Courses
GSS 100: Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies
Interdisciplinary, intersectional study of gender and sexuality in cross-cultural and historical perspective. Attention is given to the dynamic relations of race, class, ethnicity, age, (dis)ability, sexuality, nationality, citizenship, and religion drawing on antiracist, decolonial, queer, and trans perspectives.
GSS 109: Anime: Shojo and Society in Japanese Animation
Some refer to shojo animation as "girls’ anime," but the figure of the shojo–an adolescent somewhere between girlhood and womanhood, has a complex role in Japanese storytelling and society. Who is the shojo? Is the shojo a "third gender?" Does the shojo hold a special role compared with other age and gender categories? Why is the shojo so often chosen as a figure who confronts social crises or bridges social gaps? This class will explore the age and gender category known as "shojo" primarily through the lens of animation, but occasionally making use of literature and manga as well. The class will focus on how adolescent girls in Japanese animation interact with social problems and crises such as gender role limitations, environmental crisis, natural disaster, and urbanization.
GSS 151: Gender, Race, and Social Class in French and Francophone Film
This course explores representations of gender, race, and class including the intersectionality and historical evolution of these categories of difference. Students acquire analytical tools to better appreciate and contextualize French and Francophone films and look critically at their various aesthetic frameworks. How do classic French cinema, surrealism, avant-garde cinema, the New Wave, and postcolonial cinema question social norms and values? How do French and Francophone films represent personal memory, national history, gender relations, and colonial and postcolonial gazes? How do filmmakers address social change and capture shifting identities within French and Francophone history and cultures? Course and reading materials are in English; films are in the original with English subtitles. Not open to students who have earned credit for FRE S15.
GSS 155: Gender, Power, and Politics
This course scrutinizes several sites where power is produced-constitutions, international politics, social movements, and globalization- in order to assess the impact of gender on the status, behavior, and authority of different political actors. Recognizing how race, class, sexuality, and citizen status matter, students consider why women are under-represented in nearly all governments and how differences in national and international settings occur. Students examine questions, concepts, and theories that acknowledge women’s political agency and help assess their influence across a range of political systems.
GSS 201: Race, Ethnicity, and Feminist Thought
This course focuses on race, ethnicity, and national power at their intersections with gender. Acknowledging the realities of white supremacy and patriarchy, students develop their understanding of these systemic and interlocking oppressions, while exploring the resistance to such oppressions that continues to give rise to critical feminist theory. Using a range of transdisciplinary perspectives, students examine the work of BIPOC feminist scholars and activists and encounter modes of critical and liberatory theorizing that productively challenge notions of what constitutes theory. Additionally, students practice ongoing self-reflection, or awareness of their own positionality and the ways it affects their journey through the course.
GSS 202: Queer and Trans Sports Studies
This course brings queer studies and trans studies perspectives to sport, looking at practice, representation, discourse, and relations among them. Topics include the reach into the lives of all athletes of gender binarism and gender segregation; the regulation of transgender, gender nonconforming, and intersex athletes, including through the delineation of those categories, in the context of other discourses around human variation in sport; the roles of raced masculinities, femininities, heteronormativities, and homonormativities in the valuation of athleticism, athletes, and sports; and issues from pleasure to pink-washing. Recommended background: one course on the study of gender, sexuality, queer studies, trans studies, and/or sports studies.
GSS 207: Eve, Adam, and the Serpent
How are interpretations of the Bible’s creation stories informed by contemporary cultural understandings of right and wrong, sex and gender, power and privilege, human and non-human? And, conversely, how do interpretations of these stories – ancient and modern – shape our sense of how the world works and what is possible now and in the future? Close readings of ancient texts paired with a wide array of later interpretations and commentary provide the basis for our studies.
GSS 210: Technology in U.S. History
Surveys the development, distribution, and use of technology in the United States, drawing on primary and secondary source material. Subjects treated include racialized and gendered divisions of labor and the ecological consequences of technological change.
GSS 236: Race Matters: Tobacco in North America
This course explores race and the history of tobacco in North America. With a primary focus on the intersection of tobacco capitalism and African American history and settler colonialism the course introduces students to the impact of tobacco on the formation of racial ideologies and lived experiences through a consideration of economic, cultural, political, and epidemiological history. Recommended background: at least one course on the study of race, settler colonialism, US history, capitalism, and/or gender and sexuality.
