Women's and Gender Studies

WMST BC1006 Introduction to Environmental Humanities. 3.00 points.

COURSE DESCRIPTION This course introduces students to key concepts and texts in environmental humanities, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, sexuality, capital, nation, and globalization. The course examines the conceptual foundations that support humanistic analyses of environmental issues, climate crisis, and the ethics of justice and care. In turn, this critical analysis can serve as the basis for responding to the urgency of calls for environmental action. LEARNING OBJECTIVES Students will learn what difference humanistic studies make to understanding environmental issues and climate crisis. The course will prepare students to: Identify humanistic methods and how they contribute to understanding the world; Demonstrate critical approaches to reading and representing environments; Engage ethical questions related to the environment; and Apply concepts from the course to synthesize the student’s use of humanistic approaches to address urgent environmental questions

WMST BC2026 Authority, Power, ＆ Evidence: An Introduction to Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies (F/ISTS). 3.00 points.

Science and Technology Studies (STS) is an interdisciplinary academic field that investigates entanglements between the technical and social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. Understanding this interplay is central to addressing many of the most pressing problems of our times, such as struggles around vaccination; climate justice and environmental racism; health disparities; digital surveillance; the biology of gender, sex, and sexuality; and the growing mistrust in “science” as a domain of authority. Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies (F/ISTS) is a focused approach to Science and Technology Studies (STS) that homes in on the reciprocal relations between techno-scientific knowledge and practices, on the one hand, and gender, race, class, and other intersecting axes of power, on the other

WMST BC2140 Critical Approaches in Social and Cultural Theory. 3.00 points.

This course examines the conceptual foundations that support feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students; required for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE)

WMST BC2150 INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISMS. 3.00 points.

Enrollment for this class is by instructor approval and an application is required. Please fill out the form here: https://forms.gle/bPsV7rcf5RWB35PM9 This introductory course for the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE) as well as Majors/Minors in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) is open to all students. We focus on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, the professor will frequently be joined by other faculty and guest speakers who bring distinct disciplinary and subject matter expertise. Some keywords for this course include hybridity, diaspora, borderlands, migration, and intersectionality

WMST BC3145 Environmental Humanities in Action. 4.00 points.

Some of the central questions in the study of environmental humanities focus on human action, its context, and its effects. Thus, one major contribution of the environmental humanities is to study and consider how we conceptualize action, relations (both between humans and environments and among humans), and even the meaning of human being. The environmental humanities places these conceptual questions in the context of value and values, as well as questions of how values are materialized in practice. This course considers all of these questions through the study both theories of action in the context of environmental humanities and research into existing projects that are informed by and can inform the study of environmental humanities

WMST UN3260 Trans Genres. 4.00 points.

This seminar focuses on writing and cultural productions that reimagine and intervene in the classification of gender. Students will engage with genre theory, as they read across works of fiction, poetry, memoir, and other forms of trans expressivity. This course poses questions about the contours and limits of classification with regards to gender, literature, and politics

WMST UN3311 FEMINIST THEORY. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Feminist Texts I, or II, and the instructor's permission.
This course explores the formation of desire, sexuality, and subjectivity through the frameworks of feminist epistemologies (the question of what we can know) and feminist ethics (the question of how to be responsible within our relationships and local and global communities). We will reflect on the tension between the limits of what we can know about ourselves and others and the imperative to care for each other and remain accountable for our individual and collective actions and inaction. We will investigate how our deepest emotions, intimate encounters, and secret fantasies are formed by larger social and political contexts. In turn, we will also question how these intimate relationships with ourselves and our companions may be seen as feminist acts of resistance, disruption, and creation. Objective I: to closely engage diverse feminist perspectives in late-twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, queer theory, critical race theory, and psychoanalysis. Objective II: to begin to locate your own feminist perspective within the intersection of your unique experiences and the larger historical and social contexts that form you and which you may seek to transform

WMST BC3504 GENDERED CONTROVERSIES. 4.00 points.

