FMST - Feminist Studies

Introduces the core concepts underlying the interdisciplinary field-formation of feminist studies within multiple geopolitical contexts. Explores how feminist inquiry rethinks disciplinary assumptions and categories, and animates our engagement with culture, history, and society. Topics include: the social construction of gender; the gendered division of labor, production, and reproduction; intersections of gender, race, class, and ethnicity; and histories of sexuality.

Explores feminist theories from domestic U.S. and global contexts in order to ask how interventions of women of color in the U.S. and of radical feminist movements in non-U.S. locations radically re-imagine feminist politics. Rather than focusing on feminist movements that represent different regions of the world, course examines feminist theory through multiple histories of colonialism, post-colonialism, and globalization.

Popular culture enables people to make sense of their modern selves and their place in the world. Focusing on South Asia, this course explores the region's rich and variegated popular culture forms, including film, music, television, the painted and printed image, and sport. It also investigates how the popular articulates with nation and global conjunctures and how it constructs hierarchies of class, gender, caste, and sexuality.

Examines migration as a mode of inquiry into transnational practices across geographic locales and temporal zones. Analyzes migration in relation to the transnational formation of gender, race, and sexuality as well as processes of neocolonialism, the state, and globalization. Taught in conjunction with FMST 115.

The news is a set of narratives that produce, maintain, repair, and transform reality. Using three events that brought together old and new media, this course traces how the interaction of new media with news has changed how we make sense of the world around us and our place in it.

Examines, and critically analyzes, select post-World War II movements for social justice in the United States from feminist perspectives. Considers how those movements and their participants responded to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. A feminist, transnational, analytic framework is also developed to consider how those movements may have embraced, enhanced, or debilitated feminist formations in other parts of the world.

Introduces dominant discourses about Christianity and Islam in the American public sphere, with particular attention paid to race, gender, sexuality, and class in thinking about religion. Visual and textual media, political commentary, and popular ethnographies are analyzed.

Explores questions of science and justice. Examines the nature of scientific practice, the culture of science, and the possibilities for the responsible practice of science. Rather than focusing on feminist critiques of science, the course examines how science and technology are changing our world and the workings of power.

Introduces students to the key critical concepts, debates, and questions of practice in the emerging field of disability studies, with a focus on feminist and critical race approaches to disability.

Examines the relationship between sexuality and the contemporary term globalization as a dense entanglement of processes that emerges from a history of U.S. empire. Sexuality cannot be separated from power struggles over the classification of bodies, territories, and questions of temporality. Examines how sexualized contact zones produce new knowledge, commerce, inequalities, possibilities, and identities.

Draws from representations of transgender/transsexual people in popular, biomedical, and political contexts. Examines the impact of transgender lives on concepts of gender, identity, and technology. Engages with biological and sexological frameworks of sex/gender, trans experience, and social movements and theories.

Core course for feminist studies. Serves as an introduction to thinking theoretically about issues of feminism within multiple contexts and intellectual traditions. Sustained discussion of gender and its critical connections to productions of race, class, and sexuality. Focus will change each year.

Working from the perspective that race is a cultural invention and racism is a political, economic, and social relation, investigates how race is produced as a meaningful and powerful social category, examines the effects of racism as a social relation, and argues for the necessity of combining feminist and critical race studies. By considering different historical periods and places, aims to equip students with the tools necessary to critically examine the production and reproduction of race and racism in the U.S.

Recommended for transfer students. Focuses on particular debates about feminist methodology. Specific methodological debates vary each year but might include feminist theorizing of experience, epistemology, situated knowledges, notions of truth and the real. Feminist methods may include transnational approaches, as well as queer, decolonial, postcolonial, and critical race methodologies. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. (Formerly FMST 75.)

Interdisciplinary approach to study of law in its relation to category women and production of gender. Considers various materials including critical race theory, domestic case law and international instruments, representations of law, and writings by and on behalf of women living under different forms of legal control. Examines how law structures rights, offers protections, produces hierarchies, and sexualizes power relations in both public and intimate life.

Examines migration as a mode of inquiry into transnational practices across geographic locales and temporal zones. Analyzes migration in relation to the transnational formation of gender, race, and sexuality as well as processes of neocolonialism, the state, and globalization.

