Gender, Culture & Society
COURSES
SPRING 2010
GSOC-004-401 THE FAMILY
Lecture:
MW 11-12 Harknett (harknett@sas.upenn.edu)
REC:
402 F 10-11
403 F 12-1
404 R 12:30-1:30
405 R 11-12
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-016-401 Gender, Sexuality and Modern Novel
MWF 10-11 Gaedtke (agaedtke@sas.upenn.edu)
Freshman Seminar
Cross Listed: ENGL/CINE-016
How might a person’s sexual life be understood as an effect of language? Could gender be not simply a biological fact but also a narrative that we (or others) tell about ourselves? This course will examine a tradition of literary and theoretical writings that are guided by these questions, and we will organize our inquiry around the work and life of one of the most influential writers on the subject—Virginia Woolf. We will ask how Woolf’s novels and essays challenged normative ways of being in the world and illuminated the discursive techniques by which "normalcy" is enforced. We will also examine works by Woolf’s fellow-travelers in London’s famous Bloomsbury group, such as E.M. Forster and Vita Sackville-West, whose novels also addressed the painful prohibitions on “improper” desire. Finally, we will consider the persistence of Woolf’s legacy in recent fiction and in contemporary feminist and queer theory, including works by Michael Cunningham, Jeanette Winterson, Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler. Requirements will include several short papers and one longer paper.
GSOC-045-401 18th Century Novel
TR 3-4:30 Bowers (tbowers@english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-045
An introduction to some of the earliest novels published in English and to the culture in which they emerged. We'll sample the variety and fluidity of the genre as it took shape in Britain between the late seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries, emphasizing the period between 1700 and 1750. Required: class participation, exams, papers, and unannounced quizzes.
GSOC 090-401 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND LITERATURE: SEXUALITY, RACE AND EMPIRE IN MODERNISM
TR 12-1:30 Love (loveh@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-090
Cultural Diversity in US – Class of ’12 and After
This course considers the relays between sexuality, race, and empire in modernist literature. The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by rapid and volatile transformations in gender relations, sexual norms, conceptions of race, and the colonial situation. The profound material and psychic effects of these transformations are registered in many of the classic texts of British and American modernism. With close attention to the formal dimension of these texts, we will trace the intersections between these vectors of power in early twentieth-century experience and representation. Course readings may include: Gertrude Stein, Three Lives; E. M. Forster, A Passage to India; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing; Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.
GSOC 105-401 DISABILITY NARRATIVE
TR 3-4:30 Love (loveh@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-105
Humanities & Social Science Sector
This course will introduce students to key questions in the field of disability studies, including representation, stigma, access, civil rights, health care, institutionalization, employment, illness and disability, and conceptions of the human. We will also consider the ways that disability is inflected by other dimensions of identity including race, class, gender, and sexuality. Our focus will be on disability and literature, with attention to questions of framing and narrative strategy. Over the course of the semester we will read a range of twentieth-century novels, memoirs, and autobiographies. Readings may include: Helen Keller, The Story of My Life; Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; Katherine Butler Hathaway, The Little Locksmith; Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals; Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest; William Styron, Darkness Visible; Simi Linton, My Body Politic; Katherine Dunn, Geek Love; Eli Clare, Exile and Pride; Terry Galloway, Mean Little Deaf Queer.
GSOC 109-401 WOMEN AND RELIGION
MW 3:30-5 Comeau (lecomeau@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross-Listed: RELS-005/FOLK-029
This course will look at issues of gender in Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. By using historical, psychoanalytical and anthropological tools, we will explore the various ways in which religion shapes gender roles and vice-versa. Aspects considered will include the representation of the divine, the role of women in religious institutions, and rules regarding the human body, marriage and sexuality. We will also take into consideration contemporary women's self-representation in religious literature, art, and film.
