Undergraduate Course Offerings

WGST 201.3: Images of Gender and Sexuality in Popular Culture

An introduction to the ways gender, sexuality and identity are represented and produced in popular culture, mainstream media and populist feminist culture. Focuses on critical analysis and intervention, the production of culture and a variety of cultural forms, mainstream media and representational practices.

WGST 204.3: Gender and Popular Music

The relationship between gender, sexuality, and music; four main themes will be explored, namely rock culture, masculinities and music, femininities and music, and image and identity in music.

WGST 210.3: Gendered Perspectives on Current Events

Interdisciplinary examination of current events relating to gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, ability and class. Special attention will be paid to how recent/ ongoing wars, ecological crises, terrorism, economic recession, etc., impact the lives of women, children and subaltern men, and how such events are represented in mainstream and alternative media.

WGST 220.3: Queering the Terrain Cultural Space and Queer Theory

Locates queer embodiments, performances and projects in local, national and transnational contexts. What is made visible and invisible in performance theory, constructions/appropriations of the deviant, and the complex shifts in queer space taking place through globalization? How are effects produced as queer across interwoven spaces?

WGST 240.3: Contemporary Body Projects Refashioning the Self in Everyday Life

The body is fundamental to our sense of self and identity. This course explores the ways in which bodies are constituted in everyday life through the intersections of class, gender, ableness, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity and race.

WGST 250.3: Performing Masculinities

Introduces students to core theorists in masculinity studies and examines how "masculinities" circulate in, and are structured by diverse economic and political contexts, social conventions and cultural spaces. Explores the ideological underpinnings of the category "masculinity", its shifting and contested meanings, and alternative possibilities for thinking and mobilizing the masculine.

WGST 265.3: Feminist Critical Disabilities Studies

This course takes an intersectional, decolonizing, interdisciplinary approach to critical disabilities studies, inviting students to think critically about the reproduction of oppression and systemic barriers to inclusion operating out of prevailing socially constructed discourses of disability. Centering the invaluable scholarly and social rigour arising from minoritized perspectives, the course facilitates multi-disciplinary exploration of critical perspectives that engage social justice, social policy, human rights, social movements, intimate and international politics.

WGST 290.3: Feminist Representational Strategies Selected Topics

Considers shifts in the directions and impact of feminist critical thought and diverse practices of cultural production. Offered occasionally as faculty resources permit, the topic will vary in accordance with the research interests of the instructor, student demand and new developments in the field.

WGST 298.3: Special Topics

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

WGST 299.6: Special Topics

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

WGST 305.3: Geographies of Gender and Ecology

This course brings together feminist political ecology, geography, and post-development thought to interrogate ways of accounting for and responding to the impacts human animals are having on the environments we share with all the inhabitants of Earth's biosphere. It offers an advanced overview of the concepts, theories and implications arising from debates generated through eco-feminisms, as they intersect with the socially constructed geographies of local and global environments. How might sustainable or even post-development approaches to the flourishing of local and planetary bio-diversities, draw on intersectional gender-based ecological inquiry and feminist place-centered critiques? How might scholars and activists begin to imagine practical environmental justice? How do current models of work, consumption and the variously mediated strategies informing political ecology enable or disable gender-sensitive socio-ecological and feminist geographical research?

WGST 311.3: Contemporary Feminist Theories

Through interdisciplinary and intersectional frameworks, this course focuses on selected feminist theories that examine gender in contemporary life, analyzing the shift from what is known as 'Second Wave' to 'Third Wave' Feminisms. A variety of feminist theories will be considered with a focus on diversity, power relations and subjectivity.

WGST 312.3: Feminist Research Methodologies

Examines various feminist methodologies and approaches to the formal construction of knowledge. A survey of the major methods of research in diverse fields is presented in the context of feminist critique and epistemology. Androcentric bias, feminist epistemology, ethics and subjectivity are central themes of the course.

WGST 324.3: Rebels with a Cause Feminism and the Visual Arts

Examines contemporary feminist art since the 1970s, specifically: 1) diverse strategies of representing the female body and women's heterogeneous cultural experiences, 2) shifting relationships between art/activism, theory/practice, private/public spheres, Canadian/international contexts, and 3) the ways the practices of making, exhibiting and writing about art have intersected feminist thought.

WGST 375.3: Intersectional Gendered Analyses of Professional Life

This course offers students from all disciplines an opportunity to consider the ways their chosen or aspirational career pathways are implicated in the ongoing projects of the colonialist nation state and neoliberal capitalist expansion. They will also have the chance to explore potentials for their particular professional field/s to support more inclusive and just social relations. Students will examine North American histories of violence as organized through various forms of labour, whether valued, devalued, exploited, conscripted to national and other agendas, or privileged in local, national and transnational contexts. They will also consider the ways selected current events are shaped by human labour as a socio-political mechanism for consolidating hegemony and its many alternatives. The course provides an advanced option for students in Women's and Gender Studies, as well as other disciplines.

WGST 390.3: Gender in Interdisciplinary Contexts Selected Topics

Examines the ways diverse disciplinary projects have intersected with feminist studies. Whether co-taught, to provide an overview of converging approaches, or delving more deeply into a particular theme, the course is offered occasionally and topics vary in response to instructor and student interests, and developments in the field.

WGST 398.3: Special Topics

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

WGST 399.6: Special Topics

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

WGST 400.0: Honours Colloquium

WGST 411.3: Situated Transnational Feminisms

Examines women's and allied efforts to organize across national borders with focus on: social movements and self-advocacy; innovative uses of human rights and international change instruments; efforts to reduce poverty and create access to citizenship in processes of cooperation and conflict; critiques of economic "development", land use, and environmental damage.

WGST 420.3: Challenging Ways of Understanding Sexuality and Gender

This course provides students with an in-depth understanding of how queer theories and lenses can be applied to various bodies of knowledge, including sexualities studies. It engages critically with the interconnections among feminist, queer and trans studies, and their intersections with other marginalized fields of academic inquiry.

WGST 490.3: Gender Culture and Political Struggle Selected Topics

Examines critical and creative crosscurrents that surface at sites where gender, culture and political struggle converge. Designed for advanced students, specific topics addressed in this course will vary according to instructor and student interests and emergent issues in the field.

WGST 498.3: Special Topics

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

WGST 499.6: Special Topics

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations. Students interested in these courses should contact the department for more information.