WGSS 396 - Advanced Seminar in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: WGSS 120, junior or senior standing, or instructor consent. This course provides an opportunity for advanced students to explore in detail some aspect of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Specific topics may vary and may be determined, in part, by student interest. May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different.

Winter 2022, WGSS 396A-01: Gender and the Body (3 credits). Prerequisite: WGSS 120 or permission of the instructor. This course examines the history of the body, as well as contemporary debates about gender and the body. We will examine how scientists have understood gendered bodies and encoded messages about power and status in these claims. We will also look at the creation of beauty standards and their relationship to structures of race and class. Other topics include reproductive politics, fatphobia, and ideas about desirability, with an eye to understanding how certain bodies - including those of Black, trans, queer, and fat individuals - have been targeted for surveillance and control. Students will gain an enhanced understanding how bodies can be sites of domination and oppression as well as spaces of liberation. Horowitz