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Course Descriptions

100 Introduction to Women’s Studies
This course introduces the vast, complex, changing field of women’s studies. By engaging some key issues, questions, and conversations that have been raised in and by women’s studies in specific times and places, this course is designed to stimulate analyses about students’ locations in the circuits of such conversations, and to encourage students to raise their own questions about women, gender, feminism(s), modes of women’s organizing, and production of knowledge about women. While it is impossible to cover all pertinent topics in one semester, this course introduces various specific issues and histories, that, taken together, highlight the complexity of Women’s Studies as both an academic and activist field. (Offered each semester)

204 The Politics of Health
This course introduces students to the historical context of critical studies of health, especially health and the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. Beginning with conceptions of sex and sexuality from the Greeks and Freud, students consider the invention of new systems of classification for race and gender within the medical sciences. The course examines hormone research in the 20th century and its relationship to the American Eugenics Movement, the history of childbirth, and the changing context of reproductive rights in the early 20th century. Students explore how gender affects health treatment, the history of the reproductive rights movement, the origins of birth control and the politics of sterilization and safer sex education, the Women’s Health Movement, and AIDS activism since 1980. Prerequisite: WMST 100 or permission of instructor. (Redick)

215 Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud has been reviled by many feminists for his notions of penis envy and his puzzled query “What do women want?” And yet, Freud and such subsequent psychoanalytic theorists as Horney, Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan also have been sources of significant analyses of female subordination, sexuality, and desire. This course examines relations between psychoanalysis and feminism by focusing on ways in which psychoanalytic theory has understood gender, as well as the ways in which feminists have critiqued and/or appropriated such depictions of female experience. (Henking, offered occasionally)
Typical readings: Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love; Freud, Dora; Hooks, Feminist Theory, From Margin to Center; Olivier, Jocasta’s Children; Sayers, Mothers of Psychoanalysis; Trask, Eros and Power

223 Social Psychology
With the emergence of the discipline of social psychology in late 19th century came new ways of thinking about the gender, race, and class of individuals, groups, and nations. These new conceptualizations brought with them new ways of seeing the social psychological nature of “Man” and by extension “Woman,” and the psychological terms of modernity and postmodernity. Drawing on influential European and North American social psychologists, students in this course ask: Was social psychological nature to be understood in more symbolic interactionist, behaviorist, psychodynamic, cognitive or cybernetic terms? Students learn how ideas on social psychological life carried commitments to uncovering the “social laws of life” (Dewey); or social psychology’s efforts to engage with women and men as historicized subjects within social, political, and cultural contexts (Wilkinson, Sampson). This course also can count toward the major in psychology. Prerequisites: Permission of instructor or PSY 100. (Bayer)
Typical readings: Myers, Social Psychology; Halberstadt and Ellyson, Social Psychology Readings: A Century of Research; Festinger, Riecken and Schachter, When Prophecy Fails; Wilkinson, Feminist Social Psychologies; Bourke, A., The Burning of Bridget Cleary

243 Feminism and Science
This course explores the historical and scientific context for feminist interventions into scientific practice and study. Students are asked to consider a series of questions, including the following: How did feminist science studies develop? Is feminism relevant to the study of science? How does scientific inquiry become gendered through a variety of cultural and historical contexts? What are some specific intersections of race, gender and sexuality in the study of feminism and science? Do students think that feminism has transformed science studies within a specifically feminist context? Using the work of feminist scholars and scientists, students examine the history of genetics, sociobiology, prenatal testing, and the 1990s cultural science wars from a feminist standpoint. Prerequisite: WMST 100 or permission of the instructor. (Redick)

247 Psychology of Women
To Freud’s question of “What do women want?” psychology has brought description, analysis, categorization and diagnosis in its effort to plumb the depths of woman’s purported enigmatic nature. Parallel to psychology’s mainstream versions on the psychology of women are feminist writings exploring alternative views of psychological issues and life events of concern to women. This course examines these distinct paths from early case studies of hysteria through to mid-century depictions of the “problem with no name” (Friedan) and to late 20th-century renderings of PMS, bodily dissatisfactions and eating disorders. The course uses history, theory and research in psychology to examine these issues and events as well as to appreciate psychology’s changing views, treatment and study of women’s lives in all of their diversity. This course also can count toward the major in psychology. Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor or PSY 100. (Bayer)

