17 courses with the subject WMST UN, 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.
WMST UN1001INTRO-WOMEN ＆ GENDER STUDIES3.00
An interdisciplinary introduction to key concepts and analytical categories in women's and gender studies. This course grapples with gender in its complex intersection with other systems of power and inequality, including: sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and nation. Topics include: feminisms, feminist and queer theory, commodity culture, violence, science and technology, visual cultures, work, and family.
From blues singers to girl groups, pop divas to hip-hop icons, women are central to the histories of popular music. The musical landscape of the past century would be unrecognizable without the contributions of women including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Celia Cruz, Queen Latifah, Lady Gaga, Lauryn Hill, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, and Cardi B. Women, Power, ＆ Popular Music develops modes of feminist listening to a range of music, including the blues, spirituals, jazz, gospel, traditional music, pop, rock, R＆B, soul, salsa, country, hip-hop, and crossover music. The course’s primary focus will be attending to sounds, words and images with an ear to themes of voice, power, presence, and representation. Students will develop a critical vocabulary and practice a variety of modes of hearing and analyzing the meanings and effects of popular music. By examining popular music in relation to intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, the body, class, politics, and activism, students will examine a wide repertory of music by using a variety of analytical “sieves,” refining and enriching their musical experience as critically astute listeners and writers. The course weaves together close listening with some of the central writings on women musical artists, listening, and feminist theory through seminar-style discussion and written work. Students will develop skills in hearing popular music through critically aware ears and will reflect upon popular music and the discourse about it through close listening and viewing, discussion of assigned readings, recordings, and videos, and writing projects
This course is designed to introduce major theories sexuality, desire and identity. We will be considering the relations between the history of sexuality and the politics of gender. We will read some primary texts in gender theory, and in the study of sexuality, desire, and embodiment. This course also provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary examination of human sexual and erotic desires, orientations, and identities. We will study how desires are constructed, how they vary and remain the same in different places and times, and how they interact with other social and cultural phenomena such as government, family, popular culture, scientific inquiry, and, especially, race and class. Spring 2026: WMST UN3125 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment WMST 3125 001/10967 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm 702 Hamilton Hall Jack Halberstam 3.00 23/85
This class will ask you to read a set of novels, theoretical essays and social science studies in order to think deeply about sexuality, identity, desire, race, objects, relationality, being, knowing and becoming. We will consider sexuality, desire and gender not as a discrete set of bodily articulations, nor as natural expressions of coherent identities so much as part off the formulation of self that Avery Gordon names “complex personhood.” Beginning with a recent film from the UK that rereads queerness back through a history or labor and ending with a recent film made entirely on the iPhone and that stages queerness as part of an alternative articulation of Hollywood, we will explore new and old theories of queer desire. Through the readings, discussions, and assignments, you will develop critical analytical skills to consider social change movements with particular attention to how sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, sexual orientation, and other systems of power shape people’s everyday lives. We will trace the intersection of histories of labor, medicine, representation and activism and we will ask difficult questions about assimilation, mainstreaming, globalization and pink capitalism.
WMST UN3225TRANSGENDER STUDIES - THEMES AND TOPICS3.00
This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. While we will read about gender variable bodies within a long historical arc, the categories of both “transsexual” and "transgender" are recent social constructions. How did the many different forms of gender variance resolve into these singular forms and what has been lost in the medical and legal narrowing of gender variance to only these forms? Can we make any connections between witches in the 17th century (often accused on the grounds of cross-gender identification), mollies and dandies in the 19th century (often marked as effeminate), inverts in the late 19th and early 20th century and later constructions that assemble under the banner of “trans*”? Many academic disciplines-- including anthropology, history, gender studies, literary studies, and gay and lesbian/queer studies--have studied transgender identities, bodies and communities, but only very recently has the field become institutionalized in the academy as a discipline "Transgender Studies." In this course we examine the ongoing development of the concept of transgender as it is situated across social, cultural, historical, medical, and political contexts. Along the way, we will try to answer some fundamental questions: when did trans* emerge as a distinct social formation? What might be the differences between the understanding of gender variance in the second half of the 20th century and formulations of the phenomena of cross-dressing and passing and transvestism in earlier periods? Is the term "transgender" applicable to non-Western and previously occurring embodiments and practices?