Explores the emergence of transnational feminism through U.S. women of color and postcolonial feminism. Underscores the role of globalization, nationalism, and state formation in relation to feminist theorizing, activism, and labor across the Global South. In an attempt to understand the salience of inequalities, the course interrogates the continuation of feminist critique that is attentive to the war on terror, neocolonialism, and empire.

Explores relationship between feminism and culture. Topics will vary and include different forms of cultural production such as film and literature. Regional/national focus will also vary.

Examines new ways of understanding the body and race through the intersection of technology and science. Addresses how broader structures of power and the rise of new technological and scientific discoveries mediate power relations and alter how race, national boundaries, the body, and citizenship are normalized and contested from colonialism to the present. Course content may vary; themes may include: U.S. eugenics, I.Q. tests, patenting debates, sterilization, assisted reproduction, biometrics, and genetics across the Americas.

Explores theories and case studies tied to race, gender, and technology. Covers the history of feminist and critical race analyses of technology as well as contemporary debates.

Introduces the analysis of visual images and text with particular emphasis on feminist critical methodologies. Using case studies from photography, film, TV, advertising, and new media, students learn how to read and analyze culture.

Considers how things--what we may think of as objects, matter, nature, technology, bodies--are constitutive elements of social and political life. What happens to the political as a category if we take this matter seriously?

Postcolonial feminist studies. Explores how discourses of gender and sexuality shaped the policies and ideologies of the historical processes of colonialism, the civilizing mission, and anticolonial nationalism. Considers orientalism as a gendered discourse as well as colonial understandings of gender and sexuality in decolonialization. Explores Western media representations, literature, the law, and the place of gender in the current debate between cultural relativism and universalism. Provides an understanding of some key terms in postcolonial studies and an in-depth examination of the place of gender in these processes.

Contemporary technoscientific practices, such as nano-, info-, and biotechnologies, are rapidly reworking what it means to be human. Course examines how both our understanding of the human and the very nature of the human are constituted through technoscientific practices.

Introduces the multiple debates animating the linkages between science, race, and sexuality. Interrogates the interrelated, epistemological frameworks of science and sexuality/queer studies across a range of interdisciplinary and geopolitical locations.

Considers African American women as central to understanding of U.S. history, focusing on everyday survival, resistance, and movements for social change. Discussion of critical theories for historical research, gender, and race. Emphasis on biography, cultural history, and documentary and archival research.

Introduces the defining issues surrounding racial and gender formations in the U.S. through an understanding of the term women of color as an emergent, dynamic, and socio-political phenomenon. Interrogates organizing practices around women of color across multiple sites: film and media, globalization, representation, sexuality, historiography, and war, to name a select few.

From a foundation in semiotics, considers the ways race and gender are constructed, understood, performed, embraced, commodified, and exploited through representations. Uses representations of, by, and for the margins to engage theories of communication, identity, and representation. Creative final projects encouraged.

Advanced topics in gender and sexuality in Latin America and Latina/o studies. Analyzes role of power, race, coloniality, national and transnational processes in the production and analysis of genders and sexualities. Materials include memoir, fiction, ethnography, social documentary and history.

 

Focuses on a particular topic in feminist theory. Topics vary each offering but might include theorizing the gendered subject, racializing gender, politics and feminism, the relationship between queer theory and feminism, transgender studies, women of color feminisms, postcolonial and decolonial feminisms, feminist science studies.

Focus on a particular problem in feminist theory. Problems vary each year but might include theorizing the gendered subject, racializing gender, the meeting points of psychoanalysis and social-political analysis in theorizing gender, the relationship between queer theory and feminist theory, postcolonial feminist theory.

Individual field study in the vicinity of the campus under the direct supervision of a faculty sponsor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Individual field study in the vicinity of the campus under the direct supervision of a faculty sponsor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Approaches legal reasoning from a feminist and intersectional perspective with attention to structures and jurisdiction, case materials, and emerging international frameworks for gender justice. Designed to facilitate completion of a substantial research essay based in feminist legal philosophy.

Providing for a critical examination of canonical formations in history and archives, this course proposes new ways of thinking about history from the point of view of those who have been marginalized or excluded by race, class, gender, or sexuality.

