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Back to Fall 2009 courses
All seminars offer 4 credits unless otherwise noted (click on course name for full description). Please verify with home departments for any prerequisites/changes to all cross-listed courses. Course offerings may change prior to Fall semester. The official Smith College Catalog should be considered the definitive source for up-to-date information prior to registering for the course. All 300-level courses in the Study of Women and Gender are seminars and are normally limited to 12 juniors or seniors; seminars have prerequisites and all require permission of the instructor to enroll.
FALL 2009 / Jump to Spring 2010 Seminars
SWG 316 Seminar: Feminist Theories of Cross-Border Organizing
AAS 366 Seminar: Contemporary Topics in Afro-American Studies: Black Feminist Theories
ESS 340 Women's Health: Current Topics
FRN 320 Topics in Medieval and Renaissance Literature: Topic: Women Writers of the Middle Ages
SOC 323 Seminar: Gender and Social Change
SWG 300 Special Topics in the Study of Women and Gender: Intimate Revolutions: Sexuality and the Family in the Postwar Era
Daniel Rivers
Th 1:00-2:50
This seminar will look at the ways that categories of sexuality, class, race, and gender have intersected and operated in constructions of the family in the last half of the twentieth century. The focus will be on both political and institutional attempts to regulate the family and the ways the family has acted as a site of resistance. We will interrogate the notion of the family as a static, conservative institution and explore how changes in reproduction and sexuality have been linked both to each other and to other social transformations. Prerequisites: SWG 150, one additional course in the major and permission of the instructor.
SWG 316 Seminar: Feminist Theories of Cross-Border Organizing
Elisabeth Armstrong
T Th 10:30-11:50 am
Border crossing forms the cornerstone of feminist solidarity, whether across the bounds of propriety, or the definitions of racialized identities, or the police checkpoints of the nation-state. This seminar centers on feminist theories that imagine how to recognize strangers, defer citizenship, nurture desire and remember the very histories that divide cohorts in struggle. We will also discuss emerging methods of organizing women that inspire these theories. Course assignments include frequent short papers and in-class presentations. A background in feminist theory is required. Prerequisites: SWG 150, one additional course in the major, and permission of the instructor.
AAS 366 Seminar: Contemporary Topics in Afro-American Studies: Black Feminist Theories
Riché Barnes
T 1:00-2:50 pm
This course will examine historical, critical and theoretical perspectives on the development of Black feminist theory/praxis. The course will draw from the 19th century to the present, but will focus on the contemporary Black feminist intellectual tradition that achieved notoriety in the 1970s and initiated a global debate on “western” and global feminisms. Central to our exploration will be the analysis of the intersectional relationship between theory and practice and between race, gender and class. We will conclude the course with the exploration of various expressions of contemporary Black feminist thought around the globe as a way of broadening our knowledge of feminist theory.
ESS 340 Women's Health: Current Topics
Barbara Brehm-Curtis
T 1:00-2:50 pm
A seminar focusing on current research papers in women's health. Recent topics have included reproductive health issues, eating disorders, heart disease, depression, autoimmune disorders and breast cancer. Prerequisites: 140 or a strong biological sciences background, and permission of the instructor. Open to juniors and seniors. Enrollment limited to 18. This course may not be taken for S/U grading option.
FRN 320 Topics in Medieval and Renaissance Literature: Women Writers of the Middle Ages
Eglal Doss-Quinby
M W 1:10-2:30 pm
What genres did women practice in the Middle Ages and in what way did they transform those genres for their own purposes? What access did women have to education and to the works of other writers, male and female? To what extent did women writers question the traditional gender roles of their society? How did they represent female characters in their works and what do their statements about authorship reveal about their understanding of themselves as writing women? What do we make of anonymous works written in the feminine voice? Reading will include the love letters of Héloise, the lais and fables of Marie de France, the songs of the trobairitz and women trouvères, and the writings of Christine de Pizan.
HST 371 Problems in 19th-Century United States History: African-American Women in Slavery and Freedom
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
T 1-2:50 pm
How did race, gender and freedom affect African-American women? Despite the particular degradation, violence and despair of enslavement in the United States, African-American women built families, traditions and a legacy of resistance that nurtured freedom movements during enslavement and fostered a trajectory of activism in the Black community throughout the nineteenth century. Close reading of protest strategies, speeches and writings including those of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Sarah Remond, Francis Harper, Amanda Smith, Ida Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper. Enrollment limited to 12.
