Please consult the New School Course Catalog for a full list of current courses. Spring 2022 courses that count for the Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Certificate are listed below; view an archive of past courses.
Spring 2022 Courses
Gender and Its Discontents, GLIB 5406
Chiara Bottici, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies
This is the required core course for the university-wide graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies and is open to all graduate students who are interested in sexuality and gender studies. Our starting point is the acknowledgment that sex- and gender-based modes of social organization are pervasive and, further, that their prominence and persistence are reflected in sex- and gender-conscious research across the humanities, the arts, the social sciences, design, and studies dedicated to social policies and innovative strategies for social intervention. We expand on this starting point through both an in-depth survey of influential theoretical approaches to sex and gender, such as Marxist feminism, theories of sexual difference, queer studies, and postcolonial and decolonial feminism, and by paying attention to the significance of different approaches. Topics to be explored include but are not limited to equality and rights, exploitation and division of labor, the construction of gender, performativity, gender images, narrative, and identity.
Contemporary Sociological Theory, GSOC 5061
Benoit Challand, Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies
This course is an introduction to influential ways of thinking sociologically that emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries and develop and transform themes of the foundational period of “classical sociology.” Departing from positivism and holism, interpretivist contemporary theories shed new light on the micro-foundations of “society” and of the self, with a growing attention to gender, race, fluid identity, and questions of social reproduction and ecology. The course covers American and Continental sociological theory as well as critical race and postcolonial theory. The course equips students with the ability to critically analyze contemporary sociological texts with a focus on how these texts apply theoretical frameworks to pressing issues of our time.
Women in the Avant-Garde, GLIB 5146
Terri Gordon, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
This course examines the pivotal role of women in the European avant-garde movements of the 20th century. Women are often seen as the models and muses of their male contemporaries in the groundbreaking movements of the 20th century. Yet they were also creators and pioneers in their own right. In this course, we study the multiple ways in which women contributed to the 20th-century vanguard, the personal and political stakes involved in forging new territory in art and culture, the pain and suffering that often attended their revolutionary efforts, and the artistic legacies they have left. Themes explored include the nexus of art and politics, sexuality and gender violence, war and madness, and suffering and creativity. We study Italian Futurism, German Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, and other movements at the vanguard of European culture, politics, and art. The course covers the literary genres of poetry, prose, and drama and the artistic genres of painting, photography, collage, and photomontage. We also read "founding" documents, such as manifestos and political tracts. Writers and artists studied include Leonora Carrington, Mina Loy, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Claude Cahun, Hannah Hoch, Frida Kahlo, and Unica Zurn. We also read theoretical texts by Andre Breton, F.T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, and Walter Benjamin.
Gender and Global Capitalism, GSOC 5205
Laura Y. Liu, Associate Professor of Global Studies and Geography
Colonialism, Modernity, and Their Afterlives: Perspectives from the Central Core and Peripheral Fringe, GSOC 6239
Carlos Forment, Associate Professor of Sociology
This seminar introduces students to some of the most influential interpretations of colonialism (broadly understood) that have been advanced by thinkers in different intellectual-political traditions from across the central core and peripheral fringe. Studying the writings of Anglo-European authors (uneven and combined development, imperialism, Southern question, global color line, boomerang effect) alongside those of their Latin American, Indian, and Pan-African counterparts (nationalism, dependency, the subaltern, postcolonialism, de-colonial feminism) provides an opportunity to explore their many shared and divergent concerns as well as some of the subterranean continuities and discontinuities that have defined the boundaries of the age-old dispute on colonialism. In examining their writings, we focus on how each thinker analyzed the material and symbolic links between colonialism and modernity (capitalism, liberal democracy, rational and universal principles) and the way their interpretation of these links conditioned their depiction of and the differential hierarchies they established among and between countries, peoples, institutions, and practices of the Global North and South. The purpose of this exercise, however, is not to "provincialize," "universalize," or "particularize" any one aspect or either region, as is commonly done by scholars today. Instead, it is to encourage us to reflect critically on the following two questions (and others closely related to them): 1) Does the anticolonial perspective provide a convincing counternarrative of the emergence and development of modernity (capitalism, liberal democracy, rational and universal principles), and is it capable of challenging the image it has of itself? 2) What are the consequences of relying on a "concept-interpretation" that has been developed to analyze a specific issue or problem that surfaced in a given "place-time" to make sense of a socio-political-cultural formation with both differences and similarities?
