CGS Undergrad Courses

Learn feminist approaches to the study and development of science and technology, and the ways in which they are connected to environmental and social change.

CGS 108. Gender, Race, and Artificial Intelligence (4)
(Cross-listed with LTCS 108.) This course explores the idea of artificial intelligence in both art and science, its relation to the quest to identify what makes us human, and the role gender and race have played in both. Students may not receive credit for CGS 108 and LTCS 108.

CGS 110. Intersectional Struggles for Environmental Justice (4)
Colonial and capitalist exploitation has left a trail of environmental destruction and devastated communities stretching across the globe. This course will apply an intersectional lens to analyzing racialized, gendered extractivist wastelands, environmental injustices, and the movements struggling for alternate futures.

CGS 134. Gender and Climate Justice (4)

How are the struggles for gender and climate justice linked? Drawing on critical feminist approaches to environmental questions, students will learn about how gendered identities and relations affect people's environmental knowledges, vulnerabilities, and abilities to adapt to climate change. Prerequisites: CGS 2A or 2B or at least one CGS upper-division course.

CGS 135. Feminist Science and Technology Studies (4)
Interweaving insights from history and philosophy of science, sociology of scientific institutions and knowledge, and anthropology, science studies views sciences and technologies as crucially enmeshed in human culture and politics. This course explores modern western and/or American science with a particular focus on the dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, colonialism, and their intersections in scientific knowledge production and technological development. Prerequisites: CGS 2A or 2B or at least one CGS upper-division course.

CGS 136. Gender, Tech and Development (4) 

Can smart and innovative technologies fix global inequalities and solve contemporary social and environmental problems? Drawing on academic texts, news, popular media, and development literature, students will learn to critically analyze imaginations of technology as an apolitical solution to contemporary socio-environmental challenges and understand how the racialized and gendered targets of international development are produced and imagined. Prerequisites: CGS 2A or 2B or at least one CGS upper-division course.

Examine gender and sexuality through cultural production, including literature, performance, visual art, and popular media. 

CGS 105. Queer Theory (4) Course is DEI approved.
Examines the different methodologies and disciplinary histories that together constitute the interdisciplinary project called queer studies. Of particular interest will be how these different methodologies and history construe and construct the relations between gender, race, class, and nation. Prerequisites: upper-division standing or consent of instructor.

CGS 113. Gender and Sexuality in the Arts (4)
Examines gender and sexuality in artistic practices: music, theatre, dance, performance, visual arts, and new media. Topics may include study of specific artists, historical moments, genres, cross-cultural analyses, and multiculturalism. May be taken three times when topics vary. Prerequisites: upper-division standing or consent of instructor.

CGS 119. Asian American Film, Video, and New Media: The Politics of Pleasure (4) Course is DEI approved
(Cross-listed with LTCS 119.) The course explores the politics of pleasure in relation to the production, reception, and performance of Asian American identities in the mass media of film, video, and the internet. The course considers how the “deviant” sexuality of Asian Americans (e.g., hypersexual women and emasculated men) does more than uniformly harm and subjugate Asian American subjects. The texts explored alternate between those produced by majoritarian culture and the interventions made by Asian American filmmakers. Students may not receive credit for LTCS 119 and CGS 119.

CGS 125. Women of Color Writers (4)
For women of color, writing has been more than just artistic expression. Women of color have also used the written word to challenge dominant ideas of race, gender, desire, power, violence, and intimacy, and to construct new ways of knowing, writing, and being. This course examines writing by women of color to understand how literary texts can shape and reflect social and political contexts. Prerequisites: CGS 2A or CGS 2B or at least one CGS upper-division course.

CGS 130. Queer Performativity (4)
An advanced introduction to the interdisciplinary field of performance studies with a focus on queer expression. Examines queer theory, cultural production, and social movements, drawing from scholarship on performativity that explores how art, writing, and everyday actions make meaning in the world. Prerequisites: CGS 2A or 2B or at least one CGS upper-division course.

