Women's Studies Certificate Program
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
Course Descriptions
Fall 2005

Coordinator: Patricia T. Clough, Room 5103 (817-8895, 817-8905)

The Certificate in Women’s Studies is available to students matriculated in the Ph.D. programs at The Graduate Center. Women=s Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to research and scholarship that draws on various disciplines, while challenging disciplinary boundaries. The general aim of the program is to offer critical reflection on the experiences of both women and men in terms of differences of gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity and nation. Students are prepared to teach courses and to do research in Women=s Studies and related critical approaches to the disciplines, such as those developed in Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies. Besides focused course work and guidance in research, Women=s Studies offers participation in a wide range of graduate students and faculty activities, including lecture series and forums. Students are also invited to participate in the research programs and seminars at the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center.

WSCP 71700 - Proseminar: Multicultural/Transnational Feminisms
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Hester Eisenstein/Karen Miller [92764] [Cross listed with Soc. 80101]

This course will critically examine the idea of transnational feminism. We will look at the rise of feminism in countries seeking independence from colonial rule after World War II. We will track the role of the United Nations in developing "global feminism" since 1975, with the series of international conferences that culminated in the Beijing World Conference of Women in 1995 and the Beijing-plus-10 process recently concluded at the United Nations in March, 2005. We will look at the accusation of "imperial feminism" launched against white feminist writers by Third World writers, and track the emergence of feminisms by women of color beginning in the 1980s. We will ask the question: what is the status of the women's movement in relation to the anti-globalization movements and the international movement against racism and for reparations marked by the Durban, South Africa conference of September 2001? We will look at the range of feminist theories and practices over the period since the 1970s, and try to relate the series of demands seeking the integrity of the body, the right to reproductive self-determination, the right to sexual autonomy, and other individual or personal rights, to the broader canvas of local, state, national, and international interventions. What is the politics of international or global feminism in the current framework of U.S. imperialist expansion and global domination?

WSCP 80801 - Major Feminist Texts
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Jerilyn Fisher /Linda Grasso[92765] [Cross listed with MALS 72100]

This course examines texts that have shaped a legacy of feminist scholarship, including essays, short stories, novels, plays, treatises, and manifestos. Organized historically, readings explore a range of women's responses to patriarchal traditions from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Students read texts written by white, African American, Caribbean, Latina, and Asian American women, and explore key feminist issues such as: access to education and an intellectual life; gender as performance; acts of resistance against race, class, and gender domination; and the freedom to pursue sexual pleasure, economic independence, and self determination.

WSCP 81000 - Multiculturalism
GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Leith Mullings [92766] [Cross listed with Anth. 81200]

Description coming soon.

WSCP 81000 - Victimology
JJ T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jayne Mooney [92767] [Cross listed with CRJ. 73600]

Description coming soon.

WSCP 81000 - The Making of Americans, 1902-4-34: Stein and Other Modern Folk
GC R 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mark Dolan [92768] [Cross listed with Eng. 75300]

When Gertrude Stein was beginning her long book, The Making of Americans, it was a book about her family as first books are about families and as she began it again and again it was "a complete description of every kind of human being that ever could or would be living" as she was saying some years after finishing it and as she was writing and people were reading the book it became a book about books before and after it and as she was saying just after she had finished it "the only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends on how everybody is doing everything." In this course, we will read the books Gertrude Stein was reading and writing and the books before and after her long book, The Making of Americans.

We will read America as it was and was becoming as Gertrude Stein was writing and seeing and doing, the America that was past and the America that was becoming and the America that was as Gertrude Stein was always enjoying saying "beginning again and again" Prerequisites: None. Course Requirements: Two presentations and a final paper presenting original scholarship on a text or texts in any medium composed in the first third of the twentieth century.

