Please stop by the office for our Spring 2009 course guide or click here to download a pdf version.
V3111 Feminist Texts I: Wollstonecraft to Beauvoir.
N. Kampen
Call#03365
R 9-10:50am, TBA
4pts. The important contributions to the elaboration of feminist thought in the West, evaluated through critical discussion. Analysis of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Goldman, Anna Cooper, Radclyffe Hall, C. P. Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, and others in an attempt to discover the roots of the contemporary feminist movement. Permission of instructor required. Enrollment limited to 20 students.
V3112 Feminist Texts II: Beauvoir to the Present.
E. Bernstein
Call#02735
T 2:10-4pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension
4pts. Contemporary issues in feminist thought. A review of the theoretical debates on sex roles, feminism and socialism, psychoanalysis, language, and cultural representations.
BC3117 Women and Film.
J. Beller
Call#09389
M 7:10-9:30pm & Disc. Sect. W 4:10-5:30pm, TBA
3pts. Critical interpretation of film from a feminist perspective and exploration of the relationship of gender to the language of film.
BC3125 Pleasures and Power: Introduction to Sexuality Studies.
R. Young
Call#07188
MW 2:40-3:55pm, TBA
3pts. This interdisciplinary course explores the historical origins, social functions, and conceptual limitations of the notion of "sexuality" as a domain of human experience and a field of power relations.
BC3134 Unheard Voices: African Women.
Y. Christianse
Call#03461
W 11am-12:50pm, TBA
4pts. Themes include the politics of the canon in Africa, the problems of language, post-colonial counterdiscourse, the African-American continuum, and Third World and Western feminism. Authors include Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Nawal El Saadawi, Miriam Tlali, Bessie Head, Alifa Rifaat, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Ama Ata Aidoo, Efua Sutherland, and Tess Onwueme.
V3312 Theorizing Women's Activism.
L. Collins
Call#07248
T 2:10-4:00pm, TBA
4pts. Helps students develop and apply useful theoretical models to feminist organizing on local and international levels. It involves reading, presentations, and seminar reports, as well as talks by guest lecturers. Students use first-hand knowledge of the practices of specific women's activist organizations as the basis for theoretical work. Prerequisites: Feminist Texts I or II and permission of instructor.
BC3515 Women in Israel.
I. Klepfisz
Call#08742
T 4:10-6pm, TBA
4pts. SThe course focuses primarily on the contemporary status and experiences of Jewish and non-Jewish women living in Israel, with sessions on: women and the law; Jewish minorities; Palestinian women; Jewish women and the military; violence against women; Israeli feminism; pre-State Israel and women and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
V3522 Senior Seminar II.
J. Crawford
Section 001
Call#81998
M 2:10-4pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension
4pts. Seminar for the preparation of the senior thesis for
Columbia’s Women’s and Gender Studies majors. Individual research in
Women’s and Gender Studies conducted in consultation with the
instructor.
T. Szell
Section 002
Call#01088
T 11am-12:50pm, TBA
4pts. Second semester of a seminar for the preparation of the senior thesis for Barnard majors. Individual research in Women's Studies conducted in consultation with the instructor. The result of each research projects submitted in the form of the senior essay and presented to the seminar. Open to Columbia majors.
V3813 Colloquium on Feminist Inquiry.
K. Gravdal
Call#27846
W 11:00am-12:50pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
4pts. Survey of research methods from the social sciences and interpretive models from the humanities, inviting students to examine the tension between the production and interpretation of data. Students will receive first-hand experience practicing various research methods and interpretive strategies, while simultaneously considering larger questions of epistemology about how we know what we know. Corequisites: Feminist Texts I or II and permission of instructor.
G4000 Genealogies of Feminism: Politics in the Wake of the Human
S. Hartman and N. Tadiar
Call#86787
T 11am-12:50pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension
These seminars are directed toward students with previous work in feminist scholarship but are open to all majors.
3pts. This course examines the formation of the human in the discourses of
modernity. The discourse of man, according to Aimé Césaire, has
generated a great heap of corpses and established a hierarchy of life
in which the well-being of Man is based on the sacrifice of his
subordinates and the creation of disposable persons. By looking at
political and juridical conceptions of the human in documents like the
1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, Dred Scott
vs. Sandford, the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, and The Congress of
Racial Equality’s We Charge Genocide, we will trace the discourse of
the human from the Age of Revolution to anti-colonial movements to
feminist struggles to establish women’s rights as human rights in
international law. The course will also examine contemporary theories
of the human and the post-human, conceptions of life and sociality
beyond the discourse of man, as well as the practices of freedom intent
upon re-describing the human and engendering new terms of order.
