Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies - GWSS

Description:  This is a fully online section offered through Online and Distance Learning (ODL), College of Continuing Education. Visit "Class URL" for ODL policies, including fee and financial aid restrictions. Goals: After completing this course, you should be able to ? understand and develop a critical vocabulary of key terms and theoretical debates within the U.S. field of gender, women, and sexuality studies; ? appreciate the value of women's lives, stories, and work as sources of knowledge about the complex realities of diverse groups of women; ? complicate the ways we "read" gender and other identity categories; ? build more complex understandings of women's oppression, marginalization, sexual harassment, and other important issues; ? develop tools for understanding and analyzing historical and contemporary social phenomena and enable a more critically informed perspective on these issues; and ? critically analyze U.S. cultural products (texts, books, music, films, videos, toys, artwork, etc.) using key feminist theories discussed in the course materials. A Note on Course Content: In some courses, you are required to memorize a body of knowledge or list of facts and deliver each idea back for examinations to receive an A. This course, however, does not work this way. Instead of memorizing facts or a fixed body of knowledge, you must engage the ideas proposed in readings and media content to develop your own analysis. Some of the issues we will study are contested issues, even among feminists. This course is not about conversion to a feminist ideology, but instead asks you first to consider your personal reaction and then go deeper and think critically about all the claims being made. For the required writing--both the formal and the informal assignments--you must support your claims with ideas generated in readings and media. The reading can be challenging, and writing a formal response can be equally demanding, but be assured it will be easier to understand theoretical ideas with more complexity as the lessons progress. Strange key terms or concepts will become clearer as we read and view media examples, and soon they will become part of your "everyday" course writing vocabulary. You will use your writing as a way to explore and articulate your responses to the texts and key ideas. Of course, an introductory course is simply that--an introduction to some central ideas, dilemmas, and paradigms. We will read and engage materials from identity groups that may be different from our own. Please be cautious about making blanket assumptions about differences. It is dangerous to assume that one person speaks for or represents the group. Statements like "all women are" can be tricky. Be cautious to consider specificities by avoiding overgeneralization about gender categories and specific cultural or ethnic groups based on one person's theory. Please approach the course material with patience, openness, and a critical eye.

Class URL:  http://www.cce.umn.edu/odl

Class Time: 100% Web Based.

Work Load: 8 papers, 1 quizzes. Also: Course Completion Calendar 1 introductory letter 1 quiz 8 reading response papers 2 exercises 3 reflection essays 1 final paper

Grade: 10% quizzes, 15% reflection paper. Also: 8 reading response papers (56%) 2 exercises (4%) 1 final paper (15%)

Instructor:  Creel Falcon,Kandace

Description:  Student may contact the instructor or department for information.

Instructor:  Moskow,Rebecca J

Description:  This is a fully online section offered through Online and Distance Learning (ODL), College of Continuing Education. Visit "Class URL" for ODL policies, including fee and financial aid restrictions. While there are no formal prerequisites for GWSS 3003 (formerly WoSt 3003), the best index of your preparedness is your degree of willingness to question your own fundamental assumptions about gender and about the lives of women and men in different countries throughout the world. We all bring our own culture's assumptions and biases to the task of learning about other people. We need to become aware of these preconceptions before we can understand, much less accept, alternative ways of thinking about the lives of women and men in cultures other than our own. You should also be prepared to reconsider what constitutes politics and political engagement, challenging yourself to better recognize and understand the dynamics of global interconnectedness. This course will explore the diversity of women's (and men's) experiences in non-Western societies and the multiple social, political, and economic factors that have shaped their lives. You may decide to enroll in this course for any number of reasons. Perhaps you have just returned from the Peace Corps, or have spent part of your life living outside of the U.S., or are from another country and culture. Possibly you're attracted to the issues we'll be exploring, such as human and reproductive rights or globalization. You may simply be interested in other parts of the world, particularly in the lives of the women and men who live there. Or you may wish to take this course to fulfill a distribution requirement in your program of study. Whatever your reasons, you will do well in this course if you're willing to devote the time necessary to do the required reading and writing, and if you approach the subject matter with the thoughtfulness it deserves. The title of this course suggests a vast scope and nearly unlimited subject matter. No single course could possibly cover all there is to know about gender and global politics in highly diverse societies on several continents. What this course can provide are some materials on and insights about the lives of some women and men in some societies. With this assistance, and with careful and thoughtful reading and observation on your part, you will learn to: ?understand the complex ways in which we are all connected globally through economic, political, cultural, and other systems; ?discern the impact of global relations on women's (and men's) lives and experiences, including those shared by women generally and those specific to place, culture, and history; ?appreciate the value of women's own words, memories, and stories as sources of knowledge about women's complex realities; and recognize the problems of bias and ethnocentrism in generalizations about Third World women and men and the dangers of measuring other people's lives by U.S. standards.

