Gender and Women's Studies (GWS)

This is an archived copy of the 2015-16 guide. To access the most recent version of the guide, please visit http://guide.berkeley.edu.

Courses

GWS N1B Reading and Composition 3 Units

Terms offered: Summer 2009 8 Week Session, Summer 2008 8 Week Session, Summer 2007 8 Week Session
Training and instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. The readings and assignments will focus on themes and issues in women's studies.

GWS R1B Reading and Composition 4 Units

Terms offered: Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2016 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2015 First 6 Week Session
Training and instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. The readings and assignments will focus on themes and issues in gender and women's studies. This course satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

GWS 10 Introduction to Gender and Women's Studies 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2017
Introduction to questions and concepts in gender and women's studies. Critical study of the formation of gender and its intersections with other relations of power, such as sexuality, racialization, class, religion, and age. Questions will be addressed within the context of a transnational world. Emphasis of the course will change depending on the instructor.

GWS 14 Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Global Political Issues 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
The production of gender, sexuality, and processes of racialization in contemporary global political issues. Topics and geographical foci may vary. Examples: the post-9-11 situation in the U.S. and U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Hindu-Muslim conflict in India; the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; the Israel/Palestine situation; global right-wing movements; state and social movement terrorisms and transnational "security"
measures.

GWS 20 Introduction to Feminist Theory 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Fall 2013
Why study theory? How, and from where, does the desire to theorize gender emerge? What does theory do? What forms does theory take? What is the relationship between theory and social movements? This course will introduce students to one of the most exciting and dynamic areas of contemporary inquiry.

GWS 24 Freshman Seminars 1 Unit

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
The Freshman and Sophomore Seminars program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small-seminar setting. Freshman seminars are offered in all campus departments, and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to fifteen freshmen.

GWS 40 Special Topics 3 Units

Terms offered: Summer 2017 First 6 Week Session, Fall 2016, Summer 2016 Second 6 Week Session
The findings of feminist scholarship as they apply to a particular problem, field, or existing discipline. Designed primarily for lower division students and non-majors. Topics vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the Women's Studies announcement of courses for specific semester topics.

GWS 50AC Gender in American Culture 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Summer 2016 First 6 Week Session
A multi-disciplinary course designed to provide students with an opportunity to work with faculty investigating the topic gender in American culture.

GWS 97 Internship 2 - 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017
Internship Program: Field work in an organization concerned with women's issues plus individual conferences with faculty. Students must present a written scope of work to the supervising faculty members before enrolling. Credit earned depends on the amount of written work completed by students that interprets the experience through diaries, historical reports, and creative work done for the organization. Faculty supervisor and
student must agree on assignments.

GWS 98 Directed Group Study for Undergraduates 1 - 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Seminars for the group study of selected topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics will vary from year to year.

GWS 99 Supervised Independent Study and Research 1 - 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2017
Individual research by lower division students only.

GWS 100AC Women in American Culture 3 Units

Terms offered: Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2017, Spring 2016
This course is designed to provide students with an opportunity to work with faculty investigating the topic women in American culture.

GWS 101 Doing Feminist Research 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
In this course, students will learn to do feminist research using techniques from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The teaching of interdisciplinary research skills will focus on practices of gender in a particular domain such as labor, love, science, aesthetics, film, religion, politics, or kinship. Topics will vary depending on the instructor.

GWS 102 Transnational Feminism 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
An overview of transnational feminist theories and practices, which address the workings of power that shape our world, and women's practices of resistance within and beyond the U.S. The course engages with genealogies of transnational feminist theories, including analyses of women, gender, sexuality, "race," racism, ethnicity, class, nation; postcoloniality; international relations; post-"development"; globalization; area studies;
and cultural studies.

GWS 103 Identities Across Difference 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2015, Fall 2014
The course studies identity as a product of articulation and investigation of self and other, rather than an inherited marking. Emphasis, for example, may be placed on the complexities of the lived experiences of women of color in the United States and in diverse parts of the world.

GWS 104 Feminist Theory 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
Feminist theory examines the basic categories that structure social life and that condition dominant modes of thought. Feminist theory engages with many currents of thought such as liberalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and transnational feminist theory. In this course, students will gain a working knowledge of the range and uses of feminist theory.

GWS 111 Special Topics 1 - 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session
This course is designed to provide students with an opportunity to work closely with Gender and Women's Studies faculty, investigating a topic of mutual interest in great depth. Emphasis in on student discussion and collaboration. Topics will vary from semester to semester. Number of units will vary depending on specific course, format, and requirements.

