Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies (GSWS)

GSWS 0002 Gender and Society

This course will introduce students to the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, organize families and work like, delimit opportunities for individuals and groups of people, as well as impact the terms of local and transnational economic exchange. We will explore the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality work with other markers of difference and social status such as race, age, nationality, and ability to further demarcate possibilities, freedoms, choices, and opportunities available to people.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 0159

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0003 Introduction to Sexuality Studies and Queer Theory

This course will introduce students to the historical and intellectual forces that led to the emergence of queer theory as a distinct field, as well as to recent and ongoing debates about gender, sexuality, embodiment, race, privacy, global power, and social norms. We will begin by tracing queer theory's conceptual heritage and prehistory in psychoanalysis, deconstruction and poststructuralism, the history of sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, woman-of-color feminism, the feminist sex wars, and the AIDS crisis. We will then study the key terms and concepts of the foundational queer work of the 1990s and early 2000s. Finally, we will turn to the new questions and issues that queer theory has addressed in roughly the past decade. Students will write several short papers.

Fall

Also Offered As: COML 0030, ENGL 0160, ENGL 2303

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0011 Study of a Woman Writer

This course introduces students to literary study through the works of a major woman writer Reading an individual author across an entire career offers students the rare opportunity to examine works from several critical perspectives in a single course. How do our author's works help us to understand literary and cultural history? And how might we understand our author's legacy through performance, tributes, adaptations, or sequels? Exposing students to a range of approaches and assignments, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 0011

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0023 Study of a Theme Related to Gender & Sexuality

This introduction to literary study examines a compelling literary theme related to questions of gender and sexuality. The theme's function within specific historical contexts, within literary history generally, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 0023

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0031 Gender, Sexuality, and Social Change in the Middle East

This first year seminar introduces basic concepts, debates, and narratives pertaining to the histories of gender and sexuality in the Middle East by covering the period from the late eighteenth century until the present day. In an engagement with global historical contexts, the course aims to engage students with the history of women, gender, and sexuality as they informed and shaped political and social change in the Middle East and vice versa. This course will concentrate on selected themes such as modernity, nationalism, and colonization to encourage students to challenge preconceived assumptions about Middle Eastern women, discuss some of the many roles they have played in social change, and think comparatively and transnationally about gender, history, and social life. In doing so, the class provides a historical context pertaining to the region’s history by presenting a chronologically and thematically organized analysis to scrutinize the decline of the Ottomans, the rise of nationalisms, the implications of Islamist reformism, colonial rules before and after World War I and their impact on shaping women’s lives, gender dynamics and sexual politics, the age of decolonization and rise of state feminisms under colonial and authoritarian regimes, an historical inquiry of same-sex desire and the political activism organized around LGBTQI+ movements, and finally contemporary political movements such as the Iranian Revolution and Arab Uprisings in shaping present discourses and practices informing individual and collective social and political status along with gendered and sexual politics in contemporary Middle Eastern societies.

Also Offered As: HIST 0031

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0050 Gender, Sexuality, and Religion

What does it mean to be a gendered individual in a Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist religious tradition? How important are gender differences in deciding social roles, ritual activities, and spiritual vocations? This course tackles these questions, showing how gender - how it is taught, performed, and regulated - is central to understanding religion. In this course we will learn about gendered rituals, social roles, and mythologies in a range of religious traditions. We will also look at the central significance of gender to the field of religious studies generally. Part of the course will be focused on building a foundation of knowledge about a range of religious traditions and the role of gender in those traditions. This course focuses on religious traditions with origins outside the West. Although it is beyond the scope of this class to offer comprehensive discussions of any one religious tradition, the aim is to provide entry points into the study of religious traditions through the lens of gender. This course will train you in historical, anthropological, and theoretical methodologies. We will also read religion through feminist and queer lenses - we will explore the key characteristics of diverse feminist and queer studies approaches to religion, as well as limits of those approaches.

Fall

Also Offered As: RELS 0050

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0051 Writing the Self: Life-Writing, Fiction, Representation

This course investigates how people try to understand who they are by writing about their lives. It will cover a broad range of forms, including memoirs, novels, essay films, and even celebrity autobiographies. The course will be international and in focus and will ask how the notion of self may shift, not only according to the demands of different genres, but in different literary, linguistic, and social contexts. Questions probed will include the following: How does a writer's language--or languages--shape how they think of themselves? To what extent is a sense of self and identity shaped by exclusion and othering? Is self-writing a form of translation and performance, especially in multilingual contexts? What can memoir teach us about the ways writers navigate global literary institutions that shape our knowledge of World Literature? How do various forms of life-writing enable people on the margins, whether sexual, gendered, or racial, to craft narratives that encapsulate their experience? Can telling one's own story bring joy, affirmation, and greater transcultural or even global understanding? In sum, this course proposes to illuminate the many ways in which writing becomes meaningful for those who take it up. The format of the seminar will require students to offer oral presentations on the readings and invite them to craft their own experiences and memories in inventive narrative forms.

Spring, odd numbered years only

Also Offered As: COML 0015, ENGL 1745

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0087 Desire and Deception in Medieval Erotic Literature

In this course, we will investigate the ideology, content, and material forms of love literature from Dante Alighieri to Francesco Petrarca. Through close readings of such texts as Dante’s Vita nova (ca. 1295), Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (ca. 1353), and Petrarca's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (often referred to as the poetry book par excellence: il canzoniere, ca. 1374), we will unveil the literary and fictitious nature of medieval erotic literature. We will explore the origins of love poetry in medieval France and its subsequent interpretation and rewriting in Italian courts and comuni. We will inquire into the cultural constructions of the medieval notion of lyrical self and how it still has an impact on our own notion of consciousness. We will study the forms, themes, and characters that populate 'love stories' in the Middle Ages. We will analyze the dynamics of composition, circulation, and reception in manuscript culture. Our close analysis of the texts as they have been preserved in manuscript form will help us gauge the differences between medieval and contemporary ways of writing, reading, and loving.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 0087, ITAL 0087

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0090 First-Year Seminar: Italian American Studies

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 0090, ENGL 1299, ITAL 0090

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0092 First-Year Seminar: Italian Film and Media Studies

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 0092, ITAL 0092

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0093 First-Year Seminar: Race and Ethnicity in Italy

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 0093, ITAL 0093

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0094 First-Year Seminar: Italian Gender Studies

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 0094, ITAL 0094

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0095 First-Year Seminar: Italian Fashion

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 0095, ITAL 0095

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0096 First-Year Seminar: Italian Visual Studies

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 0096, ITAL 0096

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0097 First-Year Seminar: Italian Foods and Cultures

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 0097, ITAL 0097

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0098 First-Year Seminar: Italian Literature

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 0098, ITAL 0098

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0099 First-Year Seminar: Italian Innovations

Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 0099, ITAL 0099

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0228 Studying Sex

The concept of “sex” has meant multiple things to science and medicine over the last few hundred years: a way of sorting bodies, a behavior to observe, a driving force behind reproduction and evolution, and a yardstick by which to measure normality. It has been both a binary of male and female, and a spectrum; both separate from gender, and inseparably entwined with it. It has been defined at different moments by anatomy, hormones, chromosomes, and even metabolism. In this course, we will explore how scientists have studied—and perhaps produced—the many-faceted thing called sex, and how historians have come to understand that past. This first-year seminar introduces students to primary source research; historical writing; and methods from both Science and Technology Studies (STS), and queer, trans, and feminist studies. Course materials will focus mainly on the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Fall

Also Offered As: HSOC 0228, STSC 0228

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0320 First Year Seminar: Black Queer Traditions

This first-year seminar provides a critical introduction to Black Queer literature, art, and politics. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: AFRC 0320, ENGL 0320

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0333 First Year Seminar: Queer History and Theory

This course takes a historical approach to the study of queer theory. It considers how shifting definitions of queerness, under different guises and different terms, have shaped our understanding of sexual and gender identity today. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings

Also Offered As: ENGL 0333

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0400 Womanism and Identity Politics in the Realm of Hip-Hop

This course centers on the intersections of womanism, woman of color identity development, and agency within hip-hop culture. We will touch on several topics that uncover the condition of minoritized women in hip-hop media, including creating/owning space, lyrical assault, defining womanhood, sexuality, and fetishes. In exploring music, literature, advertisements, film, and television, we will discuss the ways women of color construct understandings of self, while navigating and reimagining reality within hip-hop contexts.

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0500 Introduction to Disability Studies: Form, Text, and Practices

This first year seminar fuses disability studies, queer theory, Black feminist theory, visuality studies, film theory, and disabled artistic practices. Centering the praxis of disability justice, this class asks students to think about practice and theory as an intertwined discipline. Students will study, write, and create works that looking towards models of production that center community based and interdependent relationality. Some areas that this course covers includes but is not limited to disability studies vs. crip theory, the history and legacy of AIDS epidemic, disability justice and mutual aid organizing, multi sensorial artistic practice, as well as tending to questions of labor, pain, excess, and debilitation. Disability studies has a long and complicated history of centering whiteness, domesticity, and the West in its models of rights-based advocacy. This class turns away from the white independent disabled superstar and towards the teachings of crip of color critique and disability justice to think beyond the terms and conditions that have been rectified as productive models in uplifting the “good disabled person.” We will use texts and teachings from Sins Invalid, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, Park McArthur, Constantina Zavitsanos, Lochlann Jain, LaMarr Jurelle Bruce, Mel Chen, Kai Cheng Thom, and Sami Schalk to guide us in our efforts. Students will also engage with transformative justice and anti-carceral models of thought through Mia Mingus’s Care Pods Activity and a training from Health Justice Commons.

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0513 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: 19th-Century American Literature

This course explores an aspect of 19th-Century American literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 0513

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0531 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Gender, Sexuality, and Literature

This seminar focuses on literary, cultural, and political expressions of gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 0531

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0680 Feminist Political Thought

This course is designed to provide an overview of the variety of ideas, approaches, and subfields within feminist political thought. Readings and divided into three sections: contemporary theorizing about the meaning of "feminism";women in the history of Western political thought; and feminist theoretical approaches to practical political problems and issues, such as abortion and sexual assault.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: PSCI 0680

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0700 Iranian Cinema: Gender, Politics and Religion

This seminar explores Iranian culture, society, history and politics through the medium of film. We will examine a variety of cinematic works that represent the social, political, economic and cultural circumstances of contemporary Iran, as well as the diaspora. Along the way, we will discuss issues pertaining to gender, religion, nationalism, ethnicity, and the role of cinema in Iranian society and beyond. Discussions topics will also include the place of the Iranian diaspora in cinema, as well as the transnational production, distribution, and consumption of Iranian cinema. Films will include those by internationally acclaimed filmmakers, such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Asghar Farhadi, Bahman Ghobadi, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Dariush Mehrjui, Tahmineh Milani, Jafar Panahi, Marjane Satrapi and others. All films will be subtitled in English. No prior knowledge is required.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 0700, COML 0700, MELC 0700, NELC 0700

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0776 Young Adult Literature

In this course, we will explore Young Adult Literature in depth to trace where adolescence and society cross, clash, mesh. We will read (and watch) across era and genre, exploring literature of the long adolescence through two-and-a-half centuries, prose narrative to graphic novel to forays into Instagram and TikTok. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 0776

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0860 Is This Really Happening? Performance and Contemporary Political Horizons

This class addresses the meeting points inside of and between a range of resistant performance practices with a focus on artists using performance to address political and social encounters in the contemporary moment. Performance, a chaotic and unruly category that slides across music, dance, theater and visual art, has long been a container for resistant actions/activities that bring aesthetics and politics into dynamic dialogue. Embracing works, gestures, movements, sounds and embodiments that push against and beyond the conventions of a given genre, performance can't help but rub uncomfortably against the status quo. Scholars working across Performance Studies and Black Studies importantly expanded critical discourse around performance to address the entanglement of the medium with physical, psychic, spatial and temporal inhabitations of violence and power. Generating copious genealogies of embodied resistance, this scholarship instigates a complex, interdisciplinary and multidimensional perspective on intersections between art and life, performance and politics. The class hosts a series of public lectures, presentations and performances by visual artists, choreographers, theater artists, composers/musicians, performers, curators and activists engaged with the social and political moment. Presentations will be open to the public with students in the course developing in-depth research into the work of each visiting artist/performer/presenter to engage the larger context of each visitor's scholarship and/or practice through readings, discussion and in-class presentations. This course is open to all interested students. No prior requisties or experience with performance or the performing arts is necessary.

Also Offered As: ENGL 3652, FNAR 3160

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0982 Non-Major Elective Credit Abroad

This course is for non-majors and minors who wish to receive study abroad credit through GSWS on a topic not taught at Penn but which deserves departmentally and level appropriate credit.

1 Course Unit

GSWS 0993 Non-Major Transfer Credit

This course is a transfer credit for a course that we do not have a direct equivalent in our published curriculum but which meets the spirit of the major. This level is intended for non-majors.

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1010 Freud: The Invention of Psychoanalysis

No other person of the twentieth century has probably influenced scientific thought, humanistic scholarship, medical therapy, and popular culture as much as Sigmund Freud. This course will study his work, its cultural background, and its impact on us today. In the first part of the course, we will learn about Freud's life and the Viennese culture of his time. We will then move to a discussion of seminal texts, such as excerpts from his Interpretation of Dreams, case studies, as well as essays on psychoanalytic practice, human development, definitions of gender and sex, neuroses, and culture in general. In the final part of the course, we will discuss the impact of Freud's work. Guest lectureres from the medical field, history of science, psychology, and the humnities will offer insights into the reception of Freud's work, and its consequences for various fields of study and therapy.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 1010, GRMN 1010, HIST 0820

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1011 The Family

Family life is deeply personal but at the same time is dramatically impacted by social forces outside of the family. In this course we will examine how families are organized along the lines of gender, sexuality, social class, and race and how these affect family life. We will consider how family life is continually changing while at the same time traditional gender roles persist. For example, how "greedy" workplaces, which require long work hours, create work-family conflicts for mothers and fathers. We will also examine diverse family forms including single-parent families, blended families, families headed by same-gender parents, and families headed by gender non-conforming parents. The lectures will also examine how economic inequality shapes family life. Students will have the opportunity to apply key concepts to daily life.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 1010

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1027 Sex and Representation

This course explores literature that resists normative categories of gender and sexuality. By focusing on figures writing from the margins, we will explore how radical approaches to narrative form and subject-matter invite us to think in new ways about desire and identity. We will read texts that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, hybridizing the genres of poetry, drama, and autobiography to produce new forms of expression, such as the graphic novel, auto-fiction, and prose poetry. From Viriginia Woolf's gender-bending epic, Orlando, to Tony Kushner's Angels in America, this course traces how non-normative desire is produced and policed by social and literary contexts - and how those contexts can be re-imagined and transformed.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 1027, COML 1027, REES 1481

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1041 The Romantic Period

This course offers an introduction to the literature of the Romantic period (ca. 1770-1830). Some versions of this course will incorporate European romantic writers, while others will focus exclusively on Anglo-American romanticism, and survey authors such as Austen, Blake, Brockden Brown, Byron, Coleridge, Emerson, Irving, Keats, Radcliffe, Scott, Shelley, and Wordsworth. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 1040

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1042 Population and Society

The course serves as an introduction to the study of population and demography, including issues pertaining to fertility, mortality, migration, and family formation and structure. Within these broad areas we consider the social, economic, and political implications of current trends, including: population explosion, baby bust, the impact of international migration on receiving societies, population aging, racial classification, growing diversity in household composition and family structure, population and environmental degradation, and the link between population and development/poverty.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 1040

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1043 Literature Before 1660

This course will introduce students to key works of English literature written before 1660. It will explore the major literary genres of this period, as well as the social and cultural contexts in which they were produced. The course will examine how literature texts articulate changes in language and form, as well as in concepts of family, nation, and community during the medieval and early modern periods. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 1020

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1060 The Fantastic and Uncanny in Literature: Ghosts, Spirits & Machines

Do we still believe in spirits and ghosts? Do they have any place in an age of science of technology? Can they perhaps help us to define what a human being is and what it can do? We will venture on a journey through literary texts from the late eighteenth century to the present to explore the uncanny and fantastic in literature and life. Our discussions will be based on a reading of Sigmund Freud's essay on the uncanny, and extraordinary Romantic narratives by Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Prosper Mérimée, Villiers de Isle-Adam, and others.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 1060, GRMN 1060

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1100 Women in Jewish Literature

"Jewish woman, who knows your life? In darkness you have come, in darkness do you go." J. L. Gordon (1890). This course will bring into the light the long tradition of women as readers, writers, and subjects in Jewish literature. All texts will be in translation from Yiddish and Hebrew, or in English. Through a variety of genres -- devotional literature, memoir, fiction, and poetry -- we will study women's roles and selves, the relations of women and men, and the interaction between Jewish texts and women's lives. The legacy of women in Yiddish devotional literature will serve as background for our reading of modern Jewish fiction and poetry from the past century. The course is divided into five segments. The first presents a case study of the Matriarchs Rachel and Leah, as they are portrayed in the Hebrew Bible, in rabbinic commentary, in pre-modern prayers, and in modern poems. We then examine a modern novel that recasts the story of Dinah, Leah's daughter. Next we turn to the seventeenth century Glikl of Hamel, the first Jewish woman memoirist. The third segment focuses on devotional literature for and by women. In the fourth segment, we read modern women poets in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. The course concludes with a fifth segment on fiction written by women in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GRMN 1100, JWST 1100, MELC 0375, NELC 0375

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1101 Sociology of Gender

Gender is an organizing principle of society, shaping social structures, cultural understandings, processes of interaction, and identities in ways that have profound consequences. It affects every aspect of people's lives, from their intimate relationships to their participation in work, family, government, and other social institutions and their place in the stratification system. Yet gender is such a taken for granted basis for differences among people that it can be hard to see the underlying social structures and cultural forces that reinforce or weaken the social boundaries that define gender. Differences in behavior, power, and experience are often seen as the result of biological imperatives or of individual choice. A sociological view of gender, in contrast, emphasizes how gender is socially constructed and how structural constraints limit choice. This course examines how differences based on gender are created and sustained, with particular attention to how other important bases of personal identity and social inequality--race and class-interact with patterns of gender relations. We will also seek to understand how social change happens and how gender inequality might be reduced.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 1100

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1122 Witches, Rebels, and Prophets: People on the Margins in Early America

This course explores the lost worlds of witches, sexual offenders, rebellious enslaved people, rebellious colonists, and Native American leaders from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Using the life stories of unusual individuals from the past, we try to make sense of their contentious relationships with their societies. By following the careers of the troublemakers, the criminals, the rebels, and other non-conformists, we also learn about the foundations of social order and the impulse to reform that rocked American society during the nineteenth century. The lives of these unique “movers and shakers” help us to understand the issues that Americans debated in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Fall

Also Offered As: AFRC 1122, HIST 1122

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1131 Crime and Criminality in Early America

This seminar examines the complex cultural history of crime and criminality in early America. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: COML 1131, ENGL 1131

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1146 Queer German Cinema

Taught in English. This course offers an introduction into the history of German-language cinema with an emphasis on depictions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer themes. The course provides a chronological survey of Queer German Cinema from its beginnings in the Weimar Republic to its most recent and current representatives, accompanied throughout by a discussion of the cultural-political history of gay rights in the German-speaking world. Over the course of the semester, students will learn not only cinematic history but how to write about and close-read film. No knowledge of German or previous knowledge required.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 1146, GRMN 1146

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1172 Bodies, Race and Rights: Sex and Citizenship in Modern American History

What did it mean to be a man or woman in the post-Civil War United States? Was being a man the same as being a citizen? If African-American men were to be fully embraced as both men and citizens in the aftermath of slavery, where did that leave women, white and black? Why did a nation built on immigration become so hostile to certain groups of immigrants during this period? In this course, we consider how the meanings and experiences of womanhood, manhood, citizenship, and equality before the law changed from the period immediately after the Civil War until the present day. We look at political battles over the meaning of citizenship, the use of terror to subdue African Americans politically and economically, and the fears of white Americans that they would lose their political and economic dominance to immigrant groups they deemed irreconcilably different from themselves. We also consider the repercussions of these conflicts for medical, legal, and economic efforts to regulate the bodies of women, children, poor people, immigrants, working class laborers, military men, and African Americans. Throughout the course, we will follow the state's changing use of racial, sexual, and economic categories to assess the bodily and intellectual capacities of different groups of citizens. We will also note some of the popular cultural expressions of manhood, womanhood, and citizenship. The lectures and reading assignments are organized around a series of historical problems, dynamic leaders, and controversies that illuminate these issues.

