Gender, Culture & Society
COURSES
SPRING 2008
GSOC-002-601
GENDER AND SOCIETY
M 6-9
Trott
Society Sector
This course examines the impact of sex and gender roles on contemporary American society. Differentiation by sex is the central organizing principle of nearly every human society. How can we understand the relationship between biological sex and socially constructed gender? How do maleness and femaleness affect the balance of power and resources in our society? How much has changed since the beginning of the Women's Movement of the 1960s? The course will examine key issues of gender difference and inequality including family life, paid work, economic status, violence, body image, sexuality, and reproduction. The course will examine men's roles and women's roles, treating gender as an interactive and dynamic concept.
GSOC-004-601
THE FAMILY
T 5-8
Lundy (garvey@pop.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: SOCI-004
Fulfills College Quantitative and Data Analysis Requirement
Society Sector
This course provides an introduction to sociological perspectives on families, focusing largely on contemporary American families. The course begins with a brief overview of theoretical perspectives on families and family patterns and changes over the past several decades. We will then turn our attention to family formation and dissolution, considering cohabitation, marriage, divorce, remarriage, and fertility. In the final section of the course, we will examine how the worlds of work and family intersect and conflict, considering both paid and unpaid labor (housework, childcare, etc.). Throughout the course, we will pay special attention to how gender structures and is constructed in family life and consider how race and class shape family experiences. Students will be taught to critically evaluate the research of others, while also conducting their own data analyses on a family-related topic of their choice.
GSOC-006-401
THE POLITICS OF SEX & SCIENCE ACCORDING TO THE KINSEY REPORT
M 3:30-6:30
Burnett (pburnett@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HSOC/STSC-008
Want to work on your public speaking skills? You will have a hard time keeping quiet in a critical speaking course about sex and science. We will examine how scientific research has influenced common conceptions of sex differences and sexual behavior during the last century, and how this knowledge in turn has shaped cultural conceptions of gender roles and “normal” behavior. Students will discuss, debate, and deliver formal presentations about these questions as we examine moments from the history of psychiatry, sexology, ethology, anthropology, endocrinology, genetics, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and neuro-endocrinology.
GSOC-009-301
GENDER IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA
TR 12-1:30
Paxton (fpaxton@sas.upenn.edu)
Fulfills College Writing Requirement
Are you a macho-man? A tom-boy? A girly-girl? How do you know? This interdisciplinary writing class invites you to think and write critically about how gender operates in your everyday life. We'll start with some basics: What is gender? What do people mean when they say it is socially constructed? When did you learn your first "gender lessons"? We'll go on to examine how writers have approached the issue of gender as well as how it plays out in controversies close to home (e.g. Penn's new gender neutral housing policy). While gender will be our umbrella theme, you'll be given freedom when it comes to selecting specific topics/texts to write about. You'll also be encouraged to view writing as a process, not a product, and as social, not solitary. Revision, peer-review and collaborative workshops will, therefore, be essential components of the course; they'll help us to remember that writing, like gender, is part of every day life and merits ongoing critical attention.
GSOC-028-601
FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY
W 6-9
Meyer (mwmeyer@phil.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: PHIL-028
Distribution Society
Feminist theory grows out of women's experience. In this course we will investigate how some contemporary feminist thinkers' consideration of women's experience has caused them to criticize society and philosophy. Traditional philosophical areas addressed may include ethics, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and epistemology.
GSOC-090-401
18th CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS
TR 3-4:30
Bowers (tbowers@english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-090
Distribution Course Arts and Letters – Class of ’09 and Prior
In this class, we'll be reading novels and short stories that examine marriage, family and childhood, as well as theoretical material that explains, subverts and enriches the fiction. The course is divided into four sections, each with texts that can be made to comment upon each other. For example, in the first section, we'll be looking at the idealization of marriage by reading Jane Eyre, Pearl Abrams' The Romance Reader and Janice Radway's classic work on romance novels and their readers. We'll also look at the realities of marriage through The Awakening, The Yellow Wallpaper and stories by the Irish novelist Edna O'Brien, and at unconventional versions of childhood and "home" through Ella Leffland's Rumors of Peace, Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and stories by Toni Cade Bambara. Throughout, we'll be investigating the ways in which fiction codifies, subverts and re-codifies notions of "proper" female behavior, domestic relations and individual freedom.
