Please consult the New School Course Catalog for a full list of current courses. Summer and fall 2022 courses that count for the Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Certificate are listed below; view an archive of past courses.
Summer 2022 Course
GLOBAL POLITICS OF LGBT+RIGHTS, NINT 5039
Cyril Ghosh, Assistant Professor of Politics
This is a survey class on the rights, recognition, and struggles of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people, queer-identified people, and other non-heterosexual individuals and sexual orientation and gender identity minorities in both the Global North and the Global South. The course proceeds in three segments. We begin with a broad overview of the discourse of human rights in international law and then survey the literature on the rights of sexual minorities. In doing so, we familiarize ourselves not only with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Yogyakarta Principles, and other documents. In addition, we analyze the scholarship on both the marriage equality movement and the claims of radical/queer critics of marriage. In the remaining two segments, we examine the rights, accomplishments, and struggles of LGBTQ+ individuals, first in the Global North (with a focus on the United States and Britain) and then in the Global South (particularly South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America).
Fall 2022 Courses
LABOR ECONOMICS I: LABOR, DEVELOPMENT AND GENDER, GECO 6270
Teresa Ghilarducci, Irene and Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of Economics and Policy Analysis
Labor Economics I is a graduate survey course in labor economics. The course is a survey of classic topics in labor economics, designed 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: the 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 and regulatory issues will also be covered. Modern capitalism distributes resources in such a way that living standards, not only in terms of material well-being, but also in terms of security, dignity, safety, and longevity, are more unequal than ever. We explore how markets, institutions, and rules affect the power balances between capital and labor and between employers and workers; determine the value of people’s time and lives; and examine working conditions and wages and salaries.
ENLIGHTENED EXCHANGES, GHIS 5829/GLIB 5829
Gina Walker, Professor of Women's Studies
In this course, we read published, private, and intertextual conversations between selected male and female thinkers to recover and assess more accurately women’s participation in the project of Enlightenment. While most of these exchanges and conversations were between contemporaneous figures, we also consider some that have gone on across centuries, like the conversations Italian Renaissance humanists conducted with their antique predecessors. Machiavelli, for example, returned home in the evening, changed his clothes, and conversed with ancient authors by reading their books. We ask: Were there were any texts by women on his list? Why is female epistemological authority always contested, so that accounts of the past either ignore or dismiss named women’s contributions? We consider female thinkers’ ideas in the context of traditional intellectual history and their interactions with their male contemporaries and one another. We draw on new research about “revolutionary women”—Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), a learned enslaved poet, and Suzanne Sanité Bélair (1781–1802), a young free woman of color who became a lieutenant in Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture’s army—to interrogate women’s resistance to canonical knowledge-ordering systems and their proposals for alternative structures and actions. We examine the conflicts and convergences between women's and men’s theological, epistemological, political, and affective understanding; women’s networks and misalliances; the new knowledge that femmes philosophes produced; and the volatile public reception to Poullain de la Barre’s Cartesian argument that “the mind has no sex” and his promotion of “the equality of the sexes.” We interrogate individual men’s and women’s responses to the ongoing slave trade and the concept of enslavement. We map the women's texts that consider gender and race inextricably interwoven and men’s resistance to or acceptance of this premise and practice. We speculate about how 60 years of feminist historical recovery has or has not made done more than just “add women into conventional historical narratives and stir.” In our discussions and presentations, we model what "enlightened exchanges" could look like. Finally, we ask: What might a knowledge-ordering system that includes a female dimension look like? We ask whether and how the inclusion of previously eclipsed women thinkers or people of various races and nationalities in a reconceived canon transforms the nature and history of Western thought. The set of enlightened exchanges we investigate can be understood as part of a project of redressing epistemic injustice, defined by the philosopher Miranda Fricker as “a wrong done specifically to someone in their capacity as a knower." Testimonial injustice, one of the two types of epistemic injustice Fricker analyses, occurs when a speaker’s report is taken less seriously by its hearer because of a dimension of that speaker’s identity, such as gender, race, or class. The women thinkers in these enlightened exchanges have largely been victims of the testimonial injustice Fricker thematizes. Beyond this dimension, however, we believe that Western thought and society have been epistemically injured by the testimonial injustice shown to these thinkers: The canon and its contents have been distorted and impoverished through the systematic exclusion of women’s voices. We hope in this course to begin to correct some of the damage.
