Core course for feminist studies. Serves as an introduction to thinking theoretically about issues of feminism within multiple contexts and intellectual traditions. Sustained discussion of gender and its critical connections to productions of race, class, and sexuality. Focus will change each year.
Working from the perspective that race is a cultural invention and racism is a political, economic, and social relation, investigates how race is produced as a meaningful and powerful social category, examines the effects of racism as a social relation, and argues for the necessity of combining feminist and critical race studies. By considering different historical periods and places, aims to equip students with the tools necessary to critically examine the production and reproduction of race and racism in the U.S.
Recommended for transfer students. Focuses on particular debates about feminist methodology. Specific methodological debates vary each year but might include feminist theorizing of experience, epistemology, situated knowledges, notions of truth and the real. Feminist methods may include transnational approaches, as well as queer, decolonial, postcolonial, and critical race methodologies. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. (Formerly FMST 75.)
Interdisciplinary approach to study of law in its relation to category women and production of gender. Considers various materials including critical race theory, domestic case law and international instruments, representations of law, and writings by and on behalf of women living under different forms of legal control. Examines how law structures rights, offers protections, produces hierarchies, and sexualizes power relations in both public and intimate life.
Cross Listed Courses
POLI 112
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.
General Education Code
ER
This experimental course situates the pioneer and controversial ethnographer, novelist, and playwright Zora Neale Hurston as an avant-garde. Analyzing her influence on academics, activists and artists, students consider the complex ways anthropology functions as material (from the textual to the visual), a source of both inspiration and refusal. In the process of exploration, students critically ponder what constitutes an intervention in academia, on the streets, or in artistic settings?
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.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 119
General Education Code
ER
Explores the emergence of transnational feminism through U.S. women of color and postcolonial feminism. Underscores the role of globalization, nationalism, and state formation in relation to feminist theorizing, activism, and labor across the Global South. In an attempt to understand the salience of inequalities, the course interrogates the continuation of feminist critique that is attentive to the war on terror, neocolonialism, and empire.
Instructor
Felici Schaeffer-Grabiel
General Education Code
CC
Explores relationship between feminism and culture. Topics will vary and include different forms of cultural production such as film and literature. Regional/national focus will also vary.
Examines new ways of understanding the body and race through the intersection of technology and science. Addresses how broader structures of power and the rise of new technological and scientific discoveries mediate power relations and alter how race, national boundaries, the body, and citizenship are normalized and contested from colonialism to the present. Course content may vary; themes may include: U.S. eugenics, I.Q. tests, patenting debates, sterilization, assisted reproduction, biometrics, and genetics across the Americas.
Instructor
Felici Schaeffer-Grabiel
General Education Code
PE-T
Explores theories and case studies tied to race, gender, and technology. Covers the history of feminist and critical race analyses of technology as well as contemporary debates.
Instructor
Neda Atanasoski
Introduces the analysis of visual images and text with particular emphasis on feminist critical methodologies. Using case studies from photography, film, TV, advertising, and new media, students learn how to read and analyze culture.
Instructor
Neda Atanasoski
General Education Code
IM
Situates current debates about reproductive rights and the repeal of Roe v. Wade in the United States in a transnational context of population governance and carceral power. Readings draw from ethnography, critical race, feminist and queer theory to trouble the concepts of privacy, bodily autonomy, and freedom that have shaped articulations of the "right to choose." Taking a comparative approach to reproductive justice movements in global norths and souths, students explore counter traditions of collective and social rights claims, belonging and responsibility, and practices of care and mutual aid in order to expand our vision of what is politically possible and necessary for a post-Roe era.
Considers how things--what we may think of as objects, matter, nature, technology, bodies--are constitutive elements of social and political life. What happens to the political as a category if we take this matter seriously?
Postcolonial feminist studies. Explores how discourses of gender and sexuality shaped the policies and ideologies of the historical processes of colonialism, the civilizing mission, and anticolonial nationalism. Considers orientalism as a gendered discourse as well as colonial understandings of gender and sexuality in decolonialization. Explores Western media representations, literature, the law, and the place of gender in the current debate between cultural relativism and universalism. Provides an understanding of some key terms in postcolonial studies and an in-depth examination of the place of gender in these processes.
Contemporary technoscientific practices, such as nano-, info-, and biotechnologies, are rapidly reworking what it means to be human. Course examines how both our understanding of the human and the very nature of the human are constituted through technoscientific practices.
General Education Code
PE-T
Introduces the multiple debates animating the linkages between science, race, and sexuality. Interrogates the interrelated, epistemological frameworks of science and sexuality/queer studies across a range of interdisciplinary and geopolitical locations.
