Women, Gender & Representation

Instructor

Fiona Maurissette

Course Description

This class is for students who recognize that we need a paradigm shift and want to change the world. What kinds of futures have you been made aware of through science fiction and fantasy texts, and how can you use your analyses to create change in the world? In this class, you will be a world builder. This is an interdisciplinary course that examines feminist science and speculative fiction narratives as political texts that critique society’s racial and gender hierarchies. By analyzing science and speculative fiction texts, you will find inspiration for your own constructions of the future. Your words will push the boundaries of what others believe is possible. You will produce a project about how to make our world better. Join others in suspending disbelief and believing in your power to promote change. Writers may include Adrienne Maree Brown, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, Nalo Hopkinson, Shirley Jackson, N.K. Jemisin and Sheree Renée Thomas.

We want to foster an open and welcome community of thinkers and learners. This class will support you in sharing your ideas and thoughts while keeping in focus that not everyone in the class has the same background.

Instructor

Anna Baeth

Course Description

Playing Like a Girl: Gender in Sport explores questions around gender and the involvement of all women in sport, physical activity, and exercise in the United States. Drawing from various texts, podcasts, videos, current events, and our especially our own experiences, we interrogate the histories of women in sport and physical education and use critical feminist theories to decipher the ways sport creates, supports, and resists dominant ideologies of inequality. This course will focus on the creation and legacy of women's sports, patterns of inclusion and exclusion in sport with particular attention to women of color and gender nonconforming athletes, and the social construction of gender, race, and sexuality in sport. This course is experiential and students may be asked to participate in some light activity which will be accessible and available for every body. 

Instructor

Tanya Pearson

Course Description

The cultural narrative of popular women musicians offers a unique view from which to study American history. In this course, students will explore the Women of Rock Oral History Project, a collection of digital interviews and written transcripts documenting the lives and careers of women-identified musicians, analyze their oral testimony, and identify emerging threads, topics and themes. Students will gain an in-depth knowledge of the history of women in rock, develop a greater understanding of their impact on culture, society and politics, gain a greater sense of women’s lives and the pervasive ways in which women musicians address societal issues, and develop and refine skills in critical thinking, discussion and writing.

The tools we will be using are: Moodle, YouTube (Women of Rock Oral History Project YouTube channel), SquareSpace and a podcasting software. We will work individually and in small groups, and the class will consist of exploring the Women of Rock archive, outside research and Zoom visits with Women of Rock Oral History Project narrators.

Instructor

Amy Howe

Course Description

What does it mean to live in Post-Roe world? A world where many are actively curtailing reproductive rights and denying gender-inclusive education? A world that includes long histories of resistance, mutual aid, and organizing? In this course, we will examine histories of sexual and reproductive health movements. We will explore how the reproductive justice framework can offer us a space to hold conversations about gender, race, equity, community belonging, and human rights. We will also spend time working with the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College. This collection is a rich archival repository and includes material such as the Loretta Ross papers, the Activist Life Oral History Project, the Black Women’s Health Imperative Records, the National Latina Health Organization Records, and a number of personal archives of well-known feminist thinkers and activists. Students will leave this course with curiosity about how historical conditions, social movement materials, and critically-informed questions shape the possibilities for critique and worldmaking.

Instructor

Alyssa Bossenger

Course Description

In the post-#MeToo era, sexual ethics are in a state of flux, with gendered power dynamics coming further into view and definitions of consent shifting dramatically. Colleges across the United States—as well as some states like California—have adopted an affirmative model of consent (“yes means yes”), rather than the earlier model in which passive acquiescence signaled permission to continue (“no means no”). More recent scholarship in sexuality studies has questioned whether consent itself does enough to ensure that sex is ethical. For young people growing up during these debates, it is difficult to navigate the impact of these cultural conversations on the daily reality of their personal lives. This course challenges students to think critically about the ethics of sexuality, examining the norms of their peers, families, and communities and reading about historical and current debates on the topic. They will practice viewing their own identities through an intersectional lens to explore the ways that power plays a role in the ethics of sex. As a final project, students will synthesize these explorations of community, history, and identity to construct their own set of personal sexual ethics.

Instructor

Elizabeth Mikesch

Course Description

How do we define feminist art? What can we learn from contemporary and historical creative movements and the artists who came before us, and how can we build upon them using our own, more inclusive definitions of expressing our experiences? In this course, we’ll view, experience, and discuss a wide range of media: writing, film, sound poetry/sound art, and fine art in the context of when they were made. Using a historical lens, we will formulate new takes on what it means to make art.

Students will pursue "quests" to explore what interests them during each session. We’ll visit the Sophia Smith archives and the Smith Art Museum to interact with contemporary and historical work outside of the class. We’ll engage in a great deal of seeing and making: zines, poems, videos, painting, drawings, collages, rituals, and all things expressive in conversation with the articles we read and the happenings we encounter. Our final product: a portfolio and showcase planned and curated by students. Our field trip: a visit to a local zine library.

Instructor

Casey Anne Brimmer

Course Description

What does it mean to be whole? In this interactive class, we will discuss the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people across time and space. We will incorporate our lived experiences in order to learn about queer lives and representation in (social) media, legislation, and the world. Grounded in queer and trans studies, we will ask about opportunities for increasing positive representation of the queer and trans people with whom we make and share communities from an intersectional perspective, including race, class, religion/faith, culture, and more. In this course, we will think critically and get creative!

Instructor

Weiling Deng

Course Description

Cyberpunk’s Night City would have lost much of its iconic charm without the Geisha on the big screen and the neon light street signs at the Japanese storefronts. The mixture of the symbols of a “traditional” Japan and the neon-lit technological dystopia of urban California has been a leading feature in American pop culture from the film and music industry to game production since the 1980s. What role does gender play in the continued creation of transpacific technological spectacle symbolized by artificial females? How did the Cold War create a lasting Pacific theater in both geopolitics and fine art? How are the sexist and racist representations of Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries—from “yellow peril” to “model minority”—integrated into the contemporary middlebrow imagination of an Asian America? This course draws on the concept of “techno-orientalism” to understand the entanglement of gender and race in the ways that these multimedia visions of Asia-influenced futures reflect and reproduce contemporary political, economic, and technological fears of Asia and a dying American dominance. Students will be trained to interrogate how fetishized Asian femininities and masculinities, such as the kawaii presentation of drones and other high-tech schemes, are imbued in the evolving modes and potentials for being human (or post-human) in both Asia and the Americas.