WSCP 81000 - Studies in Romantic Poetry: Blake and Counterculture
GC F 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jacqueline DiSalvo [92769] [Cross listed with Eng. 84100]

William Blake can be situated in three countercultures: 1) the esoteric heretical as well as subversive traditions (mysticism, prophecy, primitivism, and the radical traditions of millenarianism and anti-nominees (Levellers, Diggers, Ranters); 2) the oppositional movements of the Romantic era (Jacobinism, feminism, anti-imperialism, critiques of the politics of religion etc); 3) the countercultures and cutting edge paradigms he initiates and anticipates. Einstein, asked the source of his scientific breakthrough, replied, "I just questioned an assumption. Blake, questioning of most of the assumptions of modern bourgeois ideologies, was indeed the prophetic poet he sought to be and possibly the most subversive artist in Western culture. He anticipated aspects of Marxism, socialism, multi-culturalism, sexual radicalism (Reich, Tantra), gender criticism, Freudian as well as transformative and body-oriented psychologies (bio-energetics), non-ordinary states of consciousness, anti-dualism--rethinking the relation of mind and body, matter and consciousness, non-theistic spiritualities, multi-media art, and the rejection of atomistic and individualist perspectives for energetic field theories and the breakthroughs of modern theoretical physics. He also anticipated elements of post-modern theories of language, discourse and ideology (such as Althusser's concept of interpellation of the subject by ideological state apparatuses), Bakhtin's dialogism, Foucauld's analysis of disciplinary culture and power/knowledge, and critiques of realism and logocentrism. But Blake also offered an alternative to aspects of post-modernism, which, while providing useful methodologies of critique, really isn't post anything, but represents the breakdown of modernism, rather than its potential super cession. Blake, on the other hand, developed alternative paradigms for the revolutionary, utopian, and visionary project he referred to as "building Jerusalem" in place of "State Religion" and its "dark Satanic mills." The methodology of this class will be to study Blake poetic and artistic works intensively while undertaking a parallel exploration of a few of the cutting edge intellectual and artistic perspectives he anticipated. Students will undertake a semester long investigation of one of these questions and any insights they provide into Blake's texts. Periodically they will produce brief progress reports and think pieces and share their discoveries with the class. Finally students will write a final paper relating Blake to the questions, and ideas they have explored and the discoveries they have made. In this sense we will not just be studying Blake but being Blakean.

WSCP 81000 - 20th Century British Poetry
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jane Marcus [92770] [Cross listed with Eng. 86200]

Beginning with Hardy, Hopkins and Yeats, Keith Tuma's massive Anthology of 20th Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press) goes on through the classic poets of Modernism, World War I, the Auden Generation through contemporary poets, (more are included in New British Poetry, edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic (Graywolf Press), our supplemental text. The course will work to provide an overview of the century's poetry with particular poets, historical moments, and movements given special attention. The changing canon of women writers and writers of color will be taken into account. We will work on David Jones' World War I poem "In Parentheses," the poems from a wartime anthology edited by Edith Sitwell, called Wheels, and the important rediscovered 1919 poem "Paris" by Hope Mirrlees, a major influence on The Waste Land, published in the same series by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press , followed by Nancy Cunard's Parallax. Students will be encouraged to write a brief paper at the beginning of class, to make several short presentations in class and to produce a final paper of original research.

WSCP 81000 - Proust I
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Eve Sedgwick [92771] [Cross listed with Eng. 87100] Permission of the Instructor is required.

This is a year-long seminar (divided into two courses: Proust I and Proust II) organized around a close, start-to-finish reading of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. We will be considering a wide range of the issues, motives, and ambitions embodied in the novel, including its complicated relation to the emerging discourses of Euro- American homosexuality. Other preoccupations that I hope will emerge through our discussions include the changing possibilities of novelistic genre; narratorial consciousness; texture; habit and addiction; experimental identities; adult relations to childhood; the spatialities of present and past; the psychologies of object relations; the vicissitudes of gender; the bourgeois maternal in relation to such other roles as the grandmother, the aunt, the uncle, and a variety of domestic workers; alternatives to triangular desire; the languages of affect; phallic and non-phallic sexualities; the phenomenology and epistemology of oneiric states; the relations between Jewish diasporic being and queer diasporic being within modernism; and the affective, phenomenological, and philosophical ramifications of an interest in the transmigration of souls - to name but a few. For ease of discussion, all students are required to use the new translation edited by Christopher Prendergast (individual translations by Lydia Davis et al.). Those who wish to can also read in French.

