GQS 201: Introduction to Gender, Queer, and Feminist Studies
Professor Sara Freeman – TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.
This course serves as an introduction to Gender, Queer and Feminist Studies. It surveys the history of feminism, and then explores the rise and trajectories of gender studies and queer studies. The course engages with the ways in which gender, sexuality, race, class, ability/disability, and other facets of identity intersect with each other. Students will consider the implications of activism as well as the academic development of these disciplines, and they will engage with the ways that the readings touch upon their own lives.
AFAM/GQS/PG 366: Disorienting Histories: Reproductive Justice in the Post-Roe United States
Professor Alisa Kessel – MoWe 2-3:20 p.m.
For fifty years the decision in Roe prevented states from criminalizing or outlawing abortion, though restrictions placed upon a person seeking to terminate a pregnancy varied widely from state to state. Now, in a post-Roe world, abortion bans are proliferating across the country. This course draws upon the expertise of faculty members from across our campus as we seek to understand the deep history of abortion, abortion restrictions, coerced reproduction, and other state interventions in people's sexual and reproductive lives. We will tackle the past, present, and future of reproductive freedom and how it has and will be imbricated in other fights for justice.
GQS 494: Gender Research Seminar
Professor Laura Krughoff – MoWeFr 11 a.m.-1:50 p.m.
In this course students examine the differences between traditional scholarship and a feminist approach to knowing. Participants engage in an independent research project of their choosing, sharing process and findings with other members throughout the semester. Completion of the class includes participation in the Lewis & Clark Undergraduate Gender Studies Conference in March of each year.
Cross-Listed Courses:
AFAM 101: Introduction to African American Studies
Professor Grace Livingston – TuTh 11 a.m.-12:20 p.m.
This course provides an examination of intellectual and creative productions, developments, and events that have come to be recognized as the discipline of African American Studies. The course explores literature, history, popular culture (music, television, magazines, newspapers, movies, film documentaries), and politics as a way to identify the historical and political origins and objectives of Black Studies and the 1960s Black Liberation struggles, the early academic and social concerns of Black Studies advocates, the theoretical and critical approaches to Black Studies as a discipline, and the early objectives of Black Studies in relation to present goals of multiculturalism.
AFAM 305: Black Fictions and Feminisms
Professor Renee Simms – TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.
This course is an integrative course in the humanities that explores various constructions of black female identity. The course looks at black womanhood as it's represented in the public imaginary, feminist theories, critical race theories, and in literature and literary criticism written by black women writers. One of the questions the course asks is: How have scholars and writers addressed fundamental questions of black female identity? To answer this question, students read and view a wide survey of materials including novels, essays, memoir, and film. Through this investigation, students consider how studies of race, feminism, and gender connect to personal lives.
CONN 215: Queer Religion
Professor Heather White – MoFr Noon-1:20 p.m.
What has been the role of religion in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBQTQ) lives and communities? This course begins by considering the dominant picture of religious versus queer opposition, and it investigates the sources and normative perspectives that contribute to this picture. The course proceeds to focus on what this dominant story obscures: the complexity and variety of LGBTQ+ religious and spiritual engagement during the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. This course covers the historical emergence of sexual and gender identity communities in the United States and the attendant formations of established heteronormative and cisnormative teachings as backdrop and critical context for both opposing and supportive religious involvement LGBT politics. The course examines anti-queer religious responses but focuses predominantly on how to study queer-inclusive religious and spiritual expression. Readings include The Lord is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay, Hijab Butch Blues, and She of the Mountains.
CONN 354: Hormones, Sex, Society, & Self
Professor Melvin Rouse – TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.
Ways of identifying vary and are informed by both lived experience and aspects of biology. Our language around identity, gender identity in particular, has grown and evolved over time. Yet there remains a critical gap in understanding the contribution of biology and the biological sexes to this deeply personal psychosocial construct. There is, however, a growing body of literature that demonstrates that the sex of the brain itself (i.e. sex-typical patterns of neural organization), genetic sex (i.e. chromosomal sex), and phenotypic sex (i.e. how one's body develops and presents) can be disassociated from one another. That disassociation speaks to a biological reality that is not adequately (or often accurately) codified by the dominant social construct of gender. This course examines the intricacies and nuances of sexual differentiation with the goal of understanding this process from a multi-level view from which solid inferences can be made as to the biological underpinnings of certain aspects of gender and sexual identity formation variability.
REL 298: Reproductive Ethics
Professor Hajung Lee – TuTh 3:30-4:50 p.m.