You'll have short, frequent writing assignments, including response papers and discussion questions designed to focus and energize class discussion. You'll also do a longer paper (7-10 pages) in which you bring the theoretical readings to bear on the fiction.
GSOC-122-401
SOCIOLOGY OF GENDER
TR 1:30-3
Leidner (rleidner@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: SOCI-122
Society Sector
The assignment of gender roles and the construction of gender identities have profound consequences for women and men at every level of society: from their intimate relations, how they manage and participate in the institutions of society, their place in society's stratification systems. This course examines four aspects of gender relations: historical and cross-cultural examples of gender roles; gender relations in contemporary American institutions; theories of sex differences and gender inequality; and movements and policies for gender equality. Some specific topics to be covered are: Women and the economy, women and the professions, working class women, changing male identities, the nature of male power, and the women's liberation movements
GSOC 125-401
ADULTERY NOVEL
TR 10:30-12
Platt (kmfplatt@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: COML-127, CINE/RUSS-125
Arts and Letters Sector
The object of the course is to analyze a series of 19C and 20C novels (and a few short stories) about adultery. Our reading will teach us about novelistic traditions of the period in question and about the relationship of Russian literature to the European models to which it responded. The course begins with a novel not about families falling apart, but about families coming together - Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. We then will turn to what is arguably the most well-known adultery novel ever written, Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Following this, we investigate a series of Russian revisions of the same thematic territory that range from "great literature" to pulp fiction, including Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and other works by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Leskov, and Nagrodskaia. As something of an epilogue to the course, we will read Milan Kundera's backward glance at this same tradition in nineteenth-century writing, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In our coursework we will apply various critical approaches in order to place adultery into its social and cultural context, including: sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist examinations of family as a social and economic institution, Freudian/Psychoanalytic interpretations of family life and transgressive sexuality, Feminist work on the construction of gender.
GSOC-187-401
POSESSING WOMEN
MWF 11-12
Chance (lchance@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: EALC-017/COML-187
Distribution Course Arts & Letters – Class of ’09 and Prior
A man from Tennessee writes Memoirs of a Geisha. A Japanese novelist tells the story of the "comfort women" who served the Japanese army. A tenth century courtier poses as woman writing the first woman's diary. Poets from Byron to Robert Lowell, through Ezra Pound to Li Po, have written as though they were women, decrying their painful situations. Is something wrong with this picture, or is "woman" such a fascinating position from which to speak that writers can hardly help trying it on for size? In this course we will look at male literary impersonators of women, as well as women writers. Our questions will include who speaks in literature for prostitutes--whose bodies are in some sense the property of men--and what happens when women inhabit the bodies of other women via spirit possession. Readings will draw on the Japanese tradition, which is especially rich in such cases, and will also include Western and Chinese literature, anthropological work on possession, legal treatments of prostitution, and film. Participants will keep a reading journal and write a paper of their own choosing.
GSOC-199
INDEPENDENT STUDY
Arranged
TBA
See Department for Permission and Section Number
GSOC-226-401
JANE AUSTEN AND COMPANYTR 10:30-12
Harzewski (harzewski@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-260
Distribution Course Arts & Letters – Class of ’09 and Prior
Best embodied by the works of Jane Austen, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, the novel of manners lies between two extremes. Engaged with decoding society’s customs, dress, and private conduct, it occupies a middle ground between courtly romance and cynical anti-romantic fiction. The last decade has witnessed a major revival of this tradition in the form of film adaptations and the popular fiction subgenre “chick lit,” exemplified by international bestsellers Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. As a community of thinkers and writers we will evaluate the achievements of these perennial and new classics as well explore how novel writing is a way of creating, not just reporting, what Nancy Bentley has called “the governing fictions of culture.” Through in-class writing, discussion, and short papers, we will work to decode the ways in which this major literary tradition depicts the role and formation of heroines, male-female relations, romantic love, and courtship. As we assess this marriage of old and new, additional authors and texts may include Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Mary McCarthy’s “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment,” Louis Auchincloss’s “The Friend of Women,” Elizabeth Bowen’s “Ivy Gripped the Steps,” and Sybil Brinton’s Old Friends and New Fancies,a re-discovered sequel originally published in 1913 that unites characters from Austen’s six novels with creations of the author’s own. Besides consistent active contributions to discussion, assignments will include a class presentation, a short paper early in the semester, and a long essay (12+ pgs.) at the end of term. No midterm or final exam.
