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  • WGSS 326: Queer Temporalities

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    How do we experience and represent time, and what factors might account for both our experiences and our representations? What are some of the ways that people experience and ritually mark the passing of time? What are some of the different ways that people have made sense of time and themselves in time? Especially for individuals and peoples who have been denied certain self-representation and narratives of place, how do competing notions of time, history, space, and location get negotiated? In this course, drawing from within the broad corpus of queer theory (including theorists such as Gloria Anzaldua, Elizabeth Freeman, J. Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Mu?oz) we will examine some non-linear, non-normative, and interruptive approaches to making sense of time, space-time, and self within time. On the one hand, we will consider theorists who specifically question and challenge what Jose Esteban Mu?oz dubs the "linearity of straight time," and we will turn to a set of issues with regard to family and sexuality, especially critiques of normative lifecycle events and rituals that have reconfigured experiences and representations of time and place. On the other hand, we will also work with queer theory as it explores alternatives to normative conceptualizations of time and place that have already existed in the past. Hence we will look not only to queer theory as it reads more contemporary negotiations of sexuality, identity, time, and space-time; we will also consider how some contemporary theorists have read previous historical examples.
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  • WGSS 327: Foucault

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This course begins with a brief introduction to some of Foucault's early writings but focuses on a close reading of a selection of middle and late texts that have become central to debates about the significance of his work: Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality (vols. 1-3), and selected interviews and course lectures. We examine debates in the Foucault literature about freedom, power, ethics, and the nature of critical theory. This course has been designated EDI because it engages questions concerning power, social differences and social and political freedom. Prerequisite:    At least two courses in Philosophy or Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, or permission of instructor
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  • WGSS 328: Narrating Other Minds: Austen, Eliot, Woolf

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    At roughly fifty-year intervals, Britain produced three brilliant female novelists-- Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf-- who would each become renowned, in her own way, for her ability to combine minutely detailed social observation with a rich depiction of the inner lives of her characters. This course will examine some of their major fiction-- with an emphasis on Austen and Eliot-- in the context of recent critical debate about the nature and implications of their narrative methods for representing the consciousnesses of characters, and of the authorial narrative voices that mediate among them. Questions to be considered: how is our understanding of novelistic characters and consciousness shaped by our real-life experience in interpreting the thoughts and character of others, and vice versa? Do "omniscient" narrators lay claim to a privileged kind of knowing presumed to be unavailable either to their character or to readers, or are they modelling humanly available interpretive stances toward a world of others? Why does "free indirect discourse"-- which blurs the distinction between the consciousness of narrator and character-- feature so prominently in the work of all three? Possible texts include Austen's Emma and Persuasion, Eliot''s Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and The Lifted Veil, and Woolf's The Waves. Prerequisite:    A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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  • WGSS 333: The Nineteenth-Century British Novel

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Imagine this: a form of art and entertainment that purports to be able to represent everything-intimate, even inaccessible human thoughts and feelings, love, class, the city, shopping, sexuality, bureaucracy, social bonds, industrialization, nationalism, even modernity itself. In this course we will try to understand the scope of the nineteenth-century British novel's jaw-dropping representational aspirations: its claim to comprehend in its pages both the dizzying complexity of new social, political, and economic structures, as well as delineate in finest detail the texture of individual minds and lives. We will pay attention to the fictional modes by which apparently intractable social problems are resolved, through a sleight of hand act we seem never to tire of, in the realm of romantic love. And while we might think of the novel as an Empire of the Little, endlessly occupied with giving significance to the smallest acts of ordinary human life, we will think about the broader historical and social conditions the novel both represents in its pages, and is a crucial not-so-silent partner in promoting and contesting. We will also interest ourselves in the kind of under-the-counter work the Victorian novel does on behalf of British empire, as well as empire's own behind-the-scenes work for the novel. Since so many of these stories of everyday life seem as familiar to us as everyday life, we will work hard to maintain what is strange and specific about the nineteenth century even as we recognize within these works the birth of so much that is modern in our own culture. Likely authors include: Austen, Scott, Bronte,Dickens, Eliot, Braddon, and Forster. Prerequisite:    A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate or permission of the instructor
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  • WGSS 383: Whiteness and Race in the History of the United States

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    If race is socially and historically constructed, then the study of race relations in the U.S. extends to the topic of whiteness. And if we are never without the past, then "whiteness" must be a part of current discussions about politics, citizenship, and social issues. Focusing on how historians have written about whiteness in American history, this course uses the prism of race to explore social, political, and economic development in U.S. history. The class follows the development of "whiteness" through a chronology that begins in colonial Virginia, travels through immigration in the nineteenth century, examines racial politics and popular culture in the twentieth century, and ends with a look at the current election season. This course is framed by several questions: What is whiteness, and what has it meant in the history of the United States? Who is (and is not) white? What about other analytical categories, like gender and class (or region or ethnicity or sexuality): how have these experiences shaped and been shaped by the racial category of whiteness? Because historically whiteness has carried overtones of power, privilege, and wealth in the United States, the course necessarily critiques the roots of racial disparities. This class is not for the faint-hearted. Informed participation is necessary to its success. The course fulfills the requirements for the Exploring Diversity Initiative because it examines the differences and similarities between white Americans and other American cultures, and because it explores whiteness as a prism for understanding the operations of power and privilege in American society.
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  • WGSS 388: Psychoanalysis,Gender&Sexuality

