Women's Studies Courses for Autumn 2008

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101 Introduction to Women's Studies in the Humanities U 5 GEC's-TWO
This course fulfills GEC requirements in Arts and Humanities Culture & Ideas and Social Diversity   WS 101 is intended to introduce you to feminist analysis as a way of looking at the world and a way of "making knowledge."  Drawing on research and literature from the humanities, we will learn how to analyze forces that shape women's lives.  We will take apart "common sense" notions of sex and gender, and look at how ideas of womanhood are constructed through race and class.  This course, which fulfills the University's Social Diversity and the Arts and Humanities GEC requirements, pays particular attention to differences among women along lines of race, class, and sexuality.

110 Women, Culture, and Society U 5 GEC's-TWO
This course fulfills GEC requirements in Social Science and Social Diversity   Women's Studies 110 is an introduction to the study of women and gender and can be used to fulfill two GEC requirements — Social Diversity and Social Science.  The course explores the social and cultural diversity found among women through an examination of the ways in which gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and physical ability intersect to influence the status of women.  We will consider how individuals learn gender, how culture shapes the way we think about gender, and how law, public policy, and economics affect gender and the struggle for equality.

215 Reading Women Writers U 5
This course fulfills GEC requirements in Arts and Humanities Literature  It is designed to provide an introduction to women's autobiography across cultural and racial borders.  Feminist analysis and literary theory will help us understand how women in different locations interpret and understand their own experiences. We will concentrate on a series of questions and reading strategies regarding identity construction in relation to self, the world, history, race, gender, class, and sexuality. We will also discuss how these writings differ from each other with the writers’ different ethnic backgrounds or nationalities and if there is any  common ground.  Much of the learning in this course will be conducted through critical discussions and comparisons on the basis of individual and collective efforts.

215 Reading Women Writers U 5
This course fulfills GEC requirements in Arts and Humanities Literature  This course is designed to provide an introduction to travel narratives of modern and contemporary women across cultures and historical moments.   It covers a variety of topics and examines ways women writers address cultural and social issues in the intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, and nationality. We will use written and visual texts to understand women's travel writings from multiple perspectives.   We will also discuss how these writings speak to each other when presenting women worldviews of others and their own subjectivity. Much of the learning in this course will be through written assignments, critical discussions and analyses on the basis of individual and collective efforts.

230 Gender, Sexuality, & Race in Pop Culture U 5
This course fulfills the GEC requirement for Arts and Humanities Visual Performing Arts This course explores how popular culture generates and articulates our understandings of gender and sexuality and their intersections with race and class. We will study a variety of theories and methods used in contemporary gender/sexual scholarship on popular culture, and we will examine a number of popular media texts. We will consider that popular culture is never solely an amusement or diversion. The images, sounds and stories in popular texts are also media through which we imagine and practice femininities, masculinities, and sexualities. These gendered and sexualized images and practices are also infused with class and racial characteristics (consider, for example, the whiteness of brides in bridal magazines). The norms sustained and contested by popular culture are evident in our constructions of ourselves – from the look we aspire to and the clothes we buy, to the way we understand sex, love and romance. This course allows us to think critically about the images, practices, and narratives that perpetuate and/or disrupt these norms.

300/H300 Introduction to Feminist Analysis U 5
This course will focus on the topic of gender and democracy. The course will introduce students to various approaches to feminist analysis as we explore questions that include the following: What are feminist critiques of contemporary democratic theories and practices?  How have feminists from various contexts across the globe analyzed issues central to democracy such as obligation, consent, citizenship, representation, and participation? What are models of feminist democracy and how might they be fostered? This is an Embedded Honors course. Honors students will be given extra assignments.  (This course should be taken as early as possible after declaring a major in Women's Studies; it is prerequisite to most WS 500 level courses).

305 Gender, Culture & Power U 5
Women’s Studies 305 is an introduction to studying gender systems and women’s situations across cultures and countries. The class focuses on “globalization,” the flows of people and culture that are increasing around the world.  The class begins with the historical background for understanding the current period of globalization. We will look at specific cases of colonization in different parts of the world and emphasize on its role in the rise of factories in both the colonized and colonizing nations. We then consider the role of these factories in today’s world as they employ women from the third world (sweatshops), and explore other issues related to gender and globalization and discuss feminist responses to the changing world system. This class approach stresses that in order to understand women’s lives in the non-western world, it is important to understand the on-going connections between the “first world” and between the United States and the rest of the world.

317 Women and Film U 5 GEC
This course fulfills the GEC requirement for Arts and Humanities Visual Performing Arts This course is a critical survey of the representation of women in Hollywood cinema with examples drawn from different historical periods (from the 1930's to the present).  The goals of the course are to understand how the film medium has functioned, historically and aesthetically, in its representations of women and to understand how and why women have created alternative visions of women in film.

325 Issues in Women’s Health U 5
This interdisciplinary course explores the relationships between health and gender under political, biological, economic, cultural and/or socially constructed influences.  We will conduct a comprehensive overview of international health literature in public health, feminist cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, medicine, and popular literature.  Topics include the social construction of gender/sex, feminist critiques of biomedicine, inscription of gender onto the body, gender inequities and difference in health epidemiology around the globe, gendered approaches and practices in healing, and others.

