Class Schedule for Fall 2023

Designed to satisfy general education requirements (Social Science group and Identity, Pluralism and Tolerance multicultural category) WGS 221 focuses on gender, the body, and dis/ability as a particular nexus of experience and social meaning, influenced as well by race, sexuality, age and class. This course places bodies and how we understand them within contexts shaped by social relations and systems of power. We will examine the ways critical disability studies both enriches feminist theory and benefits from feminist and queer perspectives. We will explore how our society thinks about and represents bodies, ability, disability and illness and how those naturalized beliefs affect all of our lives, whether we are disabled or not.  The readings for this course have been chosen to offer theoretical tools for thinking about a range of disabilities and our beliefs about them (including those involving mobility, senses, cognition, and psychological states and disabilities that result from illnesses, both apparent and invisible). Our focus will be on social, as opposed to medical, models of understanding disability and difference and will highlight activism and political interventions led by people with disabilities. The readings for this class offer a range of opinions by people with disabilities that I hope will inspire discussion and debate in class.