GWS 115 Engaged Scholarship in Women and Gender 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2011, Spring 2010
This class provides students the opportunity to do supervised community service with an organization that relates to women and gender. Students will be placed in an organization and complete an internship throughout the course of the semester. Students will also spend time reflecting on their internship experiences, connecting their service with concepts learned in gender and women's studies classes, and meeting as a group to evaluate and assess
issues such as volunteer/unpaid labor, activism and the academy, and the political economy of gender and women's services.

GWS 116AC Queer Theories: Activist Practices 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2011
This class will examine various forms of activist practices and create possibilities for students to participate in community projects that allow them to explore their own definitions of activism, community engagement, and social transformation. As a class, we will consider different types of interventions -- art, law, advocacy, and direct action -- and examine the limits and possibilities of these different forms of social engagement.

GWS 120 The History of American Women 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2014, Spring 2011, Fall 2009
This course will survey the history of women in the United States from approximately 1890 to the present, a century of dramatic and fundamental change in the meaning of gender difference. We will examine such topics as work, the family, sexuality, and politics and be attentive to variations in the structure and experience of gender based on race, ethnicity, and class.

GWS 125 Women and Film 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2012, Fall 2010, Fall 2009
This course explores the role of women both in front of and behind the camera. It examines the socially constructed nature of gender representations in film and analizes the position of women as related to the production and reception of films. Emphasis is on feminist aproaches that challenge and expose the underlying working of patriarchy in cinema.

GWS 126 Film, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2011, Spring 2010
Focusing on the creative process while engaging in critical debates on politics, ethics, and aesthetics, the course explores the site where feminist film-making practice meets with and challenges the avant-garde tradition. It emphasizes works that question conventional notions of subjectivity, audience, and interpretation in relation to film making, film viewing, and the cinematic apparatus.

GWS 129 Bodies and Boundaries 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2014, Fall 2011
Examines gender and embodiment in interdisciplinary transnational perspective. The human body as both a source of pleasure and as a site of coercion, which expresses individuality and reflects social worlds. Looks at bodies as gendered, raced, disabled/able-bodied, young or old, rich or poor, fat or thin, commodity or inalienable. Considers masculinity, women's bodies, sexuality, sports, clothing, bodies constrained, in leisure, at work, in nation-building
, at war, and as feminist theory.

GWS 130AC Gender, Race, Nation, and Health 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
Examines the role of gender in health care status, in definitions and experiences of health, and in practices of medicine. Feminist perspectives on health care disparities, the medicalization of society, and transnational processes relating to health. Gender will be considered in dynamic interaction with race, ethnicity, sexuality, immigration status, religion, nation, age, and disability, and in both urban and rural settings.

GWS 131 Gender and Science 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Fall 2011, Spring 2009
Examines historical and contemporary scientific studies of gender, sexuality, class, nation, and race from late 18th century racial and gender classifications through the heyday of eugenics to today's genomics. Explores the embedding of the scientific study of gender and sexuality and race in different political, economic, and social contexts. Considers different theories for the historical underrepresentation of women and minorities in science
, as well as potential solutions. Introduces students to feminist science studies, and discusses technologies of production, reproduction, and destruction that draw on as well as remake gender locally and globally.

GWS 132AC Gender, Race, and Law 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2015
Focusing on the interconnected ways that race, gender, and sexuality are constructed through the law, this course will examine a wide range of historical texts, legal documents, literature, and critical theory. Throughout our course readings, we will be focusing on how these categories of difference inform legal constructions of nation, citizenship, immigration, masculinity, femininity, childhood, the public sphere, and everyday life. Throughout the course, we will
be making connections between historical events and the contemporary moment through a consideration of interpretation and implications of legal arguments.

GWS 133AC Women, Men, and Other Animals: Human Animality in American Cultures 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2013, Spring 2011
Explores various ways that human groups and interests, particularly in the United States, have both attached and divorced themselves from other animals, with particular focus on gender, race, ability, and sexuality as the definitional foils for human engagements with animality.

GWS 134 Gender and the Politics of Childhood 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Fall 2010
Explores gender and age as interrelated dimensions of social structure, meaning, identity, and embodiment. Emphasis on the gendered politics of childhood--for example, in the social regulation of reproduction; child-rearing, motherhood, fatherhood, care, and rights; the changing global political economy of childhoods and varied constructions of "the child"; child laborers, soldiers, street children; consumption by and for children;
growing up in schools, neighborhoods, and families.

GWS 139 Women, Gender, and Work 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Spring 2013, Spring 2011
This course uses gender as a lens to examine the nature, meaning, and organization of work. Students learn varied conceptual approaches with which to probe such issues as gender and race divisions of labor, the economic significance of caring and other forms of unpaid labor, earnings disparities between men and women, race and class differences in women's work, transnational labor immigration, and worker resistance and organizing.