367.01 U.S. Women Writers: Text and Context GEC's-TWO
This course fulfills the second level writing requirement and social diversity for B.A. This course will enhance students' critical and analytical reading and writing skills through an interdisciplinary study of women's literary representations of critical issues in United States social history.  The emphasis will be on women writers' strategies for articulating female experience and on the role of literature as a reflection of and a catalyst for political and social change.  The intersections of gender, race, class ethnicity, age and sexual identity will be the primary categories of analysis. Specific topics that may be covered include, but are not limited to: resistance to and deconstruction of racialized and gendered categories/social roles, the cult of true womanhood, slavery and the abolitionist movement, Western expansionism, the experiences of Native Americans, immigration and the notion of the "melting pot," etc.

367.04 Black Women Writers: Text and Context GEC's-TWO
This course fulfills the second level writing requirement and social diversity for B.A. The interdisciplinary content of this course - a combination of literary, social, political and cultural readings - will enable the student to read, discuss, and write about how African American female authors have historically depicted and interpreted their own socio-political and cultural status in the USA.  We will also explore the notion of an African American woman's literary tradition.  We will consider the notion of "intersectionality" to posit the ways in which race, culture and gender intersect the most common and universal literary themes and structures. Although gender will be the primary category of analysis, analysis of race, class, ethnicity, and sexual identity will also be important components of the course.

370 Varieties of Female Experience: Lesbian Cultures U 5
This course fulfills GEC requirements in Social Diversity   The term “lesbian cultures” can have a variety of meanings, depending on the era and the range of other social identities that can impact an understanding of sexual identity. This course is designed as a survey of the cultural, social, and political diversity of lesbian, bisexual, queer and transgender communities and identities in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will read fiction, lesbian/bi/feminist/queer theory & history, and consider comics, music and film as texts. We will discuss the ways lesbian identities get marked and will examine social contexts that both permit and inhibit an understanding of sexuality as fluid. We will analyze how lesbian cultures have been documented and represented. We will also look at how political activism has shaped les/bi/trans/queer identities. Understanding the ways sexual identity intersects with gender identity, class, disability and race will form the foundation of our discussions and textual analyses.

505 Feminist Analysis in Global Perspective U G 5
This course will apply feminist analysis—a lens that foregrounds gender and its intersection with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and nationality—to the specific contexts of women in an increasingly “globalized” world. We will attempt to understand the lives and experiences of women in cultural and national contexts other than our own as well as to examine the bases on which women have built global feminist alliances.

H510 HONORS American Women’s Movements U G 5
This course is designed for honors students to examine a variety of women’s movements in the United States, with particular emphasis on feminist/women’s rights movements and on the diverse interests and standpoints of women across lines of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. In addition to developing skills in critical reading and thinking, research, writing, and speaking, students should complete the course with an understanding of how social activism develops and social change occurs; how gender interacts with other elements of identity to shape the consciousness and experiences of women; and how women’s movements have been influenced by and have influenced major social, economic, and political developments in the United States. The readings and discussion will examine four arenas of women’s activism: citizenship, labor, the personal, and the global.

527 Studies in Gender and Cinema U G 5
This course focuses on the hardboiled dames and femme fatales of film noir, the crime genre where good girls don’t last long. Class material will range from the 1940s classics (Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon) to the feminist and lesbian versions of this genre (Klute, Bound). We will explore the problems and fascinations of Hollywood’s bad-girl characters in these films, their historical contexts, and questions of spectatorship, stardom, and genre.

535 Gender and Science U G 5
This course is an examination of works exploring relations between, and constitutive of, gender and science. Topics include the gendering of “science” and “nature”; biological theories of sexual and other forms of human difference; feminist science and technology studies; intersections between feminist theory and cultural studies of science.

575 Issues in Contemporary Feminist Theory: "Capstone" Course U G 5
Women's Studies 575 is a "capstone" experience for Women's Studies majors at the Ohio State University. Feminist theories analyze and critique social and political arguments and practices whose consequences disadvantage individuals because of their gender, race, class, or sexuality. This course offers a variety of feminist theoretical perspectives on oppression and feminist responses to contemporary social and political ideologies.

620 Asian American Feminisms U G 5
This course will examine the impact of U.S. wars on the historical feminization of the Asian/Pacific Islander body and the national geographies it symbolizes. We’ll look at the beginnings of the modern American empire and its imagined subjects with the acquisition of Hawaii and the Philippine territories in the Spanish-American War and consider the legacy of the neo- and postcolonial cultural imperialism in Asian territories after World War II. Whether willing or coerced, API women and men have had to confront sexualized images in popular culture and/or negotiated roles in the economy that range from sex workers and war brides to overseas contract workers and mail-order brides. This course will examine how API artists and activists position and often queer their art against these confining representations in order reveal not only the pervasive material inequities they face but also the possibilities for mobilizing political movements by and for people of color and their communities.

700 Introduction to Graduate Studies G 5
This course provides an introduction to Women's Studies as a professional/academic field of study. The course will introduce skills necessary for analyzing and comparing graduate level readings, techniques of group discussion, basic theoretical terminology and key issues and intellectual debates that characterize contemporary feminist discourse and epistemology. Readings, discussion, and papers will help students understand the nature of graduate study. 702 Teaching Women's Studies G 5 The purpose of this seminar is to assist graduate teaching assistants in meeting instructional responsibilities and developing the necessary skills for college level teaching in women's studies. Topics cover both the practical aspects of teaching such as course planning, designing and conducting lectures, leading discussions, test construction, evaluating student performance, and using computer assisted learning resources, as well as the more theoretical issues embedded in the feminist scholarship on pedagogy.

840 Topics in Representing Gender G 5
This course will offer in-depth investigations of topics and genres central to feminist theories of gender representation, including considerations of aesthetics, subjectivity, intersectionality, narrative, and/or the gaze. Course is repeatable to a maximum of 15credit hours. Prereq: 740, 742, or permission of instructor.