Undergraduate Programs

While transgender and gender-variant people have always existed, the fields of trans studies and
trans history are relatively new. Only in the late twentieth century did scholars begin to identify
trans studies as a field distinct from LGBT and Queer Studies, and it was not until the early
twenty-first century that the first Trans Studies collection was published. This course takes an
interdisciplinary approach to exploring transgender history and the development of Trans
Studies. The first five weeks of the course will be spent introducing the history of trans and
gender variant people in the United States. The rest of the semester will be spent tracking the
intellectual lineages of the field of Trans Studies, exploring when and how it developed, its
theoretical premises, and how various challenges in its short history have led to important shifts
and developments within Trans Studies that have influenced other fields beyond its disciplinary
borders

Location

Morey Room 501 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary scholarship of Gender, Sexuality and Women's studies. As a survey course, this class is designed to give students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines a basic understanding of debates and perspectives discussed in the field. We will use gender as a critical lens to examine some of the social, cultural, economic, scientific, and political practices that organize our lives. We will explore a multitude of feminist perspectives on the intersections of sex, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and other categories of identity. In this course, we will interrogate these categories as socially constructed while acknowledging that these constructions have real effects in subordinating groups, marking bodies, and creating structural, intersectional inequalities.

Location

Morey Room 501 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course provides an overview of the interdisciplinary field of medical anthropology. Using a range of ethnographic case materials (including graphic novels, documentaries, and texts), we will explore how cultural, biological, and political contexts variously shape understandings and experiences of health and illness. Key topics include cultures of medicine, medical pluralism, medicalization, social suffering, and ethics in medical research, medical technologies, and global health. This introductory survey in medical anthropology is open to first- and second-year undergraduate students.

Location

Lattimore Room 210 (MW 9:00AM - 10:15AM)

This course surveys American history through the words and work of women. Well-known historical events and developments--including but not limited to the Revolutionary War, the abolition of slavery, the Great Depression, and the protest movements of the 1960s--look different when considered from the perspective of women. The course will further examine how social categories such as race, class, sexuality, and religion have shaped women's historical experiences. Broad in chronological scope, this course is not intended to be comprehensive. Rather, we will utilize primary and secondary sources to delve into important historical moments and to explore questions about the practice and politics of studying women's history.

Location

Computer Studies Room 209 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

The study of issues surrounding human sexuality as it has been treated in world religions. Issues, such as homosexuality, transgender/transsexual, marriage, family, sexual ethics, gender in world religions will be covered. Also, the role of Eros in mystical traditions of various world religions (Sufi, Christian Mysticism, Hinduism) will be examined in those instances where the erotic and the spiritual have been manifested together. Classroom discussion about what is the connection between sexuality and spirituality and how have religious traditions dealt with that connection? College hook-up culture is also examined in light of the study of spirituality and sexuality.

Location

Interfaith Chapel Room 200 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This interdisciplinary course is an introduction to critical concepts and approaches used to investigate the intersections of gender, health, and illness, particularly in the context of individual lives both locally and transnationally. Special attention will be paid to the historical and contemporary development of medical knowledge and practice, including debates on the roles of health-care consumers and practitioners, as well as global linkages among the health industry, international trade, and health sector reform in the developing world. Emerging issues around the politics of global health include clinical research studies, bodily modification practices, and reproductive justice movements. This is a writing-intensive course and may be counted toward the University of Rochester’s Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies (GSW) major, minor, or cluster.

Location

Dewey Room 2110D (MW 7:40PM - 8:55PM)

The nineteenth-century novel is usually associated with Victorian values: happy marriage; wholesome homes; moral propriety; properly channeled emotions and ambitions. Many of the most popular novels, however, paint a very different picture: with madwomen locked in attics and asylums; monsters, real and imagined, lurking behind the façade of propriety; genteel homes harboring opium addicts; fallen women walking the streets; and sexual transgression and degeneracy popping up everywhere. Indeed, for novels centrally structured around marriage and society, madness and monstrosity appear with alarming regularity. The intertwining of these tropes suggests some of the cultural anxieties unleashed by the new body of women writers and women readers. We will begin with Frankenstein and end with Dracula, two novels from opposite ends of the century. We will also consider such classic marriage plot novels as Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and some popular sensation fiction of the 1860s. 

