University LGBTQ+ Resources

Dr. Mentz adds, for Spectrum: My Shakespeare class this spring will be looking at modern (21c) novels written in response to Shakespeare, which means it won't be explicitly q ueer theory-focused -- but there's so much queer discourse in and around Shakespeare studies that I think the Shakespeare course is always LGBTQ+-adjacent, at least. I try to highlight such issues in the plays and especially the Sonnets.

ENG. 3590: Literature & The Other Arts (15061) Race, Gender, and Science Fiction
W. 10:40AM – 1:30 PM
Dr. Shanté Paradigm Smalls
This course takes seriously the work that science fiction and speculative fiction works do in relation to constructions of gender and sexuality, race, and imaginary worlds and temporalities. This course considers how dystopian science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative categories render race and gender in the afterlife of structured society. Are race and gender metrics that register after civilization has been destroyed or radically altered? We consider such questions as: Who gets to lead in dystopian society? Who gets to have family and kinship and how are those portrayed? How is gender racialized and race gendered in post-apocalyptic worlds? And finally, can dystopic future renderings aid in undoing long-standing structural oppressions?

The class will focus on a series of objects and performances across genre, including: Octavia Butler’s Kindred in novel and its graphic novel adaptation; the film Snowpiercer; the film The Train to Busan; novels by Tomi Adeyemi and NK Jeminsin; and Marjorie Liu’s graphic novel Monstress series. Through contemporary visions of the dystopic future, present, and past, this course seeks to explore how racial hierarchies—as well as patriarchy, heteronormative logic, cissexism, and corporate nation-states—are maintained or undone in fictional realities.

There are no prerequisites for this course but students will benefit from having taken a theoretical course in the humanities or social sciences. This course should appeal to students interested in literary studies, cultural history, performance studies, media studies, communication, visual culture, gender and sexuality studies, art and aesthetics, queer studies, genre fiction, and critical race studies.

ENG 3260 Women Writers of the Nineteenth-Century (15047) Dr. Amy M. King
Mon/Th 12:15 - 1:40
The nineteenth-century is a particularly rich moment to study literature written by women; in England, the period saw the proliferation of women's writing, including novels, poetry, social criticism, drama, and other forms of non-fiction prose. The late nineteenth century also saw the appearance of the “New Woman”— a shorthand phrase for various controversies about gender and women's roles concentrated in the 1890s— and the commencement of the civil right struggle for women's suffrage that culminated in the extension of limited (1894, 1918) and then full franchise (1928) in England. In this course we will study the aesthetic and cultural contributions of various women writers from England in the nineteenth-century. The course will be divided into three units: “The Angel in the House,” “Narrating Women's Lives,” and “The 1890s, Suffrage, and the New Woman.” Our primary focus in this course will be to read and analyze the work of a set of exceptional women writers—including novelists, explorers, political activists, poets, missionaries, and housewifery consultants— and to understand them in their historical context as well as appreciate their aesthetic and political achievements. We will study the cultural phenomenon of the woman writer and the way in which various writers gave imaginative life to the situation of the modern woman, including . We also will be concerned with theorizing this body of work as a separate and gendered tradition of nineteenth-century British literature. Authors may include: Jane Austen, Anonymous, Mary Shelley, Mrs. Beeton, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Michael Field, Elizabeth Gaskell, Sarah Grand, Mary Kingsley, Harriet Martineau, Mary Prince, and Christina Rossetti.

ENG 3290 [15060] Special Topics 18th & 19th C. Literature: Female Virtue and the Novelistic Tradition
Dr. Amy M. King Mon/Th 9:05 -10:30
One of the reoccurring preoccupations of the novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the question of female innocence. The courtship novel, the fallen woman novel, and the French adultery novel are three genres that take up the trope of the “girl” and the broader cultural subject of female innocence. And yet the novel hardly invented the category of innocence, the subjectivity of the young unmarried female character, or anxiety about female “virtue.” Since Eve took the determining bite, the relationship between knowledge and female chastity has been an overriding cultural preoccupation in the west. The novel tradition reflects that long-standing cultural anxiety around chastity (is she “pure” or fallen”?), spinning repeated novelistic plots that revolve around particularly modern concerns about the relationship between female identity and “dangers” to it, including flirtation, forwardness, “fallenness” (whether by seduction, sexual violence or choice). Ideas about the way in which culture depends upon an (always imperiled) white female virtue will be one (but not the sole) entranceway into a number of novels and excerpts from novels that revolve around what Henry James called the “formula” of that “charming creature”— “the girl.” We will likely read excerpts from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Fanny Burney’s Evelina, as well as a selection of the following possible novels: (Anonymous) The Woman of Color, Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Henry James’s Daisy Miller, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