Forensics of Capital: Race, Debt, Credit, Risk, and Liability, GHIS 6285
Michael Ralph, Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies Faculty Fellow
In this course, we examine how forms of social difference (age, race, gender, sexuality, ability, generation, and national origin, and more) influence who gets access to capital and how people are governed. In exploring “forensics of capital” as an analytic, we explore how, from the Enlightenment era to the present, forensic inquiry has been used to determine who owes what to whom in matters of civil and criminal liability. In the process, we interrogate forensics as a police technology and as a method for managing breaches in modern civil society. We pay special attention to the way people grapple with alterity (human difference) through the presence of DNA traces that are inscribed in a crime scene and through patterns of criminal behavior attributed to a distinct population or demographic. We study how forensic procedures deploy technologies to determine guilt or innocence in a criminal case and to assess damages in a civil suit, but we also go beyond this more familiar use of the term to deploy forensics as a lens through which to analyze and adjudicate emergent forms of value. In the process, we examine strategies for assessing the value of a human life with specific reference to the role that mechanisms of colonial exploitation, enslavement, and incarceration have played in shaping economic systems, political institutions, and financial instruments. Finally, we examine how using "forensics of capital" as a framework potentially differs from related forms of inquiry (“racial capitalism,” “slavery’s capitalism,” and “new histories of capital”) that do not always readily appear to be intersectional.
The Psychology of Gender, Sexuality, and Relationships, GPSY 6449
Pantea Farvid, Associate Professor of Applied Psychology
In this advanced psychology course, we examine seminal as well as cutting-edge theory, research, and controversies related to the psychology of gender, sexuality, and intimate relationships. We draw on a range of approaches to understand the intersecting categories of sex, gender, identity, sexuality, and individual and collective psychologies. Using popular culture and empirical and clinical examples, we also take into consideration intersectionality of race/ethnicity, class, disability, geographical location, and immigration status. As we explore key themes and topics within critical and feminist psychological research in this field, we also focus on how this knowledge has encompassed and continues to encompass an "applied psychology," one with a social change orientation focused on social justice within and outside the discipline. Topics explored include theories of gender and sexuality, asexuality, bisexuality, BDSM, gay men, lesbian psychology, heterosexuality, intersex, gender diversity, mobile dating, casual sex, sexual violence, the sex industry, monogamy, open relationships, and relationship anarchy. Applications of this knowledge to clinical practice are also addressed throughout the course.
The Three Faces of Labor: Uncovering the Hidden Ties Between Gender, Race, and Class, GPHI 6785 / GPOL 6505
Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science
The idea for this seminar comes from W.E.B. DuBois. Describing abolition as a labor movement, he speculated that the course of U.S. history would have been fundamentally altered had the movement that aimed to emancipate enslaved back laborers united with the country’s other labor movement, which aimed to counter the degraded condition of free white wage workers. For DuBois, the tragic failure of these “two labor movements” to recognize each other squandered the chance to build a labor democracy and helped set the United States squarely on the road to plutocracy. This seminar is designed to adapt and extend DuBois’s idea to present conditions. We ask: Can anti-racist (and anti-imperialist) movements in the post-slavery era be usefully viewed as unrecognized labor struggles in societies that still rely on the expropriation of dependent labor? And if so, why stop there? Can we view feminist movements, too, as unacknowledged struggles over work in systems built on a gendered separation of paid “productive labor” from unpaid care work? More generally, can capitalist societies be fruitfully understood as relying on three analytically distinct but mutually imbricated forms of labor: exploited, expropriated, and domesticated? And if so, do the historically shifting relations between these three faces of labor constitute the hidden ties between gender, race, and class in capitalist societies? By disclosing those hidden ties, finally, can we grasp the relations between not two but three labor movements and evaluate prospects for uniting them?
