Explores theories of disability justice as they intersect with feminist and antiracist struggles. Analyzing how disability has been an important aspect of institutions and social experience in the United States and beyond, the course considers how disability activists have responded to ableism by developing art, political strategies, and subcultures that promote a more just society built for a wider variety of human bodies.

Developed by feminists of color, reproductive justice frameworks offer a roadmap for economic, social, and medical justice advocacy attentive to the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. This course reviews the historical, legal, and social bases of reproductive rights in the U.S.; discusses the history of feminist organizing for reproductive freedom; surveys critical theories of reproductive justice that go beyond abortion law to advocate for broader social transformation; and evaluates the possible futures of intersectional feminist activism after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

An examination of the economic, family, and political roles of colonial slave, immigrant and frontier women in America from the pre-industrial colonial period through the early stages of 19th-century industrialization and urbanization.

Comics push the boundaries of representation in art, tempting curious readers and artists alike with the hybrid possibilities that come from combining words and images to tell transgressive, poignant, and urgent stories. While historically, American comics have been met with restrictions due to reactionary fears about corrupting children, comics have a long history of challenging the status quo and forging a space for queer, women, and other historically marginalized communities to share their experiences through sequential art. Focus on comics, zines, and self-published narrative images by trans, queer, and women artists to explore the possibilities of comics as a medium of subversion and queer narrative possibility. Read comics by Alison Bechdel, Bishakh Som, Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet, and others, and explores the cultural contexts and image-texts that reshaped queer arts and literature. Students also create their own comics in the tradition of subversive and boundary breaking narrative art. Prior experience in drawing is not required for success in this class.

Explores the contributions of feminist scholarship in framing and resolving contemporary controversies concerning gendered bodies. It includes the ways in which knowledge about the human body has been shaped by cultural ideas of gender, race, sexuality and ability.