GSOC 122-401 SOCIOLOGY OF GENDER TR 1:30-3 Leidner (rleidner@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: SOCI-122
Cultural Diversity in US – Class of ’12 and After
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-182-401 SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE
TR 3-4:30
Cross Listed: STSC-182
This course examines the role of social science in the United States during the 20th century. There have been popular social scientific theories since the early 19th century, when the craze spread for interpreting an individual’s character by feeling the bumps on their heads. But popular social science is really a 20th century phenomenon. And popular culture influenced academic research. Our coverage cannot be comprehensive. We have insufficient time to treat all human sciences equally. For example, there is enormous popular interest in paleoanthropology and archaeology, but we will not discuss these in class-although you might choose to write your research paper for the course on a specific aspect of one of these disciplines.
GSOC-199 INDEPENDENT STUDY
Arranged TBA
See Department for Permission and Section Number
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-242-401 SCIENCE OF SEX & SEXUALITY
TR 3-4:20 Lundeen (bshannon@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HSOC/STSC-242
The author of a New York Times article entitled “On Being Male, Female, neither or both” concluded her comments with the following statement: “The definition of sex was (and is) still up for grabs.” In our post-modern world, we have become accustomed to the malleability of gender identity and sexuality. We are also aware that individuals undergo sex reassignment surgeries but by large we assume that transgender people are transitioning from one discrete category to another. Queer activists certainly challenge this assumption, preferring to envision sex, gender, and sexuality on a continuum, but these days even scientists don’t concur about a definitive definition of sex. Should sex be defined chiefly by anatomy? Chromosomes? The body’s ability to produce and respond to hormones? If the boundaries of biological categories can be contested, what are the implications for culturally constructed ideas about gender identity and sexuality?
GSOC 252-401 FREUD
Lecture: Weissberg (lweissbe@sas.upenn.edu)
TR 10:30-12
Recitations:
402 F 10-11
403 F 11-12
404 F 12-1
405 F 1-2
Cross Listed: COML-253/GRMN-253/HSOC-253/STSC-253
Humanities and Social Science Sector
Probably no other person of the twentieth century has influenced scientific thought, humanistic scholarship, medical therapy, and popular culture as much as Sigmund Freud. This lecture course will study his work, its cultural background, and its impact on us today. In the first part of the course, we will learn about Freud's life and the Viennese culture of his time. We will then move to a discussion of seminal texts, such as excerpts from his Interpretation of Dreams, case studies, as well as essays on psychoanalytic practice, human development, neuroses, and culture in general. In the final part of the course, we will discuss the impact of Freud's work. Guest lecturers from the medical field, history of science, psychology, and the humanities will offer insights into the reception of Freud's work, and its consequences for various fields of study and therapy.
GSOC 287-401 STUDIO CONTEMPORARY BLACK WOMEN
TR 3-4:30 Gilliam
Cross Listed: AFRC-287/CINE-286
Course Outline: This course begins by grounding students in “bodies of work” by 14 contemporary artists. In addition to investigating these artists for the multiple mediums and languages they create in, we will also be using their works to address recent theorizations of the black female body in relationship to a diverse set of sub-themes including: Diasporic notions of beauty, violence, religion, labor, immigration, aesthetics, pleasure, movement, hip-hop, and health. From there we will in turn develop our own critiques of how we, as individuals and members of various collectives fashion our own bodies in our contemporary world, allowing students to become more aware of their racialized and gendered selves. This course combines weekly seminar and studio classes. In lieu of more traditional, weekly response papers, the students will be trained in the studio classes to develop their own creative responses, using the genre/medium of the artist that is being studied in that week’s seminar. The midterm paper and final film screenplay will be responses to both one or more of the 14 artists we will discuss and the work the students create in the studio exercises.
GSOC 290-401 THE BLACK WOMAN
MW 5-6:30 Tillet (stillet@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: AFRC-290/ENGL-290
Cultural Diversity in US – Class of ’12 and After
Since 1970, when Toni Morrison published The Bluest Eye, Alice Walker released The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and Toni Cade Barbara published her anthology. The Black Woman, African-American women writers have produced an unprecedented number of novels, plays, essays, and books of poetry. In this course, we will examine how African-American feminist literature reflected and sometimes resisted the political ideologies and aesthetic concerns of the feminist, Civil Rights, and Black Power movements. After reading novels by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Paule Marshall, essays by Michele Wallace and Audre Lorde, and poetry by ntzoake shange and Sonia Sanchez, we will then explore how successive generations of black women writers, such playwright Suzan Lori-Parks, poets Elizabeth Alexander and Stacyanne Chin, and novelists Danzy Senna, Edwidge Danticat, Martha Southgate and Chimamanda Adichie have responded to these earlier texts with their additional emphasis on queerness, hip hop, immigration, and multiraciality. Essays, music, and films from other artists who have influenced the creative vision and the movement of African-American feminist writing supplement the works of fiction, poetry, and drama that constitute the central material of the course.
