GRADUATE STUDIES COUNCIL

Jill Campbell (English), M. Kamari Clarke (Anthropology), Moira Fradinger (Comparative Literature), Margaret Homans (DGS; English; Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies), Marianne LaFrance (Psychology; Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies), Alondra Nelson (Sociology; African American Studies), Naomi Rogers (History of Science & Medicine; Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies), Alicia Schmidt Camacho (American Studies), Emilie Townes (Divinity), Laura Wexler (American Studies; Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies).

GENERAL INFORMATION

The program in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies considers 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 (the domain of sexual practices, identities, discourses, and institutions) are studied as they intersect with class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and other areas of human difference.  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.  Completion of the Qualification demonstrates coursework at the graduate level, experience in pedagogy, and capacity to pursue independent research in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies.

The Qualification in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is open to students already enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Yale.  A graduate student who wishes to receive the Qualification in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies must (1) complete one of the designated courses in the theory of gender and sexuality; (2) complete two electives to be determined in consultation with her or his individual WGSS graduate advisor; (3) demonstrate the capacity to pursue independent research in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies by writing a qualifying paper; and (4) demonstrate ability to teach in the field by (a) teaching her or his own seminar on women/gender/sexuality; or (b) serving as T.F. for a Yale College course on women/gender/sexuality;  or (c) submitting a detailed course syllabus and explicatory essay that demonstrate the ability to teach in the field.  A student who fulfills these expectations will receive a letter from the Director of Graduate Studies, indicating that she or he has completed the work for and received the Qualification.

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE QUALIFICATION

Working in conjunction with the DGS in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies,  with the DGS and academic advisor in the degree program, and with an advisor from the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies graduate faculty, a student who intends to complete the Qualification should work out a plan for meeting the requirements of the Qualification along with her or his degree requirements.  Students intending to complete the Qualification should contact the DGS as soon as possible during the course work years.

I. Theory Course:  Each student takes one theory course.  Multiple courses fulfilling the theory requirement will be designated as such in the Graduate School Bulletin (officially known as the Graduate School of Arts Sciences, Program and Policies, Bulletin of Yale University) and in online course descriptions.  The theory course must be taken for a grade.  If the theory course is double-listed in another department or program, the student may enroll in the course under either the WGSS course number or another department’s or program’s course number.  Substitutions are permissible in consultation with the DGS of WGSS and with the WGSS advisor.

II. Two Electives: Each student takes two elective courses.  These courses may be in the student’s degree department or program or in another department or program and are normally selected from the list of WGSS courses.  One Directed Reading course may count as an elective.  Electives are normally courses focusing entirely or substantially on women, gender, and/or sexuality.  Substitutions are permissible in consultation with the DGS of WGSS and with the WGSS advisor.

III. Qualifying Paper:  Each student submits a research paper that reflects the student’s training in the field.  The paper may be a revision of a paper written for the theory course or for an elective, a draft dissertation chapter, or any other academic paper approved of by the WGSS advisor.  The qualifying paper is read by the student’s WGSS advisor, who is solely responsible for passing or failing the student on her or his work.  The paper may not be used as the qualifying paper in the student’s Ph.D. department or program.

IV. Teaching:  There are three ways for a student to fulfill  the teaching requirement: (1) a student may teach her or his own seminar on women/gender/sexuality; or (2) a student may serve as T.F. for a Yale College course on women/gender/sexuality; or (3) a student may submit a detailed course syllabus and explicatory essay that demonstrate the ability to teach in this field.  Options (1) and (2) should be developed in consultation with the student’s WGSS advisor and the DGS in WGSS.  For option (3), the student submits an original syllabus—including detailed week-by-week plan, rationale, bibliography, assignments, and other materials—and an explicatory essay for a course in her or his field that focuses on questions central to the discipline of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.  The syllabus is read by the student’s WGSS advisor, who is solely responsible for passing or failing the student on her or his work.

Courses 2008-2009

WGSS 621b/INTRL 621b/REL 827b, Religion, Gender, and Globalization. Laura Wexler, Sally Promey. 
This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to examining issues of religion, gender, representation, and globalization with special attention to the ways in which the practices of religion in women's daily lives impact and are impacted by globalization and the ways in which those effects and interventions are represented in visual culture. Th 1:30-3:20. 

WGSS 679a/REL 879a, Power, Religion, Gender, and Violence.  Sallama Shaker. 
This course will critically approach and attempt to tease out the relationships between power, religion, gender, and violence with a particular focus on women in the Middle East.   In addressing these delicate issues it is important to distinguish between the impacts of religion, tradition, and attitudes.  The course will employ gender studies as a potential mechanism for evaluating different interpretations and applications of Islam.  Among other issues, we will examine possibilities for changing the power dynamics within societies, seek to identify sources of resistance to movements from the status quo that would result in more equitable development and explore ways that globalization can present more opportunities than challenges. M 1:30-3:20.

