Queering Class: Winter 2021 Edition

Dyanna Bateman (she/her)

Looking for some last minute classes to add to next semester? Here’s your guide to all the LGBTQ+ classes being offered at UM for Fall 2021.

This LGBTQ+ Course Guide features classes that are specifically focused on LGBTQ+ topics, and classes that are focused on other subjects but include an LGBTQ+ perspective. (All descriptions have been taken directly from lsa.umich.edu/cg and compiled for your convenience.)

AAS 104 - First Year Humanities Seminar: Black Women in Popular Culture (Lydia Kelow-Bennett)
Serena Williams. Beyoncé. Oprah. Each of these Black women have captured mass attention in U.S. culture for different reasons. Popular culture is an important site for creating, challenging, and transmitting meanings about race, gender and sexuality. What can we learn about blackness and gender using the lens of popular culture, and what can critical approaches in Black Studies and Black Feminism reveal about the meanings made in popular culture? In this course, we will examine how Black women construct and are constructed by popular culture in the U.S. by building a set of critical tools that can help us navigate this rich terrain. We will explore topics such as representations of Black femininity, Black sexualities and representation, stereotypes, and subversive media over a wide range of popular culture artifacts. Throughout the course, we will trouble the term “popular” and think deeply about questions of power. (And yes, we will definitely talk about Beyoncé). Check out this link for an example of the texts we will analyze in this course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P00HMxdsVZI

AAS 304 - Gender and Immigration: Refugees of Unjust Worlds: Globalization, Gender and Nation (Amal Hassan Fadlalla)
Refugees, migrants, immigrants, diaspora groups, and transnational actors are all terms that describe people who undertake different acts of mobility or travel across borders to seek refuge. But how are these terms different? This course focuses on these various acts of mobility to show how they are labeled differently under different political and social circumstances. We examine the gendered cultural and political meanings people and governments give to mobility, border-crossing, and displacement in this turbulent time in the era of globalization and transnationalism. In this course we will also emphasize the experiences of both old and new generations of immigrants in order to understand the historical context of migration, globalization, and the processes involved in the imagination of place and nation building. One important lesson that students learn in this class is that the political processes that define the often-conflated meanings attached to the refugee, immigrant, and diaspora population cannot be divorced from histories of nationalism and transnationalism and their deeply rooted constructions in gender, race, ethnic, and class relations. Race, ethnicity, and sexism are significant components, and the course addresses them through cross-cultural ethnographies, media reports, documentary films, art, and other texts to explain how citizens and non-citizens are marked differently based on both legal and cultural terminologies. Students also learn that systems of racialization and discrimination don’t just happen at the moment of border-crossing or when refugees, migrants, and diaspora populations settle in new homelands; these modes of exclusion are also experienced in various forms in their countries of origin. Some of the forces that lead to situations of refugee-ness, migration, and dispersal include religious, ethnic, gender, racial, and political discrimination encountered at home. The course examines the different forms of these discriminations and how refugee, immigrant, and diaspora communities encounter them, live them, negotiate them, and resist them through their own cultural practices and other strategies of activism. We will particularly explore how questions of power, race, and class intersect to shape refugees and immigrants’ daily struggles for justice and human rights. How do refugees and immigrants attempt to create and “imagine” their own social world with reference to their new locations and their homelands? Our readings and discussion will focus on cultural and theoretical perspectives from the social sciences, specifically anthropology, history, and literature. And we will take as examples the ethnographies and narratives of immigrants from different parts of the world, specifically Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The seminar is intended for junior and senior undergraduates but sophomores are also welcome.

AAS 323 - Black Feminist Thought and Practice (Sarallen Strongman)
What is Black Feminism? In this course, we will explore the history of Black women’s gendered and racial politics in the United States and, in particular, how their beliefs and experiences have differed from other groups. How have Black women pushed back against and attempted to reshape traditional, Eurocentric, “white feminist” politics? How have Black Feminist responses to racism diverged from and challenged mainstream and Black masculinist political scripts? We will explore these questions as well as representations of Black women’s sexuality and political activism. Course readings are drawn from a variety of disciplines and time periods with the goal of exposing students to the history of Black Feminist thought and the breadth of Black Feminist scholarship, activism, and methodologies. By the end of the semester, students will be conversant in the major concepts of Black Feminism and Black Women’s Studies and have developed the analytical tools to understand how race, gender, and class interact to produce the unique experiences of Black women in the United States.

AAS 358 / HISTORY 328 / WGS 341 - Black Queer Histories (Jennifer Jones)
This course will introduce students to historical narratives that center on same-gender intimacies and gender non-conformity in African Diasporic communities. Students will survey the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on such topics and interrogate how black queer cultural workers craft(ed) historical narratives (via films, poems, plays, and fiction) to (re)imagine pasts and possible futures.

AAS 365 / WGS 365 - Global Perspectives on Gender, Health, and Reproduction (Amal Hassan Fadlalla)
Feminists and anthropologists have produced voluminous work on the body as a site of gendered and sexualized practices. Building on this rich corpus of literature, the course uses the body as a point of entry to examine the constructions and meanings of gender, health and reproduction, and their constitution of social differentiation. By using various cross-cultural examples, we will discuss how gender, racial, and class differences are enacted and manifested in the divisions of social spaces and in bodily conduct, function, hygiene, and sickness. In its entirety, the course attempts to introduce students to the complexity of the local and global processes underlying the cultural production of gender identities and social differentiation.