ENG. 3270: Eighteenth-Century British Poetry (15055)
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
In eighteenth-century Britain, the enterprise of writing poetry often was undertaken with gravity and precision. Considered the great literary form that was handed down to a “modern,” enlightened age from antiquity, poetry required that numerous and crucial decisions be weighed by writers. To what degree should modern poets imitate their ancient predecessors? Should poetry be written for publication, or only for discreet circulation among a private audience? What are the consequences of deviating from convention? What did it mean for a woman to compose i n this genre, long characterized as the province of educated men? How did authors use public forms of poetry to explore private matters, like desire, sex, and gender identity? Such questions shape the composition of poetry in this period; we will learn its major formal and thematic conventions in this period and seek an understanding of its varied social, cultural, political, and aesthetic implications, covering topics from lady’s dressing rooms and genitalia to landscape aesthetics and abolitionism. We will read the major, and some minor, poets from 1660 to 1789, including Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Finch, Montagu, Pope, Swift, Thompson, Johnson, More, Gray, Barbauld, and Wheatley. Evaluation will be based on essays totaling 12-15 written pages, a final, attendance, and participation. The course will be essay-writing intensive, with emphasis on drafting, revising, and literary analysis. While the course is based in a historical period that privileges Englishness, whiteness, masculinity, and rank, I aim for it to be inclusive for thinkers i nterested in matters of social, sexual, and racial justice as well as for creative writers.

ENG. 3475: African American Women’s Rhetorics (15057) TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. LaToya Sawyer
Over 150 Years after Sojourner Truth asked, “Ain’t I a Woman?” political movements like #metoo demonstrate that Black women are at the forefront of insisting that all women, their voices, and their bodies to be recognized in public spheres and conversations concerning and advocating for women. This course traces the stream (Royster 2000) of Black women’s rhetoric from historical figures such as Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida B. Wells, and Audre Lorde to more contemporary rhetors including Tarana Burke, Representative Maxine Waters, and your favorite YouTuber or IG celebrity in order to better understand Black women’s rhetorical traditions and resources and their value today.

This course goes beyond ethos, logos, pathos and other common understandings of rhetorical theory derived from Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions in order to explore how African American women take up the productive arts of persuasion. The course will consider the intersections of race, gender, and other social categories in order to understand the specificity of rhetorical production of women of African descent in the U.S. We will examine how Black women use discourses, language, and literacies such as the use of ratchet language, hair styling and hand-clap games, and digital literacy practices in order to be, advance, protect, and celebrate themselves and the people and concerns they care about. Students will consider the social, political, economic, and educational implications of African American women’s rhetorics and have the opportunity to showcase their findings. Readings will include: Talking Back: Thinking Black, Thinking Feminist by bell hooks, Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere by Gwendolyn Pough, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop by Kyra Gaunt, and other selected texts and media.

SOC 1570: GENDER, VIOLENCE, AND THE MOVIES
Prof. Villalon
Explores the relationship between violence and gender in films. Global sociological perspective on how gender/sexualities intersect with race/ethnicity/class, how they are represented, reproduced and/or challenged in film. Studying links between gender/sexualities and violence through the cinema furthers our understanding of systems of social oppression, practices and ideologies sustaining gender violence, as well as the individual and collective means to challenge such inequities. (January 2-11 2019, MTWRF 9-2:45)

SOC1170: INEQUALITY, RACE, CLASS AND GENDER
Prof. Indergaard
Analysis of the social factors determining class, power and prestige in American society. (TF 09:05-10:30)

SOC2440: GENDER IDENTITY IN POPULAR CULTURE
Prof. Byfield
Exploration of the social construction of gender in popular culture and the interaction between the individual and these images in the formation of the self. Special attention is given to the construction of gender identity in films, television and music. (MR 12:15-1:40)

SOC1150: SOCIOLOGY OF THE FAMILY
This course examines the institution of marriage and the family from a critical sociological perspective.

Theology

Intro to Catholic Moral Theology CRN 15013 W 10:40-1:30
Dr. Jeremy Cruz
Dr. Cruz is currently designing THE 2300 (Introduction to Catholic Moral Theology) to give more space to gender/sexual ethics and to independent student research. The course has many of other focus areas (environment, wealth/debt, labor, violence) but the content is about 1/5 gender and sexuality, plus opportunities for student-chosen research/presentations. Dr. Cruz teaches it once or twice a year.

Art