Courses

This course is looking to the Global South to examine the regional dynamics of gender and its intersection with race, ethnicity, sexual identity, (dis)ability, class, and other axes of oppression. This course also places special emphasis on the roles and opportunities afforded to women in the developing world context and on the effects of globalization on members of oppressed and marginalized groups.

Cross-listed with PHIL 202 this course uses philosophical analysis of issues relating to sex/gender and considers the following questions: What, if anything, is the difference between sex and gender? How much of a role do facts about biology play in our ideas about sex and gender? How many sexes are there? What ethical issues arise for us by virtue of our gender?

This course examines sexual violence and sexual citizenship from a theoretical, practical and actionable framework. It unpacks the potential role individuals, communities, institutions and societies have in awareness, prevention, education and response to sexual violence. Emphasis will be placed on discussion of what we can do as individuals, as members of a university campus, and as members of a broader community that normalizes, minimizes and silences sexual violence. Topics may include consent culture, sexual violence culture, the role of gender in sexual negotiation and sexual pleasure, the role of advocacy and allyship, active bystander intervention, sexual violence policy, and responding to disclosures of sexual violence.

This course will examine how contemporary literary and cultural texts represent, reconfigure, and resist ideas of race. Analyzing literature, film, art, popular culture, and social movements, the course covers major debates in critical race theory and anti-racist practices.

Sexuality and the Law explores the social construction of sex and sex behaviours and how those constructions shape our responses, both socially and legally. In this class we explore how our ideas around appropriate and inappropriate sexual behaviour are shaped by time, place, and historical context, analyzing how our ideas evolve from ancient family forms to our current understandings. Further, we examine the ways that we control sexual behaviour, particularly through the use of criminal law. Although this class delves into difficult subject areas, such as sexual assault and the sexual abuse of children, we use a sociological lens to try to understand the nature and extent of those behaviours and to shed light on the complicated factors that shape a person’s likelihood to engage in sexual offending.

What is feminist legal thought? This course provides an introduction to this concept with a particular focus on Canadian cases, legislation, law reform, and legal literature. Addressing issues of gender and how it intersects with age, race, ethnicity, and religion, this class analyzes the law and how it contributes to women's legal, social, political, and economic status as well as the manner in which the law is used as a mechanism of social change for women.

This course will provide upper-level undergraduate students with a seminar-style forum for considering the literature and culture surrounding gender variation in early modern Britain. The course will examine a wide variety of authors such as Aphra Behn, William Shakespeare, Charlotte Charke, and Henry Fielding and, in doing so, engage with a range of exciting texts, including works for the renaissance travesty stage, biographies of female soldiers and female husbands, sensational news reports, and ballads, sonnets, and other forms of verse. The period between 1550 and 1800 is often viewed as one in which ideas of gender identity were changing rapidly and were less fixed than in subsequent eras. Together, we will explore archives and texts about sex and gender, theatrical representation, masquerade, sexual disguise, hermaphrodites, sex changes, religious ideas of gender, and queer sexualities to assess what they reveal about the expression of transgender and nonbinary identity in the early modern period.

Cross-listed with PSCI 470, this course interrogates how the state comes to control people and their behaviours on the basis of certain physiological traits, imagined or real. Examining concepts like “exclusion,” “erasure,” and “containment,” the course asks how the regulation of race, class, disability, sexuality, and gender have come to be embedded in law and policy, and what they have to do with certain body parts, tissues, and fluids (e.g., blood, skin, eggs and sperm).