussions of how sexuality studies can enhance discussions of race and gender within the context of African American artistic forms. Cultural theorists include Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Karla Holloway, bell hooks, Kobena Mercer, and Robyn Wiegman. Writers and filmmakers will come from diverse canons, including the black feminist tradition of Mae V. Cowdery, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Dees Rees. This course will pay particular attention to the possibility of black queer texts and critical practices with an emphasis on deconstructing black masculinity through the languages of intimacy. Artists include Melvin Dixon, Thomas Allen Harris, Essex Hemphill, Issac Julien, Randall Kenan, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Marlon Riggs. One fifteen-page essay. Women's and Gender Studies majors and concentrators should mail Professor Blount at mb33@columbia.edu for permission to enroll.

WMST V3311x Colloquium in Feminist Theory 4 pts. Prerequisite: Feminist Texts I, or II, and permission of the instructor. An exploration of the relationship between new feminist theory and feminist practice, both within the academy and in the realm of political organizing.

WMST V3521x Senior Seminar I 4 pts. The Senior Seminar in Women's Studies offers you the opportunity to develop a capstone research paper by the end of the first semester of your senior year. Senior seminar essays take the form of a 25-page paper based on original research and characterized by an interdisciplinary approach to the study of women, sexuality, and/or gender. You must work with an individual advisor who has expertise in the area of your thesis and who can advise you on the specifics of method and content. Your grade for the semester with be determined by IRWGS's Director of Undergraduate Studies in consultation with your advisor. Students receiving a grade of "B+" of higher in Senior Seminar I will be invited to complete Senior Seminar II in Spring 2014. Senior Seminar II students will complete a senior thesis of 40-60 pages in a course facilitated by the IRWGS Director.

WMST V3522y Senior Seminar II 4 pts. Individual research in Women's Studies conducted in consultation with the instructor. The result of each research project is submitted in the form of the senior essay and presented to the seminar.

WMST V3813y Colloquium on Feminist Inquiry 4 pts. Prerequisites: WMST V1001 and the instructor's permission. A survey of research methods from the social sciences and interpretive models from the humanities, inviting students to examine the tension between the production and interpretation of data. Students receive firsthand experience practicing various research methods and interpretive strategies, while considering larger questions about how we know what we know.

WMST V3915x or y Gender and Power in Transnational Perspective 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. How have development and globalization impacted (and attempted to impact) gender and sexuality around the world? How do gender and sexuality circulate across national, political, and technological borders in the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization? How has feminism itself become part of these increasingly complex cultural circulations, to women's benefit as well as detriment? In addition to linking together what Chandra Mohanty has described as the "One Third" and "Two Thirds" worlds, this discussionbased seminar seeks to reconnect the disparately gendered intimate and global spheres, situating the feminized "private" domains of love, sex, and caring within fields of action such as geopolitics and global political economy. How do formations of gender and sexuality shift when intimate relations are transnationalized? Does the globalization of intimacy exacerbate inequalities of gender, race, class, and nation, or might it also and simultaneously create unexpected opportunities to alleviate these? Under what circumstances does feminism itself get intertwined in circuits of gendered power? In the first part of this class, we will carefully examine issues of gender, sexuality, and development. In the latter, we turn increasingly toward issues of emotion and transnational intimate exchange and emotional labor while situating these encounters within the economic context we discussed in the first section.

WMST W3922x or y The Jazz Age: fictional representations of Jewish-American and African-America women in the city 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. The "Roaring 20s" evokes images of jazz, the flapper, cabarets, Harlem, the bohemian life of Greenwich Village, and a time of greater freedoms for women in the US. All of these images are associated with urban life and have clear racial, class, gender, and sexual connotations. In this course, we will be examining classic Jazz-Age Jewish-American and African-American fiction that presents "New Woman" female protagonists. We will be tracing the differences between the representation of the Jewish-American "New Woman" and the "New Negro Woman," while discussing what these differences might signify with respect to the positionality of Jewish and black women in the US.

