WGST 115 - Gender, Representation, and Culture

3 Credits
The course will introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of women, gender, and sexuality (WGSS) studies through a detailed exploration of cultural representations of gender. One of the primary objectives of the course is to instigate and develop independent, critical thinking about issues of gender and social action around gender inequity. We will explore key roles that gender plays as both individual marker of identity and collective structuring mechanism of our culture. Gender is a notion that confounds and confuses us, in no small part because it seems naturalized to our body types of male and female. However, we have a multiplicity of bodies and genders at work in the world even as we try and understand them within the standard discourses of male and female, masculine and feminine. To understand how gender works, we will study a series of written and visual texts that demonstrate the breadth and depth of gender issues in representation. But we will also examine how artists across genres create depictions of gender through formal and aesthetic strategies.

*Fulfills Civitae Core FAES
*Fulfills General Education Goal 8

SI