AAS 394 - Junior Seminar in Professional Writing: Flawless/Formation/Freedom: Writing About Race, Gender & Popular Culture (Scott Poulson-Bryant)
This is a creative non-fiction writing workshop in which we will think about creative nonfiction writing as cultural reportage. We will read a survey of cultural reportage—primarily personal essays, reviews, and opinion pieces—for textual, cultural, and aesthetic analysis to think about the ways that race, gender, and sexuality intersect and operate thematically and politically in that writing. Our study of this writing will impact the main focus of this class: It is a writing workshop, in which each student will present her or his work for critique. Writing assignments will be expected of each student and possibly lead to the production of a class-produced blog or magazine at the end of the semester.

ALA 170 - Social Identity, Social Inequality & Social Media: An Introduction to Intergroup Relations (Stephanie Hicks)
What are social identities? Why do they matter? How do they impact how we interact across groups, both in-person and online? This introductory course will provide a survey of sociological, social-psychological, and social justice education theory as it relates to social identity and intergroup relations. Race, class, gender, citizenship, and sexual orientation -among other social identity categories- will be explored, as well as corresponding systems of oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, etc.) How are we socialized to interact across groups? How does that socialization uphold systems of oppression, and how does our participation in social media provide opportunities to engage these systems, and resist them? We will consider Critical Media Literacy as a framework for understanding and evaluating digital resources around social identity and intergroup relations, and evaluate our own and others' use of social media as a tool for liberation.

AMCULT 103 - Digital Feminisms
This class will address creative and political practices and scholarly dialogue surrounding current themes in new media and digital culture from an interdisciplinary feminist perspective. We will examine the histories and cutting-edge scholarship on feminism and technology produced through art, design, science, and visual media. Topics include cyberfeminism; social change and political activism through digital media; post-digital reproductive technologies and feminist futures; digital sexualities and intimacies; virtual/real-world ideas across cultures; and the role of digital technologies in social inequalities. In addition to digital and new media theory, key readings will come from women’s, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race and ethnicity studies; examples will come from art, culture, and politics.

AMCULT 240 / WGS 240 - Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies (Allison Alexy)
A survey introduction to the critical, theoretical, and historical study of women and gender from feminist and cross-cultural perspectives. Readings range across a wide body of feminist scholarship in order to familiarize students with key questions, theoretical tools, and issues within the field. The course aims to sharpen critical awareness of how gender operates in institutional and cultural contexts, in students’ own lives, and the lives of others. Two questions are central to the course: How is gender created and maintained through social practices (e.g., ideology, media representations, social norms)? How do gendered social practices intersect with other social categories, such as race, ethnicity, class, disability, and sexuality? Because Women’s and Gender Studies grew out of activism, this course will explore the relationship between how we generate critical knowledge about gender and how we work to use this knowledge to promote social justice at gender's intersection with other identities. The course materials are drawn from the US but also other cultural contexts.

AMCULT 301 - Media Activism
Media is a powerful tool. The term “media activism” refers to how media is used to campaign for or bring about social or political change. This class will primarily focus on how underrepresented identity-based and cause-based groups in the United States have used different kinds of media forms and practices in the service of social justice activism. We will examine various social movements, including AIDS activism, Black Lives Matter, the anti-war movement, Palestine solidarity, and Occupy Wall Street, and examine the media texts and practices these movements employ, such as culture jamming, street art, documentary, and narrative film, film festivals, public television, social media, and memes. We will read interdisciplinary texts from the fields of film and media studies, critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and postcolonial studies to interrogate the relationships between representation and power, and to identify how and why certain forms of media activism emerge at particular historical moments.

AMCULT 311 / ENGLISH 317 / WGS 344 - Race, Gender, Sexuality in Transatlantic Literature to 1830 (Ittai Orr)
This seminar investigates the rise of stereotypes, shared identities, and norms as they took shape in the first three centuries of European colonization of North America. How did the division of labor in the colonies produce ideas about race, gender, and sexuality? How did people understand their attractions and gender identities? When and why did categories like “black,” “red,” and “white” come to be universally understood? Readings will include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, William Earle Jr.’s Obi, or the History of Three-Fingered Jack, private diaries, letters, and Native- and African-American memoirs. Assignments include a short essay on a text in class and a longer final essay that investigates the history of a keyword in the form of a traditional research paper or an online Storymap or Timeline exhibit.

AMCULT 311 / ENGLISH 317 / WGS 344 - Trouble Man: Black Masculinity and R&B Music, 1945-84 (Michael Awkward)
This course seeks to demonstrate the extent to which Black popular music both reflects and challenges abiding perspectives on the meanings and appropriate performances of gender, race, and class. Beginning with Ray Charles’s “A Got a Woman” and Louis Jordan’s “A Man Ain’t a Man (Until a Woman Calls His Name),” each week we will investigate a seminal R&B song or theme in order to explore how representations of black American masculinity reflect – and reflect upon – vital issues in the civil rights and post-civil right eras. In addition, we will look closely at reviews, biographies, histories, and scholarship, along with contemporaneous songs that explore similar themes, to examine how these tracks speak to the urgencies – political, social, domestic, sexual, and economic – of the relationship between black American male identities and popular musical production. The artists we will examine, in addition to Charles and Jordan, may include: James Brown, Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton/Parliament, the O’Jays, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, Teddy Pendergrass, Sylvester, Rick James, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Luther Vandross.