GSOC-235-401
PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN
W 2-5
Staff
Cross Listed: EDUC-235
Critical analyses of the psychological theories of female development, and introduction to feminist scholarship on gender development.
GSOC-240-401
SPORTS IN AMERICA
M 2-5
Miller (samiller@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HIST-240
Have women started to “play hardball” on a “level playing field” in the American sporting culture? From the commercial successes of the WNBA and World Cup Soccer to new studies that document the positive effects of athletics on girls’ self-esteem, women finally seem to be turning the American obsession with sports to their own advantage. This course will examine how physical fitness and organized athletics for men and women have both reflected and helped to create norms of masculinity and femininity over the past one hundred and fifty years.
GSOC-241-401
THE PAMELA CRAZE
TR 12-1:30
Bowers (tbowers@english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENG 241
GSOC-270-401
FOLKLORE AND SEXUALITY
TR 10:30-12
Azzolina (azzolina@pobox.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: FOLK-270
Sexuality is not only a biological act or fact, it also has a creative and aesthetic element. This course examines the folklore elements of sexuality and includes historical readings such as the Bible and the Decameron as well as a contemporary look at topics such as body art and clothing choice. A field-based paper will be required and a final examination will be given on class discussions and readings.
GSOC-290-401
TOPICS IN GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND LITERATURE: HOME AND HEARTS
TR 12-1:30
Auerbach (nauerbac@department.english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-290
Distribution Course Arts & Letters – Class of ’09 and Prior
Traditionalists insist that woman’s place is in the home, indeed that a good woman is herself home; but women, in and out of fiction, haven’t always agreed. We shall examine a series of novels and films in which home becomes a haunted nightmare for the women who live in it. Fiction we shall read includes Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre, Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House. Films include Polanski’s Repulsion and perhaps Rosemary’s Baby, Robert Wise’s The Haunting, and Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.
GSOC-320-301 CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THOUGHT
W 2-5 Kurz (dkurz@sas.upenn.edu )
Distribution Course Society
This course covers the work of a broad range of feminist writers and theorists, from the pioneer thinkers of the 18th century to current feminists who focus on globalization. After examining how and why feminist thought developed, we will explore how different feminist perspectives explain gender inequality both in the US and in contemporary global contexts. Readings will also focus on how gender issues interact with race, ethnicity, sexuality, and social class. We will also focus on how feminist theory informs current social movements for gender equality.
GSOC-338-301
SWEET OLD LADIES & SANDWICHED DAUGHTERS
W 4-7
Kagan (skagen@nursing.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HSOC/NURS-338
Benjamin Franklin Seminars
This course is an intensive and focused introduction to social gerontology as a trans-disciplinary lens through which to examine aspects of social structure, actions, and consequences in an aging society. A variety of sources are employed to introduce students from any field focused on human behavior and interaction to classical notions of social gerontology and current scholarly inquiry in gerontology. Field work in the tradition of thick description creates a mechanism to engage students in newly gerontological understandings of their life worlds and daily interactions. Weekly field work, observing aspects of age and representations of aging and being old in every day experiences forms, is juxtaposed against close critical readings of classical works in social gerontology and current research literature as well as viewings of film and readings of popular literature as the basis for student analysis. Student participation in the seminar demands careful scrutiny and critical synthesis of disparate intellectual, cultural, and social perspectives using readings and field work and creation of oral and written arguments that extend understandings of the issues at hand in new and substantive ways. Emphasis is placed on analysis of field work and literature through a series of media reports and a final term paper.
GSOC-339-301
PSYCHOLOGY OF GERONTOLOGY IN 21st CENTURY
T 4-7
Kagan (skagen@nursing.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HSOC/NURS-339
Benjamin Franklin Seminars
This honors course examines the psychological gerontology of advancing age and identity in the 21st century. Examination emphasizes gendered notions of beauty and sexuality in ageing and the life span to foster discourse around historical notions and images of beauty and ugliness in late life in contrast to contemporary messages of attractiveness and age represented by both women and men. The course is designed to create intellectual foundations as place from which to critique socially mediated and personally conveyed images and messages from a variety of media and their influence on intrapersonal and interpersonal constructions and social processes. Contemporary and historical ideas encompassing stereotypical and idealized views of the older person are employed to reflect dialogue around readings and field work.