Spring

Also Offered As: AFRC 1172, HIST 1172

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1173 History of Sexuality in the U.S.

This course introduces students to a relatively new field of inquiry, the history of sexuality in the U.S. It explores the past to consider why sexuality has been so central to American identities, culture, and politics. Primary documents and other readings focus on the history of sexual ideology and regulation; popular culture and changing sexual practices; the emergence of distinct sexual identities and communities; the politics of sexuality; and the relationship between sexual and and other forms of social difference, such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, and class. Topics include many with continuing relevance to contemporary public debate: among them, sexual representation and censorship, sexual violence, adolescent sexuality, the politics of reproduction, gay and lesbian sexualities and sexually transmitted diseases.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 1173

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1180 The Art of Revolution

This course offers an international and multidisciplinary tour of revolutionary art from the 20th and 21st centuries, including cinema, literature, visual art, theater, and performance art. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: CIMS 1280, COML 1180, ENGL 1180, LALS 1180, THAR 1180

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1181 Gender and Elections in America and Beyond

This course tackles four theoretical and empirical challenges related to gender and political equality: the extension of citizenship rights and voting rights to women; the problem of women's persistent under-representation in politics; the nature of the gender gap in preferences across time and space; and the possibilities for substantive representation. We will focus about half the class on the US (contrasting the experiences of white and black women and men in politics) and the other half on other countries, detailing how different party systems, variation in electoral rules (like proportional representation), and institutional innovations such as gender quotas, enable or constrain gender equality in politics.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: PSCI 1181

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1200 Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece and Rome

What is being a man, being a woman, being masculine, being feminine, being neither, being both? Is sex about pleasure, domination, identity, reproduction, or something else? Are sexual orientation and gender identity innate? How can words, myths and stories inform cultural assumptions about sex and gender? Did people in ancient times have a concept of sexuality? How do gendered English terms (like "girly", "effeminate", or "feisty") compare to gendered ancient Greek and Latin terms, like virtus, which connotes both "virtue" and "masculinity"? Why did the Roman and English speaking worlds have to borrow the word "clitoris" from the ancient Greeks? How did people in antiquity understand consent? Can we ever get access to the perspectives of ancient women? In this introductory undergraduate course, we will learn about sex and gender in ancient Greece and Rome. We will discuss similarities and differences between ancient and modern attitudes, and we will consider how ancient texts, ancient art, ancient ideas and ancient history have informed modern western discussions, assumptions and legislation. Our main readings will be of ancient texts, all in English translation; authors studied will include Ovid, Aristophanes, Plato, Euripides, and Sappho. Class requirements will include participation in discussion as well as quizzes, reading responses, and a final exam.

Also Offered As: CLST 1200, COML 1200

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1201 African-American Literature

An introduction to African-American literature, ranging across a wide spectrum of moments, methodologies, and ideological postures, from Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 1200, ENGL 1200

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1202 Divinities, Diviners and Divinations: Religions of the African Diaspora

This undergraduate course is designed to provide students with a broad introduction to major themes within African Diasporic Religions. This is an interdisciplinary course. We will be drawing upon various theoretical methods, i.e. historical, ethnographical, and autobiographical. Additionally, we will be examining visual media to understand the presence and value of African Diasporic Religions in the 20th/21st century. Special attention will be given to Vodou, Santeria, and Candomble in the Americas. Thematically, we will work through concepts of the diaspora; memory, myth and authenticity; ritual and material practices; borders, migration, gender and sexuality, religious commodities and exchange. As we traverse through these various religious traditions, it is through the readings, lectures, invited speakers, films and class discussions that we will develop a complex understanding of integrative religious worldviews that impacts every aspect of life: family structure, gender relations, education, healing, economics, politics, arts, and so on. It is with the hopes that we can apprehend how these traditions are indeed an American Religion.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: AFRC 1201, HIST 0867

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1215 Love, Lust and Violence in the Middle Ages

Medieval Europe was undoubtedly gruff and violent but it also gave birth to courtly culture - raw worries transformed into knights who performed heroic deeds, troubadours wrote epics in their honor and love songs about their ladies, women of the elite carved out a place in public discourse as patrons of the arts, and princely courts were increasingly defined by pageantry from jousting tournaments to royal coronations. This course will trace the development of this courtly culture from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, from its roots in Southern France to its spread to Northern France and then to various kingdoms in Europe. Central themes will include the transformation of the warrior into the knight, the relationship between violence and courtliness, courtly love, cultural production and the patronage, and the development of court pageantry and ceremonial. This is a class cultural history and, as such, will rely on the interpretation of objects of art and material culture, literature as well as historical accounts.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: COML 1215, HIST 1215

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1242 Love and Loss in Japanese Literary Traditions: In Translation

How do people make sense of the multiple experiences that the simple words "love" and "loss" imply? How do they express their thoughts and feelings to one another? In this course, we will explore some means Japanese culture has found to grapple with these events and sensations. We will also see how these culturally sanctioned frameworks have shaped the ways Japanese view love and loss. Our materials will sample the literary tradition of Japan from earliest times to the early modern and even modern periods. Close readings of a diverse group of texts, including poetry, narrative, theater, and the related arts of calligraphy, painting, and music will structure our inquiry. The class will take an expedition to nearby Woodlands Cemetery to experience poetry in nature. By the end of the course, you should be able to appreciate texts that differ slightly in their value systems, linguistic expressions, and aesthetic sensibilities from those that you may already know. Among the available project work that you may select, if you have basic Japanese, is learning to read a literary manga. All shared class material is in English translation.

Fall

Also Offered As: EALC 1242

Mutually Exclusive: EALC 5242

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1260 Latinx Literature and Culture

This course offers a broad introduction to the study of Latinx culture. We will examine literature, theater, visual art, and popular cultural forms, including murals, poster art, graffiti, guerrilla urban interventions, novels, poetry, short stories, and film. In each instance, we will study this work within its historical context and with close attention to the ways it illuminates class formation, racialization, and ideologies of gender and sexuality as they shape Latinx experience in the U.S. Topics addressed in the course will include immigration and border policy, revolutionary nationalism and its critique, anti-imperialist thought, Latinx feminisms, queer latinidades, ideology, identity formation, and social movements. While we will address key texts, historical events, and intellectual currents from the late 19th century and early 20th century, the course will focus primarily on literature and art from the 1960s to the present. All texts will be in English.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 2679, COML 1260, ENGL 1260, LALS 1260

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1279 Women in Theatre and Performance

What is feminist theatre? How do artists use live performance to provoke not only thought and feeling, but also social, personal, and political change? This course will examine a wide array of plays and performances by and about women; these pieces are, in turn, serious, hilarious, outrageous, poignant--and always provocative. Our focus will be on English-language works from the late 20th century to the present (#metoo) moment. We will read these performance texts and/or view them on stage/screen; we will also read essays that provide contextual background on feminist theatre theory and history. Throughout the semester, we will engage diverse perspectives on women and race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender identity; the issues we encounter will also include marriage and motherhood, career and community, feminism and friendship, and patriarchy and power. The class will take full advantage of any related events occurring on campus or in the city, and will feature visits with guest speakers. Students will have the opportunity to pursue research on their own areas of interest (some recent examples are "women in comedy," trans performance, drag kings, feminist directing, etc.).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 1279, THAR 1279

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1300 Theories of Gender and Sexuality

What makes men and women different? What is the nature of desire? This course introduces students to a long history of speculation about the meaning and nature of gender and sexuality -- a history fundamental to literary representation and the business of making meaning. We will consider theories from Aristophane's speech in Plato's Symposium to recent feminist and queer theory. Authors treated might include: Plato, Shakespeare, J. S. Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Catherine MacKinnon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Leo Bersani, Gloria Anzaldua, David Halperin, Cherrie Moraga, Donna Haraway, Gayatri Spivak, Diana Fuss, Rosemary Hennesy, Chandra Tadpole Mohanty, and Susan Stryker. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 1300

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1310 Gender, Sexuality, and Literature

This course will focus on questions of gender difference and of sexual desire in a range of literary works, paying special attention to works by women and treatments of same-sex desire. More fundamentally, the course will introduce students to questions about the relation between identity and representation. We will attend in particular to intersections between gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation, and will choose from a rich vein of authors. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 1310, ENGL 1310

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1330 Writing Women, Part 1

This is a sophomore-level course designed for students who are curious about the literary and social history of women’s writing between 1660 and 1700. We’ll survey the work of influential writers of the time period who identified as female, and add a few texts by men writing about women. We’ll consider how women's writing participated in the many worlds from which women were excluded — the worlds of inherited literary tradition, formal education, commerce, religious debate, and contemporary politics, to name a few. The course focuses on authors resident in “Great Britain” (a national entity still under development during this time, as we shall see) between the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the turn of the eighteenth century. Another course, ENGL 1331, focuses on 1700-1790. Students may take one or both of these stand-alone courses. No prerequisites required. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 1330

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1331 Writing Women, Part 2: Sexuality and Power, 1700-1799

"Sexuality and Power” is an intermediate-level course organized as a collaborative seminar. The eighteenth century (1700-1799) in Britain was an exciting time. Literacy's long-policed borders were being relaxed, and publication was allowed to flourish largely free of censorship. As the set of those allowed to participate in public discourse slowly expanded, new opportunities arose for literate women. We will focus on the work of important female-identified writers from the period. Students from all disciplines are welcome. There are no prerequisites. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 1331

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1351 Contemporary Fiction & Film in Japan

This course will explore fiction and film in contemporary Japan, from 1945 to the present. Topics will include literary and cinematic representation of Japan s war experience and post-war reconstruction, negotiation with Japanese classics, confrontation with the state, and changing ideas of gender and sexuality. We will explore these and other questions by analyzing texts of various genres, including film and film scripts, novels, short stories, manga, and academic essays. Class sessions will combine lectures, discussion, audio-visual materials, and creative as well as analytical writing exercises. The course is taught in English, although Japanese materials will be made available upon request. No prior coursework in Japanese literature, culture, or film is required or expected; additional secondary materials will be available for students taking the course at the 600 level. Writers and film directors examined may include: Kawabata Yasunari, Hayashi Fumiko, Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Yoshimoto Banana, Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, Kurosawa Akira, Imamura Shohei, Koreeda Hirokazu, and Beat Takeshi.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 1351, COML 1351, EALC 1351

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1361 Sex Matters: Politics of Sex in the Modern Middle East

The course concentrates on the history of sexuality as it informed and shaped political and social change in the Middle East, and vice versa, in an engagement with global historical contexts. What does sexuality have to do with power, political rule, and mass movements in the modern Middle East? What can the study of sexuality and body politics teach us about colonialism and state formation over centuries of imperial rules and colonial regimes, as well as in the contemporary context of neoliberal capitalism? What is the relationship between studying LGBTQIA+ movements alongside with feminism and the use of sex and sexuality as an analytical category? This course will investigate selected themes such as modernity, nationalism, and colonization and connect them to harem lives, politics of veiling/unveiling, reproductive rights, race, polygamy, masculinity, and early modern concepts of same-sex desire in connection with modern queer thought and activism to ask questions about the preconceived notions about "Middle Eastern sexualities." The course focuses on discussing on some of the many roles that sex and gender politics have played in social and political change in the Middle East, while thinking about gender, history, and society comparatively and transnationally.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: HIST 1361

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1391 Introduction to Chick Lit

This course will introduce students to the genre known as "Chick Lit," a label that emerged in the 1990s to encompass pleasurable fiction written primarily for women, by women, and about women. Although Chick Lit has been criticized for elevating the so-called “superficial,” “trivial,” and “fluffy” elements of women’s lives, it has nonetheless remained an enormously popular and influential segment of contemporary fiction. This course journeys through Chick Lit's predecessors, greatest hits, and new boundary-pushing work, in both novels and film. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 1391

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1400 Asian American Gender and Sexualities

This course explores the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race in Asian America. Through interdisciplinary and cultural texts, students will consider how Asian American gender and sexualities are constructed in relation to racism while learning theories on and methods to study gender, sex, and race. We will discuss masculinities, femininities, race-conscious feminisms, LGBTQ+ identities, interracial and intraracial relationships, and kinship structures.

Spring

Also Offered As: ASAM 1400, SAST 1400

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1410 Asian American Women: Nation, Self and Identity

This course examines the literary constructions of Asian American Womens' identity in relation to the U.S. nation state. How have the figures of the tiger mother, the Asian nerd, the rice queen, the trafficked woman, the geisha, the war bride, emerged to represent Asian American women, and how have Asian American feminists responded to these problematic racial stereotypes? How does the scholarship on such racialized representations illuminate historical and contemporary configurations of gender, sexuality, race, class, nation, citizenship, migration, empire, war, neoliberalism and globalization as they relate to the lives of Asian American women? In exploring these questions, this course examines Asian American histories, bodies, identities, diasporic communities, representations, and politics through multi- and interdisciplinary approaches, including social science research, literature, popular representations, film, poetry and art.

Spring

Also Offered As: ASAM 1410, SAST 1410

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1411 Queer Chinas: Sexuality and Politics in the Sinophone World

This class examines queer phenomena in and around China, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the queer Sinophone world more generally. Beyond seeking to understand sexual subcultures and sites of queer intimacies on their own terms, the course examines their relationship to political economy and geopolitics. In addition to filmic and literary texts, the course includes readings that are theoretical, anthropological, sociological, and comparative. While the focus is largely on modern China, the class also attends to historical reference points both inside and outside the Sinophone world. From a macro perspective, this course examines China’s place in discourses of development, focusing on the role of desire in constituting the sexual and political subject of modernity. The overall goal of this class is to develop alternative frameworks for understanding the relationship between sexuality and politics. The course does not require specialized knowledge of China.

Also Offered As: EALC 1411

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1427 Wild Things: Children’s Literature and the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child

This course, framed as a psychoanalytic study of the child, focuses on English-language children’s literature from the 19th Century to the present. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: COML 1427, ENGL 1427

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1490 Law and Social Policy on Sexuality and Reproduction

This course will examine how statutory law, court decisions and other forms of social policy encourage or discourage various forms of sexuality, reproduction and parenting. Such issues as contraception, abortion, gay and lesbian rights, reproductive technology, family violence, and welfare and family policies will be covered.

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1500 Introduction to Disability Studies: Form, Text, and Practices

Introduction to Disability Studies: Form, Text, and Practices is a class that fuses disability studies, queer theory, Black feminist theory, visuality studies, film theory, and disabled artistic practices. Centering the praxis of disability justice, this class asks students to think about practice and theory as an intertwined discipline. Students will study, write, and create works that looking towards models of production that center community based and interdependent relationality. Some areas that this course covers includes but is not limited to disability studies vs. crip theory, the history and legacy of AIDS epidemic, disability justice and mutual aid organizing, multi sensorial artistic practice, as well as tending to questions of labor, pain, excess, and debilitation. Disability studies has a long and complicated history of centering whiteness, domesticity, and the West in its models of rights-based advocacy. This class turns away from the white independent disabled superstar and towards the teachings of crip of color critique and disability justice to think beyond the terms and conditions that have been rectified as productive models in uplifting the “good disabled person.” We will use texts and teachings from Sins Invalid, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, Park McArthur, Constantina Zavitsanos, Lochlann Jain, LaMarr Jurelle Bruce, Mel Chen, Kai Cheng Thom, and Sami Schalk to guide us in our efforts. Students will also engage with transformative justice and anti-carceral models of thought through Mia Mingus’s Care Pods Activity and a training from Health Justice Commons.

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1600 Introduction to Trans Studies

While mainstream conversations tend to frame “transgender” as a perpetually new phenomenon, this introduction to trans studies will contextualize present-day gender expansiveness within a longer intellectual history. We will be guided by the following questions: What does trans mean and how has its meaning been shaped by regimes of gender, race, colonization, ability, and medical and legal regulation? What are the main concerns of trans studies/activism, particularly in relation to more established academic fields? How have trans artists, activists, and scholars imagined other, more just worlds? By engaging with scholarship from multiple fields as well as a range of creative work, we will consider the emergence of “transgender” as both an object of knowledge and a way of knowing.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1680 Sex and Socialism

This seminar examines classic and current scholarship and literature on gender and sexuality in contemporary Eastern Europe, and examines the dialogue and interchange of ideas between East and West. Although the scholarly and creative works will primarily investigate the changing status of women during the last three decades, the course will also look at changing constructions of masculinity and LGBT movements and communities in the former communist bloc. Topics will include: the woman question before 1989; gender and emerging nationalisms; visual representations in television and film; social movements; work; romance and intimacy; spirituality; and investigations into the constructed concepts of "freedom" and "human rights."