GWS 140 Feminist Cultural Studies 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of feminist cultural studies. Drawing upon contemporary theories of representational politics, the specific focus of the course will vary, but the emphasis will remain on the intersections of gender, race, nation, sexuality, and class in particular cultural and critical practices.

GWS 141 Interrogating Global Economic "Development" 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2013, Spring 2010, Spring 2009
An introduction to women and gender in "development." Addresses theories of "development" (modernization, demographic transition, dependency, world systems, post-development, postcolonial, and transnational feminist): productions and representations of "underdevelopment"; national and international "development" apparatuses; "development" practices about labor, population, resources, environment
, literacy, technologies, media; and women's resistance and alternatives.

GWS 142 Women in the Muslim and Arab Worlds 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2016, Fall 2013
Examines differences and similarities in women's lives in the Muslim/Arab worlds, including diasporas in Europe and North America. Analysis of issues of gender in relation to "race," ethnicity, nation, religion, and culture.

GWS 143 Women, Proverty, and Globalization 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2010, Fall 2009
This course examines new patterns of inequality as they relate to the feminization of poverty in a global and transnational context. It will give students the opportunity to enhance their critical knowledge of new forms of globalization and their impact on the least-privileged group of women locally and globally. It also provides an opportunity for students to work with a local or global non-governmental or community organization with a focus on gender and
poverty, and to engage in a systematic analysis of the strategies and practices of these organizations.

GWS 144 Alternate Sexualities in a Transnational World 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2009, Spring 2008
This course engages with contemporary narrations produced by and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual postcolonial subjects through genres such as autobiography, fiction, academic writing, film, journalism, and poetry. Each semester the focus is geopolitically limited to no more than two countries to allow students to consider the conditions out of which the narrations are produced. Sites and subjects may vary from semester to semester.

GWS C146A Cultural Representations of Sexualities: Queer Literary Culture 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course examines modern literary cultures that construct ways of seeing diverse sexualities. Considering Western conventions of representation during the modern period, we will investigate the social forces and institutions that would be necessary to sustain a newly imagined or re-imagined sexual identity across time.

GWS C146B Cultural Representations of Sexualities: Queer Visual Culture 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2014
This course examines modern visual cultures that construct ways of seeing diverse sexualities. Considering Western conventions of representation during the modern period, we will investigate film, television, and video. How and when do "normative" and "queer" sexualities become visually defined?

GWS 155 Gender and Transnational Migration 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2011
What economic, social, and cultural forces impel women to migrate and shape their experiences as immigrants? How does gender, together with race/ethnicity and class, affect processes of settlement, community building, and incorporation into labor markets? This course examines gender structures and relations as they are reconfigured and maintained through immigration. It emphasizes the agency of immigrant women as they cope with change and claim their rights as citizens.

GWS 195 Gender and Women's Studies Senior Seminar 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This seminar is required for all seniors majoring in gender and women's studies. The goal of the course is for students to produce a research paper of 25-30 pages that reflects feminist methods, interpretations, or analysis.

GWS H195 Gender and Women's Studies Senior Honors Thesis 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
Entails writing a bachelor's honors thesis pertaining to the student's major in gender and women's studies. Each student will work under the guidance of a faculty adviser who will read and grade the thesis.

GWS C196A UCDC Core Seminar 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This course is the UCDC letter-graded core seminar for 4 units that complements the P/NP credited internship course UGIS C196B. Core seminars are designed to enhance the experience of and provide an intellectual framework for the student's internship. UCDC core seminars are taught in sections that cover various tracks such as the Congress, media, bureaucratic organizations and the Executive Branch, international relations, public policy and general
un-themed original research.

GWS C196B UCDC Internship 6.5 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This course provides a credited internship for all students enrolled in the UCDC and Cal in the Capital Programs. It must be taken in conjunction with the required academic core course C196A. C196B requires that students work 3-4 days per week as interns in settings selected to provide them with exposure to and experienc in government, public policy, international affairs, media, the arts or other areas or relevance to their major fields of study.

GWS C196W Special Field Research 10.5 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015, Fall 2014
Students work in selected internship programs approved in advance by the faculty coordinator and for which written contracts have been established between the sponsoring organization and the student. Students will be expected to produce two progress reports for their faculty coordinator during the course of the internship, as well as a final paper for the course consisting of at least 35 pages.
Other restrictions apply; see faculty adviser.

GWS 197 Internship 2 - 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 10 Week Session, Spring 2017
Internship Program: Field work in an organization concerned with women's issues plus individual conferences with faculty. Students must present a written scope of work to the supervising faculty members before enrolling. Credit earned depends on the amount of written work completed by students that interprets the experience through diaries, historical reports, and creative work done for the organization. Faculty supervisor and
student must agree on assignments.

