This course is designed to think critically about the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and political capacities of feminist thought. We explore the diversity of feminisms that have emerged from pre-colonial Indigenous societies to contemporary social movements within the US and beyond. Foregrounding intersectionality and decolonial feminist thought, we also examine how feminist theory is applied to critique and transform oppressive structures like patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, ableism, classism, imperialism, and more.

This course expands on Intro. to Feminist Studies though an advanced examination of feminist theories and methods. We explore the ways feminist theories draw from and intersect with other interdisciplinary areas of study, including race and ethnicity studies, LGBTQ+ studies, disability studies, and environmental studies. We also examine a wide range of feminist methods, including interviews, pláticas, literary criticism, film analysis, and more.

This course critically examines literary expressions of Latina lesbian identity, sexuality, politics, and culture from the late twentieth century into our contemporary moment. Through close readings of fiction, essays, and poetry, students analyze how Latina lesbians navigate and resist intersectional oppressions while also situating Latina lesbian writing and cultural production within a larger women of color feminist tradition. Topics include coming-of-age and coming out, butch/femme identities, sexual politics, love and relationships, family and culture, gender variance, and more.

Inspired by the 1981 anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, this interdisciplinary course focuses on the literature, politics, and activism of women of color who forward radical visions of justice. Through an exploration of women of color feminist thought across the late twentieth century into our contemporary moment, students examine how women of color critically challenge settler colonialism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, classism, ableism, and imperialism. Topics include queer and trans liberation, reproductive justice, bodily and sexual autonomy, abolitionist feminism, disability justice, and more. 

This course interrogates the politics of archives and memory through an interdisciplinary lens. It asks: Whose histories are remembered and how? How are queer people made visible or invisible in institutional archives? What memory-keeping practices do queer people take up to preserve their histories when institutions neglect or actively erase them? The course looks to institutional and community archives, as well as social media, film, photography, and other creative sites of memory, to elucidate the many ways queer people historicize and assert their existence in public life. Intersectionality and decoloniality are guiding frameworks of the course as we analyze how dominant institutions reinforce heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, and colonial systems of power in their archival practices and how queer memory work intervenes in such practices.