WSCP 81000 - Can Paulo Freire Work in Kansas? Critical Pedagogy in Reactionary Times
 GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ira Shor [92772] [Cross listed with Eng. 89000]

These are agonizing times for progressive educators, dissident scholars, and public-sector advocates in general. Following author Thomas Frank who asked WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?, this seminar will rethink the work of Paulo Freire in this reactionary era. Freire, perhaps the most important world educational thinker of the late 20th century, also co-founder of the Workers Party in Brazil which recently elected labor-leader Lula to the national Presidency, invented a rich rhetoric, theory and practice for democratic politics and critical pedagogy. His frameworks of generative themes, problem-posing, dialogic learning, "untested feasibility," and sociolinguistic research emerged from his work among battered peasants and workers in a Third World country. Can this rhetoric and pedagogy still hold promise for critical educators here in the wealthy North, where the political climate is more and more hostile to democratic politics? This seminar will rethink Freire's ideas and methods, and those whose work followed him, to examine their value for an American rhetoric and pedagogy that question the status quo, that seek transformative discourses in classrooms and society.

WSCP 81000 - Genre Theory and the African American Novel: From Picaro to Petit Bourgeoisie,1850-1930
GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jon-Christian Suggs [92773] [Cross listed with Eng. 85500]

Recent theorizing about the extended prose narrative requires that we take a new look at the development of the African American novel. Some attention, such as Sondra O'Neale's reconstruction of the bildungsroman in the works of Frances E. W. Harper, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Gayl Jones, has been paid to specific generic issues as parts of this discussion, but nothing that sketches out the dimensions of a new overview of the development of the genre has been suggested. I'd like to take a look at how the African American novel emerges as an adaptive project from the Euro-Anglo-"American" conventions that were themselves evolving in the nineteenth century. For instance, we might ask how a narrative form at least partially dedicated to charting the rising and falling and then rising fortunes of individual members of an emerging class could be adapted to the experiences of subject-actors whose very existence as individuals capable of willed action, of choice, of the capacities of self-knowledge, of irony or of romance were denied by the dominant discursive culture within which they sought to write. The course will read some recent genre theory and revisit some older theories of the novel and take a chronological look at the African American novel from its nascence in the picaresque fugitive narrative through the domestic bourgeois comedies of the New Negro movement. We will end, I think, somewhat where we began, with the picaresque adventures of Max Disher in George Schuyler's Black No More. Along the way we will try to theorize what we are seeing as African American writers fashion the American novel beside their white contemporaries.

WSCP 81000 - American Women's Writing, 1637-1900
GC T 6:30- 8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. John Matteson [92774] [Cross listed with Eng. 78000]

This seminar uses the lens of literature to examine the artistic and social achievements of a legally disadvantaged and politically excluded class: the American woman before the age of women's suffrage. Invoking a broad range of genres, it observes women speaking of and to female experience and striving to define modes of individuality that are both expressive of self and supportive of community. We shall also consider the struggle of the woman writer to achieve credibility despite the resistance of a patriarchal community of letters, exemplified by Hawthorne¹s denunciation of the "damned mob of scribbling women" and Frank Norris¹s assertion that "fatigue, harassing doubts [and] a touch of hysteria" disqualified women as serious literary artists. Our seminar will discuss the growing diversity of the American national character and the convergence of race and gender issues in the oeuvre of African-American women writers. We shall also follow the transformation of female literary voices through times of vast social change and will examine how female behavior and expression evolved, both to meet and to challenge the requirements of an urbanizing, industrializing and (gradually) democratizing society. While investigating the competing demands of aesthetic achievement and popular success, we shall see how participation in the literary marketplace enabled women to enter and influence the masculine sphere of commerce, as well as how the narration of domesticity became a means toward arguing for a larger role for women outside the home. Novelists will include Sedgwick, Cummins, Stowe, Alcott, and Hopkins. Poets will include Bradstreet, Wheatley, Sigourney, Dickinson, Gilman, and the Zaragoza Club Poets. The genre of the non-fiction narrative will be explored through the writings of Winnemucca, Velazquez, Chen, and others. Other figures are likely to include Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Alice James, and contributors to The Lowell Offering. Many shorter selections will be drawn from the first volume of the recently published Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers. The course will require an oral presentation and a final research paper.