Instructor
Anjali Arondekar
Investigates, imagines, and practices movement toward water justice in California using feminist, Indigenous, and critical race theory. The course includes collaborative projects with environmental justice organizers in the Central Valley, and offers new ways of thinking about water inequity and access through racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and critical theories of place.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 136, ENVS 136
General Education Code
PR-E
Considers African American women as central to understanding of U.S. history, focusing on everyday survival, resistance, and movements for social change. Discussion of critical theories for historical research, gender, and race. Emphasis on biography, cultural history, and documentary and archival research.
General Education Code
ER
Introduces the defining issues surrounding racial and gender formations in the U.S. through an understanding of the term women of color as an emergent, dynamic, and socio-political phenomenon. Interrogates organizing practices around women of color across multiple sites: film and media, globalization, representation, sexuality, historiography, and war, to name a select few.
General Education Code
ER
From a foundation in semiotics, considers the ways race and gender are constructed, understood, performed, embraced, commodified, and exploited through representations. Uses representations of, by, and for the margins to engage theories of communication, identity, and representation. Creative final projects encouraged.
General Education Code
ER
Advanced topics in gender and sexuality in Latin America and Latina/o studies. Analyzes role of power, race, coloniality, national and transnational processes in the production and analysis of genders and sexualities. Materials include memoir, fiction, ethnography, social documentary and history.
General Education Code
CC
Examines the voluminous history of popular culture representing incarceration through new research in visual criminology, carceral aesthetics, and critical prison studies.
Cross Listed Courses
VAST 176
Focuses on a particular topic in feminist theory. Topics vary each offering but might include theorizing the gendered subject, racializing gender, politics and feminism, the relationship between queer theory and feminism, transgender studies, women of color feminisms, postcolonial and decolonial feminisms, feminist science studies.
Focus on a particular problem in feminist theory. Problems vary each year but might include theorizing the gendered subject, racializing gender, the meeting points of psychoanalysis and social-political analysis in theorizing gender, the relationship between queer theory and feminist theory, postcolonial feminist theory.
Quarter offered
Winter, Spring
Individual field study in the vicinity of the campus under the direct supervision of a faculty sponsor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Individual field study in the vicinity of the campus under the direct supervision of a faculty sponsor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Approaches legal reasoning from a feminist and intersectional perspective with attention to structures and jurisdiction, case materials, and emerging international frameworks for gender justice. Designed to facilitate completion of a substantial research essay based in feminist legal philosophy.
Providing for a critical examination of canonical formations in history and archives, this course proposes new ways of thinking about history from the point of view of those who have been marginalized or excluded by race, class, gender, or sexuality.
Examines icons and the processes through which an iconicity is constructed and circulated in its complexity. Icons and iconicities often link or articulate various ideologies, affects, and systems of thought into a potent symbol or a mythology. Icons constitute norms, but also disrupt them; icons could articulate new technologies, aesthetics and their representations of the self with purportedly older modes of being in the world, such as a transcendent belief in a god, a faith, etc.
Examines different feminist approaches to understanding the nature of scientific practices. Particular attention paid to notions of evidence, methods, cultural and material constraints, and the heterogeneous nature of laboratory practices. Considers the ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are constructed by science and how they influence both scientific practices and conceptions of science. Also examines the feminist commitment to taking social factors into account without forfeiting the notion of objectivity.
Traces the intersection between Chicana studies and Latin American studies through transnational forms of cultural production, imaginaries, and empowerment. Analysis of theories of cultural production and discussion of the political salience of culture as a site for resistance, critique, and creativity.
Instructor
Felici Schaeffer-Grabiel
Explores questions of colonialism, empire, race, gender, and geopolitics in the proliferating images--filmic, televisual, and media--of Africa in the United States. Facilitates the completion of a substantial research essay based on the study of popular culture.
French philosopher Michel Foucault's writings on modern forms of knowledge, power, and subjectivity provide a serious challenge to how we negotiate social oppression. Engages some of Foucault's most cited works, and grapples specifically with his primary claim that modern societies are marked less by freedom and autonomy than by discipline and docility.
Instructor
Anjali Arondekar
Designed to train students in oral history and memoir writing. Emphasizes the specialness of transgressive voices; race, class, and sexuality, women's silence, erasure, censorship, and marginalization are addressed. The politics of memory, narratives, storytelling, and editorial judgment are considered.
Seminar focuses on the historical and subjective processes that produce the concept of an African or Black Diaspora. In narrative, film, and cultural studies, themes of slavery, exile, home, identity, alienation, colonialism, politics, and reinvention are explored.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190K
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 Decoloniality, Feminism, and Science Studies.)
