Please consult the New School Course Catalog for a full list of current courses. Spring 2021 courses that count for the Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Certificate are listed below; view an archive of past courses.
Spring 2021 Courses
Posthuman Eros, GLIB 5023
Dominic Pettman, Professor of Media and New Humanities
We tend to think of erotic desire as one of the most important elements that make us human. However, writers, artists, scientists, and thinkers have all challenged - or at least complicated - this assumption. This course explores the possibility that love (or "eros," to use one of Freud's key terms) is an essentially technological phenomenon. We consider different theories of love that emphasize automaticity, algorithm, code, contract, instrumentality, connectivity, and so on. After glossing the traditional models of love, skewed by the masculinist imaginary, we explore new iterations of intimacy in the digital age, which reject or refine the established protocols of love. To what extent, we ask, does eros also belong to the world of machines and/or animals? Students should complete this course with a very different view of not only love but also technology. Readings will likely include Plato, Ovid, Anne Carson, Charles Fourier, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Wilhelm Reich, Shulamith Firestone, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Alphonso Lingis, Anna-Marie Jagose, Lauren Berlant, and others.
Human Rights in Global Fashion, NINT 5112
Mary Watson, Executive Dean, Schools of Public Engagement
Linking consumers and workers in distant places, fashion has long been home to some of the most glaring inequalities and injustices on an increasingly globalized scale, linking consumers and workers in distant places. Since the 19th century, garment manufacture opened up income-earning opportunities for women but at the cost of unsafe and exploitative conditions. The sector has also been a site of social contestation that has been marked by struggles for worker rights, gender equality, the rise of social movements, the exercise of corporate power, and the fallibility of national governments. It has also been a source of innovation in public policy, corporate accountability, monitoring —processes that have led to new 21st-century designs of the industry itself. This course provides an introductory overview of key obstacles and actors and of rules and methods for crafting innovative solutions in social mobilization, legal intervention, and design, with the aim of creating more socially sustainable and economically inclusive fashion — fashion that fulfills the human rights of workers in the supply chain. The course achieves this aim by analyzing 1) actors, power, and finance in the global value chain in the fashion industry; 2) international and local standards and institutions — including workers’ human rights and corporate obligations and accountability; 3) social movements and international networks mobilizing worker power; 4) monitoring and labeling schemes mobilizing consumer power; and 5) design solutions and technological systems that fulfill worker rights amid new conceptions of industry design. The course will include lectures by faculty from across the university.
Looking Beyond the Glass Ceiling, PSCE 5130
Kimberly Ackert, Part-Time Assistant Professor
This seminar course is open to all design students but focuses on women transitioning from graduate degree programs into the professional work force. The format of the syllabus and course material encourages a direct and personalized interaction between professionals and students in discussion of a wide range of issues from a female perspective. The course material includes historical references and case studies of women in all areas of design and a review of books and articles, as well as guest speakers and office visits. The course provides a platform for discussion of and debate on current events affecting women from a political and social point of view, with the goal of recognizing challenges such as pay inequality and other forms of discrimination. Specific subjects include confidence building and developing the communication and negotiating skills required for women to thrive and succeed in professions that have been historically male dominated. Diversity in enrollment will contribute to the goal of creating a level playing field.
Gender and Its Discontents, UTNS 5406
McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media
This is the required core course for the university-wide graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies and it is open to all the graduate students who are interested in sexuality and gender studies. Our starting point is the acknowledgement that sex- and gender-based modes of social organization are pervasive and, further, that their prominence and persistence are reflected in sex- and gender-conscious research across the humanities, the arts, the social sciences, design, and studies dedicated to social policies and innovative strategies for social intervention. We will expand on this starting point through both an in-depth survey of influential theoretical approaches to sex and gender such as Marxist feminism, theories of sexual difference, queer studies, and postcolonial and decolonial feminism, and attention to the significance of different approaches. Topics to be explored include but are not limited to equality and rights, exploitation and division of labor, the construction of gender, performativity, gender images, narrative and identity.
