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Department for Gender and Sexuality Studies

Spring 2021 Undergraduate Courses

GSS 1111: Elizabeth Covington, “First Year Writing Seminar: Gendered Lives,” MWF 12:40-1:30

This course examines how literature and cultural criticism represent and theorize gendered lives. Using contemporary critical techniques and historical approaches, the course will explore how gender operates intersectionally and through environment, personal choice, and social expectations. We will read texts by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, and others. This course will meet in person, and remote-learning students will attend via Zoom.

GSS 1150 01: Allison Hammer, “Sex and Gender in Everyday Life,” TR 11:10-12:25 (AXLE: P)

This course will introduce you to the discipline of gender and sexuality studies while encouraging you to think critically about COVID-19 and current global political crises, both in the United States and transnationally. We will explore together how these developments highlight existing inequalities for women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people. Integrated and multimodal online modules will provide you with an exciting space to pursue emergent questions through an intersectional lens. The course will include the following topics: gender, healthcare, and frontline workers; gender, education, and employment; the Black Lives Matter movement; and BIPOC poetry and filmmaking. This will be a synchronous online course.

GSS 1150 02: Stacy Simplican, “Sex and Gender in Everyday Life,” TR 12:45-2pm (AXLE: P)

In this course, students will develop a critical understanding of the ways in which gender and sexuality affect our everyday lives. This will require us to learn how to think intersectionally, questioning how privilege and oppression function differently as identities intersect across gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, disability, and nationality. The course is divided into 6 modules around six key concepts, including knowledge, identity, equality, the body, representation, and place. In the Spring of 2020, we will take an additional approach that integrates each of these key concepts with questions related to the concept of care. We will ask: How have feminists redefined what it means to care? Who does the labor of care? Which bodies receive care? And how can we care for one another during the COVID-19 pandemic?  This will be a synchronous online course.

GSS 1150 03: Rebecca Epstein-Levi, “Sex and Gender in Everyday Life,” MWF 9:10-10am (AXLE: P)

This course investigates sex and gender roles in culture and society and how they are related to race and class. We will consider women and men in literature, art, culture, politics, and institutions. This course will meet in person, and remote-learning students will attend via Zoom.

GSS 1160 01: Kristen Navarro, “Sex and Society,” MWF 10:20-11:10am (AXLE: P)

How do sex and sexuality influence our understandings of ourselves, each other, and the worlds we inhabit? In this course, we will consider how sex as a practice, identity, and category structures our everyday lives. We will think about how a host of institutions legal, medical, political, social, cultural are invested in defining what constitutes sex, where it can happen, and between whom it can happen. We will consider how other social markers, such as gender, race, class, ability, religion, national origin, and citizenship status, impact understandings of sex. This will be a synchronous online course.

GSS 1160 02: Kristen Navarro, “Sex and Society,” MWF 11:30am-12:20pm (AXLE: P)

How do sex and sexuality influence our understandings of ourselves, each other, and the worlds we inhabit? In this course, we will consider how sex as a practice, identity, and category structures our everyday lives. We will think about how a host of institutions legal, medical, political, social, cultural are invested in defining what constitutes sex, where it can happen, and between whom it can happen. We will consider how other social markers, such as gender, race, class, ability, religion, national origin, and citizenship status, impact understandings of sex. This will be a synchronous online course.

GSS 2242: Kathryn Schwarz, “Women Who Kill,” MW 3:45-5pm (AXLE: P)

Western cultural history is shaped by acts of violence. What then does it mean to define violence in gendered terms, and to focus on violent women? Classical writers tell stories about murderous mothers and Amazon warriors; Renaissance writers warn men that their wives could kill them in their beds; Victorian writers accuse ‘hysterical’ women of homicidal tendencies; contemporary novels and films recycle plots about lesbian serial killers; modern political discourse tethers clichés about feminine emotions to the threat of global war. How does the capacity for lethal acts give women access to power? How does a fixation on that capacity license masculine oppression? This course will connect the fascination with deadly women to what might broadly be termed politics: the politics of agency, misogyny, history, identity, and community.

Discussions will range from classical texts to modern novels, films, cultural theories, and new media. Course requirements will include a group presentation, a midterm paper, research projects, thematic meditations, and regular class participation. This will be a synchronous online course.

GSS 2244: Katie Crawford, “Body, Culture, and Feminism,” MW 1:45-3pm (International/ Global Feminism; History/Social Movements) (AXLE: P)

This course will explore how bodies are culturally constructed. We will consider the social and historical roots of these constructions, as well as the political implications, both personal and national. We will analyze how different framings of the body and life cycle over time create narratives of “normalcy” that discipline those within and without the “normal.” We will do this by considering a range of “unruly” bodies through an intersectional focus on gender, race, ethnicity, class, dis/ability, and sexuality, with a particular focus on the implications of the pressures that make achieving society’s abstract “ideal” impossible. With that impossibility in mind, we will develop approaches and practices to refocus understandings of the body in positive ways. This will be a synchronous online course.

GSS 2254: Rory Dicker, “Feminist Fictions,” TR 9:35-10:50am (AXLE: HCA)

What makes a work of fiction “feminist”? How do we identify such a text? Must it be created by a woman? Must it address certain issues exclusively? How does feminist fiction both emerge and diverge from historical and contemporaneous feminist politics and activism? Did feminist fiction exist before the emergence of an organized women’s movement? Can we read a text both for literary qualities and for its insight into the political, social, and cultural worlds in which it is embedded? How does literature instill and challenge norms regarding gender and sexuality?