Lastly, we will consider the ways in which anti-racist, anti-colonial,
and feminist movements have tried to unsettle the discourse of Man
while remaining yoked by it.
The course reading will focus on
issues of slavery, coloniality, and disposable life in interrogating
the question of the human and attending to the excluded figures and
forms of abject existence considered external to or outside of the
embrace of Man.
Required Texts: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer,
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Aimé Césaire, Discourse
on Colonialism, J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, Veena Das, Life and
Words, Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Katherine Hayles, How We
Became Post-Human, George Jackson, Soledad Brother, Jamaica Kincaid,
The Autobiography of My Mother, Catherine MacKinnon, Are Women Human?,
Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety, Achille Mbembe, The Postcolony,
Fred Moten, In the Break, Yambo Ologuem, Bound to Violence, Orlando
Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.
In addition to these books
we will read essays by Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Patricia
Sellers, Bruno Latour, Joy James, Sharon Holland, Michel Foucault,
Samera Esmeir, Colin Joan Dayan, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Judith Butler,
Alan Badiou, and Theodor Adorno. This graduate
seminar fulfills one of the requirements of the Graduate Certificate in
Feminist Studies.
W4300 Advanced Topics in Women's and Gender Studies: Gender & Genre in African Literature.
J. Slaughter
Call#82192
T 4:10-6pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension
4pts. Gender and literary genre are both socially and culturally contingent
categories, and historically there seem to be some general affinities
between particular genres of literature (e.g., epic, novel, tragedy,
epistolary fiction, memoir, Bildungsroman, parables, the sentimental
novel) and gender. This course will explore the intersections of gender
and genre in African literature from the past half century. We will
consider not only the construction, transformation, and invention of
gender roles from the colonial to the postcolonial periods as they have
been represented in African literature, but also the ways in which
gender itself becomes associated with, and finds expression in,
particular story forms. In each of the texts we will read, questions of
gender identity are central: what does it mean to be a woman or a man
(or something else) in colonial society, in the decolonization
struggle, under a dictatorship, in the era of globalization? Along with
African and Africanist theoretical writings on gender, we will read
literary texts from across the continent. Likely authors: Achebe,
Adichie, Aidoo, Bâ, ben Jelloun, Dangarembga, Djebar, Emecheta, Farah,
Liking, Macgoye, Magona, Mda, Sembène, Soyinka, Vera, Wicomb, and
popular market literature.
W4303 Gender, Globalization, Empire.
N. Tadiar
Call#02345
R 11am-12:50pm, TBA
4pts. Study of the role of gender in economic structures and social processes comprising globalization and in political practices of contemporary U.S. empire. This seminar focuses on the ways in which transformations in global political and economic structures over the last few decades including recent political developments in the U.S. have been shaped by gender, race, sexuality, religion and social movements.
W4304 Gender, HIV, and AIDS.
R. Young
Call#01545
T 6:10-8pm, TBA
4pts. An interdisciplinary exploration of feminist approaches to HIV/AIDS with emphasis on the nexus of science and social justice.
W4305 Feminist Postcolonial Theory.
N. Tadiar
Call#06018
W 2:10-4pm, TBA
4pts. Examines important concerns, concepts and methodological approaches of postcolonial theory, with a focus on feminist perspectives on and strategies for the decolonization of Eurocentric knowledge-formations and practices of Western colonialism. Topics for discussion and study include orientalism, colonialism, nationalism and gender, the politics of cultural representations, subjectivity and subalternity, history, religion, and contemporary global relations of domination.
W4309 Sex, Gender and Transgender Queries.
E. Glasberg
Call#06678
M 4:10-6pm, TBA
4pts. Sex, sexual identity, and the body are produced in and through time. "Trans" - as an identity, a set of practices, a question, a site, or as a verb of change and connection - is a relatively new term which this course will situate in theory, time, discipline, and through the study of representation.
W4310 Contemporary American Jewish Women's Literature.
