Faculty of Arts & Science 2011-2012 Calendar

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Women and Gender Studies

Faculty

Professors
E.K. Armatage, BA, MA, Ph D
M. J. Alexander, BSW, MA, PhD
K.P. Morgan, BA, MA, MEd, Ph D
M. Nyquist, BA, MA, PhD

Associate Professors
B. McElhinny, BA, Ph D
M. Murphy, BA, PhD
K. Rittich, Mus Bac, LLM, SJD
A. Tambe, BA, MA, PhD
J. Taylor, BA, MA, PhD
A. Trotz, BA, MPhil, PhD

Assistant Professors
D. Georgis, BA, MA, PhD
M. Lo, BA, MA, MSc, PhD

Senior Lecturer
J. Larkin, BA, MEd, PhD

Introduction

For the past 40 years, we have trained students to think deeply about how gender and sexuality operate at the individual, interpersonal, institutional and global levels.  Drawing from a range of disciplines such as history and literature, sociology and law, we enable students to answer urgent and complex questions, such as how militarization can constrict men’s aspirations for their lives, why there are income disparities between women and men, how sexual expression is scripted and can be re-scripted, and even what Lady Gaga could have in common with Shakespeare.  In addition to training students to traverse the stanzas of a poem and a government report with equal care and skill in their quests, we also focus attention on matters of scale: when to aggregate and when to parse significant distinctions, how to think comparatively across space and time.

The Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto is distinctive for its transnational approach, critically addressing how national borders and nationalist discourses frame the constructions of gender and sexuality.  We study the effects of migration, diaspora and wars on experiences of home and heritage, family, desire and selfhood.  We provide students the conceptual tools to connect processes of imperialism and globalization with emergent economies and forms of labor and consumption.  Finally, we encourage students to reflect on the varied histories of feminism when framing their own activism in the present.

Our graduates go on to do innovative work in the public service, creative, and corporate sectors, becoming everything from documentary film-makers to grassroots activists to policy analysts in economic development agencies.  All of them draw on the critical lens they develop in this program, becoming part of a rich community of graduates who maintain their connections with one another, and who come back to the classroom where they once were students to share their experiences.

Undergraduate Coordinator: Professor J. Taylor, New College, Room 2029 (416-978-5238).

Undergraduate Administrator: Marian Reed, New College, Room 2036 (416-978-3668).

Email: grad.womenstudies@utoronto.ca

Web site: www.wgsi.utoronto.ca/undergraduate

Women and Gender Studies Programs

Enrolment in this program requires the completion of 4.0 courses. 

(10 full courses or their equivalent, including at least five full 300+ series courses and at least one course at the 400-level)

1. WGS160Y1
2. WGS262H1
3. WGS460Y1 and one additional full-course equivalent at the 400+ level
4. 4.5 additional full-course equivalents from the core group below
5. Two additional full-course equivalents from Group A or B

Enrolment in this program requires the completion of 4.0 courses.

(7 full courses or their equivalent, including at least three full 300+ series courses and at least one half course at the 400-level)

1. WGS160Y1
2. WGS262H1
3. 3.5 additional full-course equivalents from the core group below
4. Two additional full-course equivalents from Group A or B

Enrolment in this program requires the completion of 4.0 courses.

1.    WGS160Y1  or one of WGS271Y/WGS272Y1/WGS273Y1
2.    Three additional full-course equivalents from the core group or Group A below.

Core Group:
WGS160Y1, WGS262H1, WGS271Y1, WGS272Y1, WGS273Y1, WGS330H1 to WGS339H1,WGS350H1, WGS362H1, WGS363H1, WGS365H1, WGS366H1, WGS367H1, WGS368H1, WGS369Y1, WGS370H1, WGS372H1, WGS373H1, WGS374H1, WGS375H1, WGS380H1, WGS385H1, WGS386H1, WGS425H1, WGS426H1, WGS430H1, WGS434H1, WGS435H1, WGS440H1, WGS445H1, WGS451H1, WGS460Y1, WGS461Y1, WGS462H1, WGS463H1, WGS465H1, WGS470Y1

