32 courses with the subject SWG, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
SWG 150Introduction to the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality4
This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of women’s, gender and sexuality studies. Students learn key concepts and theories of the field by analyzing the social construction of sex, gender and sexuality as they intersect with race, class, nationality and (dis)ability at the individual, institutional and ideological levels, and in national and global contexts. The course examines the historical roots of feminist movements and thinking, and engages with contemporary movements for social justice. Texts include archival materials, films, personal narratives, theory, scholarly works, poetry, fiction, art, and popular writing and culture. Students learn interdisciplinary methodologies of archival research, historical analysis, literary and visual analysis, and theoretical analysis. Primarily for first- and second-year students. Enrollment limited to 25. {H}{S}
SWG 211Girls in the System: Gender, Youth and Justice4
This interdisciplinary course considers the issue of gender, race, sexuality and class in the juvenile justice system. Drawing on gender and sexuality studies, criminal justice and sociological literature, social critiques, policy papers, case law, documentary film, personal narratives and fiction, the course critically examines the history of the juvenile justice system; what it means to be in "the system"; the role of "justice" in the juvenile system; and reviews some of the major issues faced by the youth who are subject to this system. In addition, the course considers the role of youth action and resistance against the system. {S}
This course explores sexual violence in the United States from psychological, sociological, public health, feminist, legal, social justice, and criminal justice perspectives. It addresses the sexual victimization of teenagers and adults (not children) of all genders in a variety of social contexts, using an anti-oppression framework. The course also focuses on ways to make sexual violence prevention and intervention services better suited to culturally diverse people. (E) {S}
This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of queer studies, including its historical formations and recent innovations. The course explores the roots of queer theory in feminist theories of subjectivity and desire, queer of color critique, and queer critiques of traditional domains of knowledge production, including psychoanalysis and visual culture. Students examine a wide range of media and forms of documentation ranging from archival material and oral histories, to critical theory. The course attends to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability, and puts these and other topics or identifications in conversation with course material and discussions. {A}{S}
Trans studies is a cross-disciplinary field that, while beginning with the concept of transsexuality, is concerned with non-normative gender, the histories and legacies of sexing the body, sexology as a practice, the law and policy which regulate these, as well as the cultural productions of people now called trans, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary. Some topics covered include: trans feminism; trans cinema, art, music, and media; gender transition technologies; representation and trans visibility; medicine, law, and policy; and the ways that transgender people have made their lives in different cultural, racial, religious, and historical contexts.
This course explores the impact of gender on law and policy in the United States historically and today, focusing in the areas of constitutional equality, employment, education, reproduction, the family, violence against women and immigration. Students study constitutional and statutory law as well as public policy. Topics include sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination, pregnancy and caregiver discrimination, pay equity, sexual harassment, school athletics, marriage, sterilization, contraception and abortion, reproductive technologies, sexual assault, intimate partner violence and gender-based asylum. Students study feminist efforts to reform the law and examine how inequalities based on gender, race, class and sexuality shape the law. The class also discusses and debates contemporary policy and future directions. {H}{S}
SWG 227Colloquium: Feminist and Queer Disability Studies4
In the essay "A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer," writer-activist Audre Lorde forges pioneering connections between the work of social justice and the environmental, gendered, and healthcare inequities that circumscribe black and brown lives. Following Lorde’s intervention, this course examines contemporary feminist/queer expressive culture, writing, and theory that centrally engages the category of dis/ability. It familiarizes students with feminist and queer scholarship that resists the medical pathologization of embodied difference; foreground dis/ability’s intersections with questions of race, class, and nation; and ask what political and social liberation might look like when able-bodiedness is no longer privileged. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{L}
Feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) illuminates how gender, race, sexuality, ability, and class shape scientific knowledge. This course explores the intertwined relationship between science and power from multiple interdisciplinary angles, including the construction of scientific knowledge systems, the design and access of scientific spaces, the myth of independent scientific genius, and the ways in which bias shapes datasets, metaphors, and research questions. This course begins with a survey of foundational feminist STS texts from the 1970s–on and builds out to engage contemporary feminist STS scholarship that examines and thinks beyond issues of scientific racism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and anthropocentrism. {S}
An in-depth discussion of the history, debates, theory, activism and poetics of Black Feminism. Students study the conversations, ruptures and connections produced in dominant feminist scholarship by black feminist theory. The class reads foundational and emergent work in the field. Students learn the history of those scholarly interventions and examine the pervasive ways of knowing that are being disrupted through black feminist scholarship. Students develop an understanding of the relationship between black feminism, feminism, women of color feminism and queer theory. Topics covered using theoretical texts, works of cinema and popular culture. Students examine cultural texts alongside theory to practice close reading as a methodological tool. Students finish with the analytical and methodological skills to identify and critique structures of power that govern everyday experiences of gender, the body, space, violence and modes of resistance. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Enrollment limited to 25.