SOC 323 Seminar: Gender and Social Change
Nancy Whittier
T 3:00-4:50 pm
Theory and research on the construction of and change in gender categories in the United States, with particular attention to social movements that seek to change gender definitions and stratification, including both feminist and anti-feminist movements. Theoretical frameworks are drawn from feminist theory and social movement theory. Readings examine historical shifts in gender relations and norms, changing definitions of gender in contemporary everyday life, and politicized struggles over gender definitions. Themes throughout the course include the social construction of both femininity and masculinity, the intersection of race, class, and sexual orientation with gender, and the growth of a politics of identity. Case studies include feminist, lesbian and gay, right-wing, self help, anti-abortion, and pro-choice movements.
SPRING 2010 / Back to Top of Page
SWG 312 Queer Resistances: Identities, Communities, and Social Movements
AAS 366 Seminar: Contemporary Topics in Afro-American Studies: Black Women, Work and Family
ENG 392 South Asian Autobiographical Fictions
HST 355 Topics in Social History: Debates in the History of Gender and Sexuality
HST 383 Research in U.S. Women’s History: The Sophia Smith Collection
PSY 374 Psychology of Political Activism
SOC 314 Seminar in Latina/o Identity: Latina/o Racial Identities in the United States
SPN 372 Topics in Latin American and Iberian Studies: Women, Environmental Justice and Social Action
THE 319 Shamans, Shapeshifters, and the Magic
SWG 312 Queer Resistances: Identities, Communities, and Social Movements
Nancy Whittier
T Th 1:00-2:50
How do we know what it means to identify as lesbian, gay, queer, bisexual, or transgender? Why do these terms mean different things to different people and in different contexts? How does claiming or refusing to claim a sexual identity affect community formation or social change? This seminar will explore constructions of queer collective identities, communities, and social protest. We will pay explicit attention to how queer identities, communities, and movements are racialized, shaped by class, gendered, and contextual. Drawing on historical, theoretical, narrative, and ethnographic sources, we will examine multiple sites of queer resistance including local communities, academic institutions, media, the state, social movement organizations, and the Internet. We will examine the consequences of various theories of gender, sexuality, and resistance for how we interpret the shapes that queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identity, community, and social movements take. Prerequisites: SWG 150, one additional course in the major and permission of the instructor.
AAS 366 Seminar: Contemporary Topics in Afro-American Studies: Black Women, Work and Family
Riché Barnes
T 1:00 – 2:50 pm
Black women have always been in a precarious position as it pertains to work and family. They have been portrayed as hard workers and “lazy” welfare queens. They have held the position of cold, callous mothers to their own children, and loving mammy’s to white children. They have been hyper-sexualized erotic jezebels and domineering, unfeminine matriarchs. And when the work and family sociological literature seeks answers to the ways in which Americans balance the challenges of work and family in the contemporary global economy, African American women and their families are invisible. This seminar will provide students with an analytic framework to understand the ways gender, race, and class intersect in defining the world of work in our society and affect the available choices African American women have to best support their families. Utilizing ethnography, fiction, film, and forms of popular culture, we will explore policies that affect both the family and institutions of work, explore the ways that black men and women balance the demands of family, and pay particular attention to the development of gender roles and strategies that affect African American women's work and family decisions.
AAS 366 Seminar: Contemporary Topics in Afro-American Studies: Ida B. Wells and the Struggle against Racial Violence
Paula Giddings
M 7:00 – 9:00 pm
Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was a black investigative journalist who began, in 1892, the nation's first anti-lynching campaign. In her deconstruction of the reasons for, and response to, violence--and particularly lynching--she also uncovered the myriad components of racism in a formative period of race relations that depended on ideas of emerging social sciences, gender identity, and sexuality. The course will follow Wells's campaign, and in the process study the profound intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality which have shaped American culture and history.
ENG 392 South Asian Autobiographical Fictions
Ambreen Hai
T 1:00-3:30
How have modern South Asians adapted the forms of autobiography to make sense of their lives? What can individual idiosyncratic life stories tell us more broadly about culture or history? How does writing help us to process, or create meanings from, experiences of colonization, national independence, family, race, gender, sexuality, migration, loss, or trauma? What are the implications of creating intimacy, voice or subjectivity in a colonizer’s alien language? This course explores how diverse writers (Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, diasporic) have crafted life writing in English to produce broader meanings for various purposes (nation building, anti-colonial resistance, self-fashioning, diasporic identity formation, telling of suppressed histories, remembrance). Readings include fictional and actual autobiographies by Gandhi, Nehru, G.V.Desani, Nirad Chaudhuri, Attia Hosain, Sara Suleri, Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, Hanif Kureishi, Meena Alexander, and theories of autobiography.
