WMST

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

304 Barnard Hall Dawson

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

307 Milbank Hall Jordan-Young Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 661 3 WMST BC2140 Critical Approaches in Social and Cultural Theory. 3.00 points. 4 This course examines the conceptual foundations that support 4 feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and 4 incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students; required for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

418 Barnard Hall Pittman WMST BC3121 Black Women in America. 4 points. BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Historical Studies (HIS). Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. will be decided then. Enrollment limited to 20 students. Examines roles of black women in the U.S. as thinkers, activists and creators during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the intellectual work, social activism and cultural expression of African American women, we examine how they understood their lives, resisted oppression and struggled to change society. We will also discuss theoretical frameworks (such as "double jeopardy," or "intersectionality") developed for the study of black women. The seminar will encourage students to pay particular attention to the diversity of black women and critical issues facing Black women today. This course is the same as AFRS BC3121 Black Women in America. WMST BC3132 GENDERED CONTROVERSIES. 4.00 points. This seminar investigates the significance of contemporary and historical issues of social, political, and cultural conflicts conducted through the language of gender. How do such conflicts constitute social relations, and what do they tell us about societies, cultures, and politics? How do we understand gender analysis in relation to intersectionality? How to we read and analyze gender through contested social issues? How do we analyze the ethical discourses employed in such conflicts? How do we best create change in response to such conflicts? WMST BC3134 Unheard Voices: African Women's Literature. 4 points. BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL)., BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: lment Literature (LIT). Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. How does one talk of women in Africa without thinking of Africa as a ‘mythic unity’? We will consider the political, racial, social and other contexts in which African women write and are written about in the context of their located lives in Africa and in the African Diaspora. This course is the same as AFRS BC3134 Unheard Voices: African Women's Literature. WMST BC3510 Interpreting Bodies: Engendering the Black Body. 4 points. Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. lment will be decided then. Enrollment limited to 20 students. This course examines how the body functions as an analytic model and a process of embodiment by focusing on the black female body in particular. Looking at feminist theorizing of the black body, it explores how the black female body has been marked in particular ways and lment with profound effects. WMST BC3518 STUDIES IN U.S. IMPERIALISM. 4.00 points. Historical, comparative study of the cultural effects and social experiences of U.S. imperialism, with attention to race, gender and sexuality in practices of domination and struggle

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Prerequisite

Students must attend first day of class and admission Enrollment limited to 14 students. Students must attend first day of class and admission Enrollment limited to 20 students.

302 Barnard Hall Solomon WMST BC3131 WOMEN AND SCIENCE. 4.00 points. womens involvement with science. Womens contributions to scientific discovery in various fields, accounts by women scientists, engineers, and physicians, issues of science education. Feminist critiques of biological research and of the institution of science WMST BC3132 GENDERED CONTROVERSIES. 4.00 points. This seminar investigates the significance of contemporary and historical issues of social, political, and cultural conflicts conducted through the language of gender. How do such conflicts constitute social relations, and what do they tell us about societies, cultures, and politics? How do we understand gender analysis in relation to intersectionality? How to we read and analyze gender through contested social issues? How do we analyze the ethical discourses employed in such conflicts? How do we best create change in response to such conflicts? Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 665 WMST UN3311 FEMINIST THEORY. 4.00 points. 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 t 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 t 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 Fall 2025: WMST UN3311 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Prerequisite

Enrollment limited to 18 students. Enrollment limited to 18 students. History and politics of Feminist Texts I, or II, and the instructor's permission.