WGSS 685aU, Black Beauty: Concert Dance in the Africanist Grain. Thomas DeFranz
A comparrisonof the work of four African American choreographers with the study of aesthetic theory and historical treatmnets of black concert dance in America, this course seaks to engage students critically in the developing fields of African American dance documentation and enterpretation, and to enable them to understand and articulate the key questions and to formulate their own criticism and theory. W 3:30-5:20.

WGSS 689a/ANTH 591a, Black Feminist Theory and Praxis.  Jafari Allen.
In this course we will analyze black feminisms both as political space and scholarly choice. This framework will enable us to examine the continuities between black feminist and womanist theorizing in diverse locations, as well as to explore how different embodied experiences -including histories, geographies, and genealogies - condition divergent perspectives. This course finds theory in literature, activism, art, ethnography and everyday life. Likewise, we demand elements of praxis from academic production. This course fulfills the theory requirement for the Graduate Qualification in WGSS. HTBA

WGSS 699b/AMST 863b, Feminist Visual Theory. 
Laura Wexler. 
An exploration of the history of ideas about the gaze, with specific reference to the power relations of gender, race and class in American visual culture. This course fulfills the theory requirement for the Graduate Qualification in WGSS.  T 3:30-5:20.

WGSS 701bU/ANTH 508bU, Queer Ethnographies. Karen Nakamura.
Explores both classic and contemporary ethnographies of gender and sexuality. Emphasis on understanding anthropology’s contribution to, and relationship with, gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. T 1:30-3:20.

[WGSS 702b, Theoretical Approaches to Gender and Sexuality]

WGSS 704b/LAW 21577/SOCY 601b, Work and Gender. Vicki Schultz.
This course will examine how workplaces, jobs, and workers come to be structured along gendered lines. The class will read theoretical accounts, empirical studies, ethnographies, and legal cases to obtain an understanding of the mechanisms through which work becomes gendered. Among the questions the course will address are: Does the workplace reflect or rather actively reproduce gendered social relations and identities? What is the relationship among wage work, citizenship, and gender? How do structural features of organizations tend to reproduce sex segregation and gender harassment? How should we understand the relationship between gender and sexuality at work? Which theories ground past and present interpretations of the law’s ban on sex discrimination? Which theories should do so? The representation of gender and work in the popular media is also explored, through an accompanying, required in-class film series. Scheduled examination. HTBA

WGSS 708b/LAW 21415, Workplace Theory and Policy Workshop: New Directions in Labor and Employment Law. Vicki Schultz. 
This seminar critically examines work and work-related institutions from theoretical, legal, and policy perspectives. It examines recent transformations in work, employment, and workplaces, explore the regulation of employment and other forms of work, and analyzes ways to restructure work and work-related institutions. A number of prominent legal scholars (and perhaps a few lawyers) will come to the Law School to present their work. The speaker’s paper (if there is one) is circulated a week before the class and discussed during class time. Students will read, discuss, and write reflection papers on the works-in-progress produced by the guest speakers. There may also be an opportunity to meet with some of the speakers informally. The workshop should be of interest to students who are interested in labor and employment law and to students interested in social justice and equality more broadly. M 4:10-6:00

WGSS 710aU, Reading Gender and Sexuality in the Archive.  Graeme Reid.  
Discussion of a wide range of theoretical approaches to research on gender and sexuality studies. Exploration of the relationship between personal memory, social memory, and archives. Focus on issues of knowledge construction and the exercise of power. Frequent library visits to examine various collections, databases, and finding tools.  This course fulfills the theory requirement for the Graduate Qualification in WGSS. W 1:30-3:20.

WGSS 712b/HIST 775b/AMST 866b, Readings in the History of Sexuality. George Chauncey.
Selected topics in the history of sexuality. Emphasis on key theoretical works and recent historical literature. M 1:30-3:20.

WGSS 714a/CPLT 727a/ENGL 935a, Postcolonialism and Its Discontents.  Sara Suleri Goodyear. 
A reading of theoretical and fictional texts from the Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, to raise questions of cultural, religious, and racial identities.  This course fulfills the theory requirement for the Graduate Qualification in WGSS.  M 1:30-3:20. 

WGSS 719b/AFAM 719bU/SOCY 654bU, Race, Racisms, and Social Theory.  Alondra Nelson.  
In this seminar we examine some of the ways in which “race” and its inextricably linked correlate “racism” have been defined, delineated, and critiqued by social theorists.  Bearing in mind that some regard the idea of race as always signaling notions of inferiority and superiority, while others regard it as a sign of shared history and collective identity, we will consult a range of opinions as to what race is and how perceptions of racial difference shape the social world.  Our inquiry into the concepts of race and racism proceeds along several tracks: We consider the interplay of race with class, gender, and sexuality and the consequences of this “intersectionality” for how racism is deployed and experienced.  We examine how race operates as a valence of social stratification and consider how the concept is taken up in the social sciences as an underlying assumption of qualitative scholarship and as a central variable of quantitative work.  In addition, we will turn our attention to explanations of how race and racism are reflected in the structure of institutions, in the formation of the nation-state, in the dynamics of political processes, and through the dissemination of cultural representations.  T 2:30-4:20. 

WGSS 730b/HIST 943b/HSHM 736b, Health Politics, Body Politics. Naomi Rogers.
A reading seminar on struggles to control, pathologize, and normalize human bodies, with a particular focus on science, medicine, and the state, both in North America and in a broader global health context. Topics include colonialism and prostitution; repression and regulation of birth control; the teaching of sex education; the public celebration and denial of sexual differences; politics of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS; public health and legal efforts to define and restrict abortion; the pathologizing and identity politics of transgendered people; and the development and regulation of artificial insemination and other methods of reproductive technology. T 9:25-11:15. 

WGSS 736b/AFAM 709b/AMST 709b/HIST 736b, Research in Twentieth-Century U.S. Political and Social History.  Glenda Gilmore.
Projects chosen from post-Civil War period, with emphasis on twentieth-century social and political history, broadly defined.  Research seminar.  W 1:30-3:20.

WGSS 739a/AFST 947a/HIST 847a, Women and Gender in African History.  Michael Mahoney. 
This course is an introduction to the history not only of women in Africa, but also of the various ways in which gender has been defined and constituted there.  The study of women and gender is a crucial element in African history, for it highlights the particularities of women’s and men’s historical experiences.  Similarly, the study of Africa is crucial for the history of women and gender, for it shows the historical experiences of African women have been both similar to and different from those of women elsewhere. T 1:30-3:20.

 [WGSS 744a, Readings in the History of Gender]

WGSS 745bU/SOCY 610bU, Race, Gender, and the African American Experience. Averil Clarke.
This course explores how the social constructs of race and gender impact individual and collective black experiences within major social institutions (i.e., education, family, criminal justice, media and entertainment, and politics and the economy). It also analyzes the ways in which these institutions produce and are constituted by race and gender inequality. Attention is paid to theories of discrimination and to social movements that both differentiate and unite the black experience along gender lines. Enrolled students are required to present the oral and written results of research on race and gender in one such social institution. T 9:25-11:15

[WGSS 750b, Research on Gender and Sexuality]

WGSS 765a/PHIL 700a/PLSC 616a, Philosophy and Politics in Hannah Arendt’s Thought. Seyla Benhabib.
This course examines mainly Arendt’s posthumous work on The Life of the Mind. We focus on her readings of Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger; her theories of judgment and of the will; action, narrative, and interpretation. Readings from Arendt, Heidegger, Kant (Third Critique), and Nietzsche. Th 9:25-11:15.

WGSS 771a/ENGL 725a, The Eighteenth-Century Novel.  Jill Campbell.
Studies in the emergence of the "novel" as a category of literature and of "fiction" as a basis for experience in the course of the long eighteenth century.  Likely authors include Behn, Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley.  Special emphasis on the forms of selfhood developed by the novel; the claims to attention of suppositional persons in fictional forms; and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century experimentation with the uses of fiction for didactic and  political ends.  Readings will also include a sampling of prose fiction for children and of non-fictional, polemical prose. T 1:30-3:20.

WGSS 772b/CPLT 579b/ENGL 983b, Literature in the Age of Globalization.  Shameem Black.
This course focuses on interdisciplinary theories of globalization and explores how these phenomena affect the production, circulation, and interpretation of literature.  Placing sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and literary theory in dialogue with contemporary prose narratives from five continents, the class explores different ways to conceptualize and evaluate the increasingly transnational and transcultural flows at the turn of the millennium. Topics include the globalization of labor, violence, and affect; the changing roles of women, gender, and sexuality in transnational contexts; the production of knowledge across national borders; the question of translation and the status of English; and the recent retheorization of "world literature."   M 1:30-3:20.  

WGSS 774b/ENGL 880b, Victorians to Moderns. 
Tanya Agathocleous. 
A survey of the literature of the British fin de siècle and an introduction to research in the field. The course is designed to introduce newcomers to a period of literary and cultural transition and to examine its implications for earlier and later periods, as well as to raise questions about periodization. We focus on key avant-garde and political movements of the period—Aestheticism, Decadence, feminism and socialism—and consider the material forms in which the writing and art we examine first appeared, making use of collections at the Beinecke Library. Figures include: Olive Schreiner, Wilde, Michael Field, Pater, Beardsley, Edward Carpenter, Gissing, Conrad.   Th 1:30-3:20.

Official Yale College Program Course Information is found in the Yale College Program of Study available online at www.yale.edu/yalecollege/publications/ycps/.

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