GSOC-290-601 BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS
T 5:30-8:30 Enderle (enderlej@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-290
Writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf have long held a place in the literary canon. In this survey, we will read them alongside other woman writers who, though less known today, were no less influential in their own time. In the process, we will explore the act of writing as a source of both freedom and constraint for women. Denied a public voice, many of these writers found that they could only achieve their political and financial goals through their writing. How did these women use the written word to negotiate political and financial constraints? And how did women's writing remain constrained despite their negotiations? As we explore these questions, we will read works by authors such as Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Catherine Macaulay and Angela Carter; class requirements will include weekly blog posts, two short papers and a final exam.
GSOC-295-601 WOMEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN SOUTH ASIA
T 4:30-7:30 Roy (railiroy@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross-Listed: SAST-295
One aspect of the position of women in Afghanistan and Pakistan is all too clear from the images and reports we see more and more frequently: veiled (or cocooned in a burka), victim of an honor killing, an acid attack or a gang rape; subject to Islamic laws that devalue them. But women in these two Muslim countries have sought to break the barriers of their rigidly patriarchal societies while refusing to surrender their identity as Muslims. Understanding how they have fared could hold the key to how women in South Asia and other parts of the Muslim world negotiate their autonomy and reclaim their right to participate as equal citizens on their own terms. At the same time, no women’s movement anywhere can develop in isolation. Therefore, this course will explore lines of conflict and co-operation between women and other groups in society, such as the rural peasantry, the urban poor, migrant labor, students and peace activists.
GSOC 310-401 THE MEDIEVAL READER
TR 12-1:30 Kirkham (vkirkham@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: COML 310/ITAL-310
Benjamin Franklin Seminars
Through a range of authors including Augustine, Dante, Petrarch, Galileo, and Umberto Eco, this course will explore the world of the book in the manuscript era. We shall consider 1) readers in fiction-male and female, good and bad; 2) books as material objects produced in monasteries and their subsequent role in the rise of the universities; 3) medieval women readers and writers; 4) medieval ideas of the book as a symbol (e.g., the notion of the world as God's book; 5) changes in book culture brought about by printing and electronic media. Lectures with discussion in English, to be supplemented by slide presentations and a visit to the Rare Book Room in Van Pelt Library. No prerequisites.
GSOC-320-301 CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THOUGHT
W 2-5 Kurz (dkurz@sas.upenn.edu )
Required course for GSOC majors
In this course, which will be organized as a seminar, we will read contemporary feminist works examining feminist approaches to explaining women's experiences, their representations, and their relative positions in society. We will examine critically the theoretical assumptions of various schools of thought, and pay particular attention to the theoretical contributions women of color have brought to the feminist thought. Finally, we will also analyze selected contemporary social issues from the vantage point of different feminist perspectives.
GSOC-338-401 SOCIAL IMAGES & ISSUES AGING
W 4-7 Kagan (skagen@nursing.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HSOC/NURS-338
Benjamin Franklin Seminars
This honors course examines social issues and consequences of advancing age in the 21st century. The examination is designed to create intellectual foundations as place from which to critique social images, constructions and processes. Contemporary and
historical ideas ranging from stereotypes of the dirty old man and the sweet little old lady to language of intergenerational conflict and the sandwich generation are all material for building those foundations. Resources used include classical works in social gerontology and emerging research in aging studies and related fields. These works and those selected by the student are viewed through a critical lens built from understandings of diverse individual, familial, cultural and societal notions of aging and human experience and drawing on student and faculty background and life experience. Skills for participant
observer field work in the tradition of thick description are built to allow reflection of current representations of aging and being old in contrast to the contemporary and historical ideas gleaned from the literature.