GSS 238: Queer Power: Political Sociology of U.S. Sexuality Movements
This course introduces students to social movement theory and interest group politics in the United States via the case study of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) politics from the immediate post-World War II period to the present, and it examines the relationship of sexuality to the racial and gender dynamics of U.S. identity-based social movements. The course traces the development of research methodologies to study collective action from early rational choice models to resource mobilization theory to new social movement models and political opportunity and process models. How the LGBTQ+ movements drew upon, expanded, and challenged foundations established by both African American civil rights and feminism is also explored. Prerequisite(s): any 100-level course in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Politics, or Sociology.
GSS 250: Interdisciplinary Studies: Methods and Modes of Inquiry
Interdisciplinarity involves more than a meeting of disciplines. Academic practitioners stretch methodological norms and reach across disciplinary boundaries. Through examination of a single topic, this course introduces students to interdisciplinary methods of analysis. Students examine what practitioners actually do and work to become contributing practitioners themselves. Prerequisite(s): AFR 100, AMST 200, or GSS 100, and one other course in Africana, American studies, or gender and sexuality studies.
GSS 256: Feminist Political Thought
What is the point of feminism? This course brings an emphasis on the big questions about gender to political science while bringing a specifically political theoretical mode of questioning to gender and sexuality studies. Students evaluate and reshape their own beliefs about feminism and its political demands while reading and discussing feminist theories and writing their own feminist theory. Themes may include feminist epistemology, intersectionality, Black feminisms/womanisms, lesbian and trans feminisms, democratic feminist theory, ecofeminism, Indigenous feminist theory, transnational feminism, feminist theories of work and labor, and anti-pornography feminism. Students will examine feminist political thought as both a practice (what should feminist politics be?) and a methodology (how do we theorize and practice feminist politics?). Recommended background: PLTC 121, 191, or a GSS course.
GSS 262: Feminist Philosophy
What is gender? What is race? What is oppression? What does it mean to experience discrimination or oppression? Feminist philosophy uses philosophical methods to think carefully about gender, the way gender intersects with other identities, the lives of historically marginalized voices, and the concepts employed in feminist political movements and similar social movements such as those centered around race, class, sexual identity and orientation, and disability. Additional areas of study may include science and society; gender and science; sex and sexuality; reproduction; family; gender in popular culture; and the body and appearance.
GSS 267: Blood, Genes, and American Culture
Places recent popular and scientific discussions of human heredity and genetics in broader social, political, and historical context, focusing on shifting definitions of personhood. Topics include the commodification of human bodies and body parts and the emergence of new forms of biological citizenship and belonging.
GSS 270: Sociology of Gender
This course focuses on the social construction of gender through a consideration of a series of interrelated social institutions and practices central to gender inequality. Emphasis is placed on the intersections between gender inequality and inequalities of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nation. Recommended background: one previous course in gender and sexuality studies or sociology.
GSS 273: US Immigration: Rise of the Immigration Regime
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" encapsulates the belief that the United States is a nation of immigrants, yet that can be an oversimplification of a deeply complex issue. This course explores the various reasons people migrate, acculturate, and what it means to be an "American" and an immigrant. Students review immigration records to examine how issues of poverty, sexual orientation, gender, race, and political affiliation affected how people "breathe free" and navigated the US immigration regime from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
GSS 281: Upstairs, Downstairs, and Outside: Gender, Class, and the Household in British History
If the home was the “Englishman’s castle,” its walls were porous. Liberal culture called for separating private from public life, yet households were key sites for negotiating classed, gendered, and racial relationships. Fear that family units might break down spurred social movements and governmental reform. Modern life tends to be understood as the rise of the presumptively white, male individual, someone independent of his surroundings. By flipping the script, this course demonstrates the centrality of women, family, and community in defining and redefining society. Topics explored include work, motherhood, property rights, and the everyday life of politics, capitalism, and empire.
