Introduction to Feminist Gender Sexuality Studies

This course explores U.S.-based, intersectional and antiracist feminist approaches to understanding masculinities/femininities, genders, and sexualities. Together, each class community examines the ways in which we learn and perform genders and sexualities through the weaves of culture/s, ethno-racial politics, class experience, desire, political action– through our bodies, our communities, our histories, our differences.

The subject(ivities) of “woman”, (or “man”) cannot be presumed. Gender-ing is a social process that is indelibly connected to other forms of social identity, experience and power—such as race, ethnicity, nation, sexualities, religion, language, class and so forth. These are “performances” of being– and doing– which create embodied and material experiences of power, privilege and inequality in our individual and collective lives.