This practicum course is an academic complement to the work students interning with the Meridians journal as Praxis interns, Quigley Fellows, STRIDE Fellows, MMUF, Meridians interns, etc. are doing. Run by the journal editor, the class discusses the scholarly, creative, artistic, archival and artistic work published in Meridians and how it is informed by - and contributes to - intersectionality as a paradigm and practice. Students also become familiarized with feminist journal production processes and ethics, promotion and marketing strategies, co-curricular events planning and archival research. S/U only. Enrollment limited to 5. Instructor permission required.
SWG 238Women, Money and Transnational Social Movements4
Flickers of global finance capital across computer screens cannot compare to the travel preparations of women migrating from rural homes to work at computer chip factories. Yet both movements, of capital and people, constitute vital facets of globalization in the current era. This course centers on the political linkages and economic theories that address the politics of women, gender relations and capitalism. Students research social movements that challenge the raced, classed and gendered inequities, and the costs of maintaining order. The course assesses the alternatives proposed by social movements like the landless workers movement (MST) in Brazil, and economic shifts like the workers cooperative movement. Assignments include community-based research on local and global political movements, short papers, class-led discussions & written reflections. {S}
This course analyzes the history, prevalence and current manifestations of the white supremacist movement by examining ideological components, tactics and strategies, and its relationship to mainstream politics. Students research and discuss the relationship between white supremacy and white privilege, and explore how to build a human rights movement to counter the white supremacist movement in the U.S. Students develop analytical writing and research skills while engaging in multiple cultural perspectives. The overall goal is to develop the capacity to understand the range of possible responses to white supremacy, both its legal and extralegal forms. {H}{S}
SWG 246Colloquium: Agitating, Cultivating, and Performing for Justice4
This course focuses on ongoing struggles, transnationally, to make knowledges for sociopolitical, ecological, and epistemic justice across geographical and institutional boundaries. It brings into conversation themes such as: land, rivers, crops; history, haunting, memory; bodies, dreams, agitations; and poetry, protest, hope. Students grapple with a range of texts, labors, and cocreations that seek to advance sociopolitical, ecological, and climate justice with a planetary consciousness. The course explores ways of coming together across diverse sites to generate transformative practices of unlearning, relearning, creating, and be(com)ing to struggle for a just world, and to find joy and momentum in that struggle. Enrollment limited to 18. {A}{S}
Why do changemakers find it critical to remember, mourn, and (re)write wars, partitions, and historical trauma? How do they mobilize this work to build alternative futures? This course centers a wide range of texts, with an eye toward opening up the meanings of war, remembering, mourning, writing, performing, and reimagining. As well, these texts offer dreams and languages of justice and liberation that defy pregiven separations among the intellectual, political, psychic, and spiritual. The course examines how these narrations and visions are contoured by temporal and spatial specificities of caste, race, gender, sexuality, religion, language, queerness, diaspora, and colonialism. Enrollment limited to 18. {A}{L}{S}
This course focuses on the growing field of queer American history. This course explores the histories of same-sex desire, practice, and identity, as well as gender transgressions, from the late 19th century to the present. Using a wide range of sources, including archival documents, films, work by historians, and oral histories, students investigate how and why people with same-sex desire and non-normative gender expressions formed communities, struggled against bigotry and organized movements for social and political change. This course pays close attention to the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality, and the ways that difference has shaped queer history. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Enrollment limited to 20. {H}
SWG 270Colloquium: Oral History and Lesbian Subjects4
Grounding the work in the current scholarship in lesbian history, this course explores lesbian, queer and bisexual communities, cultures and activism. While becoming familiar with the existing narratives about lesbian and queer lives, students are introduced to the method of oral history as a key documentation strategy in the production of lesbian history. How do research methods need to be adapted, including oral history, in order to talk about lesbian and queer lives? Texts include secondary literature on 20th-century lesbian cultures and communities, oral history theory and methodology, and primary sources from the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC). Students conduct, transcribe, edit and interpret their own interviews for their final project. The oral histories from this course are archived with the Documenting Lesbian Lives collection in the SSC. Prerequisite: SWG 150 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 20. {H}{L}
