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Body Politics
How do bodies inform lived experience? How are bodies situated in matrices of privilege and oppression? What are the politics of the body? Explores the social, cultural, and political construction of the female/feminine/femme body. Considers specifically the bodies of women and girls, transgender and gender nonconforming women and girls, queer people that embody and identify with the feminine/femme, female masculinities, and bodies that identify and are identified as female/feminine/femme, as bodies that have historically and traditionally been sites of political contention, of societal meaning making, of cultural symbolism, and active resistance.
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Framing Fatness
Explores various aspects of identity politics and body politics such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and citizenship status as they relate to and intersect with body size and constructions of fatness. Considers how fatness has been conceptualized over time, the formation of gendered body ideals, and the proliferation of “obesity” rhetoric. Investigates how fat people experience the social world, and critically examines arenas such as the American health care system, education, social welfare, immigration, and media.
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From Past Feminisms to Postfeminism
Where have we come from and where are we going? Designed to take us on a journey and tell stories of knowledge building over time, explores feminist theories from a broad array of disciplines and perspectives including Black feminist thought, queer theory, disability studies, fat studies, ecofeminism, and transnational and global feminisms. Identifying and addressing crucial areas of contestation that punctuate the dynamic relationships among texts from past and present—the arrivals, departures, and returns—in feminist theory.
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Food for Thought
Approaches human relationships with food from micro to macro levels. Asks questions about personal and individual responsibility in relation to food, the role of communities, municipalities, governments, and global entities in determining what people eat and how. Explores the gendered, raced, and classed politics of food systems; questions of sovereignty, sustainability, access, regulation, dissemination, and policy making. Examines the cultural, ecological, and economic implications of the ways food is perceived, produced, and consumed across cultures. From land conservation to the politics of globalization, from local food systems to global food justice, critically considers how food is produced, by whom, the key stakeholders involved, and who benefits and who suffers in these arrangements of how food gets from a source to a stomach.
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Women’s Global Health and Human Rights
Takes a human rights approach to provide an overview of health issues within the context of women’s life cycles – childhood, adolescence, reproductive years, and aging. Explores gendered realities, barriers, and capacities towards “good health” and how women and girls manage their lives in the face of societal and cultural pressures and obstacles. Attention is given to critical issues such as poverty, unequal access to education, food, health care, and gender-based violence. Focuses on the nuances, and complexities, that influence experiences of women and girls in different regions, and the geopolitics that inform borders of nations and cultures.
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Gender, Women, and Society in Global Perspective
Engages understanding of the essential concepts and methods of feminist inquiry, as well as a wide range of global women’s and gender issues. Develops skills in the basic tools of feminist inquiry to explore how power relations based on gender, class, race, sexuality, location, and ability impact the lives of others in local, national, and global contexts. Emphasizes critical examination of personal experiences and social locations as part of larger political and social systems and institutions.
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