Winter 2012 Course Offerings
Students interested in minors are no longer required to complete WGS120 before the end of their sophomore year but are encouraged to take the course as soon as possible.
During Winter 2012, the following courses will be offered for credit toward a Women's and Gender Studies minor. Students may also petition the Head of Women's and Gender Studies for permission to use a course not listed here for credit. Click on an underlined course title to see the course description.
Courses
In addition, students who would like to take English 232: The Novel (Professor Keen), English 309: Creative Writing: Writing the Memoir (Professor Miranda), or English 380-03: American Ethnic Literatures (Professor Miranda) for WGS credit may work with the professor on a final project appropriate to WGS.
Course Descriptions
- Anthropology 275: Feminist Anthropology (3). Professor Goluboff. This course covers the complex and sometimes “awkward” relationship between feminism and anthropology. We explore topics such as the place of feminist theory and politics within the discipline of anthropology, the problems involved in being a feminist and an anthropologist, and the creation of feminist ethnography. Course web site from 2009
- English 232: The Novel (3). Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. Topic for Winter 2012: How do writers create fictional worlds? What happens to readers as they imaginatively move “out of this world” to immerse themselves in storyworlds? Contemporary novels about escapes from confinement range across the genres: we will read thrillers, dystopias, literary fiction, and one novel originally written for publication on the web. Students will learn the vocabulary and analytical techniques of narrative theory in this course on contemporary fiction.
- English 309: Creative Writing: Writing the Memoir (3). Prerequisite: Three credits in 200-level English and instructor consent. Topic for Winter 2012: Flannery O’Connor once said that any writer who could survive childhood had enough material to write about for a lifetime. Memoir is a mosaic form, utilizing bits and pieces from autobiography, fiction, essay and poetry in ways that allow the author to muse (speculate, imagine, remember, and question) on their own life experiences. Modern literary memoir requires tremendous work from the author, as she moves both backward and forward in time, re-creates believable dialogue, switches back and forth between scene and summary, and controls the pace and tension of the story with lyricism or brute imagery. In short, the memoirist keeps her reader engaged by being an adept and agile storyteller. This is not straight autobiography. Memoir is more about what can be gleaned from a section of one’s life than about chronicling an entire life. Like a mosaic, memoir is about the individual pieces as much as the eventual whole. We read memoirists, freewriting, and workshopping in and out of class.
- English 380-03: American Ethnic Literatures (3). Prerequisite: Junior or senior majors, or sophomores with ENGL 299. This course focuses on ethnic “minority” literature (material written by men and women of non-dominant cultures in the U.S.), moving it from the edges (or margins) of your world into the center. We focus on four groups: African American, Native American, Mexican American, and Japanese American. We study stories, poems, narratives, autobiographies, music and visual art from these communities. We complicate the issue of labels by looking also at gender relationships and histories within these communities, using a relatively small handful of texts. On your own, you study one author from one of these communities not on our syllabus, in preparation for a small group presentation and your final research essay. We start by asking these questions: What is “American” storytelling? What stories do Americans tell? Is there one American story? How do ethnicity and gender affect stories told about our lives in the United States? What do they allow? What do they not allow? What do they make possible? What do they disrupt? How are ethnic literatures different from canonical American Literatures? How are ethnic literatures important to the overall history of the United States? Why are these stories important for you?
- Philosophy 242 - Social Inequality and Fair Opportunity (3). An exploration of the different range of opportunities available to various social groups, including racial, ethnic and sexual minorities, women, and the poor. Topics include how to define fair equality of opportunity; the social mechanisms that play a role in expanding and limiting opportunity; legal and group-initiated strategies aimed at effecting fair equality of opportunity and the theoretical foundations of these strategies; as well as an analysis of the concepts of equality, merit and citizenship, and their value to individuals and society.
- Philosophy 254: Philosophy of Family (3). This course considers philosophical issues raised by family as a social institution and as a legal institution. Topics addressed include the social and personal purposes served by the institution of family, the nature of relationships between family members, the various forms that family can take, the scope of family privacy or autonomy, and how family obligations, mutual support, and interdependency affect individual members of families.
- Politics 255: Gender and Politics (3). Prerequisite: POL 100, 105 or 111 or permission of the instructor. This course investigates the gendered terms under which women and men participate in political life. Attention is given to the causes of men’s and women’s different patterns of participation in politics, to processes that are likely to decrease the inequalities between men’s and women’s political power, and the processes by which society’s gender expectations shape electoral and institutional politics. The different effects of gender on the practice of politics in different nations are compared, with a special emphasis placed on advanced industrial democracies.
- Religion 215: Female and Male in Western Religious Traditions (3). An investigation of views about the body, human sexuality, and gender in Western religious traditions, especially Judaism and Christianity, and of the influences of these views both on the religious traditions themselves and on the societies in which they develop. The course focuses on religion and society in antiquity and the Middle Ages, but also considers the continuing influence of religious constructions of the body and sexuality on succeeding generations to the present.
