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All courses offer 4 credits unless otherwise noted (click on course name for full description). Please check with home departments for any prerequisites/changes to all cross-listed courses. The official Smith College Catalog should be considered the definitive source for up-to-date information prior to registering for the course.
WST 100 Introduction to Queer Studies
WST 150 Introduction to Women’s Studies
WST 260 The Cultural Work of Memoir
WST 290 Queer Looks: Gender, Sexuality and Film (Colloquium)
AAS 209 Feminism, Race and Resistance: History of Black Women in America
ANT 251 Women and Modernity in East Asia
ANT 342 Seminar: Topics in Anthropology: Motherhood
CLS 236 Cleopatra: Histories, Fictions, Fantasies
CLT 234 The Adventure Novel: No Place for a Woman?
CLT 235 Fairy Tales and Gender
CLT 272 Women Writing: 20th and 21st Century Fiction
CLT 278 Gender and Madness in African and Caribbean Prose
CLT 293 Writings and Rewritings: Antigone
ENG 292 Reading and Writing Autobiography
FRN 230 Readings in Modern Literature. Topic: Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean
GOV 205 Colloquium: Law, Family and State
HST 223 Women in Japanese History: From Ancient Times to the Nineteenth Century
HST 289 Colloquium: Aspects of Women’s History
HST 278 Women in the United States, 1865 to Present
HST 280 Problems of Inquiry: Women Writing Resistance
IDP 208 Women's Medical Issues
ITL 344 Italian Women Writers. Topic: Women in Italian Society: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
REL 110 Colloquia: Thematic Studies in Religion: Women Mystics’ Theology of Love
SOC 213 Ethnic Minorities in America
WST 100
Introduction to Queer Studies
Gary Lehring
Th 7:30-9:30pm
An introduction to the questions, debates and possibilities of
this emerging field.
WST 150 Introduction to Women’s Studies
Marilyn Schuster, Director
M W F 11:00am-12:10pm
An introduction to the interdisciplinary field of women’s studies through a critical examination of feminist histories, issues and practices. Focus on the U.S. with some attention to the global context. Primarily for first and second year students. Lecture and discussion, students will be assigned to sections.
Further work in Women’s Studies usually requires WST 150, Introduction to Women’s Studies, as a prerequisite.
WST 260 The Cultural Work of Memoir
Susan Van Dyne
M W 2:40pm-4:00pm
This course will explore how queer subjectivity intersects with gender, ethnicity, race, and class. How do individuals from groups marked as socially subordinate or non-normative use life-writing to claim a right to write? The course uses life-writing narratives, published in the U.S. over roughly the last 30 years, to explore the relationships between politicized identities, communities, and social movements. Students also practice writing autobiographically. Prerequisites: WST 150, and a literature course.
WST 290 Colloquium: Queer Looks: Gender, Sexuality and Film
Judith Halberstam
M 7:00-9:30 pm and viewing times.
In this class we will read feminist and queer film theory from the last two decades in relation to a set of popular and independent films from a variety of genres. We will try to cover the “classic” texts in feminist and queer film theory but we will also remain attentive to genre, theories of reception, the meaning of global cinema and the changing nature of film criticism and film circulation in the age of the internet. While we will inevitably watch some independent and low budget films, this course will also track the development of queer and feminist film theory in response to popular film. Throughout the course we will examine the logics of the gaze, the pleasure and danger in looking, the relations between race and class and visibility. Enrollment limited to 25; pre-requisites: WST 150 and one other course in Women’s Studies; priority to WST majors and minors. Subject to the approval of the Committee on Academic Priorities
WST 300 Special Topic: Redefining Community Within and Across Nations: South Asian Women’s Cultural Production in India, Britain, and the United States
Josna Rege
W 7:30-9:30 pm
We will examine South Asian women's collaborative projects, archives and networks (like Sound and Picture Archives for Research On Women), cultural collectives (like Asian Women Writers Collective), and publishing houses (like Kali for Women)that take control of their own cultural production. Reading literary-cultural and theoretical texts in different genres, we will ask a series of related questions: How do these projects redefine received notions of family and community? Represent gender roles and relations? Negotiate relationships to larger domestic and diasporic collectivities? Facilitate cultural translation? Build communities that support women's creative work? Finally, we will find ways to contribute to at least one such community.
