Gender Studies in American Culture

Gender here is treated as a structural force that shapes American life, not just a topic to survey, so the course pushes you to read gender as a social construction with real political and economic stakes. You'll work through dense theoretical and essayistic readings — Rubin, Butler, Srinivasan, Faludi, Lorde, Scott — and be expected to argue with them in seminar discussion, a quiz, a midterm, and a final, rather than just summarize. As a senior AMER requirement, it pulls together the cultural-studies toolkit you've built across the program and asks you to apply it to live debates about feminism, masculinity, sexuality, and secularism in the contemporary U.S.