Leaning In, Hooking Up: Visions of Feminism and Femininity in the 21st Century

Semester:

Spring

Offered:

2021

https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/39658

Featured as #11 of "63 College Classes That Give Us Hope for the Next Generation," Elle, June 2016. What does it mean to do feminism, or to be a feminist in the 21st-century United States? What can we make of the dominant social expectations for a woman's life? This course explores contemporary ideals of feminine success, including their physical, familial,...

Domestic Witness: "At Home" for Better or Worse

Semester:

Fall

Offered:

2020

In the spring of 2020 many Americans were sent home by the state, to shelter in place and learn news ways of working “safely”. Others were deemed “essential workers” and forced to labor under conditions of risk. Some faced homelessness while others fled to second homes. This collision of work and home, public and private, exposed multiple fault lines across the axes of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Our current moment is rooted in a long history in which the home becomes a charged site for racialized, classed, and gendered performances of cleaning, cooking, childcare, and schooling...

The History of Sexualities in the Modern West

Semester:

Fall

Offered:

2018

It is easy to imagine sexuality as natural, bodily, instinctual—something that emanates from the essential self. But the forms that desires and even needs take are highly specific to place and time. That is, they have histories. This course addresses sexuality within its ever-changing cultural contexts, and seeks to understand how ideas about sex, sex acts, and sexual identities and attitudes have transformed over time. In turn, we look at the ways in which sexuality has served as a...

Body Contests: From Pageants to Playoffs

Semester:

Fall

Offered:

2017

This course covers the gamut of situations in which bodily ideals (either visual or performative), and therefore gender, are competitively at stake — child sports, beauty contests for children and adults, college athletic scholarships and Title IX, cheerleading, football and damage to the body, couch potatoes and the issue of spectatorship, the Olympics and sexual sorting, bodybuilding, modeling contests (straight and drag), plastic surgery and the goal of the ideal/ageless body, DNA and designer babies and bionic bodies, even competitive eating and oenophile competitions. We will...