Also Offered As: ANTH 1688, REES 1680, SOCI 2972

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1761 Sex and Empire

This course explores the historical narratives surrounding modern empires and colonialism, with a specific focus on the role of sex and gender. Modern empires as complex political and social structures built upon and operated on the basis of difference—racial, religious, sexual. Colonial encounters not only produced unequal and uneven conditions for the colonized, but also in the construction of racialized and gendered structures in the formation of modern capitalism, market economies, political regimes, citizenship, everyday violence and so on. This course examines the historical literature on the intersections of power and historical experience in the framework of a variety of themes including modern family, marriage, slavery, property, labor, incarceration, sex trafficking, science of sex, displacement, and reproduction as they relate to sexuality, race, and religion categories in imperial contexts. The course spans the early nineteenth century to the present and is framed around global and cross-cultural perspective to analyze how scholars have engaged with sexuality and gender to explore broader themes pertaining to formation of modern empires and colonialism.

Also Offered As: HIST 1761

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1800 Introduction to Queer Art

It's no exaggeration to note that queers have long been at the forefront of innovation in the arts, and that the arts, generally, have been a comfortable home for queers, even at moments when society at large was distinctly hostile. In fact the concepts of modern art and homosexuality that we use today are twins, for they were both founded in the third quarter of the 19th century and grew up together. Introduction to Queer Art thus begins with the coining of the word "homosexual" in 1869, and surveys how a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and film shifted in response to new definitions of sexuality. Along the way, we will work towards answering two related questions: 1) Why were queer creators largely responsible for the introduction of modernity in the arts, and 2) why do we find so often that queer social and political dissent found form in, and as, aesthetic dissent as well? In creating new forms for art that often seem far removed from any traditional definition of sexuality, including non-objective and abstract art, queer artists pushed the boundaries of normativity, leading to new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking that often dared to encode queer meanings as part of their formal innovation. We will look into the politics of queer art, and how and why in the US, even amidst often dangerous homophobia, it was queer artists who represented America to itself. Thus, we will cover such key cultural figures such as Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frank O'Hara, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Agnes Martin. Throughout, new methods informed by queer, gender, and critical race theory will be utilized.

Fall

Also Offered As: ARTH 1800

1 Course Unit

GSWS 1861 Othello

In this class, we will examine Shakespeare's Othello from a variety of critical perspectives through close-analysis of the play-text and adaptations on film and stage, beginning with the play’s earliest performance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 1861

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2000 Topics In Classicism and Literature: Epic Tradition

This advanced seminar will examine the classical backgrounds of western medieval literature, in particular the reception of classical myth and epic in the literature of the Middle Ages. Different versions of the course will have different emphases on Greek or Latin backgrounds and on medieval literary genres. Major authors to be covered include Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CLST 3708, COML 2000, ENGL 2000

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2021 Topics in Renaissance Literature

This course explores an aspect of renaissance literature intensively; specific topics will vary from year to year. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. See our ENGL catalog, go to ENGL 2310: https://catalog.upenn.edu/courses/engl/

Also Offered As: ENGL 2021

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2072 Modernism Seminar on Gender & Sexuality

This course explores literary modernism through questions of gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2072

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2092 Kelly Writers House Fellows Seminar

This seminar features visits by eminent writers as "Fellows" of the Kelly Writers House, the student-conceived writing arts collaborative at 3805 Locust Walk. Throughout the semester we will study the work of these writers—and some of the materials "around" them that make the particular contemporary context in which each operates so compelling. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2092

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2100 Trauma Porn to Title IX: Gender Based Violence at Penn

What does it mean to center survivors? Do safe spaces exist? How do institutions like Penn perpetuate gender based violence? How do we encounter and *counter* violence inside and outside the academic space? This course will explore these questions through the various lenses of academic research, literature, art, popular culture, and media, allowing for a nuanced and historically contextualized understanding of the challenging and enduring issue of gender based violence on college campuses, its prevalence, its causes, and its potential solutions. Students will participate in weekly guided discussions and the course will feature regular guest speakers who are involved in anti-violence work at Penn and in the broader community. Creative practices will be encouraged and centered each week, and course assignments will reflect this priority. Previous experience with Gender Studies is welcome but not required.

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2120 American Literature Seminar

This course explores an aspect of American literature intensively; specific course topics will vary, and have included "American Authors and the Imagined Past" and "American Gothic." See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2120

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2155 Gender History and American Film

More than any other medium, the motion pictures fostered new ideals and images of modern womanhood and manhood in the United States. Throughout the twentieth century, gender representations on the screen bore a complex relationship to the social, economic, and political transformations marking the lives and consciousness of American men and women. This course explores the history of American gender through film. It treats the motion pictures as a primary source that, juxtaposed with other kinds of historical evidence, opens a window onto gendered work, leisure, sexuality, family life, and politics. We will view a wide range of Hollywood motion pictures since 1900, as well as films by blacklisted artists, feminists, and independent producers.

Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 2155, HIST 2155

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2159 The History of Family Separation

This course examines the socio-legal history of family separation in the United States. From the period of slavery to the present-day, the United States has a long history of separating and remaking families. Black, Indigenous, poor, disabled, and immigrant communities have navigated the precarious nature of family separation and the legal regime of local, state, and federal law that substantiated it. In this course, we will trace how families have navigated domains of family separation and the reasoning that compelled such separation in the first place. Through an intersectional focus that embraces race, class, disability, and gender, we will underline who has endured family separation and how such separation has remade the very definition of family in the United States.

Also Offered As: ASAM 2159, HIST 2159

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2217 CU in India - Topics Course

C.U. in India is a hybrid, domestic/overseas course series which provides students with the opportunity to have an applied learning and cultural experience in India or South East Asia where students participate in 1) 28 classrom hours in the Fall term 2) a 12-day trip to India or South East Asia with the instructor during the winter break visiting key sites and conducting original research (sites vary) 3) 28 classroom hours at Penn in the Spring term and 4) a research paper, due at the end of the Spring term. Course enrollment is limited to students admitted to the program. For more information and the program application go to http://sites.sas.upenn.edu/cuinindia This is a 2-CU yearlong course DEADLINE TO REGISTER IS MARCH 31st

Two Term Class, Student must enter first term; credit given after both terms are complete

Also Offered As: ARTH 3170, COML 2217, SAST 2217

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2219 Social Inequalities: Caste and Race

This course introduces students to two systems of inequity, caste in South Asia, particularly in India, and race in the United States. It’s main objective is to demonstrate how these modes of inequity, sometimes dismissed as outdated or irrelevant, continue to shape social and state institutions like family, law, and bureaucracy. The course will explore sociological literature on caste and race and examine how these systems existed in a range of historical contexts. It will examine how certain groups were recipients of economic, political, and social privilege, and how these groups othered communities such as Afro-Americans in the United States and Dalits in India. We will consider how privileged groups continue to represent modern institutions like state and law that fail to protect disadvantaged communities in both India and the United States. The course will also explore how privileged communities employ the tool of gendered violence of different kinds like physical violence against men and sexual violence against women of Afro-American communities and Dalit communities to maintain forms of social power and control. The final unit of the course will deal with the emerging and imagined solidarities between Afro-American social and political movements in the United States and Dalit movements in India.

Also Offered As: AFRC 2219, SAST 2219, SOCI 2970

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2220 African Women's Lives: Past and Present

Restoring women to African history is a worthy goal, but easier said than done.The course examines scholarship over the past forty years that brings to light previously overlooked contributions African women have made to political struggle, religious change, culture preservation, and economic development from pre-colonial times to present. The course addresses basic questions about changing women's roles and human rights controversies associated with African women within the wider cultural and historical contexts in which their lives are lived. It also raises fundamental questions about sources, methodology, and representation, including the value of African women's oral and written narrative and cinema production as avenues to insider perspectives on African women's lives.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 2220

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2272 In/Visible: Asian American Cultural Critique

This interdisciplinary seminar examines how popular cultural representations frame Asian Americans as either invisible or hypervisible—our explorations will move across race and national origin, language and class, gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ARTH 3749, ASAM 2272, ENGL 2272

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2310 Gender, Sexuality, and Literature Seminar

This advanced seminar focuses on literary, cultural, and political expressions of gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 2310, COML 2310, ENGL 2310

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2315 Gender and Sexuality in the Medieval Imaginary

This course will explore some of the most fascinating uses of gender and sexuality in medieval English literature, from Old English epic poetry to Arthurian romance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2315

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2320 Queer Life in U.S. History

Queerness has held a variety of meanings and queer life has looked different over the past several centuries of United States history, but it certainly isn’t new. This course traces queer existence—in terms of both gender and sexuality—from the seventeenth century through the present, and foregrounds lived experience, identity formation, community development, and political consciousness. We will attend closely to how race, class, immigration status, and ability shape and are shaped by queer life, and engage with current topics of concern in the field of queer history, like the rural/urban divide, capitalism and neoliberalism, and queer memory.

Also Offered As: HIST 0819

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2321 Criminality and Gender Deviance in Early America

This advanced seminar explores literary, cultural, and political expressions of gender and sexuality, with special foci on criminality and deviance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2321

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2353 Sex and Power in the Middle East: Unveiling Women's Lives

How did Middle Eastern women and men really live? What impact did tradition have on practices of veiling, seclusion, and politics? How did attitudes toward intimacy and sexuality change over time? This course strives to answer these questions by offering a comparative perspective on people's lives in the modern Middle East (Southwest Asia) and North Africa. We begin in the 19th century and move quickly to the twentieth century when social policies and politics shaped gender relations. We will consider the birth and popularity of fashion industries, beauty contests, journalism, the visual arts, television, and challenges to norms of sexuality. Part of the class will also engage with traditionalist rejection of such new social and cultural trends. From Iran to Algeria, women and men grappled with culture wars that centered on gender, sexuality, and power. To make the learning process interactive, we will watch video clips, documentaries, and interviews as we delve into this ongoing tug-of-war.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 2353, MELC 2567, NELC 2567, SOCI 2947

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2354 The Body in Middle Eastern History

The body has long been the focus of social and scientific inquiry, as well as the foundation of religious, philosophical, and artistic thought. This seminar examines premodern and modern notions of the body in the Middle East as they intersect with colonialism, nationalism, religion, labor, law, military, gender, race, medicine, and art. Students use the notion of the body as a "useful" historical category to investigate the broader social, cultural, and political transformations occurring in the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran, followed by post-empire and colonial modern Middle Eastern contexts. The course addresses diverse views and theories as manifested in the constructions and practices over the body by using literary texts, primary sources, medical recipes, religious orders, and even public monuments to unearth the role of the body in the making of Middle Eastern history.

Also Offered As: HIST 2354, MELC 2354, NELC 2354

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2385 Terrifying: Adolescence, Real and Imagined

This course explores the concept of “choice” in adolescence, and where adolescence and society cross, clash, and mesh, primarily focused around the subjects of gender and sexuality. We will explore media of the long adolescence through two-and-a-half centuries: prose narrative to graphic novel to television and TikTok and more, from Austen to Vuong, Kant to Kaling to Kobabe, J. Swift to T. Swift (well, probably not Jonathan Swift, but it felt clever).

Also Offered As: ENGL 2385

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2390 Clarice Lispector

This seminar focuses on the work of Clarice Lispector, the Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer (1920-1977). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: COML 2390, ENGL 2390, LALS 2390, PRTG 0090

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2400 Gender and Popular Culture

This course examines the representation of gender in American popular culture from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will examine texts across television and film, pop music, popular print media, social media, advertising, and fashion, and we will engage the historic relationship between these pop texts and sociopolitical movements. We will also read critical texts from the feminist and queer tradition on desire and sexuality, race, religion, and political power. And we will consider how the methods and modalities of gender studies can inform our understanding of pop culture. Students are responsible for three short papers of 3-5 pages and a final paper of 10-15 pages that showcase their original research around the themes of the class.

Also Offered As: ENGL 1395

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2401 Indians, Pirates, Rebels and Runaways: Unofficial Histories of the Colonial Caribbean

This seminar considers the early history of the colonial Caribbean, not from the perspective of colonizing powers but rather from “below.” Beginning with European-indigenous contact in the fifteenth century, and ending with the massive slave revolt that became the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), we will focus on the different ways in which indigenous, African, European and creole men and women experienced European colonization in the Caribbean, as agents, victims and resistors of imperial projects. Each week or so, we will examine a different social group and its treatment by historians, as well as anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and novelists. Along the way, we will pay special attention to the question of sources: how can we recover the perspectives of people who rarely left their own accounts? How can we use documents and material objects—many of which were produced by colonial officials and elites—to access the experiences of the indigenous, the enslaved, and the poor? We will have some help approaching these questions from the knowledgeable staff at the Penn Museum, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the Van Pelt Library.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: AFRC 2401, HIST 2401, LALS 2401

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2402 Faces of Love: Gender, Sexuality and the Erotic in Persian Literature

Beloved, Lover and Love are three concepts that dominate the semantic field of eroticism in Persian literature and mysticism. The interrelation among these concepts makes it almost impossible to treat any one of the concepts separately. Moreover, there exists various faces and shades of love in the works of classical and modern Persian literature that challenges the conventional heteronormative assumptions about the sexual and romantic relationships between the lover and the beloved. A sharp contrast exists between the treatment of homosexuality and 'queerness' in Islamic law, on the one hand and its reflection in Persian literature, particularly poetry (the chief vehicle of Persian literary expression), on the other. This course introduces and explores different faces of love, eroticism and homoeroticism in the Persian literary tradition from the dawn of dawn of the Persian poetry in the ninth century all through to the twenty-first century. It offers a comprehensive study of representations and productions of heteronormativity, sexual orientation and gender roles with particular reference to the notion of love, lover and beloved in Persian literature.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 2400, MELC 2400

Mutually Exclusive: MELC 6310

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2405 Global Feminisms

Feminism has both united women and also generated debates between women of different races, locations and sexual orientations, across the world, and also within the US. Feminism means both understanding the construction of gender and sexuality in society, and challenging the oppressive structures that constrain people of all genders. As such, there can be no single feminism that is globally relevant. How should we, located in a prestigious US university, locate our own ideas about gender and sexuality in a global framework? Each week we will engage with a piece of work—fiction, autobiography, film, historical or activist writing--from a different part of the world. Through them we will explore how histories of colonialism, slavery and race, nation-making and war have led to very different conceptions of the family, sexuality, gender identities the body, labor, and agency around the world. Texts and films will likely include: Domitila Barrios de Chúngara, Let Me Speak; Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class; Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Veronique Tadjo, Queen Pokou; Saidiya Hartmann, Lose Your Mother; Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil; Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman, The Odyssey of Indenture; Marjane Satrapi Persepolis; Marijie Meerman, Chain of Love; Ousmane Sembene Moolade; A. Revathi, The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story; Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy. Satisfies the Cross-Cultural Requirement of the College's General Education Curriculum; Fulfills Sectors 1 and 2 of the English major.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2405

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2410 What is Capitalism? Theories of Marx and Marxism

At their root, Marx and Marxisms try to examine the problems with both capitalism and the political and economic discourses that justify or ignore those problems. Today, many around the globe are also reflecting on capitalism’s problems, in the hope of imagining and realizing a better future. This course will trace some of the origins of that renewed inquiry, and examine its limits and possibilities in today’s world. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: COML 2402, ENGL 2402

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2420 Science of Sex & Sexuality

While sexual and gender diversity have been consisten features in most cultures throughout history, how such gender and sexual based discussion have been articulated, understood, condoned, or condemned has varied. If medical historians and queer theorists have paid most obsessive attention to these subjects, bioethicists have intervened to a lesser degree and on only a handful of relevant subjects. Bearing in mind the social and medical legacies related to sexual and gender identities, this course will consider a range of historical and contemporary topics which speak to the intersection of bioethical dilemmas on medicine, sexuality and gender identity, including: the gay adolescent, the intersex person, gay-conversion therapies, the prospect of gay gene studies, sex addiction, queer blood/organ donation policies, and the wake of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. Specifically, we will focus on literary sources (memoirs, diaries, and films) as well as non-literary accounts (medical texts, bioethical scholarship, and historical records) that explore the emotional and somatic aspects of matters related to sexuality, gender identity, and bioethics.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2455 Happily Ever After?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are no more famous opening words than “Once upon a time”. They are familiar to the point of ubiquity, beloved, demanded, simply accepted as a promise that something extraordinary is about to unfold. And, in fairy tales, something always does. In this course, we will focus not on that promise (after all, it’s an immutable truth), but on the less immutable “Happily ever after” that we expect to have follow. Because not every tale ends happily for anyone, let alone everyone. Just ask most fictional stepmothers. And even for the winner, the path is seldom smooth. We will examine fairy tales and folklore across continents and centuries, considering both form and function in how they stand as both rulebook and cautionary tale, specifically as they speak to gender. What determines success in these tales? Who deserves to win? The ambitious young man with few resources but plenty of ambition and cunning? The beautiful girl with few expectations but boundless patience? What, really, are the messages in these age-old tales? In their contemporary adaptations? When we sing along loudly with Queen Elsa of Disney’s Frozen, exhorting each other to “Let It Go”, what is it? Materials will include the traditional fantastical (Grimm’s tales, One Thousand and One Nights, Ghanaian folklore, The Odyssey, Pride and Prejudice), to the modern (Disney Disney Disney, Hayao Miyazaki, Angela Carter, Barbie) to the scholarly (Bettelheim, Lieberman, Kristeva, Warner).

Also Offered As: ENGL 2355

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2490 Philosophy of Education

The philosophy of education asks questions about the foundational assumptions of our formal institutions for the reproduction of culture. It ranges therefore, from epistemology and philosophy of mind to ethics and political philosophy. For instance: What is the nature of learning and teaching? How is it possible to come to know something we did not know already--and how can we aid others in doing that? How, if at all, should formal institutions of education be concerned with shaping students' moral and civic character? What is the proper relation between educational institutions and the state? We also ask questions more specific to our own time and context. For example: how, in a multicultural state, should we educate students of varied social identities, like race, gender, and religion? What is the relationship between education and justice.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: PHIL 2560

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2500 History of Private Life in China

Underneath the grandeur of empires, war, revolutions, history eventually is about people’s life. This seminar explores how the boundaries of private life in China intersect with the public arena and how such an intersection has significantly re-shaped Chinese private life between the 16th century and the present. The first half of the seminar will explore how the private realm in late imperial China was defined and construed by Confucian discourses, architectural design, moral regulation, cultural consumption, and social network. Moving into the twentieth century, the remaining part of the seminar will examine how the advent of novel concepts such as modernity and revolution restructured the private realm, particularly in regard to the subtopics outlined above. Organizing questions include: How did female chastity become the center of a public cult which then changed the life paths of countless families? How did the practice of female foot-binding intersect with marriage choices, household economy, and social status? How did print culture create a new space for gentry women to negotiate the boundaries between their inner quarters and the outside world? What was the ideal and reality of married life in late imperial China? How did people’s life change when the collective pursuit for Chinese modernity placed romantic love, freedom to marry and divorce at the center of public debates? How was “Shanghai modern” related to the emerging middle class life style as evidenced in advertisement posters? How has the ideal of gender equality been re-interpreted and realized under the Communist regime? How have the current market reforms reformulated the contours of private life in China?