African American Women: Subsistence in Blackness Through Dress, UTNS 5549
This course examines the history of African American women’s subsistence ethos as it has been sustained and curated through dress as a reaction to systemic barriers. Through exploration of historical and material culture, the class investigates African American women’s aesthetic practices as influencers and makers in response to institutional racism and sexism during the Jim Crow era through the present context of dressing for the corporation, purposefully obfuscated by the privilege of choice. This course will also examine queer African American cis and trans women’s and non-binary African American people’s dress aesthetic as cultural resistance and a provocation for hate violence. Black subsistence in the penal system through dress will also be explored as an identity and cultural preservation practice and means of resisting authority within a system designed to strip away identity.
Experimental Fashion and Performance, PGHT 5550
Francesca Granata, Associate Professor of Fashion Studies
This graduate seminar examines visual and material culture at the turn of the millennium, with a focus on the work at the juncture between experimental fashion and performance art. It explores the ever-increasing challenge posed by practitioners from the art and fashion fields to the “classical” concept of the body and of beauty, which found one of its most successful articulations in the images surrounding 20th-century high fashion. Examining the way designers and artists problematize easy demarcations between the inside and outside of the body, the course questions why this period saw an explosion of grotesque imagery — imagery articulating unsettling ruptures of borders — which had been lurking just beneath the surface throughout the 20th century. Among the questions we will ask are: Why is the sealed and “perfect” body, which developed in the Western vocabulary as early as the Renaissance, so forcefully challenged by contemporary designers and artists? How can we read this proliferaion of the grotesque in relation to changes in gender roles, normative sexuality, and the AIDS crisis? We look at a range of media including the video and performance work of Leigh Bowery in collaboration with Charles Atlas and Michael Clark, the dance performances by Merce Cunningham in collaboration with Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, the experimental fashion shows staged by Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan, and the more recent phenomenon of Lady Gaga. We also examine textiles' relation to the body as a second skin, a surface on which bodily borders are negotiated. The seminar will combine theories and methodologies from fashion theory, gender studies, art history, performance studies, science studies, and medical anthropology in its exploration of the topic. Among the authors read will be Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Lynda Nead, Frances Connelly, Emily Martin, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Caroline Evans.
Knowing Women: Exploring New Forms of Knowledge Through Historiography and Design, UTNS 5700
Gina Walker, Professor of Women's Studies, and Lisa Strausfeld, Part-Time Faculty Member
This course will provide students with an opportunity to explore the ways in which we build new forms of knowledge-ordering systems through the integration of critical thinking, historical research, and design. Building off a collaborative platform that historian Gina Luria Walker and information architect Lisa Strausfeld have been developing — called Knowing Women — students working in small teams will collaboratively investigate, develop, sketch, and propose new knowledge systems that attempt to represent women’s missing place in history. In this experimental course, students will combine readings in critical history; visual analysis of timelines, encyclopedias, and other knowledge-ordering systems; and spatial design practices to ask a simple but fundamental question: By what means do we represent “missing” women when the systems we have in place have been built to represent the lives of men? This course in collaborative co-production and cross-disciplinary research is not simply an opportunity to translate historical research into a visual medium. Instead, and along the way, we will use design and critical reflection to challenge the norms and forms of historical research — even the making of History itself — to foreground “female biography” as a vehicle to interrogate what it means to explore and represent the past. The course does not presuppose knowledge in women’s history or in data visualization, but instead assumes that students from a variety of disciplines and practices will want to roll up their sleeves and work through the complex challenges of visualizing women’s history differently than conventional History, mainly by, for, and about men.
Women's Studies in French, NFRN 5725
Marie-Christine Masse, Assistant Professor of French
The Body: Aesthetics, Culture, and Politics in the 20th Century, GLIB 5841
Terri Gordon, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
“You do not realize how the headlines that make daily history affect the muscles of the human body,” the dancer Martha Graham once noted. This course examines the relationship between politics, social tensions, and cultural values and muscles, movement and skin, a relationship that has made the body one of the most visible signs of 20th-century culture. We study deployments of the body in Europe and the United States, covering the historical and contemporary avant-garde; body culture and life reform movements; war and propaganda; and cabaret, dance, and performance art. How can we “read” the body? How do representations of the body reflect and support prevalent notions of race, gender, and nation? In what ways do images of the body critique and subvert cultural norms? We study literature, history, art, and cultural documents, including articles in the press and political manifestoes; fictional works by Hawthorne, Kafka, and Audre Lorde; artworks by Frida Kahlo, Cindy Sherman, and Orlan; and theoretical texts by Butler, Freud, Foucault, Sontag, and others. We also spend class time viewing painting, photography, and performance art.
