GNDR 2110.002 – Introduction to Women Gender & Sexuality Studies
Offered: Full Semester Online
Instructor: Scarlett Higgins, shiggins@unm.edu

This course introduces students to key concepts, debates, and analytical tools informing women, gender, and sexuality studies. As an interdisciplinary field of study, women, gender, and sexuality studies employs academic perspectives from a range of disciplines and theoretical approaches. It also incorporates lived experience and social location into its object of analysis. This course will develop tools through readings and assignments that critically analyze how gender and sexuality are shaped by different networks of power and social relations and demonstrate how the intersections of race, class, disability, national status, and other categories of identity and difference are central to their understanding and deployment. There are no prerequisites to this course.

WGSS 304.001 – Feminist Theories
Offered: TR 12:30pm – 1:45pm
Instructor: Summer Abbott, babbott@unm.edu

This course explores the origins of feminist theories, assesses their ongoing cultural & political impacts, & develops understanding of feminist theories as tools of social transformation. Through examination of a variety of feminist theories—liberal, Freudian, radical, queer, postcolonial, Marxist, postmodern, transnational, ecofeminist, women-of-color, & transfeminist lenses—we'll build critical skills to interrogate formations of power based on gendered social relations.

We'll ask how feminist scholars, thinkers, & activists have organized their projects to address oppression based on gender, ability, race, & class. By looking at how feminist theories have evolved & the influence they continue to have in debates about art, personhood, struggles for equal pay and equal rights, marital arrangements, reproductive health, & reproductive justice, we'll uncover feminism's profound & enduring role in social change.

WGSS 331.001 – Transnational Feminisms
Offered: Full Semester Online
Instructor: Rinita Mazumdar, rinita@unm.edu

We shall begin this course with the Aristotelian division between the public (polis) and the private (oikos/domestic)and study some important articles by First and Second Wave feminist such as Wollstonecraft, De Beauvoir, Hartmann, Ferguson and Folbre, and Rubin in order to set the framework to study transnational feminisms. Next, we shall talk of "nations" as "imagined communities”, the role of race and gender as identities that foster social exclusion, and the different kind of configuration of the "public" and "private" space. Over the course of the semester we will study the role of colonization and other historical forces, the formation of post colonial States, and hegemonic writing on "woman" outside of the main centers of global power. Further, we shall also study how feminism as a resistance movement evolved in different socio-historical-cultural spaces and the rise of religious fundamentalism and feminist resistance. We shall then move onto the question of labor, population, and scarcity. We shall end the course by studying the works of Nussbaum and Sen on poverty, famines, capability deprivation and empowerment. We will study how some sexual assaults, ethnic cleansing, and genocides are visible and some are not in the public discourse and the reason for such exclusion.

WGSS 336.002 – Queer Theories
Offered:  TR 4:00pm - 5:15pm
Instructors: Staff

“We're Here! We're Queer! GET USED TO IT!” This is one of the infamous chants from 1990's queer activists and part of their controversial "in your face" political strategy that took the epithet "queer" and turned it into a movement and an academic field now called Queer Studies.

Queer Studies is an area of study concerned with how hegemonic structures of regulation, morality, and normalization create violence, especially around "sex.” As UC Irvine's Queer Theory program explains, "Queer Studies focuses on the study of how norms are produced and come to be taken for granted, and, conversely, how they are destabilized either through their own internal contradictions or through the interventions of activists seeking social justice.” And, importantly, when queer theory is done well, it is not just concerned with norms of sexuality, but all types of norms that can create violence, pain, and suffering. In this course, we will be learning about how norms of sexuality, gender, race, Indigeneity, class, nation, empire, and more, are created, sustained, and work together. But we will also learn how these norms can be disrupted, dismantled, or even undone. In this way, current queer theory continues the queer activist practice of making "queer" into a verb, as in the sense that queer studies is invested in finding ways to queer (as in make strange, denaturalize, make odd) the various norms that are all around us.