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: EALC 2721, HIST 2500

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2501 The Science-Fictions of Octavia E. Butler

This course covers key novels, short stories, and essays by the great African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, with a focus on her experiments with genre and gender-bending shape-shifters. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: AFRC 2501, ENGL 2501

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2512 Introduction to Italian Cinema

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a current course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 2512, ITAL 2512

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2522 Modern Italian Culture

Please check the website for a current course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 2522, ITAL 2522

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2537 Gender and Health

Women's health is a constant refrain of modern life, prompting impassioned debates that speak to the fundamental nature of our society. Women's bodies are the tableaux across which politicians, physicians, healthcare professional, activists, and women themselves dispute issues as wide-ranging as individual versus collective rights, the legitimacy of scientific and medical knowledge, the role of the government in healthcare, inequalities of care, and the value of experiential knowledge, among many others. Understanding the history of these questions is crucial for informed engagement with contemporary issues.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: HSOC 2537

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2545 Sex, Love, and Race in African American Life and History

This course discusses the political and social implications of sex, race and personal relationships in U.S. political and social history. In this class, we examine how so-called ‘emotional,’ human experiences such as falling in love, engaging in a sexual relationship, marriage, coming out of the closet, and other deeply personal events over the course of a lifetime are shaped by political, legal and historical forces. This course will examine the history of marriage rights, claims to ethnic and racial identity, activism among multiracial people in the United States, sex education in public schools, and debates about marriage and family rights in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Fall

Also Offered As: AFRC 2545, HIST 0818

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2600 Witches, Whores and Rogues

What should we make of the disorderly people of the past? Were they acting out their dissent against powerful customs and institutions in their lives? Or were they the victims of those customs and institutions? In this course, we consider the lives of these disorderly people: the witches, prostitutes, criminals, escaped servants and slaves, criminals, cross dressers, and rowdies of early modern Europe and the Americas. The course will focus on several case studies featuring people considered to be troublemakers, or at the very least, non-conformist, by their contemporaries. We will use films, primary sources, book-length studies, and works of theory to develop our analyses of the problem of dissent, disorder, and resistance in the early modern past

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 2600

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2601 Women and the Making of Modern South Asia

This course on women in South Asian history has four objectives - 1. To acquaint ourselves with the historiography on South Asian women. 2. To gain an understanding of evolving institutions and practices shaping women's lives, such as the family, law and religious traditions. 3. To understand the impact of historical processes - the formation and breakdown of empire, colonialism, nationalism and decolonization - upon South Asian women between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. 4. To become familiar with some of the significant texts written about and by women in this period. We will read a wide variety of primary sources including a Mughal princess' account, devotional verse authored by women, conduct books, tracts, autobiographies and novels.

Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 3500, SAST 2260

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2610 The Asian Caribbean

Although Asians have lived in the Americas for centuries, the Asian American community and experience tends to be defined by the post-1965 wave of immigration to the United States. In an effort to correct this narrative this course will explore the histories, experiences, and contributions of some of the forgotten Asians of the Americas. In particular, we will focus on the earlier labor migrations of Chinese and South Asian individuals to the Caribbean and the United States. The experiences of these individuals, who built railroads, cut sugarcane, and replaced African slave labor, complicate our understandings of race today. By examining the legal and social debates surrounding their labor in the 19th century and exploring how their experiences are forgotten and their descendants are rendered invisible today, we will complicate what is Asian America and consider how this history shapes immigration policies today.

Spring

Also Offered As: ASAM 2610, LALS 2601, SAST 2610

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2620 Italian Scandals

When you think of the term “scandal,” what comes to mind? Is there something about a society’s national identity that makes particular scandals resonate and shake the culture more than others? By exploring several Italian scandals that have helped define the cultural fabric of generations of Italians, we will learn to understand the social and political roots behind the what and why of these phenomena. Through cross-mediatic and transnational archival research, we will look at the ways that different media and different nations use these phenomena to represent national belonging, social fear, and cultural expectation. Each crime has its own story, but how do they help us understand how Italy makes sense of itself through tragedy, corruption, murder, and mayhem? How bello is this bel paese after all? Did you ever wonder what’s behind Italy’s ever-revolving government? Or why do Italians prefer to use the English word “serial killer”? This course will be taught in English

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 2620

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2650 Sex Wars

In this course, we explore several “sides” of the conflict that raged between U.S. feminists four decades ago, as well as their entanglements with other political trajectories in the context of capitalist development. The aim is to shed light on contemporary discourses on sexual representation and sexual conduct as commonly framed under controversial rubrics such as “OnlyFans,” film ratings, “no kink at Pride,” sexting, “revenge porn,” sex-trafficking, and more. Rejecting or at least complicating the “pro-sex vs. anti-porn” definition of feminist history’s belligerent parties, students are invited to consider lesbian-socialist, working-class butch/femme, black feminist, youth-liberationist, sex-radical, and transfeminist permutations of the politics of “pleasure and danger,” going back significantly before the infamous flashpoint that was the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality. Typically, “Barnard 1982” is lamented as a traumatizing event with a regrettable legacy. Yet is there something to be said in favor of the laying-bare of feminist enmities, indeed, enemy feminisms? Were there positive consequences? Further questions we might confront together on this course include the following: What is violent pornography? How (if at all) should it be produced, regulated, distributed, discussed, and consumed? What is violence against women, representationally? Why is it so prevalent in our culture and how might we change this? Whom do antiprostitution laws keep safe? What furthers the conditions of possibility for black feminist porn to flourish? Readings will include texts from Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Stryker, Gail Dines, Carol Leigh, Carole Vance, Lisa Duggan, Joan Nestle, Gayle Rubin, Jennifer Nash, Amber Hollibaugh, Ellen Willis, and Audre Lorde.

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2700 Folklore and Sexuality

Sexuality is usually thought of as being biological or social, divided into categories of natural and unnatural. Often misssed are its creative and communicative aspects. Examining the constructed social elements of sexuality requires attention be paid to folklore in groups, between individuals and on the larger platform of popular technological media. The most interesting locations for exploration are those places where borderlands or margins, occur between genders, orientations and other cultural categories. A field-based paper will be required that must include documentary research.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2705 Media and Culture in Contemporary Iran

This course offers a comprehensive introduction to the culture and media of modern Iran, with a critical perspective on issues such as identity formation, ethnicity, race, and nation-building. It focuses on how these issues relate to various aspects of modern Iranian culture -- such as religion, gender, sexuality, war, and migration -- through the lens of media, cinema, and literature.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 2705, MELC 2705, RELS 2180

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2720 18th-Century Novel Seminar

This course explores an aspect of 18th-century novel intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2720

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2770 Gender, Sex & Urban Life: The City as a Feminist/Queer/Trans Archive

How does the city shape our experience of gender and sexuality? How do women, non-binary, queer, and trans subjects inhabit and transform urban space? In this course, we will think about the city as an archive of feminist, queer, and trans communities, activism, and intimate life. Course sessions will be divided into two types – the first, in-class discussions of key theoretical and historical texts exploring how gender and sexuality inform, and are informed by, the design of cities around the globe. Second, we will engage Philadelphia itself as a repository of queer/feminist/trans life through experiential learning activities – from walking tours to archive and institution visits. During the experiential part of the course, we will experiment with embodied methods for interpreting the city, including autoethnography, poetry, critical essay writing, visual representation (collage, photography, design proposals, zine-making), oral history, sound capturing/production, and more. Interdisciplinary in nature, the course will draw from urban history, feminist, queer, and trans theory, architectural and planning theory, and geography, as well as from fiction, poetry, art and film.

Spring

Also Offered As: URBS 2770

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2800 "In the Dark We Can All Be Free": Black Queer, Feminist & Trans Art(s) of Abolition

If the afterlife of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman argues, is an aesthetic problem, what then is the relationship between abolition and aesthetics? How has the ongoing project of abolition been an aesthetic enterprise, and how does art shape its aims and horizon -- historically, presently and in afro-futuristic imaginary of the to come? How might the analytics of black studies, feminist theory, and trans studies, in their co-implicacy and entanglement, prompt a rethinking of aesthetics -- both its limits and possibilities? In this course we will consider the art(s) of the Black radical tradition, trans art, queer art and feminist art and theory, alongside a grounding in aesthetic theory, and explore the work of a constellation of scholars in Black studies, art history and artists including Saidiya Hartman, Laura Harris, Fred Moten, Huey Copeland, American Artists, fields harrington, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Tourmaline, Juliana Huxtable, Kiyan Williams, Simone Leigh, Alvin Baltrop, Tina Campt, (and more) to consider how abolition is activated in contemporary Black queer, trans and feminist visual art.

Also Offered As: AFRC 2800, ARTH 3989

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2841 Mourning and Sexuality in the English Elegy

From antiquity to the present, poets have written elegies to express their diverse experiences of the mingling of love and loss. In this advanced seminar on poetic history, genre, and form, we’ll explore a major poetic genre—the elegy—in relation to its two, intertwined themes: death and sex. All of the elegies we’ll read raise challenging questions about desire, identification, reproduction, gender, and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2841

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2860 Drama to 1660 Seminar

This course explores an aspect of drama before 1660 intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2860

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2870 Postwar Art

At a time of seismic shifts in the American polity, postwar art has too often seemed above the fray. Even as New York came to replace Paris as the epicenter of art world in the post war period, the rapid succession of styles and movements from Abstract Expressionism to Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Happenings can seem to have their own internal logic, severed from the historical backdrop of the time. Some of the artists we'll consider include Pollock, Krasner, Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Kusama, Martin, Lichtenstein, Bearden, Oldenburg, LeWitt, Chicago and Judd. In this course, we'll reexamine American art and art criticism in the postwar period alive to everything from the Cold War's virulent anti-communism to the rise of progressive liberation movements around race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. In the process, we will repeatedly underscore how art both served, and bit, the hand that fed it.

Also Offered As: ARTH 2870

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2872 Sex in the Museum

This course maps the often fraught intercourse between the history of sexuality and the history of museums, exhibitions, and curation. Bodies have long been the mainstay of art, but the attribution of sex to those bodies is a highly variable social phenomenon that tells us as much about the culture in question as it does about ourselves. Sex is thus in the eye of the beholder, defined by cultural, religious, scientific, and political norms, themselves often defined in and through a politics of visibility and exhibition. Beginning in the ancient world and moving into the present, this course studies the sexual politics of display, inherent but little studied, in the history of art history. From Renaissance battles over fig leaves to Enlightenment Europe’s titillation at what they saw as the unbridled eroticism of the ancient world to the culture wars of today, sex has long been a hidden motor of shifts in the art world. Whether coming to understand the so-called “Free Body Culture” of turn of the 20th century Europe with its very public nudity, to the explosion in nude performance in the 1960s to the culture wars of the 1980s in the USA over an art that addressed queerness, AIDS, and their intersection, we’ll see how often exhibitions have served as proxy for other social and political issues. In this course we’ll also come to understand the distinction between the nude, a category in art, and the naked, a category that was often said to corrupt art. Reading the latest work in queer, feminist and anti-racist scholarship, we will see how easily bodies on display can turn into sex, and conversely, slip as easily back from sex into bodies again.

Also Offered As: ARTH 2872

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6872

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2879 Global Queer History

Sexuality has a history that is both geographically and culturally specific. For this reason, this course aims to destabilize familiar sexual categories and identities by exploring how it was (and is) to be queer in different parts of the world. We will historicize sexual orientation as a category anchored in Western medical and legal discourses; we will link the history of sexuality with that of capitalism, colonialism, and racism; and we will evaluate the idea of “Gay Imperialism” and how it is resisted around the world. The course is not comprehensive either chronologically or geographically. Instead, it considers some key topics in the history of queer sexualities; it provides a general historiographical background; and it introduces a toolbox for doing critical queer history with a global perspective. Finally, we will address how contemporary LBGTQ+ issues around the world can be put into historical perspective, and why queer history is essential for achieving the goals of social justice.

Also Offered As: HIST 0879

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2892 Major Elective Credit Abroad

This course is for GSWS majors who wish to receive study abroad credit through GSWS on a topic not taught at Penn but which deserves departmentally and level appropriate credit.

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2940 Art Now

One of the most striking features of today's art world is the conspicuous place occupied in it by the photographic image. Large-scale color photographs and time-based installations in projections are everywhere. Looking back, we can see that much of the art making of the past 60 years has also been defined by this medium, regardless of the form it takes. Photographic images have inspired countless paintings, appeared in combines and installations, morphed into sculptures, drawings and performances, and served both as the object and the vehicle of institutional critique. They are also an increasinglyimportant exhibition site: where most of us go to see earthworks, happenings and body-art. This course is a three-part exploration of our photographic present.

Spring

Also Offered As: ARTH 2940, ENGL 2639, VLST 2360

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2950 Global Film Theory

This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as "cinema," to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. There will be an asynchronous weekly film screening for this course. No knowledge of film theory is presumed.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 2950, CIMS 2950, COML 2950, ENGL 2900

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6950

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2960 Literary Theory Seminar

This course explores an aspect of literary theory intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 2410, ENGL 2400

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2978 Just Futures Seminar II: Health and Healing in Abiayala (the Americas)

Health and Healing in Abiayala (the Americas) will introduce students to ecosocial notions of health, colonialism’s contributions to ill-health, and decolonial action as healing action. Part one of the course introduces general concepts of body, health, and illness in biomedical models. It then pivots to the relational and ecosocial practices of body, health, and wellbeing among many First Peoples of the Abiayala, highlighting “radical relationality.” For many First Peoples, community includes humans, plants, animals, ancestors, and earth beings (such as the land, mountains, rivers, and lakes) that are materially, socially, and spiritually interdependent. These beings work together to maintain a “shared body” through practices of reciprocal care. Part two of the course examines how the shared body has been and is threatened by the colonization of Indigenous lands and bodies through (e.g.) land dispossession, pollution, extractive industry, lack of access to quality education and medical care, forced sterilization, forced removal of children, exploitative economic relations, and political violence. The third part of the course will follow how First Peoples of Abiayala are healing from the physical, social, and spiritual wounds of colonialism through decolonial action. First Peoples are creating their own healing centers and ecological protection agencies, engaging in Land Back movements, in legal and direct-action processes to protect the shared body from extractive industry, and reproductive justice movements. Healing is future oriented, powering the “radical resurgence” of First Peoples. Some questions addressed in this class include, where does the body begin and end? What constitutes personhood? How does continued colonization affected indigenous peoples’ health—and that of all peoples? How do indigenous peoples use ancestral knowledges, relation ethics, and local ecologies to help heal historic and contemporary wounds to power their futures? Is there a political dimension to healing? How do autonomy and self-determination figure into healing and wellbeing?

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 2978, HSOC 2332, LALS 2978

1 Course Unit

GSWS 2995 Major Transfer Credit

This course is a transfer credit for a course that we do not have a direct equivalent in our published curriculum but which meets the spirit of the major. This level is intended for GSWS majors.

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3010 French Identity in the Twentieth Century

Topics vary. Please see the department's website for a description of the current offerings: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: CIMS 3010, FREN 3010

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3020 Queer Cinema

Queer Cinema, in Theory: This course explores the role of cinema in shaping the history of gender and sexuality, at the same time introducing students to some of the most relevant texts in the field of queer, gender and trans studies. While the last decades have been characterized by increasing acceptance of gays, lesbians and trans people into mainstream society, this process has no doubt reproduced new inequalities and asymmetries – in terms of race, class, and gender presentation. Does “queer” still pose a threat to the mainstream or is it now part of the “normal”? Should one welcome the progressive acceptance or queer lives within the mainstream or should one reject it in the name of an indissoluble difference? How do whiteness and homonormativity participate in the structural marginalization of black and trans people? Some of the topics addressed by this course are the “closet” in classical Hollywood cinema and its critique in 1990s queer films such as Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997); the intersection of sexuality and race in black feminist films such as Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden,1983) and Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996); the treatment of reproductive labor in experimental feminist films such as Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman, 1975); the representation of the AIDS crisis in new queer films such as The Living End (Gregg Araki,1992); sex reassignment politics in 2000s Iranian films such as Sex My Life (Bahman Motemedian).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3030, ITAL 3030

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3100 Politics of Political Writing: From

The Politics of Political Writing: From "We, the People" to "Power to the People" is a literary study and research course charting the development of libratory politics, aesthetics and subjectivities in response to colony, capital and empire. Students will read anthology, collected essays, a novel, reportage, oral history, interviews, travel writing and memoir. We will look at works in which the authors articulate political stances that impact the public sphere and their literary craft as well as works in which they examine, often self-critically, the politics of writing as practice, career, advocacy, trickery, solace and pleasure. The works, including ones by June Jordan, Jean Genet, Patricia Galvao, and Claribel Alegria worry the divide between art and politics, and some trouble the notion that writing encapsulates an author's politics and activism. Using the texts as models we will examine in lecture, discussion, and research projects the effect and impact of aesthetic acts on making trouble for state, social and financial structures as such trouble-making urged many of these works into inception, making difficult their production and reception. The Marxist theory of the dialectic and M. Jacqui Alexander's configuration of palimpsestic time in the neo/post/anti-colonial Americas will serve as our theory touchstones. While some of the works are from the recent past and others far older, they touch on, and in many instances, speak to the histories of regions and countries currently in the news and in crisis (Central America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, France, the US and Brazil) contemporary movements (Black Lives Matter, international solidarity, undocuqueers) and problematics (migration, US financial intervention, imperialism).

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3102 Attention Poetics

This is a poetry workshop about paying close attention: to the ordinary and the ephemeral, as well as to the extraordinary and the large, often inexorable systems around us. Experienced poets and students new to poetry are all welcome. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Also Offered As: ENGL 3102

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3104 Poetry Lab

A creative writing workshop in which students will learn to experiment and deepen their writing practice using the tools of poetry. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Also Offered As: ENGL 3104

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3130 Gender, Capitalism, and Environment

What is "the economy," and how is "it" gendered? How is access to land, resources, and livelihood options mediated by hierarchies of gender that are co-constituted with race, class, age, and ability? How are gender equality, economic justice, and environmental justice interrelated? This course grapples with these and other foundational questions concerning the ways that gender, economy, and environment are intimately linked. Using case studies from around the world, we will consider Marxist-feminist, ecofeminist, political ecology, queer, critical race, and postcolonial approaches to understanding how abstract economic processes are materialized in social relations and in human-environment interactions. From women peasant farmer's online practices in Myanmar to land-grabs and contemporary witch-hunting in African countries, together we will engage with the material histories, politics, and power relations shaping the uneven distribution of wealth and resources among gendered populations - and how different social groups are mobilizing to contest these gender, economic, and environmental inequalities together. In addition to our core questions, this course asks: How is capitalism itself gendered, and with what effects? What is considered productive work, and how are categories of worker gendered? Why are women overrepresented as peasant farmers in global south countries? How and why is climate change gendered? How and why are solutions to climate change and other environmental problems gendered? What are the gendered benefits and costs of sustainable development, and who bears them? Most of these questions lack clear answers, but by the end of the semester you will be able to give compelling oral and written explanations in response to each. Using a diverse array of texts - including film, podcasts, poetry, and peer-reviewed academic literature - this course will equip students with tools to thoughtfully and ethically engage with academic, activist, policy, and development spaces that are concerned with the intersection of gender, economy, and the environment.