Queer ＆ Trans Migration places a special emphasis on queer, transgender, and gender nonbinary global migrant experiences and how these expand conceptions such as citizenship and diaspora alongside sexuality, gender, race, indigeneity and class. This course will ask: how do queer, transgender and feminist studies offer critical insights on - and inform politics regarding - issues of forced displacement, migration, citizenship, national belonging and global rights? Students will engage with ethnography, history, fiction, and digital media to explore the multi-dimensional phenomenon of (internal and transnational) queer, transgender and gender nonbinary migration. The course gives special attention to viewpoints from the global South and to New York City as a queer migrant nexus. Students will develop their expertise on course themes through their own digital ethnographic research projects, that can include observation of social media and other virtual spaces for queer, transgender, and non-binary communities in diaspora. Throughout the course, they will put their research in conversation with queer and feminist theory from interdisciplinary perspectives that draw attention to the ways migration and citizenship is entwined with sexuality, gender, race, settler colonialism, indigeneity, Blackness, and political economy. In class dialogue and readings will allow students to consider the implications of such analysis for political and cultural movements related to migration, and how these politics play out in everyday life, from language to love and desire
Prerequisites: Feminist Texts I, or II, and the instructor's permission. This course explores the formation of desire, sexuality, and subjectivity through the frameworks of feminist epistemologies (the question of what we can know) and feminist ethics (the question of how to be responsible within our relationships and local and global communities). We will reflect on the tension between the limits of what we can know about ourselves and others and the imperative to care for each other and remain accountable for our individual and collective actions and inaction. We will investigate how our deepest emotions, intimate encounters, and secret fantasies are formed by larger social and political contexts. In turn, we will also question how these intimate relationships with ourselves and our companions may be seen as feminist acts of resistance, disruption, and creation. Objective I: to closely engage diverse feminist perspectives in late-twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, queer theory, critical race theory, and psychoanalysis. Objective II: to begin to locate your own feminist perspective within the intersection of your unique experiences and the larger historical and social contexts that form you and which you may seek to transform
Considering local, national, and international activist case studies through social movement theories, we work together to understand what activism looks like, the people who engage in it, how activist messages are constructed, and how visions of transformation are developed. Prerequisite: Either one introductory WGSS course or Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory or Permission of the Instructor
WMST UN3335Gender and Wars: Perspectives from the Global South3
Wars are salient features of globalization. But, how can we understand the relationship between gender and war? How do notions of masculinities and femininities operate in the organizing, waging, protesting, and commemorating war? Starting from the premise that gender is crucial to explaining what happens in national revolutionary wars, postcolonial conflicts and civil wars, peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions, and the social and personal aspects when wars come to an end; this course considers a transnational feminist analysis to reflect on the relationship between gender and militarism. It pulls together literature from different disciplinary fields to explore the gendered dimensions of wars of national liberation, armed conflicts, wartime gender based/sexual violence, politics of victimhood, anti-war activism, resistance and agency. We will pay particular attention to case studies from the global South. The gendered analyses of war will be explored from a multi-disciplinary framework including history, anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, philosophy, literature and film. We will utilize film, journalistic accounts, ethnographic narratives and other resources to explore the complex ways in which people, especially men and women experience and respond to wars differently.
WMST UN3345Reframing Gender Violence: Global Agendas3
Over the past couple of decades, violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) have come to prominence as loci for activism throughout the world. Both VAW and GBV regularly garner international media attention and occupy a growing place in international law and global governance. Since 2000 alone there have been more than 25 UN protocols, instruments and conventions directed at its eradication or mitigation. By embedding gendered violence in a complex matrix international norms, legal sanctions, and humanitarian aid, the anti-VAW movement has been able to achieve a powerful international “common sense” for defining, measuring, and attending to violence against women in developing countries, particularly during conflict and post-conflict situations. When invoked in the halls of the United Nations and used to shape international policy, the terms violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) are often assumed to have stable meanings; yet they do not. What do different parties mean when they talk of violence against women or of gender-based violence? What is left out when the problem is framed in particular ways, and whose interests are served by such framings? Religion, culture, and ethnicity are often linked to gendered violence with entire groups pathologized. Women in conflict situations are abstracted from their local contexts while the conflicts themselves are insistently localized. The definition of VAW or GBV is narrowed to attacks on bodily integrity, with economic, political and structural forms of violence increasingly excluded from the frames. This course will explore transnational feminist debates about gender-based violence and examine the critical concepts being developed within the scholarly literature to question this “common sense.” What are the elisions and exclusions in many common-sense understandings of these terms? Can we deepen the ways in which we engage with the manifestations and causes of such violence? We will proceed through close readings of the texts of the key feminist thinkers, researchers, and activists who are contributing to the critical analysis of the dynamics and history of this international agenda. We pay special attention to place-based research on the applicability and deployment of particular approaches to gender-based violence as found in human rights work, humanitarianism, philanthrocapitalism, and the proliferating organizations, governmental and nongovernmental, around the world that promote girls’ and women’s rights and freedom from violence. Case studies will focus mostly on the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. This course is open to advanced undergraduates with preference given to WGS majors and those with previous coursework on the relevant regions. By permission, cap of 20.