AMCULT 348 - History of American Radicalism (Howard Brick)
This course offers a general history of radical, left-wing movements in the United States that were intended to challenge varied forms of inequality, domination, exploitation, or violence and to foster some kind of emancipatory reconstruction of American life and government. With some attention to early forms of artisans´ and workingmen´s radicalism, as well as the antebellum abolitionist and women´s rights movement, we will focus on the development and the fate of a modern Left — from the labor, anarchist, socialist, and communist movements through the Black freedom struggle and the New Left of the 1960s, feminism, gay liberation, union democracy movements and beyond. We will try to understand the aspirations and ideas, forms of organization and activism, dilemmas and weaknesses, relations to mainstream politics and repressive authority, successes and failures in each of these cases.  The course will conclude with a study of radicalism in the late 20th century and early 21st century: women´s, environmentalist, antiwar, and queer activism of the 1980s; the organization of street protests in response to "globalization," signaled dramatically in the “Battle of Seattle” of late 1999; and the advent of “Occupy Wall Street” in the global “year of the protester,” 2011. We conclude with a discussion of debates from 2012 to the present over social inequality in the United States, including popular protest against police violence and mass incarceration.

AMCULT 366 /HISTORY 353 / WGS 366 - Sex and Sexuality in U.S. Popular Culture (Anthony P Mora)
We will explore how changing ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender appeared in certain types of twentieth-century popular culture. As a group, we will learn to interpret media, such as movies or television, as historical texts that provide insight into past notions about sex in the United States. To this end, we will start with the assumption that media functions as mechanisms of socialization and as a venue for expressing popular concerns or beliefs about gender roles, same-sex desire, race, and so forth. We will uncover how the media represented historical issues such as courtship among heterosexuals, pornography, gay liberation, and birth control through a weekly film lab. At the same time, we will seek to uncover the voices of groups that the mainstream media have often omitted (or actively sought to silence) in discussions about sex. To that end, much of our course reading will draw from academics engaged in an assortment of overlapping fields. Students will be introduced to scholarship in race and ethnic studies, queer studies, feminist studies, and so forth. Students should be aware that certain course materials contain sexually explicit language and/or images. Some images include nudity and/or sexually graphic content.

AMCULT 371 / HISTORY 371 / WGS 371 - Sex and Gender in U.S. History, 1600-2015 (Mary C Kelley)
Beginning in seventeenth-century British America, this course will focus upon the experiences of American women--black and white, native and settler--from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. We will explore the family structure, gender expectations, and cultural practices. We will look closely at intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class and the role they play in the development of self-identity. The changing concepts of equality and difference, as employed by women and men in articulating gender relations, will serve as a theoretical framework for our examination.

AMCULT 405 - Dancing Women/Dancing Queer (Clare Holloway Croft)
Integration was central to both the theories and practices of mid-twentieth-century American race relations. This course brings together content and methods from dance studies and performance studies to consider responses to integration, from landmark civil rights legal decisions to social and art movements that questioned mainstream understandings of integrations' potential denial of racial difference. The course will be anchored in key examples drawn from American dance from 1930-1970, but will also include the study of complementary performances in theatre and musical theatre. The course will develop students' performance analysis skills through close readings of choreographic works, plays, and librettos, as well as introducing students to performance studies' approaches appropriate for considering embodied forms of public engagement, including civil rights protests and political speeches, as performance. Interweaving dance and performance studies in a final writing project will provide undergraduate students with a dance-specific paper appropriate for application to graduate programs in dance studies and performance studies. The class will also provide historical and theoretical concepts students can deploy in their work as artists and as critically-engaged audience members. Credit earned in this course will count toward the History and Ideas requirement for dance majors.

AMCULT 425 - Feminist Practice of Oral History (Emily Lawsin)
Do you have a Grandma/Lola/Auntie/Role Model you've always wanted to learn more about, but never have enough time to just sit and chat? Or a Research Project/Thesis that you have to do interviews for, but just don't know where to start? Have you been searching for a small seminar where you can learn a really good skill in-depth? THEN THIS ORAL HISTORY CLASS IS FOR YOU! This course focuses on the theory and practice of collecting oral histories of women. We will examine various methods of conducting interviews, with a concentration on the feminist perspective. We will discuss theoretical issues such as relationships between the interviewer and interviewee, "insider-outsider" perspectives, our role as "narrator", legal and ethical issues, the reliability of memory, and how the complex intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality are reflected in women's life stories. We will also explore how material and cultural artifacts are made, and how meaning is produced in oral history narratives. Students will learn different strategies of how to prepare for, conduct, and process an oral history interview; how to develop an interview question guide, how to do background research, how to phrase questions to get the most out of an interview, and what type of equipment choices one has. Towards the latter half of the course, we will cover post-interview processing, including transcribing, editing, indexing, and presenting the interview. Students will have the opportunity to uncover "new" historical findings within our local community, by conducting an interview with one woman, adding to the oral history research available on women.

AMCULT 498 / WGS 431 - Advanced Topics in LGBTQ Studies: Trans Times and The Futures of Gender (Scott Larson)
Is the future Trans? Even though gender variance has long been part of human experiences and communities, trans-ness seems to always be something new, something on the horizon. In this class, we will explore movements for trans freedom, trans youth & elders, and technologies of identity and identification. We will pay particular attention to the role of policing, state surveillance, and biopolitical distribution of life chances, and the ways that structural inequalities based on race, class, ability, citizenship, and religion enable some futures while limiting others.

ANTHRCUL 446 / WGS 446 - Sex and the City: Urban Geography and Sexual Locations (Gayle S. Rubin)
This course examines contemporary sexual diversity in the context of urban geography, urban studies, and the political economies of sexuality and space. It addresses the spatial locations of sexual populations and situates the formation and disappearance of sexual neighborhoods and territories in terms of the larger dynamics of urban life. Some of the material includes some general aspects of LGBTQ history and the politics of sex work. More specific topics include relationships between urban size and sexual specialization, the impact of redevelopment and gentrification on the texture of urban neighborhoods, and studies of red-light districts, gay neighborhoods, trans territories, and lesbian locations.