Love and sex have long been studied as historical constructs influenced by social, political, and economic dimensions. This course aims to expand this discourse by incorporating the often-overlooked lens of technological mediation. Beginning with the premise that romantic love is deeply shaped by the affordances of the technology of the time, a critical awareness of technological mediation in romance –especially of digital technologies, i.e. online dating, social media, or cybersex— allows for a deeper understanding of how social categories such as gender, race, class, ability, or sexuality are technologically-mediated, thereby informing our societal and cultural perceptions of love, dating, and sex. Sandra Moyano-Ariza is Term Assistant Professor of WGSS and Research Director at BCRW. Her research works at the intersection of pop culture, philosophy, and digital technologies, with interests in the fields of media studies and digital scholarship, contemporary feminist theory, critical race theory, posthumanism, and affect theory

WMST BC3514 HIST APPROACHES FEMINIST QUES. 4.00 points.

Comparative study of gender, race, and sexuality through specific historical, socio-cultural contexts in which these systems of power have operated. With a focus on social contexts of slavery, colonialism, and modern capitalism for the elaboration of sex-gender categories and systems across historical time

WMST UN3521 SENIOR SEMINAR I. 4.00 points.

The Senior Seminar in Women's Studies offers you the opportunity to develop a capstone research paper by the end of the first semester of your senior year. Senior seminar essays take the form of a 25-page paper based on original research and characterized by an interdisciplinary approach to the study of women, sexuality, and/or gender. You must work with an individual advisor who has expertise in the area of your thesis and who can advise you on the specifics of method and content. Your grade for the semester will be determined by the instructor and the advisor. Students receiving a grade of B or higher in Senior Seminar I will be invited to register for Senior Seminar II by the Instructor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Senior Seminar II students will complete a senior thesis of 40-60 pages. Please note, the seminar is restricted to Columbia College and GS senior majors

WMST UN3525 Senior Seminar I (Barnard). 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. Enrollment limited to senior majors.
Student-designed capstone research projects offer practical lessons about how knowledge is produced, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the application of interdisciplinary feminist methodologies

WMST UN3915 GENDER, SEXUALITY ＆ POWER IN TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES. 4.00 points.

Enrollment limited to 15.

Prerequisites: Critical Approaches or the instructor's permission.
This course considers formations of gender, sexuality, and power as they circulate transnationally, as well as transnational feminist and queer movements that have emerged to address contemporary gendered and sexual inequalities. Topics include political economy, global care chains, sexuality, sex work and trafficking, feminist and queer politics, and human rights. If it is a small world after all, how do forces of globalization shape and redefine the relationship between gender, sexuality, and powerful institutions like the state? And, if power swirls everywhere, how are transnational power dynamics reinscribed in gendered bodies? How is the body represented in discussions of nationalism and in the political economy of globalization? These questions will frame this course by highlighting how gender, sexuality, and power coalesce to impact the lives of individuals in various spaces including workplaces, the academy, the home, religious institutions, the government, and civil society, and human rights organizations. This course will enable us to think transnationally, historically, and dynamically, using gender and sexuality as lenses through which to critique relations of power and the ways that power informs our everyday lives and subjectivities

WMST GU4000 GENEALOGIES OF FEMINISM. 4.00 points.

Genealogies of Feminism: Course focuses on the development of a particular topic or issue in feminist, queer, and/or WGSS scholarship. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates, though priority will be given to students completing the ISSG graduate certificate. Topics differ by semester offered, and are reflected in the course subtitle. For a description of the current offering, please visit the link in the Class Notes

WMST GU4100 Modes of Living: Feminist and Critical Approaches to Ethics. 4.00 points.