This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of reproductive health, rights and justice in the United States, examining history, activism, law, policy and public discourses related to reproduction. A central framework for analysis is how gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, disability and nationality intersect to shape people’s experiences of reproductive oppression and their resistance strategies. Topics include eugenics and the birth control movement; the reproductive rights and justice movements; U.S. population control policies; criminalization of pregnant people; fetal personhood and birth parents’ citizenship; the medicalization of reproduction; reproductive technologies; the influence of disability, incarceration and poverty on pregnancy and parenting; the anti-abortion movement; and reproductive coercion and violence. {S}
This interdisciplinary course teaches students how to translate feminist scholarship for a popular audience. Students practice how to use knowledge and concepts they have learned in their women and gender studies classes to write publicly in a range of formats, including book and film reviews, interviews, opinion editorials and feature articles. The course explores the history and practice of feminist public writing, with particular attention to how gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, disability and citizenship in women’s experiences of public writing. The course also considers some of the political and ethical questions relating to women’s public writing. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{S}
This course considers the manner in which norms of gender and sexuality are reflected, reinforced and challenged in popular culture. The class uses theories of knowledge production, representation and meaning-making to support an analysis of the relationship between discourse and power; the engagement with these theoretical texts helps track this dynamic as it emerges in popular culture. Key queer theoretical concepts provide a framework for examining how the production gender and sexuality impacts cultural production. Through a critical engagement with a selection of films, music, television, visual art and digital media, the class discusses mainstream conventions and the feminist, queer and queer of color interventions that enliven the landscape of popular culture. Prerequisite: SWG 150 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 25. {A}{S}
SWG 300JSSeminar: Topics in the Study of Women and Gender-Justice and Security4
This course explores understandings of security and justice from a feminist perspective. It draws upon a trans-disciplinary range of social theories and materials from both the US and international contexts (mostly in the Global South) to critically explore how traditional practices of security authorize and protect specific interests while destabilizing and rendering vulnerable other populations. The course centers grassroots practices of security, peace and justice that challenge prevailing militarized and securitized assumptions and practices. At the heart of this course is a commitment to questioning our conceptions of how security works around the intersections of power and oppression (i.e., gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.). Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {S}
SWG 300LRSeminar: Topics in the Study of Women and Gender-Beyond the Grind: Feminist and Disability Theories of Care, Love, and Resistance4
This course turns to disability justice, Black feminist, feminist-of-color and Marxist feminist thought in order to explore the revolutionary potential of care, love and rest. Additionally, the course examines the complications and contradictions of care work under U.S. racial capitalism. Rather than viewing practices of love and care as a sideline to activist movement work, the course takes these practices seriously by engaging a range of texts from the late 20th and 21st centuries. Discussions include mutual aid, disability justice, queer forms of kinship, Black feminist love-politics, global economies of care work and anti-work politics. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {L}{S}
SWG 300QTSeminar: Topics in the Study of Women and Gender- Building Queer and Trans Lives4
This course considers “building” as both metaphor and practice in queer and trans feminist epistemologies. What systems and institutions (e.g. white supremacy, settler colonialism, binary gender, ableism, late-stage capitalism, the carceral state) do queer and trans epistemologies slate for demolition or destruction? Should certain structures (e.g. medical, educational, political, scientific, housing) and relationships (e.g. platonic, romantic, sexual, caregiving, community) be repaired or renovated? What needs to be built from scratch or salvaged from existing resources to ensure sustainable, accessible, non-violent, joyful modes of living? The course draws on queer, trans, Black feminist, critical disability and feminist science studies blueprints for world-building. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.