GSS 282: Constitutional Law II: Rights and Identities
An introduction to constitutional interpretation and development in civil rights and race equality jurisprudence, gender equality jurisprudence, sexual orientation law, and matters related to privacy and autonomy (particularly sexual autonomy involving contraception and abortion access). Expanding, contracting, or otherwise altering the meaning of a right involves a range of actors in a variety of venues, not only courts. Therefore, students consider rights from a "law and society" perspective, analyzing judicial rulings as well as evaluating the social conceptualization, representation, and social movement mobilization around these rights. Prerequisite(s): PLTC 216, PLTC/SOC/GSS 238, or any course in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
GSS 287: Gender and Visual Culture
Situating an intersectional trans and queer studies at the center rather than the margins of gender studies, this course has two primary and interconnected areas of focus: the study of people as gendered makers and viewers of visual culture, with emphasis on the later 20th and the 21st centuries; and the role of visual culture in the gendering of people, objects, activities, and more. With objects of study ranging from art-making to music videos to material objects like powder puffs, the course considers gendering in relation to matters including but not limited to race, ability, class, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, ability, and colonialism/settler colonialism.
GSS 301D: Regulating Intimacy: Histories of the Labor of Sex in North America
Despite being referred to as the “world’s oldest profession,” sex labor is often excluded from traditional discussions of “work.” To understand sex work’s exclusion, this course focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries efforts by the United States, Canada, and Mexico to control, regulate, and end sexual commerce. The course will pay particular attention to how race, class, and gender ideologies have influenced the regulation and perception of sex labor. Students will learn to analyze historical sources, understand scholarly debates in the field, and conduct original research, culminating in a final research paper.
GSS 301Z: Intersectionality and Feminist Social Movements
This course considers how racial formations have developed in and influenced gendered and feminist movements. Movements examined may include woman’s suffrage, anti-lynching, civil rights, Black Power, LGBTQ+, moral reform, welfare rights, women’s liberation, and peace. Topics examined include citizenship, colonization, immigration, reproductive justice, and gender-based violence. Cross-listed in gender and sexuality studies, history, and politics.
GSS 302: Black Feminist Activist and Intellectual Traditions
This seminar examines the intersections of gender with Black racial and ethnic identities as they have been and are constructed, expressed, and lived throughout the anglophone and francophone African/Black diaspora. The course not only pays special attention to U.S. women and the movements where they lead or participate; but it also devotes substantial consideration to African, Caribbean, Canadian, European, and Australian women of African descent. The course combines approaches and methodologies employed in the humanities, social sciences, and arts to structure interdisciplinary analyses. Using Black feminist (womanist), critical-race, and queer theories, students examine Black women’s histories; activism; resistance; and cultural, intellectual, and theoretical productions, as well as digital literacy. Prerequisite(s): one course in Africana, American studies, or gender and sexuality studies.
GSS 303: Birthing while Black
This course explores the complex and intense history of Black reproduction in the United States and abroad. Students examine the social value of Black life both during and after enslavement. They mine contentious topics such as welfare caps, compulsory sterilization, abortion access, and the disparate experiences of Black mothers in the U.S. healthcare system that have led to maternal death rates twice the national average. The course considers both the ordinary experiences of Black women birthing as well as the sensationalized experiences of mothers such as activist Erica Garner, athlete Serena Williams, and pop icon Beyoncé.
GSS 305: College for Coming Times
Why attend class in the era of instantaneously streaming information? What purposes might educational institutions such as Bates, created as seminaries in the nineteenth century, hold for lives framed by the pressing global challenges of the twenty-first century? This advanced discussion-based seminar addresses these and related questions. Drawing insight from multiple disciplinary approaches, students consider the role of small residential colleges in confronting issues such as pandemic preparedness, generative AI, and climate change. Prerequisite(s): GSS 100.
GSS 306: Queer Africana: History, Theories, and Representations
This course examines the debates among authors, politicians, religious leaders, social scientists, and artists in Africa, the African Americas, and Afro-Europe about non-normative sexualities, throughout the diaspora. While the course analyzes histories of sexualities, legal documents, manifestos by dissident organizations, and anthropological and sociological treatises, it focuses primarily on textual and cinematic representations, and proposes methods of reading cultural productions at the intersection of sexualities, race, ethnicities, and gender. Recommended background: at least one course offered by the Program in Africana, the Program in gender and sexuality studies, or one course in literary analysis.
