Introduces the core concepts underlying the interdisciplinary field-formation of feminist studies within multiple geopolitical contexts. Explores how feminist inquiry rethinks disciplinary assumptions and categories, and animates our engagement with culture, history, and society. Topics include: the social construction of gender; the gendered division of labor, production, and reproduction; intersections of gender, race, class, and ethnicity; and histories of sexuality.
General Education Code
CC
Explores feminist theories from domestic U.S. and global contexts in order to ask how interventions of women of color in the U.S. and of radical feminist movements in non-U.S. locations radically re-imagine feminist politics. Rather than focusing on feminist movements that represent different regions of the world, course examines feminist theory through multiple histories of colonialism, post-colonialism, and globalization.
General Education Code
CC
Introduces students to the basics of podcasting and guides students to become contributors to Feminist Files, a podcast that makes feminist scholarship and scholars accessible to the public. This course gives students the theoretical and practical framework to critique a variety of podcasts and engage in the podcast movement. Students learn how to conceptualize stories, research topics, interview guests, write scripts, host shows, records and edit audio. Students also build their collaboration skills by working in groups to produce segments.
Popular culture enables people to make sense of their modern selves and their place in the world. Focusing on South Asia, this course explores the region's rich and variegated popular culture forms, including film, music, television, the painted and printed image, and sport. It also investigates how the popular articulates with nation and global conjunctures and how it constructs hierarchies of class, gender, caste, and sexuality.
General Education Code
IM
Examines migration as a mode of inquiry into transnational practices across geographic locales and temporal zones. Analyzes migration in relation to the transnational formation of gender, race, and sexuality as well as processes of neocolonialism, the state, and globalization. Taught in conjunction with
FMST 115.
General Education Code
ER
The news is a set of narratives that produce, maintain, repair, and transform reality. Using three events that brought together old and new media, this course traces how the interaction of new media with news has changed how we make sense of the world around us and our place in it.
General Education Code
IM
Black feminist theoretical and methodological approaches to the dailiness of women's lives, which considers historical and contemporary Black feminist interventions and praxis that challenge ethnographic hegemony. Students revisit old and new debates to ponder questions of authority, genres, positionality, and citation politics.
General Education Code
ER
Focuses on key issues, core concepts and debates foundational to Black feminisms. With some consideration from the Black diaspora, students examine processes of self-making from resistance to a history of violence, practices and strategies of creative survivalism, and the ongoing struggle to liberation.
General Education Code
ER
Examines, and critically analyzes, select post-World War II movements for social justice in the United States from feminist perspectives. Considers how those movements and their participants responded to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. A feminist, transnational, analytic framework is also developed to consider how those movements may have embraced, enhanced, or debilitated feminist formations in other parts of the world.
General Education Code
ER
Introduces dominant discourses about Christianity and Islam in the American public sphere, with particular attention paid to race, gender, sexuality, and class in thinking about religion. Visual and textual media, political commentary, and popular ethnographies are analyzed.
General Education Code
IM
Explores questions of science and justice. Examines the nature of scientific practice, the culture of science, and the possibilities for the responsible practice of science. Rather than focusing on feminist critiques of science, the course examines how science and technology are changing our world and the workings of power.
General Education Code
PE-T
Introduces students to the key critical concepts, debates, and questions of practice in the emerging field of disability studies, with a focus on feminist and critical race approaches to disability.
General Education Code
PE-H
Examines the relationship between sexuality and the contemporary term globalization as a dense entanglement of processes that emerges from a history of U.S. empire. Sexuality cannot be separated from power struggles over the classification of bodies, territories, and questions of temporality. Examines how sexualized contact zones produce new knowledge, commerce, inequalities, possibilities, and identities.
General Education Code
CC
Draws from representations of transgender/transsexual people in popular, biomedical, and political contexts. Examines the impact of transgender lives on concepts of gender, identity, and technology. Engages with biological and sexological frameworks of sex/gender, trans experience, and social movements and theories.
Centering Black feminist Toni Cade Bambara's existential question, "Are you sure, Sweetheart, that you want to be well?" this course puts the emphasis on transnational feminist praxis to consider interdisciplinary approaches and methods to living with inequity while pursuing wholeness and well-being. Considering notions of individual and community, care and personhood, environment and nature, self-love and happiness, and other themes, we find theoretical grounding in the concept of rasanblaj (the gathering of ideas, things, people, and spirits).
Why has the proliferation of research on prisons—demonstrating economic and racial disparities, as well as negative effects on individuals and communities—not led to more substantial questioning of public policy that treats imprisonment as a major solution to social problems? This course is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the role visual culture plays in the maintenance of the prison industrial complex and an introduction to artistic practices that challenge law and social policy; the course also introduces fundamental concepts to the study of art and visual culture in relation to the movement for prison abolition.
Cross Listed Courses
VAST 01
General Education Code
IM
Cross-listed Courses
Uses the critical tools of feminist theory and cultural anthropology to look at how global development discourses and institutions mobilize, reinforce, and challenge systems of gender-based inequality. Topics include non-governmental organizations (NGOs), development practice, microcredit, and technocrat cultures. (Formerly Gender and Development.)