WSCP 81000 - Humiliation
GC W 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum [] [Cross listed with Eng. 88100]

This seminar will explore experiences of humiliation, as represented in literature, and as enacted in aesthetic process. Our sources will probably include Shakespeare's King Lear, the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom (excerpts), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, Richard Wright's Black Boy, poetry and drawings from Antonin Artaud's final period, Jean Genet's Funeral Rites, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Sylvia Plath's Ariel, José Saramago's Blindness, Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, art and texts by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Louise Bourgeois, and theoretical writings by Julia Kristeva and Silvan Tomkins. We will see one film, possibly Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Students will each develop an original research project, embodied in a final essay.

WSCP 81000 - History of Modern Italy
GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mary Gibson [92775] [Cross listed with Hist. 71700]

This course will explore modern Italy with an emphasis on the social and cultural history of the period 1860-1945. We will examine how men, women, and children experienced political and economic processes like unification, industrialization, urbanization, colonialism, the rise of socialism and fascism, and the two world wars. We will pay particular attention to the place of gender, class, and race in the cultural discourses of both the liberal period following unification and the fascist dictatorship of the interwar period. The course will place the Italian experience within the framework of more general European historiographical debates on gender and the family, class relationships, legal definitions of crime and sexual deviance, anti-semitism, regionalism (northern/southern Italy), the origins of fascism, and fascist culture. 

Class requirements include book reviews (1-2 pages each) of the assigned readings (30%); a historiographical paper of 10-12 pages (30%); and oral presentations and class participation (40%). Readings emphasize the most current contributions to modern Italian social and cultural history; we will look at them as models applicable to the history of other European and non-European societies. Required readings are in paperback; others are available at the Graduate Center Library or the New York Public Library.

WSCP 81000 - Approaches to the Study of the Middle East
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Beth Baron/Selma Botman [92776] [Cross listed with Hist. 78000]

This seminar will expose students to major themes in Middle East studies in a range of disciplines, including history, art history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and comparative literature. We will consider the making of the field, with particular emphasis on the American academic context, and discuss current trends. We will invite CUNY colleagues to set their own research and writing trajectories within the context of disciplinary and theoretical debates in their fields and region of specialization. The goal of this pro-seminar is to broaden students' perspectives beyond their discipline and/or country of specialization, and to expose them to trends, methods, and issues by mapping the field of Middle East Studies.

WSCP 81000 - History of Childhood from Antiquity to Modern Times
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Margaret King [92777] [Cross listed with Hist. 70500]

Studies the place children occupied in society and the way people have thought about children and childhood from antiquity through the twentieth century in Europe, the United States, and in non-Western societies. It will look at child-rearing practices, the concept and practice of parenting, the problem of childhood disease and mortality, the education of children, the development of private and state-based programs for improving children's lives, the ways in which the experience of childhood have been recalled, and the ways historians have attempted to reconstruct the history of the child.

Classes will be devoted to discussion of primary texts read in common. and monographs read by individual students, each of whom will read six for the term. Students will submit brief abstracts (1-2 pages) on their chosen six books. There will be a take-home final exam (3-5 pages).

To read over the summer: Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Trans. R. Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1965)

WSCP 81000 - Seminar in Music History and Theory: Feminist Music Studies
GC T 10:00-1:00 p.m., Room 3491, 3 credits, Prof. Ellie Hisama [92778] [Cross listed with Music 86900] Permission of the Instructor is required.

An interdisciplinary examination of the ways that studies of gender and sexuality have informed music theory, musicology, ethnomusicology, and composition. We will consider a variety of music in order to investigate how performers, composers, audiences, scholars, and critics have understood music to be gendered. The seminar explores and builds upon previous efforts to theorize music using gender as a unit of analysis. Readings by Brett, Brooks, Butler, Cusick, Griffin, Guck, Kielian-Gilbert, Maus, McClary, Perry, Scherzinger, Solie, Tick, Tucker, and others. Permission of instructor required.

WSCP 81000 - American Public Policy
GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Joyce Gelb [92779] [Cross listed with P SC 82503]

This course will relate theories of the policy making process to actual case studies in decision making in the U.S. Among the topics to be analyzed will be policies selected from the following: policy toward breast cancer and health, anti tobacco, the environment, family policy (child care and parental leave), and crime and criminal justice, as well as possible consideration of the decision to invade Iraq or implement the NAFTA.

