FEMGEN 154C: Shall We Dance? Social Dancing as Political Practice (CSRE 154C, DANCE 154, TAPS 154C)
This seminar investigates social dancing as a political practice, and the dance floor as a place where race, ethnicity, class status, and sexuality are formed and contested. While many students may be familiar with salsa, and can imagine how it produces particular kinds of Latin/a feminities, this course asks students to expand the notion of social dancing beyond partner-dancing spheres. Course materials will focus on dance practices from the late-nineteenth century to present-day, ranging from rural Louisiana dancehalls to NYC nightclubs to Iranian backyards. We will examine how dances become racially coded (e.g., what makes a dance black or Latin@?), and understand how categories such as gender, class, and regionality intersect with such racializations. Students will engage in a range of activities, including reading, viewing films, and participating in occasional movement workshops (no previous dance experience required). Each student¿s final project will require independent, sustained, ethnographic research in a social dance setting of choice (e.g., student dance club, yoga studio, aerobics class, or YouTube).
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Carrico, R. (PI)
FEMGEN 155: The Changing American Family (FEMGEN 255, SOC 155, SOC 255)
Family change from historical, social, demographic, and legal perspectives. Extramarital cohabitation, divorce, later marriage, interracial marriage, and same-sex cohabitation. The emergence of same-sex marriage as a political issue. Are recent changes in the American family really as dramatic as they seem? Theories about what causes family systems to change.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Rosenfeld, M. (PI)
FEMGEN 156: Happiness, Well-Being, Gender (PSYCH 129)
Exploring the meaning and attainment of psychological well-being and happiness, this course will address gender differences in well-being and approaches that can be used by all individuals to improve their state of happiness and well-being. Course literature will be drawn primarily from social, clinical, and positive psychology, but will be drawn from other disciplines as well. Students will actively engage with course material by critiquing studies, discussing research, and applying methods for improving well-being to their daily lives.
Last offered: Winter 2014
FEMGEN 156H: Women and Medicine in US History: Women as Patients, Healers and Doctors (AMSTUD 156H, HISTORY 156G)
Women's bodies in sickness and health, and encounters with lay and professional healers from the 18th century to the present. Historical consttruction of thought about women's bodies and physical limitations; sexuality; birth control and abortion; childbirth; adulthood; and menopause and aging. Women as healers, including midwives, lay physicians, the medical profession, and nursing.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-Gender, GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Horn, M. (PI)
FEMGEN 156X: Language and Gender (LINGUIST 156)
The role of language in the construction of gender, the maintenance of the gender order, and social change. Field projects explore hypotheses about the interaction of language and gender. No knowledge of linguistics required.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
FEMGEN 157: Language as Political Tool: Feminist and LGBTQ Movements and Impacts (AMSTUD 157X, FEMGEN 257)
How does a social or political movement gain traction? For example, how did 20th-century movements of the disenfranchised, such as the Civil Rights movement or Women's Suffrage, gain a voice an eventually enact change? In the mediascape of today, where everyone with access to a computer has voice, how does a movement like Occupy Wall Street change the national conversation? How do written and verbal choices of the movements impact their success? In this course, students will write and revise their own arguments in order to best understand the writing in these movements and to best produce future work for social change. We'll examine the role of rhetoric¿the use of argument to persuade¿in social movements working toward social justice.
FEMGEN 157P: Solidarity and Racial Justice (AFRICAAM 157P, AMSTUD 157P, CSRE 157P)
(Co-taught by Dereca Blackmon and Daniel Murray) Is multiracial solidarity necessary to overcome oppression that disproportionately affects people of color? What is frontline leadership and what role should people play if they are not part of frontline communities? In this course we will critically examine practices of solidarity and allyship in movements for collective liberation. Through analysis of historical and contemporary movements, as well as participation in movement work, we will see how movements have built multiracial solidarity to address issues that are important to the liberation of all. We will also see how racial justice intersects with other identities and issues. This course is for students that want to learn how to practice solidarity, whether to be better allies or to work more effectively with allies. As a community engaged learning course, students will have the option to work with an organization that is explicitly devoted to this kind of multiracial movement-building work around a particular issue. Specific issues are yet to be determined, but may include environmental justice, policing and mass incarceration, and education.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
Instructors:
Blackmon, D. (PI)
;
Murray, D. (PI)
FEMGEN 158: Black Queer Theory (AFRICAAM 158)
This course takes a multifaceted approach to black queer theory, not only taking up black theories of gender and queer sexuality, but queer theoretical interrogations of blackness and race. The course will also examine some of the important ways that black queer theory reads and is intersected with issues like affect, epistemology, space and geography, power and subjectivity, religion, economy, the body, and the law, asking questions like: How have scholars critiqued the very language of queer and the ways it works as a signifier of white marginality? What are the different spaces we can find queer black relationality, eroticism, and kinship? How do we negotiate issues like trans*misogyny or tensions around gender and sexuality in the context of race? Throughout the course, students will become versed in foundational and emerging black queer theory as we engage scholars like Sharon Holland, Cathy Cohen, Hortense Spillers, Marlon B. Ross, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Barbara Smith, Roderick Ferguson, Robert Reid-Pharr, E. Patrick Johnson, and many others. Students will also gain practice applying black queer theory as an interpretive lens for contemporary social issues and cultural production including film, music, art, and performance.
Last offered: Winter 2015
FEMGEN 159: James Baldwin & Twentieth Century Literature (AFRICAAM 159, ENGLISH 159)
Black, gay and gifted, Baldwin was hailed as a ¿spokesman for the race¿¿although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds. This course examines his classic novels and essays as well his exciting work across many lesser-examined domains¿poetry, music, theatre, sermon, photo-text, children¿s literature, public media, comedy and artistic collaboration. Placing his work in context with other writers of the 20C (Faulkner, Wright,Morrison) and capitalizing on a resurgence of interest in the writer (NYC just dedicated a year of celebration of Baldwin and there are 2 new journals dedicated to study of Baldwin), the course seeks to capture the power and influence of Baldwin's work during the Civil Rights era as well as his relevance in the ¿post-race¿ transnational 21st century, when his prescient questioning of the boundaries of race, sex, love, leadership and country assume new urgency.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Elam, M. (PI)
FEMGEN 160: Performance and History: Rethinking the Ballerina (DANCE 160, TAPS 160, TAPS 260)
The ballerina occupies a unique place in popular imagination as an object of over-determined femininity as well as an emblem of extreme physical accomplishment for the female dancer. This seminar is designed as an investigation into histories of the ballerina as an iconographic symbol and cultural reference point for challenges to political and gender ideals. Through readings, videos, discussions and viewings of live performances this class investigates pivotal works, artists and eras in the global histories of ballet from its origins as a symbol of patronage and power in the 15th century through to its radical experiments as a site of cultural obedience and disobedience in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Ross, J. (PI)
;
Chaleff, R. (TA)
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