Gender Studies Chester New Hall Phone 905.525.9140 & 1280 Main Street West Ext. 24491 Feminist Research Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Fax: 905.777.8316 L8S 4L9 Email [email protected] GSFR Electives 2021-2022 Preferred Electives These courses have been pre-approved by the GSFR Director to count towards your GSFR program in 2021-22. In some but not all courses, seats have been reserved for GSFR students. You will need department consent to enroll. Please see each course for who to contact for help enrolling; please include your McMaster student number in all email requests for elective seats. Fall 2021/Term 1 (September-December 2021) A decision has not yet been made about whether Fall 2021/Term 1 courses will be in person or online GENDRST 708 Creating and Embodying Theory – Dr. Grace Kehler Day/Time TBD Contact: Angela Zaya, [email protected] This course focuses on a range of creative texts (such as film, painting, short stories, novels, and autobiography), looking to their prompts to engage with the pressing everyday issues of ongoingness and revitalization in the face of violence, loneliness, loss, disability, and racial and sexual/gender discrimination. All of the primary texts will be accompanied by theoretical ones, but the impetus is to explore how the creative invites particular theoretical and embodied engagement. Possible textual pairings include: • the diary, paintings, and sketches of Frida Kahlo (Mexican); the documentary The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo; and critical writing by Carlos Fuentes (Introduction to Kahlo’s Diary) and excerpts from either Tobin Siebers’ Disability Aesthetics (2010) or Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (2017) • The Road Forward (2017), a musical-documentary by Marie Clements (Canadian Métis), and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s “Nishnaabeg Brilliance as Radical Resurgence Theory” (2017) • Casey Plett’s transgender novel Little Fish (2018) along with excerpts from Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (2010) • Stories from Shani Mootoo’s (Trinidadian-Canadian) Out on Main Street (1993) and excerpts from Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (2010) • Honeyland (2019), a documentary set in North Macedonia, along with Franklin Ginn and Kelsey Green’s “The Smell of Selfless Love: Sharing Vulnerability with Bees in Alternative Apiculture” (2014) 1 Gender Studies Chester New Hall Phone 905.525.9140 & 1280 Main Street West Ext. 24491 Feminist Research Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Fax: 905.777.8316 L8S 4L9 Email [email protected] GENDERST 6QA3 Queerness in the Archives: Lesbian and Gay Writing, Art and Activism in Canada – Dr. Amber Dean Day/Time TBD Contact: Angela Zaya, [email protected] Please note this course is only available to MA students (not PhD diploma students) This course examines lesbian and gay writing, art and activism in Canada during the period 1969 to 1989. The course will include a trip to the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto, and students will be trained in archival research methods. In 1969, then Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously proclaimed his view that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” as sweeping changes to the Criminal Code of Canada effectively decriminalized “homosexuality.” Taking this year as our starting point we will explore the next two decades of queer life in Canada, a time of intensive lesbian and gay cultural production and activism. We will focus on fiction, journalism, theatre, film, visual and media art, and documentation of activism such as responses to decriminalization in 1969, to the Toronto bathhouse raids of 1981, to state censorship of lesbian and gay materials deemed “obscene,” and early organizing in response to AIDS. In the early 1990s, lesbian and gay activism in Canada increasingly begins to focus on achieving equal rights and state protection from discrimination; while these issues were also pursued, discussed and debated in the two decades prior, we will consider whether and how the art, activism and writing from 1969-1989 anticipates, invites, defends against, or worries about this shift in focus toward greater inclusion of lesbians and gays and away from an emphasis on gay and lesbian identity and culture as different from (and existing in tension with) so- called mainstream or “heteronormative” culture and values. The 1990s also saw the rise of queer theory as a field and the productive questioning of the categories of “gay” and “lesbian” in the interests of securing an understanding of “queer” as antinormative and subjectless. We will explore what might be read as “queer” about the writing, activism and art of lesbians and gays before the emergence of queer theory as a field, challenging