Smith College's Moodle

This course is designed to introduce students to key concepts, debates and provocations that animate the study of women, gender and sexuality. We will engage with a range of analytical frameworks as we develop the critical tools needed to examine the social construction of gender, race, sex, sexuality, class, citizenship, disability and nationality in the US and globally. We will consider how these concepts have changed over time, and how they circulate in popular culture. We will study important historical figures who advocated for gender justice as well as freedom from racial, ethnic, nationality and class oppression and their intersections. This course will address issues of ableism, transphobia, as well as environmental justice and reproductive justice in contemporary movements. We will study how capitalism shapes our lives, our movements and our horizons for social change. This course will develop methodologies of archival research, historical analysis, literary and visual analysis, political economy, ethnography and theoretical analysis. Over the course of the semester, students will engage with and begin to grow comfortable with reading critical theoretical texts.