Upcoming Courses

Maymester and Summer 2023

1160: Sex and Society

Maymester – Online Asynchronous

Taught by Allison Hammer

Description: In this exciting summer course, we will analyze the intersections of sex, sexuality, race, and gender in our world. We will ask critical questions about our historical moment in the areas of popular culture (music, film, and visual art,) reproductive justice, sexual violence, and the LGBTQ2S+ community. We will discover the range of ways that sexuality and gender are expressed, regulated, and resisted in society. The course will be taught asynchronously, which means you will not have to attend class at a specific time, and you can complete the work in a way that fits your schedule. The mid-term paper and final project will be self-directed to reflect your own interests and fields of study.

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

1150: Sex and Gender in Everyday Life

Summer Session I

Taught by Stacy Simplican

Description: Sex and gender roles in culture and society. Gender, race, and class. Women and men in literature, art, culture, politics, institutions.

Eligible for African American and Diaspora Studies, and Latino/Latina Studies

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

1160W: Sex and Society

Summer Session I – Online Synchronous

Taught by Jenna Christian

Description: Historical, cultural, and social contexts of sexual diversity, discrimination, and sexual violence. Understanding the centrality of sexuality to identity; challenging harmful modes of sexual expression; developing critical awareness of sex and sexuality.

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives, and AXLE: 1000-level W course

Fall 2023

1111: First Year Writing Seminar – Gendered Lives

Taught by Kristin Rose

Description: This course examines how literary texts represent gendered lives. Using contemporary critical techniques and historical approaches, the course will explore how gender is determined by environment, personal choice, and social expectations. Authors will include Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Virginia Woolf.

Counts towards AXLE: First-Year Writing Seminar

1150 01 & 02: Sex and Gender in Everyday Life

Taught by Allison Hammer

Description: In this course, we will discover and analyze how the intersections of sex, sexuality, and gender in the U.S. and transnationally affect every aspect of our lives. We will ask critical questions organized into five units: intersectionality; labor and class; reproductive justice; the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC); and LGBTQ+ identity. We will consider the range of ways that norms of sex, sexuality, and gender are expressed, regulated, and resisted. Through readings, discussions, and academic and creative assignments, you will learn to comprehend and analyze theoretical texts, essays, literature, popular articles, and film for what they reveal about the past, present, and future of gender and sexuality in everyday life.

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

Eligible for African American and Diaspora Studies; and Latino/Latina Studies

1150W 01 & 02: Sex and Gender in Everyday Life

Taught by Kristin Rose

Description: Sex and gender roles in culture and society. Gender, race, and class. Women and men in literature, art, culture, politics, institutions.

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives; and AXLE: 1000-level W course

Eligible for African American and Diaspora Studies; and Latino/Latina Studies

1160 01 & 02: Sex and Society

Taught by Kristen Navarro

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

1160 03 & 04: Sex and Society

Taught by Jessica Lowe

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

1273: Gender and the City

Taught by Julie Gamble

Description: Gender and urban processes; spatial and social organization of the city. Geography of gender relations. Gender, sex, race/ethnicity, class, and ability as spatial power relations.

This course explores the interdisciplinary field of gender and the city. The coursestarts from the premise that gender is a category that influences the social and spatial organization of the city. Gendered, racialized and sexed power relations shape who can use cities, who is surveilled, and who benefits from them. In cities, there is a clear geography of gender relations—between public and private, inside, and outside, city center and suburb, etc. Gender is presented as a central social relation that shapes cities and urban life. Over the course of the semester, we will draw on classical and contemporary readings about gendered approaches to cities, pulling on complementary themes from anthropology, geography, sociology, urban planning, and urban history. At the same time, we will engage directly in Nashville itself to apply the concepts from class through experiential assignments that include walking, mapping, riding and consuming the city. We will build a set of conceptual and theoretical tools to analyze the relations between gender and urban processes. Students will also be tasked with reading one monograph throughout the semester that explores elements of gendered urbanism. Key topics include: urban experiences, urban spatial organization, social reproduction, racialized and sexualized spaces, latinx and black urbanism, informal urbanism, gentrification, slums and global urban transformation.

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

2242: Women Who Kill

Taught by Kathryn Schwarz

Description: Examination of classical and contemporary representations of women who kill.

Western cultural history is shaped by acts of violence. What then does it mean to define violence in gendered terms, and to focus on violent women? Classical writers tell stories about murderous mothers and Amazon warriors; Renaissance writers warn men that their wives could kill them in their beds; Victorian writers accuse ‘hysterical’ women of homicidal tendencies; contemporary novels and films recycle plots about lesbian serial killers; modern political discourse tethers clichés about feminine emotions to the threat of global war. How does the capacity for lethal acts give women access to power? How does a fixation on that capacity license masculine oppression? This course will connect the fascination with deadly women to what might broadly be termed politics: the politics of agency, misogyny, history, identity, and community.

Discussions will range from classical texts to modern novels, films, cultural theories, and new media. Course requirements will include a group presentation, short research projects, thematic meditations, and regular class participation.

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

2244: The Body, Culture, and Feminism

Taught by Katie Crawford

Description: The body as a cultural, social, and historical construction. Western culture and narratives of “normalcy” and their impact on identity and representation. Body image and eating disorders. Cultural politics of size, weight, and shape. Disability. Cosmetic surgery.

