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Core and Cross-listed Elective Course Offerings

Spring 2007 semester
Women's and Gender Studies

Each semester, the Women's and Gender Studies program offers its own core courses and cross-listed courses from other departments at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Descriptions for all of these courses appear below. At the undergraduate level, WGS 210 and WGS 304 are required for the WGS minor. They may also be taken as electives or be used to fulfill a general education requirement. At the graduate level, WGS 402 and WGS 404 are required for both the master's degree and the graduate certificate. Students in both these programs may take multiple sections of WGS 404, Topics in Feminist Theories, as electives. These courses are also available to any graduate student looking for a stimulating elective. Cross-listed courses count as electives for the WGS minor, master's degree, or graduate certificate.

WGS Core Course Offerings

WGS 304/404 Feminist Theories of Performance                     

Regina Buccola Chicago campus M 2-4:30 PM

Starting with theatrical, biographical, and frankly fictive accounts of the “roaring girl,” Mary Frith, or Moll Cutpurse, charged with repeated counts of transvestism in seventeenth-century London, we will explore how gender is performed in both the theater and in life. We will bring a variety of critical perspectives to bear on our examination of plays, novels, films, and performance art, including feminist theater theory, feminist literary theory, feminist cultural theory and the feminist philosophical musings of Judith Butler.  By the end of the term, students will be able to apply feminist criticism from all of these perspectives to their own written analyses of works in all four genres (drama, film, fiction and performance art). In addition to Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s seventeenth-century play The Roaring Girl, we will also read Ellen Galford’s lesbian historical romance novel Moll Cutpurse: Her True History, Caryl Churchill’s gender-bending, cross-cast play Cloud 9, Eve Ensler’s recent play The Good Body, and the texts of Karen Finley’s performance art pieces collected in Shock Treatment. Finally, we will view and critique the films Boys Don’t Cry and Transamerica. . Open to graduate students in all disciplines.

WGS 304 Feminist Theories of Sexuality 
Mary Pflugshaupt Schaumburg campus W 2-4:30 PM
In this course, we will read essays, an erotic novel, and several short stories, focusing on how sexuality is defined, constructed, and theorized within the texts and how those interpretations intersect with gender, race, and class.  We will pay particular attention to desire and how social stigmas attached to desire influence the authors’ discourses on sexuality and normativity. In particular, we will examine the idea of normality and how it often stifles the growth of a healthy sexual identity.  In addition, we will discuss how desire and sexual practice often lead to feelings of guilt and alienation, and also open up avenues to  empowerment and self-determination. Finally, we will analyze the novel and short stories in relation to several feminist ideologies.  Although we will engage in frank discussions of course materials, we will do so with attentiveness and sensitivity.
                                                                        

WGS 404 Feminist Theories of the Body
Carrie Brecke Chicago campus Th 6-8:30 PM
This course will focus on how women’s bodies have been constructed theoretically through medical, religious, cultural and philosophical discourse, but will explore also how “others’” bodies, e.g., persons of non-Western nationalities, the disabled, gay men, have been constructed in relational ways. Readings will be selected from a variety of disciplines and time periods with the heaviest emphasis being from contemporary feminist works. We will read works by Audre Lorde, Radhika Mohanram, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway, Jewell Gomez, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Judith Halberstam and Susan Bordo, but also popular magazines, medical pamphlets, and children’s books. While the class will pursue certain lines of inquiry together, students will delineate, research and present an avenue or issue within “body theory” that interests them. NOTE: This is a graduate student only seminar. Open to graduate students in all disciplines.

WGS 495 Internship: Feminist & Critical Pedagogy at the Writing Center

Carrie Brecke Chicago campus Day/time TBA

In this graduate-level internship, the student works directly with the Writing Center Director to participate in planning and teaching the tutor training course (an advanced course in writing) and assist in administering at the writing center.  Readings in critical and feminist pedagogy and the politics of literacy and community will be supplemented by classroom and writing center observation and participation. The student will help create and foster a community working towards social justice goals—in this case a writing community dedicated to bringing a writing voice to all.