ANTHRCUL 454 / HISTORY 474 - What is Marriage?: Histories and Structures of Marital Institutions (Gayle S Rubin)
Although marriage is often assumed to be a universal and more or less consistent institution, what we call marriage is a variable and changing bundle of arrangements, relationships, and expectations. These can include status, residence, rights, obligations, property, sex, inheritance, offspring, and heirs. Moreover, weddings-- the conventional, legal, or ritual process by which a marriage is established -- also vary widely in different social and historical contexts. This class will explore some of the range of institutional forms that have been called marriage, as well as the specific histories of marriage in the Christian West which have shaped so much of the way marriages are made, unmade, and understood in the contemporary United States. It will include case studies of marital institutions from other societies and cultures and will touch on issues of divorce, illegitimacy, interracial marriage, and same-sex marriage. The class will be a group exploration: a seminar in which we read and discuss works of literature together.

ARCH 216 / HISTART 216 - Contested Spaces: Art, Architecture, Politics (Ana Maria Leon)
This course encourages students to think critically about how specific sites and objects have participated in the construction of class, race, gender, body ability, and other socially constructed markers of difference. Building on the histories of art and architecture, the course proposes the category of "space" as an alternative to the geographic, aesthetic, and analytic categories that have shaped the canons of these two disciplines. We address the architecture of those excluded from these canons by examining how objects and sites structure social relations and broader networks of power. Each week we address a type of "space" central to the formation of modernity in the Americas. We discuss these spaces through on objects and sites from different historical times and geographical locations across the region. The course first introduces notions of forum, commons, and protest as a primer to the course's own policies of inclusion and participation. In the first part of the semester, we focus on notions of otherness as they breach public and private spheres. We start in 1492, a moment of encounter that generated contacts, trade, and exchange and led to the construction of modernity and its myths. We trace the networks of colonial trade and slave exploitation, connecting distant sites and reciprocal influences through the spaces of the colony and the plantation. We explore the kitchen as a source of both community and segregation, the closet as a metaphorical construction of secrecy and forbidden sexuality, and the slum as the outcome of systemic racism. In the second half of the semester, we turn to institutional spaces, putting together the critique of Michel Foucault and Tony Bennett with more recent discussions on abolitionism and immigration to examine the border, the prison, the school, and the museum. The use of a core spatial construct as the base of each lecture enables the course to range broadly within a long date span while also offering students concrete, in-depth knowledge of key objects and sites, concluding with a contemporary point of view. By examining these contested spaces, we challenge canonical narratives and reveal the fundamental role of class, race, and gender struggle in the construction of modernity.

ASIAN 352 / WGS 352 - Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Premodern China (SE Kile)
This course explores gender and sexuality in China before the 20th century. Are “women” and “men” useful categories of analysis for premodern China, or did people think of themselves in other terms? What role did bodies, duties, virtues, and desires play in relationships among people? What role did writing play in negotiations of gender roles and expressions of sexual desire in premodern China? In this course, you will learn how gender and sexuality functioned in a range of premodern discourses and practices. We will begin by reading foundational Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian texts that prescribe gendered roles and virtues. We will bring these into conversation with the conception of the body and sex difference presented in traditional medical texts, which drew on all of these traditions. In the second part of the course, we will investigate the relationship between writing and gender, asking how people described gender and sexuality in letters, poetry, plays, novels, and short stories. We engage these experimental, utopian, or prescriptive gendered textual spaces with an interest to understand how people conceived of the delights and dangers, possibilities, and constraints of the negotiations between their bodies and texts. We will occasionally take our investigation beyond the textual realm to consider other sorts of objects: paintings, decorative objects, book illustrations, and theatrical performances. We will conclude by evaluating attacks on the traditional sex-gender system by feminist modernizing movements at the turn of the 20th century.

ASIANPAM 102 - First Year Seminar in Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies: Food & Gender in the Asian American Community (Emily P Lawsin)
This first-year seminar introduces students to historical and contemporary issues of Asians in America, through the lens of food and culture. We will examine how foodways often shape gender roles, labor, power dynamics, and Asian American identity. Focusing on, but not limited to, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Indian, and Vietnamese American communities, we will explore how (as acclaimed author Frank Chin puts it) "Food is our only common language." Students will learn: How gender, like food, is a cultural construct;? The historical impact of legislation and immigration on communities and culinary practices; The strategies that various Asian communities have used to survive in America; and? An introduction to contemporary issues and foodways in Asian American communities.

CLCIV 303 - Women in the Ancient Mediterranean (Anna Bonnell Freidin)
Women make up half the population, and yet we have little evidence of their experiences in their own words for most of human history. This course engages creatively and deeply with the limits of historical knowledge by exploring the lives of women in antiquity. Focusing on the multicultural world of the Roman empire, we will examine the roles of women in the political, domestic, and religious spheres, as well as how women were implicated in major cultural transformations, such as the rise of Christianity. Through sources that include literary texts, medical treatises, material culture, and works of art, students will learn to read against the grain in order to explore the opportunities and obstacles that women faced long ago – and, in certain ways, still, face today.

COMM 340 - Gender and the Media (Jimmy Draper)
This course introduces the study of gender in contemporary U.S. media. It provides you with tools, strategies, and language to critically assess how creative industries construct and otherwise engage with ideas about gender and its intersections with sexuality, race, class, and disability. To do this, we apply concepts and theories to wide-ranging representations and discourses in media culture, from fashion ads and Instagram feeds to romantic comedies, memes, music videos, and more. Assignments offer opportunities for you to analyze media and topics of personal interest.