GSOC-344-401
PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONAL GROWTH
M 5-8
Zamel (pzamel@aol.com )
Cross Listed: EDUC-345
Intellectual, emotional and behavioral development in the college years. Illustrative topics: developing intellectual and social competence; developing personal and career goals; managing interpersonal relationships; values and behavior. Recommended for sub-matriculation in the Psychological Services Master's Degree program.
GSOC-345-401
GENDER AND AMERICAN HISTORY TO 1865
TR 10:30-12
Brown (kbrown@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HIST-345
Distribution Course History and Tradition – Class of ’09 and prior
From the sixteenth century, when Native American populations flourished on the North American continent, to the Civil War, when North and South collided over the question of slavery, women have played a critical role in American society. This course traces the history of women and gender in America during this period with special emphasis on the importance of women's reproductive and economic roles to the emergence of ethnic, racial, regional, and socio-economic categories in the United States. Slides, lectures, and readings drawn from primary documents introduce students to the conditions of women's lives during the colonial and revolutionary periods and to the rise of women's activism in the nineteenth century. In addition, we will consider how dramatic changes in housework, wage labor, female access to public forms of power, and ideas about female sexuality make it difficult to generalize about what is commonly thought of as women's "traditional" or "natural" role.
GSOC-390-401
BURDEN OF REPRESENTATION
TR 12-1:30
Love (hlove@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-390
Distribution Course Arts & Letters
Benjamin Franklin Seminars
GSOC-400-301
SENIOR THESIS
F 2-5
Kurz (dkurz@sas.upenn.edu)
This seminar is for senior undergraduate Women's Studies majors who are writing their theses.
GSOC-499
INDEPENDENT STUDY (SENIOR LEVEL)
Arranged
TBA
Permission Needed From Department
GSOC-518-401
NURSING, HEALTH, AND ILLNESS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1860-1985
W 4-7
Wall (wallbm@nursing.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: NURS-518
Distribution Course History– Class of ’09 and Prior
This course uses nursing's history as a framework for analyzing gendered themes in health and health care since the Civil War. Thus, the ideas, events, people and institutions that have played a role in shaping the historical health care system are examined as part of an inclusive social context that considers the multifaceted meanings of women's work and women's experiences. Specifically, this course concentrates on the ways in which women have both challenged and collaborated with social structures and ideologies that were themselves gendered. This focus is presented as one way of understanding the complex interrelationships among gender, class, and race in the American health care system.
Content includes changing ideas about the nature of health and illness; changing forms of health care delivery; changing experiences of women as providers and patients; changing role expectations and realities for nurses; changing midwifery practice; changing segmentation of the health care labor market by gender, class and race.
GSOC-538-401
FEMINIST THEORY
M 3-6
Sanchez (sanchezm@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-538
This seminar will examine how we can productively employ current feminist methodologies and conceptual vocabularies to study early modern writers to whom such theoretical concerns and rubrics would have been largely foreign. The course will be grounded on a range of early modern literary authors for whom gendered constructs are of central concern (Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, Wroth, Lanyer, Cavendish, Hutchinson, Marvell, Milton), and we will be particularly focused on the relations among their formal properties, conceptual stances, and historical contexts. We will be equally interested in talking about how we can read these texts through the lens of the evolution of gender studies over the past few decades. Accordingly, we will look at a selection of critical theory (Marx and Engels, Freud, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault), second-wave feminism (Beauvoir, Brownmiller, MacKinnon, Rubin, Kristeva, Gilbert and Gubar, among others), and more recent debates about gender, race, power, sexuality, and “women’s studies” in the academy (Sedgwick, Butler, Wiegman, Berlant, Warner, Chow, Brown, for instance). In addition, we will read some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tracts on women, sexuality, and domestic relations, and, finally, a range of early modern literary critics who share our interest in gender, literature, and history.
GSOC-555-401
WOMEN AND INCARCERATION
R 4:30-6:30
Brown/Guidera/Durain (brownkm@nursing.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: NURS-555
This elective course will afford students the opportunity to participate in service learning and health education in the Philadelphia prison system, in particular to incarcerated women. Students will explore the social and historical framework and trends in the incarceration of women and the health status of incarcerated women. During seminar discussions with experts in the criminal justice system and with staff and inmates at Riverside, the Philadelphia women's jail, students will explore the health, health care and health care needs of incarcerated women and identify specific areas in need of attention, especially with regard to health education. In collaboration with Philadelphia jail staff and female inmates, students will design and implement
a health education project.