Group A: (Women and gender relations)
ANT343H1, ANT456H, ANT460H1; CLA219H1, CLA220H1; EAS303H1, EAS452H1, EAS453H1, EAS462H1;, ENG307H1, ENG355H1, FAH425H1, FCS497H1; FRE304H1, FRE305H1, GER421H11; GGR320H1, GGR327H1; HIS202H1, HIS245Y1, HIS297Y1, HIS306H1, HIS348H1, HIS354Y1, HIS363H1, HIS383H1,HIS395H1, HIS406H1, HIS418H1, HIS442H1, HIS446Y1, HIS448H1, HIS475Y1; HIS481H1, HIS483H1; ITA455H1; JAL355H1; JPP343Y1; NEW240Y1, NEW325H1; NMC284H1, NMC484H1; PHL243H1, PHL367H1; POL315H1, POL344H1, POL351Y1, POL432Y1, POL450H1, POL480H1; PSY323H1; RLG251H1, RLG236H1, RLG237H1, RLG313H1, RLG314H1, RLG315H1; SLA248H1, SLA453H1; SOC365Y1, SOC366H1, SOC367H1, SOC383H1; SPA382H1; UNI237H1; VIC341H1, VIC342H1, VIC343Y1, VIS209H1

Group B: (General interest)
ANT329Y1, ANT427H1;  ENG273Y1,ENG384Y1; FCS395H1; GGR362H1, GGR363H1; HIS341Y1, HIS459H1; INI327Y1; ITA493H1; NEW302Y1, NEW424Y1; NMC276Y1; PHE403H1; PHL268H, PHL281H1, PHL384H1; PRT351H1; SOC207Y1, SOC214Y1, SOC215H1, SOC220Y1, SOC375Y1; SPA380H1; TRN311H1, TRN320Y1; UNI255H1, UNI354H1, UNI355H1, UNI371H1; VIC210Y1; VIS310H1

Women and Gender Studies Courses

The 199Y1 and 199H1 seminars are designed to provide the opportunity to work closely with an instructor in a class of no more than twenty-four students. These interactive seminars are intended to stimulate the students’ curiosity and provide an opportunity to get to know a member of the professorial staff in a seminar environment during the first year of study. Details here.

During the first round of enrolment, WGS160Y1 is subject to certain enrolment restrictions. Please refer to the Faculty of Arts & Science Registration Handbook & Timetable.

An integrated and historical approach to social relations of gender, race, class, sexuality and disability, particularly as they relate to womens lives and struggles across different locales, including Canada.

During the first round of enrolment, 200-level courses, with the exception of WGS273Y1, are subject to certain enrolment restrictions.  Please refer to the Faculty of Arts & Science Registration Handbook & Timetable.

Examines modes of theories that shaped feminist thought and situates them historically and transnationally so as to emphasize the social conditions and conflicts in which ideas and politics arise, change and circulate.

Exclusion: WGS262Y1
Recommended Preparation: WGS160Y1
Distribution Requirement Status: This is a Humanities course
Breadth Requirement: Society and its Institutions (3)

WGS271H1 Gender, Race and Class in Contemporary Popular Culture [24L]

A critical examination of institutions, representations and practices associated with contemporary popular culture, mass-produced, local and alternative.

Distribution Requirement Status: This is a Humanities course
Breadth Requirement: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)

WGS271Y1    Gender, Race and Class in Contemporary Popular Culture[48L]

A critical examination of institutions, representations and practices associated with contemporary popular culture, mass-produced, local and alternative.

Distribution Requirement Status: This is a Humanities course
Breadth Requirement: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)

WGS272H1 Queer Cultures [24L]

Examines the history of queer and the cultures that have been imagined from it. Understood in terms of what does not conform to sexual normativities, queer does not just define social identities but references a range of emergent cultural expressions.

Distribution Requirement Status: This is a Humanities course
Breadth Requirement: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)

WGS272Y1    Queer Cultures[48L]

Examines the history of queer and the cultures that have been imagined from it. Understood in terms of what does not conform to sexual normativities, queer does not just define social identities but references a range of emergent cultural expressions.

What does it mean to think about environmental justice from a feminist perspective?  In this class, it means we look critically at how problems Get identified, explained, and prioritized.  We do this in ways that are transnational in scope, and interdisciplinary in focus.  We bring Scientific assessments, community complaints, and government responses into conversation with one another, even when they appear to be speaking very different languages.  Students in this class will have the opportunity to think comparatively about how human and non-human nature, ecological crises, political economies and environmental movements are raced, classed, and gendered, in a variety of geographical, historical and cultural contexts.
And together we will try to answer challenging questions such as:   Does environmental justice include social justice, or are they in conflict? What
might environmental justice and activism involve?
This course will actively engage students in the issues raised above through the use of actor narratives, case studies and an introduction of Theoretical frameworks. Assignments will be participatory and reflexive, and there will be opportunities for the use of new media through the course website and blogging platforms. Not all assigned work will be text-based (written) in order to provide students with the opportunity to express themselves in ways other than the traditional essay.