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-341-401 THE PAMELA CRAZE
TR 10:30-12 Bowers (tbowers@english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-341
Benjamin Franklin Seminars
In 1740, a successful London printer named Samuel Richardson published what turned out to be one of the most influential and controversial novels ever written, *Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded.* It tells the story of a servant girl who repeatedly resists the sexual overtures of her powerful “master,” Mr. B., and of the supposedly happy ending – marriage to a wealthy man – that her virtuous behavior eventually earns. The questions about power, class, gender, virtue, and meaning that *Pamela* made visible sparked an enormous amount of writing in its day and ever since. Was Pamela really virtuous, or did she manipulate Mr. B’s desire for her in order to gain wealth and social position? Who is the agent of the seduction in *Pamela,* and who its object? What is the nature of Pamela’s “virtue,” and what is the quality of her “reward?” Is women’s virtue different from men’s? Is marriage necessarily a form of economic exchange, even of prostitution for women? These are some of the questions that *Pamela* raised for readers of the eighteenth century, and that continue to this day to be debated in writing surrounding this controversial work.
In this advanced seminar, we will examine the universe of writings that have emerged since 1740 in response to *Pamela,* with emphasis on works by Richardson's contemporaries in the mid-eighteenth century. Starting with the novel itself and with Richardson’s defenses of it, we’ll look at the multitude of “anti-Pamelas” that crowded 18th-century publication lists, and at voices that have sounded since in the debate, either to praise or to attack the novel. Emphasis will be placed on independent library research and on the recovery and interpretation of eighteenth-century texts. Students will learn to use sophisticated research tools -- electronic databases, microfilm collections, and rare book libraries, for example – efficiently and critically. Class meets on the 6th floor of Van Pelt Library. Students from disciplines other than English are welcome.
GSOC-344-401 PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONAL GROWTH
M 5-8
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 346-401 GENDER IN MODERN AMERICAN HISTORY
TR 12-1:30 Brown (kabrown@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HIST-346
Cultural Diversity in US – Class of ’12 and After
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-349-401 HISTORY OF SEXUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES
MW 2-3:30 Peiss (peiss@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HIST-349
Cultural Diversity in US – Class of ’12 and After
This course introduces students to a relatively new field of inquiry, the history of sexuality in the U.S. It explores the past to consider why sexuality has been so central to American identities, culture, and politics. Primary documents and other readings focus on the history of sexual ideology and regulation; popular culture and changing sexual practices; the emergence of distinct sexual identities and communities; the politics of sexuality; and the relationship between sexual and other forms of social difference, such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, and class. Topics include many with continuing relevance to contemporary public debate: among them, sexual representation and censorship, sexual violence, adolescent sexuality, the politics of reproduction, gay and lesbian sexualities and sexually transmitted diseases.
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 430-401 LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL & TRANSGENDER REPRESENTATIONS
W 2-5 Sender (ksender@asc.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: CINE-492/COMM-430
An examination of the role of cultural institutions in shaping the images and self-images of homosexuals in western culture. Because of their "invisibility", sexual minorities provide a unique example of the role of cultural stereotypes in socialization and identity shaping and can thus illuminate these basic communicational processes. Definitions and images to be analyzed (within a historical and cross-cultural context) are drawn from religious, medical, and social scientific sources, as well as elite and popular culture.