Class URL:  http://www.cce.umn.edu/Online-Distance-and-Evening-Courses/index.html

Class Time: 100% Web Based.

Work Load: 7 homework assignments. There are no exams. The media analysis (assigned as the final essay) requires you to demonstrate what you have learned in a comprehensive way. To do this, you will need to draw from material you have covered in all the lessons.

Grade: See the Syllabus for grading information.

Instructor:  Purcell Gates,Laura

Description:  Student may contact the instructor or department for information.

Instructor:  Urquhart,Alex T

Description:  Student may contact the instructor or department for information.

Instructor:  Kumar,Elakshi

Description:  Thirty years before Ellen, before Will and Grace, or The LWord, gay and lesbian writers and poets were publishing their own work and making a culture for themselves. Magazines such as The Ladder, which contained writing by members of the lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis and the gay men?s Matachine Society were sent to subscribers in plain brown wrappers. The Ladder became the mother of journals such as Sinister Wisdom and Conditions which would carry early and established work by authors such as Gloria Anzaldua, Dorothy Alison, Barbara Smith, and Cherrie Moraga among many others. While City Lights books in San Francisco was publishing work by Allen Ginsberg, Glad Day and other small presses were bringing out work by many other queer poets.Self publishers in the late 1960?s and early 1970?s, unable or unwilling to find mainstream venues for their writing published ground breaking work on their own. Soon, in the wake of the women?s movement and the Stonewall uprising, small presses were publishing work by established poets and writers as well as known queer artists and theoreticians. This class will attempt to examine and contextualize the history of this publishing movement by reading work by and about the writers involved in these various publishing enterprises, using original texts where available. We will also take advantage of local research resources such as the University of Minnesota?s Tretter Collection and augment our study with guests from the community. Texts for this course will include work by Audre Lorde; Adrienne Rich; Allen Ginsberg; Essex Hemphill;Cherrie Moraga, and many others.

Class Time: 40% Lecture, 10% Film/Video, 30% Discussion, 10% Student Presentation, 10% Guest Speakers.

Work Load: 30-50 pages reading per week, 20 pages writing per term, 2 papers, 1 presentations.

Grade: 40% reports/papers, 10% attendance, 25% in-class presentation, 25% class participation.

Instructor:  Katz,Judith

Description:  This course explores the roles and lives of Chicanas in the US from a feminist and interdisciplinary perspective. In order to understand the historical and contemporary positionality of Chicanas we will use the Aztec deity, Coyolxauhqui, as our organizing concept. The dismemberment of Coyolxauhqui by her brother, Huitzilopochtli, not only represents the first misogynistic act perpetrated against the antecedents of present-day Chicanas, but also symbolizes the dismemberment of Chicanas by the political, economic, social and cultural structures of the US. As such, this class will examine the roles and lives of Chicana artists, intellectuals, activists, scholars, writers and workers. We will use a variety of sources, including scholarly articles, creative writing, film and art, in order to construct a nuanced understanding of Chicanas at different historical moments and in our contemporary society. As we interrogate the lived experience of Chicanas over the course of the semester we will also attempt to re-member Coyolxauhqui in order to reconstruct her in a new feminist order.