Human Rights in Global Fashion: Value Chains, Workers, Corporate Accountability, and Systems Design, NINT 5112
Mary Watson, Executive Dean, Schools of Public Engagement
This course provides an introductory overview of the key obstacles, actors, rules, and methods for crafting innovative solutions in social mobilization, legal intervention, and design with the aim of creating more socially sustainable and economically inclusive fashion—fashion that honors the human rights and labor rights of workers in the supply chain. The course achieves this aim by analyzing 1) actors, power, and finance in the global value chain in the fashion industry; 2) international and local standards and institutions, including workers’ human rights and labor rights, corporate obligations, and accountability; 3) social movements and international networks mobilizing worker power; 4) monitoring and labeling schemes mobilizing consumer power; and 5) finding design solutions and technological systems that honor workers' rights amid new conceptions of industry design. The course includes lectures by faculty from across the university.
21st-Century Feminisms, NMDS 5316
Kate Eichhorn, Chair and Associate Professor of Culture and Media
In the early 2000s, some people believed we had reached a "postfeminist" era. Rather than being transcended, feminism has become increasingly popularized over the past two decades. We now live in a world where feminist slogans emblazon overpriced T-shirts and global corporations like Nike and Dove sponsor advertising campaigns promoting girls' and women's empowerment. During this time, networked feminism has also changed both who engages in feminist activism and how they do it. Feminism is now mainstream. It has gone viral. But feminism's popularization has also come at a cost. This course examines post, popular, and networked feminisms in the 21st century. Students read articles and books by feminist culture and media studies scholars such as Angela McRobbie, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Safiya Noble, and Jessica Ringrose. They also research and interrogate the efficacy of several recent feminist events and movements (e.g., Slutwalk, MeToo, and the Women's March). Students leave the course with a deeper understanding of contemporary feminisms and their inherent contradictions.
Global Drug Policy, NINT 5446
Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, Part-Time Lecturer
Current drug policies are failing. Worse, they are causing enormous harm to individuals, communities, and entire nations. The current opioid crisis in the United States is only one glaring example. Around the world, poorly designed drug laws designed to penalize production, possession, use, and even dependence have fueled violence, instability, human rights violations, and health crises. The vast majority of research indicates that in countries that have ended the senseless criminalization of people who use drugs, crime and addiction did not increase. In fact, alternative drug policies that support health services and human rights have proven to be extremely successful at helping individuals and communities. Drug crises pose broad social, economic, and political challenges: illicit financial flows, criminal capture of the state, social instability, and gender inequality and the burden of care work, to name a few. These crises have their roots in failures of global governance. In this course, we examine the global to local roots and consequences of current drug policies and explore approaches rooted in regard for human rights, social justice, and public health.
Politics of Dignity and Equity: Rethinking Caste Globally, NINT 5466
Ashok Gurung, Associate Professor of International Affairs
To engage with complex questions on increasing indignities, injustices, and inequities, we must critically interrogate the idea and practices of caste in and beyond South Asia. Caste is important not only for understanding the dehumanization of more than 240 millions Dalits (also referred to as “untouchables”) but for rethinking systemic inequities experienced by millions of African Americans and Adivasi-Janajati (Indian and Nepali Indigenous people). For instance, we examine Isabel Wilkerson’s argument that caste is important for understanding racism in the United States. What does she mean by “Caste is bones, race the skin”? In what ways can we better engage with race and caste questions? In this multidisciplinary seminar course, we interrogate the epistemology of caste and its invisible and visible structures of systemic inequity. The course draws on theoretical debates and narratives of Dalits, Black people, and Adivasi-Janajati for understanding the idea and practice of pure (superior) and impure (inferior) people. We foreground the importance of dignity in sustainable development by examining the intersectionality of caste, race, gender, and class. The course draws on the work of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. DuBois, Gunnar Myrdal, Nancy Fraser, Shailaja Paik, Sharmila Rege, Uma Chakravarti, Sukhdeo Thorat, Anupama Rao, Sarita Pariyar, Kalyani K., Isabel Wilkerson, and others. Select scholars investigating caste questions join seminar discussions to serve as resource people.