GSS 311: Buddhism and Gender
This course examines the role of gender in Buddhist communities from the inception of the religious tradition to the modern day. How has gender identity influenced the development of this tradition? Where do we see gender in Buddhist literature, doctrine, and art? How do modern ideas of what "Buddhism" is affect change in the North American context, and how is this different from the Buddhist past? The course draws on a variety of sources, including literary, cinematic, and visual materials, to answer these questions. Special attention is given to how gender is presented in doctrinal texts, and the (dis)connection between these documents and the lived experiences of Buddhist people, as presented in interviews and autobiographies by Buddhist practitioners from a variety of moments and communities.
GSS 312: Transgender Narratives
Many transgender and gender-expansive authors have written about navigating the experiences of childhood, coming out, transition, passing or not passing, or not trying to pass, and living within a cis-normative society. What is compelling or relatable about these narratives? Are there similar patterns or arcs among them? How do these differ from the trans experiences depicted by cisgender authors? Using memoir, blogs, vlogs, prison letters, interviews, poems, and diary entries, students examine the narratives that transgender and other gender-expansive people construct and present about their experiences. This interdisciplinary course considers the telling of one’s own story and the impetus to do so for people embodying marginalized genders, especially those who are multiply marginalized by such factors as race, socioeconomic class, ability, citizenship, and place. Recommended background: one course on the study of gender, sexuality, queer studies, and/or trans studies. Prerequisite(s): One course in GSS.
GSS 314: Sex and the Modern City: European Cultures at the Fin-de-Siècle
Economic and political change during the 1800s revolutionized the daily lives of Europeans more profoundly than any previous century. By the last third of the century, the modern city became the stage for exploring and enacting new moral fears. This course examines these developments by focusing on sex, gender, and new urban spaces in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. We will explore the writings of Sigmund Freud and Gustav Le Bon, investigate middle-class fascination with urban voyeurism and new media, and read about sensational cases like those of Jack the Ripper and the “discovery” of an international sex trade. Note: As part of History’s 301 series, the course is designed to guide students through the research and writing process.
GSS 317: Beyond Human: Cyborgs and Technology
What is a cyborg and how does this political and cultural concept evolve through various historical periods? How are transformative relations between humans, animals, and machines imagined across cultural texts? What is trans- and post-humanism? The course examines changing ideas of constructing, enhancing, and technologizing body and mind in the Soviet Union and modern Russia. Students engage with ideas of the biopolitical remaking of humans, rejuvenating bodies surgically, prosthetically, pharmacologically, and digitally. Topics discussed include technologies of gender and gender technologies, identity politics, immortalization narratives, geopolitics. Conducted in English. Recommended background: prior coursework in literature or film.
GSS 318: Sex, Gender, Islam, Power
This course examines the four central terms of the title in several combinations. We first explore the human-human and human-divine relationship as framed in the Qur’an and the Hadith, studying key feminist thinkers on equality, personhood, and women’s humanity. The second part of the course surveys key questions about women, sex, and gender that have vexed the study of Islam in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—sex in and outside marriage; punishment for ‘sexual’ crimes; licit and illicit sex; homosexuality, bisexuality, and queerness; transition and third genders; ritual leadership; and mourning. In the third and final part of the course, we will examine gendered and racialized representations of Muslim women and Muslim bodies in popular culture and the news media. By the end of this course, you will be able to engage and analyze the major debates around women, sex, and gender in Islam; and theorize the functions of power on all levels of human life.
GSS 321: Representations of Gender, Labor, and Craft in the Mediterranean
The history of the modern Mediterranean has often been described as a history of fragmentation, fueled by nation-building and divided by the forces of colonialism. This course will approach this history through the architecture of transcultural studies, examining narratives of twentieth-century migration. It will explore how material culture visualizes intersections of gender, imperial hegemony, and systems of labor, seeking to expand our understanding of work, homeland, and womanhood. Through object-based research, museum visits, and digital humanities projects, students question what role does “women’s work” play in histories of migration, cross-pollination, and connectivity? How do gendered representations of labor (paid and unpaid) or craft codify differences even inflicting segregation around the Mediterranean after 1900? This class illuminates an understudied and marginalized group – the female migrant – as an active agent in regional and trans-regional art history.
