NMSU GENDER & SEXUALITY STUDIES - FALL 2024 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
GNDR 2110G: Introduction to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies ONLINE
Various Instructors
This course introduces students to key concepts, debates, and analytical tools informing Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As an interdisciplinary field of study, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies employs academic perspectives from a range of disciplines and theoretical approaches. It also incorporates lived experience and social location into its object of analysis. Though content will vary according to the expertise and focus of the instructor, this course will develop tools through readings and assignments that critically analyze how gender and sexuality are shaped by different networks of power and social relations and demonstrate how the intersections of race, class, disability, national status, and other categories of identity and difference are central to their understanding and deployment. In addition to feminist thought, areas of focus might include gender and sexuality in relation to social, cultural, political, creative, economic, or scientific discourses. This class is recommended for those with a general interest in the topic area as well as for those seeking a foundational course for further study. This class fulfills Gen Ed Area 4 requirement.
GNDR 2120G: Representing Women Across Cultures ONLINE
Various Instructors
This course explores fundamental concepts in the interdisciplinary field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and feminist theory, especially as they relate to aspects of identity beyond sex and gender. We will critically examine concepts of power, privilege, and inequality in conjunction with intersections of gender with race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. We will read and view texts that allow us to gain familiarity with the roles women occupy in diverse societies, and the social institutions that shape our perceptions of gender, race, and class. This class fulfills Gen Ed Area 4 requirement.
GNDR 350: MEDIA LITERACY & SOCIAL JUSTICE ONLINE
Prof. G. Lawrence
This advanced composition class invites you to consider: What is "fake news" and is it new? How can we determine "truth"? Can we avoid bias? Does writing inspire social change? Where do social justice movements take place? Which audiences can we reach with effective writing? This class is ideal for students majoring in Law, Government, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Criminal Justice, History, Communication, or Education. Taught with ENGL 2130.
GNDR 371: INTRODUCTION TO LGBTQ+ STUDIES ONLINE
Dr. M. C. Jonet
Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies offers a foundational exploration of the history, culture, politics, and wide-ranging experiences within lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) communities. As the theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously asserted in the 1990s, "queer" is the "open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, resonances, lapses, and excesses of meaning."
Through readings, immersive engagement with multimedia materials, discussions, analysis, and projects, learners will engage with key concepts, expression, and contemporary issues within LGBTQ+ communities. By examining LGBTQ+ history, movements, legal struggles, representation in media, health disparities, and other important topics, learners will gain a comprehensive understanding of the extensive complexity of LGBTQ+ life, culture, and the evolving experience of human rights within the US and other societies. The course will also encourage learners to consider the practical applications of LGBTQ+ Studies, including advocacy, policy-making, and social change.
Whether you identify as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, an ally, or an interested learner, Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies offers an entry into a field of study that envisions possibilities beyond binary constructs, embracing fluidity, complexity, and nonconformity. Queer worldmaking is a powerful tool for envisioning more inclusive and equitable societies that embraces human diversity and a spectrum of social identities.
GNDR 380V M01: WOMEN WRITERS T/Th 10:30-11:45
GNDR 380V M02 T/Th 3:00-4:15
Prof. R. Conley
This course addresses women’s contributions to literature across a range of literary forms, styles, and genres. Our course readings explore social and power dynamics reflected in representations of social movements and institutions; historical changes and trends; religious, sexual, domestic, racial, gender, ethnic, and international complexities and conflicts. This course and its texts address the issue of women’s roles within movements of social change. What does it mean when women, as writers and active agents within their own cultures, contribute commentary on and artistic representations of their societies and the events and changes within them? Course readings include Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House, and more. Taught with ENGL 380V.
GNDR 402/502: TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISMS ONLINE
Dr. D. Blackston
This class will explore how feminist theories and activism emerging from varied geographical and socio-political contexts has reshaped the boundaries of gender, catalyzed new understandings of migration and mobility, collectivized environmental justice organizing, and resisted imperialism and its connected effects on local economies and national identities. What are transnational feminisms? How do various communities understand and name their connections to feminism? As a class, we will explore how feminism intersects with transnationalism, with a focus on how local organizing and theorizing connects to interconnected, transnational social justice efforts.
GNDR 408/508: FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES M 1:30-4:00
Dr. L. Williams
This course explores the ways food texts—literary and other popular media texts centered on cooking and eating—reflect experiences of racialized and gendered bodies. We will examine how these representations reveal structures of power that enforce ideas about authority, “normalcy,” and authenticity. Portrayals of cooking and eating offer a productive field of media to study how social structures govern bodies, desires, and notions of belonging. We will consider how these ideas are constructed and maintained. We will also investigate strategies of resistance through alternative foodways, especially as they create avenues for action and agency for disenfranchised identities.
