WGSS 5520b / AMST 6635b / ER&M 5200b / HSHM 7570b, Applied Research in Feminist Science and Technology Studies  Kalindi Vora

In this seminar, participants conduct applied research on projects with the primary investigator/instructor. Structured as a lab, we learn research methods, design research activities including building bibliographies for scholarly review, and collecting data through surveys and interviews. Topics vary but are linked to active research by instructor in feminist science and technology studies. Permission of instructor is required. Undergraduates may enroll by permission of instructor.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

WGSS 5529a, Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights  Ali Miller

This course explores the application of human rights perspectives and practices to issues in regard to sexuality, gender, and health. Through reading, interactive discussion, paper presentation, and occasional outside speakers, students learn the tools and implications of applying rights and law to a range of sexuality- and health-related topics. The overall goal is twofold: to engage students in the world of global sexual health and rights policy making as a field of social justice and public health action, and to introduce them to conceptual tools that can inform advocacy and policy formation and evaluation. Class participation, a book review, an OpEd, and a final paper required. This course follows the Law School calendar. Enrollment limited. Permission of the instructor required. Also SBS 585; GLBL 529; WGSS 529.
Th 9:25am-11:20am

WGSS 5808a / EALL 5808a, Sexual Cultures in East Asia  Kyunghee Eo

This course explores how sex and sexuality have been discussed, regulated, and represented across East Asia and its diaspora, with particular focus on non-normative sexualities and gender variance. Course materials are organized in roughly chronological order, moving from scholarship on homoerotic practices in premodern East Asia; the introduction of modern sexological discourse in the early twentieth century; literary expressions of sexual deviance from the Cold War era (1945–1987); and LGBTQ subjectivities, cultures, and social movements since the 1990s. All class materials will be in English translation, and no previous knowledge of East Asian languages is required.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

WGSS 6600a, Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies  Joseph Fischel

Introduction to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies as a field of knowledge and to the interdiscipline’s structuring questions and tensions. The course genealogizes feminist and queer knowledge production, and the institutionalization of WGSS, by examining several of our key terms.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

WGSS 6607a, Feminist and Queer Ethnographies: Borders and Boundaries  Eda Pepi

This seminar gives students a storm’s eye view of contemporary crises, where borders are as volatile as the ring of a wedding bell or the birth of a child. Feminist and queer ethnographies explore the geopolitical lines and social divides that define and confine us. Manifesting through laws, social norms, and physical barriers, borders and boundaries shape our identities, turning the intimate act of living into a fiercely political one. We consider them as lived experiences that cross militarized lines—as the everyday realities of families, detention centers, workplaces, universities, and even nightclubs. Our readings trace the fluidity of borders, the extension of the global north's influence, and the internal colonialism that redraws the landscapes of nations. Contemporary ways of bridging time and space are profoundly gendered, sexualized racialized, and class-specific, capable of materializing with sudden intensity for some and remaining imperceptible to others, morphing from ephemeral lines to seemingly permanent barriers. The course is an invitation to think beyond the map—to understand borders as something people live, challenge, and transform. Our intellectual battleground is the liminal space where geopolitics meets the raw human struggle for recognition, peeling back the layers of political theatre to witness the making and unmaking of our borderlands. Anchored by a “radical hope for living otherwise,” the seminar also aims to expand the intellectual horizons necessary for dreaming of, and working towards, the world to come.
T 4pm-5:55pm

WGSS 6608b, Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East  Eda Pepi

This seminar invites students to explore how gender and citizenship intersect across the Middle East and North Africa, examining how these identities shape—and are shaped by—forces like nationalism, migration, capitalism, family, and religion. Drawing from ethnography, history, and literature, we trace how gender and sexuality simultaneously reify and trouble colonial legacies that uphold racialized ideas of “modernity.” And ask: How do global border regimes and the political economy of intimacies that sustain them reshape what it means to be—or not to be—a citizen? Our approach extends beyond laws to include everyday acts of citizenship across national and cultural divides. Readings highlight how people navigate their lives in the everyday, from the ordinary poetry of identity, love, and belonging to the spectacular drama of war and conflict.
T 4pm-5:55pm