GWS 198 Directed Group Study for Advanced Undergraduates 1 - 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Seminars for group study of selected topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics will vary from year to year.

GWS 199 Supervised Independent Study for Advanced Undergraduates 1 - 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2017
Reading and conference with the instructor in a field that does not coincide with that of any regular course and is specific enough to enable students to write an essay based upon their studies.

GWS 200 Theory and Critical Research 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course will provide an opportunity for the examination of diverse feminist theories produced in different disciplines and across disciplines. The course will ground contemporary philosophical and theoretical developments in the study of gender to specific histories of class, race, ethnicity, nation, and sexuality. Participants in the class will be urged to draw upon their own disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds and interests
to produce multifaceted analyses of how feminist theory has acted to delimit the study of women in some instances as well as how it may be used critically and imaginatively to open the field in complex and dynamic ways. Graduate students research and write a substantial (25-50 page) paper for the course. They will also participate in organizing and leading class discussion on a rotating basis.

GWS 210 Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
A cross-disciplinary examination of specific problems in the study of gender, women, and sexuality. Topics will vary; for example, representations of motherhood, women in the public sphere, work and gender, globalization of gender, and the history of sexuality.

GWS 220 Research Seminar 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
Members of the seminar will present their ongoing dissertation research and mutually explore the interdisciplinary dimensions and implications of their work.

GWS 230 Transnational Feminist Theories 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2012, Fall 2011, Spring 2010
The aim of this course is to provide graduate students with an understanding of transnational feminist theories so that they may more effectively engage with this area of scholarship, but moreover so that they may critically and creatively contribute to it through their own writing.

GWS 231 Proseminar in Transnational Gender and Women's Studies 1 Unit

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Designed to encourage dialogue around themes related to transnational gender and women's studies, this proseminar is organized around colloquia, panels, and conferences sponsored by the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, the Beatrice Bain Research Group, the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, and (as relevant) other campus units.

GWS 232 Transnational Feminist Approaches to Knowledge Production 4 Units

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course focuses on incorporating the analytic power of transnational feminist studies in academic reserch projects and practices. It examines the ways in which interdisciplinary and transnational approaches to gender and wormen replicate, challenge, reconfigure, and transform the emergence of new knowledge frames, analytics, and research practices. Students in this course will explore these and other questions in the context of their own research projects.

GWS 236 Diaspora, Border, and Transnational Identities 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Fall 2013, Fall 2011
This course will study debates around the notions of home, location, migrancy, mobility, and dislocation by focusing on issues of gender and sexuality. We will examine the ways in which various cultural flows have fundamentally challenged and changed the nature of global economy by expanding mobility of capital, labor, and systems of representations in a transnational context. We will also look at the impact of new technologies in production, distribution
, communication, and circulation of cultural meanings and social identites by linking nationalism, immigration, diaspora, and globalization to the process of subject formation in a postcolonial context.

GWS 237 Transnational Science, Technology, and New Media 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2010, Fall 2008
This is a core class of the new Ph.D in Transnational Gender and Women's Studies. It will expose students to critical thinking about science, technology, and new media. The class explores intersections of gender and women's studies with science, technology, engineering, medicine, and new media around the world; including women in science; transnational feminist science and technology studies; technologies of reproduction, production and destruction; divisions
of scientific and technical labor; embodiment and subjectivity; digital divides, digital consumption, embodiment, and circulation; modernist projects of categorization; and the making and breaking of gendered bodies. It mixes secondary sources with primary sources, and among the primary sources, mixes scientific and technical documents with new media and the arts.

GWS 238 Feminist Bio-Politics 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2010
This course is divided into three sections, Theorists and Methods, The Sciences of Life, and Bio-and-Necro-politics, and within each section there are further thematic headings. The course serves both to introduce graduate students to science and technology studies and to introduce new works and directions in the field. The syllabus foregrounds the life and biomedical sciences, and thematizes space and trans-place, time and genealogy, disciplines and inter-disciplines
, method and/as theory, identity and governance, ethics and objectivity, knowledge and stratification, security and transparency.

GWS 250 Queer Translation 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2014, Fall 2010
This seminar aims for both a familiarization and a potential reworking of selected contemporary debates in queer theory: those concerning migration, race, globalization, and movements of theory. How do queer theories, queer theories-as-practice, queer practices travel? Furthermore, do critiques of stability found in queer theory invite presumptions of mobility? We will interrogate the shadow of "mobility" in queer theory by considering queer tourism
, gender identity, sub-class labor migration, and the outer zones of citizenship.

GWS 299 Individual Study and Research 1 - 9 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017
For students engaged in individual research and study. May not be substituted for available graduate lecture courses.

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