DIGITAL 158 - Digital Feminisms (Irina Aristarkhova)
This class will address creative and political practices and scholarly dialogue surrounding current themes in new media and digital culture from an interdisciplinary feminist perspective. We will examine the histories and cutting-edge scholarship on feminism and technology produced through art, design, science, and visual media. Topics include cyberfeminism; social change and political activism through digital media; post-digital reproductive technologies and feminist futures; digital sexualities and intimacies; virtual/real-world ideas across cultures; and the role of digital technologies in social inequalities. In addition to digital and new media theory, key readings will come from women’s, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race and ethnicity studies; examples will come from art, culture, and politics.

DIGITAL 258 / ENGLISH 216 - Neurodiversity and Digital Culture
Neurodiversity—shorthand for neurological diversity—is gaining broader cultural recognition. In this course, we will consider neurodiversity as both a movement and a way to move. That is, we’ll routinely investigate neurodiversity as a site of activism and as an orientation toward the world. We will discuss the neurodiversity movement’s history and its formations online, with particular attention paid to the movement’s broader reaches across disability coalitions (such as mad pride, psychiatric survivorship, and mental health consumer discourse) and its intersections with disability justice, BIPOC organizing, and queer/trans activism. During our time together, we will also explore the ways in which neurodivergent people narrate their own lives, as well as the ways in which neurodivergent people move through and against complex social institutions and digital cultures. Among other things, we’ll analyze social media, explore the neurodiversity blogosphere, examine in/accessible technology, and read scholarship, all in order to develop an understanding of disability as a complex part of the world and human experience.

DIGITAL 368 / FTVM 368 - The Internet of Identities (Sheila C Murphy)
This class will examine both representations of identity and the lived experiences of users online. During the early history of the Internet, gender play and experimentation were practiced in many ways, from games to seemingly non-fictional self-representations. Despite this sense of free play, representations of online gender often became stereotypical, shoring up categories like "geek" and "cute" in, particularly technological contexts. While we no longer live in an era when the Internet is an anonymous place, online cultures still celebrate identity and representation. This course takes a media studies approach that is informed by cultural studies, material history, and cultural ethnography.  Along the way, we’ll study selfies, profiles, social media platforms, online socialities, race, gender, class, sexuality, labor, toxic geeks, cyberfeminisms, trolls, glitter, cuteness, Black Twitter, virtual signaling, and many more complex ways we make and are made within digital media culture. In this seminar-style course, we will endeavor to understand how Internet users and cultures express, represent, and gives us an opportunity to consider how identities are made. Two key questions will guide us: How are online selves worn and performed? How do social forces like platforms and communities shape our understanding of online identities?

ENGLISH 314 / WGS 314 - Gender and Sexuality Studies in Literature (Daniel Valella)
What meanings do the terms “queer” and “of color” carry? How do different literary and artistic genres represent the experiences of (racial, sexual, gender, or other social) minorities? What relationships can we trace between textual legibility (how a work of art can, or asks to, be interpreted) and cultural legibility (how an individual or community can, or asks to, be identified)? In this course, we will explore these questions as we read, watch, and evaluate artistic works that transport us across the globe—from Parisian bars to the Rio Grande Valley to Philippine jungles to Oklahoman indigenous communities. In our travels across space, time, and genre, we will consider the benefits—as well as the limitations—of understanding the term “queer” not simply as a reference to LGBT identities but, more expansively, as a signifier of opposition to any number of sociopolitical norms. Similarly, we will contemplate what can be gained (or lost) by taking comparative and intersectional approaches to the study of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and nation. How useful is it, for instance, to understand subjects as “of color” rather than “black” or “Asian”? What do we learn when we shift our focus from, say, “Latinos” or “the gay community” to “trans-Afro-Latinas in the U.S.”?

ENGLISH 340 - Queer Poetics (Aric David Knuth)
First, let’s acknowledge that it’s not always easy to say what makes a poem queer—but everyone should be able to agree on the fact that some poems are made up of material from the lives and hearts and minds of queer people—in both explicit and implicit ways. Queer love and romance, queer desire and sex, the complexities of gender, gender identity, and gender norms—there’s a whole world of poetry that allows us as readers to see these things in action through the (sometimes strange) performance of language that poetry invites us to witness. And because the mode of witnessing that poetry allows for is different from, say, what we might experience in a documentary mode—or even other literary genres like the fictional or the dramatic—poems can give us a special entry point into discussions of queerness, leading to questions and insights that can be harder to get to with other approaches. When Mark Doty asks, for example, in his book Atlantis, which chronicles his last days living on Cape Cod with his lover Wally, who was dying of AIDS: “What is a description, after all, / but encoded desire?” or when Natalie Diaz, in her Postcolonial Love Poem, writes: “Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me— / and I am demoned by those desires,” the poetry puts us right in the middle of these two queer poets’ lives, and allows us to ask questions about how desire works in those lives, what desire even is, really, and how it might differ from other, heteronormative ways we’ve understood desire in non-queer texts and spaces.