Also Offered As: ANTH 3130

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3136 Queer Science

This course gives students a background in the development of sex science, from evolutionary arguments that racialized sexual dimorphism to the contemporary technologies that claim to be able to get at bodily truths that are supposedly more real than identity. Then, it introduces several scholarly and political interventions that have attempted to short-circuit the idea that sex is stable and knowable by science, highlighting ways that queer and queering thinkers have challenged the stability of sexual categories. It concludes by asking how to put those interventions into practice when so much of the fight for queer rights, autonomy, and survival has been rooted in categorical recognition by the state, and by considering whether science can be made queer. Along the way, students will engage with the tools, methods, and theories of both STS and queer studies that emphasize the constructed and political underpinnings of scientific thought and practice.

Spring

Also Offered As: STSC 3136

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3150 Queer Modernisms

This course tracks the development of Modernism in America, Western Europe, and specific other locations around the globe, with particular emphasis as to how and why dissident sexualities so often found expression in and as aesthetic dissent. Creating new expressive forms and theories that often seem far removed from any traditional definition of sexuality, queer modernist artists often replaced dangerous forms of social dissent with more prudent forms of formal dissidence. In pursuing these questions, we will place art in its broader social context, seeking to answer such significant problems as how and why forms of artistic representation that were once transparent, eminently legible to all strata of society, increasingly became, under the avant garde, designed to speak only to an elect, to a select few in our culture. We will ask what happens when art deliberately narrows its audience, and how that narrowing is related to questions of sexual difference. What is the relationship between queerness and cultural elitism, a connection generally presumed in popular culture, but rarely examined academically? And finally we will ask about the utility of forms of queer political dissent if those forms remain illegible as queer to a wider audience. Throughout, new methods informed by queer, gender, and critical race theory will be utilized.

Also Offered As: ARTH 3830

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3153 American Feminist and LGBT Movements, 1960s-1980s

This seminar explores the history of the feminist and LGBT movements from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s in Philadelphia. Although there will be some attention to national organizations, we will focus on social and political activism as it was made in local groups and spaces. We will explore the social and cultural web that fostered activism, for example, in gay and lesbian coffee houses, campus women's centers, bookstores, and radio shows. We will also pay attention to groups and actions that may not have been self-consciously defined as "feminist" or "gay liberationist," but had important effects on social change related to gender and sexuality; these include African American, Latino/a, and working-class organizations. This is a hands-on research seminar, with students exploring local archives and special collections to document and analyze these complex movements. Each student will conduct an oral history, analyze a set of published and printed sources, and write a paper based on archival research.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: HIST 3153

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3220 Advanced Topics in Global Gender and Sexuality Studies

This is an advanced topics course, and the course description will vary from semester to semester.

Fall

Also Offered As: COML 3220

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3240 Children's Health in the United States, 1800-2000

This course explores the impact of historical ideas, events, and actors pertaining to the history of children's health care in the United States. Emphasis is placed on tracing the origins and evolution of issues that have salience for twenty-first century children's health care policy and the delivery of care. Prerequisite: For Benjamin Franklin Scholars & Nursing Honors Students This course satisfies the History & Traditions Sector for Nursing Class of 2012 and Beyond.

Fall

Also Offered As: NURS 3240

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3246 The Tale of Genji

"Crowning masterpiece of Japanese literature," "the world's first novel," "fountainhead of Japanese literary and aesthetic culture," "a great soap opera in the vein of Jacqueline Susann." Readers over the centuries have praised the Tale of Genji, the monumental prose tale finished just after the year 1000, in a variety of ways. In this course we will read the latest English translation of Murasaki Shikibu's work. We will watch as Genji loses his mother at a tender age, is cast out of the royal family, and begins a quest to fill the void she left. Along the way, Genji's loyalty to all the women he encounters forges his reputation as the ideal lover. We will consider gender issues in the female author's portrayal of this rake, and question the changing audience, from bored court women to censorious monks, from adoring nationalists to comic book adaptors. Study of the tale requires consideration of poetry, imagery, costume, music, history, religion, theater, political and material culture, all of which will be components of the course. We will also trace the effect of the tale's many motifs, from flora and fauna to murderously jealous spirits, on later literature and conceptions of human emotions. All material is in English translation. There are no prerequisites.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: EALC 3246

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3340 Feminist Ethnography

This course will investigate the relationships among women, gender, sexuality, and anthropological research. We will begin by exploring the trajectory of research interest in women and gender, drawing first from the early work on gender and sex by anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; moving through the 1970s and 1980s arguments about gender, culture, and political economy; arriving at more current concerns with gender, race, sexuality, and empire. For the rest of the semester, we will critically read contemporary ethnographies addressing pressing issues such as nationalism, militarism, neoliberalism and fundamentalism. Throughout, we will investigate what it means not only to "write women's worlds", but also to analyze broader socio-cultural, political, and economic processes through a gendered lens. We will, finally, address the various ways feminist anthropology fundamentally challenged the discipline's epistemological certainties, as well as how it continues to transform our understanding of the foundations of the modern world.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 3340, ANTH 3340

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3360 Feminism and the Internet

From the earliest message boards and email chains, the internet has given people a way to connect, not just digitally but sexually. Porn, online dating, sex education: digital technology has made it easier for people to find each other and explore sexuality, but these same tools have also been used in relationships that are exploitative and criminal. In this course, we look at the different connections between sex, gender, queerness and the internet: changing policies regulating sex (like FOSTA and SESTA), the platforms that have created controversies around sex (for example, craigslist, tumblr and Grindr) and shifting norms around how sex and sexuality manifest online. This is an interdisciplinary course that brings together internet studies, queer theory, and cultural studies in order to understand the social and historical dimensions of sex, sexuality and digital technologies.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COMM 3360

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3400 Money, Power, Respect: Funding Social Change

This course is about how to apply a race, gender and LGBTQ lens to support contemporary social justice movements in the U.S. and globally, including Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, transgender equality, and disability justice. We will explore intersectionality as a theoretical framework, and how it is practically applied to support social justice organizations and leaders, and fund social change. Over the course of the semester, Professor of Practice Roz Lee, a black lesbian feminist and lifelong racial, gender, LGBTQ and economic justice advocate, and who currently serves as Vice President of Strategy and Programs at the Ms. Foundation for Women, will be joined by movement leaders and philanthropy colleagues to discuss and analyze what's happening on the frontlines of movements for equity, justice and freedom.

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3401 Contemporary Italy

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3401, ITAL 3401

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3402 Italian Film and Media Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3402, ITAL 3402

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3403 Race and Ethnicity in Italy

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3403, ITAL 3403

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3404 Italian Gender Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3404, ITAL 3404

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3405 Italian Fashion

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3405, ITAL 3405

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3406 Italian Visual Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3406, ITAL 3406

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3407 Italian Foods and Cultures

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3407, ITAL 3407

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3408 Italian Literature

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3408, ITAL 3408

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3410 Italian Renaissance Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3410, ITAL 3410

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3411 Mediterranean Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3411, ITAL 3411

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3412 Italian Performance Studies

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3412, ITAL 3412

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3413 Italian Science and Philosophy

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 3413, ITAL 3413

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3416 Boccaccio

Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 3416

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3425 Gender, Religion, and China

This course examines the interrelationship among "gender," "religion," and "China" as conceptual and historical categories. We ask, for example, how gender plays critical and constitutive roles in Chinese religious traditions, how religion can be used both to reinforce and to challenge gender norms, how religious women impact Chinese society and culture, and what the construction of "China" as a cultural identity and as a nation-state has to do with women, gender, and religion. We will also think about what assumptions we have when speaking of gender, religion, and China, and the infinite possibilities when we strive to think beyond. We will read three kinds of materials: (1) scholarship on gender and religion in historical and contemporary China as well as the Chinese-speaking world, (2) scholarship concerning theories and methodology of gender and religious studies not necessarily focused on China, and (3) historical record of religious women in English translation.

Spring

Also Offered As: EALC 3425, RELS 3425

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3440 Psychology of Personal Growth

Intellectual, emotional and behavioral development in the college years. Illustrative topics: developing intellectual and social competence; developing personal and career goals; managing interpersonal relationships; values and behavior. Recommended for submatriculation in Psychological Services Master's Degree program.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: EDUC 3545

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3447 From Puberty to Parenting: The Evolutionary Context of Reproduction

This course explores the processes that influence reproduction in human populations. We adopt an evolutionary perspective to examine the factors that have shaped human reproductive physiology and contribute to variation in reproductive parameters between populations. To place human reproduction in a broad evolutionary context, we will consider similarities and differences between humans and other apes in how ecology shapes reproduction. The biology of puberty, pregnancy, hormonal changes across the lifespan, the cessation of reproduction, the impact of parenting behavior on the biology of offspring and parents themselves, and the influence of sex and gender diversity on reproduction will be discussed. Both the ecological and sociocultural factors that influence the steps in the reproductive process will be considered.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 3447

Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5447

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3448 The Future of Disability and the Afterlives of Epidemics

Medical framings of disease focus on "cure" narratives, but what does "getting better" really mean when examined from a patient perspective and how might epidemics challenge or reshape our relationships to concepts of health, illness, and disability? In this course, we will learn to examine stories of epidemics past and present through the lens of disability. In doing so, we will ask how epidemics in the past have shaped our ideas and experiences of disability, muddied our binary thinking about illness and wellness, and challenged the beliefs, epistemologies, and institutions that drive our approaches to caring for the body, the mind, and the spirit. Through an exploration of primary and secondary source readings, we will interrogate how these eras of crisis, and their aftermaths, have historically influenced the ways we think about and experience disability and its relationship to identity, family, culture, religion, society, and citizenship in the days, weeks, months, years, and decades that follow in their wake. Ultimately, we will draw upon the insights of the past to develop better questions about present epidemics, including COVID-19, Monkeypox, as well as the re-emergence of "old" epidemic diseases like measles and polio in order to think in novel and critical ways about how our ideas about wellness, disability, and society both shape and are shaped by our encounters with contagious epidemic diseases.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HSOC 3447

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3480 Gender, Sexuality, & Pop Music

How is popular music implicated in the representation, production, performance, and interpretation of gender and sexuality? How have musicians negotiated traditional categories of gender and sexuality? In this class, we will approach the study of popular music through the lens of feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, transnational feminist theory, and intersectional methodologies to articulate the ways in which gender and sexuality have shaped musical discourse and popular culture more broadly. Topics include: gay anthems, trans vocality, masculinities, boy bands, oral histories, queer electro-pop, afrofuturism, performance alter-egos, queer(ing) methods, cover songs, censorship, musical borrowings & cultural appropriation, the politics of representation, and affective modes of listening. Students will learn about and be able to articulate the values and ideologies that are communicated in various subgenres of popular music, and how musical production impacts our understanding of cultural practices and social systems. *No prior musical knowledge required.*

Also Offered As: MUSC 3480

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3500 Trans Method

What are the subjects of trans studies? What does “trans” as a category afford us in looking at texts, people, systems, and objects? To what extent is trans an identity? What might it mean to think of it as a methodology? How might the tools of trans studies intervene in conversations and practices beyond the field itself? What are the stakes of such an expansive approach? This course introduces students to “trans” as a still-forming analytic that has emerged out of academic spaces, activist movements, and trans cultural production. We will engage with texts and questions that build on trans studies’ connections to (and divergences from) queer and feminist studies, history, critical race studies, disability studies, and science studies, among other fields, and we will also consider how trans knowledge can act beyond the theoretical.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: HSOC 3889, STSC 3889

Prerequisite: GSWS 0002 OR GSWS 0003 OR ENGL 1300

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3501 Writing and Witnessing

This course will explore one of the fundamental questions we face as humans: how do we bear witness to ourselves and to the world? How do we live and write with a sense of response-ability to one another? How does our writing grapple with traumatic histories that continue to shape our world and who we are in it? The very word “witnessing” contains a conundrum within it: it means both to give testimony, such as in a court of law, and to bear witness to something beyond understanding. In this class, we will explore both senses of the term “witness” as we study work by writers such as Harriet Jacobs, Paul Celan, M. NourbeSe Philip, Bhanu Kapil, Layli Long Soldier, Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, and others that wrestles with how to be a witness to oneself and others during a time of ongoing war, colonialism, racism, climate change, and other disasters. Students are welcome in this class no matter what stage you are at with writing, and whether you write poetry or prose or plays or make other kinds of art. Regardless of your experience, in this class you’ll be considered an “author,” which in its definition also means a “witness.” We will examine and question what authorship can do in the world, and we will analyze and explore the fine lines among being a witness, a bystander, a participant, a spectator, and an ally. In this class you will critically analyze and write responses to class readings; you’ll do writing exercises related to the work we read; and you’ll complete (and be workshopped on) a portfolio of creative writing (and/or art) that bears witness to events that matter to you.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 3501, ENGL 3501

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3504 Italian Gender Studies

Taught in Italian. Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ITAL 3504

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3508 Queer Forms

Queer and trans writers have always queered form, constantly inventing new ways to express new forms of becoming. And yet, much of the attention paid to LGBTQ+ writing has focused on identity and content rather than looking at the many innovations in form that queer and trans writers are always producing. This multi-genre creative/critical workshop will examine some of the methods contemporary LGBTQ+ writers have used to queer genre and form in their writing, whether they are working through fiction, poetry, essay, play/performance, or some combination thereof. Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s notions of disidentification and queer futurity will help guide our thinking in this course. Students will read and write creative/critical responses each week to a wide range of writing that queers form. The class will include weekly workshopping and students will work towards a final project that incorporates all they have learned over the term, generating ever new queer forms of making.

Also Offered As: COML 3508, ENGL 3508

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3510 Love, Anger, Madness: History and Silences in Modern Haiti

On the stage of modern world history, Haiti plays the unique role as both the exceptionally victorious and tragic character. This course interrogates archival documents, oral histories, historical texts, and prose created within the nation and her diaspora in order to establish a nuanced image of the projection of Haiti's modern history. Using two classic Haitian texts, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness (1968) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995),this course examines how, why,and to what end Haiti's history and popular narratives about the country have served to construct and dismantle global movements, popular culture, and meanings of race, gender, and citizenship in the Americas. In our historical examination, we will question some of the iconic representations of Haiti through literature that deepen the affective historical profile of Haiti with interrogations of culture, sexuality, political, and media performance. Students will become familiar with the post -colonial history of Haiti and the region, meanings of race, and the production of history. The course is a research and historical methods seminar. Students will conduct archival research and write narratives from primary source material. This course qualifies as a "methods" course for Africana Studies undergraduate majors and minors.

Spring

Also Offered As: AFRC 3510, HIST 0840, LALS 3510

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3514 Writing Towards Transformation

Writing Towards Transformation is a critical and creative writing workshop focused on developing works across genres that express and elaborate upon current and historical conditions of crisis and injustice. Using guided meditation, critical feedback and healthy, ethical discussion, the students of the class will develop manuscripts of poems, short stories, essays, plays and/or screenplays that in some way articulate their analysis of the present and the past towards a transformative future. We will read essays, manifestos, theater and fiction as well as view films that will hopefully inspire each student to develop texts and scripts of hope. Writers used as models of inspiration will include Gary Indiana, Valerie Solanas, June Jordan, Bertolt Brecht, Cherrie Moraga, Leslie Feinberg and Toni Cade Bambara, among many others. This is a graduate level course open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor.

Also Offered As: ENGL 3514, LALS 3514

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3520 Death and the Sacred in Queer Cinema

Death and the Sacred in Queer Cinema is a course for driven students interested in moving image, queer histories, and the politics of representation. We will survey histories of the moving image, film, and video art through the themes of remembrance, promise, death, and the sacred in order to ask questions of unrealized potentials, futurity, memory, and non-linear expressions. We will ask how artists have put pressure on straight concepts of time, pastness, and legacy. Our focus will be on how the medium of film and video can offer queer strategies and methods for intervening on dominant ideas of remembrance, while articulating our visions as critics, artists, and writers. This course is a seminar and production course for students who want to engage in research and experimental approaches to synthesis, with projects that could range from visual essays, films, lectures, poetry, and more. This course is intended for students with demonstrated experience in artistic production, art criticism, cinema studies, or creative writing. Interested students without relevant experience should reach out to instructors directly.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3550 Latin American Cuir/Queer Critique

While certain debates around queer theory and queer studies have emphasized the problematics of a deployment of a North American field to other geopolitical spaces, this course takes a different approach by emphasizing how Latin America expands the notion of queerness while also contributes to the field of queer studies and queer theory at large. As such, the course emphasizes different manifestations of the non-normative from and within Latin America. Paying close attention to aesthetic practices as well as criticism, theory, and activism, students will be exposed to how Latin American literary and cultural practices labor a critique of hegemonic structures of visibility that simultaneously direct our senses to quotidian and communal strategies of survival. Students will engage with aesthetic artifacts, such as film, literature, manifestoes, poetry, performance, music, video and street art, and photography from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru.

Also Offered As: LALS 3551

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3559 Gender and Sexuality in Japan

If you have ever wondered about the following questions, then this is the right course for you: Is Japan a hyper-feminine nation of smiling geisha and obedient wives? Is it a hyper-masculine nation of samurai and economic warriors? Is it true that Japanese wives control the household? Is it true that Japanese men suffer from over-dependence on their mothers? What do young Japanese women and young men worry about? What does the government think about the future of Japanese women and men? Assuming that expressions of gender and sexuality are deeply influenced by cultural and social factors, and that they also show profound differences regionally and historically, this course examines a variety of texts--historical, biographical, autobiographical, fictional, non-fictional, visual, cinematic, analytical, theoretical--in order to better understand the complexity of any attempts to answer the above questions.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: EALC 3559

Mutually Exclusive: EALC 7559

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3600 The Planets in my Pen: Experiments in Writing, Visual Art & Performance

The Planets in my Pen is a multi-genre creative arts workshop constellated around experimentation. We will be looking at innovative writing, visual art and film as models for the making of poetry, fiction, memoir, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, plays and performance. The genres, techniques and movements of science fiction, surrealism, performance art and the political essay will be key with an emphasis on feminist, queer, left and anticolonial models of art and world making. The works of William S. Burroughs, John Rechy, Nelly Santiago, Jean Genet, Ntozake Shange, Octavia Butler, Adrienne Kennedy, Lucrecia Martel, Aimé Cesaire, Jamaica Kincaid, Regina Jose Galindo, Raul Ruiz, Josefina Baez, Zadie Smith and Cherríe Moraga will be among those read, viewed and studied. As their final project students will submit a final manuscript, performance and/or art object as well as participate in a public reading/viewing/screening.