702 Hamilton Hall Halberstam ment

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

752 Ext Schermerhorn Lughod

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

754 Ext Schermerhorn

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

754 Ext Schermerhorn Wilson

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

113 Milstein Center

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

101a Barnard Hall

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

119 Milstein Center WMST GU4325 Embodiment and Bodily Difference. 4 points. At once material and symbolic, our bodies exist at the intersection of multiple competing discourses, including the juridical, the techno- scientific, and the biopolitical. In this course, we will draw upon a variety of critical interdisciplinary literatures—including feminist and queer studies, science and technology studies, and disability studies nt —to consider some of the ways in which the body is constituted by such discourses, and itself serves as the substratum for social relations. Among the key questions we will consider are the following: What is natural about the body? How are distinctions made between presumptively normal and pathological bodies, and between psychic and somatic experiences? How do historical and political-economic forces shape the perception and meaning of bodily difference? And most crucially: how do bodies that are multiply constituted by competing logics of gender, race, nation, and ability offer up resistance to these and other categorizations? Spring 2026: WMST GU4325 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to key concepts and analytical categories in Feminist Theory through a focus on "reading the body." How do we define "deviant" bodies and which bodies get to count as "normal"? How does our understanding of Nature and Culture, authenticity and artifice structure our beliefs about the body and gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race? The course will explore a range of topics, including: Racial politics and reproductive justice; Discipline, power, and the modern body; "Somatechnics," cosmetic surgery, and other forms of body modification; Gender-based violence, activism, and narratives of trauma; Diseased bodies, hysteria, and psychoanalysis; Transnational bodies and the politics of labor and migration; Queer politics, utopia and futurity. Class will be supplemented by excursions to the theater (including "Eclipsed" on Broadway) and NYC museums. This course fulfills the Feminist Theory requirement for the Columbia major in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. WMST SD Writing Women. 3 points. Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. This course has a dual focus: to explore the work of women writers of the 18th century to the present and also to grapple with the ways in which women, gender and sexuality are written and represented in a range of literary, cultural, and historical texts. This course fulfills the elective requirement for the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality major, providing a solid introduction to key concepts and analytical categories in women's, gender, and sexuality studies. The course not only interrogates the category of "Women," but also grapples with gender in its complex intersection with other systems of power and inequality, including: sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and nation. Authors will include: Christine de Pizan, Assia Djebar, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Virginia Woolf, Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, Harriet Jacobs, Sapphire, Toni Morrison. WMST UN1001 INTRO-WOMEN # GENDER STUDIES. 3.00 points. 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. Fall 2025: WMST UN1001 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enroll

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Contemporary issues in feminist thought. A review of the theoretical debates on sex roles, feminism and socialism, psychoanalysis, language, and cultural representations

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. Sexuality is often taken to be a natural and unchanging element of individual life. In this course, we seek to examine ways in which sex is both social and political. That is to say, sexuality has different meanings in different contexts, and it has different effects in terms of power relations within the social order. To this end, we will examine how sexuality has been socially constructed, paying careful attention to the ways these ideas relate to other social forces such as gender, race, and class. We begin with a historical examination as to how sexuality has been defined as a natural component of self by early sexologists and eugenicists, paying careful attention to their contemporary legacies. We continue this historical overview through an examination of early scholars who increasingly argued that sexuality has a social basis, culminating in the theoretical analyses of Foucault. The first part of this course thus seeks to historically situate and denaturalize some of the basic concepts we tend to take for granted, including that of “sexuality” itself. In the second part of the course, we will consider the state of sexual politics within the contemporary United States, focusing upon key arenas of political struggle including sex education, prostitution, and homosexuality. lment

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

points. Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. Why, and in what ways, has sex been a central issue for feminism throughout its history? How have feminist attitudes towards sex changed over time, and how did attitudes vary amongst feminists themselves? What connections did feminists make between sexual reform, women’s rights, and broader social, political, and economic change? And what are the legacies of past feminist sexual politics for the present day? This course addresses these questions by exploring the history of feminist sexual politics in Europe over the course of the “long nineteenth century,” that is, between the years 1789 and 1918, and will focus on developments in Britain, France, and Germany. From the French Revolution to the achievement of women’s suffrage, we will examine feminists’ writings on and activism surrounding sex and sexuality to understand how definitions of “sex,” “feminism,” and “sexual politics” changed over time, and how issues of class and race shaped feminist sexual politics. We will also analyze contradictions, tensions and continuities within diverse feminist approaches to sexuality, and assess similarities and differences amongst feminists from different national backgrounds. Furthermore, by adopting a focus on feminism and sexuality, this course offers a unique lens on the major “world historical” events of modern European history.