This course will attempt to answer these questions by analyzing literature written from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. We will consider the cultural work these texts accomplish, especially in regard to issues of gender, sexuality, and feminism. We will pay particular attention to the ways that gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, disability, religion, and national origin in order to consider the ways that feminist issues have been represented in the literary sphere and how this representation has (or has not) changed over time. We will approach texts through close reading, and our close reading will be informed by theoretical and historical materials. Texts to be read may include Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. This will be a synchronous online course.

GSS 2259W: Nancy Reisman, “Reading and Writing Women’s Lives,” TR 9:35-10:50am (AXLE: HCA)

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” This was the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s view, and this course takes on significant ways of telling, illuminating truths, bearing witness to other lives, using language and image to convey one’s own vision. “Reading and Writing Lives” is a hybrid of textual readings, artist conversations, discussion of craft, and original writing.  The course material will focus primarily but not exclusively on the lives of women and girls, and will include a visiting artist series with writers/artists about their work.  We’ll consider stories, poems, essays, graphic novel,  personal documentary film, among other forms.  This is a W class, and the writing will include short response papers and a related longer analytical piece.  We’ll also delve into storytelling in very short creative fiction and nonfiction (flash forms).  No previous creative writing experience required. This will be a synchronous online course.

GSS 2267: Cara Tuttle-Bell, “Seminar on Gender and Violence,” TR 3:55-5:10pm (AXLE: P)

This course is an in-depth study of the prevalence, conditions, and responses to gender-based violence, including consideration of its disproportionate impact.  Topics include dating and domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and global experiences of gender-based violence. Focus on complexity of the harms and identify and evaluate potential solutions, while examining violence on a societal, institutional, and individual level, interrogating the “personal as political,” and exposing power structures that shape our communities. This course will meet in person, and remote-learning students will attend via Zoom.

GSS 2612: Allison Hammer, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies,” TR 2:20-3:35pm (Sex, Sexuality, and Society) (AXLE: HCA)

LGBTQ Studies will provide an interdisciplinary introduction to the historical and contemporary experience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. We will engage in critical analysis of queer and normative sexualities, historical formations of sexual and gender minorities, and the culture and politics of sexuality transnationally. We will approach these topics through four main threads: LGBTQ identity, race, and socioeconomic class (SES); politics and activism; representation in visual art and film; and LGBTQ literature. We will be particularly attentive to how perceptions of how these identities have shifted over time. We will also track how LGBTQ populations continue to suffer disproportionately during the COVID-19 pandemic and the current global political crises. The course will be a synchronous online course.

GSS 3305: Allison Hammer, “Gender and Sexuality in Times of Pandemic,” TR 12:45-2pm (History/Social Movements)

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that one of the most powerful forces in human history, and one of the most forbidding challenges to gender and sexual justice, is infectious disease. Science and medicine are integral to the social construction of race, gender and sexual identity, interconnected with national identity, economic growth and climate change. This course will provide opportunities to analyze the historical and literary contexts of disease, pandemic, and epidemic. We will ask critical questions about how the intersections of sex, sexuality, and gender are expressed, regulated and resisted during medical/scientific crises. Our subjects will be catastrophic illnesses, including the Black Death (bubonic plague), the White Plague (tuberculosis), Cholera, Flu, Malaria, AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19. The course will be a synchronous online course.

GSS 3405: Shatema Threadcraft, “Mass Incarceration and Abolition Feminism,” TR 3:55-5:10pm (History/Social Movements)

IAlthough feminists have been among the most prominent theorists and activists in the cause of prison abolition, the body that is understood to be at the center of the phenomenon that we call mass incarceration is male. This class aims to de-center the male body. This class will examine the theorists who have expounded on the concept of prison abolition, study the sexual assault to prison pipeline that has led to black women being the fasted growing population in US prisons, the effects of carceral gendering, which began in Jim Crow modernity, on black women’s lives, the economic, psychological and physiological costs of the emotional labor women provide to men in prison, as well as the nexus of interpersonal and state violence in black women’s lives. An important theme of the course will be understanding how Kimberle Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality helps to illuminate the particular power formation that is the carceral regime. This course will be an online course with both synchronous and asynchronous components. Please note: this course is currently listed in YES as GSS 3892. Please register for GSS 3892 and the number will change to GSS 3405 by the beginning of Spring 2021 semester.

GSS 4960 01: Katie Crawford, “Senior Seminar,” T 3:10-5:40

This course is the capstone course for the Women’s and Gender Studies major and minor. We will build on the coursework you have done in WGS and explore cutting edge WGS theory and praxis. Ultimately, this course is intended to provide you with the tools to help you discern your goals for your life after Vanderbilt. While we will read many theoretical texts, the focus of the class is on practical application of the things you have learned during your undergraduate career. This will be a synchronous online course.

GSS 4960 02: Stacy Simplican, “Senior Seminar,” W 3:10-5:40

This course is the capstone course for the Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor. We will build on the coursework you have done in GSS and explore cutting edge GSS theory and praxis. Ultimately, this course is intended to provide you with the tools to help you discern your goals for your life after Vanderbilt. While we will read many theoretical texts, the focus of the class is on practical application of the things you have learned during your undergraduate career. This will be a synchronous online course.