GSS 325: Black Feminist Literary Theory and Practice
This seminar examines literary theories that address the representation and construction of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly, but not exclusively, theories formulated and articulated by Afra-diasporic women such as Spillers, Ogunyemi, Carby, Christian, Cobham, Valerie Smith, Busia, Lubiano, and Davies. Students not only analyze theoretical essays but also use the theories as lenses through which to explore literary productions of women writers of Africa and the African diaspora in Europe and in the Americas, including Philip, Dangarembga, Morrison, Gayl Jones, Head, Condé, Brodber, Brand, Evariston, Zadie Smith and Harriet Wilson. Cross-listed in Africana, English, and gender and sexuality studies. Strongly recommended: at least one literature course.
GSS 340: Poverty, Policy, and Social Inclusion
This seminar explores debates in the research and policy literature on poverty and intersecting inequalities, particularly in the United States. Topics include policy related to housing, health, education, and food access; care work; and the integration of work and family. These topics are addressed with attention to social inclusion and exclusion on the basis of systemic inequalities, including race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, as well as critical analysis of neoliberal approaches to poverty policy. Prerequisite(s): AFR/AMST/GSS 250 or SOC 205 or SOC 250 or GSS/SOC 270.
GSS 341: Family, Youth and Childhood
This seminar explores the history and structure of the family as a social institution, as well as youth and childhood as socially constructed life stages, particularly in the United States. This exploration attends to dynamics of privilege, exclusion, and marginalization, including systemic racism, capitalism, and inequalities of gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, nationality and citizenship. Students consider how these dynamics shape family structure, and how intersecting dimensions of inequality are reproduced and resisted through families. Prerequisites: SOC 205, AMST/AFR/GSS 250, GSS/SOC 270, SOC 250, or SOC s14.
GSS 343: Women, Culture, and Health
This course examines a variety of perspectives on women’s health issues, including reproductive health, body image, sexuality, substance use and abuse, mental health, cancer, AIDS, heart disease, poverty, work, violence, access to health care, and aging. Each topic is examined in sociocultural context, and the complex relationship between individual health and cultural demands or standards is explored. Prerequisite(s): one 200-level psychology course.
GSS 345: Trans Studies in the Politics of Visibility
In recent decades, many people have welcomed increased visibility of trans and/or gender-nonconforming people as a sign of progress. Yet who is visible and who do particular visibilities benefit and harm? This course uses a trans studies framework to consider both the products and the politics of visibility, with attention to the historical and current contexts. Topics include: the representation of queer and trans genders in contemporary visual culture; critiques of visibility in relation to state surveillance and white supremacy; and the interconnected roles of norms regarding race, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and ability, among other matters, in perceptions and practices of gender normativity and transgression. Recommended background: at least one course with substantial work in gender, queer, or trans studies or the study of visual culture.
GSS 353: Critical Theory/Critical Acts
Critical theory is about the unraveling of streams of repressive discourses and hierarchies in our contemporary world, and it has been artists who have fostered ruptures and fissures in everyday life. This seminar ponders the concept of "cultural worker" and laments the domain of theory by exploring the intersections between critical theory, art, and cultural and queer politics. Students engage in the ruptures, the fragments of knowledge, and the making sense of the residue of "social change" while not forgetting the problematization of the aesthetic. They consider U.S.-based interdisciplinary artists such as Fusco, Ana Mediata, Tania Bruguera, David Hammon, Vanessa German, Pope.L, and Dianne Smith, and Jelili Atiku with critical theorists such as Fanon, hooks, Foucault, Mbembe, Muñoz, Moten, Hartman, and Benjamin. This seminar is based on close readings of theoretical texts and connecting those texts with contemporary cultural politics.
GSS 357: Feminist Foreign Policy
Since Sweden declared a Feminist Foreign Policy (FPP) in 2014, the concept has gained significant traction, and fourteen countries have subsequently adopted the term to describe their own global engagements. However, there is little consensus regarding what an FPP means in practical terms. Can a feminist approach to foreign policy be truly realized in the modern international state system? Through the use of case studies and consideration of policy areas including migration, development, humanitarian intervention, human rights, and security, students will critically engage the concept of FPP and grapple with the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities it presents. Prerequisite(s): one of the following: PLTC 155, 171, 256, or GSS 100.