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Psychoanalytic thought offers one of the most subtle and startling accounts we have of the nature of gender and sexuality, one that suggests how inextricably sexuality is bound to language, to the limits of culture, and to the problem of identity as such. We'll be interested in these issues in their own right; we'll be equally interested in the surprising ways psychoanalytic thought opens up literary, cinematic and visual works--psychoanalysis is, in the end, a form of reading. The course will weave together theoretical texts and fictions from As You Like It to Some Like it Hot. We'll explore Antigone, "chick flicks" and "buddy" films, courtly love lyrics and novels (Balzac, Woolf, Duras) in the light of thinkers such as Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacqueline Rose, Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. Prerequisite:    A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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  • WGSS 395: Fashioning Bodies: Dress, Consumption, and Gender from the Renaissance to the Present

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This course explores costume and fashion as vehicles for the (re)creation and expression of gender, class, and sexual identities in Europe and the United States. We will begin by looking at the relationship between fashion and the political and economic power of the courts of early modern Europe. Revolutionary ideologies will be linked to sartorial politics, consumption of clothing to colonization, and changes in the style of clothing to shifting social norms. As our focus turns to the fashion industry in the twentieth century, when mass-produced clothing increased the possibility for reflexivity and imaginative play in dress, we will relate representations of the dressed body to the formation of diverse cultural communities, beauty ideals, and status hierarchies, examining both the normative and subversive potential of fashion. The course considers work in the fields of art history, cultural history, sociology and anthropology, feminist theory, and fashion journalism to ask questions such as: What are the origins of consumer societies? When, why, and how were fashion and consumption feminized? Is clothing a language? What cultural, political and social meanings do certain forms of dress generate? What is the relationship between prevalent understandings of the body and fashion? How is clothing used to stigmatize or differentiate individuals and communities? Topics include: the origins of uniforms and sportswear, eroticism and androgyny in fashion, the cultural politics of ethnic clothing, and the relationship between the fashion industry and cinema. Prerequisite:    Open to first-year students with instructor's permission
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  • WGSS 396: Modern Pleasure

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This course investigates the modernist imagination of pleasure, both sensual and aesthetic, with a particular focus on the ways that modernism's formal strategies facilitate the representation of queer pleasures, affections, intimacies, and desires. We will read some texts that seek explicitly to represent lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender sexualities; we will look at others that radically re-imagine the feeling and expression of pleasure. We will approach these texts through the questions: What constitutes "modern" pleasure? What makes pleasure (or a representation of it) queer? And do queer textual expressions of pleasure differ from representations of LGBT sexuality and desire? In tandem with our discussion of literary form, we will consider the crucial role that subcultural sites of intimacy, like Harlem?s cabarets and Natalie Barne's sapphic salon, played in the collaborative production and transatlantic circulation of modernism. Authors likely to be studied include Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, Radclyffe Hall, Willa Cather, and James Baldwin. We will also consider visual and aural texts, including photographs of the Barney salon, cubist portraits and landscapes, and the music of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey. We will read the work of sexologists and situate modernist literature in relation to early 20th--century scientific and cultural conversations about the nature of pleasure. Some contemporary scholarship on modernist sexual culture and much queer and feminist theory will accompany these texts and provide a framework for our analysis of modernism's queer pleasures. Prerequisite:    A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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  • WGSS 402: Dangerous Bodies: Black Womanhood, Sexuality & Popular Culture

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Whether presented as maternal saints, divas, video vixens, or bitches, black female celebrities navigate a tumultuous terrain in popular culture. This course considers the ways that black female celebrities such as Oprah, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Janet Jackson, and Michelle Obama negotiate womanhood and sexuality, and the popular landscapes through which we witness that negotiation. It also engages contemporary black feminist scholarship, which most frequently presents the presentation of black female bodies in popular media forms as exploitive. We will review historical stereotypes of black women in popular media forms, discuss the history of the "politics of respectability" within black culture, engage black feminist responses to these types, and examine theoretical approaches to assess social constructions of womanhood and sexuality. We will also consider provocative questions relevant to discussions of contemporary black sexual politics: Should we view these women as feminists? Are they merely representatives of cultural commodification and control of black women's bodies? Do these women best exemplify the reiteration of problematic characterizations? Are they positive models for demonstrating female empowerment, agency, or "fierceness?" This course explores the histories of representation of black female figures in popular culture, and in so doing, troubles contemporary considerations of black womanhood and sexuality. This course is part of the Gaudino Danger Initiative.
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  • WGSS 452: Women in America, 1620-1865

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This course will explore the diversity of American women's experiences from the colonial era through the Civil War. We will pay particular attention to the roles women filled--as slaves, nuns, housewives, mothers, and workers, as well as depictions of women as witches, paragons of virtue, and urban consumers. In our reading of historiography and primary texts we will analyze the ways in which literacy and artistic culture as well as geopolitical events shaped women's lives. As we study works of history, we will also read modern works of feminist and race theory to further our understanding of connections between ideology and practice, between narrative and argument.
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