Need a Social Science Level I or II Course This Summer?
WMS 1001 Introduction to Women's Studies | Online Only
This course introduces the discipline of women's studies, the historical development of feminist thought, the intersectionality of identities, including gender, race, class, and sexual orientation, and the social, economic, and technological factors that have led to changing roles for women throughout the world. The course also focuses analysis on gender, race and class, including experiences of women of color. Fulfills Level I Social Science Credit.
WMS 2100 Women of Color | Online Only
Though U.S. women share much in common, their differences are salient to a thorough understanding of all these women's experiences. Comparative analysis of women's race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation are central to this course. The similarities among diverse groups of women are also examined in order to better understand the complexity ofwomen's lives. The course addresses issues of work, health, interpersonal violence, globalization, as well as resistance, activism, and social change across identities. Fulfills Level II Social Science Credit and Multicultural Credit.
Check out these Summer 2013 Courses!
WMS 2770 Gender & Communication | Monday, Wednesday & Friday 9:40am-12:20pm
This course explores the relationship of gender to the communication process by examining issues of power, conflict, sex role stereotypes, and cultural patterns of interaction on relationships and identity. Students explore the multiple ways that masculinity and femininity are created and sustained through communication in such contexts as families, schools, the workplace, and the media. Students will use feminist theoretical perspectives and interpretive approaches from communication studies to analyze cultural assumptions and the relationships of notions of gender to class, sexuality and race.
WMS 3050 Psychology of Gender | Monday, Wednesday & Friday 12:30-3:10pm
This course presents a survey of major contemporary approaches to gender, including a range of scientific and theoretical work. A constructionist approach is utilized to synthesize the views. The course then reviews several major areas of application, including relationships, health, violence, workplace, and achievements.
WMS 3350 Gender & Society | Mondays & Wednesdays 5:30-8:00pm
This course offers an exploration of historical and contemporary social, political and economic trends affecting the roles of women and men in society. The emphasis is on the historical, social and cultural forces that have contributed to gender-role stereotyping in the United States and in other societies, and on the effects on individuals and the broader society in terms of maintaining and/or changing gender roles.
WMS 4160 Human Trafficking | Mondays & Wednesdays 9:30am-12:00pm
This course will explore human trafficking on the international, national and local levels. Multidisciplinary perspectives on labor and sex trafficking will be reviewed to provide a comprehensive understanding of this human rights issue. Tactics used by traffickers to recruit and control victims and the effects of abuse on victims will be examined. An overview of U.S. federal and local laws to curb trafficking will be highlighted, including the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, as well as the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Acts of 2003, 2005 and 2008. Finally, global and local efforts of the current anti-trafficking movement will be evaluated, including ways for students to be involved.
WMS 425K Black Women Writers | Online Only
This course introduces students to female writers from Africa and the Americas and focuses attention on a work written by each. This semester most of the writers hail from islands in the Caribbean and various parts of the United States; however, there is also focus on a writer from West Africa, as well as an Aboriginal writer from Australia. These cross-cultural perspectives will be explored through the genres of literature and film, with concepts of Womanism assuming the theoretical focus of the course. Reading material will include The Stillborn, Reena and Other Stories, Sula, The Woman of Brewster Place and The Bridge of Beyond.
Looking for some fun courses for Fall 2013?
WMS 1200 Multicultural Study of Genders and Sexualities | Tuesdays & Thursdays 3:30-4:45pm
This multidisciplinary course introduces the study of sexualities and genders including the history, major theories, racial intersections, and issues. Foundational concepts and vocabulary are taught so that the student will be equipped to take advanced courses in this area. General models of identity linked with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender sexualities are explored. Intersectional analysis will be applied with particular attention to the experiences of sexuality and gender in the African-American, Chicana/o, and Asian American communities.
WMS 2400 Women's Folklore | Mondays & Wednesdays 2:00-3:15pm
This course provides an exploration of folklore in everyday life, including folk narrative and other verbal genres, as well as material forms and other manifestations of traditional expressive behavior, as it pertains to reinforcing and resisting gender identity and norms. This course focuses on the centrality and pervasiveness of creativity, developing a contextual approach to understanding aesthetic expression.
WMS 290F Transgender Studies | Mondays 5:00-7:50pm
This course explores the transgender and transsexual experience, focusing on Western cultural definitions and concepts. The course covers transgender basics, including definitions and language; the history of the trans gender movement; the legal, social, and medical aspects of medical transition; current political issues within and for the movement; cultural aspects of gender diversity; well-known trans people in Western culture; working with transgender and transsexual populations; and being a good ally and advocate. After a basic understanding of the concepts is established, students will explore the many aspects of being transgender and/or transsexual in the United States. By the end of the course, students will have the language, knowledge, and skills to work with transgender and transsexual populations in a variety of settings, and will understand the diversity of the transgender experience. Both trans-identified and non-trans-identified students are encouraged to take this class.
WMS 3170 Social Justice and Self-Citizenship | Thursdays 5:00-7:50pm
This course focuses upon psychological theory and self-identity in the context of multicultural and social justice issues (classism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism). Lectures, readings, and discussions are integrated with a required service learning placement involving 30 hours of volunteer work in a setting for the undeserved. Students have the opportunity to a) reflect on social oppressions; b) analyze the political systems that surround their communities and institutions; and c) apply their reflections to their career goals and personal development.
WMS 3280 Queer Theory | Tuesdays & Thursdays 12:30-1:45pm
This course surveys a broad array of scholarship in queer theory, as well as applications of queer theory in a variety of academic fields to explore practices, identities, and communities as well as the cultural construction of gender and sexuality.
WMS 3300 Women's Leadership | Saturdays 9:00am-5:00pm (9/14-10/5)
This course will examine the various roles, models, and guiding principles of women in leadership. The discussions will be intentionally interactive as students share their own experience of women’s leadership ranging from traditional to unconventional. Students will identify the values most clearly associated with women’s leadership cross-culturally and read diverse women’s experiences in their communities. Each student will interview a woman whom they deem to be in a leadership role, though not necessarily a formal position, and will present his or her findings to the class. All class members will reflect on their own leadership values in relation to the course material.
WMS 390G Bodies and Embodiment | Mondays & Wednesdays 3:30-4:45pm
In this course, students will explore various interdisciplinary discourses about gendered, sexed, raced, classed, and able bodies, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Students will have the opportunity to discuss the inscribed, as well as the lived, body through the analysis of key theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, bell hooks, and Iris M. Young. In order to historically situate these discourses, students will discuss the body as a social construct that is controlled and manipulated but that also has unique experiences that often cannot be verbalized and/or dominated. In addition, students will investigate the many ways in which bodies are gazed at, desired, fashioned, heard, and eroticized. By the end of the semester, students will leave the class with a strong understanding of the history of the social body and how 17th-century, Cartesian, mind/body dualisms have persisted to help construct and reinforce gender, sex, race, class, and ability dualisms and inequalities. They will leave the class with the critical thinking skills needed to question how our current, Western perceptions of bodies (and what they do and how they perform) may or may not be different from other cultures and the consequences of these differences.
WMS 3930 Theories of Love and Sex | Wednesdays 5:00-7:50pm
This course introduces and synthesizes theories from philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, religion, and literature about love and sex. The complexities of love and sex, including their fundamental meanings, contemporary understandings, identity implications as well as their historical constructions, are explored. An important dimension of this exploration is the source and meaning of the moral valuation assigned various forms of sexual activity.
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