Sources to be utilized will draw from: Stone, Policy Paradox; Hayes, The Limits of Policy Change; Kingdon, Agendas Alternatives and Public Policies, and Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics, as well as relevant case studies.

Course work will include a midterm, short paper and take home final.

WSCP 81000 - United States as a Welfare State in Comparative Perspective
GC W 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Frances Fox Piven [92780] [Cross listed with PSC 82601 and Soc. 84000]

The governments of all western industrial societies have developed an array of programs to protect people against certain risks such as unemployment or ill health, and also to protect specified groups who are considered to be particularly at risk, such as the very young or the very old. However, there are large differences in the timing, type and scale of these interventions. The first American national social welfare programs were inaugurated in the United States during the Great Depression, some fifty years after comparable programs were begun in Western Europe, and these programs remained relatively niggardly. Moreover, while both European and American programs were inscribed with distinctions that differentiated among people by gender, American programs also reflected and reproduced the racial distinctions that pervaded other American institutions. There are, in other words, both provocative parallels and provocative contrasts in the development of the American and European welfare states.

In this course, we will explore these differences and similarities in the light of major theories of welfare state development, particularly those theories that fasten on gender, class or race as explanatory variables in institutional development. We will pay particular attention to what is sometimes called the contemporary "crisis of the welfare state," and to the influence of gender, class and race in the unfolding of this so-called crisis. We will also consider the implications of current developments for the future of the welfare state.

This course has been designed in three main parts. Part I takes up some of the main theoretical perspectives which have guided work on the welfare state. Part II draws on these perspectives to examine the historical origins of the welfare state in old poor relief arrangements, the emergence of the modern welfare state in the 20th century, and the distinctive pattern of American welfare state development . Part III deals with the contemporary crisis of the welfare state. In this section we will consider arguments that root the so-called crisis in the economy, and arguments that root the difficulties in politics, (including the politics specifically generated by the consequences of the operation of welfare state programs.) We will also consider some of the proposals for resolving these contemporary problems, using a case study of the recent debacle over health care reform as an illustration. And finally, we will draw on theory and history to consider the question of the political future of the welfare state in the United States. Do postindustrial (or postmodern) transformations in our society demand new ways of thinking about welfare state development? A research paper is required for the completion of this course. It should be planned in consultation with the instructor.

WSCP 81000 - The Study of Lives
GC R 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Suzanne Ouellette [92781] [Cross listed with Psych 80103]

Close and careful looking at lives reveals individuals in all their complexity and enables discoveries about the communities, societies, and cultures of which those individuals are part. Deep understanding of one single person enables and requires the understanding of many persons in their distinctive times and places. The class will review the history of the study of lives, covering issues like (a) psychology's ironic ambivalence about studying lives (and preference for studying variables and concepts), (b) the reliance on life studies by contemporary sociology, anthropology, and education research, (c) the place of biography in literary studies, and (d) the current explosion of autobiographical forms such as memoirs and blogs. We will read several studies of lives. People write and tell their own lives and those of others against and within the background of all sorts of life circumstances. In this class, we will focus on lives written by or about people who contend with social injustices such as those of racism and heterosexism and/or serious illness and debilitation. We will read autobiographies and memoirs, biographies, life histories, and other forms of life studies. Through discussion of these texts, we will develop conceptual and methodological skills to be applied in our own attempts at life writing. Several theoretical positions will be considered, including recent contributions by feminist, postmodern, existential/phenomenological, and narrative approaches. We will seek to craft methods that match the theoretical promise and practical needs that we uncover. The course is intended for students seeking to make life studies a central part of their work as well as those for whom the biographical is only to supplement other approaches. The course is open to students from all disciplines concerned with life study. Given that life study work is best done across disciplinary lines, the course will seek to take advantage of what each participant brings from her or his disciplinary "home" and engage life study work at the intersections of literature, social science, and the arts. Class meetings will take a variety of forms. Some will involve discussion of published life studies and formal statements on why and how one does life study work. Other sessions will involve actual practice of selected techniques for the observation and analysis of evidence, and the writing of life studies.