GNDR 411/511: GENDER & MIGRATION T/Th 12:00-1:15
Dr. C. Bejarano
This course will use feminist and interdisciplinary readings to discuss the multiple experiences of women, children, men, and LGBTQIA+ migrants who find themselves in situations of forced migration and displacement due to street level and organized violence, structural dislocation due to neoliberalism and globalization, economic collapse and government instability, histories of civil war, and climate catastrophes/displacement, and the push and pull factors that extract people from their home countries to foreign lands. We will explore the challenges presented to communities fleeing structurally complex situations, and the in-transit and receiving communities’ responses to these migrant mobilities. We will discuss the local, regional, and global responses to creating long-term and meaningful change in communities most affected by migration. We will also examine issues of oppression, violence, vulnerability, power, and the structural factors that have worked historically and contemporarily to create situations of fear, crime, persecution, and overwhelming conditions that foster wide-scale migration.
GNDR 433V: SEX, GENDER & CULTURE M 1:30-4pm
Dr. A. Marks
This seminar course introduces students to the anthropological study of gender. We take an integrated approach to the subject, considering the ways that that different kinds of anthropological research, including archaeology, biological anthropology, ethnography, etc.,expand our understanding of the various ways gender is defined across space and time, how it is lived, and what it means to us and others. Students will review the historical context and development of this subject within the field, and will explore such topics as sex versus gender, embodiment and gendered performance, gender hierarchies, the politics of reproduction, and globalization. Taught with ANTH 433V.
GNDR 450/550 M01: QUEER & TRANS VISUAL CULTURES T/Th 10:30-11:45
Dr. D. Blackston
In this course, we will immerse ourselves in an interdisciplinary investigation of queer and trans representation, the limitations of positive images, and the benefits and perils of mainstream LGBTQ visibility. We will examine how visual productions of transness and queerness are produced alongside and through racial, ethnic, and class identities. What visual economies does queer and trans art depend on, defy, or construct otherwise? What possibilities for survival do queer and trans art offer? Students will engage these questions and others over the course of the semester. In connection with course readings, students will study related photography, sculpture, film, and performance art.
GNDR 450/550 M02: WOMXN OF COLOR FEMINISMS W 4:30-7pm
Dr. V. Aguilar
Womxn of color (WOC) feminisms grounds theoretical frameworks produced by Asian American, Black, Chicanx/Latinx, LGBTQIA+, and Indigenous peoples. Students will explore literature produced from the 1990’s third wave feminist movement to the contemporary. The course draws on an array of themes such as navigating the world, social justice, activism, healing, sexuality, and identity formation. In this literary course, students will explore foundational texts such asAudre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches and Gloria Anzaldúa & Cherrie Moraga’s edited collection, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color as meditations for challenging oppression and raising awareness. In addition, we will juxtapose the non-fiction texts with novels, short-stories, poems, songs, such as Beyoncé’s “Church Girls” & Ivy Queen’s “Yo Quiero Bailar,” and digital media to help students reflect on how WOC feminist frameworks promote critical transformational spaces while amplifying marginalized voices. Taught with ENGL 417/517.
GNDR 465/565: SEX, GENDER, & THE BODY ONLINE
Dr. L. Williams
This course examines a range of social forces that work to define and categorize human (and other) bodies. We will consider how “sex” and “gender” are defined; how ideas about what is “natural” and “normal” for gender identity have changed over time; how different discourses (historical, scientific, medical, political, and cultural) influence and affect our embodied experiences. We will explore how other categories of identity—including race and ethnicity, gender identity and sexuality, socioeconomic class, and citizenship—intersect with one another. Some questions guiding our class will be how and why structures of power create and maintain the categories of male/female? How are these destabilized and blurred? And how do these categories influence individual bodies as well as societies?
GNDR 471/571: SEMINAR IN FEMINIST & QUEER THEORIES ONLINE
Dr. M. C. Jonet
What is feminist theory? Why is it considered such a profoundly important discourse, even in comparison to other forms of critical theory? Why is its study significant to so many different fields, careers, and walks of life? What about queer theory? What is it and how is queer theory linked to feminist theory? How does queer theory produce its analyses? L. Ayu Saraswati and Barbara L. Shaw, editors of Feminist and Queer Theory, note that “a course on theory often has a reputation of being intense, intimidating, and full of abstract readings with verbose language that only experts in feminist and queer studies understand” (ix). This seminar seeks to rethink how feminist and queer critical theories are studied and pedagogically approached by (a) emphasizing the importance of them as knowledge projects and (b) forming a reflexive learning environment that prompts us all to bring feminist and queer theory “home,” as Sara Ahmed calls it, by considering its connections to our lives, communities, and futures. Over the course of the semester, we will be exploring a wide range of contemporary feminist and queer theoretical approaches. Together, we will create opportunities to suggest what insights and strategies feminist and queer theories have to offer to help us understand the intersecting social and politic al dynamics that shape our lives.
GNDR 474: GENDER IN EAST ASIAN HISTORY T/TH 1:30-2:45
Prof. E. Masson
This course Examines the position of women and the social roles of both sexes in traditional China and Japan, and traces the changes taking place in those societies in the course of modernization in the last century and a half. Scholarly literature and works of Chinese and Japanese literature in translation and cinema used. Taught with HIST 474.
