Women’s Studies

PUBLIC STATEMENT

In response to the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery, David McAtee, Sean Monterrosa and Rayshard Brooks, WGSS stands in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives and in opposition to all forms of racist violence, especially violence enacted by the state and including carceral uses of feminism. We particularly support our colleagues in Africana Studies who lead our campus in the study of African Diasporas and African American communities. Here is the beginning of the statement by our colleagues in Africana Studies, including a list of relevant courses.  We also include a related list of WGSS courses and our commitment to action. 

For a link to the full, comprehensive statement: https://africana.barnard.edu/statement-africana-studies-faculty

 

A Statement From Africana Studies Faculty

“When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice.”—Audre Lorde

The faculty and administrators of Africana Studies Department stands with those individuals and organizations in the Barnard-Columbia community, in New York City, in the United States, and throughout the world who have conveyed support for the individual and collective acts of resistance and rage in the streets of the United States in response to the ongoing devaluation and destruction of Black people of all ages, genders, sexualities, and abilities.

Africana Studies continues to shape our curriculum in a manner that provides our students with deep historical and broad comparative bases for understanding issues in the immediate context. Our Fall 2020 courses, for which students have already enrolled, are responsive to the vicissitudes of our times, as will courses taught in Spring 2021 (which includes the Harlem Semester program) and Summer 2021.

COURSES

Here is a list of Africana Studies classes that address relevant issues:

Fall 2020 Africana Courses that Address the Violence of Present and Historical Systemic Racism

• Historical preconditions of the present moment 
  • Introduction to African American History (lecture)—Professor Celia Naylor
  • Remembering Slavery: Critiquing Modern Representations of the Peculiar Institution (seminar)—Professor Celia Naylor
  • Introduction to African History (lecture)—Professor Abosede George
  • Shange Digital Storytelling (seminar)—Professor Kim Hall
  • Before ‘Black Lives Matter’ (seminar)—Professor Yvette Christiansë
  • Home to Harlem (English department seminar)— Professor Monica Miller 

 

• Structures of dominance
  • Caribbean Digital (seminar)—Professor L. Kaiama Glover
  • Introduction to African American History (lecture)—Naylor
  • Remembering Slavery: Critiquing Modern Representations of the Peculiar Institution (seminar)—Naylor
  • Introduction to African History (lecture)—George
  • Shange Digital Storytelling (seminar)—Hall
  • Before ‘Black Lives Matter’ (seminar)—Christiansë
  • Home to Harlem (English Department seminar)—Miller 

 

• Present manifestations/representations of the forces & compulsions of historical preconditions
  • Africana Senior Seminar—Professor Colin Leach 
  • Remembering Slavery: Critiquing Modern Representations of the Peculiar Institution (seminar)—Naylor
  • Real Time/Real Talk (seminar)—Christiansë 
  • Caribbean Culture and Societies (seminar)—Professor Maja Horn
  • Before ‘Black Lives Matter’ (1 credit seminar)—Christiansë

 

• Racial formation and racial capitalism 
  • Poor in America (seminar)—Professor Rose Razaghian
  • Remembering Slavery: Critiquing Modern Representations of the Peculiar Institution (seminar)—Naylor
  • Caribbean Culture and Societies (seminar)—Horn

 

• Uneven distribution of poverty and risk / political economy
  • Poor in America (seminar)—Razaghian
  • Introduction to African American History (lecture)—Naylor
  • Remembering Slavery: Critiquing Modern Representations of the Peculiar Institution (seminar)—Naylor
  • Introduction to African History (lecture)—George
  • Caribbean Culture and Societies (seminar)— Horn

 

• Inequitable health care and access to social resources
  • Poor in America (seminar)—Razaghian

 

• Expressive traditions in which racially minoritized subjects have engaged the problems of hemispheric American society 
  • Shange Digital Storytelling—Hall
  • Before ‘Black Lives Matter’—Christiansë
  • Introduction to African History (lecture)— George
  • Caribbean Diaspora Literature in New York (seminar)—Horn 
  • Francophone Fictions (Seminar)—Glover
  • Home to Harlem (English Department seminar)—Miller 

 

• The relations between American radicalization and other formations of difference in the global south
  • Caribbean Cultures and Society—Horn
  • Caribbean Digital—Professor Kaiama Glover
  • Francophone Fictions – Glover
  • Blackness in French—Glover
  • Before ‘Black Lives Matter’—Christiansë

 

• African and African diasporic contributions to critiquing the social, economic, political and aesthetic dimensions of inequality
  • All Africana courses

 

• Subjective experience of racialization 
  • All Africana courses

 

