Please consult the New School Course Catalog for a full list of current courses. Fall 2021 courses that count for the Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Certificate are listed below; view an archive of past courses.
Fall 2021 Courses
Trans Theory as Gender Theory, GLIB 5150
McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media
Trans people have a unique relation to gender in that they have experienced being two (or more) genders, whereas most cis people have only ever been one. So what if we took the accounts and theories of gender created by trans people as central to thinking about the concept of gender in general, rather than as a subtopic of feminist or queer theory dealing only with a special case? We build on pioneering work in trans studies (Susan Stryker, Sandy Stone, Leslie Feinberg) as well as recent contributions (Paul Preciado, C. Riley Snorton) as ways of constructing alternative pathways into the research on gender and sexuality of more standard accounts (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler). It may turn out that certain aspects of transgender experience and thought do not fit neatly in accepted conceptual frameworks. Besides examining theoretical texts, we look at examples of trans literature, art, and media that might transcend existing theoretical categories and call for novel concepts.
Gender, Culture, and Media, NMDS 5117
Lana Lin, Associate Professor of Film Theory and Digital Cinema
For historian Joan Scott, gender is a useful category for historical analysis. For transactivist Leslie Feinberg, gender is poetry. For Black feminists, such as Angela Davis and Kimberlé Crenshaw, gender is inextricable from race, class, and sexuality. This course examines the complex and fluid concept of gender as it manifests in media forms in the widest sense (including human and cyber bodies, print and online news, graphic novels, movies, television, Web series, and performing arts). We study the ways in which gender identities are imposed, resisted, and lived, focusing on the role of media in transmitting, shaping, maintaining, and transforming representations of gender. We analyze gendered and racialized language and embodiment in the fields of art, activism, popular culture, and the law and consider how the intersection of gender and race influences the construction of media. The course provides an introduction to feminist approaches to media studies, drawing on Black feminism, queer theory, disability studies, psychoanalysis, memoir, and journalism. Note: This course was titled "Gender and Visual Culture" in fall 2019. Much of the content is similar. Please email the instructor for more details.
Trans | Aesthetics, NMDS 5443
McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media
Since the alleged "transgender tipping point," there has been an expansion in the visibility of transgender and gender-variant people in the North American cultural world. But is this visibility always a good thing? In what ways does visibility tip over into surveillance? How are trans bodies coded in cultural and media systems, and are they resonant there in ways that are enabling or disabling for trans lives, particularly those of of trans people of color? This course takes up these and related questions connected to the problem of what it means to appear as anything other than a cis person. It touches on questions in visual cultural studies and connects them to questions emerging out of the media practices and media critique originating among trans artists and activists themselves.
Global Pandemics in an Unequal World: Learning from COVID-19, NINT 5443
Manjari Mahajan, Associate Professor of International Affairs and Starr Professor
COVID-19 is not just a pandemic; its spread and consequences for human lives have been uneven, shaped by the social, economic, and political contexts of 21st-century globalization. The differing experiences of the pandemic in different countries have thrown a spotlight on implicit and explicit social contracts, uneven geographies of rights and freedoms, gendered burdens of household care work, divergent conceptions of individual and collective welfare, and asymmetries of resources and power within and between countries. It also underlines the consequences of 21st-century capitalism, even as nations vary in their economic policies, health systems, and infrastructures. In this course, we use COVID-19 as a lens through which to understand underlying structures, norms, and values in societies around the world and to understand the nature of global capitalism in the 21st century. The course is organized as a series of lectures by faculty across The New School and by guest speakers. Specific themes that will be covered in the course include politics of data, digital cultures, borders and mobility of microbes and migrants, economic inequalities and access to healthcare, gendered consequences of economic crises, and global flows of technologies and scientific knowledge.
Women's Intellectual History, GLIB 5145
Gina Walker, Professor of Women's Studies
Women’s Intellectual History complements and corrects the traditional narrative of Western thought by and about mainly men. We ask: What are the historical assumptions about the connections between women’s sexuality and their learning, beginning with the ancients? What role did religion and “Natural Philosophy” play in facilitating or limiting women’s access to education? How did continuing debate over whether the mind “has sex” influence the cultural roles for which women were educated? Was there a causal relation between la querelle des femmes and the diffusion of l’égalité des sexes, first proposed by Cartisian Poullain de la Barre? We examine the texts, contexts, and new information about earlier “learned ladies” that feminist scholarship has recovered over the past 40 years: Enheduanna, Sappho, Diotima, Aspasia, Hypatia, early Christian martyr Vibia Perpetua, Hildegard of Bingen and her 12th-century contemporary Héloïse, the erotic trobaritz, and Christine de Pizan’s political visions of a “City of Ladies.” We ask: Did women have the same “Renaissance” as men? We read Tullia d’Aragona, Veronica Franco, and Gaspara Stampa, female humanists, “honorable courtesans,” and poets in 16th-century Venice who develop Neo-Platonist ideas of their own. We consider Elizabeth I of England as an early modern humanist “prince,” one of “the monstrous regiment of women rulers" in Europe, and a beacon to clusters of early modern women thinkers. We scrutinize new critical perspectives, such as an enlightened “republic of women,” to elucidate disputes in current theory and historiography about a lineage of earlier “feminists” and what we have inherited from them.
