GWSS 501: Feminist Formations
Winter 2026
Tuesday 10:30-12:20
Friday 10:00-11:50
Sieg Hall 227
Sasha Su-Ling Welland
Email: swelland@uw.edu
Office: Padelford B-110J
Office/Student Hours: W 12:00-1:30 pm / Signup Link
Course Description
From the Course Catalogue:
Examines the relationship among: (1) feminist thought, as it emerges in everyday spaces and grassroots movements; (2) feminism as an intellectual formation; and (3) Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies as an institutional site. Focuses on locations and conjunctures at which this relationship emerges, as well as how feminist knowledge travels and is transformed over time.
Further Details:
As the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies celebrates its 55th anniversary at the University of Washington and faces intensified animus against its mission of feminist knowledge production and political praxis, this course takes the moment as an opportunity to take stock and forge ahead. When, at the start of the twenty-first century, departments like ours that had achieved departmental status and intellectual recognition, its proponents asked about the cost of institutionalization within the academy. For example, in Women’s Studies on the Edge (2008), editor Joan Wallach Scott asked, “did we run the risk of affirming a system we sought to radically alter?”
We currently find ourselves at a different historical edge, one of institutional precarity rather than success, that yet requires a similar commitment to feminism’s critical edge, “to self-scrutiny as well as to denunciations of domination and oppression.” With that in mind, this course is organized around key debates over the decades since our founding in 1970. We will explore these debates as conjunctures of grassroots social movement, feminist queer theory, and the institutionalization of GWSS in the academy, with knowledge sharing and tensions across these domains, to ask what critical edge they provide as we strategize feminist futures in the current moment.
As we re-engage texts from a field that’s always been in formation, always on the edge, students will collaboratively dig into the ways these texts connected to movements within and beyond the academy. You will reflect on the social, political, economic, historical context in which these thinkers wrote; and engage in imagined and real conversations with them about how that knowledge can be brought to bear on our contemporary situation, as well as your feminist interventions in the university and the world.