Our bodies seem, in many ways, to be the most stubbornly solid parts of our life—the most “given,” the most resistant to cultural, social, and historical construction and interpretation. And yet, our descriptions, representations, and understandings of our bodies are inseparable from and significantly produced by precisely those processes and institutions which they at first seem to resist. How does this work? How can something as ephemeral as culture shape and produce something as solid a body? In this course, we will explore some of the ways it does this through the themes of representation (how individuals, communities, and institutions describe and understand what bodies are and/or ought to be), discipline (the programs through which individuals, communities, and institutions form, shape, and control bodies), and disorder (the ways various kinds of bodies fail to comply with or resist regnant representations of what bodies should be like and regnant disciplines of how they should be formed.) Within these themes, we will tackle (note: a physical word used to describe a primarily mental process!) topics including body image, fatphobia and fat activism, cosmetic surgery, eating praxes and eating disorders, disability, illness, reproduction, race, and religion.

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

2256: Literary Lesbians

Taught by Allison Hammer

Description: From the nineteenth century to the present. How girls’ and women’s intimacies are monitored and policed in literature and culture. Impact of race, class, religion, and disability on expression and reception of relationships.

Counts towards AXLE: Humanities and the Creative Arts

2262: Gender and Ethics

Taught by Rebecca Epstein-Levi

Description: Religious worldviews connected to moral traditions. Epistemological and ethical systems and their relationship to gender and patriarchy. Social construction of gender; violence against women; feminism; and difference.

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

2610 01 & 02: Womanism in Global Context

Taught by Danyelle Valentine

Description: Survey of global Womanist (Black Feminist) theory and praxis. Race, class, sexuality, spirituality, and activism. Controversies over female bodies.

Counts towards AXLE: International Cultures

3250: Contemporary Women’s Movements

Taught by Rory Dicker

Description: Recent feminist history. The origins and parameters of women’s movements from the 1960’s to the present.

Many people interested in contemporary women’s movements don’t know much about feminist history, so this course begins by discussing the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. We’ll consider liberal feminism through an examination of reactions to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. We’ll then explore radical feminism by looking at essays and opinion pieces written by members of the women’s liberation movement. We will examine the exclusiveness and racism of second wave feminism, reading selections from This Bridge Called My Back. The last portion of the class will focus on current feminist theory and activism, considering which issues addressed by feminist writers have not been solved even to this day.

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

Eligible for African American and Diaspora Studies; and American Studies

3306: Reproductive Justice – The Politics of Reproduction, Family, and Liberty

Taught by Kristen Navarro & Jessica Lowe

Description: Historical constructions of reproduction with attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. Social constructs of family, motherhood, pregnancy, and parenting. Rights, health, agency, and freedom in the reproductive justice framework.

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

3308: Gender, Race, and Urban Mobilities

Taught by Julie Gamble

Description: Perspectives on and influences of gender and race on mobility, urban and transit planning, and policy. Methodological skills to study modes of transit. Transportation innovation across the Global North and South.

This course considers how gender and race are spatially produced and intersect with mobility. How people move is coded and reproduces gendered and racial power hierarchies. It is a permanent aspect of life, yet divides how, where, when, and with who we move. Mobility provides the experience of modernity as it is laden with freedom and circulation, vigilance and control. It also suggests that we must look at what does not move, or immobility—being still while on transit, being stuck in a place, unable to cross the border, or move out of a neighborhood. Mobility enables, disables and transforms the practices of gender and race in geographic locations and across borders. Conversely, the course considers how the gender, sexed and racialized coding of the built urban environment influences where we move. From bodily differences of walking, to travel behavior, trip purpose and human mobility, the role of gender and race intersect with movement. This course will start from embodiment to construct how gender, race and space interact, and build to an understanding of how and why there is gender-differentiation within the use of public transport, for example. While situated in Nashville, this course will have an experiential component examining what it is like to exist in a world on the move, considering subjects like fear, street harassment, care work, and narratives as women fight back against catcalling. The course will focus primarily on North American and Latin American geographies.

Counts towards AXLE: Perspectives

ENGL 3740: Critical Theory – Introduction to Queer and Trans Theory

Taught by Shoshana Adler

Description: This course is an introduction to the intellectual tradition of queer and trans theory. We will study identity politics, sexual analytics, queer historiography, and LGBTQ organizing, exploring both foundational and contemporary debates in the field over gender, sexuality, race, activism, social norms, and historiography. Questions include: What is the relationship between gender/sexual deviancy and political radicalism? What methods do social and sexual deviants use to imagine, narrate, and practice alternate forms of community? Is there a proper way to do the history of homosexuality? What are the historical and intellectual forces that led to the emergence of queer theory as a distinct field of inquiry? What is the relation between queer and trans studies, and between trans studies and feminism? The class is primarily focused on theory, but our readings will be punctuated with queer films.

Counts towards AXLE: 2000-level and above W course; and AXLE: Humanities and the Creative Arts

GSS 8301: Gender and Sexuality – Feminist Approaches

Taught by Elizabeth Covington

Description: Interdisciplinary introduction to the major debates, theoretical terms, and research methods in feminist, gender, sexuality, and queer studies.

Graduate level course