Course Description
Summary
This course will examine the categories of gender and sexuality within and beyond the psychological discipline and aims to familiarize students with major theoretical perspectives on gender including social constructionism, feminism, queer theory, and decolonization. The program will draw from psychological empirical research on gender and sexuality across history and culture and emphasizes the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, ability, and immigration in people's experiences and identities. We will explore how gender and gendered practices have been studied in relation to macro-social processes, such as patriarchy and capitalism, but also how they form meanings in the physical and psychological lives of individuals. We will look at how gender and sexuality are embedded in contested relations of power in diverse communities and how feminist psychologists have explored the possibilities for change in and beyond academia.
Course themes will include: history and frameworks of the psychology of gender and sexuality, gender deconstructed, feminist methodology and ethics, psychological well-being, body politics, sexuality and desire, reproductive justice, gender and labor, structural and direct violence, healing, and solidarity and agency.
This class will be taught in a hybrid format. We will meet for seminar on Zoom most weeks, with in-person meetings during select weeks. Students will have the option to complete peer group work in-person or on Zoom.
