Courses

Kim Coates | W 2:30-5:20PM | Shatzel Hall 330

Description: At the October 2006 “Feminism and War” conference held in Syracuse, New York, Angela Davis asked her audience to “consider the unrepresentability of war in the United States” and to reflect on ways that “feminism can aid us in contesting the culture of war.” During the years of ongoing conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, feminists like Davis cogently pointed out that war, the horrors of which already take us to the limits of representation, has become even more difficult “to see,” especially in the United States. We were overwhelmed with reports and television footage, but we were not presented with images of the dead and wounded. After Abu Ghraib, we saw photographs providing clear evidence that prisoners had been tortured by American soldiers; however, we also heard the photos explained as depicting the behavior of a few misguided individuals rather than as reflective of a United States government guilty of sanctioning torture while simultaneously crusading for freedom. This kind of ideological veiling works especially well in an American culture where violence, death, and destruction are eroticized and packaged as “entertainment” rather than presented as realities suffered by human beings who have names, faces, families, and communities. In this graduate level seminar, we will be reading various texts written predominantly, but not exclusively, by women alongside contemporary feminist criticism that has emerged over the last several decades in response to the past wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war there as well as the recent escalation in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict prompted by Hamas’ attack on Israel October 7, 2023 and Israel’s brutal retaliation and ongoing attack on Gaza. As we do so, we will be thinking about what kinds of feminist discursive frames present themselves in these aesthetic and theoretical texts and how they complement, resist, and/or chafe against one another and against more familiar hegemonic frameworks and constructions. We will be examining a variety of theoretical, cultural, and aesthetic texts/events for the way they remake and diffract our assumptions about gender, nation, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality in the context of war.

Rachel Walsh | TuTh 2:30-5:20PM | East Hall 306

Description: Since the Ferguson uprising of 2014, there has been a “Baldwin Renaissance” within U.S. literary and cultural studies which has been in conversation with the Black Lives Matter movement. To provide a brief catalogue: in 2016, novelist Jesmyn Ward publishes a tribute to Baldwin with her essay collection, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race; that same year, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck releases his acclaimed documentary on James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro (2016). In 2019, Bill V. Mullens publishes a biography of Baldwin, Living in the Fire, that, similar to Peck’s documentary, showcases Baldwin’s critiques of racial capitalism and U.S. imperialism. Most recently, in August 2024, musician and poet Meshell Ndegeocello released her album, No More Water: The Gospel of a James Baldwin, a text that remixes Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time with Audre Lorde’s work and Ndegeocello’s lyrics. In this class, we will consider how and why Baldwin’s writings have served as a resource for understanding our contemporary moment. Throughout the semester, we will examine different facets of Baldwin’s career: his depiction of queerness-as-becoming, his theorization of the relationship between whiteness and heteronormativity, his fraught experiences navigating the Cold War literary marketplace as a Black, queer author, and how these facets of his work heavily inform Queer of Color theory of the late 1990s and early aughts. Alongside this, we will explore his role in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements as well as his critiques of U.S. imperialism and his prophetic insights about the rise neoliberalism and the backlash against the Civil Rights movement during the 1970s and 1980s. To this end, we will focus on his major writings of the 1960s and 1970s and place him in conversation with Black, queer, women writers — Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, and Nikki Giovanni — whose respective bodies of work have likewise garnered greater attention among readers and scholars.

Michaela Domiano | T 2:30-5:20PM | Shatzel Hall 242

Description:

Katherine Lynn Meizel | Th 5:30-8:20PM | Moore Musical Arts Center 2002

Description: This course explores how the music we listen to, play, sing, and talk about reflects and shapes ideas about ability and disability. How does music fit into social, political, and medical discourses regarding disability? How do musicians with disabilities negotiate these ideas, and how are they represented in music performance and media? And how do ideas about ability and disability affect our experiences of music? Students do NOT need to have music experience to register.

Abhishek Bhati | MW 4:30-5:45PM | Central Hall 101

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Jeffrey A. Brown | W 6:00-9:00PM | Shatzel Hall 242

Description: The American film industry learned the importance of attractive actors and actresses shortly after the development of motion pictures. The unprecedented appeal of silent film performers like Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bera, and Louise Brooks demonstrated how Hollywood could define, and profit from, manufacturing a shared perception of beauty and irresistible sexuality. These early screen icons captured the hearts and passions of viewers and established the idea of ‘sex symbols’ as a critical measure of erotic desires. Used first to describe erotically charged actresses in the 1910s and 1920s, such as Clara Bow, Asta Nielsen, and Vilma Banky, the apparent simplicity of the concept “sex symbol” elides the nearly inexpressible relationship between sexuality and filmic presentations. Over the years the sex symbols change: Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Raquel Welch, Scarlett Johansson, Gary Cooper, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, George Clooney, and many more; each reflecting shifting standards of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, as well as social moralities and changing physical ideals. This course will focus on classic Hollywood sex symbols in order to develop an understanding of the role of modern sex symbols in American culture. 

Kei Nomaguchi | W 2:30-5:15PM | Psychology 327

Description: Theoretical and empirical literature on family and gender, including feminist theoretical and methodological approaches to family; the significance of gender in structuring family and shaping family change.

Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson | W 2:30-5:20PM | Wolfe Center 201

Description: This is a comprehensive survey and seminar covering the earliest beginnings in African American history from 1619 to the present.