Instructor:  Bueno,Marianne M.

Description:  Multiracial Feminist Politics and Policy This course will explore the contemporary ways that multiracial feminists have confronted the intersecting effects of racism, sexism, and colonialism through local, translocal, and transnational social and political activism. Most of the readings, discussions, and workshops will be focused on domestic violence, immigration, criminalization, and reproductive justice. This course will introduce students to new theorizing on politics, feminist policy alternatives, and the actual organizing strategies that multiracial feminists have employed to challenge intersecting social inequalities. Required Texts: Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology. Boston: South End Press, 2006. The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism edited by Vivian Labaten and Dawn Lundy Martin. New York: Anchor Books, 2004.

Instructor:  Isoke PhD,Zenzele

Description:  What is the transnational, and why is it such an important area of study today? In this course, we will explore the term in relation to feminist theories and activisms, focusing particularly on the following aspects: ? distinctions among the transnational, the international, and the global ? the advantages and challenges of transnational activism ? universal rights versus cultural particularity ? resisting and participating in hegemonic feminism(s) ? the role of the UN and other organizations Over the course of the semester, we will learn to navigate the complex terrain of agency and resistance, local and global processes, and critiques of power and violence. Proposed assignments for the course include Reflections, 50 minutes, and Shop Talk.

Instructor:  Murthy,Pashmina V

Description:  Student may contact the instructor or department for information.

Instructor:  Puotinen,Sara Lynne

Description:  Student may contact the instructor or department for information.

Instructor:  Nagar,Richa

Description:  Student may contact the instructor or department for information.

Instructor:  Kaminsky,Amy K

Description:  Our very notions of native citizen was forged against ?aliens ineligible for citizenship,? our ideas of cultural appropriateness were formulated in relation to groups deemed to have ?excessive culture? on the one hand and ?no culture? in the other, and the designation of some groups as ?model minorities? was intended to discipline ?not-so-model minorities.? We thus believe that a serious engagement with the heterogeneous and trans-national histories and relationships among communities such as African Americans, Euro-Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans is necessary for contemporary scholarship of race in general, as well as of any particular community or identity. Even research projects that are not explicitly comparative must think through the various subtexts, shadows, and other categories through which or against which their particular foci was constructed. We believe that by interrogating comparative racial formations both across ?minority? groups as well as between majority and minority groups, this seminar will strengthen a wide-array of interdisciplinary research that engage with questions of race, privilege, power, identity, intersectionality, citizenship, American culture and history, and diaspora. Within this context, the course will also explore how racial formations are inflected and must be understood as articulated through and mutually constituted by other forms of social difference such as class, ethnicity, citizenship, gender, and sexuality. This class is designed for those who have passed their prelim exams. Creating a supportive and rigorous environment in which graduate students learn to both expand their conceptual paradigms and assemble the building blocks of writing a dissertation is a central goal of the course. The design of the course is thus two-fold: it will combine both interdisciplinary readings and discussion in comparative race and ethnic studies and peer feedback workshops. A central theme of the class, then, will be to think through the process and methodology of writing, to develop our writing ? both process and the product ? in conversation with each other. First, by building an interdisciplinary peer writing community, the seminar will require students to present their research topics and questions in a manner that is understandable to those in other disciplines while learning to make explicit the possibilities and limitations of their own scholarship. Second, we will acknowledge and discuss explicitly the very particular process and form of writing a dissertation, and in doing so, we hope to create an enriched learning experience that seeks to demystify the steps of completing a PhD. We realize that the writing process can be painful, isolating, invigorating, frustrating, and inspiring. Through peer workshops and faculty feedback, the hope is that this class will establish an intellectually engaging environment and tackle the specificities of the dissertation format.

Co-Instructor:  Desai,Jigna (Arthur Motley Exemplary Tch Aw)

Co-Instructor:  Ho,Karen Z