Evaluating Women's Microenterprise Groups in Ethiopia, NINT 6008
Mark Johnson, Assistant Professor of Practice
As development schemes go, organizing impoverished women into savings groups is relatively simple, and, while microenterprise has been broadly dismissed as ineffective, the Ethiopian “Self-Help Groups" have demonstrated success in lifting women and their families out of multidimensional poverty. Some women do not form small businesses yet still seem to reap benefits from membership. We study the case of Self-Help Group membership and its financial and psycho-social benefits. New School students began monitoring Self-Help Group members’ economic performance in 2016 through the summer Ethiopia International Field Program, working with a national coalition of approximately 13,000 women’s microenterprise groups with upwards of 250,000 members in 2010. This year, we also examine nonfinancial benefits, designing a quantitative survey on psychosocial benefits. The course covers the fundamentals of monitoring and evaluation, a systematic method of collecting and analyzing data on project impact and success, and the development and nonprofit industries’ best means of determining results and effectiveness. We work on setting measurable indicators and collecting data and, building on a successful collaboration last summer, again work with Addis Ababa University students on data collection and analysis. We also read about and discuss Ethiopian history, culture, and the current combustive political and military situation. The last few years have seen dizzying swings in the country’s political environment, from a controlled one-party state to dramatic but short-lived reforms and optimism under new Prime Minister Abiy, to a return to more repression and finally the civil conflict of the last year.
Feminist Economics, NINT 6297
Faculty TBA
Feminist economics might be imagined as a way of radically reconceptualizing and reorienting the study of economics rather than just an approach designed to make gender inequalities visible. Taking such a position, this course surveys foundational and contemporary feminist scholarship on epistemology, methodology, and economic theory in order to trace their evolution over time and explore their transformative potential. The course begins with an introduction to feminist epistemology and its insistence on the constitutive role of power relations in knowledge production. This grounds our discussion on economic methodology and feminist proposals to produce a more critical, reflexive, and engaged economics that dovetails with critiques of methodological individualism, deductivism, and mathematical formalism. We survey important theoretical interventions made by feminists into the gendered nature of standard microfoundational assumptions such as free choice and rationality, new ways of conceptualizing discrimination and expanding the boundaries of the discipline to include sociocultural norms and non-market spheres in the analysis. We revisit historical debates on “the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism” and household economics and engage with contemporary discussions on social reproduction, the care economy, the gender wage gap, occupational segregation, and gender and globalization, asking all the while: What makes this research feminist?
Theory of the Interior, PGID 5111
Allyson McDavid, Assistant Professor of Ancient Material and Visual Culture; Claudia Marina, Part-Time Lecturer; and Yetunde Olaiya, Part-Time Faculty
This course is a survey of key theoretical grounds for the study of interiors and the practice of interior design. It uses the study of interiors to address a range of issues that concern designers today. We begin by questioning whether there is a theory specific to interior design, and thus interrogate the very notion of theory and its relevance for interior design practice. We explore the kinds of discourses that might be considered useful in thinking about the ways in which interior design has been practiced at different times and investigate the way a body of theory might be constructed in this field as opposed to the field of architecture, within which interior design is usually studied. Some of the themes we explore are taste, comfort, fashion, gender, lifestyle, and the everyday. Through the topics considered, we address interior design as a socially relevant practice that is closely in step with daily life and popular culture. The course is run as a research seminar and is experimental in character. Students are expected to contribute significant research and ideas to the course.
Indigenous Fashion, PSOF 5110
Sariah Park, Assistant Professor of Fashion Design
This course introduces Indigenous practices and systems of making from pre-contact to the present day, which continue to influence the course of history. Indigenous communities throughout North and South America continue to expand global thinking on sustainable design and land-based practices, in areas including agricultural health and environmental activism and on critical issues surrounding cultural advocacy, social justice, gender diversity, plurality, and inclusion. We study the differences in making, from craft to contemporary art, between Indigenous communities throughout the Americas. We examine the way traditional dress, regalia, and body adornment are revered in Indigenous societies as ritual and way of life, the ultimate expression of identity and belonging, and healing and storytelling through modes of making that connect to the land and the preservation of ancestral knowledge, raising fashion from a visual language into the spiritual realm. We critique and challenge Eurocentric worldviews, presenting fashion as a form of protest based in decolonization and the dismantling of imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchal systems of oppression.
