Women's and Gender Studies
315 WLH, 100 Wall, 432.0845
Chair
Laura Wexler
Professors
Linda Bartoshuk (Psychology), Seyla Benhabib (Political Science),
Kelly Brownell (Psychology), Jill Campbell (English), Hazel
Carby (African American Studies; American Studies), Kang-i
Sun Chang (East Asian Languages & Literatures), Kathryn
Dudley (American Studies; Anthropology), Glenda Gilmore (History;
American Studies; African American Studies), Ingeborg Glier
(German), Dolores Hayden (Architecture; American Studies),
Margaret Homans (English; Women’s & Gender Studies),
Paula Hyman (History; Religious Studies), Marianne LaFrance
(Psychology; Women’s & Gender Studies), Charles
Musser (Film Studies; American Studies), Judith Resnik (Law),
Frances Rosenbluth (Political Science), Cynthia Russett (History),
Harold Scheffler (Anthropology), Reva Siegel (Law), William
Summers (Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry), Laura Wexler
(American Studies; Women’s & Gender Studies), Robert
Wyman (Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology)
Associate Professors
Elizabeth Dillon (English; American Studies), Laura Frost
(English), Nora Groce (Epidemiology & Public Health),
Janet Henrich (School of Medicine), Serene Jones (Divinity;
Women’s & Gender Studies), Jonathan D. Katz (Adjunct,
History of Art; Women’s & Gender Studies), Linda-Anne
Rebhun (Anthropology), Michael Trask (English), Eric Worby
(Anthropology)
Assistant Professors
Jennifer Bair (Sociology; Women’s & Gender Studies),
Bernard Bate (Anthropology),
Jessica Brantley (English), Hannah Brueckner (Sociology),
Alicia Schmidt Camacho (American Studies; Ethnicity, Race
& Migration), Kamari Clarke (Anthropology), Shannon Craigo-Snell
(Religious Studies), Stephen Davis (Religious Studies), Laura
Frost (English), Casiano Hacker-Cordon (Political Science),
Mary Lui (History), Sanda Lwin (English; American Studies),
Naomi Rogers (History of Medicine & Science; Women’s
& Gender
Studies), Lidia Santos (Spanish & Portuguese)
Lecturers
Sarah Bilston (Women’s & Gender Studies), Geetanjali
Singh Chanda (Women’s & Gender Studies), Seth Silberman
(Women’s & Gender Studies; African American Studies),
Vron Ware (Sociology; Women’s & Gender Studies)
Fields of Study
The
program in Women’s and Gender Studies establishes gender
and sexuality as fundamental categories of social and cultural
analysis and offers critical perspectives upon them as a basis
from which to study the diversity of human experience. Gender
(the social and historical meanings of the distinction between
the sexes) and sexuality (sexual practices, identities, discourses,
and institutions) are studied as they intersect with class,
race, ethnicity, and nationality. The introduction of these
perspectives into all fields of knowledge necessitates new
research, criticism of existing research, and the formulation
of new paradigms and organizing concepts.
Graduate students who wish to receive the Qualification in
Women’s and Gender Studies must complete the specified
course work at the graduate level, assist in teaching in appropriate
courses, and demonstrate capacity to pursue independent research
in Women’s and Gender Studies. Students who fulfill
these expectations will receive a letter from the chair, indicating
that they have completed the work for the Qualification. The
Qualification in Women’s and Gender Studies is open
by application to students enrolled in selected Ph.D. programs
at Yale.
Applications and program information are available on request
from the Chair, Women’s and Gender Studies Program.
Courses
WGST 590au, History of Feminist Thought. Margaret
Homans. TTh 1–2.15
This course explores a range of key works from the intellectual
history of feminism in Britain, France, and the United States
from the Enlightenment onward. We also examine influential
writings on gender and sexuality with which these works are
in dialogue. The aim is to trace the foundations and development
of various strands of feminist thought: liberal feminism with
its emphasis on sameness and equality, cultural and separatist
feminisms with their focus on difference, and postmodern and
third-wave feminisms and queer theory with their questioning
of such identity categories as “woman.” Also
ENGL 982au.
WGST 710a, Anthropological Perspectives on Emotion. Linda-Anne
Rebhun. W 1.30–3.20
This seminar focuses on cross-cultural meanings of emotional
experiences. Topics include the relations among emotion, cognition,
and other psychological experiences in various cultural settings,
vocabularies of emotion in different languages, gender issues
in emotion, and the interconnections among emotion, sickness,
religion, and healing. Also ANTH 502au.
WGST 720b, Modernism and Sexuality: A Literary Approach. Laura
Frost.t 10.30–12.20
This course examines the representation of sexuality
in modern fiction through a formal and historical approach.