ourselves to reconsider dominant stories about the origins and rise of both LGBTQ rights claims and queer theorizing. CMSTMM 707 Theoretical Issues in Media, Culture, and Communication – Dr. Lyndsey Beutin Day/Time TBD Contact: Cassandra Weimann, [email protected] This course analyzes how the key concepts underpinning media, cultural, and communication studies – concepts like liberalism, democratic participation, the public sphere, privacy and surveillance, and social inequity – are fundamentally shaped by race, gender, and global white supremacy. Students will be introduced to recent conversations in Black studies, Indigenous studies, critical ethnic studies, and disability studies. Students will learn how to apply theoretical frameworks to specific research case studies. ENGLISH/CULTRST 708 Selfie/Culture – Dr. Sarah Brophy Day/Time TBD Contact: Ilona Forgo-Smith [email protected] 2 Gender Studies Chester New Hall Phone 905.525.9140 & 1280 Main Street West Ext. 24491 Feminist Research Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Fax: 905.777.8316 L8S 4L9 Email [email protected] A critical study of the uses of digital vernacular photography, especially selfies, informed by auto/biography studies, cultural theory, comparative decolonial and feminist studies, and visual and digital media studies. HISTORY 766 Comparative Perspectives on Health and Medicine in the Colonial World – Dr. Juanita De Barros Wednesdays 2:30-5:30pm Contact: Aurelia Gatto [email protected] Concentrating on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this comparative course explores the history of health and medicine in the colonial world. Topics include public health, responses to epidemics, the roles of indigenous healthcare workers, interactions between imperial centres and colonies, and global health organizations. LABRST 740 Labour Geography (Special Topics in Labour Studies) – Dr. Suzanne Mills Day/Time TBD Contact: Megan Stokes, [email protected] Space is critical to how work is organized as well as to how workers and worker movements leverage power. This course will ask: How have workers shaped the geography of capitalism? How do unions use space to gain power and further their interests? To what extent do workers who characterized as marginalized have agency? We will adopt a spatial lens that is attentive to how social categories such as gender, racialization, Indigeneity, and sexual orientation shape worker experiences. We will begin by examining the geography of capitalism and key concepts in labour geography such as scale and place before moving on to discuss key debates and emerging topics in labour geography. LABRST 791 Contemporary Issues in Labour Studies – Dr. Judy Fudge Day/Time TBD Contact: Megan Stokes, [email protected] In 2016, the United Nations adopted Target 8.7 as one of its Sustainable Development Goals, calling on all governments to take immediate and effective measures to end forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking, as well as child labour in all its forms. Migrant workers and transnational supply chains are seen as two vectors that make forced labour a truly global problem, and there is a growing global consensus that “fair recruitment” initiatives and laws regulating supply chains are required. What does the contemporary focus on forced labour reveal about conventional understandings of global capitalism and labour exploitation? Who are the social actors shaping the “modern slavery” policy space? What are the governance mechanisms that have been developed to regulate forced labour? We will explore these questions throughout the seminar, drawing upon a range of theoretical lenses (such as feminism, Marxism, critical race and postcolonial theory) and different disciplinary perspectives (political economy, geography, anthropology, sociology and law, for instance). A key component of the seminar will be interrogating the relationship between theory and policy, and developing skills of policy analysis and policy writing using initiatives designed to eliminate forced labour in supply and labour chains as our focus. 3 Gender Studies Chester New Hall Phone 905.525.9140 & 1280 Main Street West Ext. 24491 Feminist Research Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Fax: 905.777.8316 L8S 4L9 Email [email protected] LABRST 793 Advanced Labour Studies Theory – Dr. Stephanie Ross Day/Time TBD Contact: Megan Stokes, [email protected] In this seminar, students will deepen their knowledge of select thinkers in classical and contemporary labour studies theory. Class time will be divided between the work of key theorists in the areas of labour process theory, the sociology of work and labour markets and that of theorists who challenge or extend these conceptualizations. The focus on contemporary labour studies theory will examine how