Connecting cultural and social issues to ethical questions, this course in feminist and critical interdisciplinary studies offers students the opportunity to consider the relationship between values and value in different modes of living. All too often in public discourse ethical values are invoked but not clearly articulated in terms of their meaning, parameters, and relation to each other. This research seminar investigates values through a semester-long consideration of a single overarching question. This version of the course focuses on the environmental humanities, but other instantiations may use this method to consider different issues. Here, the values commonly invoked in public discussions of the environment are considered in relation to each other, placed in larger analytic contexts, and applied. The final section of the course brings the study of values together with a study of major environmental issues, with a focus on inter-relations amongst those issues. The course uses these interdisciplinary and critical approaches that have become central to feminist ethics as the basis for students developing a major semester-long research project on a question of their own choosing

WMST GU4305 Decolonization and Feminist Critique. 4.00 points.

This advanced seminar examines historical, social, cultural, and theoretical propositions for decolonizing praxis and their complex relations to feminist critique. How do we understand Western European colonialism and coloniality as modes, conditions, and institutions of power, dispossession, subjugation, and subjection continuing into the present? What are the methods, practices, and vision enacted and proposed by the colonized for undoing and radically transforming the determinate logics, instruments, and structures of colonialism as these persist in the present moment? We will consider how gender and sexuality as well as race – as technologies of social organization, codes of valuation, and modes of survival – shape colonialism and the struggles against it. We will inquire into their significance to projects of decolonization. How might decolonization envision and make possible other ways of life?

WMST GU4322 Planetary Questions. 4.00 points.

This advanced seminar examines important approaches, issues, perspectives, and themes related to planetary concerns of environmental crisis, climate change, life sustainability, and multi-species flourishing, with a focus on feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist, and queer perspectives. Topics for discussion and study include the global pandemic, histories of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, Prereqs: BOTH 1 WMST Intro course PLUS any WGSS 'Foundation' course, OR instructor permission

AFEN BC3815 SHANGE ＆ DIGITAL STORYTELLING. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at: http://bit.ly/ShangeWorlds. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Women's Studies. Please note that this is a yearlong course; students who are accepted into this course will need to take its second half, AFEN BC3816, in the spring semester.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at: https://bit.ly/AFEN3815. A poet, performance artist, playwright and novelist, Shange’s stylistic innovations in drama, poetry and fiction and attention to the untold lives of black women have made her an influential figure throughout American arts and in feminist history. We will examine Shange’s works through the dual lenses of “embodied knowledge” and historical context. In conjunction with our multidisciplinary analysis of primary texts, students will be introduced to archival research in Ntozake Shange’s personal archive at Barnard College. Thus the seminar provides an in-depth exploration of Shange's work and milieu as well as an introduction to digital tools, public research and archival practice. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Women's Studies. You can find more information and apply for the course at https://bit.ly/AFEN3815

AMST BC1030 Everything for Everyone: Social Movements in North America. 3.00 points.

Over the past months, social movements have captured the nation’s attention: from protests against immigration enforcement to Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York City. From the Haitian and American Revolutions to the campaign for an eight-hour day, the Civil Rights movement, indigenous demands for land back, and Black Lives Matter course will explore the long history of movements for economic and social justice across North America. Questions that we will explore together include: how have different groups demanded economic justice over the past two hundred years? What lineages and breaks can we trace in these efforts? What divisions emerged among and within various movements over time? How did groups debate and disagree over the concept of “socialism” and what their ideal visions of liberated society would be? What role have race and gender played as dividing lines and as sites of new liberatory forms of struggle?

AMST BC3401 American Studies Methods: Archive Fever. 4.00 points.

Introduction to the theoretical approaches of American Studies, as well as the methods and materials used in the interdisciplinary study of American society. Through close reading of a variety of texts (e.g. novels, films, essays), we will analyze the creation, maintenance, and transmission of cultural meaning within American society

AMST GU4500 Eugenics. 4.00 points.