Looking Beyond the Glass Ceiling, PSCE 5130
Kimberly Ackert, Part-Time Assistant Professor
This seminar course is open to all design students but focuses on women transitioning from graduate degree programs into the professional work force. The format of the syllabus and course material encourages a direct and personal interaction between professionals and students in the discussion of a wide range of issues from a female perspective. The course material includes historical references and case studies of women in all areas of design, a review of books and articles, and guest speakers and office visits. The course provides a platform on which to discuss and debate current events affecting women from political and social points of view, with the goal of recognizing challenges such as pay inequality and other forms of discrimination. Subjects explored include confidence building and developing the communication and negotiating skills required for women to thrive and succeed in professions that have been historically male dominated. Diversity in enrollment contributes to meeting the goal of creating a level playing field.
Empowered Neighborhoods: Community Advocacy and Housing Justice, PSDS 5516
Gabriela Rendon, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Community Development
This course delves into community-led practices and tools used to promote housing justice and equitable neighborhood development in cities. Often led by women, people of color, and minorities, these nonhierarchical social-oriented endeavors are becoming increasingly relevant in communities experiencing profit-driven urban development and rampant gentrification. Students explore how tenant unions, rent strikes, community land trusts, limited-equity housing cooperatives, and other community-control forms of organizing and development are gaining ground through networks and coalitions across neighborhoods and cities. Applying that knowledge, students develop advocacy and intervention strategies to support ongoing community-led projects and neighborhood-based initiatives. Using a sociospatial justice framework and a focus on empowerment, this course involves research, design strategies, advocacy, and collaboration with multi-year community partners engaged in the production of sustainable and just neighborhoods. This course is connected to the research and initiatives of the Housing Justice Lab.
Experimental Fashion and Performance, PGHT 5550
Francesca Granata, Associate Professor of Fashion Studies
In this graduate seminar, we examine visual and material culture at the turn of the millennium, with a focus on work created at the juncture between experimental fashion and performance art. We explore the ever-increasing challenge posed by practitioners from the art and fashion fields to the classical concept of the body and of beauty, which found one of its most successful articulations in the images of 20th-century high fashion. We investigate the way designers and artists problematize easy demarcations between the inside and outside of the body, asking why this period saw an explosion of grotesque imagery—imagery articulating unsettling ruptures of borders—that had been lurking just beneath the surface throughout the 20th century. Among the questions we ask are: Why is the sealed and “perfect” body, which developed in the Western vocabulary as early as the Renaissance, so forcefully challenged by contemporary designers and artists? How can we read this proliferation of grotesque imagery in relation to changes in gender roles, normative sexuality, and the AIDS crisis? How do theories of the posthuman influence contemporary fashion and performance? We look at a range of media, including the video and performance work of Leigh Bowery in collaboration with Charles Atlas and Michael Clark; the dance performances of Merce Cunningham in collaboration with Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons; the experimental fashion shows staged by Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Martin Margiela, and Hood by Air; and the pop phenomenon of Lady Gaga. We also examine textiles' relation to the body as a second skin, a surface on which bodily borders are negotiated. The seminar combines concepts and methodologies from fashion theory, feminist and queer theory, art history, performance studies, disability studies, science studies and medical anthropology in its exploration of the topic. Among the authors read are Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Donna Haraway, Paul B. Preciado, Monica Miller, Lynda Nead, Emily Martin, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Caroline Evans.
Collab: Code, Decolonized, PSAM 5550
Xin Xin, Assistant Professor of Interaction and Media Design
Code, Decolonized is a teaching practicum in which we investigate the ever-shifting roles of software and explore new forms of code pedagogy influenced by queer, Black, abolitionist, and intersectional feminist consciousness. We research, experiment, and practice new ways of learning and teaching programming languages for the Web employing perspectives that are traditionally overlooked and underrecognized in the technical classroom. Following bell hooks' vision of “education as the practice of freedom,” this course equips future educators with tools that can be used to reframe their understanding of traditional computer science education and craft socially engaged course materials. Throughout the course, we employ an array of syllabi, collaborative tools, assignments, and in-class exercises, which students present in an end-of-semester symposium that they facilitate and attend outside of class time. This collab studio partners with the Processing Foundation, Emergent Works, and POWRPLNT and is well suited to students interested in pursuing teaching careers after graduation, as well as those looking to deepen their understanding of code and community work.
