The course offers a critical introduction to queer theory. The course is organized into two sections. The first half of the course presents an outline of the emergence of queer theory in the early 1990s as a critical response to the limitations of the gay and lesbian movement. The second half of the course presents an outline of queer theory’s failure to examine the effect of race on the construction and representation of gender and sexuality.
(IV, VII)

What is gender? Why does studying it matter? Explores how feminism has understood not only gender as a category of social analysis, but how gender structures personal identities, family, citizenship, work and leisure, social policy, sexuality, and language.
(IV, VII)

Examination of gender and sexuality in relation to the production of identities created through participation in state and nation. Examines complexity of relationship between feminism and nationalism, feminism and state.
(VIII)

This course examines the intersections of race and gender in the formation of feminist theory and practice. It looks closely at the ways that prevailing notions of both race and gender are mutually transformed by an intersectional approach and highlights the particularly rich and dynamic contributions of black feminist theorizing for a range of critical topics and issues. To that end, the course pays special attention to the political framing of three major contemporary fronts of feminist movement – domestic violence, sexual assault, reproductive justice – and to the form and substance of the divergent collective efforts that women have organized under these overlapping banners.
(VII)

There has been an unusual growth of women writers and film makers since the 1980's in Korea in the wake of the emerging feminist movement. This course explores the themes and issues, and styles which these women writers raise and employ through their respective medium. We will analyze the novels and short stories by such writers as Choe Yun, Kong Ji-yong, Sin Kyong-suk, and Chon Kyong-nin, and the films by women directors including Im Sun-rye and Pyon Yong-ju.
(Same as East Asian 150)

In this class we analyze selected films from the Bombay film industry (the popular Hindi cinema) referred to as Bollywood Film. We examine the films as historical, social and cultural texts that represent a national consciousness. Within this context we explore issues of gender and interrogate how the "babes" are represented as self-sacrificing mother, devout daughter/daughter-in-law, chaste woman/wife among other representations.
We examine how this popular cinema negotiates national identity, family values, and communal identity, at the same time that it creates grand song and dance spectacles. Further questions we address are: how has Bollywood transformed representations of women from the 1950s onwards? How and why is sexuality expressed through songs, revealing costumes and suggestive dances? We will engage with the unique and different film language that emerges from our study of Bollywood cinema.

This course will consider the development of the American teen film in relation to the ‘invention’ of adolescence in the 1930s and Hollywood’s subsequent exploitation of teens, and more recently tweens, as consumers. We will focus on the ways in which teen films enforce gender norms, in tomboy films for instance, while also reflecting concerns about adolescent sexuality and heteronormativity during a period when sexual mores underwent dramatic change.
(Same as Film &Media 190)

Is home a literal place, a territory, a state of mind? What does it mean to be "at home," and how does such a feeling of security relate to "being at home in the world?" How do Home and the World replicate each other; or, do they? Is home a sovereign and normative space, or is it a space of non-discriminating, ever inclusive belonging? Can some one's home become some other's exile? Can home be the function of a regime such as Nationalism? What is the relationship between having a home and enjoying the privileges of citizenship? How do race, gender, immigration, ethnicity, and sexuality determine what is home and what is exile? What happens when one leaves one's home and lives elsewhere? Can there be divided homes characterized by "double consciousness?" During these times of intensive diasporas, movements of peoples-goods-and ideas across boundaries and borders, how does home become a mere location, and location acquire the significance of home? Is a home more natural than a mere location? Are homes natural or are they imagined constructs? With these questions in mind, we will be analyzing a number of texts, some fictional and some theoretical, as they traverse home and away in an infinite series of arrivals and departures.
Format: A combination of lectures, discussions, and class presentations. 1 take home examination, 1 short paper, and 1 long paper.
Texts: Theorizing Diaspora, Ed. Anita Mannur, Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, and Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter.
(Same as AsianAm 110, Comp Lit 108, AfAm 118)

This course will undertake an historically-situated analysis of the emergence of a visible “gay and lesbian literature.” We will attempt to ask why and how such a literature has emerged as a “literary market” in the 20th century as well as what qualifies as “lesbian and gay literature”­and why. As such, our work will be as much an exploration of the literary (and even economic) social construction of “queerness” as an appreciation of the development of a significant “minority literature.” Students can expect to read widely (and often) in a variety of genres--novels, stories, plays, and poetry. A mid-term, a final, a short paper, and a longer paper will be required, as well as frequent in-class writing assignments.
(Same as English 105)