300 Feminist Theory
This seminar surveys several strands of feminist theorizing and their histories. By critically engaging the underlying assumptions and stakes of a range of theories, students become more aware of their own assumptions and stakes, and sharpen their abilities to productively apply feminist analyses in their own work. Prerequisite: WMST 100 or permission of instructor. (Fall)

301 Feminist Oral History
Feminist oral history considers how women communicate and conceptualize their life stories, putting into practice a feminist commitment to recording women’s life stories. This seminar operates as a workshop, investigating the theory underlying feminist oral history while putting the methodology to work through a class interviewing project. Through critical reading and practical experience, students research oral history questions and conduct interviews that are recorded using audio and video equipment. Furthermore, they develop the critical tools and analytical judgment needed to analyze the role of gender in oral history interviewing and prepare interviews to be deposited in an archive.

304 Medical Historiography
This upper-level seminar introduces students to the history of medicine as a field of study, focusing on research methods. Students explore the history of medicine broadly, beginning with the origins of Western medicine in both Greece and the Renaissance. Students also explore transnational medical practices, and consider how Western medical practices have come to be historically valorized. Students read key texts in medical sociology and gain an understanding of how the history of medicine and physiology came to be a disciplinary subspecialty in the early to mid-20th century. Students perform a research project that makes use of methods in medical history. This could include archival research, oral histories, or interview methods. Prerequisite: WMST 100 or any 200 level WMST course. (Redick)

323 Research in Social Psychology
How lives are studied in social context is the question at the heart of social psychological research and feminist epistemology. Brought together, these approaches have reawakened concerns about the place of language, cultural discourses and relations of power in social psychological life. This course asks students to think through the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings to different research paradigms as they learn how to put different research methods into practice. Students design and conduct a research project, for which one component will be discourse analysis of women’s and men’s forms of language and the subtle ways in which these forms act on perceptions. This course also can count toward the major in psychology and satisfies the psychology laboratory requirement. Prerequisites: WMST 223 or WMST 247 or permission of the instructor. (Bayer)
Typical readings: Wetherell, Taylor, and Yates, Discourse Theory and Practice; Potter and Wetherell, Discourse and Social Psychology; Wilkinson and Kitzinger, Feminism and Discourse: Psychological Perspectives (Gender and Psychology)

357 Self in American Culture
Twentieth century U.S. life is distinguished by an increasing tendency to see everyday life in psychological terms. How and when did it become so chic to see and conceive of ourselves as essentially psychological? What happens when these forms of self recede and newer ones, such as the consumer self, the narcissistic self, or the saturated self begin to signify the psychology of a decade and who we are as humans? This course draws on a feminist approach to examine the place of social psychology in the cultural history of American individualism and notions of the self. This course also can count toward the major in psychology. (Bayer)
Typical readings: de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Danziger, The Historical Formation of Selves; Pfister and Schnog, Inventing the Psychological; Gergen, The Saturated Self; Haiken, Venus Envy

372 Topics in Social Psychology
This course focuses on a topic of current interest. Topics are announced in advance and are addressed through history and theory in feminist social psychology. One topic is peace: students examine practices for peace and social justice through movements, writing, art, and film in the larger social and psychological context of humanity and quests for life lived in harmony and equality. Other topics include cyberpsychology; Cold War America and Cold War psychology; the psychology of the Women’s movement; and history of psychology. This course also may count toward the major in psychology. Prerequisites: PSY 100 or WMST 223 or permission of instructor. (Bayer)

401 Senior Seminar
Women’s studies seniors produce a culminating project as they apply feminist theories and research methods, integrating their experiences as women’s studies majors. Prerequisites: WMST 100 and WMST 300. (Spring, offered annually)

450 Independent Study/Practicum
This course provides the opportunity for students to engage in practical involvements in topics/issues in women’s studies as well as pursuing independent research under faculty supervision.