Here is a related list of WGSS classes:

FALL 2020

BC 1050 Women & Health -- Beck Jordan-Young T TH 4:10-5:25 

BC 2140 Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory -- Alex Pittman T Th 1:10-2:25

UN 3311 Feminist Theory --Marisa Solomon W 4:10-6:00

UN 3312 Theorizing Activism -- Kimberly Spring T Th 12:10-2 Immersive Block B

BC 3514 Historical Approaches -- Neferti Tadiar Th 2:10-4

BC 3518 Studies in U.S. Imperialism -- Neferti Tadiar W 11-12:50

UN 3813 Feminist Inquiry -- Beck Jordan-Young T Th 12:10-2 Immersive Block A

BC 3525 Senior Seminar: Knowledge, Practice, Power -- Manijeh Moradian M 12:10-2

 

SPRING 2021

BC 2140 Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory – Marisa Solomon

BC 2150 Practicing Intersectionality (Manijeh Moradian)

BC 3132 Theorizing Activism -- Kimberly Springer Immersive Block B

BC 3530 Feminist Media Theory -- Jon Beller 

W 4301 Jewish Women Immigrant Writers -- Agi Leguto 

BC 4303 Gender, Globalization and Empire -- Manijeh Moradian 

BC 3526 Senior Seminar II – Elizabeth Bernstein

GU 4000 Genealogies of Feminism: Decolonization and Feminist Critique -- Neferti Tadiar

New Course: Oppression is a Pre-Existing Condition: Health Disparities and Coronavirus – 

Beck Jordan-Young Immersive Block A (Prerequisite: Women & Health)

New Course: Dying of Racism: Health and Premature Death in Central Harlem-- Beck Jordan-Young

New Course: Research Seminar  -- Neferti Tadiar

 

SUMMER 2021

BC 3138 Affect & Activism -- Manijeh Moradian

BC 3512 Art/Work: Sex, Aesthetics, and Capitalism -- Alex Pittman

BC 4000-level Bodily Disruptions -- Elizabeth Bernstein

ACTION

With our CCIS colleagues, WGSS is dedicated to linking inquiry and action, theory and practice, scholarship and feminism and we work with our colleagues at the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) to pursue these connections and produce resources that provide alternative analyses and practices that address the current moment, including scholarly discussions (http://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/wayward-lives-beautiful-experiments-a-salon-in-honor-of-saidiya-hartman/ and http://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/sf-conference-archiving-colonialism/), student projects with local communities (http://bcrw.barnard.edu/publications/radical-black-women-of-harlem-walking-tour/), videos on transformative justice (http://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/building-accountable-communities/), and the work of fellows in the BCRW Social Justice Institute (http://bcrw.barnard.edu/socialjusticeinstitute/). 

We join our voices with those of the National Women’s Studies Association, American Studies Association, and Scholars for Social Justice to demand that our college take up actions that contribute to transformative justice. Possible actions include:

1) Defunding the Police: To divest from prisons and their attendant institutions requires defunding the police and endorsing alternative models of safety.

a) Shifting our model of public safety away from policing and toward community accountability;

b) Removing and refusing to install surveillance technologies such as swipe access and facial recognition;

c) Investing the public safety budget in meeting the needs of our communities, including both our campus communities and surrounding communities;

d) Ending all collaborations that support policing and mass incarceration, such as consultations with the NYPD regarding public safety on campus;

e) Supporting both scholarly and community efforts to develop more open models of conflict-resolution, accountability for harm, and transformative justice;

f) Resisting and refusing interactions with ICE, as well as the policing of immigrants and surveillance of students and student organizations, including Muslim students and anti-racist activists;

g) Ensuring that institutional expressions of feminism at Barnard are resistant to carceral state structures and racist violence.  

2) Investing in Communities: Barnard and Columbia have participated in the gentrification of New York and the uneven development of Black and brown communities. We are committed to affirming, uplifting and investing in communities who have been harmed.

a) Developing democratic processes of participatory community budgeting, including for both our campus communities and surrounding communities;

b) Investing more in financial aid so that all students can graduate debt-free;   

c) Making payments in lieu of taxes to contribute to the public goods of our city;

d) Creating a community benefits agreement with neighboring communities;

e) Pursuing all activities, including global connections, with a principle of community benefit. 

