Issues in Feminist Thought (graduate)

What is the place of theory in feminist practice, Women Studies, and intellectual inquiry? How do systems of race, sexuality, class, and nationality both reflect and produce feminist theories? How can understanding some key elements in the genealogy of feminist theories help us to read, evaluate and produce relevant bodies of feminist knowledge today? What is the relationship of theory to scholarship and activism in Women Studies?

Through an intensive investigation into some (but by no means all) key moments and movements in recent feminist theorizing, this class sets out to provide some provisional answers to the questions above. We will read works that have, in some way, transformed feminist understandings of gender, race, sexuality, and class. Then we will consider how different theoretical models intersect with one another and with various cultural moments and political movements.

This course is designed to provide graduate students in the Women Studies MA program a solid foundation in feminist theory. Students in other disciplines may also find the course useful. Expect difficult but rewarding readings from several fields in the humanities and social sciences.

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Introduction to Graduate Women Studies

This course is the introductory course for first year master's students in Women Studies at San Francisco State University.   This semester we will work together to investigate the present status of the field of women and gender studies and we will contemplate the future of this field.    As students working towards an MA in Women Studies, you will each participate in shaping the future of women and gender studies as you work in a variety of fields, social, political, and geographic locations during your time at SFSU and after your MA is completed.   This course is designed to familiarize you with some of the tensions, debates, and stakes of "Women Studies" as a field of academic inquiry, as a site of cultural production, and as a catalyst for engaged community interventions.

Feminist Approaches to Sexual Identities, Practices, and Cultures (combined graduate/undergraduate)

This course examines how female sexuality, and in particular female same-sex sexuality, functions in different theoretical models, historical moments, cultures, and communities.   By no means a survey, this course explores themes and topics related to female same-sex sexuality such as the relation of lesbian erotics to empire, the cultural constructions of female sexuality, histories of homosexuality, the politics of sexual deviance, and the intersections and complexities of racial, sexual, and gendered identities. Readings will include theoretical texts, case studies, short stories, films, and other critical and creative texts.

The major goal of this course is to hone critical tools that allow us to examine the roles of normative and deviant sexuality in history and culture from a transnational feminist perspective.   We will only scratch the surface of current work on female same-sex sexuality, yet it is my hope that the work of this course will allow all of us to see how sexuality functions culturally and politically on individual, community, national and global levels. We will also examine how studies of female same-sex sexuality have changed across time and disciplines as we evaluate the efficacy of various theoretical models of female same-sex desire, identity, and subjectivity.

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Senior Seminar (undergraduate)

This core course for the Women Studies major should be taken in the last (or second-to-last) semester of your major. The goals of WOMS 690 are ambitious: to provide an environment through which Women Studies majors may reflect on their undergraduate experience in the Women Studies major; to help students acquire appropriate tools and plans for work, study, and feminist practices after the WOMS B.A.; to provide an intellectual forum in which senior majors may deepen their knowledge of a topic in women and gender studies; and to create meaningful capstone projects which capture the present and future of undergraduate feminist scholarship, action, and productions.

Feminist Thought (undergraduate)

This course is an intensive seminar designed to give students a familiarity with some major trends in contemporary feminist thought.   We first explore the question of "theory" itself, then study some of the foundational texts to contemporary feminist thought.   The bulk of the course is devoted to critical reading, thinking, analyzing, and writing about current directions in feminist theory.   Throughout the course we will investigate the connections between gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationalism in feminist thought and contemporary culture.   We will also examine what "counts" as theory and how theory and practice work together in feminist thought.   The goal of this course is to provide students with the theoretical background, critical thinking skills, and analytic tools to tackle the problems, challenges, and pleasures of feminist thought today.

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Theories of Female Sexuality

What do we mean by "female sexuality"? By "theory"?   Do "theory" and "sexuality" change over time and space?   How does identity effect sexuality?   What is the relationship of gender to sexuality?   Of theory to practice?   We will address these questions and others through readings in sexuality from a broad range of theorists.   The course is divided into three parts: we first cover a few critical methods within feminist theory for examining questions of female sexuality. Then, armed with these tools, we proceed historically, examining the divergences and continuities of theories of female sexuality.   The course concludes with three contemporary case studies.   Throughout, we emphasize the cultural, as well as historical, particularity of sexual expression and sexual communities.

Lesbian and Queer Perspectives on Literature and Media

This course explores the relations of lesbian sexuality to cultural memory by addressing a series of inter-related questions: what defines a "lesbian" Are all lesbians "queers"? What do those categories enable and whom does those terms exclude? What are the various relationships of sexual practices to identity?   How do other aspects of identity shape the meanings of sexual desires?   How do desires and identities change over time though the stories of individual lives and through the stories of cultures?   We will focus primarily on novels, memoirs and films of the twentieth century.   Through reading these various texts, students will hone critical reading, thinking and writing skills as well as consider how issues of cultural change, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity produce the way we think through our desires and identities.

Gender and the Culture of War (undergraduate)

This upper division, undergraduate course (ENGL 214 pre-requisite) is designed to analyze the gendering of war and state violence in a cultural context.   Using historical, theoretical, fictional, and cultural texts, students will discuss the political, cultural and ideological configurations of war as a masculine pursuit in conjunction with case studies of men and women's involvement in different violent conflicts.   Topics will include the gender of nationalism and imperialism, intersections of race, gender, sexuality and nation in representations of violent conflict, the relation of fiction to ideologies of war, gendered representations of the military in the media, and the role of sexuality in constructions of nationalism and violence.

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Introdution to Women and Gender Studies

What are the cultural and historical forces that affect gender relations?   What are the positions of women and men in the world?   What is the relationship of sex to gender, sexuality, race, nation, class, and other classifications by which societies are ordered?   How do race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and nation both reflect and construct gendered positions?  

This course explores women and gender issues through four broad themes: (1) Social and Historical Constructions of Gender; (2) Gendered Identities in Nations and States; (3) Representations, Cultures, Media and Markets; and (4) Gendering Globalization and Displacement.   By reading materials from a broad range of historical and cultural perspectives, Introduction to Women and Gender Studies provides a set of critical tools for engaging questions about gender and society from a transnational, feminist perspective.