AAS 209 Feminism, Race and Resistance: History of Black Women in America
Paula Giddings
M 7:00-9:30 pm
This interdisciplinary course will explore the historical and theoretical perspectives of African American women from the time of slavery to the post-civil rights era. A central concern of the course will be the examination of how Black women shaped, and were shaped by the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality in American culture. Not open to first year students.
Sherry Marker
M W 1:10-2:30 pm
With the help of the Sophia Smith Collection and the Smith College Archives, this writing intensive course looks at a number of 19th and 20th century American women writers. All wrestled with specific issues that confronted them as women; each wrote about important issues in American society. Enrollment limited to 15. Priority given to first year students. WI
ANT 251 Women and Modernity in East Asia
Suzanne Zhang-Gottschang
T Th 9:00-10:20 am
This course explores the roles, representations and experiences of women in 20th century China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan in the context of the modernization projects of these countries. Through ethnographic and historical readings, film and discussion this course examines how issues pertaining to women and gender relations have been highlighted in political, economic, and cultural institutions. The course compares the ways that Asian women have experienced these processes through three major topics: war and revolution, gendered aspects of work, and women in relation to the family. This course is co-sponsored by, and cross-listed in, the East Asian Studies Program.
ANT 342 Seminar: Topics in Anthropology: Motherhood
Suzanne Zhang-Gottschang
T 3:00-4:50 pm
Motherhood integrates economic, political, biological and social processes. The study of motherhood in the early days of anthropology frequently focused on how it functioned in terms of kinship and reproduction. With the developments in feminist theory within and outside of anthropology, however, we have come to understand that motherhood may provide insights into structures of power, dynamics of gender relations, identity politics as well as economic relations. This research has destabilized a naturalized understanding of mothering. As a result, motherhood as an institution and experience is understood to vary across time and space, history, society and culture. Motherhood will be treated here as a cluster of practices, ideas and experiences that are linked to issues of sexuality, reproduction, power and authority, personhood, consumption, morality and social order and disorder. Our purpose in this seminar is to review some of the major works on motherhood produced by anthropologists in recent years and contextualize them in light of feminist theory.
CLS 236 Cleopatra: Histories, Fictions, Fantasies
Nancy Shumate
T Th 9:00-10:20 am
A study of the transformation of Cleopatra, a competent Hellenistic ruler, into a historical myth, a staple of literature, and a cultural lens through which the political, aesthetic and moral sensibilities of different eras have been focused. Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Orientalist, Postcolonial, Hollywood Cleopatras; reading from, among others, Plutarch, Virgil, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Dryden, Gautier, Shaw, historical novelists; some attention to Cleopatra in the visual arts.
CLT 234 The Adventure Novel: No Place for a Woman?
Margaret Bruzelius
M W 2:40-4:00 pm
This course explores the link between landscape, plot and gender: how is the adventure landscape organized? Who lives where within it? What boundaries mark safe and unsafe places? Beginning with essays on cartography by Denis Wood, we’ll read three classic 19th century boys’ books (Scott, Stevenson, Verne), then adventure fictions with female protagonists by E.M. Forster, Ursula Le Guin, Peter Dickinson, Astrid Lundren and others, to explore the ways in which this genre has embraced and resisted female heroes.
CLT 235 Fairy Tales and Gender
Elizabeth Harries
T Th 1:00-2:50 pm
A study of the literary fairy tale in Europe from the 1690s to the 1990s, with emphasis on the ways women have written, rewritten and transformed them. Some attention to oral story-telling and to related stories in other cultures. Writers will include Aulnoy, Perrault, le Prince de Beaumont, the Grimms, Andersen, Christina Rossetti, Angela Carter, Sexton, Broumas. Prerequisite: at least one college-level course in literature. Not open to first-year students.
Katwiwa Mule
T Th 10:30-11:50 am
This course will examine how African women playwrights use drama to confront the realities of women’s lives in contemporary Africa. What is the specificity of the vision unveiled in African women’s drama? How do the playwrights use drama to mock rigid power structures and confront crisis, instability and cultural expression in postcolonial Africa? How and for what purposes do they interweave the various aspects of performance in African oral traditions with elements of European drama? Readings, some translated from French, Swahili and other African languages, will include Ama Ata Aidoo’ s Anowa, Osonye Tess Onwueme’s Tell It to Women, An Epic Drama for Women, and Penina Mlama’s Nguzo Mama (Mother Pillar).
