As reproductive health, immigration, and LGBTQ+ equity continue to make local, national, and global headlines, three Winter 2023 courses in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies provide students with historical context and feminist frameworks for critical analysis of debates surrounding these issues. Students will learn how structural forces play out in personal lives, as well as how to restore histories of resilience and survivance as inspirations to action.
GWSS 299: Colloquium on Reproductive Justice Politics (C/NC, 2 credits)
Co-Instructors: Chandan Reddy & Sasha Welland
This colloquium series presents a survey of ongoing reproductive justice efforts and debates, engaging field-practitioners, activists, and scholars. Guest speakers involved in the current on-the-ground response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade will provide a range of perspectives on the topic, including historical legacies of past reproductive justice movements, as intertwined with those of the present, and analyses of contemporary local and global politics.
GWSS 390: Chicana/Latina Feminisms (5 credits)
Instructor: Elizabeth Ramírez Arreola
This course explores Chicana/x & Latina/x Feminisms through key writings, film, drama, art, and activism. Students read literature and essays describing the resilience and agency of Chicana/xs and Latina/xs in the U.S. Attention to the concept of intersectionality guides an understanding of the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other terrains of difference as they gain meaning from each other, and the ways feminism is utilized to combat multiple levels of oppression. The course engages in testimonio production as a decolonial research method foregrounding the narratives and experiences of primarily Chicanas/xs and Latina/xs in the U.S.
GWSS 490: Queer Futures (5 credits)
Instructor: Chandan Reddy
This course focuses on the most cutting-edge developments in 21st-century queer and transgender cultures, genders, social and sexual practices, art, and historical research. Students examine transformative impact of these developments on what societies value economically; mark as morally worthy; encourage as family and kinship; and normalize as bodily wholeness, sexuality, desirability beyond globally dominant norms of heterosexuality, nuclear family, and blood-based kinship. The course explores varied media including film, TV, podcasts, documentaries, autobiography, novels, etc. alongside scholarly articles and works to map a post-heterosexual future.