Sample Syllabi

GENDER, SEXUALITY & POP MUSIC (SPring 2023)

How is popular music implicated in the representation, production, performance, and interpretation of gender and sexuality? How have musicians negotiated traditional categories of gender and sexuality? In this class, we will approach the study of popular music through the lens of feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, transnational feminist theory, and intersectional methodologies to articulate the ways in which gender and sexuality have shaped musical discourse and popular culture more broadly. Topics include: gay anthems, trans vocality, masculinities, boy bands, oral histories, queer electro-pop, afrofuturism, performance alter-egos, queer(ing) methods, cover songs, censorship, musical borrowings & cultural appropriation, the politics of representation, and affective modes of listening. Students will learn about and be able to articulate the values and ideologies that are communicated in various subgenres of popular music, and how musical production impacts our understanding of cultural practices and social systems. Content will focus primarily on work in the U.S. and Canada. *No prior musical knowledge required.*

Gender & Society (Spring 2019, online Fall 2020, hybrid Fall 2021)

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies with a focus on the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, delimit opportunities for groups and individuals, and impact lived experiences. Using an intersectional lens, this course will cover the material and social constructions and productions of sex and gender and the power dynamics that drive and structure gendered social orders. We will aim to strengthen our analyses of what is present/current through historical context and attention to intellectual genealogies. While primarily situated in the U.S. context, the course also asks students to reflect on transnational interconnections, recognizing that the power structures that shape gender, race, and class in the United States do not exist in isolation. This class counts toward the Cultural Diversity in the United States and Society Sector requirements.

Border Crossings: Gendered Dimensions of GlobalizatioN (Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021)

This course explores the ways in which gender manifests in a variety of cultural and national contexts and the impact of globalization on gendered social relationships. Gender indicates the ways in which our social lives are organized around gender categories – in relation to work, family, sexuality, immigration, crime, culture, and nation-state. Globalization indicates the transnational flow of capital, goods, people, ideas, militaries, cultures, media, diseases, ecologies, and more. Questions we will explore include: How does globalization relate to settler colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and chattel slavery? How do women, men, transgender, and non-binary people experience globalization differently? For example, how are their wages, compensation, and value negotiated in the global labor market? How different are experiences of women in the Global North from those of women in the Global South? We will explore these issues and others by reading scholarly studies, watching films/documentaries, and engaging in classroom discussion. The course will take an intersectional approach in considering the complex interactions between gender and other social categories such as race, religion, class, sexuality, age, ability, and nationhood in a range of geographic contexts. This intersectional approach to gender informs the course’s exploration of global strategies for decolonization and collective liberation. Fulfills Global/World Society requirement

Sexual Difference in the Cinema (Fall 2019)

Laura Mulvey’s pathbreaking article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” identified how visual representation constructs the concept of woman and determines how “the meaning of woman is sexual difference.” How does the medium of cinema conceive of women as “to-be-looked-at”? And how do other cinematic trends define, produce, and shape our understandings of gender and difference more broadly? This class takes up the social and political production of sexual difference and its relationship with feminism. With special attention to sexual difference in relation to sexuality, race, and class, we will examine fundamental and more recent texts in feminist film theory with readings of Hollywood films, independent films, international films, short films, and documentary films. We will critique ideological assumptions that are created, reinforced, and subverted in a variety of films while building skills to analyze cinematic techniques, genres, and forms, including developing technical language to discuss cinematography, film grammar, sound design, mise-en-scène, narrative, etc.

Voicing Politics/Politicizing Voices (Fall 2017 & Spring 2018)

What does it mean to have a voice? To raise your voice? To have your voice heard? What do our voices say about us and what do they fail to communicate? How we speak and how our voices are perceived impact our interactions in daily life, our participation in the political sphere, and our capacity to effect change through activism. In conjunction with Communication Within the Curriculum, this course explores the parameters by which voice is defined in the context of music and sound studies, social justice, philosophy, and media and communication studies. We will consider how voice embodies our political constitution through an examination of various operatic and art song repertoires; the vocal practices of artists such as Tanya Tagaq, Anohni, Juliana Huxtable, Laurie Anderson, Sikh Knowledge, and Lucas Silveira; the phenomena of voice-activated devices such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo; and the collective voices of movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock water protectors.