WGSS 379.001 – T: Women, Medicine & Health
Offered: Full Semester Online
Instructors: Arianna Trott, arianna8@unm.edu and Justina Trott, jtrott@unm.edu

Ever wonder how one-size-fits-all clothing could actually work for someone 5' tall weighing 100 lbs., 5'5" tall at 185 lbs. and someone 6'4" tall weighing 160 lbs.? Well, the same question can be asked of medicine and the health care system. The answer is simple: It doesn't! This course will trace the history of women's health and explore how both sex (genetics) and gender (social determinants of health) affect health. Although this course explores the intersection of sex and gender in any individual, it will mostly focus on examples of female biology (individuals with XX chromosomes) raised with assigned gender roles as girls/women. Using examples of sex and gender differences in health care - in prevention, screening, diagnosis and treatment students will discuss the implications of sex and gender for health, health care policy, programs, services, products, practice and research, as well as education. Readings, videos and discussions will focus on the paradigm of thinking that has led to current women's health care practices, and a new paradigm of thinking that can lead to a deeper understanding of women's health and improve health care for everyone.

Objectives:

• By the end of the course, you will be able to describe the difference between the biologic (sex), social determinants of health (gender), and their complex interactions.
• You will analyze research, policy, programs, products, and services using a sex/gender/diversity lens through course discussions, exercises and projects.
• You will create a project using a set of sex- and gender-specific analytic methods and tools.

WGSS 379.002 – T: Food Justice
Offered: M 4:00-6:45pm
Instructor: Elisabeth Stone, eastone@unm.edu

This course investigates the politics, praxis, and lived experience of local food systems. Through readings, service learning, field trips, independent research, and conversation, we will explore the ways the growing, preparing, selling, and consuming food engages and shapes justice, equity, and community-building. This class will include visits to farms, restaurants, and non-profit organizations and independent projects with local food justice advocates, growers, and others in aligned work.

WGSS 379.003 – T: Atomic Bomb and Feminism
Offered: TR 11:00-12:15pm
Instructor: Eileen Shaughnessy, eileens@unm.edu

The atomic bomb was invented, tested, and manufactured in New Mexico…and it continues to be made here today. What does an analysis of the nuclear weapons industry that is attuned to gender & sexuality reveal? This class will take a queer feminist approach to analyzing the social and environmental impacts of nuclear weapons in our world. In "The Atomic Bomb and Feminism”, students will explore topics like the hetero-patriarchal nuclear family, notions of apocalypse, anti-nuclear activism, environmental racism, nuclear colonialism, and more. We will explore these topics through field trips, community experts, and creative, interdisciplinary approaches.

WGSS 379.004 – T: Race, Sex & Fashion
Offered: TR 2:00-3:15pm
Instructor: Francisco Galarte, galarte@unm.edu

Description Forthcoming.

WGSS 579.003 – T: Queer Theories
Offered: TR 4:00pm - 5:15pm
Instructors: Staff

“We're Here! We're Queer! GET USED TO IT!” This is one of the infamous chants from 1990's queer activists and part of their controversial "in your face" political strategy that took the epithet "queer" and turned it into a movement and an academic field now called Queer Studies.

Queer Studies is an area of study concerned with how hegemonic structures of regulation, morality, and normalization create violence, especially around "sex.” As UC Irvine's Queer Theory program explains, "Queer Studies focuses on the study of how norms are produced and come to be taken for granted, and, conversely, how they are destabilized either through their own internal contradictions or through the interventions of activists seeking social justice.” And, importantly, when queer theory is done well, it is not just concerned with norms of sexuality, but all types of norms that can create violence, pain, and suffering. In this course, we will be learning about how norms of sexuality, gender, race, Indigeneity, class, nation, empire, and more, are created, sustained, and work together. But we will also learn how these norms can be disrupted, dismantled, or even undone. In this way, current queer theory continues the queer activist practice of making "queer" into a verb, as in the sense that queer studies is invested in finding ways to queer (as in make strange, denaturalize, make odd) the various norms that are all around us.