FRENCH 235 - Sociopolitical and Multicultural Issues (Eric Beuerlein)
Through current events and their historical background, this course focuses on some concepts essential to French and Francophone Studies, among which French slavery, colonialism, decolonization, migration, race relations, globalization, gender, and sexuality. While stressing a communicative approach and the four skills, the content components of this course will be presented simultaneously with a review and expansion of grammatical structures: What is the French Republic?, The European Union (past and present), Transatlantic and Multilateral Relations: a. Franco-American Historical Relations b. Globolization and its Opponents, Families and Sexual Identities: "Marriage for Evryone"-Same Sex Marriages and Parenthood-Gender Identities-Homophobia, Transphobia, Women: Rights and Inequalities (past and present)-Domestic Violence// Women Sexual Mutulation, France’s Multicultural Society-Slavery-Colonization-Immigration-Islam of France, A Multicultural "Francophone" : Stromae, Stylistic and multicultural analysis of his songs

FRENCH 379 - Studies in Gender and Sexuality: Families (David Caron)
If you were to choose between your family and your friends, who would you choose, and why? When is the family an oppressive structure? When is it a recourse against social and political oppression? What are the links between heterosexuality and capitalism? Is homosexuality inherently subversive? How are the private and the public spheres articulated, and for what purpose?
The focus of the course is the twentieth century and the modern family. In addition to short theoretical texts dealing with the construction of the modern bourgeois family, we will examine a variety of literary texts and visual media that challenge existing models and/or propose alternative ones.

FTVM 366 / WGS 343 - Women of Color Feminist Filmmaking (Melissa Phruksachart)
According to UCLA's 2020 Hollywood Diversity Report, 93% percent of senior executive positions in Hollywood are held by white people and 80% by men. Women of color feminist filmmaking imagines futures for people who fight patriarchy without the shield of whiteness. This course introduces students to some of the major films and theories in U.S. women of color feminist thinking, filmmaking, and artmaking from the 1970s to the present. We will not engage with material that merely depicts or represents women of color as objects of study. Instead, we’ll read essays and view films that theorize the aesthetic, social, and political differences made by various WOC perspectives. Upon successful completion of this course, you should be able to… Provide a working definition of women of color feminism; narrate its origins; and explain the difference it has made in North American theorizing, artmaking, and political organizing. Sketch the various contributions of queer, trans, Black, Chicanx, Latinx, Asian American, and/or Indigenous thinkers, activists, and artists to women of color feminisms. Read, interpret, and argue with scholarly essays. Produce analyses of films that take into account aesthetics, politics, and history.

HISTART 211 / WGS 211 - Gender and Popular Culture (Tara Ward)
Gender and popular culture are interrelated social constructs that have a profound impact on our everyday lives. Movies, TV, magazines, and the internet not only reflect what it means to be a man or woman today, they also inform those identities. This course will focus on the visual aspects of these phenomena and survey key methods for interpreting them, including the gaze, queer theory, radical feminist theory, Foucauldean theory, and issues of socioeconomic status. We will apply these theories to examples of contemporary American culture from Instagram and Bar Stool Sports to the suburban home and Beyonce. This process will also allow us to debate questions like: Does gender have to be binary? How does gender affect the experience of space? Is the availability of pornography affecting our ideas of gender? Why is child rearing such a contested domain? How does racial identity influence gender norms? And perhaps most importantly, who is missing from popular representations of gender?

HISTORY 496 - History Colloquium: Fascism from a Comparative Perspective (Dario Gaggio)
This course introduces students to the history of activism in the United States after WW II and it particularly emphasizes on the social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Students will be asked to analyze the origins, strengths, weaknesses, and impact of various movements and the important connections between them. Among these will be the LGBTQ movement, the Black Freedom Struggle, the Welfare Rights Movement, the Prisoner Rights Movement, the Chicano/a Rights Movement, the Asian- American Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, and many more. Students will draw from books, memoirs and primary documents, as well as will view numerous documentaries so that they not only have a good handle on what motivated various social and political movements and what their impact might have been, but also how those movements shine important light on politics today. Course meets fully online synchronously. This course meets the Upper Level Writing Requirement.

MIDEAST 295 - Sex and Gender in the Ancient Middle East (Jessie DeGrado)
Gender expression in the ancient Middle East and North Africa holds many surprises for a modern audience. Mesopotamian scribes believed that the world’s first author was a woman. In ancient Egypt, Pharaoh Hatshepsut used feminine pronouns but referred to themself as king and son—not queen or daughter. And in the temples of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, clergy crossdressed in religious ceremonies. This class studies gender as a social construct and considers the ways in which people in the ancient Middle East maintained and contested gender roles. We will read a variety of texts, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, and survey visual evidence to consider the complex interaction between the categories of gender and sexual orientation. We will also explore how modern assumptions about patriarchy, biological sex, and the Middle East can interfere with our ability to explore the full variety of gendered experiences in the ancient world.

MIDEAST 309 - Sin, Sex, and Desire: Romance in the Middle East (Cameron Cross)
What does it mean to love? As both a literary genre and a system of emotion, romance has played a crucial role in answering this question across the Middle East, from the novels of late antiquity (Greek and Latin) to medieval Islamic and Christian tales of love (Arabic, Persian, Turkish, French, and Georgian), including the great books of Layli & Majnun, the 1001 Nights, and the Haft Paykar. This class offers an introduction to the romantic tradition through a close reading of some of its prominent examples, with an eye for how they construct and subvert their own ideology: even as they vaunt chastity and fidelity, normative gender roles, and licit sex (typically heterosexual marriage) as ideal virtues, they simultaneously interrogate those ideals with numerous cases of betrayal, murder, castration, gender-bending, and illicit sex (incest, adultery). The role of women in society, and their agency in shaping their stories and destinies, lies at the center of this negotiation and will be a constant focal point for us throughout the course. Although we will connect these texts with modern examples, the bulk of our readings are drawn from the pre-modern period, which will afford us a better understanding of where romantic love comes from, and a diachronic view into points of difference and similarity with its modern incarnations. In this seminar class, students will develop a framework for critically unpacking contemporary notions of love, allowing them to reconsider how such seemingly universal experiences can be conditioned by society and culture, yet also to recognize the drives, emotions, and obsessions that we may know from our personal lives in people who lived and loved centuries ago and continents away.