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 270 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

Rochester sits in one of the worlds most explicitly carceral landscapes, with more than a dozen state prisons within a 90 min drive. This co-taught course is a collaborative ethnographic research project designed to examine how the presence of prisons in towns around Rochester reflects and shapes the political, economic, and cultural lives of those who live in the region. Students will be introduced to methods and practices of ethnography and conduct firsthand research on the cultural politics of prison towns. Through assigned reading, students will learn about the history, sociology, and cultural logics of Rochester and the wider region, and of mass incarceration. What does a prison mean for a person living near one? How does the presence of prisons shape peoples notions of justice, citizenship, and punishment? How do these nearby but largely invisible institutions shape the ways that we live in Rochester? Recommended prior courses: Being Human: Cultural Anthropology or Incarceration Nation

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 269 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

The category of “guilt” floats between theology, psychology, and criminology. Sometimes as a feeling, sometimes as a purported objective condition, guilt stars in big stories moderns tell about what it is to be a member of a society, what it is to be a religious person, and how it feels to be a creature with sexual appetites. Meanwhile, for legal and mental health professions, proof of guilt is used to sort the good from the bad, the normal from the deviant, and the socially respectable from the socially disposable. Not all is so dour, however. Guilt lives in confession, denunciation, and in criminal sentencing, but it is also the stuff of jokes, of ethnic pride, and of eroticism. Toward an anatomy of guilt, in this course we will draw on the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Arendt, Foucault, Janet Malcolm and Sarah Schulman, and we will wrestle with the films—and complicated legacies—of Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, two filmmakers who are preoccupied with (and implicated by) guilt, as feeling and as fact.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

This course explores Hollywood's fascination with race and gender as social issues and as spectacles. In particular, we will focus on the ways that social difference have become the sites of conflicted narrative and visual interactions in our films. To examine competing representations of racial difference and sexual difference in US culture, we analyze popular films from the 1950s to the present.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Exploration of the ways males and females differ in interaction, theories of development of sex differences, consequences for social change.

Prerequisite: PSYC 101

Location

Meliora Room 203 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Location

Todd Union Room 107 (T 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

This course will examine the varieties of thought about, and practice of, civil disobedience within social movements, with an emphasis on contemporary activism. When, why, and how do communities choose to push back against structures of violence and injustice? Throughout the semester, we will study canonical texts? of modern resistance history speeches, writing, direct action protests, art and will consider the role of this form of counter-conduct within larger campaign strategies to build power from below and get free.

Location

Meliora Room 224 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course addresses questions such as these: Do species have “origins”? Does the universe have a beginning? What is meant by “creation”? Are “fundamental” particles related to religious fundamentalism? Is cognitive science connected to the “tree of knowledge”? Are “knowledge” and “truth” key terms in both science and religion? Are there “higher” and “lower” organisms? Do mothers have “instincts”? Are people smarter than other animals? Have “instincts” and “intelligence” been identified by science? Does a sperm “penetrate” or “fertilize” an egg? Do either God or Nature have “laws”? Is “the invisible hand” a religious idea? Is “the great chain of being” a religious idea, and did Darwin overtake it? Do people need to be “saved”? Is “evil” a “problem”? How do people describe the practices of circumcision and communion? Readings are taken from the bible, history of science, feminist critiques of religion and science, and literature. Emphasis is on common language usages and their political valences.

Location

Frederick Douglass Room 403 (TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

This course examines the contemporary interplay among gender, war, and militarism through engagement with feminist international relations and critical masculinities scholarship on these themes, as well as an exploration of their representation in media and popular culture, such as Pearl Harbor (2001) and television news coverage. We will identify the historical and sociopolitical conditions that enable the militarization of a society and give rise to war by considering examples from around the world, including 20th and 21st century conflicts in Cambodia, Somalia, Guatemala, Serbia, and Afghanistan. We will pay particular attention to the social construction of femininity, masculinity, and gender relations in a militarized culture. Topics will include security, foreign policy, development, peacekeeping, and human rights.

Location

Morey Room 205 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

This course examines the interplay among gender, war, and militarism through engagement with feminist international relations and critical masculinities scholarship on these themes, as well as an exploration of their representation in media and popular culture. We will identify the historical and sociopolitical conditions that enable the militarization of a society and give rise to war or peace by considering examples from around the world. We will pay particular attention to the social construction of femininity, masculinity, and gender relations in a militarized culture. Weekly topics include security, foreign policy, development, peacekeeping, and human rights.

Location

Morey Room 205 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

For GSWS majors completing an honors project in their fourth year, typically taken in the fall to be followed by 393H in the spring. The time of the class is flexible and will be decided by those enrolled in collaboration with the instructor.

Location

Lattimore Room 540 (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)