As society shifts in its views about sexuality and gender, so too does the law. Indeed, legal developments in this area have been among the most dynamic of the past couple of decades. Yet law does not map easily or perfectly onto lived experience, and legal arguments do not necessarily track the arguments made in public debate. In this seminar, we will explore the evolving jurisprudence of sexuality and gender law in a variety of areas. Our goal throughout the semester will be to understand and think about these issues as lawyers do - with our primary focus on understanding and evaluating the arguments that can be made on both (or all) sides of any particular case, with some attention to the factors outside of the courtroom that might shape how courts approach their work. Related to this, we will also seek to understand how and why some of the jurisprudence has changed over time.
Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. Enrollment limited to senior majors. Student-designed capstone research projects offer practical lessons about how knowledge is produced, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the application of interdisciplinary feminist methodologies
Who is food for? The simple answer is that food is for everyone, yet a close look at the stories we tell reveals that, actually, food is not for everyone. In our novels, nonfiction, films and even in our manifestoes, some people eat and some provide food; some appetites must be unleashed and others, regulated and controlled; and some people—some people are food. Instead of a benign arena for the imagination and enactment of universal rights, food thus exposes “universal” “human” and “rights” as crucial and deeply contested terrains of raced and gendered power. This economy of exchange, of consumption and deprivation, of the satiation of some bodies through devourment of others, of the invisibility of some hungers and the criminalization of some appetites, are all aspects of our founding narrative. These relations define the past and have also come to define our time. In this seminar, will explore the ways that we imagine food and narrate acts of feeding and eating as a means of examining both the historical enactments and contemporary mechanisms of power. Fall 2026: WMST UN3600 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment WMST 3600 001/10879 F 2:10pm - 4:00pm 754 Ext Schermerhorn Hall Janet Jakobsen 4 16/16
WMST UN3655Gender and Public Health: Disparities, Pathways, and Policies3.00
This seminar providea an intensive introduction to critical thinking about gender in relation to public health. We begin with a rapid immersion in social scientific approaches to thinking about gender in relation to health, and then examine diverse areas in which gendered relations of power – primarily between men and women, but also between cis- and queer individuals – shape health behaviors and health outcomes. We engage with multiple examples of how gendered social processes, in combination with other dimensions of social stratification, shape health at the population level. The overarching goal of this class is to provide a context for reading, discussion, and critical analysis to help students learn to think about gender – and, by extension, about any form of social stratification – as a driver of patterns in population health. We also attend consistently to how public health as a field is itself a domain in which gender is reproduced or contested
Prerequisites: WMST V1001 and the instructor's permission. Knowledge, Practice, Power is a practical and multi-disciplinary exploration of research methods and interpretive strategies used in feminist scholarship, focusing on larger questions about how we know what we know, and who and what knowledge is for. Open to non-majors, but sophomore and junior majors in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) are encouraged to enroll in this course as preparation for Senior Seminar I. This course is required for students pursuing the concentration or minor in Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies. Prerequisite: Either one introductory WGSS course or Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory or Permission of the Instructor
WMST UN3915GENDER, SEXUALITY ＆ POWER IN TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES4.00
Prerequisites: Critical Approaches or the instructor's permission. This course considers formations of gender, sexuality, and power as they circulate transnationally, as well as transnational feminist and queer movements that have emerged to address contemporary gendered and sexual inequalities. Topics include political economy, global care chains, sexuality, sex work and trafficking, feminist and queer politics, and human rights. If it is a small world after all, how do forces of globalization shape and redefine the relationship between gender, sexuality, and powerful institutions like the state? And, if power swirls everywhere, how are transnational power dynamics reinscribed in gendered bodies? How is the body represented in discussions of nationalism and in the political economy of globalization? These questions will frame this course by highlighting how gender, sexuality, and power coalesce to impact the lives of individuals in various spaces including workplaces, the academy, the home, religious institutions, the government, and civil society, and human rights organizations. This course will enable us to think transnationally, historically, and dynamically, using gender and sexuality as lenses through which to critique relations of power and the ways that power informs our everyday lives and subjectivities