POLITICAL ECONOMICS OF DEVELOPMENT, NINT 5251
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs
The defining challenges of our times—extreme inequality within and between countries, environmental destruction, pervasive poverty, threats to democracy—do not fall from the sky. They result from public policies and social institutions that in turn are shaped by theories about the process of development. This course offers a critical introduction to the central ideas and theories that have shaped these policy choices. The course addresses questions such as: is inequality necessary for economic growth? Why is the gender wage gap so persistent? Should the understanding of the economy be limited to market interactions? How can developing countries grow in an environmentally sustainable way? Is spending in health and education a luxury or an investment? Do international trade agreements create a level playing field for countries? Is a flexible labor market the most effective way to promote employment and wage growth? What is the role of the state in transforming economies? How should the governance of global international economic institutions be reformed to give a greater voice to the Global South? The course emphasizes the importance of ethical foundations and the historical inequities of North–South relations. It introduces theories from mainstream and heterodox approaches including structuralism, feminism, capabilities and human rights, and sustainability. The aim is to prepare students to engage critically and creatively in contemporary debates about what works and does not work to promote sustainable and equitable development. NOTE: This course was formerly titled Development Economics.
GLOBAL PANDEMICS IN AN UNEQUAL WORLD: LEARNING FROM COVID-19, NINT 5465
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs
COVID-19 is a pandemic whose spread and consequences for human lives will be uneven, shaped by the social, economic. and political contexts of 21st-century globalization. The varied experience of the pandemic in different countries has thrown a spotlight on implicit and explicit social contracts, uneven geographies of rights and freedoms, gendered burdens of household care work, divergent conceptions of individual and collective welfare, and asymmetries of resources and power within and between countries. It also underlines the consequences of 21st-century capitalism, even as nations vary in their economic policies, health systems, and infrastructures. This course uses COVID-19 as a lens through which to understand underlying structures, norms, and values in societies around the world and to understand the nature of global capitalism in the 21st century. The course is organized as a series of lectures by faculty from across The New School and by guest speakers. Themes covered in the course include politics of data, digital cultures, borders and mobility of microbes and migrants, economic inequalities and access to healthcare, gendered consequences of economic crises, and global flows of technologies and scientific knowledge. Open to juniors and seniors by permission of the instructor.
FASHION STUDIES: KEY CONCEPTS, PGFS 5000
Hazel Clark, Professor of Design Studies and Fashion Studies, and Heike Jenss, Associate Professor of Fashion Studies
This seminar provides a critical review of definitions of fashion and of the theoretical concepts and debates that have shaped the development of fashion and of fashion studies as a scholarly field. Responding to the definition of fashion in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture as “the cultural construction of the embodied identity,” the course addresses discourses on the relationship of fashion, body, and identity, problematized by complex variables such as gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality. In studying key issues, texts, and paradigm shifts in the discourse of fashion studies, students become familiar with scholars who have influenced the field, such as Elizabeth Wilson, Susan Kaiser, Valerie Steele, Caroline Evans, Agnes Rocamora, Tanisha Ford, and Carol Tulloch, and with debates in disciplines that have informed the field, including cultural studies, gender studies, anthropology, and sociology. In addition to engaging in critical class discussion and close readings of texts, students work on a research paper exploring key concepts at a deeper level, learning how to use and synthesize scholarly perspectives in the field of fashion studies.
WARDROBE STORIES, PGHT 5518
Christina Moon, Associate Professor of Fashion Studies
This course explores the worlds of clothing through the interplay of image, clothing, and text. It is inspired by the only photo I have of my grandfather, showing him as a child standing between his two brothers, taken in the early 20th century during the Japanese occupation of Korea. The three brothers wear Korean, Japanese, and Western formal dress, reflecting the competing colonial empires of that era. Through clothing, as through photographs, we seek connections to our present, past, and future. Closets, too, reveal other lives lived. Wardrobes are portals that lead us into other worn worlds and dimensions. This course seeks “another way of telling” (in the words of John Berger) to make visible obscured histories, forgotten dreams, and reimagined possibilities. We explore photography, art, performance, film, digital media, and technology alongside ethnography, memoir, essays, and poetry. We study the work of artists, writers, and thinkers who explore clothing in relation to cultural identity, the body, gender and sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity. Together we find creative ways to locate and describe the constantly shifting tempos, maps, and borders of our lived experience and memory through stories of the wardrobe.
SOCRATES' WOMEN, GPHI 6790
Cinzia Arruzza, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Discussions about the nature and virtues of women, sexual difference, and women’s proper role in the city and the household were prominent in the Socratic circle and later among the Socratics. This course focuses on this ancient debate. We read fragments and testimonies concerning Aeschines, Antisthenes, and Xenophon; passages from Plato's dialogues and from Aristotle's Politics and biological works; and influential contemporary feminist interpretations of these texts.
PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE, GPHI 6598
Chiara Bottici, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies
What does it mean to write? What is the difference, if any, between philosophical and literary modes of writing? If it is true, as some have claimed, that a myth is deposited into our language, can there be philosophy without literature? And vice versa: If philosophy positions us in the world, can there be a literature that is not, at least to some degree, philosophical? Furthermore, who can write what? Is there gender in writing or a gendered way of writing? Can (or should) women write? And what role do other subalterns have? Assuming that they can speak, can (or should) they also write? If so, what and for whom?