GSOC-572-401
LANGUAGE AND GENDER
R 10-12
Pomerantz (apomeran@gse.upenn.edu )
Cross Listed: EDUC-572
A critical investigation of the relationship between language, gender, and social structure which addresses the role of language in reflecting and perpetuating gender divisions. Students' ongoing discourse analytic projects are integral to our exploration of issues related to sexism in and through language. Implications for individual and social change are discussed.
GSOC-588-401
THE POLITICS OF WOMEN’S HEALTH
R 3-6
Lewis/McCool (jllewis@nursing.upenn.edu )
Cross Listed: NURS-588
This course will utilize a multidisciplinary approach to address the field of women’s health care. The constructs of women’s health care will be examined from a clinical, as well as sociological, anthropological and political point of view. Topics will reflect the historical movement of women’s health care from an obstetrical/gynecological view to one that encompasses the entire life span and life needs of women. The emphasis of the course will be to undertake a critical exploration of the diversity of women’s health care needs and the past and current approaches to this care. Issues will be addressed from both a national and global perspective, with a particular focus on the relationship between women’s equality/inequality status and state of health.
GSOC-590-401
GENDER AND EDUCATION (ELD)
W 7-9
Kuriloff (kuriloff@gse.edu)
Cross Listed: EDUC-590
This course is designed to provide an overview of the major discussions and debates in the area of gender and education. While the intersections of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality are emphasized throughout this course, the focus of the research we will read is on gender and education in English-speaking countries. We will examine theoretical frameworks of gender
and use these to read popular literature, examine teaching practices and teachers with respect to gender, using case studies to investigate the topics.
GSOC-592-401
QUEER THEORIES AND HISTORIES
W 3-6
Love (hlove@sas.upenn.edu )
Cross Listed: ENGL-592
This course introduces students to several classic texts in the history and theory of sexuality. We will consider the politics and meaning of non-normative sexualities and genders across time and in different cultural locations. After working through several key texts in the field, we will turn to contemporary debates about transgender politics, gay pride and gay shame, the meaning of 'queer', and responses to HIV/AIDS. We pay particular attention to questions of queer historiography, considering the intersection between developmental narratives of the individual and the community. Readings by Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Gayle Rubin, Cherrie Moraga, D.A. Miller, and others. One seminar paper, and a class presentation.
GSOC-599
INDENDENT STUDY (GRADUATE LEVEL)
Arranged
TBA
See Department for Permission and Section Number
GSOC-612-401
INTERACTIONAL PROCESSES WITH LGBT INDIVIDUALS
W 10-12
Burnes (burnes@gse.upenn.edu)
Cross-Listed: EDUC-612
In the past quarter century, a growing awareness of the unique issues facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals has become essential for practitioners in education and psychological services. This course will provide an introduction to a range of factors that shape LGBT experiences in educational and psychological service settings, and it will offer opportunities to consider and develop strategies for working with and advocating for LGBT constituencies. By analyzing LGBT encounters with the fields of psychology and education, this course recognizes both professions’ historically strained relationships with LGBT populations, while also acknowledging the possibilities for researchers and practitioners in each field to enhance their work through cross-disciplinary reflections on valuable lessons-learned. Although the primary focus is on how psychological and educational professionals can support LGBT individuals, the course may also interest those in related fields who want to gain a deeper understanding of LGBT experiences across social, cultural, institutional, and professional contexts.
This course is divided into three thematic units. In the first unit, a conceptual overview of the otherization of marginalized genders and sexualities is offered as a backdrop for understanding LGBT experiences, and snapshots of LGBT spaces and cultures afford contrasting examples of how LGBT populations have negotiated their marginalized status. In the second unit, the course focuses on psychological perspectives, first by offering theories of LGBT identity development, and then by exploring strategies for supporting LGBT individuals through LGBT-affirmative therapy. In the third and final unit, the experiences of LGBT individuals in a range of educational settings take center stage and provide the backdrop for considerations of anti-homophobic educational practices. Collectively, these three units are designed to provide students with some familiarity with LGBT life experiences, and to encourage students to apply that familiarity to educational and psychological practices.