Examines icons and the processes through which an iconicity is constructed and circulated in its complexity. Icons and iconicities often link or articulate various ideologies, affects, and systems of thought into a potent symbol or a mythology. Icons constitute norms, but also disrupt them; icons could articulate new technologies, aesthetics and their representations of the self with purportedly older modes of being in the world, such as a transcendent belief in a god, a faith, etc.

Examines different feminist approaches to understanding the nature of scientific practices. Particular attention paid to notions of evidence, methods, cultural and material constraints, and the heterogeneous nature of laboratory practices. Considers the ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are constructed by science and how they influence both scientific practices and conceptions of science. Also examines the feminist commitment to taking social factors into account without forfeiting the notion of objectivity.

Traces the intersection between Chicana studies and Latin American studies through transnational forms of cultural production, imaginaries, and empowerment. Analysis of theories of cultural production and discussion of the political salience of culture as a site for resistance, critique, and creativity.

Explores questions of colonialism, empire, race, gender, and geopolitics in the proliferating images--filmic, televisual, and media--of Africa in the United States. Facilitates the completion of a substantial research essay based on the study of popular culture.

French philosopher Michel Foucault's writings on modern forms of knowledge, power, and subjectivity provide a serious challenge to how we negotiate social oppression. Engages some of Foucault's most cited works, and grapples specifically with his primary claim that modern societies are marked less by freedom and autonomy than by discipline and docility.

Designed to train students in oral history and memoir writing. Emphasizes the specialness of transgressive voices; race, class, and sexuality, women's silence, erasure, censorship, and marginalization are addressed. The politics of memory, narratives, storytelling, and editorial judgment are considered.

Seminar focuses on the historical and subjective processes that produce the concept of an African or Black Diaspora. In narrative, film, and cultural studies, themes of slavery, exile, home, identity, alienation, colonialism, politics, and reinvention are explored.

Discusses the characteristics of settler colonialism and the politics of comparison in the study of global settler colonialism. Looks at settler colonial state practice across multiple different sites, including Santa Cruz, as students craft their own research projects. (Formerly offered as Decoloniality, Feminism, and Science Studies.)

Cross Listed Courses

Prerequisite(s): CRES 10 and CRES 100; satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Enrollment is restricted to senior critical race and ethnic studies majors.

Explores the production of sexualities, sexual identification, and gender differentiation within multiple contexts of colonialism, decolonization, and emerging neo-colonial global formations.

Cross Listed Courses

Prerequisite(s): CRES 10 and CRES 100; satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Enrollment is restricted to senior critical race and ethnic studies majors.

Examines human rights projects and discourses with a focus on the politics of gender, sexuality, race, and rights in the international sphere. Reading important human rights documents and theoretical writings, and addressing particular case studies, emphasizes the tensions between the ideals of the universal and the particular inherent in human rights law, activism, and humanitarianism.

Cross Listed Courses

Prerequisite(s): CRES 10, CRES 100; satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements.

Queer diaspora emerged from Third World/queer-of-color critique of queer theory and provides a framework for analyzing racializations, genders, and sexualities in colonial, developmental, and modernizing contexts. Readings from anthropology, history, literature, and feminist and cultural studies.

Cross Listed Courses

Prerequisite(s): CRES 10 and CRES 100. Enrollment restricted to critical race and ethnic studies majors.

Explores literature from the natural sciences, anthropology, history, cultural studies, and sociology. Provides theoretical approaches to complex questions in queer studies and geopolitics, and a framework for understanding embodiment, medical regulation, gender formation, the human/animal divide, etc.

Senior seminar focusing on tourism, colonialism, and militarism. Considers case studies on tourism in colonial contexts and sites of U.S. empire across multiple geographies as students craft their projects, participate in writing workshops, and present research.

Explores critically the intersections and crisis points between feminism and Marxism as bodies of thought, theoretical formations, and forms of historical inquiry.

Senior seminar focusing on questions of the politics of space, time, and matter. Readings informed by fields, such as indigenous studies, queer studies, afrofuturism, borderland studies, critical race studies, decolonial studies, disability studies, feminist science studies, and new materialisms.