During the first round of enrolment, 300-Series Courses are subject to certain enrolment restrictions. Please refer to the Faculty of Arts & Science Registration Handbook & Timetable.

Note: Courses numbered WGS330H1 - WGS339H1 are reserved for Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies.  Topics vary from year to year.

A critical feminist reading of selected works of fiction, poetry and essays by Caribbean women writers. The aim is to appraise the development of this literature, situate texts within the key social and political debates which have influenced the regions literary output, as well as to consider the implications of the environments within which these writers function.

An upper level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year. Topic for 2011-2012: Life Writing. A theoretical and literary study of the practice of life writing.  Students will learn about narrative styles and their potential for a feminist imaginary.  The course will include works of oral history, creative biography and autobiography, personal memoir and poetry.

An upper level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year. Topic for 2011-2012: The Politics of Girlhood. How and when do girls become the target of campaigns for everything from HPV vaccinations, economic development, consumer goods, and empowerment? How are their emotions, potentialities, citizenship rights, and bodies variously engaged? A transnational and historical lens is used to better understand the girl-child as an evolving focus of concern.

An upper level course. Topics vary from year to year. Topic for 2011-2012: Gender and Sexuality in World Literature. This course explores gender and sexuality within literary texts as they move in transnational circuits of translation and publication.   Reading, situating, and discussing fiction and prose, the class will consider the different ways gender, sexuality, affect, race, labor, violence, and nation are narrated, theorized, and entangled.

This course contextualizes racialized masculinities and violence within postcolonial and anti-imperial discussions on contemporary discourses of terror. Working with concepts in gender and queer studies, this course draws on cultural production to offer a complex reading of masculinities and what it means to be human in conflict zones.

An upper level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.

An upper level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.

Examines the operation of the law as it affects women, the construction and representation of women within the legal system, and the scope for feminist and intersectional analyses of law. Includes an analysis of specific legal issues such as sexuality and reproduction, equality, employment, violence and immigration.

A critical interdisciplinary investigation of how gender impacts on central topics in disability studies: ableism as a political ideology; the normalized body and cultural representations; sexuality, violence and nurturance relations; the cognitive and social roles of medicine; transnational perspectives on disability, disability rights and issues of social justice.

Examines diverse traditions and normative models of health (e.g. biomedicine, social constructionist, aboriginal health) in conjunction with analyses of the origin, politics, and theoretical perspectives of contemporary Womens Health Movements. Topics may include fertility, sexuality, poverty, violence, labour, ageing, (dis)ability, and health care provision.

Explores the ways in which gendered constructions of cultural identity and difference are implicated in local and transnational political projects, including feminism. Challenges colonialist stereotypes of women as exotic or victims of culture.

Examines gendered representations of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and disability in a variety of colonial, neo-colonial, and post-colonial contexts. Topics may include the emergence of racialist, feminist, liberatory and neoconservative discourses as inscribed in literary texts, historical documents, cultural artifacts and mass media.

Drawing on diversely situated case-studies, this course focuses on the ideals that inform struggles for social justice, and the mechanisms activists have employed to produce the change. Foci include the gendered implications of movement participation, local and transnational coalition, alternative community formation, and encounters with the state and inter/supra/transnational organizations.

An interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship of women to a variety of psychological and psychoanalytical theories and practices. Topics may include women and the psychological establishment; womens mental health issues; feminist approaches to psychoanalysis.

An interdisciplinary study of gendered violence in both historical and contemporary contexts including topics such as textual and visual representations; legal and theoretical analyses; structural violence; war and militarization; sexual violence; and resistance and community mobilization.

Sexual agency as understood and enacted by women in diverse cultural and historical contexts. An exploration of the ways in which women have theorized and experienced sexual expectations, practices and identities.

