Undergraduate Programs

Since the 1960s, the body has become the medium for artists to challenge dominant social systems and gender norms. Artists use bodies to subvert gender and racial stereotypes or reveal social and political violence. This course will introduce students to key concepts in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies by examining global performance art from the 1960s to the 2000s, as well as the critical theory surrounding artists’ practices. We will examine the history of performance art, from feminist to decolonial practices, primarily in the US and East Asia, to understand how artists negotiate ethnic identities and social assumptions about the gendered body. We will explore various ways in which artists challenge the boundaries of race, gender, and class, such as revealing the vulnerability of the body and manipulating their appearances and behaviors. We will discuss performances by artists Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Yoko Ono, Tehching Hsieh, Marina Abramović, and others. Through these case studies, we will gain insight into how artists transform bodies into a wounded site, a social catalyst, and a conceptual object that reflects trauma, racial stereotypes, and the complexities of capitalism. By examining documentation in photography, film, and written work, students will learn how to analyze performances and various aesthetic manifestations that demonstrate how the body can be a crucial site for subverting racial and gender norms and assumptions.

Location

(MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

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

(R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

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

(MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

In this colloquium we will look at the history of international feminism and explore its many faces. We will examine the various factors that have contributed to women’s historically lower status in society; will look at the emergence of women’s rights and feminist movements as well as the distinctions among various feminist theories, and will discuss the relevance of feminism today.

Location

(T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

In this colloquium we will look at the history of international feminism and explore its many faces. We will examine the various factors that have contributed to women’s historically lower status in society; will look at the emergence of women’s rights and feminist movements as well as the distinctions among various feminist theories, and will discuss the relevance of feminism today.

Location

(T 2:00PM - 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

(MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

The goal of this course is to radically problematize the concepts of queer, gender and sexuality, fundamentally questioning the assumptions that attend the usage and deployment of these terms in quotidian discourse. This will not be your typical queer theory course as we will not move from the center to the margins, relegating racialized bodies to the position of reactionary actors responding to an epistemic erasure. Rather we will center these critiques as the basis for a new canon and thus grounds for theory.

Location

(M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Location

(MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course explores questions of social justice, representation, and political expression clustered around three major revolutionary moments in 20th century Germany: The German Revolution of 1918, the German Student Movement & German Women’s Movement of 1968, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Oriented by a careful reading of Marx and Engel's Communist Manifesto, we will consider several revolutionary genres in art and literature (manifestos, essays, pamphlets, posters, political theater, and film). 1918, 1968 and 1989 are historical hinge points (a term I am borrowing from Matt Christman) that bring various emancipatory impulses into relief, and that find formal expression in the revolutionary (socialist, feminist, avant-garde, anti-authoritarian) works we will explore together. Students will also engage in an independent research project throughout the semester, culminating in a class conference. Readings and discussion in English, but if students of German would like to work on German language texts, these can be provided along with alternative assignments where German language practice and translation are included.

Location

(TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

This course will explore various concepts of mobility and encounters within ethnographic films and texts. Questions we will investigate include: How does one represent a culture? What notions of race, gender, sexuality and national identities are reinforced and challenged in these works? Who speaks for whom and what are the consequences? What kinds of power relationships are hidden or made visible in these films and texts?

Location

(MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

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

Location

(TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Location

(R 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Humanitarianism, understood as the ultimate of ethical acts, took root in the modern world as an effort to remake the world so that it better served the interests of humanity. Against the “hegemonic corporate forces of predatory capitalism,” aid agencies perform the work of welfare workers who are part of the network of moral discourses, religious beliefs, ethical commitments, and international norms that generate an obligation to help distant strangers.” Humanitarianism and Social Insecurities engages students in a critical understanding of humanitarian discourses and practices. With the recognition that “noble actions can have negative and unintended consequences”, this course takes the student on an intellectual journey for a better understanding of humanitarian intervention, from the movement to abolish the slave trade and slavery to humanitarian disasters of our age by way of colonial invasions that were framed as humanitarian ventures.

Location

(MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

This course will examine the oeuvre of the singer Beyonce Knowles through a broad range of analyses that considers gender, race, nationalism, and class relative to her music and their accompanying filmic texts. We will intertextually connect Beyonce’s work to theories in Black feminist and ecological discourse, as well as think through American regionalisms. Among the texts we will engage are Lemonade, Renaissance, Cowboy Carter as well as related texts like Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, the writings of Audre Lorde, and the Combahee River Collective's work.

Location

(T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

In this course, we will explore how women’s reproductive experiences and the meanings attached to such experiences have changed over time and why. This is a research seminar, so students will further explore these issues through their own research and writing on some aspect of the history of reproduction. Readings and discussions will focus on the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but students may explore the location and period of their choice in their papers.

Location

(T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

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

(F 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course provides undergraduate students the opportunity to pursue in-depth, independent exploration of a topic not regularly offered in the curriculum, under the supervision of a faculty member in the form of independent study, practicum, internship or research. The objectives and content are determined in consultation between students and full-time members of the teaching faculty. Responsibilities and expectations vary by course and department. Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed through the Independent Study Registration form (https://secure1.rochester.edu/registrar/forms/independent-study-form.php)

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

This course provides undergraduate students the opportunity to pursue in-depth, independent exploration of a topic not regularly offered in the curriculum, under the supervision of a faculty member in the form of independent study, practicum, internship or research. The objectives and content are determined in consultation between students and full-time members of the teaching faculty. Responsibilities and expectations vary by course and department.  Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed through the Independent Study Registration form (https://secure1.rochester.edu/registrar/forms/independent-study-form.php)​

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

This course provides undergraduate students the opportunity to pursue in-depth, independent exploration of a topic not regularly offered in the curriculum, under the supervision of a faculty member in the form of independent study, practicum, internship or research. The objectives and content are determined in consultation between students and full-time members of the teaching faculty. Responsibilities and expectations vary by course and department. Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed through the Internship Registration form ( https://secure1.rochester.edu/registrar/forms/internship-registration-form.php)

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

This course provides undergraduate students the opportunity to pursue in-depth, independent exploration of a topic not regularly offered in the curriculum, under the supervision of a faculty member in the form of independent study, practicum, internship or research. The objectives and content are determined in consultation between students and full-time members of the teaching faculty. Responsibilities and expectations vary by course and department.  Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed through the Independent Study Registration form (https://secure1.rochester.edu/registrar/forms/independent-study-form.php)​

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)