NURS 220 / WGS 220 - Perspectives in Women's Health (Joanna Motino Bailey)
This course will review women's health issues from a feminist perspective. Topics covered will range from physiology of menstruation, sexuality, violence, disability, body image, mental health, childbirth to various constructions of health and disease across the lifespan. Constructions of gender and health and their intersections of social, racial, ethnic, and political aspects will be considered.

PHIL 486 / WGS 486 - Feminist Philosophy (Ishani Maitra)
This course offers a philosophical examination of gender and feminism as these relate to topics of traditional philosophical concern. Topics to be studied may include feminist moral and political philosophy, feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, and feminist theories of the self, sexuality, and society.

PSYCH 337 - Hormones and Behavior (Jennifer A Cummings)
In this upper-level Biopsychology course, we will examine how hormones can produce changes in behavior, as well as how behavioral interactions can alter hormones. Throughout the course, we will explore the hormonal influences on sex determination, sexual behavior, parental behavior, dominance and aggression, responses to stressful stimuli, immune function, and homeostasis, biological rhythms, learning and memory, and endocrine disruptors.

PSYCH 371 - Advanced Topics in Sexual and Gender Minority Mental Health (Craig Rodriguez-Seijas)
This course is designed for advanced undergraduate students to introduce research methods in clinical psychology. The course will help students become better consumers and producers of research in psychology. Lectures will cover the following topics: the need for scientific research in psychology, ethics of research, psychological measurement, research design, statistical tests, and examples of current psychological research in the popular press and scientific research articles.

PSYCH 401 - Advanced Research in Sexuality
This course will focus on developing research projects and collecting data on questions related to sexuality and gender, (including casual sex, monogamy, and safer sex issues).

PSYCH 457 - Gender and Development (Rona Carter)
Puberty represents the most salient developmental milestone in early adolescence (10 through 14 years of age). Although it is commonly thought of as the emergence of secondary sexual characteristics (e.g.,breast development, body hair growth), there are a multitude of other important biological, psychological, and social changes associated with puberty. This course examines several questions concerning the impact of pubertal change on social and emotional development during early adolescence. Does pubertal development contribute to the shifts in family relations during this time period? Does pubertal development prompt changes in existing peer social networks and friendships? How does the timing of pubertal development contribute to the onset of psychological problems? What kinds of experiences and relationships help pubertal children mature into healthy adolescents? In this course we will discuss these and other questions and will critically examine research methodology used to test these issues.

RCCORE 100 - Feminisms in Latin America (RC Professor)
Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of feminist mobilization in Latin America, punctuated by massive marches throughout the region to protest violence against women. This mobilization might seem to be unprecedented. Indeed, stereotypes of Latin America that circulate in the United States often depict it through the trope of machismo—a Spanish word that connotes clownish male chauvinism, sexism, and homophobia paired with female submissiveness. The reality of gender inequality and violence in the region was brought to public attention in the United States in 2018, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions banned immigration judges from considering the threat of domestic violence as a basis for refugee status for battered women from Central America. Sessions’ order was later overturned and the issue remains controversial. What went unremarked during this controversy is the role Latin American feminists played in identifying, denouncing, and combating gender-based violence and inequality, and in making visible the intricate connections between the violation of women’s rights and other forms of social or political persecution. This feminist activity did not appear suddenly, but developed throughout the history of Latin American women’s activism over more than 100 years.

RCCORE 334 / WGS 380 - Special Topics: Out of the Past: 20th Century LGBT History (David Thomas Burkam)
College students today have grown up in a “gay-aware” if not “gay-friendly” world. LGBT characters are everywhere on TV and in the movies. The debate over gay marriage fills the news with discussions of equal rights, states’ rights, and recently-lifted federal bans. In Michigan and other states, benefits for same-sex domestic partners are publicly championed by some cities and universities but regularly attacked in the legislatures.
How did LGBT people move from the mostly-anonymous fringe to front-and-center of today’s popular culture and political debates? This two-credit mini-course explores 20th century LGBT history in the United States through documentaries and archival research. We will be watching and discussing documentary films.

SOC 345 / WGS 345 - Sociology of Sexualities (PJ McGann)
Human sexuality is often thought of as a realm of experience outside of or "unmarked" by society. In contrast, this course introduces students to the myriad ways that sexual desire and sexual activity are structured by social relations, and to how sexuality, sexual practices, and sexual identities vary in time and space. Social scientific theories of sexuality are considered, and historical accounts of sexual practices are reviewed. Other topics include the emergence and elaboration of forms of sexual desire (“sexualities” or categories of sexual orientation/preference), sexual subcultures and communities; relationships between sexual identity and sexual behavior; sexual hierarchies; sexual ethics; the political manipulation of sexuality; the institutional nature of heterosexuality; and how sexuality as a social institution intersects with hierarchies of race, class, and gender.

SOC 447 / WGS 447 - Sociology of Gender (PJ McGann)
For individuals, gender is often an essential aspect of personhood and personal experience. But gender is also a cultural and structural system that differentiates members of society. At both the individual and institutional levels, gender intersects with race, class, and sexuality to structure identities, rights, privileges, and opportunities. Organized around investigation of the socially produced North American binary gender order, this course is an introduction to the sociological study of gender that focuses on gender as embedded in social life. Specific topics of study include gender identity, how children and adults "become" gendered and "do" their gender(s), gender as a symbolic system, gender and sport, desire and gender, trans, and intersex.