GSS 360: Independent Study
Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester.
GSS 363: Gendered Perspectives in Africa
The depiction of Africa in Western media is often negative, dealing mostly with civil conflicts, epidemics, lack of resources, and human rights abuses. While these certainly remain a reality, they provide a limited perspective. This course strays away from such preconceptions and examines issues surrounding women and gender in Africa, including political participation, conflict, women’s rights, and civil society. Students having taken courses in international relations, politics, and gender and sexuality studies may have an easier time understanding the theoretical framework, but such courses are not required. Recommended background: GSS 155 or PLTC 122, 155, 171, or 290. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level PLTC course.
GSS 371: Indigenous Women’s Social Movements in Latin America
This course examines Indigenous women’s movements in Latin America. Comparing Indigenous movements throughout Abiyayala (the Americas) requires investigating ethnographic, political, and socio-economic contexts in which Indigenous women’s movements develop, thrive, and sometimes fail. The course pays particular attention to Indigenous women’s responses to marginalization and oppression in the 20th and 21st centuries and entails an applied project through community engaged learning. Recommended background: Prior coursework in the social sciences.
GSS 377: Colon/Colonisé: Récits de l’Expérience Nord-Africaine
This course studies the colonial, postcolonial, and immigrant experience of North Africans as portrayed in Francophone literature and film. Readings include narratives and journals from the beginning of the colonial period (1830), as well as the contemporary novels, films, and discourse of writers and artists from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, such as Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem, Lyes Salem, Rachid Bouchareb, and Leïla Sebbar. Gender and colonialism are highlighted as categories of analysis. Prerequisite(s): FRE 240, 250, or 251.
GSS 383: Surveillance and Society
Surveillance in a pervasive feature of modern societies—indeed, surveillance is often considered part of what defines “modern” social life. In this course, students will explore how personal, everyday uses of surveillance devices and experiences of data collection shape and are shaped by larger efforts to control populations, and how mobile digital connectivity influences those dynamics. Together, we consider foundational texts in academic studies of surveillance; techniques of surveillance found in health, education, and other social spheres; surveillance as a component of modern governance; and persistent stratifications in surveillance practices.
GSS 400A: On Gender and Tyranny
The contemporary turn toward more authoritarian rule in the Global North has aroused intense popular and scholarly concern. Much of the mainstream commentary on the present tilt toward authoritarianism, however, ignores both longer histories of enslavement, captivity, and colonization, and the complex connections between shifting forms of governance and gendered relations of power and resistance. This reading-intensive seminar is designed to hone students’ engagement with the intricacies of gender, sexuality, tyranny, and freedom now and in coming times.
GSS 400C: Understanding Disease
Intensive reading seminar examining competing understandings of human disease, illness, and health. Students consider queer, trans, feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial perspectives on biomedical frameworks, and historical and contemporary movements for health equity and healing justice. Prerequisite(s): five core courses in gender and sexuality studies.
GSS 400F: Gender and Material Culture
This intensive reading junior/senior seminar explores material culture and the production of gender, sexuality, race, and nation. It examines how identities, circuits of power, and value are constructed and negotiated through commodity culture and capitalism. It considers how objects like hoodies, cigarettes, and vanity license plates come to have meaning, and asks what role material culture plays in expressions of pain, pleasure, grief, and resilience. Prerequisite(s): five courses in gender and sexuality studies.
GSS 457: Senior Thesis
The research and writing of an extended essay or report, or the completion of a creative project, under the supervision of a faculty member. Majors normally register for GSS 458 in the winter semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both GSS 457 and 458.
GSS 458: Senior Thesis
The research and writing of an extended essay or report, or the completion of a creative project, under the supervision of a faculty member. Majors normally register for GSS 458 in the winter semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both GSS 457 and 458.
GSS S13: Infrastructures
Popular representations of digital technologies often present them as somehow independent of material constraints-as inherently clean, "green," and ethereal as a cloud. Those images belie the realities of the information economy’s myriad environmental impacts, from resource depletion to water pollution to massive energy consumption. This course, an introduction to the history and politics of infrastructure, directs attention to relationships between human and nonhuman nature, using everyday personal computing as a point of departure. Throughout, students engage with activists, regulators, and maintainers working toward justice and sustainability in the digital age.
