WGST 101
Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies Fall 2009 (also offered Spring 2010)
Division II Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

This discussion course introduces a range of feminist issues, theories, and controversies. It has several aims: to provide critical and analytical tools for thinking about gender; to explore key issues confronting women in U.S. (and other) societies, and to discuss strategies for confronting them. The course will examine issues such as: body politics, sexuality, reproductive rights, sexual violence, gender and work, motherhood and family. Above all, the course is intended as an exploration of the tremendous diversity of thought contained under the general rubrics of feminist and gender studies and as a vehicle for developing skills in writing and research, as well as analytical tools for further work in the field. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that its main emphases are on challenging the notion of one universalizing category of “woman,” and to recognize the diverse ways in which national, sexual, ethnic, racial, classed and other kinds of differences produce multiple and often divergent relations of gendered power. It also whenever possible contextualizes within a global frame the central issues that have made up and continue to define the U.S. feminist tradition, in order to encourage students to recognize the role cultural difference plays in a variety of feminist issues and to decenter the U.S as a reference point for all feminist theory and politics.