Prerequisite(s):
CRES 10 and
CRES 100; satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Enrollment is restricted to senior critical race and ethnic studies majors.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190L
Explores the production of sexualities, sexual identification, and gender differentiation within multiple contexts of colonialism, decolonization, and emerging neo-colonial global formations.
Prerequisite(s):
CRES 10 and
CRES 100; satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Enrollment is restricted to senior critical race and ethnic studies majors.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190M
Instructor
Anjali Arondekar
Examines human rights projects and discourses with a focus on the politics of gender, sexuality, race, and rights in the international sphere. Reading important human rights documents and theoretical writings, and addressing particular case studies, emphasizes the tensions between the ideals of the universal and the particular inherent in human rights law, activism, and humanitarianism.
Prerequisite(s): CRES 10, CRES 100; satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190O
Queer diaspora emerged from Third World/queer-of-color critique of queer theory and provides a framework for analyzing racializations, genders, and sexualities in colonial, developmental, and modernizing contexts. Readings from anthropology, history, literature, and feminist and cultural studies.
Prerequisite(s):
CRES 10 and
CRES 100. Enrollment restricted to critical race and ethnic studies majors.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190Q
Surveys how over the course of the 20th century and into the present, the U.S. prison system has metastasized with more than 2 million people locked in cages and many millions more under forms of correctional supervision such as parole, probation, or deportation order, as well as the expansion of a policing apparatus that surveils, stops and frisks, asks for "papers, please," and shoots first. Recently, historians have produced works exploring the origins of this era of racialized police terror, criminalization, mass incarceration, and deportation. Course surveys key works in carceral studies while guiding students through the process of crafting their own original research projects.
Prerequisite(s):
CRES 10 and
CRES 100, and satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Enrollment is restricted to senior CRES majors.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190R
Instructor
Marisol LeBron
Explores literature from the natural sciences, anthropology, history, cultural studies, and sociology. Provides theoretical approaches to complex questions in queer studies and geopolitics, and a framework for understanding embodiment, medical regulation, gender formation, the human/animal divide, etc.
Senior seminar focusing on tourism, colonialism, and militarism. Considers case studies on tourism in colonial contexts and sites of U.S. empire across multiple geographies as students craft their projects, participate in writing workshops, and present research.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190U
Explores critically the intersections and crisis points between feminism and Marxism as bodies of thought, theoretical formations, and forms of historical inquiry.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190V
Senior seminar focusing on questions of the politics of space, time, and matter. Readings informed by fields, such as indigenous studies, queer studies, afrofuturism, borderland studies, critical race studies, decolonial studies, disability studies, feminist science studies, and new materialisms.
Explores the entanglements of histories, genders and archives across a number of intellectual and imperial contexts. Our inquiry approaches the concept of the archive to reflect on who counts as a historical and/or gendered subject and what are the ethics of representation that guide such archival formations. In approaching these questions, students draw on literature from the disciplines of philosophy, gender/sexuality studies, anthropology, history, and literary criticism.
Instructor
Anjali Arondekar
What would we learn about the pressing questions of our time if we centered sound, noise, voice, and music? To think with sound or to think sonically "is to think conjuncturally about sound and culture." Such a "sonic imagination," not only enables us to immerse ourselves in the questions and problems of our time but has the potential to "redescribe them from unexpected standpoints." Thinking with a feminist and sonic imagination, this course is interested in exploring conjunctures and culture by using sound as its point of departure. It serves as an immersive introduction to sound studies and as a senior seminar encourages students to center soundscapes in their own research.
The senior thesis/project which satisfies the major requirement. Course is for independent research and writing. Prerequisite(s): satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements; students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Provides for individual study program off campus for which faculty supervision is not in person. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Provides for individual study program off campus for which faculty supervision is not in person. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Individual directed study for upper-division undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Individual directed study for upper-division undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Cross-listed Courses
From Janet Mock to Young M.A., queerness has become hypervisible in Black popular culture--but at what cost? Using music, television, and social media as central texts, students investigate the intersections of sexuality, gender, and race in public life.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 110Q, FMST 110Q
General Education Code
IM
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
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
Instructor
Xavier Livermon
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.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 119
General Education Code
ER
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
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
Instructor
Sylvanna Falcon
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
Introduction to feminist philosophy. The topics may include (but are not limited to) oppression, normalization, discrimination, objectification, misogyny, androcentrism, patriarchy, the sex-gender distinction, sexed embodiment, gendered labor, and the relationships between sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 17
General Education Code
PE-H
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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, ANTH 267A
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
Instructor
Julie Bettie, Rebecca London, Hiroshi Fukurai