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.