GWSS/ANTH/JSIS A 328, Gender and Sexuality in China
MW 2:30-4:20, CMU 120, Professor Sasha Welland, SLN 21514
This course provides a rich exploration of gender and sexuality as key aspects of China’s process of modernization, from the late Qing dynasty through the building of the Republic, Communist revolution, and post-Mao economic reform. It examines, through historical, anthropological, and cultural studies scholarship, the centrality of these social constructs in terms of family, state, labor, body, and ethnicity. Offered simultaneously at the undergraduate and graduate levels, with differentiated assignments.
GWSS 390 Intermediate Topics, Critical Conversations in Feminism and Technology
TTh 2:30-4:20, LOW 201, Ivette Bayo Urban, SLN 14833
The course is built around 5 interconnected concepts with relation to technology: Privacy, Security, Self-representation, Identities, and Archives. We will consider the implications, possibilities, and limitations of digital tools as platforms. Through readings, self-reflections, and critical conversations students will review the history and practice surrounding our embodied
relationships with technology in theory and practice. Students will add to a growing archive of materials relating to feminist technologies and will collaborate on a final project that fills a need. This can be informative, action oriented or an expressive project.
GWSS 490 C/JSIS 485 D Special Topics in Women Studies, Gender and Sexuality in India and Turkey
MW 1:30-3:20, BLD 286, Akanksha Misra, SLN 21548
This course looks at the relationship between gender and sexuality and the (trans)national. Whilst acknowledging the centrality of gender and sexuality to the experiences of nationalism, citizenship formation, and global capitalist economies, it also looks at how gender and sexuality are constructed by nation state formation, histories, and transnational connectivities. The comparative aspect of the course provides the framework for not only looking at how transnational histories, ideas and economies shape the sexual citizen, but also how the concept of the transnational itself rests upon colonial/imperial legacies that are fundamentally sexual. Focusing on these two countries of the global ‘South’ urges us to reconceptualize the transnational both as an actual geographical space of uneven capitalist development but also as an imaginary space of desired sexual and modern citizenry. By looking at histories, contemporary movements, discourses of development/modernity, and the centrality of oppressed voices to the sustenance of mainstream religious and hegemonic notions of womanhood and sexuality, this course will try to draw connections between the past and the present, in an attempt to understand the rise of the right around the globe, including India and Turkey. Primary source materials in Hindi and Turkish will be provided for those interested, although no prior understanding of Indian and Turkish contexts, feminisms, and social movements is necessary.