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 148
Examines Indigenous environmentalist struggles and contemporary movements to protect land and water in California and in Oceania. Course examines three Indigenous women-led movements to protect land and water: Run4Salmon, Sogorea Te Land Trust, and Protect Mauna Kea. Also examines their transnational collaborations with Aotearoa/New Zealand and West Papua.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 127
Instructor
Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu
General Education Code
PE-E
Focuses on key learning outcomes of humanistic research and writing: developing a method for critical race feminist analysis, identifying objects and fields of study, formulating an appropriately narrow topic and thesis, identifying and critiquing sources, and completing well-structured written argumentation. Readings offer key theoretical models in critical race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, and queer theory.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 194S
Examines Indigenous environmentalist struggles and contemporary movements to protect land and water here in California and in Oceania. We look at three Indigenous-women-led movements to protect land and water: Run4Salmon, Sogorea Te Land Trust, and Protect Mauna Kea.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 227
Instructor
Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu
Explores how human subjects come to be visually defined and marked by race discourse. Covers diverse theoretical literatures on the topic, primarily in visual studies, but also in cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and psychoanalysis.
Cross Listed Courses
HISC 245, FMST 245
Instructor
Jennifer Gonzalez
Explores issues central to Indigenous women's life experiences and Native feminist thought. Students consider the concerns and methodologies of Native feminisms—theories and actions that highlight how settler colonialism is a fundamentally gendered process. Engages in foundational discussions of Native feminisms, settler colonial theory, and feminist methodologies. Course content focuses on communities in settler states currently known as the U.S. and Canada. Covers topics such as reproductive justice, gendered violence, cultural reclamation, and rematriation. (Formerly FMST 119.)
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 119
General Education Code
ER
Discusses the characteristics of settler colonialism and the politics of comparison in the study of global settler colonialism. Looks at settler colonial state practice across multiple different sites, including Santa Cruz, as students craft their own research projects. (Formerly offered as FMST 194L, Comparative Settler Colonial Studies.)
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 194L
Instructor
Caitlin Keliiaa
Examines the position of Africa in cultural studies and the simultaneous processes of over- and under-representation of the continent that mark enunciations of the global and the local. Themes include defining diaspora, the West as philosophy, and Africa in the global economy.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 264
Examines cultural, philosophical, and political foundations for human rights and provides students with critical grounding in the major theoretical debates over conceptualizations of human rights in the Americas. Addresses the role of feminist activism and jurisprudence in the expansion of human rights since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Addresses challenges of accommodating gender rights, collective rights, and social and economic rights within international human rights framework.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 240
Surveys the role of women as music-makers throughout history in a variety of cultural, social, and musical contexts. The course material consists of musical works (in written and aural form) and primary source writings by composers and performers as well as scholarly writing that places primary source material in context along with critical commentary. The major topics include women in Western Art Music history from the medieval through 20th century; women in popular music; women in electronic and computer music; and selections of women music-makers from around the world.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 80S
Instructor
Tanya Merchant
General Education Code
CC
Advanced seminar on the politics of knowledge production and translation in queer theory across the Américas, considering the meaning and construction of queer/cuir in three languages. Students develop bibliographies of academic and activist work addressing the lives of queer/trans people throughout the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Américas, including U.S. Latinx communities. Examines gaps in translation in this field, and students practice translation of work specific to sexual minority communities based on their language training and proficiency. Class works from the language and community expertise of students in the course inspired by bilingual poetics. Final projects produce a translation of a significant article or chapter-length work in queer theory from Spanish, Portuguese, or English to another one of these languages.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 160
General Education Code
CC
Topics in feminist philosophy, which may include: the nature of feminist philosophy, feminist approaches to philosophical issues, social and political philosophy, theories of knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, and science, technology, and medicine studies. Presupposes some familiarity with philosophy or feminist scholarship.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 168
Course bridges feminist theory and social psychological research to explore connections between theory covered and empirical studies on various topics in social psychology. Seminar format allows students opportunity for extensive discussion.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 251
Graduate-level advanced seminar explores ways that seeing, hearing, and knowing are influenced by culture, power, race, and other factors. Readings emphasize how documentary subjects are constituted and known, addressing questions of epistemology, social constructivism, objectivity, and method.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 204
Considers the practical and epistemological necessity of collaborative research in the development of new sciences and technologies that are attentive to questions of ethics and justice. Enrollment is by permission of instructor. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.
Cross Listed Courses
BME 268A, FMST 268A, CRES 268A
Provides in-depth instruction in conducting collaborative interdisciplinary research. Students produce a final research project that explores how this training might generate research that is more responsive to the links between questions of knowledge and questions of justice. Prerequisite(s):
SOCY 268A, BME 268A, FMST 268A, or ANTH 267A. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students and by permission of the instructor.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 268B, BME 268B, ANTH 267B