 Survey topics include the African Grove theatre from 1821-1824, Blackface minstrelsy from 1828, African American pageants in the 1910s, Pan-Africanism, the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the Federal Works Project and the American Negro Theatre (1930s-1940s), the Civil Rights Movement (1950s-1960s), Black Power and the Black Arts Movements (mid 1960s – 1970s), the emergence of hip hop and hip hop theatre in the 1980s, Black feminist and Black LGBTQ theatres, performance artists, African mythology/spirituality in African American theatre, Afrofuturism (Black Speculative Arts Movement), #BlackLivesMatter and the reemergence of White Nationalism in the 2010s, the summer of racial reckoning in 2020 to articulations of Black joy. This survey covers key moments, significant plays, texts, performances, dramatic literature, theatre companies, theatre makers, theories, statements, and manifestos by, for, about, and near African Americans.

*Students will be encouraged to attend a play at the Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio, the longest-running African American theatre in the United States, since 1915.

Sarah Rainey-Smithback | TuTh 11:30AM-12:45PM | Shatzel Hall 126

Description: This course takes as its starting point Gayle Rubin’s “charmed circle,” and explores how and why some types of sex and sexual identities are “good” and others are cast out into the “outer limits.” And, what is at stake when a previously damned sexuality moves into the charmed circle? We will look closely at BDSM/kink/fetish, interracial relationships, intergenerational sex, commercial sex, LGBTQI sexualities and identities, people with disabilities, polyamory, and other types of “bad sex.” Our interdisciplinary exploration will explore the influence of legal policy, media, eugenics, sexology, capitalism, and political discourse on the process of sexual marginalization. 

Radhika Gajjala | T 6:00-9:00PM | East Hall 117

Description: In this course we will investigate contemporary feminist thought from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical orientations. We will focus on key issues in feminist theory such as the sex/gender debate, the politics of location, trans and queer theories, black-feminist theories, global south feminisms, data feminism, implications of AI for gender, intersectionality and multicultural feminism among others. This course also aims to think through the ways in which these issues intersect with race, class, caste, colonialism, and the nation. We will discuss why we study “theory”, consider and debate if there is a “canon” of feminist theory that has developed over the last several decades and explore the relation between feminist theory and political economy of gender/sexuality.

Becca Cragin | ONLINE (Asynchronous)

Description: This online course will explore the historical origins of contemporary U.S. feminist thought, which has been shaped by a variety of cultural forces around the world. We’ll use this historical perspective to understand how the development of theory is affected by the political and intellectual work preceding it and contemporaneously surrounding it. A background in feminist theory is not required.

Vikki Krane | TuTh 1:00-2:15PM | Eppler Complex N 108

Description: A critical examination of how gender, sex, and sexuality, and social expectations surrounding femininity and masculinity, influence experiences in sport and physical activity.

This course is cross listed with HMSL 6410 5001 (76927)  

Becca Cragin | W 2:30-5:20PM | Remote Online (Synchronous)

Description: This course will provide an introduction to critical television studies, exploring foundational and contemporary methods and concepts of the field. These will be used to examine the representation of gender, race, and class in a variety of genres. We’ll look at how television’s changing technological, cultural, and aesthetic forms enable or constrain critique of social inequality.

This course is cross listed with POPC 6800 5001 (76963)  

Radhika Gajjala | W 6:00-9:00PM | East Hall 117

Sandra Faulkner | MoWe 4:30PM-5:45PM | Eppler Complex N 302

Description: The purpose of this course is to introduce you to qualitative humanistic communication research methods, the logic and philosophy of such methods, and innovations/controversies in these methods. We will examine general qualitative research and feminist methods and analysis used by communication (and those in related fields) scholars, specifically interviews, observations, narrative analysis, ethnography, autoethnography, grounded theory, arts-based research, media criticism, and content coding. In addition, we will discuss the ethical considerations in conducting human participant research.

Kathy Meizel | MW 2:30-3:20PM | Moore Musical Arts Center 3010

Description: Voice is integral to how we understand ourselves and others. Vocalities—vocal practices, aesthetics, and timbres, grounded in cultural context—function as perceptual markers for constructions of gender, race and ethnicity, ability and disability, nation, age, class, musical genre, even our emotional lives. And in the 2020s, we play with voice and identity more than ever; ubiquitous technologies allow us to "try on" and manipulate different voices through social media and sampling libraries, and there are reality TV competitions that center on disguising voices or the bodies they come from. In this course, all of these topics will help us investigate how the voice in music serves as an embodied site for the negotiation of identity.

Heidi Nees-Carver | Tu 2:30-5:20PM | Wolfe Center 201

Description: This course explores the theoretical and practical considerations that shape Native American drama and performance in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will consider the ways in which Native artists and theatre companies create works that are informed by the political, social, and intellectual forces within particular cultural and historical contexts and we will examine ways in which Native artists use theatre and performance to subvert colonial structures, challenge previous representations produced by non-natives, employ humor as a means of resistance, create spaces for healing, raise awareness, and instigate change. Furthermore, we will consider the ways in which indigenous performances are influenced by indigenous epistemologies. In our explorations, we will critically engage with play scripts, videos, audio recordings, images, interviews, articles, and other primary and secondary texts.