WMST G4000x Genealogies of Feminism: Voice of the Witness - Trauma, Memory, Testimony 4 pts. The historian Annette Wievorka has called our age the "era of witness." This course examines the emergence of testimony as a genre and a telling source of evidence in the aftermath of 20th and 21st century catastrophes. Focusing comparatively on several key sites that illuminate theoretical and gender dimensions of testimony - war, dictatorship and crimes against humanity as well as rape and sexual abuse - we will study acts of witness in oral history, memoirs, blogs, film, performance and in trials and truth commissions. We will also look at the memorial functions of testimony archives and the role of testimony in museums and memorials. Authors studied will include Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Susan Brison, Judith Butler, Cathy Caruth, Charlotte Delbo, Judith Lewis Herrman, Antje Krog, Claude Lanzmann, Primo Levi, François Lyotard, Rigoberta Menchú, Anna Deveare Smith, Art Spiegelman, among others.

WMST G4000y Genealogies of Feminism: Body and Power 4 pts. This course examines several genealogies of contemporary critical theory in which the body and processes of embodiment are seen as exemplary sites for the production of truth and power. The purpose of the course is to understand how these authors, and these genealogies of thought, variously links bodies to power?power over life and death, power to cripple and rot certain worlds while over-investing others with wealth and hope. We will also attempt to understand how the theoretical landscapes explored and projected in these texts might relate to practical political and sociological struggles in the contemporary world.

WMST G4000y (Section 001) Genealogies of Feminism: Theories of Intimacy 4 pts. Prerequisites: Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Hirsch (mh2349@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Intimacy seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major or field, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. This course traces the Genealogies of Feminism through feminist and queer preoccupations with intimacy in the context of threats to intimate attachments caused by divisions of social difference and the inequities of power and by institutional, ideological and legal efforts to regulate kinship and affiliation. We will explore key feminist theoretical work about sites and spaces of intimacy such as love, the family (mother- daughter relationships, sisters, gay and straight marriage and adultery, motherhood, adoption and abortion), home and domesticity, friendship, activist community, collaboration, biopolitics and embodiment, and social networks.

WMST G4000y (Section 002) Genealogies of Feminism: Forms of Life: Culture as Aesthetics, Experience, Embodiement 4 pts. This course explores theories of forms of life, human and social, which have been seen to develop in the course of a global history of contemporary modernity, with an attention to the role of aesthetics and affect, communication technology and built form in shaping and expressing dominant as well as marginalized and/or alternative forms of sociality, subjectivity and collective being and experience. We will examine several scholarly literatures that deal with issues of beauty, embodiment, sensory experience, pleasure, pain, subjectivity and structures of feeling, and their relations to questions of gender and power, social order and struggle, and historical change. We will also look at questions of biopolitics, violence and the limits and possibilities of different humanist and post-humanist conceptions of "life" for understanding politics in contemporary contexts. Readings include Marx, Benjamin, Buck-Morss, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Rancière, Esposito, as well as contemporary feminist ethnography of Southeast Asia.

WMST W4300x or y Advanced Topics in Women's and Gender Studies 4 pts. This seminar considers the family at a historical and socio-technical juncture at which its form is both remarkably flexible and deeply intractable. The course begins with an overview of sociological and feminist scholarship on the family. We then examine how developments stemming from genetic science have spurred the emergence of new reproductive technologies over the last few decades and, in turn, novel forms of procreation and affiliation. To what extent do assisted reproduction practices such as in vitro fertilization, prenatal diagnosis, and surrogacy offer novels ways for constituting and conceptualizing the family? Which constituencies benefit from these possibilities, which enable them and which are constrained by them? To what extent do clinical and reproductive genetics privilege biological relatedness and, therefore, traditional gender ideologies? How is the family now simultaneously case as a source of (health) risk, a necessary resource for optimal (healthy) living, and a volitional social form? We will take up these questions against the backdrop of forms of kin-keeping sociality (family reunions, genealogy, etc.), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, "biosociality" and biological affinity. Readings include works by Cartsen, Engels, Franklin & McKinnon, Furstenberg, Nelkin, Povinelli, Katz Rothman, Strathern and Weston.

WMST V4320x or y (Section 001) Queer Theories and Histories 4 pts. The course will cover a range of (mostly U.S. and mostly 20th-Century) materials that thematize gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender experience and identity. We will study fiction and autobiographical texts, historical, psychoanalytic, and sociological materials, queer theory, and films, focusing on modes of representing sexuality and on the intersections between sexuality and race, ethnicity, class, gender, and nationality. We will also investigate connections between the history of LGBT activism and current events. Authors will include Foucault, Freud, Butler, Sedgwick, Anzaldua, Moraga, Smith. Students will present, and then write up, research projects of their own choosing. Enrollment limited to 20 students.