Also Offered As: ENGL 3608, LALS 3600, THAR 3600

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3630 Here I/We Stand: Writing/Performing Self and Community

This writing for performance workshop will focus on the creation of plays, solo performance, collectively devised work, screenplays and videos. Students can work in both the autobiographical mode common to one person shows, traditional theater and screenplay form as well as avant-garde and experimental techniques. We will write and use theater exercises to develop character and narratives that either directly or obliquely speak to the conditions of subjects who struggle to make art and sense out of self and community, history and society, memory and fantasy. We will read the work of playwrights and solo performers as well as view film and video with an emphasis on the work of leftist, feminist, queer/trans, BIPOC and social justice artists such as Jean Genet, Bertolt Brecht, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Cherríe Moraga, Luis Alfaro, Holly Hughes, Kate Bornstein, Ana Mendieta, Valerie Solanas, Wallace Shawn, Tomata du Plenty, Teatro Campesino and ACT UP.

Also Offered As: ENGL 3630

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3651 Passion Projects: Radical Experiments in Writing Plays, Screenplays, and Pilots

This creative writing workshop will focus on writing for screen, stage and internet and is open to undergraduate and graduate students at every level of writing experience. The course will be writing intensive and also include the reading and analysis of feminist, trans, queer, working class and racially liberatory plays, films, television and performance as models of inspiration. Meditation, drawing, theater games, improv exercises, screenings and outings to see work on and off campus will round out this holistic and experimental approach to making work that illuminates and entertains audiences from across the US and global audience spectrum.

Also Offered As: ENGL 3651, LALS 3651

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3655 Writing Class

Gayatri Spivak has stated, “Of race, class and gender, class is the least abstract.” While materially true, in literary, theatrical, perofmative and cinematic representational schemes, class is often occluded, made permeable in opposition to longstanding economic realities or simply wished away in order to focus on plot and pleasantry. Within this course, students will instead focus their writing on class, whether that be on the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, ruling class, or the world’s majority: the working class. Work on class can take the form of satire or solidarity; expose conflict and antagonism between and within a given class; historicize individual relationships within the history of property relations; focus on finances, wealth, or poverty; portray class ascent or descent. Writing may be in any genre: poetry, fiction, memoir, political essay, film script, play or performance. We will read and view work by artists such as Tillie Olsen, Kae Tempest, Leslie Feinberg, Zadie Smith, Cherrie Moraga, Alma Luz Villanueva, Helena Maria Viramontes, Gary Indiana, Gloria Naylor, Paul Beatty, Robert Altman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the Dardenne Brothers, Ken Loach, Lucrecia Martel, Bertolt Brecht, Clifford Odets, Adrienne Kennedy, Studs Terkel, Jean Toomer, Valerie Solanas, and the Chicano, Black and Nuyorican Theater Movements. We will develop work in/on class via writing exercises, attend readings, plays and performances both on and off campus. Students will do a midterm presentation of their work in progress. Final projects can be a short story, essay, a suite of poems, a play or film script, a short video, a collection of vignettes or a mélange of these genres. Let the writing of class begin!

Also Offered As: ENGL 3655, LALS 3655, THAR 3655

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3660 Movement Song: The Poetics of Liberation

This creative and critical poetry writing workshop will focus on the study of poets associated with antiwar, feminist, leftist, queer/trans and racial justice liberatory movements. We will study the work of Pablo Neruda, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Sean Bonney, Ntozake Shange, Jake Skeets, Chrystos, Natalie Diaz, Adelaide Ivánova, Adrienne Rich and Sonia Sanchez in relationship to the communities and movements which their work engages. Students will also work on their own poetry and will formulate innovative ways to present their work to a wider audience in the forms of video poems, zines, broadsides, social media posts, podcasts and letter print posters.

Also Offered As: AFRC 3660, ENGL 3660, FNAR 3660, LALS 3660

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3665 Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist movement and the embodied archive

Drawing inspiration from Harge’s multiform fable project FLY | DROWN and Audre Lorde’s conception of biomythography, students will trace their interiority to realize and imagine how personal histories, ancestral inheritance, and metaphysics live/move through the body. We will translate and transform stories of the flesh into a series of compositional modalities–which may include text, movement, performance, sound, and installation–to create lexicons that honor subjectivity as form. Informed by surrender, refusal, imagination, and self-sovereignty; we will situate our embodied archives as vessels for fable writing, create and correct myths through movement, and expand our relationship to memory, time, space, and illegibility. Throughout the course, we will turn to Black feminist literary and performance works employing fable, myth, and ancestral legacies including but not limited to: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Aretha Franklin’s gospel music, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Chameleon, and a close reading of Harge’s FLY | DROWN. The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 3665, ANTH 3665

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3702 Feminism in the Americas

Students in this seminar will choose their own research topic in the history of feminism. With guidance and support each person will produce a twenty-page paper based on intensive work with primary sources. Readings will range across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. We’ll take a long view, beginning in the sixteenth century, and use an expansive frame. Our purpose will not be to decide who was or wasn’t ‘a feminist’ but instead to try to understand actors within their contexts. Readings include scholarship on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sojourner Truth, the struggle for voting rights across national lines, opposition to dictatorship, and organizing against racism and homophobia. *For History Majors and Minors: Geographic requirement fulfilled by this seminar is dependent on research paper topic.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 3702, LALS 3702

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3731 Reading as a Feminist: An Encounter with Latin American Literature

In this course we will learn how to read contemporary latin american literature as feminists. We will navigate the stories that have accompanied or defied different “tides” of feminism in the region and illuminate the ways in which these pieces can be read through the lenses of social and gender justice. Expanding our knowledge about these issues can be both a reflective and urgent matter. The class will include short stories and poems by feminized, cis woman, lesbian, non-binary, racialized and queer authors. Our course is divided into five modules, each of them devoted to different themes. Our journey will begin in the household, since that was the traditional place assigned to women, and look into the appropriation and subversion of this narrative by different authors. We will move into disruptive narratives that challenged the duties of women in relation to their house and partners and continue with texts that directly address problems and themes of present day feminist struggles across Latin America, among which we can find gender violence, economical dependence, child abuse and abortion. Although these works will be studied within their historical context, this course aims at providing a framework that will allow the student to analyze them in a comparative fashion in terms of the themes presented in each work. In order to work on the narrative elements of these works, during our time in class and at home we will study the necessary concepts that will allow us to successfully analyze and discuss our texts. This course has as its main goal to improve and develop your writing and analytical skills as well as offering you ample opportunities to put into practice your Spanish through active discussion during class. With that in mind, all of our sessions will be discussion-based with a strong element of group work and written analysis. This course will be taught in Spanish. This class is part of the Penn-Mellon Just Futures Dispossessions in the Americas course series.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: LALS 3731, SPAN 3731

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3780 Sexuality of Postmodernism

This course is fundamentally concerned with why so many of the defining artists and theorists of postmodernism were queer, indeed such that one could plausibly claim that postmodernism itself was a queer innovation. Centrally, most of these queer figures raise the problem of the authorial as a defining issue. Deploying a combination of social-historical and theoretical texts, we will approach the problem of how and why so much post-war American art problematized the idea of the author, focusing on the works of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Leon Polk Smith and not least Andy Warhol. Central to this course will be the continuing relevance of the "death of the author" discourse, pioneered in literature by Barthes and Foucault, and in art by every one of the artists we will be examining. Why, at the very moment that questions of authorial difference, sexual and otherwise, emerged as important in American art did so much criticism deny the authorial role, and why did so many queer artists use that denial to camouflage their authorial voices? In other words, why does a closeted queer artist like John Cage make the performance of silence one of his calling cards? In asking this question, we are of course self-consciously violating the very premise of one key strand of postmodernist critique--and in so doing attempting to historicize a theoretical frame that is strikingly resistant to historical analysis.

Also Offered As: ARTH 3800

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3831 Queer Art Seminar

This course explores art and art history from a Queer Studies perspective, in a global and cross-cultural context. Topics vary from semester to semester and stretch widely in terms of geography and chronology.

Also Offered As: ARTH 3831

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3890 Psychoanalysis and Autobiography

Both psychoanalysis and autobiography are ways of re-telling a life. Psychoanalysis is often called "the talking cure" because, as patients tell the analyst more and more about their lives (their thoughts, dreams, memories, hopes, fears, relationships, jobs, and fantasies), they start to recognize themselves in new ways, and this can help them overcome conflicts, impasses, bad feelings, and even psychiatric illnesses that have kept them from flourishing. Autobiographers do something similar as they remember, re-examine, and re-tell their lives - though one very important difference is that they do so, not privately in a psychoanalyst's office, but publicly in books that anyone may read. This seminar is a comparative exploration of these different ways of a re-telling a life. This seminar is usually team-taught by a humanities scholar and a practicing psychoanalyst.

Fall

Also Offered As: COML 3097, ENGL 0541

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3930 Cinema and Civil Rights

This undergraduate seminar will examine key moments in the history of civil rights through a cinematic lens. Over the course of the semester, we will explore how filmmakers have depicted the lives, aspirations, and strategies of those who have struggled for equal rights; how different struggles have intersected with each other; what aesthetic strategies have been adopted to represent freedom and the denial of it; and how effective cinematic efforts to contribute to increased freedom have been as well as what criteria we use to evaluate success or failure in the first place. Each week, we will watch a film and read a series of texts that will be drawn from a variety of arenas, including histories of civil rights; civil rights pamphlets and speeches; filmmaker interviews; film and media theory; memoirs; and theories of race, gender and sexuality. Course requirements: mutual respect; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; a final project that can be a research paper, film, art project, or community-based initiative.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 3930, ARTH 3930, CIMS 3930, ENGL 0599

1 Course Unit

GSWS 3931 Participatory Community Media, 1970-Present

What would it mean to understand the history of American cinema through the lens of participatory community media, collectively-made films made by and for specific communities to address personal, social and political needs using a range of affordable technologies and platforms, including 16mm film, Portapak, video, cable access television, satellite, digital video, mobile phones, social media, and drones? What methodologies do participatory community media makers employ, and how might those methods challenge and transform the methods used for cinema and media scholarship? How would such an approach to filmmaking challenge our understanding of terms like “authorship,” “amateur,” “exhibition,” “distribution,” “venue,” “completion,” “criticism,” “documentary,” “performance,” “narrative,” “community,” and “success”? How might we understand these U.S.-based works within a more expansive set of transnational conversations about the transformational capacities of collective media practices? This course will address these and other questions through a deep engagement with the films that make up the national traveling exhibition curated by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmerman, We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, which foregrounds six major themes: Body Publics (public health and sexualities); Collaborative Knowledges (intergenerational dialogue); Environments of Race and Place (immigration, migration, and racial identities unique to specific environments); States of Violence (war and the American criminal justice system); Turf (gentrification, homelessness, housing, and urban space); and Wages of Work (job opportunities, occupations, wages, unemployment, and underemployment). As part of that engagement, we will study the history of a series of Community Media Centers from around the U.S., including Philadelphia’s own Scribe Video Center, founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah, this course’s co-instructor. This is an undergraduate seminar, but it also available to graduate students in the form of group-guided independent studies. The course requirements include: weekly screenings, readings, and seminar discussions with class members and visiting practitioners, and completing both short assignments and a longer research paper.

Also Offered As: AFRC 3932, ARTH 3931, CIMS 3931, COML 3931, ENGL 2970

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6931

1 Course Unit

GSWS 4000 GSWS Honors Thesis Seminar

This course is for senior undergraduate GSWS majors who will be completing an honors thesis. The seminar helps students decide on the most appropriate methodologies to use and topics to include in their thesis. Other topics include thesis organization and drawing conclusions from primary and secondary sources of data.

Two Term Class, Student must enter first term; credit given after both terms are complete

1 Course Unit

GSWS 4333 Love and Sex in Buddhism

From monastic celibacy to sanctified sex, this course examines the wide variety of attitudes and practices towards love, desire, attachment, and pleasure in the Buddhist tradition. Readings include primary sources from South, Southeast, and East Asia, secondary scholarship on Buddhist social history and doctrine, and theoretical literature on gender, sex, and the body.

Spring, even numbered years only

Also Offered As: RELS 3333

Mutually Exclusive: RELS 6333

Prerequisite: RELS 0050 OR RELS 1730 OR RELS 0130 OR RELS 0500 OR RELS 0790

1 Course Unit

GSWS 4387 Black Feminist Approaches to History and Memory

Topics vary: Black Feminist Approaches to History & Memory - The term black feminism emerged in public discourse amid the social, political, and cultural turbulence of the 1960s. The roots of black feminism, however, are much older, easily reaching back to the work of black women abolitionists and social critics of the nineteenth century. The concept continued to grow and evolve in the work of twentieth century black women writers, journalists, activists, and educators as they sought to document black women's lives. Collectively, their work established black feminism as a political practice dedicated to the equality of all people. More recently, black feminism has been deployed as a tool for theoretical and scholarly analysis that is characterized by an understanding that race, class, gender, and sexuality are inextricably interconnected. Using materials such as slave narratives, social criticism, and archival sources, this course will explore the theoretical and practical applications of black feminist thought in nineteenth and twentieth century North American culture and politics. In particular, we will consider the symbols and practices (storytelling, myth-making, art, archival research) that black women use to document lives. We will ask: how do these methods of documentation inform our understanding of the past and the production of historical knowledge? How can we understand black feminism as both theory and practice? And what are the implications of black feminist approaches for current research and scholarship? We will give particular attention to concepts such as gender, race, memory, the archive, and embodied knowledge to complicate our understanding of historical documentation, epistemology, and authenticity. The course material will include scholarship by Harriet Jacobs, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, Hazel Carby, Hershini Young, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Toni Morrison, and others. (Image: From In Praise of Shadows, Kara Walker (2009). See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: AFRC 4387, HIST 0817, LALS 4387

1 Course Unit

GSWS 4880 Topics: Culture, Sexuality and Global Health

What does it mean to claim that "Homosexuality is un-African"? This course explores the linked histories of race, nation, gender and sexuality in Africa that such an ideological claim invokes, yet effaces. The polemics that produce statements like this play out through the disciplinary tensions that exist between African and sexuality/queer studies. These tensions have as much to do with the role played by the relation between sexuality and race within cultures of European colonization, as they have with the role of gender and sexuality within postcolonial power relations in Africa. Such antagonisms are sustained through the marginalization of gender and sexuality perspectives within postcolonial scholarship on Africa, as well as the bracketing of African perspectives in queer and feminist studies. This course will deconstruct these impasses by exploring scholarship at the margins of each area of study. Students will be encouraged to ask questions about how issues of race, ethnicity, nation, gender and sexuality are produced as suppressed presences in a range of texts, films and other materials. The course will include readings from postcolonial, gender, sexuality and African studies, anthropology, history, literary studies and Marxism, giving students a grounding in historical and contemporary perspectives at the intersection of African, queer and feminist studies.

Fall

Also Offered As: AFRC 4880

1 Course Unit

GSWS 4890 Fashioning Gender

In 1901 the average American family spent 14% of their annual income on clothing. By 1929, the average middle-class woman owned a total of nine outfits. Fast forward to the early twenty-first century, where the relative price of clothing has dropped, clothing has become virtually disposable, and individuals post videos of their shopping hauls online. This course will examine how we got here, why fashion matters, and the far-reaching implications of our love affair with clothes. Readings and topics will include foundational theory about fashion; how clothes shape class, gender, and identity; the significance of revolutionary designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo; and the evolution of the clothing industry and its place in the global economy.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

GSWS 4999 Independent Study

Upper level undergraduate independent study. Course description and materials will be decided on case by case basis upon discussion with student, GSWS Associate Director and/or faculty member.

Fall or Spring

1-2 Course Units

GSWS 5020 Brujas and Blackness: Transnational Feminist Perspectives of AfroLatinidad

Blackness and brujería are taboo topics within Latinx communities; both typically connote negative imagery and are actively avoided. Recently, the bruja identity has been reclaimed by many AfroLatinx women who see it as an outward expression of their AfroLatinidad and source of personal empowerment. Lara (2005) describes this as a bruja positionality – “the re-membering, revising, and constructing of knowledge as well as participation in other forms of social change…built on healing the internalized desconocimientos that demonize la Bruja and the transgressive spirituality and sexuality that she represents” (p 13). Latinx spiritual practices such as espiritismo, Santeria, Palo Monte, among others, will become avenues through which will explore key themes in Black/Latina/Chicana feminisms, including the politics of representation, stigmatization, multiple forms of state and interpersonal violence, intersecting forms of oppression, economic justice, reproductive justice, queerness/sexuality/lesbianism, and strategies of empowerment and resistance. Through a variety of course materials – academic articles, personal reflections, performance, and art – we will critically examine the construction of Afro-indigenous feminist identities within the contexts of Latin America and the diaspora.

Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms

Also Offered As: AFRC 5020, LALS 5020

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5050 Women and Urban Struggles in Latin America

In Latin America, 80% of the population lives in a city. As many of these cities enter the worldwide competition for attracting networks and capitals—and to join the select club of the so-called global cities—many city residents become progressively dispossessed and excluded to the peripheries, where urban services are rarely adequate. Power relations of class, race, and gender play an essential role in how dispossession is orchestrated in the city and experienced by its residents. This course focuses on how women, specifically, find ways to “endure” in the cities of Latin America, exploring different cases of urban struggles led by women. Across the region, many have been pointing out the extraordinary leadership of women in a wide variety of political struggles - from occupying public places, to denouncing the disappearance of loved ones, and to community organizing that helps build necessary infrastructure in their neighborhoods. Women are also at the forefront of environmental and ecological transformations, leading initiatives to green their city through urban agriculture, reforestation, recycling, and compost projects. Addressed through a holistic approach to caring, these initiatives are embedded in broader struggles for housing, security, and wellness, specifically in the urban peripheries. The contingency of these projects is, at their core, multifaceted: they are typically part of women’s implication in popular education, artivism, and human rights defense. During this course, we will explore and analyze how the specific urban contexts of Latin America affect women and their political subjectivities and how, through their struggles, they play an essential role in re-shaping their cities.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: LALS 5050, URBS 5050

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5090 Topics in Yiddish Literature: Modernist Jewish Poetry

One version of this seminar considers works by Jewish women who wrote in Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and other languages in the late 19th through the 20th century. The texts, poetry and prose, will include both belles lettres and popular writings, such as journalism, as well as private works (letters and diaries) and devotional works. The course will attempt to define "Jewish writing, " in terms of language and gender, and will consider each writer in the context of the aesthetic, religious, and national ideologies that prevailed in this period. Because students will come with proficiency in various languages, all primary texts and critical and theoretical materials will be taught in English translation. However, those students who can, will work on the original texts and share with the class their expertise to foster a comparative perspective. Because we will be discussing translated works, a secondary focus of the course will, in fact, be on literary translation's process and products. Another version of this seminar presents Jewish modernism as an international phenomenon of the early 20th century. The course will attempt to define "Jewish modernism" through the prism of poetry, which inevitably, given the historical events in Europe and America during this time, grapples with aesthetic, religious, and national ideologies and methods. The syllabus will focus mainly on poetry written in Yiddish and English, and will also include German, Russian, and Hebrew verse. All poetry, critical, and theoretical materials will be taught in English translation, although students who know the languages will work on the original texts and will bring to the table a comparative perspective. Because we will be discussing translated poems, a secondary focus of the course will, in fact, be on literary translation's process and products.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 5090, GRMN 5090, JWST 5090, YDSH 5090

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5100 Inner Outer Space Travel Writing: A Creative Writing Workshop

Inner Outer Space Travel Writing is a creative writing workshop focused on writing work within the science fiction/speculative fiction/alternative futurities, science/land/travel writing, and creative-critical nonfiction traditions. Students will work within a variety of genres, with an emphasis on the essay, the short story, screen/tele-play, play, blog and performance. Students will read recommended texts from within their particular interests, and the course will culminate in both a public performance and dissemination/publication via another media platform (zine, website, podcast, etc). All levels of experience, from none/first-time writer to published writers, are encouraged to register for the course.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: LALS 5100

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5120 Passion Projects: Radical Experiments in Writing Plays, Screenplays, and Pilots

This creative writing workshop will focus on writing for screen, stage and internet and is open to undergraduate and graduate students at every level of writing experience. The course will be writing intensive and also include the reading and analysis of feminist, trans, queer, working class and racially liberatory plays, films, television and performance as models of inspiration. Meditation, drawing, theater games, improv exercises, screenings and outings to see work on and off campus will round out this holistic and experimental approach to making work that illuminates and entertains audiences from across the US and global audience spectrum.

Also Offered As: LALS 5121

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5140 Writing Towards Transformation

Writing Towards Transformation is a critical and creative writing workshop focused on developing works across genres that express and elaborate upon current and historical conditions of crisis and injustice. Using guided meditation, critical feedback and healthy, ethical discussion, the students of the class will develop manuscripts of poems, short stories, essays, plays and/or screenplays that in some way articulate their analysis of the present and the past towards a transformative future. We will read essays, manifestos, theater and fiction as well as view films that will hopefully inspire each student to develop texts and scripts of hope. Writers used as models of inspiration will include Gary Indiana, Valerie Solanas, June Jordan, Bertolt Brecht, Cherrie Moraga, Leslie Feinberg and Toni Cade Bambara, among many others. This is a graduate level course open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor.

Also Offered As: LALS 5140

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5150 Queer Francophone Cinema

Taught in English. This course will survey queer cinema in French from around the world, examining cult classics beside established masterpieces and avant-garde aesthetics alongside more mainstream productions in order to probe how film participates in both the representation and the formation of LBGT epistemologies and identities. Tracing the lineage of queer French cinema from Jean Genet's and Jean Cocteau's A Song of Love (Un Chant d'amour, 1950) to Christophe Honore's Love Songs (Les Chansons d'mour, 2007), the course will cover a variety of films from France (by Francois Ozon, for example), Belgium (Chantal Akerman), Morocco (Abdellah Taia), Quebec (Xavier Dolan and Lea Pool) and elsewhere. Theoretical and critical perspectives will be provided by Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jose Esteban Munoz, Jack Halberstam and others. No previous knowledge of cinema studies, queer studies or Francophone cultures is assumed. The course will meet for two and a half hours weekly by Zoom, complemented by asynchronous discussion of assigned film excerpts, which students will annotate online.

Also Offered As: CIMS 5250

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5180 Nursing and the Gendering of Health Care in the United States and Internationally, 1860-2000

This course examines changing ideas about the nature of health and illness; changing forms of health care delivery; changing experiences of women as providers and patients; changing role expectations and realities for nurses; changing midwifery practice; and changing segmentation of the health care labor market by gender, class and race. It takes a gender perspective on all topics considered in the course. A comparative approach is used as national and international literature is considered. This focus is presented as one way of understanding the complex interrelationships among gender, class, and race in health care systems of the United States and countries abroad.

Spring

Also Offered As: NURS 5180

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5200 Art, Sex and the Sixties

With a distinct emphasis on performance, film, installation art, video and painting, this course explores the explosion of body-based, nude and erotic work from the 1950 to the 1970s, with particular focus on the 1960s. And it seeks to explore this dynamic not only within the familiar confines of North America and Europe but within Latin America and Asia, too, in what was a nearly simultaneous international emergence of the erotic as a political force in the art world. Reading a range of key voices from Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to performance artists Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono, Neo-Freudian theorist Norman O. Brown and Brazilian theorist and poet Oswald de Andrade, we will examine how and why sexuality became a privileged form of politics at this historical juncture in a range of different contexts across the globe. We will pay particular attention to how and why an art about sex became a camouflaged form of political dissidence in the confines of repressive political dictatorships, as were then rising in Brazil, Argentina. and ultimately Chile. Students interested in feminist, gender or queer theory, Latin American Studies, social revolution, performance studies, post war art and Frankfurt School thought should find the course particularly appealing, but it assumes no background in any of these fields.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ARTH 5830, CIMS 5830, LALS 5830

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5240 Topics in Medieval Studies

This course covers topics in Medieval literature. Its emphasis varies with instructor. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 5240, ENGL 5240

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5260 The Trouble with Freud: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture

For professionals in the field of mental care, Freud's work is often regarded as outmoded, if not problematic psychologists view his work as non-scientific, dependent on theses that cannot be confirmed by experiments. In the realm of literary and cultural theory, however, Freud's work seems to have relevance still, and is cited often. How do we understand the gap between a medical/scientific reading of Freud's work, and a humanist one? Where do we locate Freud's relevance today? The graduate course will concentrate on Freud's descriptions of psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as his writings on literature and culture.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 5260, GRMN 5260

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5270 Market Women, Madames, Mistresses and Mother Superior

Market Women, Madames, Mistresses & Mother Superior studies gender, labor, sexuality, and race in the Caribbean. In our historical examination of primary source documents alongside literature, and popular media, we will question some of the iconic representations of Caribbean and Latin American women in order to understand the meaning, purpose and usages of these women s bodies as objects of praise, possession, obsession and/or ridicule by communities, governments and religions within and outside of the region. Beginning in the late-18th century and ending with contemporary migration narratives, this course considers the relationship between slave society and colonial pasts on gender performance in the modern Caribbean, Latin America, and their diasporas.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: AFRC 5270, LALS 5270

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5280 Witchcraft and Gender in the Early Modern World

From the 15th century through the 18th century, social tensions erupted in Europe and the Atlantic colonies in the witch craze, a period when intense cultural concern over witchcraft was expressed through religious treatises and sermons, popular literature such as pamphlets and broadsides, legal accusations, trials, and, in some cases, executions. Although the number of people executed during the witch-hunts is a matter of scholarly debate, their importance in understanding early modern beliefs and responses to social tensions is clear. In this class, we will explore historians' understandings of the causes underlying this cultural phenomenon. With special attention to gender, social position, and religious belief, we will join academic debates about the causes of these persecutions. We will also read some primary sources from the medieval through the early modern periods, including trial transcripts, sermons, and pamphlets. Were women the main target of witchcraft accusations and executions, and if so, was misogyny their most important cause? What role did sexual norms and beliefs have in the way that accusations were framed? Were there different patterns of accusations and executions across time and region, and if so, what social and cultural factors might explain them? In what ways were witchcraft accusations an effort to control marginal people in local communities, particularly in regard to gender, socio-economic position, and age? How might religious developments and conflicts have influenced elite and popular ideas about witchcraft? What challenges do historians face in analyzing primary sources about witchcraft and witchcraft trials? Through in class discussions and threaded discussion forums on primary sources, students will learn about the challenges involved in interpreting sources including treatises, trial transcripts, pamphlets, and images.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5290 History of Sexuality

In this online course, we will consider the impact of social, economic, and political conditions on social constructions of sexuality, from the classical world of Greece and Rome, to the early modern West, to the streets of Victorian London and 1920s New York. Topics of interest include: the prostitutes of New Orleans' Storyville district; Jack the Ripper and sensational media accounts of crimes of passion; the taverns and bawdy houses of colonial Philadelphia; cases of sexual misconduct in premodern Europe, Latin America; and colonial America; the history of sexual harassment in the American workplace; the history of hermaphrodites and transgendered people; JFK and representations of 20th-century masculinity. We will pay special attention to the ways that race, class, religion, and gender come together to shape power dynamics through the development, change, and continuity in sexual roles, norms, and relationships.

Summer Term

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5300 Latin American Sexual Movements

This course explores significant sexual movements in Latin America that destabilized the idea of nation formation and its frames of citizenship. From the 1960s and on, we will analyze and study homosexual, lesbian, and feminist irruptions of contestation from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and U.S. and how their interruption in the social, public, and political sphere changed sexual and reproductive rights.

Summer Term

Also Offered As: LALS 5300

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5310 Gendered Constructions of Other Cultures in Western Travel Literature

Descriptions of peoples from foreign lands and faraway places have captured the imaginations of Europeans for centuries. Pilgrims and merchants, explorers and conquistadores, Victorians taking their Grand Tour and 21st-century travelers have preserved their observations, both in written form, in ethnographies and diaries, novels and travel narratives, and in visual form, in maps, illuminated manuscripts, engravings, and photographs. Through these media, these travelers have not simply captured their memories, but have also helped to shape Western representations of the people they encountered, often justifying Western political, economic, cultural, and social dominance as a result, although some travelers have critiqued the West instead. And in all these depictions, gender and sexuality have played central roles in the creation of these identities and relationships. In this online course, we will explore this topic by studying a variety of primary and secondary sources focusing on medieval Ireland and Wales; English, Spanish, and Portuguese texts representing the New World and indigenous Americans; orientalism through the lens of imperial representations of the Middle East, India, and Africa; and 20th- and 21st-century representations of a globalized world, focusing on political, economic and cultural tensions between the West and other regions of the world. Primary texts will include travel diaries and narratives, ethnographies and novels, as well as visual images. We will also examine how scholars from fields including anthropology, art history, cultural studies, history, and literary studies have analyzed these works, with attention to theories on colonialism and post-colonialism, gendered and queer readings, orientalism and othering, and globalization. Finally, we will also look at how some of the people who were described by the Western writers described Westerners themselves. Assignments will include weekly blogs in response to readings, primary source threaded discussions, live discussions every week in our online classroom, leading class discussion for two weeks, writing two response papers, and completing a final essay in several stages.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5460 Women's Writing in French, 1160–1823

In this course, we will examine a representative sample of premodern women’s writing in French, beginning in the Middle Ages and concluding in the Revolutionary Era. The authors studied come from differing walks of life, social classes, and religious and political identifications, and they express themselves in a wide variety of genres, including short stories, fairy tales, lyric poetry, letters, plays, and novels. Despite their many differences, these authors are united by a common tendency to question a centuries-old tradition of misogynistic discourse, patriarchal social order, and gender normativity. Authors to be studied include: - Marie de France (ca. 1160), a brilliant storyteller and poet attached to the court of Henry II of England whose fabulous tales, arguably an early form of speculative fiction, imagine alternatives to the rigidity of arranged marriages and the heterosexual couple. - Christine de Pizan (1364–ca. 1430), a court writer for Charles VI of France and several other powerful patrons who is often considered France’s first professional female writer. Her Livre de la Cité des Dames (Book of the City of Ladies) systematically refutes the misogynistic pronouncements of learned male authors and holds up devotion and religious life as alternatives to accepting the assigned role of wife and mother. - Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), the sister of Francis I of France and a prolific author of devotional poetry, plays, and the Heptaméron, a collection of tales modeled on Boccaccio’s Decameron and known for its often shocking subject matter. Throughout her oeuvre, she calls into question the social perception of women rooted in misogynistic discourse, as well as the tendency to blame sexual violence on women, while at the same time revealing the potential danger of masculinity for men and women alike and envisioning Pauline Christianity as a means of radical equality. - Pernette du Guillet (1520–1545), Louise Labé (c. 1524–1566), and Anne de Marquets (1533–1588), three poets who respond to and write against the male-centered tradition of Petrarchan love poetry. Guillet and Labé stand out for their frank and often sensual depictions of female desire and sexuality in spite of taboos against their public expression, while Marquets, a Dominican nun at the convent of Poissy, combines Petrarchan, devotional, and mystic tropes to envision religious life as an alternative to the heteronormativity of lay French society and the Protestant Reformation. - Madame de Lafayette (1634–1693) and Madame de Sévigné (1626–1696), whose writings are of monumental importance in the history of literature in French as well as invaluable testimonies to the role played by women in the intellectual developments of the early modern period, including salons, Jansenism, and free-thinking (libertinism). - Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (1685–1755), author of the first known version of La belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast), who, along with other female authors of fairy tales, used the conventions of the genre to challenge social conventions and criticize the treatment of women. - Claire de Duras (1777–1828), whose novel Ourika, much like Villeneuve’s La belle et la bête, shows how feminist concerns might intersect with colonialism and race; a bestseller in its day, it is one of the first works in French to feature a complex and articulate black narrator and what many scholars consider to be a modern outlook on race and identity. To provide historical and theoretical context, these readings will be supplemented with relevant primary and secondary sources, as well as with modern and contemporary adaptations, such as illustrations and films. The course is open to graduate students and to advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor. Discussions will be in English. Readings will be made available both in the original French and in English translation, and final papers may be written in English or in French.

Also Offered As: COML 5460, FREN 5460

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5500 Etudes sur le XVII siecle

The specific topics of the seminar vary from semester to semester, depending on the instructor and his/her choice. Among the topics previously covered, and likely to be offered again, are the following: The Theatre of Jean Racine, Fiction of Mme de Lafayette, The Moralists (La Bruyere, La Rochefoucauld, Perrault ), Realistic Novels (Sorel's Francion, Scarron's Le Roman Comique, Furetiere's Le Roman Bourgeois). Students give oral and written reports, and write a term paper.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 5500, FREN 5500

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5520 Affect Theory and Power

This seminar will examine contemporary affect theory and its relationship with Michel Foucault's theory of power. We will begin by mapping out Foucault's "analytics of power," from his early work on power knowledge to his late work on embodiment, desire, and the care of the self. We will then turn to affect theory, an approach which centralizes the non-rational, emotive force of power. No previous knowledge of theory is required.

Also Offered As: COML 5520, RELS 5520

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5650 More Human Than Human

In early 2017, animal rights lawyer Steve Wise argued that two of his clients should be afforded the rights of "personhood." The clients in question were chimpanzees. This case suggests that "speciesism" might soon be met with the same degree of suspicion as sexism and racism. This course will explore how such a shift could come about and what it might signal. We will begin by examining the western foundations of binaries such as human-animal, male-female, and self-other. From here we will explore recent attempts to dismantle these constructs by ecofeminists and post-humanists. We will also look at how such categories have manifested in social movements and cultural artifacts. Finally, we will investigate how our beliefs about who "we" are and what "we" are not can affect everything from the foods we eat to where and how we vacation.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5680 Gender, Power & Feminist Theory

This seminar will examine the theme of power as it engages questions of sex andgender. Subsidiary themes that will be developed over the course of the semester include: the modernism/ postmodernism debate as it particularly relates to feminism; the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and class and how feminists can and do talk about "women"; the relevance of feminist theory to policy issues, and which theoretical approaches are the most appropriate or have the most powerful potential. The readings will start with "foundational" texts in feminist theory-- texts that anyone who wants to work in or teach feminist theory needs to have in their repertoire, they set out the background and history of contemporary feminist theory, and they operate from a variety of disciplinary frameworks. We then will move onto some newer scholarship and some more specific political issues and topics, depending on what students in the course are interested in studying. This course is open to undergraduates who have had some prior course work in feminist theory, gender and sexuality studies, and/or political theory, in consultation with the professor.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: PSCI 5680

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5720 Language and Gender

This course traces the development of research on language and gender, introducing key theoretical issues and methodological concerns in this area. Participants will consider how gender ideologies shape and are shaped by language use, with particular attention to how research findings can be applied to educational and other professional settings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: EDUC 5240

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5780 Sexuality of Postmodernism

This course is fundamentally concerned with why so many of the defining artists of the postwar generation were queer, indeed such that one could plausibly claim that postmodernism in American art was a queer innovation. Centrally, most of these artists raise the problem of authoriality and its discontents. Deploying a combination of social-historical and theoretical texts, we will approach the problem of the disclaiming of authoriality in post war American art, focusing on the works of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Leon Polk Smith and not least Andy Warhol. Central to this course will be the continuing salience of the "death of the author" discourse, pioneered in literature by Barthes and Foucault, and in art by every one of the artists we will be examining. What, in short, is the relationship between the rise of an anti-biographical, anti-authorial theoretical framework, and the lived histories of so many queer authors? In asking this question, we are of course self-consciously violating the very premise of one key strand of postmodernist critique--and in so doing attempting to historicize a theoretical frame that is strikingly resistant to historical analysis. (Undergraduates interested in the course should contact Professor Katz.)