Money, Sex, Power: Feminist Theories of Work, GSOC 6250
Kathi Weeks, Visiting Professor at NSSR, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University
This course is organized around the theme of work. In the first part of the course, we consider a variety of theoretical orientations toward work, from early liberal feminist prescriptions of waged work for women to Marxist feminist and postwork critiques of work under capitalism. In the second part of the course, we turn our attention to recent developments in the organization of work, focusing on particular forms and modes of feminized labor, including waged domestic work, aspirational labor, sex work, emotional labor, gestational labor, care work, and precarious work.
Marxist Feminism: A Genealogy of U.S. Feminist Theory, GPHI 6779
Kathi Weeks, Visiting Professor at NSSR, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University
The course explores the U.S. Marxist feminist theoretical tradition. We consider the past, present, and future of a variety of post-1960 feminist reformulations of Marxist concepts and methods designed to theorize and contest heteropatriarchal racial capitalism. Topics covered may include the domestic labor debate, social reproduction theory, prison abolitionism, wages for housework, transgender Marxism, postwork feminism, gestational labor, sex work, and queer Marxism.
African American Women: Subsistence in Blackness Through Dress, PSOF 5102
Luciana Scrutchen, Assistant Professor of Fashion
In this course, we examine the history of African American women’s subsistence ethos as it has been sustained and curated through dress as a reaction to systemic barriers. Through historical and material culture, we investigate the aesthetic practices of African American women as influencers and makers in response to institutional racist sexism during the Jim Crow era through the present context of dressing for the corporation, purposefully obfuscated by the privilege of choice. We also examine the dress aesthetic of queer African American cis and transwomen and non-binary African American people as a form of cultural resistance and a provocation for hate violence. Finally, we explore Black subsistence in the penal system through dress as an identity and cultural preservation practice within a system designed to strip away identity and the impulse to resist authority.
Fashion Criticism: Past, Present, and Future, PGHT 5512
Francesca Granata, Associate Professor of Fashion Studies
In this seminar, we investigate the history, present state, and possible futures of fashion criticism. We begin by examining English language newspapers and magazines starting in the late 19th century, when the “women’s pages” were established. We stay particularly attuned to the ways fashion criticism mediated shifting gender roles as well as shifting understandings of race, as evident in the change in newspaper nomenclature of fashion sections in the 1960s and 1970s from "women’s pages" to "style sections" and the expansion of the Black fashion press in the same period. We then examine the way fashion criticism gained momentum in the 1980s and won legitimacy as a form of cultural criticism in the 1990s. In the final section, we examine the way fashion criticism is being transformed by new technologies while also intervening in their development. Some of the questions we ask are: Why has fashion criticism lagged behind criticism of other forms of popular culture, such as film or music? What happened from the 1980s onwards that catalyzed an increased interest in fashion as a cultural force and its attendant forms of criticism? And finally, what forms will fashion criticism take in the future? We read primary texts from a range of media sources and critics, from Oscar Wilde to Robin Givhan, concomitantly with theoretical approaches to the study of media and fashion media in particular, from Andreas Hepp on mediatization to Agnès Rocamora on “fashion media discourse.”
Political Economics of Development, NINT 5251
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs
The defining challenges of our times — extreme inequality within and between countries, environmental destruction, pervasive poverty, threats to democracy — do not fall from the sky. They result from public policies and social institutions that in turn are shaped by theories about the process of development. This course offers a critical introduction to the central ideas and theories that have shaped these policy choices. The course addresses questions such as: Is inequality necessary for economic growth? Why is the gender wage gap so persistent? Should the understanding of the economy be limited to market interactions? How can developing countries grow with environmental sustainability? Is spending on health and education a luxury or an investment? Do international trade agreements create a level playing field for countries? Is a flexible labor market the most effective way to promote employment and wage growth? What is the role of the state in transforming economies? How should the governance of global economic institutions be reformed to give more of a voice to the Global South? The course emphasizes the importance of ethical foundations and the historical inequities in North-South relations. It introduces theories from mainstream and heterodox approaches including structuralism, feminism, capabilities and human rights, and sustainability. The aim is to prepare students to engage critically and creatively in contemporary debates about what works and does not work to promote sustainable and equitable development. Note: This course was formerly titled Development Economics.