For almost two hundred years, people around the world have sought to perfect society through scientifically directed breeding. Though often described as a thing of the past, contemporary life is suffused with fears over declining birth rates and dreams of producing perfect “designer babies.” In this class we will explore the long history of attempts to remake reproduction and regulate population across U.S. History (with some excursions into India and Germany), through a study of a range of interdisciplinary scholarship. Together, we will ask: why have panics around population emerged under specific circumstances, and who pushed them? How and why did eugenics explode into popularity at the turn of the century, and how was it adopted into and by various social movements? What, exactly, is (and was) eugenics? What is the relationship between it and earlier efforts to scientifically categorize and remake society? What role did it play in the development of twentieth-century politics? Why did states engage in campaigns of mass sterilization across the first half of the twentieth century? Why did they stop? How have different groups sought to remake reproduction since?

ARCH GU4305 ABOLITION ARCHITECTURE. 4.00 points.

This seminar introduces students to histories of abolition through constructed environments and artistic, material, and spatial practices. We study abolition of slavery, prisons, and borders during a period from the eighteenth century to the present. Attending to the distinct social movements and discourses sparked by these very different abolitionist targets, we examine the political, ethical, and aesthetic intersections that emerge. We investigate these problems through architecture, landscapes, material culture, and art, studying primary works, secondary texts, and methods. The course emphasizes study through historical reasoning as well as analysis of sensorial and affective material. This multimodal approach is necessary in studying forms of injustice in order to comprehend unfreedom, a paradoxical concept that produces cognitive dissonance and counters liberal reason. The course draws on architectural history as crucial to illuminating how place, space, design, and planning of built environments have enacted and archived people’s unfreedom, and relies on intersectional feminist and critical race frameworks to understand abolition as part of a tradition of emancipatory thought and teaching. We study practices and institutions that have produced and shaped enclosure and incarceration in contexts around the world, placing abolition in dialogue with the anticolonial. The course illuminates the roles that both reform and radical refusal have played in abolitionist struggles for spatial justice, and maintains attention to material, spatial, and aesthetic practices throughout. This seminar has no prerequisites and all assignments are guided. Readings consider the formation of space, power, and knowledge together, in aesthetic and cultural analyses of the abolition of enslavement, incarceration, and border regimes. Students lead discussion, based on exercises in collective annotation of full books, including: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole Fleetwood; Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition by Sarah Thomas; and Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies, by Yến Lê Espiritu, Lan Duong, Ma Vang, Victor Bascara, Khatharya Um, Lila Sharif, and Nigel Hatton. These texts are contextualized in relation to other books and articles, study of works of art and architecture, visits to archives, and guest lectures. Each student produces a long-format research paper that frames an architectural history of abolition

AHIS BC3667 CLOTHING. 4.00 points.

Human beings create second, social, skins for themselves. Everyone designs interfaces between their bodies and the world around them. From pre-historic ornaments to global industry, clothing has always been a crucial feature of people’s survival, desires, and identity. This course studies clothing from the perspectives of anthropology, architecture, art, craft, economics, labor, law, psychology, semiotics, sociology, and sustainability. Issues include gender roles, local traditions, world-wide trade patterns, dress codes, the history of European fashion, dissident or disruptive styles, and the environmental consequences of what we wear today

CLFR GU4292 QUEER MEDIEVAL FRANCE. 3.00 points.

Co-taught by Met curator Dr. Melanie Holcomb and Prof. Eliza Zingesser (Columbia, French) in conjunction with the exhibit “Spectrum of Desire” at the Cloisters, this course considers conceptions of gender, the body, and eroticism in medieval French-speaking territories. Surveying literary texts in their manuscript contexts, sculptures, paintings, and personal items, we will attend to “queer” sexual practices, non-normative conceptions of gender, the homosocial within “courtly love,” all while learning to look askance or queerly at what might initially seem to be resolutely heteronormative. We will consider the following questions, among others: - In an era in which all non-procreative sex was conceived as sinful, does the opposition between homosexual and heterosexual still hold? - Was gender assigned based on the body or on some other factor? Was it conceived as binary or spectral, natural or cultural? - Does the use of modern categories help or hinder our understanding of gender and sexuality in a historically distant period? - What might medieval categories be able to teach us about the limitations of our contemporary understanding of gender and sexuality? - Where do literature and the visual arts align in their modes of engagement with/representations of queerness and where do they diverge? Class taught in English with readings available in English translation. French majors or concentrators/minors should complete the readings in French, whenever possible. Several class sessions will be held at The Met. Enrollment in this course is by application. Please send an email to eliza.zingesser@columbia.edu with information on your class year, major or main topic of research, and the reasons for your interest in this course