WGSS 6620a / AMST 6619a / ER&M 6520a / HSHM 7920a, Enduring Conditions: Chronic Illness, Disability, Care, and Access  Kalindi Vora

This interdisciplinary course brings together scholarship on access and care that bridges concerns in the fields of disability studies and humanistic approaches to chronic illness. Scholarly texts are drawn from the fields of critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, anthropology and sociology of medicine, history, and feminist science and technology studies (fSTS). Seminar participants also engage with the arts and media as critical sites for understanding culture work bringing together knowledge in disability and chronic illness spaces. To embrace community-based research and knowledge sharing, the course features regular guest lectures from grassroots disability justice organizers and culture workers. The course is offered in a hybrid format. To consider what disability studies and work on chronic illness can build together, we explore the work of Moya Bailey, Aimi Hamraie, Jina B. Kim, Sami Schalk, Akemi Nishida, Ryan Cartwright, and Arthur Kleinman, among others. Permission of instructor is required. Undergraduates may also enroll with permission of instructor.
W 4pm-5:55pm

WGSS 6697b / AMST 6687b / HIST 7210b, Colonial Domesticity and Reproductive Relations  Lisa Lowe

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we study the central importance of kinship, family, and domestic labor to the social reproduction of racial colonial processes. Settler colonialism, colonial slavery, overseas empire, and their aftermaths depend not only on the brute force of war, captivity, and occupation; they are also sustained and contested through culture, language, forms of family and household, and the social reproduction of race, gender, intimacy, and filiation. We trace a genealogy of “colonial domesticity” that considers histories of the sexual violation and separation of slave women from their children, compulsory boarding schools for Native Americans, racialized gendered divisions of care labor, transnational Asian adoption, and contemporary migrant detention and family separation; this genealogy also includes alternative forms of kinship, domesticity, generation, and relation. Readings include historical and anthropological studies of colonialism, feminist debates on social reproduction, and literary and visual culture materials by Maria Mies, Ann Laura Stoler, Silvia Federici, Tithi Bhattacharya, Ruha Benjamin, Kalindi Vora, Thavolia Glymph, Saidiya Hartman, Dorothy Roberts, Audra Simpson, Jodi Byrd, Amy Kaplan, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Laura Briggs, Elizabeth Freeman, Chandan Reddy, Alys Weinbaum, Louise Erdrich, Mary Prince, Toni Morrison, Patricia Powell, Chang-rae Lee, Octavia Butler, and others. Permission of the instructor required.
W 4pm-5:55pm

WGSS 7700b, Feminist and Queer Theories  Staff

This course is designed as a graduate introduction to feminist and queer thought. It is organized by a number of key terms and institutions around which feminist and queer thinking has clustered, such as the state, the law, religion, family and kinship, capitalism and labor, the body and language, knowledge and affect, globalization and imperialism, militarism and security. The “conversations” that happen around each term speak to the richness of feminist and queer theories, the multidimensionality of feminist and queer intellectual and political concerns, and the “need to think our way out of these crises,” to cite Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty. The aim is to leave students appreciating the hard labor of feminist and queer thought, and understanding the urgencies out of which such thinking emerges.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

WGSS 7718b / ANTH 7818b / ER&M 6606b / SPAN 9718b, Multi-Sited Ethnography: Methodological Pivoting Under Duress  Eda Pepi and Ana Ramos-Zayas