CLT 272 Women Writing: 20th and 21st Century Fiction
Marilyn Schuster
M W F 1:10-2:30 pm
A study of the pleasures and politics of fiction by women from English-speaking and French-speaking cultures. How do women writers engage, subvert, and/or resist dominant meanings of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity and create new narrative spaces? Who speaks for whom? How does the reader participate in making meaning(s)? How do different theoretical perspectives (feminist, lesbian, queer, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, postmodern) change the way we read? Writers such as Woolf, Colette, Condé, Larsen, Morrison, Duras, Rule, Kingston, Shields and Atwood. Not open to first-year students.
CLT 278 Gender and Madness in African and Caribbean Prose
Dawn Fulton
T R 3:00-4:20 pm
The representation of madness in novels written in English and French by women from Africa and the Caribbean. Beginning with an introduction to theories of madness, we will look specifically at how the category of madness functions in these novels, connoting on the one hand exoticism and marginality, and on the other a language of resistance. Emphasis on close formal analysis, with particular attention to how such narratives articulate or obscure boundaries between madness and reason, and how gender figures in these boundaries. Essays by Edouard Glissant and Franz Fanon; works by such authors as Ken Bugul, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bessie Head, Jean Rhys, Maryse Condé, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra.
CLT 293 Writings and Rewritings: Antigone
Ann Jones
M W 2:40-4:00 pm
A study of how literary texts written in a particular historical and cultural moment are revised and transformed in new geographies, ideological frameworks, and art forms. Oedipus’ daughter Antigone, executed for burying her brother against the decree of the tyrant Creon, has been read as a sister defending family bonds against state power, as a woman supporting private good over brutal law, as a feminist resisting male domination, and as a challenger of normative kinship relations. Why has she been interpreted in such different ways in different times and places? We’ll analyze her transformations from ancient Greece to the 21st century in drama and film from Sophocles to Anoulh, Brecht, the Congolese dramatist Sylvain Bemba, and the modern American playwright Martha Boesing, and in theorists from Hegel to Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Gayle Rubin, Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler.
ENG 292 Reading and Writing Autobiography
Ann Boutelle
T 1:00-2:50 pm
In this workshop, we will explore, through reading and through writing, the presentation of self in autobiography. A major focus will be on the interweaving of voice, structure, style, and content. As we read the work of ourselves and of others, we will be searching for strategies, devices, rhythms, patterns, and approaches that we might adapt in future writings. The reading list will consist of writings by twentieth-century women. Admission by permission of the instructor.
FRN 230 Readings in Modern Literature: Topic: Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean.
Dawn
Fulton
T Th 10:30-11:50 am
An introduction to works by contemporary women writers from francophone Africa and the Caribbean. Topics to be studied include colonialism, exile, motherhood, and intersections between class and gender. Our study of these works and of the French language will be informed by attention to the historical, political, and cultural circumstances of writing as a woman in a former French colony. Texts will include works by Mariama Bâ, Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra.
Martha Ackelsberg
T Th 10:30-11:50 am
The growth and development of political communities in metropolitan areas in the United States, with specific reference to the experiences of women, black and white. Focus on the social structuring of space; the ways patterns of urban development reflect prevailing societal views on relations of race, sex, and class; intergovernmental relations; and the efforts of people -- through governmental action or popular movements -- to affect the nature and structure of the communities in which they live.
GOV 205 Colloquium: Law, Family and State
Alice Hearst
W F 1:10-2:30 pm
Explores the status of the family in American political life, and its role as a mediating structure between the individual and the state. Emphasis will be placed on the role of the courts in articulating the rights of the family and its members. Limited enrollment. Suggested preparation GOV 202 or WST 225.