I. Klepfisz
Call#02095
R 4:10-6pm, TBA
4pts. Identifies trends in Jewish American women's writing of this period: integration of Jewish and feminist consciousness into Jewish women's mainstream writing; exploration through fictive narratives of women's roles in Jewish orthodox communities; recording of experiences of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and from Arab countries.
V4320 Thinking Sexuality: Queer Theories & Histories.
L. Duggan
Call#17598
W 4:10-6pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension
4pts. The course will cover a range of (mostly U.S. and mostly 20th-Century) materials that thematize gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender experience and identity. We will study fiction and autobiographical texts, historical, psychoanalytic, and sociological materials, queer theory, and films, focusing on modes of representing sexuality and on the intersections between sexuality and race, ethnicity, class, gender, and nationality. We will also investigate connections between the history of LGBT activism and current events. Authors will include Foucault, Freud, Butler, Sedgwick, Anzaldua, Moraga, Smith. Students will present, and then write up, research projects of their own choosing. Enrollment limited to 20 students.
G8001 Feminist Pedagogy.
A. Kessler-Harris
Call#96400
February 6, 13, 27 and March 6, 12-2pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
1pts. The goals of this course are to develop a community in which to discuss issues of feminist pedagogy: to ask what it means to teach as a feminist, to think about the gender dynamics of the classroom, and to think about feminist course content. This is a one-credit course so the demands are light: do the reading and assignments, and come to class prepared to discuss them.
Crosslisted Courses
83224 Women Writers in Renaissance Italy.
M. Martin
Call#26549
TR 9:10-10:25am, 511 Hamilton Hall
3pts. Same as ITAL V3224. This class will survey the writings produced by women in Italy’s sixteenth century. Primary texts will include: Boccaccio’s Decameron and On Famous Women; Lucrezia Marinella’s Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men; Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women, and more. We will consider the recurrent themes and motifs used by male and female authors to argue for and against women’s writing. Attention will also be given to the literary representations of gender and sexuality by female and male authors, and to how women’s writing interacted with male literary culture. Lectures will focus on close readings of primary texts. Lectures are in English. ALL writings are in both English and Italian.
83462 Music, Gender, and Performance.
E. Gray
Call#10792
TR 1:10-2:25pm, 404 Dodge Hall
4pts. Same as MUSI V3462. This seminar explores relationships between gender, music and performance from the perspective of ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, critical music studies, feminist and queer theory and performance studies. We examine debates around issues of sex and gender and nature and culture through the lens of musical performance and experience. Some questions we consider include: In what ways is participation in particular musics dictated by gendered conventions? What social purpose d these delineations serve? What might the voice tell us about gender or sexuality? What might music tell us about the body? What is the relationship between performance and the ways in which masculinity and femininity, homosexuality and heterosexuality are shaped? How can we think about the concept of nation via gender and music? How might the gendered performances and the voices of musical celebrities come to representor officially “speak” for the nation or particular publics? How does music shape our understanding of emotion, our experience of pleasure?
83710 American Literature & Culture: AIDS and the Politics of Literary Form.
M. Blount
Call#85035
R 2:10-4pm, TBA
4pts. Same as ENGL W3710. This seminar examines the formal and thematic tendencies of the artistic response to the AIDS crisis in the United States. Aside from the historical and political significance of that response, what does it tell us about questions of authorship, literary history, and artistic genre. This course will ask the larger theoretical question of the importance of sexuality in understanding artistic reception and production. Is it possible to argue that responses to the AIDS crisis help us to define some of the persisting characteristics of gay literature? In part, this course will focus on the elegy as a literary form that has been particularly useful in expressing same-sex erotic fulfillment and desire. By looking at how artists have represented the AIDS crisis, we may also get a sense of how gay men, especially, have turned to the elegy as a form of historical agency and political desire. We will analyze the work of a range of artists, theorists, and activists, especially Raphael Campo, Michael Cunningham, Douglas Crimp, Melvin Dixon, Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, Essex Hemphill, Paul Monette, Sonia Sanchez, Eve Sedgwick, and Susan Sontag.
84110 Classical Civilization: Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Greece.
H. Foley
Call#07500
MW 2:40-3:55pm, TBA
3pts. Same as CLCV V4110. Examination of the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed in ancient Greek society and represented in literature and art, with attention to scientific theory, ritual practice, and philosophical speculation. Topics include conceptions of the body, erotic and homoerotic literature and practice, legal constraints, pornography, rape, and prostitution. Prerequisites: Sophomore standing or permission of the instructor. General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA).