Subject

WMST

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

4 points. studies, and the instructor's permission (please request application from csv1@columbia.edu) This seminar uses the new scholarship on sexuality to engage with ongoing theoretical conversations and activism on sexuality, rights, gender, and health. Pressed by the increasing recognition of the importance of sexuality in a wide range of rights and advocacy work (for example, HIV/AIDS, sexual and reproductive health, and sexual violence), theorists and advocates alike have struggled with complex, sometimes fluid and elusive nature of sexuality. What is this "sexuality" in need of rights and health? How does it manifest itself across a range of persons and cultures? And how can culturally and historically situated work about sexuality inform and improve legal and advocacy interventions? The seminar also turns a critical eye on recent scholarship, in light of current issues raised by policy interventions and advocacy in many countries and cultures. Finally, the seminar aims to promote dialogue and exchange between academic, activist, and advocacy work.

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Prerequisite

introductory course in human rights or sexuality/gender

This class is an introduction to the debates on women that played a dominant role in both the philosophical and literary traditions of the European/Atlantic world from the classical period through the seventeenth-century. Beginning with the works of ancient political theory that actively debated women’s political, social, and ethical position in society (chiefly Aristotle, Plato, and Plutarch), the course will address the pan-European books of “Good Women” that served as exemplary case studies, the querelle des femmes (or debate on women) that dominated political and humanist discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the crucial importance of the political analogies between the household and the state and the marital and social contracts in the premodern world (and, indeed, in our own). We will study works from ancient Greece and Rome and medieval and early modern Italy, Spain, France, England, Ethiopia and Mexico, and topics ranging from domestic violence and political resistance theory to transvestitism and lesbianism.

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

This course explores the importance of sexuality to modern histories of North America and Western Europe, with particular emphasis on the U.S. and U.K., and secondarily Canada, Germany and France. We will examine changing sexual cultures and their relationship to new gender norms from the late seventeenth century through the mid twentieth century. The emergence and ascendance of concepts of gender, the self, heterosexuality and homosexuality will be examined through political, intellectual, cultural, and social history. The course begins when new attitudes about individual privacy, equality, and freedom first took hold in ways that helped to define the “West” and “modern” attitudes about gender and sex. We will track the continual revisions to, and contestations over, this first sexual revolution through the 1960s, when celebrations and concerns about sexual liberation, hedonism, and the “decline of virtue” came to occupy the center of cultural debates. We will examine the ways in which the study of sexuality intersects with, and offers opportunities to re-think, other major topics in the histories of the ‘West,’ including the role of state regulation, and ideas about reproduction, racial categories, violence, pleasure and love.

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

in American Politics. 4 points. For much of the 20th century, the American political system excluded lesbians and gay men from full citizenship. This course seeks to understand the political and social forces shaping the transformation of these sex nonconformists from a pariah group into a viable social movement and eventually into a powerful constituency within the Democratic Party. Special emphasis will be placed on the state’s role in defining lesbian and gay identities, the ways in which gender and racial diversity have shaped the LGB movement, and the role that partisan electoral strategies played in ushering sexuality to the center of American political conflict. Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 679

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Middle Ages. 3 points. In this course, we consider the body both as a site for textual production—the animal skin used to make medieval parchment—and as an object of representation in medieval francophone literature. How does the choice of literary genre inflect the presentation of gender? What characterized the corporeality of the medieval hero? How did writers depict themselves and the objects of their desire? When genitalia “speak for themselves,” as in some the medieval fabliaux we will read, what do they say and whose desire do they express? Which bodies are clearly gendered and why? How does bodily metamorphosis intersect with sexual transgression and other kinds of gender trouble?