CGS 137. Latina Issues and Cultural Production (4)
(Cross-listed with ETHN 137.) This course will focus on the intersection of labor, class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and immigration in Latina cultural production. Examined from a socioeconomic, feminist, and cultural perspective, class readings will allow for historically grounded analyses of these issues. May be taken for credit three times. Prerequisites: CGS 2A-B, ETHN 1, 2, or 3, at least one CGS or ETHN upper-division course, or permission of the instructor. Students may receive a combined total of twelve units for CGS 137 and ETHN 137.

Learn feminist approaches to the law, with an emphasis on women’s and LGBTQIA+ civil liberties, such as bodily autonomy, migration, racial justice, and other social movements.   

CGS 106. Gender and the Law (4)
Explores the legal treatment of discrimination on the basis of gender, including equal protection doctrine and some statutory law such as Title VII. Topics include the meaning of gender equality in such areas as single-sex education, military service, sexual harassment, discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, and other current issues.

CGS 114. Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class (4)
(Cross-listed with ETHN 183.) Gender is often neglected in studies of ethnic/racial politics. This course explores the relationship of race, ethnicity, class, and gender by examining the participation of working-class women of color in community politics and how they challenge mainstream political theory.

CGS 116. Feminist Social Movements (4)
This course will examine past and present feminist social movements and their implications and political impact in the contemporary moment. What are the basic dynamics of social movements? What future political forms and practices may be enabled by past and present movements? The #MeToo movement and other social movements will be covered.

CGS 118. Gender and Incarceration (4)
(Cross-listed with ANSC 186.) This course investigates the ways in which forces of racism, gendered violence, and state control intersect in the penal system. The prison-industrial complex is analyzed as a site where certain types of gendered and racialized bodies are incapacitated, neglected, or made to die. Students may not receive credit for CGS 118 and ANSC 186.

CGS 123. Gender and Reproductive Politics (4) Global Health
Legal treatment of gender, reproductive rights, and the family, particularly as evolving law, primarily in the U.S., has created conflicting rights, roles, and responsibilities. Topics include abortion, fetal rights, surrogacy, marriage, and child custody issues. Students will not receive credit for both CGS 107 and 123. Prerequisites: CGS 2A-B, at least one CGS upper-division course, or permission of the instructor.

CGS 126. Muslims on Gender and Sexuality (4)
This course will critically examine selected feminist, queer, and trans activist and scholarly productions of Muslim women and nonbinary people who are engaging with urgent questions about gender and sexuality in relation to Islam and Muslimness in the Islamicate and diasporas. It will encourage students to explore questions of gender and queerness at the Muslim sacred and seemingly secular sites of the Qur’an, law, borders, immigration, home, labor, desire, fashion, and activism. Prerequisites: CGS 2A or 2B or at least one CGS upper-division course.

CGS 127. Feminist Border Studies (4)
This course investigates how borders are produced, policed, and maintained, centering gender and sexuality, embodiment, and racialization as key analytic lenses. Prerequisites: CGS 2A or 2B or at least one CGS upper-division course.

CGS 150. Visuality, Sexuality, and Race (4)
(Cross-listed with ETHN 150.) Examines the role of the visual in power relations; the production of what we see regarding race and sexuality; the interconnected history of the caste system, plantation slavery, visuality and contemporary society; decolonial and queer counternarratives to visuality. Students may not receive credit for CGS 150 and ETHN 150. Prerequisites: CGS 2A-B, ETHN 1, 2, 3, at least one CGS or ETHN upper-division course, or permission of the instructor. 

CGS 167A. Decolonial Muslim Feminisms (4)

Bring an intersectional feminist lens to the study of mental, physical, and public health, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. 

CGS 109. Sexual Violence (4)
This course examines how sexual violence is experienced in relation to/with gender, racialization, sexuality, and class. It considers reporting structures and asks who is heard when sexual violence is named and how so many are not heard. It also explores movements working to interrupt sexual violence.

CGS 111. Gender and the Body (4)
Various approaches to the study of gendered bodies. Possible topics to include masculinities/femininities; lifecycles; biology, culture, and identity; medical discourses; and health issues. May be taken for credit three times when topics vary. Prerequisites: upper-division standing or consent of instructor.

CGS 117. Transgenderisms (4)
(Cross-listed with ANSC 117.) This course contrasts mainstream Anglo-American conceptualizations of transgenderism with ethnographic accounts of the experiences and practices of gender expansive people of color (African, Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Latinx Americans) in the United States and abroad. It will question the idea of transgenderism as a crossing from one gender to another one, the distinction between gender identity and sexuality, and the analytic of intersectionality. Students will not receive credit for both CGS 117 and ANSC 117.

CGS 123. Gender and Reproductive Politics (4)
Legal treatment of gender, reproductive rights, and the family, particularly as evolving law, primarily in the U.S., has created conflicting rights, roles, and responsibilities. Topics include abortion, fetal rights, surrogacy, marriage, and child custody issues. Students will not receive credit for both CGS 107 and 123. Prerequisites: CGS 2A-B, at least one CGS upper-division course, or permission of the instructor.

CGS 124. Girls and Sexuality (4)
Explores how girls’ sexualities are shaped by gender, race, class, educational, medical, and penal institutions, and sexual norms. Engages with interdisciplinary scholarship that examines how and why girls and sexuality is such a volatile subject of public debate, and the manner in which girls’ sexualities are represented in various media. Students will not receive credit for both CGS 116 and 124. Prerequisites: CGS 2A-B, at least one CGS upper-division course, or permission of the instructor.

CGS 147. Black Feminisms, Past and Present (4)
(Cross-listed with ETHN 147.) An advanced introduction to historical and contemporary black feminisms in the United States and transnationally. Students will explore the theory and practice of black feminists/womanists and analyze the significance of black feminism to contemporary understandings of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Students may not receive credit for CGS 147 and ETHN 147. Prerequisites: CGS 2A-B, ETHN 1, 2, 3, at least one CGS or ETHN upper-division course, or permission of the instructor.

CGS 150. Visuality, Sexuality, and Race (4)
(Cross-listed with ETHN 150.) Examines the role of the visual in power relations; the production of what we see regarding race and sexuality; the interconnected history of the caste system, plantation slavery, visuality and contemporary society; decolonial and queer counternarratives to visuality. Students may not receive credit for CGS 150 and ETHN 150. Prerequisites: CGS 2A-B, ETHN 1, 2, 3, at least one CGS or ETHN upper-division course, or permission of the instructor. 

Practice feminist, comparative approaches to the study of global structures of administration, international politics, and public policy, with attention to gender, sexuality, and advocacy. 

CGS 101. Gender and Globalization (4)
This course explores the effects of globalization on transnational relations of gender and sexuality. Topics include the division of labor, politics of production and consumption, constructions of gender and sexuality within global grassroots movements, and the migration of people, capital, and culture. Prerequisites: upper-division standing or consent of instructor.

CGS 112. Sexuality and Nation (4)  Course is DEI approved
(Cross-listed with ETHN 127.) This course explores the nexus of sex, race, ethnicity, gender, and nation and considers their influence on identity, sexuality, migration movement and borders, and other social, cultural, and political issues that these constructs affect. Prerequisites: upper-division standing or consent of instructor.

CGS 120. Capitalism and Gender (4)
(Cross-listed with ANSC 180.) Drawing insight from anticolonial and queer of color critique, this course critically examines the demands capitalism makes on us to perform gender, and how that relates to processes of exploitation and racialization. We will explore alternatives and develop strategies for navigating jobs in this system. Students may receive credit for one of the following: CGS 120, CGS 180, and ANSC 180.