86506 Gender Justice.
K. Franke
Call#
TBA, TBA
3pts. Same as LAW L6506. This course will provide an introduction to the concrete legal contexts in which issues of gender and justice have been articulated, disputed and hesitatingly and provisionally resolved. Readings will cover issues such as Women and the Legal Profession, Sexual Harassment, Sex Role Stereotyping, Work/Family Conflict, Marriage and Alternatives to Marriage, Parenting, Domestic Violence, Reproduction and Pregnancy, Rape, Sex Work & Trafficking, Gender & Cultural Equality, and International Women's Rights. Through these readings we will explore the multiple ways in which the law has contended with sexual difference, gender-based stereotypes, and the meaning of equality in domestic, transnational and international contexts. So too, we will discuss how feminist theorists have thought about sex, gender and sexuality in understanding and critiquing our legal system and its norms. Students will be evaluated both on class participation and on a final take-home examination. For more information, go to: http://www2.law.columbia.edu/faculty_franke/Gender_Justice/home.html
88760 Seminar in Medical Anthropology: Sex Work, Trafficking, Health, and Human Rights.
C. Vance
Call#12206
M 3:00-4:50pm, TBA
3pts. Same as SOSC P8760. The seminar explores the use of ethnographic and social research methods in producing accurate, complex, and culturally grounded descriptions of diverse combinations of work, sexuality, migration, and exploitation, in the US and globally. The seminar examines contemporary issues of sex work and trafficking into forced prostitution, with emphasis on implications for public health and human rights. In addition, the seminar considers the relationship between social research and the development of policy and health interventions, as well as issues of representation. Historical background and current legal frameworks are also examined. Students from diverse disciplines are welcome. (Permission, email csv1@columbia.edu)
Gender Related Courses in Other Departments
For more information about these courses, including day/time, professor, and description, please look in our course guide.
American Studies
W3931 Topics in American Studies: Sec. 1 - Food and American Life.
W3931 Topics in American Studies: Sec. 2 - Equity in American Higher Education.
Anthropology
V3160 The Body and Society.
V3525 Introduction to South Asian History and Culture.
V3940 Ethnographies of the Middle East.
V3977 Trauma.
Barnard Leadership Initiative
BC3450 Women and Leadership.
East Asian Languages and Cultures
W3881 History of Modern China II: China in the 20th c.
English & Comparative Literature
W4503 20th c. Poetry: Race, Gender, and Poetic Form.
Ethnicity and Race
W1010 Introduction to Asian American Studies.
W3935 Political History of Sexuality in the Caribbean.
Dance
BC3583 Gender and Historical Memory in American Dance of the 1930s to the Early 1960s.
First-year seminar
BC1284 Staging American Identity.
BC1287 Experiences of Warfare.
BC1329 Women and Culture II.
BC1333 Women and Culture II.
French
W3421 Introduction to Francophone Studies II.
W3549 Love, Sex, and Gender in Modern French Culture.
G8516 Women in/of Disorder.
History
W3304 Modern Germany, 1900-2000.
BC3681 Women and Gender in Latin America.
BC3803 Gender and Empire.
BC4870 Gender and Migration: A Global Perspective.
BC4886 Fashion.
G8547 Colloquium in History of Women and Gender.
International Affairs
U6368 Women and Globalization.
U8470 Work/Family Policy In Advanced Industrialized Countries.
U8510 Women-Power: Impact of Public and Private Sector Policy.
U8785 Gender, Politics & Development.
U8792 Women & Non-Profit Management.
Law
L6252 Family Law.
L6506 Gender Justice.
L8006 Seminar: Domestic Violence and the Law.
L8157 Women in the Legal Profession.
L9232 Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic.
Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture
V2008 Contemporary Islamic Civilization.
Rehabilitation Medicine
M8815 Women's Health Issues.
Psychology
BC3152 Psychological Aspects of Human Sexuality.
G4615 Psychology of Culture and Diversity.
Sociomedical Sciences
P8720 History of Sexual Health Promotion.
P8727 Women, Children & AIDS.
P9719 Research in Gender, Sexuality, and Health.
Spanish and Portuguese
BC3510 Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Cultures
Urban Studies
Race, Gender, and Urban Violence.
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