SWG 300WKSeminar: Topics in the Study of Women and Gender-Feminist Ways of Knowing4
This course explores feminist learning as an endless movement by centering the praxis, politics and poetics of collective knowledge production. How does one know what one knows? Who and what are served by that knowledge? How might a commitment to anti-coloniality and justice push one to imagine, make and move differently in relation to structures of violence that one seeks to transform? Students dive into these questions by engaging with over 25 years of organizing and co-creativity inspired by the Sangtin movement and Parakh Theater in India, and they make connections with these through embodied activities in the classroom. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}{S}
SWG 301Seminar: Thinking with Water: Feminist STS and the Blue Humanities4
This seminar approaches oceans and other water bodies as sites of power, knowledge, and relation through feminist science and technology studies (STS) and the blue humanities. Students analyze scientific, artistic, and media objects, including oceanographic models, experimental cinema, contemporary artwork, and aquariums, to examine how water is represented and contested. Drawing on Black feminist, Indigenous, queer, hydrofeminist, and posthuman feminist frameworks, the course interrogates colonial, militarized, and extractive histories of water. Assignments culminate in a final research or creative project designed to support dynamic student engagement with water bodies. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}{S}
Students in this course gain a thorough and sustained understanding of queer of color critique by tracking this theoretical framework from its emergence in women of color feminism through the contemporary moment using historical and canonical texts along with the most cutting-edge scholarship being produced in the field. The exploration of this critical framework engages with independent films, novels and short stories, popular music, as well as television and digital media platforms such as Netflix and Amazon. We discuss what is ruptured and what is generated at the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality. Prerequisites: SWG 150. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}{S}
SWG 307Seminar: Abortion History, Law and Politics4
Previously SWG 300ah. On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, reversing a half-century-long precedent of constitutional abortion rights. This course explores the history, law and politics of abortion in the U.S. before, during and after Roe. The course examines ideologies, strategies and tactics of the abortion rights movement as well as the anti-abortion movement, focusing in particular on the gender and racial politics of these movements. Discussions include abortion access, anti-abortion violence, “crisis pregnancy centers,” fetal personhood campaigns, the criminalization of pregnancy, abortion pills, telemedicine abortion and self-managed abortion. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.
SWG 314Seminar: Documenting Queer and Trans Lives4
This course examines visual and literary documentations of queer and trans life by reading memoirs and screening short and feature-length documentaries films. The course considers the power dynamics imbued in documenting queer & trans lives while contending with the politics of visibility, representation, and embodiment as they are impacted by race, class, and gender. The course considers the performativity of gender and the fluidity of sexuality while also engaging with storytelling and the politics that lie therein. Students have the option of producing a short film, creating a short memoir, writing a research paper, or proposing another mode of documenting experiences of queer and trans life. Prerequisites: SWG 150 and one additional SWG course. Enrollment limited to 12. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required. {A}{L}
SWG 317Seminar: Women Fighting Back: Gender and Violence4
Previously SWG 300gv. Patriarchal societies are permeated with gendered violence. Across time and place, men and boys have perpetrated multiple forms of violence against women and girls, including intimate partner violence, sexual assault and harassment, and reproductive coercion—usually without legal or social consequences. This course explores how women and girls fight back against male violence historically and today, using a wide range of strategies, including collective resistance, legal challenges, art, film, humor and, sometimes, physical violence. Using intersectional feminist theory, the class reflects on how and why patriarchal societies allow male violence against women and girls, and punish female resistance to male violence. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.
Marxist feminism as a theory and a politics both imagines alternate, liberatory futures and critiques present social orders. Beginning with a simple insight: capitalism relies on the class politics of unpaid, reproductive "women’s work," Marxist feminists in the 19th century sought to imagine new social connections, sexualities and desire to overthrow patriarchy, slavery, feudalism and colonialism. Today, queer of color and decolonial feminist theory, alongside abolition, environmental and reproduction justice movements, rejuvenate this tradition of Marxist feminism. This seminar focuses on theoretical writings from around the world to better understand radical social movements from the past and the present. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {H}{L}
This course brings together foundational and contemporary queer theoretical texts to discuss the history and production of sexuality and gender in the U.S. Students practice close reading canonical queer theoretical texts alongside scholarly interventions to the canon that emerge from queer of color critique, trans theory and black queer studies. The course studies the ways that queer theory, from these different vantage points, challenges norms of knowledge production, temporality, space, gender and belonging. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.
An 8-credit, two-semester thesis taken in addition to the 10 courses that fulfill the major. Eligibility requirements for honors work, and supervision and evaluation of the thesis, are determined by the Program Committee for the Study of Women and Gender as outlined on the Program website at https://www.smith.edu/academics/departments-programs-courses/study-women-gender-sexuality. Department permission required.