SOCIAL IMAGINARIES: MAKING SENSE OF THE POLITICAL TODAY, GSOC 6246
Elzbieta Matynia, Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies; Director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies
What has happened to that revolutionary imaginary that emerged in 1989, the one that promised comprehensive systemic change without bloodshed and became a site of tangible hope wherever unfreedom and political violence still reigned? Are today's reversals of democracy a necessary outcome of the alienation caused by the contemporary representative mode of democracy that relies on experts, incumbents, and money? Would not an exploration of shifting social imaginaries—those collective interpretive frameworks—help us make sense of the political and the social today? This forward-looking seminar is organized around three sets of discussions that examine the factors that made it possible for hope to take root in the first place: those that facilitated both the unprecedented setbacks to democracy and the growing appeal of its alternatives and those that sustain the promise of a reclaiming of democracy. We examine the emergence of an infrastructure of public hope and its association with the performativity of democratic politics; we discuss factors that led to the gradual dismantling of a shared narrative, such as the instrumentalization of public memory, history, and imagination; and, finally, we focus on the notion of the public square and explore the possibilities for a renewal of the political, paying particular attention to women’s experience in the midst of rising anti-feminism and anti-genderism. The readings include Cornelius Castoriadis, Charles Taylor, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, Paul Ricoeur, Václav Havel, Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Adam Michnik, Bernard Crick, Achille Mbembe, and Olga Tokarczuk.
FEMINIST ECONOMICS, NINT 6297
Faculty TBA
Feminist economics might be imagined 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 its evolution over time and explore its 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 dovetail on 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?
CLIMATE CHANGE: SYSTEMIC CRISIS, SYSTEMIC CHANGE, NEPS 5001
Leonardo Figueroa Helland, Associate Professor and Chair of the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Program
This course examines climate change as a central component in a web of interconnected global crises associated with the so-called Anthropocene epoch (better understood as Androcene, Eurocene, Plantationocene, Capitalocene, etc.). Guided by an intersection of critical frameworks and subaltern knowledges, we foreground questions of power and resistance, identity and diversity, hegemony and social-ecological transformation as we explore the historical and structural dimensions of climate change as a matter of global (in)justice (i.e., climate (in)justice). In emphasizing the social drivers and political ecologies of climate change, we highlight the way complex and intersecting power relations systemically connect climate change to multiple other crises in fields like energy, economics, food systems, health, demographics (e.g., urbanization, migration), security, and governance at the global, local, and transnational levels. We draw on diverse critical approaches to global political ecology (e.g., Indigenous, decolonizing, peasant, and anti-racist perspectives; world systems ecology; eco-Marxism; intersectional ecofeminism; Global South feminism; social ecology; complex systems ecologism; posthumanism; and eco-ability, frontline, fenceline and grassroots knowledges) to take a critical look at political and policy responses to climate change by dominant actors such as governments, intergovernmental organizations, corporations, and large NGOs in the international and national policy spheres. We also examine the groundswell of alternative paradigms and subaltern movements working locally and globally to resist climate injustice, prefigure just transitions, and address the climate crisis in relation to other crises by advancing “system change, not climate change.” Students research and assess the work of different actors and organizations in the spheres of climate policy and/or climate justice with the aim of producing collaborative research projects that combine critical insight, systemic analysis, socially transformative creativity, public engagement, and potential pathways for change.
TRANS THEORY AS GENDER THEORY, GLIB 5150
McKenzie Wark, Professor, Culture and Media; Program Director, Gender Studies
Trans people have a unique relation to gender in that they have experienced being two (or more) genders, whereas most cis people have only ever been one. So what if we took accounts of and theories about gender created by trans people as central to thinking of the concept of gender in general, rather than as a subtopic of feminist or queer theory referring only to a special case? We build on pioneering work in trans studies (Susan Stryker, Sandy Stone, Leslie Feinberg) as well as recent contributions (Paul Preciado, C Riley Snorton) as a way of constructing alternative pathways into the research on gender and sexuality in more standard accounts (Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler). It may turn out that aspects of transgender experience and thought do not fit neatly into accepted conceptual frameworks. Besides examining theoretical texts, we look at selected examples of trans literature, art, and media that may transcend existing theoretical categories and call for novel concepts.
PSYCHOLOGY OF GENDER, GPSY 6359
Lisa Rubin, Associate Professor of Psychology (Clinical) and Co-director of Gender and Sexuality Studies
Over the past 30 years, feminists have transformed the field of psychology. Feminist psychologists have challenged how we study, what we study, and what we know about the lives of both women and men. This course provides an overview of the growing field of the psychology of gender, from the early feminist psychologists who challenged notions of women's intellectual and emotional inferiority through their rigorous scientific research to the growing study of field of masculinity studies within feminist psychology. Focusing on the intersectionality of gender with race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and disability, we explore key themes and topics within feminist psychological research. Topics examined include theories of gendered psychological development, the regulation and management of the body across the lifespan and across cultures, sexuality and reproduction, mental and physical health, feminist therapy, work, and violence.