Women, Gender, & Representation

Instructor

Anna Baeth

Course Description

This course explores questions about gender, identity, and practices of embodiment, dance, sport, physical activity, and exercise. Drawing from indigenous ways of knowing, critical Black feminist scholarship, and environmental justice, this course considers various texts, podcasts, videos, current events, and, especially, our own experiences to interrogate the history of gender in sport. We focus on the creation and legacy of women’s (and men’s) sports, patterns of inclusion and exclusion in sport with particular attention to athletes of color, indigenous peoples, gender nonconforming athletes, LGBTQ+ folks, and bodies of differing physical and neurological abilities. Turning to, and participating in, dance, intergenerational sport, and embodied practices of movement, this course asks students to reimagine movement as forms of medicine and active-ism. Students will participate in light activity that will be accessible and available for every body.

Instructor

Kate Dugan

Course Description

What does it mean to live in a post-Roe world? What is the history of reproductive justice? What are the legacies of protest movements for and against access to reproductive health care? This course will examine histories of sexual and reproductive health movements. We will study the UN’s reproductive justice framework and how it empowers global conversations about bodily autonomy. We will explore Smith College’s Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, which is a rich archive of the history of movements for reproductive health, including Loretta Ross papers, the Activist Life Oral History Project, the Black Women’s Health Imperative Records, the National Latina Health Organization Records, and several personal archives of well-known feminist thinkers and activists. Students will leave this course with well-informed curiosity about how historical conditions, social movement materials, and critical questions shape the possibilities for reproductive justice.

Instructor

Fiona Maurisette

Course Description

This class is for students who recognize that we need a paradigm shift and want to change the world. What kinds of futures have you been made aware of through science fiction and fantasy texts, and how can you use your analyses to change the world? In this class, you will be a world builder. This interdisciplinary course examines feminist science and speculative fiction narratives as political texts that critique society’s racial and gender hierarchies. By analyzing science and speculative fiction texts, you will find inspiration for your own constructions of the future. Your words will push the boundaries of what others believe is possible. You will produce a project about how to make our world better. Join others in suspending disbelief and believing in your power to promote change. Writers may include Adrienne Maree Brown, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, Nalo Hopkinson, Shirley Jackson, N.K. Jemisin, and Sheree Renée Thomas.

We want to foster an open and welcoming community of thinkers and learners. This class will support you in sharing your ideas and thoughts while keeping in focus that not everyone in the class has the same background.

Instructor

Sydney Curtis

Course Description

In this course, we will use embodied ways of learning to explore the relationship between the gender as a social construct and the built and natural environment. Using a Black feminist lens, students will engage threshold concepts in women and gender studies that will prime them for further study. In addition, students will develop critical literacy in the history of environmental justice and ways that the current challenges of climate change intersect with gender-based violence and discrimination. We will closely examine sources of injustice in multifaceted forms throughout the world, and critique the ways that these forces impact our bodies. In partnership with concurrent WGR courses, students in this course will explore the Black feminist ethics of care and will utilize movement, meditation, conversation, and reflection to excavate the authentic and necessary rest practices that strengthen our ability to persist and thrive amidst gendered and environmental repression.

Instructor

Ileana Jiménez

Course Description

This course is all about love. However we identify along the continuum, we all long to give and receive love. During our time together, we will read and watch love stories as narrative and art, poetry, and film exploring everything from romantic love to family love to community love to self-love. We will also use Smith’s excellent resources to explore love stories through art and archives. In particular, we will visit Smith’s museum to view queer and trans art as well as visit our extensive alumnae archive to learn about Smith’s incredible history of queer and trans life and activism both on campus and beyond from the past and present. We will also watch films from the U.S. and abroad. Throughout it all, we will question whether we see ourselves in these representations, and how we might use these stories, art, and media to imagine our own futures in relationship and community through creative writing, personal storytelling, and media making. We might laugh and we might cry. Throughout it all, we will experiment with different ways to approach these texts through intersectional feminist as well as queer, non-binary, and trans perspectives. As we gather for two weeks, we will ponder what Maya Angelou invites us to do, which is to “have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”

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 their daily 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 how power shapes 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.