Classes

Race, Sex, & the Ethics of Collection in the Harvard Peabody Museum (WGS 645)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2022
Instructors: Caroline Light & Meredith Reiches
Convened at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, this course examines how historical relations of gender, sex, sexuality, and imperial/racialized power continue to be narrativized, hidden, and excavated in historical and contemporary anthropological projects. Using an interdisciplinary feminist lens, we will enter the urgent and complex web of conversations, within the Peabody and between the museum and its publics, about how to reckon with its past and how to move, with ethical... Read more about Race, Sex, & the Ethics of Collection in the Harvard Peabody Museum (WGS 645)

Love's Labors Found: Uncovering Histories of Emotional Labor

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2018

How do love, care, and desire influence the value of work, and why is emotional labor – which is vital to child or elder care, domestic labor, nursing, teaching, and sex work – often considered to be something other than work? How and why do the racial and gender identities of workers affect the economic, social, and emotional value of their labor? How do political and social arrangements of labor help produce and reinforce racial categories while solidifying the boundaries separating masculinity and femininity? Through a mix of primary and secondary sources, this seminar...

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WGS 1424 - American Fetish: Consumer Culture Encounters the Other

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2017

Our consumer culture bombards us with images, logos, icons; and this bombardment can shape and even manufacture desires and attitudes in ways that are quite subtle and difficult to notice (let alone to guard against). Have you ever wondered, for example, why computers and phones bearing an Apple logo seem to be “worth” more than other, similar products? Or why we’re willing to pay more for certain commodities – like blue jeans – that bear a recognizable label? More troublingly, what does it mean when notions of human difference – like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, to name a few...

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USW 26 - Sex and the Citizen: Race, Gender, and Belonging in the U.S.

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2016

 

Ever wonder why race still matters (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. in on-line dating, even though most people claim to be “colorblind” when it comes to love? Or why and how the U.S. began conferring citizenship by “jus soli,” to people born on U.S. soil? Why did over half of the states prohibit marriage between people of (presumably) different races, and how have...

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The Secret Sex Life of Anthropological Artifacts

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2016

 

Objects in museum collections lead secret lives. Enmeshed in webs of sexed and gendered significance, they speak to hidden relations of desire and the erotics of power. There is a given-ness to museum display - to the selection of objects, the breadth of their claims for representativeness, the manner of their acquisition - that this course challenges using an interdisciplinary feminist lens. What does it mean to collect human cultural and biological history? What are the roles of gender, sex, and race in shaping the politics of anthropological collection and study? How...

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