Beauty and Belonging, PGHT 5563
Christina Moon, Associate Professor of Fashion Studies
This course is an exploration Asian America in fashion, art, and design history. It focuses on fashion making, textiles, and fiber arts produced by artists and makers, weavers and laborers of Asian descent who have introduced new forms of vernacular artistic practice into the United States. Themes explored include cultural identity, gender, queerness, (im)migration, diaspora, creative possibility, the mother tongue, home, belonging, and the possibilities and burdens of representation. Students have the opportunity to collectively shape what is explored in this course. We look at fashion and art alongside literature and explore methodological approaches employed in narrating and making visible figures of the present and the past. A final project involves the creation of a course-based community archive for our university. Some artists and authors to consider: Theresa Hakyoung Cha, Ruth Asawa, Flo Oy Wong, Isamu Nogochi, Kay Sekimachi, Yoko Ono, Tehching Hsieh, Anne Anlin Cheng, Chien-Chi Chang, Shūsaku Arakawa and The Reversible Destiny Foundation, Pacita Abad, Danh Võ, Bernadette Corporation/United Bamboo, Ocean Vuong, Kaisik Wong, Cathy Park Hong, the Godzilla collective, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, the Canal Street Research Association, and Lisa Lowe.
Materializing the Marginal: Race, Gender, and Class in the Long 18th Century, PGHT 5736
Tracy Ehrlich, Part-Time Associate Teaching Professor
Among the main preoccupations of the age of Enlightenment was the nature of human diversity. In 18th-century Europe, the eagerness to categorize human beings led to a construction of race in which skin color was the primary racial marker. Scientific theorists associated the color white with light and intelligence. Johann Joachim Winckelmann eloquently fabricated a mythical “white” Greek antiquity, contributing to the birth of neoclassical aesthetics that linked whiteness with beauty and power. In this course, we interrogate the relationship between the marginalized body and material culture during this “enlightened” age, particularly the way material things and objects were employed to signify race, gender, and class. Like the marginalized bodies we address, material objects and goods often deemed marginal—such as fans, cosmetics, and dressing tables—demand re-examination as potent means of identity construction. Although material objects often served to reinforce social hierarchy, they also functioned to subvert social norms. Rather than proceeding stylistically, chronologically, or geographically, this class moves thematically, considering such topics as gendered spaces and furnishings, sociability and craft, the intersection of landscape and labor, race at the table, and sourcing and the erasure of colonial identity in the Atlantic world. Our aim is not to be historically comprehensive. Discussions will be wide-ranging geographically, covering France, England, Italy, and Spain as well as Spanish America and the Caribbean. Students may extend their research projects to eastern Europe, China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire.
Becoming Visible, UTNS 5702
Gina Walker, Professor of Women's Studies
This course engages with ongoing research into the historical, technical, and gendered contexts of textile production that now make it possible to speculate about the lives of named women workers and their innovations across geographies and cultures. Producing the stuff of civilization was historically considered to be “women’s work” and formed an essential part of global trade. The legions of female workers were invisible at all times and places. During the transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age economy, women’s economic power was erased from collective memory. The reasons for this shift are not yet clear. The myth was perpetuated that men adventure while women remain stationary and perform undifferentiated “women’s work.” Such undervaluation continues today. New multidisciplinary research provides evidence of individual women and their accomplishments from the past. For example, translations of recently excavated cuneiform letters from the 19th Century BCE reveal details of the experiences of named female weavers, managers, colleagues, wives, and mothers, some from accounts written by the women themselves. We learn that even then, women were denied equal recognition as “professionals” with their male collaborators. Students have the opportunity to interrogate what can be known about these figures and their creations, devising ways to make them visible for the first time using approaches and media of their choice.