WSCP 81000 - Family/Parenthood/Adoption
GC T 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Barbara Katz Rothman [92783] [Cross listed with Soc. 85404]

This course will offer a sociological analysis of the family in its many old and new variations, with particular attention to issues of birth and parenting. The focus will be on the United States and its particular racial, class and gender politics and eugenic history, with an awareness of the global context in which Americans live and raise our families.

Specific topics to be covered will include:

Infertility and the new technologies of procreation such as the donation and sale of gametes and 'gestational services;' Contraception and abortion, including prenatal testing and selective abortion; The medicalization and demedicalization of childbirth practices, the midwifery and homebirth movements; Child bearing and rearing within gay and lesbian families; Child care arrangements and services, including 'transnational mothering'; Adoption, with particular attention to the issues of foster care, international and 'transracial' adoptions; Other topics to be agreed upon by members of the seminar.

WSCP 81000 - Current Issues in Social Theory
GC T 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Patricia T. Clough [92784] [Cross listed with Soc. 80000]

The course will bring into focus a number of social issues which confront the world in these times and ask what resources sociological theory has to offer for understanding and critically engaging these issues and for studying their effect on everyday life. The course is composed around five sets of questions. 1) What our "these times?" Does the arrangement of the private and public spheres, civil society and the nation-state, in terms of which the founders of sociological theory first wrote, need rethinking? How would we theorize present day political economy as well as the reconfiguration of nation-states, civil society the public and private spheres given the global context? Must we rethink the social? 2) In what ways can US sociology accommodate geopolitics? Can it critically engage the US as empire? In re-theorizing power in this context, what can we make of biopolitics or what has been termed necropolitics? 3) What is the relationship between theorizing and employing methods? What is data and what is presentation of data? How do developments in science require complicating methods and forms of presentation of data in sociology? What does the sociology of science offer? 4) What is representation three decades after the so called crisis of representation? What is the relationship of representation and the current deployment of the discourse on democracy in the US and around the world? What is the condition of identity, of the spheres of intimacy? What is the present state of technology and how do technological developments in media and biotechnologies transform the question of technology, of violence and war, of the body, of meaning and culture? 5) Given the explosion of critical theories that occurred in the last three decades of the twentieth century for the most part outside sociology, what is the relationship of sociological theory and criticism? What should we now make of feminist theory, queer theory, post-colonial theory? What should we be theorizing about race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity which were the focus of these critical theories? Readings in preparation.

WSCP 81000 - Black Homosexuality: People, Politics and Place
GC M 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Juan Battle [92785] [Cross listed with Soc. 85403]

Missing! Marginal! Misrepresented! Until the early 1990s, scholarly and political inquiries into the diversity of Black experiences seemed to proceed much as it had in prior decades, paying little or no attention to how questions of same-sex sexuality might alter or significantly inform the perspectives and interpretations of the research and/or politic itself. But that has begun to change, albeit slowly.

In delineating the experiences of Black gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals, this course draws on various bodies of scholarship - historical, social scientific, and literary - to reveal the multiple and intersecting social forces that have shaped their place, or lack thereof, in U.S. society. Notably, this course also pays attention to how gays, lesbians, and bisexuals themselves have resisted and questioned dominant notions of place, based on the racial and sexual hierarchy.

Because students will be exposed to (and contribute from) a wide variety of perspectives on the subject, this course is appropriate for students in the traditional social sciences (e.g. sociology, anthropology, psychology, urban education, and history) as well as more contemporary ones (e.g. women's studies, race studies, American studies, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies).

WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy and Planning I
H T 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. S.J. Dodd [92786] [Cross listed with SSW 71000] Permission of the instructor required.

Social welfare policy represents solutions to social problems. This advanced introduction to social welfare policy in the United States reviews the history of the US welfare state; contemporary social welfare policies; social, economic and political forces contributing to the expansion and contraction of the welfare state, and alternative welfare state models. With a view toward developing framework for analyzing social welfare policy and the skills for critical analysis, the course examines social welfare policy through the filters of history, welfare state theories, political ideologies and social change. Special attention is paid to dynamics of race, gender and class and to Feminist theories of the welfare state. In a final paper, students conduct policy analysis using the frameworks developed in class.