GSS S15: Queer and Trans Reproductive Justice
This course engages the conceptual framework of reproductive justice, as defined by Black feminists, and its principles: the right to parent, the right not to parent, the right to parent in healthy and safe communities, and the right to bodily sovereignty, which includes the right to sexual autonomy and gender self-determination. Students in this course investigate notable convergences between reproductive justice movements and a range of queer and trans rights movements to mark the makings of dynamic coalitions. Topics also include the origins and evolutions of reproductive justice, queer and transgender history in the United States, LGBTQ+ family formation, reproductive healthcare, and trans fertility. Recommended background: one course on the study of gender, sexuality, queer studies, and/or trans studies. Recommended background: one course on the study of gender, sexuality, queer studies, and/or trans studies.
GSS S18: Wilde Times: Scandal, Celebrity, and the Law
Oscar Wilde, an icon today, was popular in his own time as well. His relationship with Alfred Douglas was an open secret despite the fact that homosexuality was at the time a criminal offense. Indeed, Wilde’s sexuality was tolerated until he sued Douglas’ irascible father for libel. This course begins with the 1895 trials, seeking to understand cultures of sexuality in a period notorious for sexual repression, and contextualizing issues they raise of scandal and the law, celebrity, gender, and sexuality. Designed to encourage independent research, the course guides students through the research process, drawing to the fore histories often hidden from view. Cross-listed in European studies, gender and sexuality studies, and history. Open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 30.
GSS S24: Technologies of the Body
This reading-intensive, experimental course examines how specific technologies alter the shape, texture, form, and lived experience of particular bodies, and how altered bodies, in turn, help direct the development and use of new technologies. The course culminates in the presentation of individual research projects. Recommended background: GSS 100.
GSS S25: Bates Unplugged: Rethinking Digital Connectivity
Through nearly all of the college’s long history, students at Bates lived and learned without internet-facilitated communication—much less the ceaseless, worldwide connectivity made possible by mobile devices. What might "college" mean without such constant connectivity? What might we learn—about education, about technology, about the past, and about contemporary society—in the process of trying to find out? Please note: this short course requires enrolled students to refrain from using *all* handheld internet-facilitated devices (computers, tablets, smartphones, watches, and rings) for seven continuous days.
GSS S31: Smoke Screens: Tobacco, Smoking, and Visual Culture
This course introduces students to the political, social, and cultural history of representations of smoking and the tobacco industry in television series, films, and music videos. Students consider how gender, race, class, and sexuality shape and are shaped by these visual narratives. Prerequisite: one GSS course.
GSS S35: Feminist Political Theory (Taylor’s Version)
Taylor Swift is one of the most influential U.S. cultural products consumed so far in the 21st century, a cultural and political lightning rod. This course takes up the two questions: what does Taylor Swift’s music and cultural impact have to teach us about politics and feminism in the 21st century, and what do political and feminist theory have to teach us about Taylor Swift’s music and cultural impact? The course addresses the complicated relationship between Taylor Swift (her persona, artistic output, and fandom), politics, and feminism. It focuses on topics such as celebrity politics, intersectionality, queer counter-readings, postmodern multiplicity of meaning, and norms of femininity and motherhood. Students will work collaboratively to produce an original research product combining the insights of feminist and/or queer theory with original data collection. Prerequisite(s): PLTC/GSS 256, GSS 100, GSS 201, GSS 262, GSS 302, or permission of instructor.
GSS S50: Independent Study
Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study during a Short Term.
GSS S51E: Short Term Innovative Pedagogy: Intersectional and Interdisciplinary Pedagogy
Participants in this Short Term Innovative Pedagogy Course (STIP) will complete a review of the course materials, requirements, and pedagogies used in GSS 301 Intersectionality and Feminist Social Justice Movements. Through this course students will a) assess interdisciplinary and intersectional pedagogies that best create learning pathways for all students and b) explore effective pedagogies for using multimodal materials (poetry, art, theory, etc). Prerequisite(s): INDS 301Z, HIST 301Z, GSS 301Z, or PLTC 301Z.