We consider how literary constructions of sexuality reflect
modernist aesthetics and formal innovation as well as historical
preoccupations such as pseudo-scientific discourses of sexuality
from the turn of the century to mid-twentieth century. Topics
include sexology and psychoanalysis, Victorianism and the
“repressive hypothesis,” theories of “perversion,”
female sexuality and feminism, modernism and mass culture,
eroticism and pornography, and the politics of pleasure. Primary
authors include T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall,
Henry James, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, Thomas
Mann, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. Critical
readings include Bersani, Boone, Butler, Carpenter, Ellis,
Foucault, Laqueur, Rubin, and Sedgwick. Also CPLT 956b,
ENGL 956b.
WGST 730b, Art, Sex, and the Sixties. Jonathan
D. Katz. M 3.30–5.20
Using the work of Andy Warhol as our ur-text, this graduate
seminar maps the development of increasingly cool and ironic
modes of art making against the heated and ideologically loaded
social and political developments of the 1960s. Its central
query concerns why a set of aesthetic practices that seemingly
celebrated normative values (i.e., Pop art) were nonetheless
elevated to dominance ahead of a range of more confrontational
and oppositional strategies in line with the tenor of the
times. Sexuality, its liberation and its suppression figure
prominently in this inquiry into the paradoxical engendering
of opposition through the citation of normative forms. In
asking this question, this course hopes to make sense of such
wildly divergent artistic genres of the period as Pop, minimalism,
photo-realism, opart, Fluxus, protest art, performance, hard-edge
abstraction, happenings, assemblage, new media, conceptual
art, text-based art, etc. Painters became dancers, filmmakers,
authors, and designers in record numbers, And at a moment
when Formalist theory grew both increasingly rigid and prominent,
an unheard-of range of distinctly non-Formalist artistic practices
flourished amidst new audiences, new galleries and art spaces
and, perhaps most notable of all, new prestige. As American
cultural influence finally matched, and perhaps even exceeded,
American military and economic influence, the once esoteric
art world became genuinely popular and certain artists, most
notably Warhol, came to be seen as defining of their social-historical
moment despite—and indeed in some sense through—their
sexuality. Among the readings for this class are Herbert Marcuse’s
One Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization,
Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage
and other works, as well as period art criticism and social
critique like Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology—in
addition to a range of primary and secondary art historical/critical
texts. Also AMST 733b, HSAR 703b.
WGST 740a, Reading Black Queer Literatures of the United
States and the Caribbean. Seth Silberman.
HTBA
Close study of both the racial underpinnings of psychoanalytic
method and psychoanalytic discourse in fiction by black Americans
Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, LeRoi Jones, Nella
Larsen, Charles Perry; Jamaican Andrew Salkey; Martiniquan
Joseph Zobel; Guyanan Edgar Mittelholzer. Exploration of race
and sexuality in psychoanalytic criticism by W. E. B. Du Bois,
Daniel Boyarin, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan,
Hortense Spillers, Claudia Tate. Our aim is twofold: first,
to examine psychoanalytic discourse in literary metaphors
of black liberation; and second, to ameliorate psychoanalysis
anxiety in African American Studies scholarship. Also
AFAM 751a.
WGST 750bu, Visuality and Violence. Laura
Wexler.w 7–8.50
(Formerly Photography and Images of the Social Body.)
Examination of different sets of photographic images—documentary,
medical, and digital images; family snapshots; stereotypes
and anti-stereotypes of race and gender; portraiture; advertising;
industrial images; and art—in light of major writings
on photographic representation. Study of how different ways
of making and displaying images of the body invest it with
culturally specific and historically informative meanings.
Also AMST 870bu.
[WGST 850b, Queer Theory: Normativity and Its Deviations.]
[WGST 890a, Feminist and Gender Theory.]
WGST 901b, Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Gender and
Sexuality.Margaret Homans and staff. F 12.30–2.20
An interdisciplinary research seminar investigating contemporary
methods of research in women’s and gender studies. Requirements
include a research paper, a works-in-progress presentation,
peer reviews, and reviews of critical literature in a variety
of humanities and social science fields.
Related Courses
AMST 673b, Theorizing “Black” and “Asian”
Intersectionalities in the United States. Diana Paulin.
AMST 923a, Cities, Suburbs, and the Culture of Sprawl. Dolores
Hayden.
ANTH 548bu, Gender and Media in India. Bernard
Bate.
ENGL 812b, Jane Austen and the British Empire. Katie
Trumpener.
HIST 934b, Medicine, Public Health, and Colonialism,
175o–195o. Naomi Rogers.
HIST 941a, Making the Modern Body. Susan Lederer.
LAW 21291, Gender—Locally, Globally. Judith
Resnik, Vicki Jackson.
PLSC 586au, Feminism, Imperialism, and Global Justice. Casiano
Hacker-Cordon.
PSYC 57ob, Nonverbal Communication. Marianne
LaFrance.
REL 758b, Trauma and Grace. Serene Jones.
RLST 6o3bu, Women and Gender in Early Christianity. Stephen
Davis.
Next: Research Institutes
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