HST 355 Topics in Social History: Debates in the History of Gender and Sexuality
Darcy Buerkle
T 3:00-4:50
This course examines the trajectory of research on the history of sexuality and gender in the modern period, with a primary focus on modern Europe. Topics include historical debates about gender and fascism, the establishment of the welfare state, feminism and war and gendered cultural production. In addition to developing a strong sense of recent historical research on gender, this course will consider how notions about gender in history inform contemporary theory and politics. Sources include original documents, recent historical monographs, autobiography and film.
HST 383 Research in U.S. Women’s History: The Sophia Smith Collection: American Women in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Helen Horowitz
R 1:00-2:50
A research and writing workshop in U.S. women's history, working with archival materials from the Sophia Smith Collection (letters, diaries, oral histories, newspaper articles, government documents, etc.) and historical scholarship, to research, analyze and write a paper of your own choice.
PRS 305 Cultural Literacy
Kevin Quashie (Afro-American Studies) and Susan Van Dyne (Study of Women and Gender)
T Th 10:30-11:50
How have race and gender intersected or diverged in the ways we read our shared past? How do visual images like Rosie the Riveter or Betty Crocker, or a song like “Strange Fruit,” or even a “look” like Angela Davis’ afro become cultural icons? We’ll explore the processes through which these artifacts are circulated, acquire new meanings, and serve as catalysts for group action as well as triggers for group memory or misremembering. How have economic and political interests used cultural icons to shape collective identities? The seminar involves archival research, engaging theory, and reading media through a cultural studies lens. Students will investigate an interdisciplinary research question and make a presentation involving several media. Enrollment limited to 15 juniors and seniors. Permission of the instructors required. Seniors and juniors who have studied race and gender through courses in SWG, AAS, AMS or SOC are welcome to apply. Others should seek permission of the instructors by email describing the courses that prepare them to do advanced work in the area.
PSY 374 Psychology of Political Activism
Lauren Duncan
T 1:00-2:50
Political psychology is concerned with the psychological processes underlaying political phenomena. This seminar focuses on people’s motivations to participate in political activism, especially activism around social issues. Readings include theoretical and empirical work from psychology, sociology, and political science. We will consider accounts of some large-scale social movements in the U.S. (e.g., Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Movement, White Supremacy Movements.) Prerequisite: 266, 270, or 271 and permission of the instructor.
SOC 314 Seminar in Latina/o Identity: Latina/o Racial Identities in the United States
Ginetta Candelario
T 1:00-2:50
This seminar will explore theories of race and ethnicity, and the manner in which those theories have been confronted, challenged and/or assimulated by Latina/os in the United States. Special attention will be paid to the relationship of Latina/os to the white/black dichotomy. A particular concern throughout the course will be the theoretical and empirical relationship between Latina/o racial, national, class, gender and sexual identities. Students will be expected to engage in extensive and intensive critical reading and discussion of course texts.
SPN 372 Topics in Latin American and Iberian Studies: Women, Environmental Justice and Social Action
Michelle Joffroy
This multi-disciplinary course explores key debates and theoretical approaches involved in understanding environmental concerns, as well as the role of art and cultural production in social movements, in Latin America from a gender and justice perspective. With Latin American women’s and environmental movements as our lens, we will map the politics and poetics of environmental justice in Latin America from the early 20th century to the present. Through films, memoirs, ethnography, music and narrative fiction we will explore how women’s cultural and social activisms have articulated the multiple ways that gender, class and race mediate paradigms of political-environmental justice. Enrollment limited to 12.
THE 319 Shamans, Shapeshifters, and the Magic
Andrea Hairston
T 3:00-5:00, W 7:00-9:30 pm
To act, to perform is to speculate with your body. Theatre is a transformative experience that takes performer and audience on an extensive journey in the playground of the imagination beyond the mundane world. Theatre asks us to be other than ourselves. We can for a time inhabit someone else’s skin, be shaped by another gender or ethnicity, become part of a past epoch or an alternative time and space similar to our own time but that has yet to come. As we enter this ‘imagined’ world we investigate the normative principles of our current world. This course will investigate the counterfactual, speculative, subjunctive impulse in overtly speculative drama and film with a particular focus on race and gender. We will examine an international range of plays by such authors as Caryl Churchill, Wole Soyinka, Dael Olandersmith, Derek Walcott, Bertolt Brecht, Lorraine Hanberry, Craig Lucas, and Doug Wright, as well as films such as Quilombo, Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, X-Men, Contact, and Brother From Another Planet.