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. Historical Approaches to Feminist Questions” examines issues of gender and sexuality across time and space. We explore how feminist analyses may reorient how we think about the past. We also ask how historical perspectives can bring the contingent and contextual nature of ideas about gender and sexuality into relief. We will consult both primary and secondary historical sources as well as key theoretical texts on the politics of women’s history and the history of sexuality in intersection with other forms of identity and inequality.

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

This course examines a genealogy of contemporary debates in queer theory beginning with feminist debates on sexuality and power in the 1970s and moving through critical race theory, the rise of antinormativity, affect theory, and posthumanism. Will fulfill Feminist Theory requirement.

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

points. Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. This seminar considers the family at a historical and socio-technical juncture at which its form is both remarkably flexible and deeply intractable. The course begins with an overview of sociological and feminist scholarship on the family. We then examine how developments stemming from genetic science have spurred the emergence of new reproductive technologies over the last few decades and, in turn, novel forms of procreation and affiliation. To what extent do assisted reproduction practices, such as in vitro fertilization, prenatal diagnosis, and surrogacy, offer novel ways for constituting and conceptualizing the family? Which constituencies benefit from these possibilities, which enable them, and which are constrained by them? To what extent do clinical and reproductive genetics privilege biological relatedness and, therefore, traditional gender ideologies? How is the family now simultaneously case as a source of (health) risk, a necessary resource for optimal (healthy) living, and a volitional social form? We will take up these questions against the backdrop of forms of kin-keeping sociality (family reunions, genealogy, etc.), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, "biosociality" and biological affinity. Readings include works by Cartsen, Engels, Franklin & McKinnon, Furstenberg, Nelkin, Povinelli, Katz Rothman, Strathern and Weston.

Subject

WMST

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Responses: 1939-1990. 4 points. BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). students. A study of Jewish women’s fiction, memoirs, art and film in response to the feminist/gender issues raised by the Second Wave. The seminar includes analysis of the writings and artwork of Jo Sinclair, Tillie Olsen Judy Chicago, Helene Aylon, Elana Dykewomon, Rebecca Goldstein, E.M. Broner and others.

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Prerequisite

Permission of instructor. Enrollment limited to 13

Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. and examination of the readings, enrollment is strictly limited to 20 students. Please read and follow the updated instructions: 1) Interested students must write a 50-100 word essay answering the following question: "What background, experience or expertise do you bring to the discussion of Sexuality and the Law that will help inform and challenge the other 19 students in the class?"; 2) Include the following: your name, institution you are graduating from, year of graduation, declared major, and whether you are working towards a Women's Studies major or minor; 3) Send your information and essay through email with the subject line "Barnard Sexuality & the Law"; 4) Send your email to Riya Ortiz, WS Department Assistant, at sortiz@barnard.edu no later than Wednesday, September 1, 2010. The final list of students who are registered for the course will be announced on Friday, September 3, 12 pm. Classes start on Monday, September 13. (Note: Students who have registered for the course must also submit the essay to guarantee their registration). Explores how sexuality is defined and contested in various domains of law (Constitutional, Federal, State), how scientific theories intersect with legal discourse, and takes up considerations of these issues in family law, the military, questions of speech, citizenship rights, and at the workplace.

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Prerequisite

Because this seminar emphasizes weekly discussion

This course will provide an introduction to the concrete legal contexts in which issues of gender and justice have been articulated, disputed and hesitatingly, if not provisionally, resolved. Readings will cover issues such as Workplace Equality, Sexual Harassment, Sex Role Stereotyping, Work/Family Conflict, Marriage and Alternatives to Marriage, Compulsory Masculinity, Parenting, Domestic Violence, Reproduction and Pregnancy, Rape, Sex Work & Trafficking. Through these readings we will explore the multiple ways in which the law has contended with sexual difference, gender-based stereotypes, and the meaning of equality in domestic, transnational and international contexts. So too, we will discuss how feminist theorists have thought about sex, gender and sexuality in understanding and critiquing our legal system and its norms.For more information, go to: http:// web.law.columbia.edu/gender-sexuality/faculty/katherine-franke/ gender-justice.

Subject

WMST

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu