Women, Gender, & Representation

Instructor

Anna Baeth

Course Description

Play Like a Girl: Gender in Sport explores questions about gender and the involvement of all women, trans, and nonbinary people in sport, physical activity, and exercise in the United States. Drawing from various texts, podcasts, videos, current events, and our especially our own experiences, we interrogate the histories of gender in sport and physical education and use critical feminist and queer theories to decipher the ways sport creates, supports, and resists dominant ideologies of inequality. This course will focus on the creation and legacy of women's sports, patterns of inclusion and exclusion in sport with particular attention to women of color, trans, and nonbinary athletes, and the social construction of gender, race, and sexuality in sport. This course is experiential and students may be asked to participate in some light activity that will be accessible and available for every body.

Instructor

Sydney Curtis

Course Description

In this course, we will use embodied ways of learning to facilitate rest in tandem with rigorous engagement with the history of Black womens’ right to rest and traditions of rest as resistance. Using The Nap Bishop Tricia Hersey’s Rest as Resistance: A Manifesto as our guide, we will embark on an embodied experience of rest as a political praxis. In partnership with concurrent WGR courses, students in this course will closely examine sources of unrest in multifaceted forms throughout the world, and critique the ways that these forces impact our bodies. We will explore the Black feminist ethics of care to trace the origins of self care from diasporic womens’ experiences and conceptions of labor in enslavement, to and through our current practices and experiences of self-care and/or “commercialized rest”. Through movement, meditation, conversation, and reflection, we will excavate the authentic and necessary rest practices that strengthen our ability to persist and thrive –while we continually examine and critique the social structures that perpetuate our restlessness. We will further explore expressions of radical interiority from artistic, astrological, secular, spiritual, and religious lenses, to engage and learn with transcendent sources of rest. By the end of this course, students will have a radical understanding of the history and practice of rest!

Instructor

Fiona Maurisette

Course Description

This class is for students who recognize that we need a paradigm shift and want to change the world. What kinds of futures have you been made aware of through science fiction and fantasy texts, and how can you use your analyses to change the world? In this class, you will be a world builder. This interdisciplinary course examines feminist science and speculative fiction narratives as political texts that critique society’s racial and gender hierarchies. By analyzing science and speculative fiction texts, you will find inspiration for your own constructions of the future. Your words will push the boundaries of what others believe is possible. You will produce a project about how to make our world better. Join others in suspending disbelief and believing in your power to promote change. Writers may include Adrienne Maree Brown, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, Nalo Hopkinson, Shirley Jackson, N.K. Jemisin, and Sheree Renée Thomas.

We want to foster an open and welcoming community of thinkers and learners. This class will support you in sharing your ideas and thoughts while keeping in focus that not everyone in the class has the same background.

Instructor

Kate Dugan

Course Description

What does it mean to live in a Post-Roe world? What is the history of reproductive justice? What are the legacies of protest movements for and against access to reproductive health care? This course will examine histories of sexual and reproductive health movements. We will study the UN’s reproductive justice framework and how it empowers global conversations about bodily autonomy. We will explore Smith College’s Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, which is a rich archive of the history of movements for reproductive health, including Loretta Ross papers, the Activist Life Oral History Project, the Black Women’s Health Imperative Records, the National Latina Health Organization Records, and several personal archives of well-known feminist thinkers and activists. Students will leave this course with well-informed curiosity about how historical conditions, social movement materials, and critical questions shape the possibilities for reproductive justice.

Instructor

Tanya Pearson

Course Description

The cultural narrative of popular women musicians offers a unique view from which to study American history. In this course, students will explore the Women of Rock Oral History Project, a collection of digital interviews and written transcripts documenting the lives and careers of women-identified musicians, analyze their oral testimony, and identify emerging threads, topics, and themes. Students will gain an in-depth knowledge of the history of women in rock, develop a greater understanding of their impact on culture, society, and politics, gain a greater sense of women’s lives and the pervasive ways in which women musicians address societal issues, and develop and refine skills in critical thinking, discussion, and writing. We will use multiple digital tools and conduct group research with the Women of Rock Oral History Project narrators.

Instructor

Ileana Jiménez

Course Description

This course is all about love. Whether we are queer, straight, pansexual, asexual, questioning, or anywhere on the continuum of desire and attraction, we all long to give and receive love. During our time together, we will read and watch love stories as narrative, poetry, and film exploring everything from romantic love to family love to community love to self-love. We will question whether we see ourselves in these representations, or whether love stories include some and exclude others. These readings and various media will ask us to explore themes about attraction and desire; intimacy and connection; communication and compassion. We might laugh and we might cry. Throughout it all, we will experiment with different ways to approach texts through intersectional feminist as well as queer, non-binary, and trans perspectives. We will begin with some of the opening chapters in bell hooks’s All About Love (2000) followed by poetry that may include pieces by Sappho, Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and more. The films we watch will be from the U.S. and abroad. The invitation for all of us as we gather for two weeks will be, as Maya Angelou writes, to “have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”