The course offers a critical introduction to queer theory. The course is organized into two sections. The first half of the course presents an outline of the emergence of queer theory in the early 1990s as a critical response to the limitations of the gay and lesbian movement. The second half of the course presents an outline of queer theory’s failure to examine the effect of race on the construction and representation of gender and sexuality.
(IV, VII)

What is Gender? Why does it studying it matter? This course will explore how gender as crucial to the ways in which all societies and cultures create groups based on ideas of difference in bodies, behavior and culture. In this course we will explore how and why gender matters in creating personal identities, family structures, citizenship and nationalism, ideas of work and leisure, social and public policy, and also, global economic and political decisions. In short, we will see how gender does make the world go around. But we will not consider gender in isolation; rather, we will see how gender becomes meaningful when it emerges in relation with race, sexuality, class, caste, nation, religion and ethnicity.
(IV, VII)

This course focuses on what constitutes distinctly feminist modes of producing knowledge and feminist approaches to activist knowledges— knowledge produced when feminists take on social, political, and cultural critiques and the knowledges that lead to that feminist activism. Specifically, students will look at the uses of performance and visual culture to produce feminist “toolkits.” Using scholarship on indigeneity, the hemispheric Americas, women and war, gender and labor, and the uses of performance strategies to critically interpret gender expressions, students will think critically about social issues and examine the kinds of information, research, ideas, theories and concepts that underlie feminist cultural analysis and expression. Investigating examples such as U.S.-based solidarity actions with Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan to the performance art of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, which explores women, war, and colonial conquest, to the strategies of drag king performance troupes to address the politics of performing across differences of race, class, nation, and gender, students will explore what is the role of performance and visual culture in the producing, storing, and transmitting feminist knowledge? What is the relationship between different modes of producing feminist knowledge and effecting certain forms of social, economic, and legal justice?

EEE Website: https://eee.uci.edu/09f/33580

This course examines ideologies of nationalisms, nation-states, and statehood, and their unique relations to gender, sexuality, class, and race. Assigned readings will include several classical texts on nationalism, as well as their feminist, queer and postcolonial critiques. Specific topics addressed may include: the definition of state and nation, the relationship of gender and sexuality to nationalist movements, the spread of this model of identity and territoriality through colonial expansion, nationalism and notions of family and domesticity, women's participation in various nation-and state-building projects and anti-colonial struggles, and the interrelation of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity in national identity construction.
(VIII)
EEE Website: https://eee.uci.edu/09f/33595

This course will focus on ART, SCIENCE, FICTION, and TECHNOPOLITICS . What do art, science, and politics have to do with each other? Do technologies transcend politics? What happens to feminist politics when the information revolution dawns, when technology fixes gender troubles, or when fiction imagines a different world? This course is a brief introduction to the vast experimental area at the intersection of arts and science. Students engage with a range of material drawn from film, fiction, historical and theoretical non-fiction, world events, and public sphere discourse.

Surveys the development of Chicana feminist thought and practice. Focuses on historical contemporary writings by and about Chicana feminists. Draws from interdisciplinary scholarship in order to survey the diversity of Chicana feminisms.
(Same as Chc/Lat 158W)

This course examines the intersections of race and gender in the formation of feminist theory and practice. It looks closely at the ways that prevailing notions of both race and gender are mutually transformed by an intersectional approach and highlights the particularly rich and dynamic contributions of black feminist theorizing for a range of critical topics and issues. To that end, the course pays special attention to the political framing of three major contemporary fronts of feminist movement – domestic violence, sexual assault, reproductive justice – and to the form and substance of the divergent collective efforts that women have organized under these overlapping banners.
(VII)

The sixteenth-century encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples of the Americas were riddled with violence and miscommunication as well as negotiation and opportunity. In the first moments of early globalization, Iberians and native Americans defined and defied each other’s gender and racial expectations – to shape past and present identities of Latin Americans.
This course examines the role of sex, gender, ethnicity, and race in the imagination of Spanish and Portuguese colonizers in the Americas. In turn, the class asks students to investigate how indigenous societies (the Incas in the Andes, the Nahuas in Mexico, the Maya in Central America) experienced European conquest from the household to the market place and from the battle field to the bedroom.
Throughout the quarter, students will explore questions such as: How did new colonial laws adapt to indigenous understandings of property and community? Did Catholic evangelization completely silence native beliefs? How did competing ideas of masculinity inform the acts of conquest and resistance throughout Latin America? How did gendered hierarchies as well as new racial categories create the clashes of conquest throughout the Americas?
Grades will be evaluated based on student participation, midterm and final exams, and two short papers. (Same as History 169, Global Studies 103B)

This course will examine the construction of gender in ancient Greece. Using evidence from literature, oratory, law, medicine, and philosophy, we will investigate how the ancient Greeks understood gender and sexuality, both masculine and feminine. What were proper gender roles in ancient Greece? How were ancient Greek ideas of gender and sexuality similar to and different from our own? All readings will be in English and no
previous knowledge of ancient Greece will be required. Non-Classics majors are most welcome.
(Same as Classic 170)

Creating, naming, and claiming the self has been a central preoccupation of African American literature from the 1800s to the 21st century. This course will explore several subgenres of autobiographical writing: slave narratives, autobiographical fiction, memoirs, and critical essays that utilize personal histories. Writers whose works we’ll analyze include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, John Edgar Wideman, Bell Hooks, and Patricia Williams. The writing component of the course will allow students to do some autobiographical writing, if they so choose.
(Same as AfAm 112B, and English 102D).

This course will provide the students with an introduction to the concept of globalization at the beginning of the course. Next, it will focus on the influence of globalization on the South-Asian subcontinent, specifically regarding gender and sexuality.
South-Asian culture always has recognized a "third gender" (transgender), while also honoring women "who row against the >stream". However, this recognition has not automatically translated into a societal openness towards gay, lesbian or transgender sexuality.
This course will discuss literature, films, TV programs, essays, etc. that deal with gender, sexuality and related topics, and discuss the varied strong reactions they have received in South Asia. After a brief historical perspective, the course will turn to examining a framework that can help us analyze and understand 20th century Indo-Pakistani literature, film etc. Within this context, we will study how globalization has influenced the production and reception of literature and art forms that openly discuss or display "alternative ways" of experiencing gender and sexuality."
(Same as GlblClt 103A)

Looking at a wide variety of films and issues, from gay diva worship and lesbian cinephilia to the cult followers of sci-fi television, this course asks the question: how do camp, cult, and trash function as politicized strategies for marginalized communities who attempt to turn the tables on establishment culture? The course looks at three distinct but overlapping film cultures that uphold, redeem, or re-read critically disparaged films, from over-the-top musicals and melodramas to cheesy sci-fi movies to risqué exploitation/B-film fare. This course is both an unconventional genre class which looks at films in terms of how their fans/followers have transgressively reappropriated them, and a rigorous look at how these oppositional "connoisseurships of trash" function as politicized strategies for marginalized communities. While similar in many ways, the devoted cult following of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the champions of camp/cult auteurs like Busby Berkeley, Ed Wood, John Waters or Russ Meyer, and the fans of Mae West, Marlene Deitrich, Greta Garbo and Star Trek, have differing cultural competences and complex relationships with these works-ranging from affectionate ridicule to parodic celebration to worshipful nostalgia. This class looks at what has been called a "good taste of bad taste", considering the sensibilities which can assert, paradoxically, that a film is "so awful it's good," or "so serious it's funny."
(Same as Film & Media 190)