This course examines the increasingly recognized role of women in global peace and security affairs, as recognized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. Through politics, the military, non-governmental, and grass roots organizations, women are involved in conflict prevention, peace building, development, and war. Consideration is given to various perspectives on why gender empowerment has proven difficult, the demonstrated consequences of not including women in security affairs, and what might be expected in the future.

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"Our black ladies have rather a tendency to the Amazonian cast of character..."--Mr. Hamden, arguing to Barbados legislature against a law that proposed a ban on whipping of female slaves, 1798

The difference between Euro- and Afro-Caribbeans, posited colonial writer Edward Long, was located in their bodies: slaves' physical development, thought, and above all sexuality were other than that of their white counterparts, he argued. In response, regional literatures developed textual strategies to reclaim rhetorically and physically colonized bodies, genders, and sexualities, multiplying possible understandings of race, wo/manness, and desire. This course provides an introduction to literature from the English-, French-, Dutch- and Spanish- speaking Caribbean while exploring a series of texts that address this problematic. How are histories of racialized genders and sexualities—beginning in the Middle Passage and continuing to the present day—experienced in the Caribbean? What interests do the misrepresentation of (hyper) heterosexuality serve, and (how) can transculturating gender and/or sexuality link to political empowerment? Reading poetry, songs, essays, and novels from Jamaica, Suriname, Cuba, Antigua, Haiti, Curaçao, Martinique, and Trinidad, the course will focus both on how ideas of race, gender, and sexuality are colonially constructed in specific times and places; and on how these constructions can be re-thought and re-worked to imagine gender and sexual transgression as postcolonial praxes.

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This course will examine and compare eight major strands of contemporary North Atlantic feminism: liberal feminism, dominance feminism, cultural feminism, socialist/materialist feminism, economic feminism in a liberal market frame, critical race feminism, postmodern feminism, and the relations between feminism and conservatism. We will read classics in feminist legal theory and case studies allowing us to examine and compare the ways in which various strands of feminism have engaged law and law reform.
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In this new course, we will explore the political and politicized lives—for better and for worse—of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and queer peoples living in the United States since World War II. Centering an intersectional framework and an historical critique of “progress,” we will focus our attention on the interrelationship between protest (how LGBTQ people have organized themselves), politics (how LGBTQ people have navigated the “culture wars”), and policy (how LGBTQ people have shaped laws and rights) from the Stonewall Generation (1960s and 1970s) to the AIDS Generation (1980s and 1990s) to the Marriage Generation (2000s to present). We will study significant movement moments, hear firsthand from a diverse range of change agents (including allies and adversaries), and analyze specific legal and legislative inflection points. Targeted discrimination against queer people is considered a modern phenomenon, yet too often it is treated as an afterthought in discussions and debates about human rights and social justice—despite the fact that such prejudicial practices continue to perpetuate stigma and violence against queer people in myriad ways. The modern LGBTQ movement in the United States offers some important lessons about the long and difficult struggle from repression to rights, oppression to liberation. We won't cover everything or figure it all out in one module, but any student who is interested in knowing this history and changing this world will be welcomed and valued in this course.
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