The senior thesis/project which satisfies the major requirement. Course is for independent research and writing. Prerequisite(s): satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements; students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Provides for individual study program off campus for which faculty supervision is not in person. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Provides for individual study program off campus for which faculty supervision is not in person. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Individual directed study for upper-division undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Individual directed study for upper-division undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Introductory required course for feminist studies graduate students. Covers major theorists, debates, and current questions as well as foundational texts through which feminist critiques have been grounded. Content changes with instructor.

Explores feminist theorizing across disciplinary and cultural contexts for both methodology (theories about the research process) and epistemology (theories of knowledge). Goal is to orient students toward changes in organization of knowledge and provide them with different feminist methodologies in their pursuit of both an object of study and an epistemology.

Prepares students to develop research skills and initiate their research projects. Students consider what is meant by feminist research and undertake designing and performing feminist research.

Examines feminist pedagogies as projects in transgressing traditional disciplinary boundaries. Examines historical examples of alternative pedagogies and contemporary models for creating communities dedicated to social justice. Designed to assist graduate students develop teaching strategies in multiple fields.

Explores the interrelated epistemological frameworks of critical race studies and queer studies. Through the study of a range of philosophical, scientific, literary, and cinematic texts, course historicizes and theorizes discourses of race and sexuality.

Analyzes the ways transnational processes intersect with changing notions of gender, sexuality, and race. Examines processes such as tourism, the Internet, capitalism, and labor spanning Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and the United States.

Interrogation of the relationship between law and its instantiating gendered categories, supported by feminist, queer, Marxist, critical race, and postcolonial theories. Topics include hypostasization of legal categories, the contest between domestic and international human rights frameworks, overlapping civil and communal codes, cultural explanations in the law, the law as text and archive, testimony and legal subjectivity.

Graduate seminar on feminist science studies. Topics will vary and may include: the joint consideration of science studies and poststructuralist theory; the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena; and the relationship between ontology, epistemology, and ethics.

Addresses the intersection of the postcolonial and the postsocialist as theoretical ground. Considers how (neo)liberal ideologies about race, class, gender, secularism, and democracy are shaped by the intersection between postsocialist geopolitics and imperial legacies. (Formerly Postsocialism, Postcolonialism, Neoliberalism.)

Explores the entanglements of archives, genders, and histories across a number of intellectual and imperial contexts. Approaches the concept of the archive to reflect on who counts as a historical and/or gendered subject and what are the ethics of representation that guide such archival formations. Draws on literature from philosophy, gender/sexuality studies, anthropology, history, and literary criticism.

Positioning tourism and militarism as central sites of inquiry for feminist and ethnic studies, course draws from literature on colonialism and empire to illuminate how tourism functions and how tourists move, in sites of past and present warfare.

Focuses on the increasing importance of religion as a category of analysis in feminist theory. Addresses the relationship of religion, feminist politics, and activism in connection with nationalism, the family, sexuality, and geopolitics.

Variable topics that could include postcolonial approaches to questions of epistemology and knowledge production, theories of nationalism and nation-state formation, subaltern historiography, analyses of modernization and developmental theory, postcolonial approaches to globalization, and transnationalism. Significant component of feminist contributions to these literatures.

Course takes as its central topic the institutional politics of feminist and critical race knowledges in the post-1960s United States university. Considers these fields' complex and contradictory relation to disciplinarity, the university's primary or default mode of arranging and legitimizing knowledge formations.

Re-visions and extends Reconstruction from 1865-1920 from a black feminist standpoint. Topics include: redefining democracy; labor; literacy and education; suffrage; re-visioning sexuality; childbirth; parenting, etc. Analyzes traditional historiography and the methodological implications of the boundaries between history and fiction, and archival and oral traditions.

Focuses on generative interfaces within and at the edge of the anthropological discipline, in particular, the way ethnographies and fields are being reconfigured by feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives and methodologies in science and technology studies (STS).

First-year graduate students meet with the teaching assistant trainer for bi-weekly meetings covering pedagogical approaches. Also includes class visits and shadowing. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students. (Formerly offered as First-Year Advising.)

Independent study formalizing the advisee-adviser relationship. Regular meetings to plan, assess, and monitor academic progress, and to evaluate coursework as necessary. May be used to develop general bibliography of background reading trajectory of study in preparation for the qualifying examination. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Prerequisite(s): advancement to candidacy. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Prerequisite(s): advancement to candidacy. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.