COURSES
BEREA COLLEGE
Gender, Sexuality, and Black Lives Matter: This lower-division Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies special topics course introduces students to expressions of racial blackness that destabilize binary notions of sex/gender and sexuality. The Black Lives Matter movement is rephrased here as a question for feminism about black reproductive futurity and the limits of Western metaphysical philosophy.
Black femme freedom makes all life matter: This lower-division General Education course introduces students to ‘intersectionality’ as a legal analytic that helps us understand not how identity works, but how state institutions co-constitute and contain difference. Students marry Kimberlé Crenshaw’s critique with those offered by contemporary black feminist thinkers like bell hooks, Jennifer Nash, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Hortense Spillers, to understand the unique vulnerability of black women and femmes as the “zero degree” of larger institutional and social inequities (Spillers).
Theory in the Flesh: Black Feminist Theory: This sophomore and junior-level Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core course explores contemporary and foundational black feminist texts to attend to the intersections of blackness, gender, sexuality, desire, and embodiment; aesthetic and expressive cultures; the political, personal, and libidinal; the politics of respectability; reproductive and environmental justice; and the everyday business of making black social life.
Animals, Monsters, and Others (oh my!): This sophomore and junior-level Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies special topics course asks students to consider how monstrous and animal Others are raced, sexed, and gendered in popular media. Querying representation as a trap that mires us in non-human caricatures, readings include texts by Che Gossett, Colin Dayan, Tavia Nyong’o, Joshua Bennett, and more.
Intersectionality and its Dis/Contents: This Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies capstone asks students to engage black femme(inist) and queer of color critiques to examine how intersectionality (i.e., as an analytic for understanding how black women and femmes live and die) is challenged and/or upheld by recent contributions to the field.
The Revolution Will Not Be Humanized: This General Education capstone introduces students to critiques of humanism offered by thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Kim Tallbear, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and others, in order to facilitate their learning of liberal humanism as a project that has failed to protect the most vulnerable among us, encouraging students to articulate demands for revolution outside of humanist discourse.
BELOIT COLLEGE
Sex and Power: This introductory course introduces students to the intersections of racialized and sexualized identities, gendered expressions, dis/ability, and power, with a focus on representations of difference in popular culture, including but not limited to media cultures.
Black Lives (Don’t) Matter: This upper-division advanced theory course introduces students to discourses of modernity that exclude black persons from human recognitions and protections. Students interrogate popular media representations that reproduce racist spectacle to ask how black lives can matter, if at all, and to further deliberate how black lives might be sexed and gendered.
Local Colonialisms: This upper-division course investigates historical and contemporary manifestations of colonial relations. Drawing on the expertise of faculty, staff, and the local community, this course asks students to consider how “the local” both represents and resists larger histories of conquest, settlement, and citizenship.
University of California, IRVINE
Gender and Feminism (Summer 2014): The first in a three-part introductory series. Emphasis on black feminist interventions, intersectional and transnational assemblages of sex and gender, and the impact of these discourses on/for critical humanism(s).
Gender and Power (Summer 2015): The second in a three-part introductory series. Special Topic: “Black Lives (Don’t) Matter”. Emphasis on the gendering of anti-black racism and on media representations of extra-legal black murders.
Gender and Popular Culture (Summer 2013-14): The third in a three-part introductory series. Emphasis on media representations of black masculinity.
Gender and Feminism (Fall 2010-2012; Summer 2012); Priya J. Shah and Karen Kim, Instructors of Record. Guest Lecture: “Gender Performance and Consumer Culture” (October 21, 2010).
Gender and Power (Winter 2011-2013); Lilith Mahmud and Laura Kang, Instructors of Record. Guest Lecture: “Transnational Feminisms” (March 3, 2011).
Gender and Popular Culture (Spring 2011- 2013); Jeanne Scheper and Kavita Philip, Instructors of Record. Guest Lecture: “New Media and Cyber Activism” (June 2, 2011).
DUKE UNIVERSITY
Dating and Mating: The Hookup Culture at Duke: This student-run class attracted upwards of 30 students each semester. Its syllabus inspired a cross-listed, special topics course in Cultural Anthropology and Women’s Studies in 2006.