MUSI GU4450 Music and Global Women. 3.00 points.

This course offers a comparative exploration of women music practitioners from cross-cultural perspectives, examining their music, oral histories, and lived experiences as well as the impact of these experiences on their music-making in a global context. By tracing the journeys and analyzing the music of specific selected women musicians from various regions, the course investigates their participation in art music, traditional music, popular music, and sacred music from women’s perspectives. Engaging primarily with their music and interviews, the course particularly examines the comparative roles of women as active creators, performers, sponsors, and consumers of music, highlighting how their lived experiences shape their musical contributions. Students will be introduced to critical concepts for analyzing representations of gender, class, ethnicity, nationalism, race, and globalization in music while exploring these women’s sounds, identities, and performances

SPAN UN3895 Women, Creation, and Feminisms in Contemporary Spain. 3.00 points.

At the crossroads of social media, social movements, and the arts, the present course offers a comprehensive genealogy of recent cultural interventions embodying the most pressing issues for feminisms in Spain today. For this endeavor, the syllabus is organized around three thematic axes: memory, bodies, and territories. By deploying an open consideration of arts, activism, and their creators, the case-studies here introduced unfold a polyphonic nature in both content and form. In this light, problematics such as ecology, technology, love, violence, healthcare, labor, or collective trauma will be navigated through the genres of performance, essay, poetry, graphic novel, photography, documentary, music, or the videoclip. These will shape the singularities of the later socio-political cycle in the country, distinguished by the internationalist expansion of feminisms; an interconnected and intersectional approach to social justice; the emergence of a globalized and domestic far-right; and the shifting of the institutional left. Such a background will nurture a series of feminist interventions claiming radical imaginaries in the favor of the 99％

WMST UN3125 INTRO TO SEXUALITY STUDIES. 3.00 points.

This course is designed to introduce major theories sexuality, desire and identity. We will be considering the relations between the history of sexuality and the politics of gender. We will read some primary texts in gender theory, and in the study of sexuality, desire, and embodiment. This course also provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary examination of human sexual and erotic desires, orientations, and identities. We will study how desires are constructed, how they vary and remain the same in different places and times, and how they interact with other social and cultural phenomena such as government, family, popular culture, scientific inquiry, and, especially, race and class.   

WMST UN3514 HIST APPROACHES TO FEM QUESTNS. 4.00 points.

This course will provide students with a comparative perspective on gender, race, and sexuality by illuminating historically specific and culturally distinct conditions in which these systems of power have operated. Beginning in the early modern period, the course seeks to destabilize contemporary notions of gender and sexuality and instead probe how race, sexuality, and gender have functioned as mechanisms of differentiation embedded in historically contingent processes. Moving from “Caliban to Comstock,” students will probe historical methods for investigating and critically evaluating claims about the past. In making these inquiries, the course will pay attention to the intersectional nature of race, gender, and sexuality and to strategic performances of identity by marginalized groups. This semester, we will engage research by historians of sexuality, gender, and capitalism to critically reflect on the relationship between critical studies of the past and debates about reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and gay and lesbian rights in our contemporary moment

WMST UN3522 SENIOR SEMINAR II. 4.00 points.

Individual research in Womens Studies conducted in consultation with the instructor. The result of each research project is submitted in the form of the senior essay and presented to the seminar