Gender and Sexuality Studies

Abstract

Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago encompasses diverse disciplines, modes of inquiry, and objects of knowledge. Gender and Sexuality Studies allows undergraduates the opportunity to shape a disciplinary or interdisciplinary plan of study focused on gender and sexuality. Students can thus create a cluster of courses linked by their attention to gender or sexuality as an object of study or by their use of gender/ sexuality categories to investigate topics in sexuality, social life, science, politics and culture, literature and the arts, or systems of thought. Students in other fields of study may also complete a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Information follows the description of the major. Advanced 100 Units. This seminar engages concepts and lineages central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality. We begin by tracing genealogies of feminist and queer identity formation, including those developed from theories of performativity, affect, and deviance alongside postwar social movements such as gay liberation and Black feminism. We then explore varieties of precarity and normalization through cases such as pornography, consent, the administration of trans lives, and anti-Black figurations of "the human." Generally, our aims are to gain familiarity with key theoretical anchors for the study of gender and sexuality; to question our obligations to the "classics" of the field; to examine how structures are reproduced and reconfigured around identities; and to explore innovative pedagogies. We will read aesthetic objects alongside theoretical works such as those Gayle Berlant, Hortense Spillers, and our we they do we Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality. 100 Units. This seminar engages concepts and lineages central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality. We begin by tracing genealogies of feminist and queer identity formation, including those developed from theories of performativity, affect, and deviance alongside postwar social movements such as gay liberation and Black feminism. We then explore varieties of precarity and normalization through cases such as pornography, consent, the administration of trans lives, and anti-Black figurations of "the human." Generally, our aims are to gain familiarity with key theoretical anchors for the study of gender and sexuality; to question our obligations to the "classics" of the field; to examine how structures are reproduced and reconfigured around identities; and to explore innovative pedagogies. We will read aesthetic alongside theoretical works health rapidly changing benefits methodologies, and we will discuss benefits and limitations of various research designs. Class debates will cover epistemological, ethical, and practical matters in ethnographic research. We will discuss issues of positionality, self-reflexivity, and power. Students will be required to formulate a preliminary research question at the beginning of the course, and will conduct a few weeks of ethnographic research in a field site of their choosing. Each week students will produce field notes to be exchanged and discussed in class, and as a final project they will be asked to produce a research proposal or a short paper based on their observations. This introductory graduate course examines the social construction of gendered identities in different times and places. We study culturally-specific gendered experiences, 'roles,' rights and rebellions around the world, discussing the individual and social consequences of gender and the interrelationships between gender and other categories for identity including race, class and sexuality. While focusing on the global diversity of gendered experience and expectations, we also examine gender in the US, taking a critical approach to understanding gendered inequality and gender-based and sexual violence both abroad and at home. Finally, we examine the role of gendered expectations in Western science, the relationship between gender and 'globalization,' and the contemporary movements affecting change in gendered norms, especially in the arts and media. Advanced Undergraduates with Instructor consent. This looks at the impact of religious identity on their understandings and performance of racial and gendered identities. This graduate-level course delves into the impact such intersectional identities have on one's movement within personal, political, and community spheres. We will pay particular attention to American religious denominations. Students can also expect to read and reflect on foundational works in the sociological study of religion. As digital technology advances, the separation between IRL and URL blurs. Participants enrolled in this course will explore techniques that will help them create thought-provoking work, strengthen their ability to give critique, and build an understanding of how the corporeal interacts with the digital. Throughout this course, students will offer and receive constructive feedback during instructor-led critiques on peers' works. By the end of this course, students will feel comfortable utilizing different processes of development to create digital how to interventions Caribbean and the do these episodes from the American past reveal contemporary encounters with modern diseases like HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19? Course will be drawn from book chapters and scholarly articles, as well as primary sources ranging from public-health medical and scientific journals to political maps, and personal diaries. be based on participation, weekly Canvas posts, peer review, and a series of written assignments (a proposal and an annotated primary source analysis, book review, and rough all of which will culminate in a ten-page final research paper. social epistemologically and This course examines ways of seeing, or representation, in the making of gender and sexuality across time and place. We will study feminist and queer literature and arts, and theories of representation across disciplines, on questions from migration and borders to care. For example, how do practices of mapmaking, or narratives of crossing, help us understand intimacy or estrangement? And how might visualizing care move us toward repair or a new world? In taking this lens, we will also consider how gender and sexuality are co-constituted with race, the nation-state, and labor. Through a workshop model, we will build on these foundational and new approaches to representing gender and sexuality together. Participants are encouraged to bring in supplementary texts to build out our archive of transnational gender and sexuality. Our class will culminate in a glossary, made up of short essays by participants on aesthetics, interpretative approaches, and imaginaries. (Fiction, Theory) focus gender-on the relationship between life-experience, ethnographic case major and of in North based and private with of claims for and Our case studies the we reproductive in a field of contestation involves state interests, and movement histories. how do contemporary iterations of radical Black feminism engage with and resist against the state? does Black Queer Feminism shape politics and society? syllabus will incorporate various disciplines including political science, sociology, and Black studies and focus on how the simultaneity of hegemony shapes access to and relationships with power. An examination of the diverse social, economic, political, and cultural histories of those who are now commonly identified as Latinos in the United States. Particular emphasis will be placed on the formative historical experiences of Mexican Americans and mainland Puerto Ricans, although some consideration will also be given to the histories of other Latino groups, i.e., Cubans, Central Americans, and Dominicans. Topics include cultural and geographic origins and ties; imperialism and colonization; the economics of migration and employment; legal and the family; racism and other forms of discrimination; the politics of national identity; popular and the Development and 100 This course will explore the dominant and emerging trends and debates in the field of women and international development. The major theoretical perspectives responding to global gender inequities will be explored alongside a wide range of themes impacting majority-world women, such as free market globalization, health and sexuality, race and representation, participatory development, human rights, the environment and participation in politics. Course lectures will integrate policy and practitioner accounts and perspectives to reflect the strong influence development practice has in shaping and informing the field. Course materials will also include anti-racist, postcolonial and post-development interruptions to dominant development discourse, specifically to challenge the underlying biases and assumptions of interventions that are predicated on transforming "them" into "us". The material will also explore the challenges of women participating in politics and what are the consequences when they do or do not. This course explores Roman art, especially painting, through the single most thoughtful, playful and creative text on naturalistic painting written in antiquity. Arguably, it is the most interesting examination of the brilliance and the problems of naturalism ever written in the Western tradition, creating a non-historicist, fictive and rhetorically-inflected model for thinking about art. Philostratus took the rhetorical trope of Ekphrasis to new heights, in an extraordinary intermedial investigation of textuality through the prism of visuality and of visual art through the descriptive prism of fictional prose. The course will involve close readings of Philostratus' descriptions of paintings alongside exploration of the Greek and Roman art of the imperial period from Pompeian paintings via floor Mosaics to sarcophagi. A reading knowledge of Greek could not be desc