SOC 495 - Race & Sexuality (Margo Myra Mahan)
This seminar explores the intersections between race, sexuality, and violence in the making of Western modernity. Historical in scope, students will develop a broad theoretical understanding of how race, sexuality, and violence shape and construct one another and operate as systems of power. We will draw on other disciplines—from art history to literary analysis—in order to explore the ways in which race, sexuality, and violence have operated to create social hierarchies, construct normative categories, maintain relations of power, and shape individual identities at different historical moments. We will also consider the challenges of doing historical research on these topics, with particular attention to the silences that available sources do not address, and possibilities for overcoming them. 

SPANISH 232 - Second-Year Spanish: LGBTQA in the Hispanic World: Artistic and Cultural Manifestations (Yeray Ramos Silgado)
With this topic course, we will be provided with a general overview and a better understanding of the LGBTQA community/minority in the Hispanic World through a series of different artistic and cultural manifestations: politics, political linguistics, cinema, music, literature, painting, history, law, and society. Throughout the semester, three main thematic units will be covered. Each unit will have its own cultural content. These cultural aspects will be used not only for the correspondent cultural component of the course but also for the design of in-class and out-of-class grammar and vocabulary activities. The subtopics of each unit will be thematically related as well as the main movie, readings, and songs selected. Although not all the additional movies will be directly related to the different thematic units independently, other movies will be included so students can practice and improve their comprehension and listening skills while relating the language to the common thread: LGBTQA in the Hispanic World.

SPANISH 432 / WGS 462 - Gender, Sexuality, and Culture (Ana Sabau Fernandez)
In the wake of contemporary feminist movements across the hemisphere, this course provides a historical perspective to feminist politics and thinking in Latin America. Our discussions will follow two axes: first, we will explore the junctures at which feminism intersects with other struggles for change and constitutes a rich site for the critique of colonialism and social relations under capitalism; the second, by honing onto feminism’s creative potency to imagine and experiment with alternative arrangements for life. To do so we will analyze an array of texts both literary and philosophical as well as other forms of cultural expression like photography, painting, and film.

WGS 265 - Introduction to Transgender Studies (Andrea Bolivar)
Gender expansive individuals have existed all around the world since the beginning of time, and have long been subjects of scholarly inquiry. “Transgender,” on the other hand, is a recent social category. This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Transgender Studies. We will study how transgender is understood by various disciplines, including medicine, history, anthropology, sociology, women’s studies, and queer theory. More importantly, we will also engage with “trans” as an analytic, and examine how transgender has contributed to our ever-changing understandings of gender, sex, race, identity, the body, etc. This course takes an intersectional approach to gender, which locates transgender within specific cultural, political, social, and economic contexts, and always in relation to race, class, nationality, and disability. It pays particular attention to trans of color critique and people’s lived experiences. The course will cover major topics and debates within Transgender Studies. We will ask the following questions: What does “trans” mean? What is transgender studies and how does it differ from feminist thought and queer theory? How has transgender expanded notions of sex, sexuality, and the body? How do we understand transgender cross-culturally? How do trans and gender-nonconforming individuals, especially people of color, experience political and economic marginalization? What are trans politics? Class materials are interdisciplinary. In addition to academic texts, we will analyze manifestos, films, documentaries, blogs, essays, poems, music, and newspapers.

WGS 431 - Advanced Topics in LGBTQ Studies: Feminist and Queer Sex Work (Andrea Bolivar)
Sex work is a hotly contested issue. It animates impassioned, and often polarizing, discussion amongst feminists, activists, theorists, and people throughout society. Why do so many people, from diverse backgrounds and with different interests, feel so strongly about sex work? This class examines the ways in which feminist and queer scholars, activists, and sex workers understand sexual labor. We critically consider the boundary between what is—and isn’t--considered sex work, and look at various types of sexual labor. This course also reveals how feminist and queer analyses of sex work trouble taken-for-granted assumptions about a number of interrelated concepts, including: sex, intimacy, agency, authenticity, labor, pleasure, money, commodification, and victimization. This course takes a transnational and intersectional approach to sex work, and locates sexual labor within specific cultural, political, social, and economic contexts, and always in relation to gender, race, class, nationality and disability. We focus on the meanings and values that sex workers themselves attribute to sexual economies of labor. Course materials center the experiences, writings, and cultural productions of sex workers, especially those who are marginalized by their race and gender, such as sex workers of color, and transgender sex workers. Additionally, we study the role of sexual labor in the development of feminist, queer, and trans theorizing.

WGS 432 - Advanced Topics in Gender and Health: LGBTQ Reproductive Health (Cynthia A Gabriel)
This class surveys LGBTQ+ reproduction through several theoretical lenses. We will explore definitions of "family" and "parenting" across time and cultures. What makes someone a parent? What are the rights and responsibilities of this role? How has this role been defined in relationship to sexual orientation and biological relatedness across time and across cultures? We will explore the biological, social, cultural, and legal experiences of LGBTQ+ family-making, including explorations of pregnancy, childbirth, IVF and donor sperm/eggs, surrogacy, adoption, divorce, and marriage.

Looking for more?
Check out these majors and minors offered by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies:
Women’s and Gender Studies Major
Gender and Health Major
Gender and Health Minor
Gender, Race, and Nation Minor
LGBTQ and Sexuality Studies Minor