Examines the challenge indigenous knowledges posed to colonialism by analyzing Spanish and British legal codes. Focusing on the links between sexuality and spirituality, we explore how gender shaped the social dynamics of conquest and resistance and draw out the implications for contemporary colonialisms.

Examines the gendered effects of white settler colonization on/in 21st Century Canada and traces the formation of multiple settlements by examining black and immigrant populations. The course poses a challenge to contemporary formulations of diaspora and multiculturalism. It examines solidarity movements within and across these three communities.

Reviews major feminist transnational, Marxist and Foucaultian approaches to the study of neoliberalism. Adopts a comparative, historical and global approach to the ways that gender is implicated in state restructuring, changing roles for corporations and non-governmental organizations, changing norms for personhood, sovereignty and citizenship, and changing ideas about time/space.

Offers a critical analysis of political economy, its historical and contemporary contentions and the ruptures that open the space for alternative theorizing beyond orthodox and heterodox thinking, by inserting gender and intersecting issues of power, authority and economic valorization across multiple and changing spheres: domestic, market and state.

During the first round of ROSI enrolment, 400-Series courses are reserved for Specialists and Majors in Women and Gender Studies. Enrolment restrictions vary from course to course and pre-requisites will be enforced during the first round of enrolment. During the second round of enrolment, students must enroll at the department and fill out the appropriate 400-level ballot form. Please note that students cannot enrol in WGS470Y1 via ROSI and therefore must ballot at the department.  Ballot forms are available from the Women and Gender Studies Program Office, Room 2036, Wilson Hall, New College, 40 Willcocks St, or on-line at www.utoronto.ca/wgsi/undergraduate/400levelballots.html. Forms must be signed and approved by both the course instructor and the Undergraduate Coordinator for the Women and Gender Studies Program. Please note that students in their first or second year of study (with 8.5 credits or less) are not permitted to enroll in 400-level courses.

Provides a critical feminist analysis of development theories and paradigms and an overview of related theoretical and conceptual debates on the concept of development itself, its gender implications, competing discourses, and related practices within national, regional and global contexts, and from a post-colonial feminist/gender perspective.

Critically examines current interdisciplinary scholarship on globalization, its intersections with gender, power structures, and feminized economies. Related socio-spatial reconfigurations, ‘glocal’ convergences, and tensions are explored, with emphasis on feminist counter-narratives and theorizing of globalization, theoretical debates on the meanings and impacts of globalization, and possibilities of resistance, agency, and change.

This course is an overview of the growing field of Queer Diasporas. It considers how queer people inhabit transnational spaces. It also examines how diaspora, as an analytical framework that challenges meanings of un/belonging, might be queered. Alongside theoretical works on queer diasporas, this course draws on cultural/aesthetic texts to think through its major themes.

An upper level seminar. Topics vary from year to year depending on instructor. Topic for 2011-2012: Gender and Transnationalism in the Black Diaspora. This course introduces students to feminist discussions of material and cultural processes underpinning the transnational production and circulation of blackness.  Among the topics that will be explored are migratory circuits, the cultural politics of memory, sexuality and the boundaries of diaspora, carceral regimes and the forging of transnational political communities.

An upper level seminar. Topics vary from year to year depending on instructor.

Examines how gender illuminates the sacred by focusing upon the forces of nature within the Vodou and Yoruba cosmological systems. Explores how these sacred knowledges disturb the secular parameters of feminism through close attention to the conceptual and ceremonial practices among practitioners in the diaspora.

Considers the gendered impact of migration on womens indigenous spiritual practices, taking globalization as a political economic starting point. Focuses on the lives of women whose experiences emblematize displacement and examines how womens agency interrupts and transforms normative meanings of tradition and modernity.

Under supervision, students pursue topics in Women and Gender Studies not currently part of the curriculum.

Supervised undergraduate thesis project undertaken in the final year of study. Students attend a bi-weekly seminar to discuss research strategies, analytics, methods and findings. A required course for Specialist students.

An upper level seminar. Topics vary from year to year depending on the instructor.

An upper-level seminar. Topics vary from year to year depending on instructor.

Senior students may pursue more advanced study in feminist theory. Topics vary from year to year depending on instructor.

Senior students may pursue advanced study in gender and law. Topics vary from year to year.

The application of theoretical study to practical community experience. Advanced Women and Gender Studies students have the opportunity to apply knowledge acquired in the Women and Gender Studies curriculum through a practicum placement within a community organization.