Women, Gender & Representation

Instructor

Anna Baeth

Course Description

Play Like a Girl: Gender in Sport explores questions about gender and the involvement of all women, trans, and nonbinary people in sport, physical activity, and exercise in the United States. Drawing from various texts, podcasts, videos, current events, and our especially our own experiences, we interrogate the histories of gender in sport and physical education and use critical feminist and queer theories to decipher the ways sport creates, supports, and resists dominant ideologies of inequality. This course will focus on the creation and legacy of women's sports, patterns of inclusion and exclusion in sport with particular attention to women of color, trans, and nonbinary athletes, and the social construction of gender, race, and sexuality in sport. This course is experiential and students may be asked to participate in some light activity that will be accessible and available for every body.

Instructor

Alyssa Bossenger

Course Description

In the post-#MeToo era, sexual ethics are in a state of flux, with gendered power dynamics coming further into view and definitions of consent shifting dramatically. Colleges across the United States—as well as some states like California—have adopted an affirmative model of consent (“yes means yes”), rather than the earlier model in which passive acquiescence signaled permission to continue (“no means no”). More recent scholarship in sexuality studies has questioned whether consent itself does enough to ensure that sex is ethical. For young people growing up during these debates, it is difficult to navigate the impact of these cultural conversations on the daily reality of their personal lives. This course challenges students to think critically about the ethics of sexuality, examining the norms of their peers, families, and communities and reading about historical and current debates on the topic. They will practice viewing their own identities through an intersectional lens to explore the ways that power plays a role in the ethics of sex. As a final project, students will synthesize these explorations of community, history, and identity to construct their own set of personal sexual ethics.

Instructor

Casey Anne Brimmer

Course Description

What does it mean to be whole? In this interactive class, we will discuss the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people across time and space. We will incorporate our lived experiences in order to learn about queer lives and representation in (social) media, legislation, and the world. Grounded in queer and trans studies, we will ask about opportunities for increasing positive representation of the queer and trans people with whom we make and share communities from an intersectional perspective, including race, class, religion/faith, culture, and more. In this course, we will think critically and get creative!

Instructor

Ariel Burgess

Course Description

Global Ecofeminist and Intersectional Art Activism. How does gender shape how various groups of people raise their voices differently? How does being young in climate change differ from being old? How does extreme weather affect people in southern Bangladesh differently than people north of the Arctic Circle? How does being a woman or someone with a disability change how climate change impacts your life? How do histories (feminist, queer, Indigenous, environmental, place-based, etc.) affect what we see today? These are the kinds of questions we will explore in this course. We will examine art projects to study different environmental relationalities and how intersectional justice/injustice impacts how people stand up to harm. We will explore how people are affected differently by deforestation, toxification, pollution, and climate change, here in the US and beyond. This course will pay special attention to how people use art and creative mediums to stand up for justice.

Instructor

Amy Howe

Course Description

What does it mean to live in a Post-Roe world? A world where many are actively curtailing reproductive rights and denying gender-inclusive education? A world that includes long histories of resistance, mutual aid, and organizing? In this course, we will examine histories of sexual and reproductive health movements. We will explore how the reproductive justice framework can offer us a space to hold conversations about gender, race, equity, community belonging, and human rights. We will also spend time working with the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College. This collection is a rich archival repository and includes material such as the Loretta Ross papers, the Activist Life Oral History Project, the Black Women’s Health Imperative Records, the National Latina Health Organization Records, and a number of personal archives of well-known feminist thinkers and activists. Students will leave this course with curiosity about how historical conditions, social movement materials, and critically-informed questions shape the possibilities for critique and worldmaking.

Instructor

Tanya Pearson

Course Description

The cultural narrative of popular women musicians offers a unique view from which to study American history. In this course, students will explore the Women of Rock Oral History Project, a collection of digital interviews and written transcripts documenting the lives and careers of women-identified musicians, analyze their oral testimony, and identify emerging threads, topics and themes. Students will gain an in-depth knowledge of the history of women in rock, develop a greater understanding of their impact on culture, society and politics, gain a greater sense of women’s lives and the pervasive ways in which women musicians address societal issues, and develop and refine skills in critical thinking, discussion and writing. 

The tools we will be using are: Moodle, YouTube (Women of Rock Oral History Project YouTube channel), SquareSpace and a podcasting software. We will work individually and in small groups, and the class will consist of exploring the Women of Rock archive, outside research and Zoom visits with Women of Rock Oral History Project narrators.

Instructor

Kate Dugan

Course Description

In this course, we read, listen, and experience spiritual autobiography/ies by women and queer writers authors from several different religious and spiritual traditions. These stories speak from and offer a range of intersectional positionalities: What are the queer experiences of being Catholic or Buddhist? If you’re born Jewish, queer, and have a Baptist mom, what’s that like? How do these spiritual life experiences translate in immigration experiences? The class will work with two local Western MA persons—a woman who converted to Islam and a Protestant yoga teacher—who are at work on projects telling their own spiritual stories. After reading, analyzing, and discussing how spiritual stories are gendered, we will create our own stories, in digital form. Students will gain an understanding of how gender and spirituality shape life stories and develop their skills of storytelling.

Instructor

Sydney Curtis

Course Description

In this course, we will use embodied ways of learning to facilitate rest in tandem with rigorous engagement with the history of Black womens’ right to rest and traditions of rest as resistance. Using The Nap Bishop Tricia Hersey’s Rest as Resistance: A Manifesto as our guide, we will embark on an embodied experience of rest as a political praxis. In partnership with concurrent WGR courses, students in this course will closely examine sources of unrest in multifaceted forms throughout the world, and critique the ways that these forces impact our bodies. We will explore the Black feminist ethics of care to trace the origins of self care from diasporic womens’ experiences and conceptions of labor in enslavement, to and through our current practices and experiences of self-care and/or “commercialized rest”. Through movement, meditation, conversation, and reflection, we will excavate the authentic and necessary rest practices that strengthen our ability to persist and thrive –while we continually examine and critique the social structures that perpetuate our restlessness. We will further explore expressions of radical interiority from artistic, astrological, secular, spiritual, and religious lenses, to engage and learn with transcendent sources of rest. By the end of this course, students will have a radical understanding of the history and practice of rest!