This course examines various religious, cultural, legal, feminist, and ethical issues surrounding reproduction and assisted reproductive technologies. It analyzes tensions related to curtailing or enhancing fertility in the United States. The course surveys how religious beliefs, cultural contexts, and laws have influenced patients' reproductive decisions, clinicians' medical decisions, and the reproductive healthcare system. Moral issues surveyed in this course may include Dobbs v. Jackson, contraception, abortion, prenatal diagnosis, assisted reproduction, surrogacy, genetic engineering in assisted reproduction, reproductive justice, LGBTQ reproductive rights, and activism for inclusive reproductive health services. Students actively participate in discussion, debate, and role-playing based on assigned readings. Readings include religious texts, bioethics literature, feminist literature, film, and legal cases.
REL 307: Prisons, Gender, and Education
Professor Trishna Senapaty – MoWe 2-3:20 p.m.
What is the relationship between the university and the prison? How does college in prison raise questions of authority, power and privilege? This is an experiential learning class that combines involvement in a college program at the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW) and academic classes and readings. Students read texts on the history of prisons, theories of punishment, higher education in prison, and how the intersection of race, gender and sexuality impact the experience of incarceration and education in prison. Students also participate as research partners and study hall co-learners with students at the prison in collaboration with the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS), a signature initiative of the University of Puget Sound. Through collaboration with FEPPS students, students in this class will gain knowledge about the challenges and benefits of the liberal arts in prison.
SOAN 202: Families in Society
Professor Jennifer Utrata – TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.
This course challenges students to learn to 'see' families sociologically and to think critically and comparatively about the family as an ideological construct and as a complex social institution. Rather than assuming a universal model of the family, course readings examine families in the United States and elsewhere in the world as diverse entities shaped by economic and political factors, gender ideologies, racial and class inequalities, sexual norms, and cultural changes. Family ideals frequently clash with contemporary family realities; social science is a powerful tool for illuminating the implications and meanings of family continuity and change.
SOAN 304: Gender and Sexuality in Japan
Professor Lindsay Custer – MoFr 2-3:20 p.m.
This course uses a sociological framework to examine gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan. Students are introduced to theoretical frameworks that underpin the study of gender and sexuality and apply those frameworks to the case of Japanese society. Using a culturally relativistic lens, students critically examine the following aspects of Japanese society: the social construction and representation of feminine and masculine gender and sexuality, both normative and otherwise; recent changes in the sexual landscape and the fluidity of both gender and sexual identities across time and space; changing patterns in intimate relationships and the social forces driving these trends; the commodification of gender performances; and feminist perspectives and debates.
SPAN 325: Remembering a Violent Past
Professor Nagore Sedano Naveira – MoWeFr 1-1:50 p.m.
What are the lessons that we can learn from the past? How are dominant narratives about the past solidified, contested, and/or reimagined? Debates over how to memorialize a conflictive past are at the forefront of political discussions today, ranging from the renaming of buildings to the revision of history textbooks. In this course, we will use Spain's politics of memory as a case study to explore how contemporary societies remember a recent violent past. We will concentrate on past and contemporary cultural artifacts that portray the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) as an international battle against Fascism.
Affiliated Courses:
CCS 117: Coming Out!: The Gay Liberation Movement
Professor Laura Krughoff – MoWe 2-3:20 p.m.
This course examines the Stonewall riots of June 1969 and the impact of this event on the gay liberation movement that grew in the years after the riots. This incident of queer protest has become iconic as a beginning of LGBTQ activism in the United States, but scholars and activists alike debate both the details of what happened in the riot and this incident's significance as a movement beginning. Students will explore a range of popular and scholarly viewpoints about Stonewall, which respond to questions that range from "who threw the first brick?" to "what actually changed?" By engaging these readings, students will also learn how to distinguish between different types of information and how to evaluate sources for biases, reliability, and appropriateness. In a short final essay, students will intervene in these debates with arguments of their own, which will draw from interdisciplinary scholarship about how and why--or why not-- to remember and memorialize the Stonewall riots as part of the LGBTQ past.
CCS 150: Crunk Feminisms: Sexuality, Subversion, and Society
Section A: Professor Regina Duthely – MoWeFr 11-11:50 a.m.
Section B: Professor Wind Woods – MoWeFr 11-11:50 a.m.
In the 1980s in New York City hip-hop was born. In basement parties, front stoops, and oversized boomboxes the sound of hip-hop could be heard flooding the marginalized communities that the government abandoned. Since this art form emerged it has shaped and been shaped by United States culture. Hip-hop has also been criticized for its violent, misogynistic, and hyper capitalist content. Despite their presence in hip-hop culture from the very beginning, women are often left out of these conversations unless they're being framed as powerless, exploited figures. This course challenges that framing, and examines Black feminist hip-hop cultures. We will consider the ways that Black women understand their own participation in hip-hop culture, as well as the ways they engage in subversive work both within and outside of the hip-hop community. We will also discuss the ways that the violent legacies of discrimination, and hip-hop's resistance, inform the ways that hip-hop culture is understood today.