In the face of resurgent authoritarianism, nativism, and assaults on academic freedom, this course examines ethnographic pivots under conditions of duress that are not exceptions but constitutive of the method itself. “Fieldsites choose us” as much as we choose them, pressing ethnographers to move with the currents of empire, capital, and knowledge production while reckoning with their limits. We retrace the genealogies of ethnographic practice and “turns” tethered to geopolitical demands: from the long shadow of “the native,” carried forward in avatars such as “the welfare queen” and “the terrorist,” to World War II–era area studies, Cold War intelligence collaborations, and the backlash against codified ethics in fieldwork and classrooms. Equally formative are the bureaucracies of academia—funding cycles, time-to-degree mandates, thematic calls, and the logics of publishing and tenure—that shape how ethnographers pose questions and frame methods. As some field sites become foreclosed and others newly thinkable, the very concept of “the field” splinters across multiple scales. What is “multi-sited” is not only movement across places but the doubleness of sites themselves—at once local and global, discrete and imbricated in imperial and transnational formations. Securitized borders, shrinking budgets, and the weaponization of academia leave open the question of whether these frictions will consolidate into a new “Americanist turn,” yet they press us to imagine the ethnographic otherwise. What becomes possible when archives, digital platforms, and mapping technologies are brought into conversation with participant observation and thick description? How might studies of diaspora, migration, enclaves, personhood, and neoliberal subjectivities be pursued not as fallback designs but as deliberate strategies? A flagship offering of the interdisciplinary Yale Ethnography Hub, the course welcomes graduate and undergraduate students across the humanities and social sciences—those preparing dissertations, senior essays, or fieldwork-driven projects, as well as those curious about ethnography’s possibilities and limits.
T 4pm-5:55pm

WGSS 7734a / AMST 7780a / HIST 7601a, Capitalism, Labor, and Class Politics in 19th-20th Century US  Jennifer Klein

This is an intensive readings course, oriented around the concept of political economy.  In some cases, the emphasis is on the relations between business, labor, and the state; in others, the connections between community, work, and the state.  We focus on U.S. capitalism in its modern form--corporate, concentrated in ownership, global in reach, constitutive of state,  market, families, and class.  Yet we investigate different modes of capitalist accumulation and creation of landscapes, territories, boundaries.  Readings will enable us to look at how regionalism, race, and class power shaped the development of American capitalism.
W 9:25am-11:20am

WGSS 8816a / ANTH 8816a, The Limits of Agency: Practical Reason, Ethnographically  Eda Pepi

You march. You chant. You show up again the next week. When resistance feels obligatory but ineffective, we learn to find agency everywhere—especially where it changes nothing. This seminar follows a history of practical reason that turns not on what agency enables, but on what remains when it does not deliver: when nothing shifts, when violent worlds hold. Rather than something one possesses, agency appears as an ethnographic problem, a historically formed, analytically ambiguous discourse tasked with rationalizing lives lived under conditions that feel structurally totalizing. Read this way, our identities as agents are not the endpoint of inquiry but its provocation, with the unsettling potential to undo the very terms we use to enter into solidarity. While the field draws from moral philosophy, our entry into practical reason is phenomenological: from Pierre Bourdieu to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, action comes into view as embodied, sedimented, and constrained within uneven fields of power. Agency cannot be assumed; it must be accounted for. We track how this idiom was inherited, stretched, and made to bear explanatory weight it cannot always sustain. Across ethnographic works where the language of agency begins to fray, human and other-than-human forces refuse, comply, persist, improvise. Standing ground or in fugitivity, we endure and sometimes even thrive in the long meantime … come the revolution. Whether agency names a capacity, an effect, a misrecognition, or something else not yet named animates our time together. Without presuming an answer, the seminar invites a different kind of attention: to forms of life that do not announce themselves as “vita activa,” to transformations that register in unintended effects, and to the possibility that we may need other vocabularies—quieter, sharper, less assured—for describing how people live in worlds that do not yield, in worlds that refuse us.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

WGSS 9900a or b, Colloquium and Working Group  Staff

The course is made up of two components: the WGSS Graduate Colloquium, in which graduate students present ongoing research (meets every two to three weeks); and the WGSS Working Group, in which faculty present pre-circulated works-in-progress for critical feedback from the WGSS community (meets every two to three weeks).  ½ Course cr
HTBA

WGSS 9905a or b, Directed Reading  Staff

Directed reading, Students enrolling in a directed reading must complete the WGSS Directed Reading Proposal found on our website (wgss.yale.edu) and submit it to the DGS in order to secure permission of the instructor.
HTBA