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5800

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5790 Provocative Performance

What is feminist theatre? How do artists use live performance to provoke not only thought and feeling, but also social, personal, and political change? This course will examine a wide array of plays and performances by and about women; these pieces are, in turn, serious, hilarious, outrageous, poignant--and always provocative. Our focus will be on English-language works from the late 20th century to the present (#metoo) moment. We will read these performance texts and/or view them on stage/screen; we will also read essays that provide contextual background on feminist theatre theory and history. Throughout the semester, we will engage diverse perspectives on women and race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender identity; the issues we encounter will also include marriage and motherhood, career and community, feminism and friendship, and patriarchy and power. The class will take full advantage of any related events occurring on campus or in the city, and will feature visits with guest speakers. Students will have the opportunity to pursue research on their own areas of interest (some recent examples are "women in comedy," trans performance, drag kings, feminist directing, etc.).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 5790, THAR 5790

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5791 Globalism and National Identity in the Americas

This course examines the way that issues of universal, global, and national identity have been negotiated and challenged in art and visual culture of the Americas. It also aims to give students an introduction to the various theories and methodological practices that have been used to critique and explain these images and objects since the end of WWII. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 5791, ARTH 5791, LALS 5791

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5792 Biography and Art History

Beginning with the ancient Greeks, people have created specific biographical structures as a way to understand and explain the artistic process.  Artists have often been labeled as natural prodigies possessing creative powers on par with the divine. This seminar will examine the role that biography plays in the assessment of visual art and the creative process over time and across European and American culture.  During the semester we will read art historical texts, watch biographical films, and debate the historical and post-structuralist critical theory that has helped to shape the current cultural construction of the artist. Throughout the seminar we will discuss the underlying debates around these various approaches to biography. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 5792, ARTH 5792, CIMS 5792, LALS 5792

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5810 Advanced Psychology of Women

The course is intended for those who already have a foundation in the study of the psychology of women and want to expand their understanding of the provision of psychological services to include a contextual, feminist, and relational perspective. Theoretical and applied practices regarding women's mental health, issues of diversity, sexuality and relationships for women will be addressed. Prerequisite: Introduction to Psychology and an undergraduate course in the Psychology of Women or approval by professor.

Also Offered As: EDUC 5581

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5850 Fashioning Gender

In 1901 the average American family spent 14% of their annual income on clothing. By 1929, the average middle-class woman owned a total of nine outfits. Fast forward to the early twenty-first century, where the relative price of clothing has dropped, clothing has become virtually disposable, and individuals post videos of their shopping hauls online. This course will examine how we got here, why fashion matters, and the far-reaching implications of our love affair with clothes. Readings and topics will include foundational theory about fashion; how clothes shape class, gender, and identity; the significance of revolutionary designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo; and the evolution of the clothing industry and its place in the global economy.

Fall

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5880 The Politics of Women's Health Care

This course will utilize a multidisciplinary approach to address the field of women's health care. The constructs of women's health care will be examined from a clinical, as well as sociological, anthropological and political point of view. Topics will reflect the historical movement of women's health care from an an obstetrical/gynecological view to one that encompasses the entire life span and life needs of women. The emphasis of the course will be to undertake a critical exploration of the diversity diversity of women's health care needs and the past and current approaches to this care. Issues will be addressed from both a national and global perspective, with a particular focus on the relationship between women's equality/inequality status and state of health. This course satisfies the Society & Social Structures Sector for Nursing Class of 2012 and Beyond.

Fall

Also Offered As: NURS 5880

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5930 Classical Film Theory

At a moment when contemporary film and media theory has become increasingly interested in how earlier film theories can help us understand our moment of transition, this course will give students the opportunity to read closely some of those key early texts that are preoccupied with questions and problems that include: the ontology of film, the psychology of perception, the transition to sound, the politics of mass culture, realism, and ethnography. Course requirements: ; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; 20-25 page paper.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5930, CIMS 5930, COML 5930, ENGL 5930

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5931 Contemporary Film Theory

In this course, we will dig in to a variety of contemporary film theory debates in the context of earlier texts with which they engage or against which they define themselves. We will also watch films weekly and consider the relationship between theory and practice.Course requirements: ; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; 20-25 page paper.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5931, CIMS 5931, ENGL 5931

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5932 The Place of Film and Media Theory

Taking its title from a recent special issue in the journal Framework, this seminar will engage the where of film and media theory. At a moment when this discourse, often presumed to have roots in Anglo and Western European traditions, is purportedly undergoing a global turn, we will consider how some of film and media theory's key terms and preoccupations including realism, documentary, genre, identity, sound, spectatorship, nation, auteur, and screens are being inflected by expanded geographic, linguistic, aesthetic and cultural frames. We will grapple with some of the logistical challenges, motivations, resistances, and questions that scholars encounter as they attempt to shift film and media theory's borders; compare contemporary efforts to broaden the discourse's geographic horizon with earlier efforts to do the same; and consider what happens to the viewer's sense of space and place in different media environments. Course requirements: full participation in readings, screenings, discussion, and class presentations; 20-25 page research paper + annotated bibliography.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5932, CIMS 5932, ENGL 5932

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5933 Cinema and Media Studies Methods

This proseminar will introduce a range of methodological approaches (and some debates about them) informing the somewhat sprawling interdisciplinary field of Cinema and Media Studies. It aims to equip students with a diverse—though not comprehensive—toolbox with which to begin conducting research in this field; an historical framework for understanding current methods in context; and a space for reflecting on both how to develop rigorous methodologies for emerging questions and how methods interact with disciplines, ideologies, and theories. Students in this class will also engage scholars participating in the Cinema and Media Studies colloquium series in practical discussions about their methodological choices. The course’s assignments will provide students with opportunities to explore a particular methodology in some depth through a variety of lenses that might include pedagogy, the conference presentation, grant applications, the written essay, or an essay in an alternative format, such as the graphic or video essay. Throughout, we will be trying to develop practical skills for the academic profession. Although our readings engage a variety of cinema and media objects, this course will be textually based. No prior experience needed. The course is open to upper-level undergraduates with relevant coursework in the field by permission of instructor only. Course Requirements: Complete assigned readings and actively participate in class discussion: 20%; Reading responses: 10%; Annotated bibliography or course syllabus on a particular methodology: 20%; SCMS methodology-focused conference paper proposal according to SCMS format: 10%; Research paper, grant proposal, or essay in an alternative format using the methodology explored in the syllabus or bibliography: 40%.

Fall

Also Offered As: ARTH 5933, CIMS 5933, COML 5940, ENGL 5933

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5940 Topics in Contemporary Art

Topics vary. The primary for this course is the Art History Department. For a course description please see their website: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/courses

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5980 Theories of Gender & Sexuality

This course addresses the history and theory of gender and sexuality. Different instructors will emphasize different aspects of the topic. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: COML 5980, ENGL 5980

1 Course Unit

GSWS 5999 Independent Study

Graduate level independent study. Course description and materials will be decided on case by case basis upon discussion with student, GSWS Associate Director and/or faculty member.

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

GSWS 6120 LGBT Counseling & Development

In the past quarter century, the awareness of the unique issues facing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals has expanded and become essential knowledge in our work as educators, providers of psychological services, and other service provision fields. This course provides a contextual and applied understanding the interactional processes facing LGBT individuals.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: EDUC 6512

1 Course Unit

GSWS 6400 Studies in the Renaissance

Topics vary. Previous topics have included Rabelais and M. de Navarre, Montaigne, and Renaissance and Counter-Renaissance. Please see the department's website for the current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 6400, FREN 6400

1 Course Unit

GSWS 6550 Black Political Thought: Difference And Community

This course is designed to familiarize graduate students with some of the key texts and debates in Africana Studies concerning the relationship between racial slavery, modernity and politics. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, much of black political thought (thinking and doing politics) has advocated group solidarity and cohesion in the face of often overwhelming conditions of servitude, enslavement and coercion within the political economy of slavery and the moral economy of white supremacy. Ideas and practices of freedom however, articulated by political actors and intellectuals alike, have been as varied as the routes to freedom itself. Thus, ideas and practices of liberty, citizenship and political community within many African and Afro-descendant communities have revealed multiple, often competing forms of political imagination. The multiple and varied forms of political imagination, represented in the writings of thinkers like Eric Williams, Richard Wright, Carole Boyce Davies and others, complicates any understanding of black political thought as having a single origin, genealogy or objective. Students will engage these and other authors in an effort to track black political thought's consonance and dissonance with Western feminisms, Marxism, nationalism and related phenomena and ideologies of the 20th and now 21st century.

Also Offered As: AFRC 6550, LALS 6550

1 Course Unit

GSWS 6665 Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist movement and the embodied archive

Drawing inspiration from Harge’s multiform fable project FLY | DROWN and Audre Lorde’s conception of biomythography, students will trace their interiority to realize and imagine how personal histories, ancestral inheritance, and metaphysics live/move through the body. We will translate and transform stories of the flesh into a series of compositional modalities–which may include text, movement, performance, sound, and installation–to create lexicons that honor subjectivity as form. Informed by surrender, refusal, imagination, and self-sovereignty; we will situate our embodied archives as vessels for fable writing, create and correct myths through movement, and expand our relationship to memory, time, space, and illegibility. Throughout the course, we will turn to Black feminist literary and performance works employing fable, myth, and ancestral legacies including but not limited to: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Aretha Franklin’s gospel music, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Chameleon, and a close reading of Harge’s FLY | DROWN. The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 6665, ANTH 6665

Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3665

1 Course Unit

GSWS 6780 Gender and Sexuality in Education

This seminar gives an overview of the intersections and interplay among gender, sexuality, and education through theory, practice, current discussions, and analysis of varied contexts in English speaking countries (e.g. the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia). After examining the theoretical foundations of genders and sexualities, we will look at their histories and effects in K-12 schools and colleges and universities as well as explore special topics.

Fall

Also Offered As: EDUC 6178

1 Course Unit

GSWS 6870 Postwar Art

At a time of seismic shifts in the American polity, postwar art has too often seemed above the fray. Even as New York came to replace Paris as the epicenter of art world in the post war period, the rapid succession of styles and movements from Abstract Expressionism to Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Happenings can seem to have their own internal logic, severed from the historical backdrop of the time. Some of the artists we'll consider include Pollock, Krasner, Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Kusama, Martin, Lichtenstein, Bearden, Oldenburg, LeWitt, Chicago and Judd. In this course, we'll reexamine American art and art criticism in the postwar period alive to everything from the Cold War's virulent anti-communism to the rise of progressive liberation movements around race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. In the process, we will repeatedly underscore how art both served, and bit, the hand that fed it.

Also Offered As: ARTH 6870

1 Course Unit

GSWS 6872 Sex in the Museum

This course maps the often fraught intercourse between the history of sexuality and the history of museums, exhibitions, and curation. Bodies have long been the mainstay of art, but the attribution of sex to those bodies is a highly variable social phenomenon that tells us as much about the culture in question as it does about ourselves. Sex is thus in the eye of the beholder, defined by cultural, religious, scientific, and political norms, themselves often defined in and through a politics of visibility and exhibition. Beginning in the ancient world and moving into the present, this course studies the sexual politics of display, inherent but little studied, in the history of art history. From Renaissance battles over fig leaves to Enlightenment Europe’s titillation at what they saw as the unbridled eroticism of the ancient world to the culture wars of today, sex has long been a hidden motor of shifts in the art world. Whether coming to understand the so-called “Free Body Culture” of turn of the 20th century Europe with its very public nudity, to the explosion in nude performance in the 1960s to the culture wars of the 1980s in the USA over an art that addressed queerness, AIDS, and their intersection, we’ll see how often exhibitions have served as proxy for other social and political issues. In this course we’ll also come to understand the distinction between the nude, a category in art, and the naked, a category that was often said to corrupt art. Reading the latest work in queer, feminist and anti-racist scholarship, we will see how easily bodies on display can turn into sex, and conversely, slip as easily back from sex into bodies again.

Also Offered As: ARTH 6872

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2872

1 Course Unit

GSWS 6910 Transatlantic Black Feminisms in Francophone Literatures

This course explores the evolution of representations of the Black femme body in French and francophone imaginaries, tracing a chronological arc that begins with early colonial imagery and ends with the rise of a 2018 movement spearheaded by a collective of Black comediennes, denouncing exclusionary practices in the French entertainment industry. We will first focus on the male gaze — European, Caribbean and African — and the way it constructed the Black femme body, to better understand how Black female authors undermine, resist, parody, or continue to bear the weight of these early images when they take control of their own representation. While our primary readings will be authored by French-writing women, including Mayotte Capecia (Martinique), Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Mariama Bâ (Senegal) and Marie Ndiaye (France), our theoretical foundation will include anglophone thinkers, such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and others. Readings and discussions will be in English.

Also Offered As: AFRC 6910, COML 6910, FREN 6910

1 Course Unit

GSWS 7350 Premodern Trans Studies

This seminar revisits the question of gender before modernity in light of new expansions and developments within gender and sexuality studies, particularly trans studies. Different instructors may emphasize different aspects of the topic. Please see English.upenn.edu for a full list of course offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 7350, ENGL 7350

1 Course Unit

GSWS 7411 Gender and Sexuality in the Premodern World

This graduate seminar addresses the pressing need to study comparative histories of gender and sexuality in the premodern world from non-Western-centric perspectives. It accentuates the significance of studying gender and sexuality together, as well as the relevance of the non-Western premodern to our contemporary world. This course is not a world history survey but a focused discussion of select academic works that are particularly inspiring and pathbreaking in their approaches and methodologies. The selection of readings will depend on students’ interest and new scholarship of the time, but the initial selection will come from the attached bibliography.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: EALC 7411

1 Course Unit

GSWS 7762 Women in South Asia

This course on women in South Asian history has several objectives. To comprehend the genres of narratives in which South Asian women between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries have spoken and have been spoken about. To gain an understanding of evolving institutions and practices shaping womens lives, such as the family, law and religious traditions. To understand the impact of historical processes -- the formation and and breakdown of empire, colonialism, nationalism and decolonization -- upon South Asian women between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. We will read primary sources in addition to familiarizing ourselves with the historiography of women in South Asia.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: SAST 7762

1 Course Unit

GSWS 7901 Recent Issues in Critical Theory Related to Gender & Sexuality

This course will provide an overview of critical theory related to the study of gender and/or sexuality. Different instructors will emphasize different topics within these fields. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 7901, ENGL 7901

1 Course Unit

GSWS 7904 New Directions in Black Thought and Literature

This course explores contemporary Black thought through a set of literary, visual, and theoretical texts. Our theoretical repertoire will include concepts like love, quiet, fabulation, and gaze to explore Black interiority in relation to political movements, aesthetic experimentation, gender and sexual identity, and African continental and diasporic practices. The course will draw on a range of genres (including films, photo portraits, personal essays, and criticism) and also take a comparative approach (including works from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 7904, COML 7904, ENGL 7904

1 Course Unit

GSWS 8300 Conducting Research in Global Women's Health

An introduction to theoretical and methodological issues as they relate to conducting research in global women's health. Advanced analysis of historical, social, cultural, economic, political, technological and geographical contexts as they influence the health of girls and women across the lifespan and thier relation to health care systems as both clients and providers. This includes contextual issues that constrain the provisiond & receipt of adequate healthcare. Prerequisites: Completion of course in Global Health (this may include a reputable online course eg: Coursera), or equivalent backround (eg. global health field experience). Permission of Instructor. For graduate and professional students from any field with an interest in global women's health; Master students by permission of instructor. A critical examination of theoretical and methodological issues pertaining to research on women and girls condcuted around the world across disciplines. A focused and intenstive exploration of place as it pertains to women and girls formal and informal structors of health care delivery as those needing and/or seeking health care, and as those providing health care to others. Students will examine the multiple dimensions and qualities of these endeavors (e.g. activity, power, control, visibility, value, and remuneration) and the intersection of gender and health - locally, globally and across borders. Students will focus thier examination on the implicaitons of seeking and providing health care for women's and girls' health and well-being. By examining issues in local and global contexts and across geographical boundaries, students will have the opportunity to challenge gendered, class, political, and cultural assumptions related to women's health.

Fall

Also Offered As: NURS 8300

1 Course Unit

GSWS 8841 Current Japanology

This is a course designed for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students, primarily those majoring in Japanese and East Asian Studies and related disciplines. The main objective of the course is to survey recent and current scholarship on Japan. Each week we will focus on one monograph or a set of chapters or essays, reading them closely not merely to acquire up-to-date knowledge, but to gain new frameworks for approaching the study of Japanese culture, history, and society. Japanese-reading ability is not assumed and discussions will be in English, but optional readings in Japanese will be available.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: EALC 8841

1 Course Unit

GSWS 9005 Finding Voice: Perspectives on Race, Class and Gender

This writing workshop explores the influence of identity, primarily race, class, gender, and sexuality, on the ways we convey our personal truths to the world.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 9005, ENGL 9005, MLA 5005, URBS 9005

1 Course Unit

GSWS 9006 Learning from James Baldwin

This class will examine the intellectual legacy that James Baldwin left to present-day writers such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thulani Davis, Caryl Phillips, and others. We will spend time reading and discussing Baldwin's novels, short stories, plays and essays, and students will research subjects of their own choosing about Baldwin's life and art.

Also Offered As: AFRC 9006, ENGL 9006, MLA 5006, URBS 9006

1 Course Unit

GSWS 9013 Memoir Writing

This memoir workshop will shine light on the human experience as viewed through your personal lens. We’ll see how memoir can illuminate larger cultural themes - from the inhumanity of war, to racism, misogyny, and economic inequality - as viewed through lived experiences.

Also Offered As: ENGL 9013, MLA 5013, URBS 9013

1 Course Unit

GSWS 9016 Being Human: A Personal Approach to Race, Class & Gender

In this workshop, we will address the ways race, class, and gender impact our lives, our work, and our culture. As a class, we will create connection and community by practicing deep listening, daily writing, deep reading, and the sharing of ideas and observations.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 9016, ENGL 9016, MLA 5016, URBS 9016

1 Course Unit

GSWS 9017 Considering Race, Class and Punishment in the American Prison System

This writing seminar will sharpen and expand our writing, while bringing to our hearts and minds a deeper understanding of the reality of imprisonment in the United States. This system never goes away. This year it is locking up more than 2,300,000 men, women and children—the highest per-capita rate of imprisonment in the world. Even when we know the statistics and watch shows about crime and jail on TV, what do we really know about life behind bars? For a year? Ten years? Life? As a young journalist, I saw how the criminal justice system was used to suppress Black leadership. I felt drawn to teach creative writing at Holmesburg Prison, to eventually investigate the state prison system, interview prisoners, make friendships, write a newspaper series, magazine articles, and my first book on the subject. For nearly five decades, I’ve observed the human cost of a prison system that connects and damages all of our lives and keeps people from poverty in place. In this course, we will seek insights in books and stories written from prisoners’ personal experiences. We’ll also read scholars—Michelle Alexander, Bryan Stevenson, Angela Davis and others—who shed light on the historical repetitions and political exploitations. Guest speakers will include public defenders, parolees, former prisoners, and those fighting for prisoners’ rights and re-entry. Students will gain a more intimate understanding of how the legacies of slavery, racism, the prejudices of class, caste, and misogyny intersect and determine who goes to prison and who does not. Students will free-write for ten minutes a day, every day, and write personal reflections on readings, films, and guest speakers. Responses will lead to essays or stories that students write and present for class discussion. These key pieces may draw from observation, facts and imagination, and may traverse literary nonfiction, memoir, fiction, or poetry. We will present the best of your work in a reading at the end of the semester.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AFRC 9017, ENGL 9017, MLA 5017, URBS 9017

1 Course Unit