GSOC-499 INDEPENDENT STUDY (SENIOR LEVEL)
Arranged TBA
Permission Needed From Department
GSOC-518-401 NURSING, HEALTH AND ILLNESS IN THE UNITED
W 4-7 STATES, 1860-1985
Wall (wallbm@nursing.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: NURS-518
Distribution Course History/Tradition– 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 528-401 GENDER AND SCIENCE
T 1:30-4:30 Lindee (mlindee@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HSSC-528
With a special focus on methods, this course explores the rich literature on gender and technical knowledge
GSOC-555-401 WOMEN AND INCARCERATION
R 4:30-7:30 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-566-640 LITERATURE AND LAW
W 6-8 Gamer (mgamer@english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: COML/ENGL-566
This seminar will explore the relationship between two of our most powerful forms of social discourse, literature and the law. The two share conspicuous similarities: a tendency to represent, interpret, and criticize flesh-and-blood interactions; a reliance on story-telling; a fondness for precedent, evidence, and testimony. Yet the two are perhaps even more frequently in conflict with one another, particularly over questions fundamental to both -- how language works, what constitutes evidence and truth, and what kinds of advocacy and representation are desirable or harmful. Readings will begin in the ancient world and move forward chronologically to the present day. For the first weeks of the course, we'll explore the literary and legal bases of the ancient and medieval world in authors like Homer, Aquinas, Dante, and Machiavelli. How did these writers define fundamental terms like authority and jurisdiction? How did their different legal codes conceptualize issues still controversial today, like habeas corpus, trial, and torture? Around week five or six we'll move from these foundational texts forward in time to that most powerful legal and literary fiction, the republic of letters, asking how this modern fictional space underwrites our sense both of an independent judiciary and what we most often call "the public sphere" or "the court of public opinion." What do we expect of our laws or our literature? How do each manage to stay alive for posterity? What kinds of interpretive approaches should govern both? How might literature and law be said to regulate one another? Along the way we'll explore the law-making qualities of literature (its tendency to posit artificial forms onto lived experience even as it insists that those forms have value) and the literariness of the law (its ability to turn fictions into enforceable realities and its fondness for resolving conflict). Aside from the authors already listed above, our readings will likely include works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Giambattista Vico, Thomas Jefferson, Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, Herman Melville, Angela Carter, Vladamir Nabokov, and Richard Brautigan, as well as several legal cases and critical essays. Required work will be two essays of around 8-10 pages each.
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 6:30-9:30 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-595-601 WOMEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN SOUTH ASIA
T 4:30-7:30 Roy (railiroy@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross-Listed: SAST-295
One aspect of the position of women in Afghanistan and Pakistan is all too clear from the images and reports we see more and more frequently: veiled (or cocooned in a burka), victim of an honor killing, an acid attack or a gang rape; subject to Islamic laws that devalue them. But women in these two Muslim countries have sought to break the barriers of their rigidly patriarchal societies while refusing to surrender their identity as Muslims. Understanding how they have fared could hold the key to how women in South Asia and other parts of the Muslim world negotiate their autonomy and reclaim their right to participate as equal citizens on their own terms. At the same time, no women’s movement anywhere can develop in isolation. Therefore, this course will explore lines of conflict and co-operation between women and other groups in society, such as the rural peasantry, the urban poor, migrant labor, students and peace activists.
GSOC-599 INDEPENDENT STUDY (GRADUATE LEVEL)
Arranged TBA
See Department for Permission and Section Number
GSOC-612-401 INTERACTIONAL PROCESSES WITH LGBT
INDIVIDUALS
W 6:30-8:30 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.
GSOC-790-401 CRITICAL THEORY
M 3-6 Love (loveh@english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL/COML-790
GSOC-806-401 GENDER, GLOBAL & MEDIA
M 4-6 Parameswaran
Cross Listed: COMM-806
This seminar creates a forum for debate over the ways in which the cultural politics of gender structure the historical, economic and social landscapes of media globalization. Media culture, as the course readings seek to show, provides a fertile site to examine how globalized media practices articulate gendered imaginations. Adopting a transnational feminist perspective, the seminar specifically addresses the intersections between and among media technologies, representations, and institutions and the complex scripting of gendered meanings and subject positions in multiple locations in the global public sphere. Course topics include globalization and transnational and postcolonial feminist theories; gender, sexuality, and media; gender and labor in globalized media industries; femininity, consumerism, and global advertising; gender, global media, and morality; tourism, gender, and media economies; and gender, religion, and popular culture. For the major assignment, students will be expected to produce a research paperthat focuses on one of the following: a critical review of a set of theories or a body of empirical work in a specific region; textual analysis of media with special attention to influences of globalization; political-economic analysis of media institutions and corporate practices.