HST/EAS 223 Women in Japanese History: From Ancient Times to the Nineteenth Century
Marnie Anderson
M W 9-10:20 am
The dramatic transformation in gender relations is a key feature of Japan’s premodern history. This course examines how Japanese women and men have constructed norms of behavior in different historical periods, how gender differences were institutionalized in social structures and practices, and how these norms and institutions changed over time. Our goal is to understand the gendered experiences of women and men from different classes from approximately the seventh through the nineteenth centuries. Consonant with current developments in gender history, we will also explore variables such as class, religion, and political context which have affected women’s and men’s lives.
HST 278 Women in the United States, 1865 to Present
Jennifer Guglielmo
T Th 10:30-11:50 pm
This course explores how women have both experienced and shaped the defining events of this period, including colonization, emancipation from slavery, racial segregation, industrial capitalism, imperialism, mass migration, urbanization, mass culture, nationalism, war, liberatory movements for social justice, and global capitalism. Explores how gender, race, class, and sexuality have changed over time to shape women’s lives in vastly different ways, and how women have both contested and contributed to these systems. This class is open to all students except those who have taken HST 178.
HST 280 Problems of Inquiry: Women Writing Resistance
Jennifer Guglielmo
T Th 3:00-4:20 pm
Women’s testimony as a tool for understanding U.S. history in the 19th and 20th centuries. How women have used cultural work to unmask power relations in their confrontations with colonialism, racism, patriarchy, war and capitalism. Examines women’s writing – speeches, journalism, essays, journal entries, etc. – in comparison with other forms of creative expression such as visual art, oral history, music, folklore, and political action. Central focus on women's production of knowledge to explore what constitutes history.
HST 289 Colloquium: Aspects of Women’s History: The History
of Sexuality from the Victorians to the Kinsey Report
Jennifer Hall-Witt
M W
9-10:20 am
This course traces the history of sexuality in the West from the
early 1800s to the 1950s. By investigating a variety of primary
sources, including the writings of evangelicals, freethinkers,
doctors, social purity reformers, sexologists, literary figures,
eugenicists, and pro-natalists, it examines identity and national
strength during this period. By examining sources that focus on
how the average person thought about sex, it also goes beyond
public discourse to the realm of lived experience, at least as
related in diaries, letters, and surveys. There are no
prerequisites for this class. Enrollment limited to 20 students
HST 383 Research in U.S. Women's History: The Sophia Smith Collection
Topic: American Women in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Helen Horowitz
W 1:10-3:00 pm
IDP 208 Women's Medical Issues
Leslie Jaffe
T Th 10:30-11:50 am
A study of topics and issues relating to women's health, including menstrual cycle, contraception, sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, abortion, menopause, depression, eating disorders, nutrition and cardiovascular disease. While the course focus will primarily be on the physiological aspects of these topics, some social, ethical and political implications will be considered including the issues of violence, the media's representation of women and gender bias in health care.
ITL 344 Italian Women Writers. Topic: Women in Italian Society: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Giovanna Bellesia
M W 1:10-2:30 pm
This course provides an in-depth look at the changing role of women in Italian society. Authors studied include Sibilla Aleramo, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and Dacia Maraini. A portion of the course is dedicated to the new multicultural and multiethnic Italian reality. The selection of texts written during the last ten to fifteen years by contemporary women immigrants in Italy include works by Igiaba Scego and Christiana de Caldas Brito. Limited enrollment, permission of the instructor required. Conducted in Italian.
REL 110 Colloquia: Thematic Studies in Religion: Women Mystics’ Theology of Love
Elizabeth Carr
M W 9:00-10:20 am
This course studies the mystical writings of Hildegard of Bingen, Hadewijch, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa of Avila, and their relevance to contemporary spirituality. Focus on their life journeys in terms of love, creativity, healing, and spiritual leadership. Occasional films and music.
SOC 213 Ethnic Minorities in America
Ginetta
Candelario
T Th 10:30-11:50 am
The sociology of a multiracial and ethnically diverse society. Comparative examinations of several American groups and subcultures
Ginetta Candelario
T Th
1:00-2:50 pm
This course will comparatively examine the African experience in both Central and South American and Caribbean contexts, historically and contemporarily. A relative consideration of the impact of these various hemispheric race ideologies will be undertaken. Enrollment limited to 20. Prerequisites: SOC 101 required; LAS 100 or AAS 117 helpful.