3) Acknowledging and Repairing Barnard’s Historical Implication in Injustice: Injustice doesn’t happen once; neither does repair. The legacy of colonialism, slavery and indigenous genocide are longstanding, and we are committed to the continuous process of accounting for and imagining repair.

a) Accounting for Barnard’s historical location on Lenape Land;

b) Supporting Lenape cultural work and scholarship in collaboration with institutions such as the Lenape Center in Manhattan; 

c) supporting Lenape and indigenous efforts to decolonize higher education and strengthen indigenous knowledges and communities;

d) Accounting for and supporting projects to unearth Barnard’s historical implication in slavery in the U.S. and the international slave trade;

e) Accounting for Barnard’s historical implication in segregation and quotas;

f) Endorsing free tuition for descendants of Lenape genocide and removal and descendants of enslaved people owned by officials of Barnard and Columbia;

g) Supporting all students regardless of immigration status; 

h) Supporting space, scholarship, and courses dedicated to community visions of repair.

4) Supporting Living Wages and Community Action: We recognize that supporting community action means supporting material redistribution.

a) Paying all employees a living wage;

b) Supporting healthcare for all, including medical provision, protective equipment, and safe environments;

c) Supporting hiring policies to eliminate employment discrimination on the basis of criminal record or poverty by “Banning the Box” and eliminating credit checks;

d) Supporting connections and actions for justice beyond our campus, including housing and food justice, and democratic community organizing. 

5) Developing Principles of Universal Access and Universal Design: Barnard’s campus is often not open and welcoming to people of color, especially Black people, nor to trans and non-binary people, nor to disabled people.

a) Creating a campus that is open to all across social differences in its physical layout and in its intellectual life; 

b) Resisting the role of donors in framing curricula and limiting acceptable discussion;

c) Making all scholarly materials produced at the college and all library materials open access;

d) Making the campus a sanctuary campus and adopt an expansive sense of sanctuary to include all efforts to protect undocumented immigrants, activists, and all people from policing;   

e) Highlighting these principles and commitments as the basis for communications and connections across communities. 

 

 

Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Department Mission

 

 

Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies is an interdisciplinary department for students who wish to explore gender and its relation to other axes of power: race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. We use these concepts to analyze human experience in its bodily, political, economic, and cultural dimensions. Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies covers a complex variety of theoretical and empirical scholarship both within traditional disciplines and in interdisciplinary frames in the humanities, in the social sciences, and in the natural sciences, as well as combinations of the three. The Department is committed to critical perspectives and bodies of knowledge that contribute to possibilities for transformation and change.

Early in their sophomore year, students interested in the major should consult the Department to plan their major. Students also have the option of electing a combined major and a minor. Areas of faculty research specialization include feminist and queer politics and ethics in U.S. public life; contemporary and historical social movements; gender and global political economy; sexuality and the state; sociology of the body, sex, and gender; critical science studies of gender and sexuality; transnational feminisms; Asia-Pacific cultural studies; and comparative literature and critical theory.

Complementing the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, the Barnard Center for Research on Women maintains an extensive and expanding resource collection on women’s issues. Many of these resources, including BCRW’s own online journal, The Scholar & Feminist Online, are available on BCRW’s multimedia website. BCRW also sponsors a variety of events that are invaluable to students interested in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies participates in a Consortium with Africana Studies and American Studies that supports the development of intellectual and curricular projects across the three fields and offers a concentration and minor in studies of race and ethnicity, with an attention to global and diasporic frameworks. We are particularly interested in relations between and among, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nation. The Consortium is working to create models for research and teaching that contribute to new ways of understanding processes of social differentiation and that help to create new possibilities for social relations.

Student Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the major, students will be able to attain the following outcomes:

1) Identify and denaturalize core assumptions that are attached to present-day systems of gender, race, and sexuality;

2) Understand the variability and complexity of social identities in multiple historical, social, and cultural contexts;

3) Demonstrate through oral and written presentations their understanding of gender, sexuality, and race as mutually constituted and relatively autonomous categories of social difference;

4) Develop an awareness of a broad range of historical and transnational contexts for studying gender in relation to other social relations of power;

5) Develop a familiarity with major theoretical perspectives and concepts of feminist thought and practice;

6) Distinguish between different kinds of feminist claims and critically assess their effects in the world;

7) Understand and apply key social theory concepts and perspectives as these have been used in critical scholarly and activist engagements with contemporary issues and problems;

8) Integrate gender, race, and sexuality theoretical frameworks along with a critical awareness of the politics of knowledge production in the conception and writing of an original research paper.

What You Can Do with Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Among our alumnae are filmmakers, doctors, artists, lawyers, professors, writers, librarians, counselors, teachers, and a rabbi. Majoring in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard teaches students to view the world with a complex analytical approach, to have a conscious point of view, and to retain a sense of responsibility to other women and of the need to work for women throughout their lives.