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The field of African Feminism has had a controversial history. This course aims to provide an introduction to this history, and to give an overview of key debates in African feminism. In the early days of African decolonization, discourses around decolonial nationalisms and the afterlives of colonialism were dominated by men. Yet women novelists, theorists, and activists, while previously largely overlooked nevertheless wrote and continue to write. Many women wrote from the domestic sphere, using the dynamics of the (post)colonial home to reflect on the nation, colonialism, gender, and sexuality. More recent literatures reflect on global belonging, Africannness, and blackness from a feminist lens. This course considers how African feminist literatures imagine decoloniality in the context of gender, sexuality, and blackness that dominant narratives obscure.

GWS 203 Queer Theory: This course introduces students to a range of theoretical frames for analyzing and interpreting queer identities, queer experiences, the particular intersectionalities that structure queer experience, including queerness and race, queerness and socioeconomic class, and local and global differences in how queerness is conceptualized. The course examines the history of how queerness is understood through early queer theorists like Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler and explores contemporary accounts of queer experience and identity through theorists like Jasbir K. Puar and Sara Ahmed. We will evaluate the usefulness of queer theories through literary, film, and cultural analysis and interpretation.

This course will primarily focus on women's experiences in history from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries in Europe. In addition, students will study concepts like femininity and masculinity and the role of gender in history. Topics include religion, science, childbirth, feminism, sexuality, class, imperialism, industrialization, the Holocaust, and the cold war as understood through the lens of women and gender. Students will be assigned primary and secondary readings, will write several papers, and will give oral presentations on research topics.

This seminar explores feminist engagements with some of the central concepts in politics and political theory, specifically freedom, action, justice, rights, and equality.