Gendered Ecologies, NEPS 6003
Abigail Perez Aguilera, Part-Time Faculty Member
The Feminist Commons, GANT 6172
Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Labor Economics I: Labor, Development, and Gender, GECO 6270
William Rodgers, Senior Fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis
Labor Economics I is a graduate survey course in labor economics. The course aims to survey the classic topics in labor economics to prepare students to engage in original research and teach labor economics in several economic traditions. The successful student will be able to distinguish between several schools of thought in labor economics: neoclassical, institutionalism and radical political economy. Specific objectives include understanding modern research methods in labor economics and the dominant and heterodox models of labor markets. Students will be able to explain the most important labor market outcomes using various analytical frameworks including ones that assume varying degrees of market power, full employment, and constraints on choice. Some labor union history, regulatory issues will also be covered. Modern capitalism distributes resources in such a way that living standards, not only in terms of material wellbeing, but also in terms of security, dignity, safety, and longevity, have never been more unequal. We cover how markets, institutions, and rules affect the power balances between capital and labor, employers and workers and determine the value of people’s time and life, and working conditions and wages and salaries.
Feminist Economics, NINT 6297
Sheba Tejani, Assistant Professor of International Affairs
Feminist economics can be viewed as a way of radically reconceptualizing and reorienting the study of economics rather than just an approach designed to make gender inequalities visible. Taking such a position, this course surveys foundational and contemporary feminist scholarship on epistemology, methodology, and economic theory in order to trace their evolution over time and explore their transformative potential. The course begins with an introduction to feminist epistemology and its insistence on the constitutive role of power relations in knowledge production. This grounds our discussion on economic methodology and feminist proposals to produce a more critical, reflexive, and engaged economics that brings together critiques of methodological individualism, deductivism, and mathematical formalism. We survey important theoretical interventions made by feminists on the gendered nature of standard microfoundational assumptions such as free choice and rationality and new ways of conceptualizing discrimination and expanding the boundaries of the discipline to include sociocultural norms and non-market spheres in the analysis. We revisit historical debates on “the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism” and household economics and engage with contemporary discussions on social reproduction, the care economy, the gender wage gap, occupational segregation, and gender and globalization, asking all the while: What makes this research feminist?
The Psychology of Gender, Sexuality, and Relationships, GPSY 6449
Pantea Farvid, Assistant Professor of Applied Psychology
In this advanced psychology course, we will examine seminal as well as cutting-edge theory, research and controversies related to the psychology of gender, sexuality and intimate relationships. We draw on a range of approaches to understand the intersecting categories of sex, gender, identity, sexuality and individual/collective psychologies. Using popular culture, empirical and clinical examples, we also take into consideration intersectionality of race/ethnicity, class, disability, geographic location and immigration status. As we explore key themes and topics within critical and feminist psychological research in this field, we also focus on how this knowledge has, and continues to, encompass an ‘applied psychology’, one with a social change orientation focused on social justice within and outside the discipline. Topics include theories of gender and sexuality, asexuality, bisexuality, BDSM, gay men, lesbian psychology, heterosexuality, intersex, gender diversity, mobile dating, casual sex, sexual violence, the sex industry, monogamy, open-relationships, relationship anarchy. Applications of this knowledge to clinical practice is also addressed throughout the course.
Black Feminist Thought: Labor, Genealogy, Memory, GPHI 6774
Psychoanalytic Bodies, GPHI 6775
How does psychoanalysis think of the body? Are we a body or do we have a body? Can we make the body equivalent to the drive — what Freud called his speculative fiction at the limit of the somato-psychic? What is the difference between the erogenous body and the anatomical one composed of flesh, organs, fluids, and genitals? And what about the problem of distinguishing the difference between body and language — only vaguely resolved by the term “embodiment” or “materiality”? Is psychoanalysis itself, a work with a patient's body or their language? From Freud to Klein, Kristeva, Ferenczi, and Lacan to Nancy, Foucault, Preciado, and others, we will search for the body in psychoanalysis.