GWSS 290 A, Black Gender: Manhood and Womanhood in the African American Community, MTWThF 11:30-12:20, SLN 15672, Professor Bettina Judd
This course engages the complexities of racial and gender identities within Black communities. We question the concepts of manhood and womanhood and their intersection with racial constructs as categories of personhood through the critical lens of Africana/African American Studies and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies. We will discuss how gender in the U.S. is mediated by race by focusing on intra-community or “insider” everyday conversations about race and gender within Black communities. This class makes use of popular culture, current events, and emphasizes the importance of creating a democratic learning community.
GWSS 290 B, Black Feminist Geographies, MTWThF 10:3-11:20, SLN 15673, Professor Kemi Adeyemi
This course explores how theorizations of geographic space are embedded in black feminist deconstructions of race, gender, sexuality, and power. Images, ideas, and assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality are enmeshed with how we think, feel, and move about the landscapes we move through—and black people, black women, and black queer people are often made to be a threatening presences that “need” to be policed, contained, and, more often than not, completely excised from the landscape. The ongoing, rampant killings of black people who exist across the spectrum of gender and sexuality tell us as much. As black feminists write to expose and rewrite the logics of white hegemony that make these killings possible, they do so by interrogating the strategies of territorialization (of land of bodies and of minds) that have become the hallmark of the white, heteronormative, western world. This course subsequently mines black feminist thinking about space, affect, and the body as geographic modes of being—as physical and metaphorical sites that can be inhabited—that offer unique and creative sites of resistance where black subjects (re)claim their rights to the world that surrounds them.
GWSS 390, Gender Media, and New Technologies: Collaborations in Feminism and Technology, TTh 12:30-2:20, SLN 15690, Professor Cricket Keating
This course will explore the relationship between technology, social media, and movements for gender, racial, and sexual justice. In particular, we will examine feminist theories of technology and social change, ways that activists have used technology to build coalitions and unite people across diverse contexts, and links between the “do it yourself” approach to social movement and the open-source ethics in technology cultures. Course topics include: the impact of technology on identity and subjectivity, technological activism, and the transformative potentials of new technologies. The course itself is a part of a cutting-edge experiment in education, culture, and technology. It is a “nodal” course within a Distributed Online Collaborative Course (DOCC). Students in this node of the DOCC will engage in their course of study alongside, and in dialogue with, other undergraduate and graduate students participating in the DOCC around the world.