Course Descriptions

The following is a complete listing of the Undergraduate and Graduate courses offered in the Women and Gender Studies Department.

Courses and course descriptions in Women and Gender Studies are listed in the San Francisco State University Bulletin and online A current schedule of classes is available online on the SFSU Class Schedule page.

Undergraduate Courses:

WGS 150 - Women in American History and Society (USH)
Examines the historical development of American institutions and ideals and the evolution of economic, political, and social processes in the U.S. from American Indian times to the present, particularly with regard to the roles and status of women.

WGS 160 - Women, Politics, and Citizenship (USG, CSLG)
Examines American political ideals, institutions, and processes, with particular attention to their implications for women and women's contributions to public life.

WGS 200 - Introduction to Women and Gender Studies (GE)
Introduction to the origins, purpose, subject matter, and methods of Women and Gender Studies and to feminist perspectives on a range of social issues affecting women.

WGS 201 - Gender, Race, and Nation
Prerequisite: WOMS 200; ENG 214 or equivalent. Through an interdisciplinary perspective, examines the politics of representing women and gender through differences of race, class, sexuality, nation, and state. Focuses on feminist and related social movements including US women of color.

WGS 301 - Women, Gender, and Community (GE)
Prerequisite: English 214 or equivalent. Discussion of Community as a concept, as well as specific communities that address women’s or gender issues. Topics many include imagined, communities, scholarly communities, community activism, coalition politics, and other forms of feminist affinity and networking.

WGS 302 - Translating Women's Experience (GE)
Prerequisite: English 214 or equivalent. An exploration of various ways to translate women's cultural experience into writing. Students express, analyze and act upon women's experience in several modes: personal and critical essays, journals and autobiographies, fiction and poetry, socio-political action writing.

WGS 303 - Women as Creative Agents (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Personal expression and self-definition through creative experience in various media: drawing, painting, photography, poetry, sculpture and writing. Examination of related work of women artists, film makers, and poets from various backgrounds. Classwork, two units; laboratory, one unit.

WGS 304 - Gender and Popular Culture
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. The question of representation; that is, the formation of culture in relation to women and gender. How women and gender are constructed, narrated, and represented in both written and visual cultures.

WGS 305/WGS 805 - Women and Gender Studies Lecture Series
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Lecture series provides a sampling of feminist perspectives on scholarship, research, and activism including presentations, film screenings, and academic lectures on current theories and topics in the field of women and gender studies. Paired with WOMS 805. Students who have completed WOMS 305 may not take WOMS 805 later for credit. CR/NC grading only.

WGS 400 - Research Methods in Women and Gender Series (GE)
Prerequisite: WGS 200 and ENG 214 or equivalent. Women and gender: feminist knowledge, review of methodological problems, and the understanding of the importance of power relations in the formation
of knowledge.

WGS 445/RAZA 445 - Gendered Borders: Latinas and Globalization (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Gender and globalization: moving society toward borderless economies with barricaded borders. Latinas struggle for fair wages, self-determination, and healthy families. Women living in US and Latin America adjusting to transnational reality. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix).

WGS 485/BECA 485 - Women and Media (GE)
Prerequisite: English 214 or equivalent. Analytic modes, including feminist, psychoanalytic, and economic criticism, to assess both how women are represented in mass media and the status of women employed in mass media. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WGS 510 - Gender and the Culture of War
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Using historical, theoretical, fictional, and cultural texts, students discuss political, cultural, and ideological configurations of war in conjunction with case studies of men/women’s involvement in different violent conflicts.

WGS 511 - Women and Violence
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. The psychological and physical violence visited upon women, relations of gender and violence. Research, feminist theory, and controversy within the women's movement; incest, rape, battery, pornography, etc.

WGS 512 - Feminist Approaches to Queer Identities and Communities.
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Examination of queer identities in cultural and historical contexts, using a transnational feminist approach. Presents a challenge to Western assumptions about sexual identities and analysis of sexuality through nation, gender, race and class.

WGS 514 - Women and the Prison Industrial Complex
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Incarceration of women and children in prisons, jails, juvenile, and mental institutions. Treatment on the basis of race, class, and ethnicity; reforms or alternatives to incarceration.

WGS 516 - Gender and Visual Culture
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Using an interdisciplinary/transnational perspective, this course will examine how gender is understood through visual registers and how visual culture depends upon ideas about gender. Key authors, concepts and methodologies in the field of visual studies will be covered.

WGS 530 - Women and Gender Studies and Social Theory
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Topic to be specified in Class Schedule. May be repeated when topics vary.

WGS 531 - Gender and the Politics of Development
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Critical examination of gendered politics of international development discourses, agencies, and programs. Examination of the most pervasive effects of modernization introduced through development projects. Women's localized and transnational movements that offer alternatives to development projects and practices.

WGS 533 - Women, Men, and Cultural Change (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Film, literature, and small group discussions/dynamics are used to help women and men become better co-workers, parents, political allies, friends, lovers.
Re-educates women and men of different cultures to new understandings of their interpersonal/social relations.

WGS 534/SS 345 - Gender and the Law (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Study of feminist legal thought and analysis of the role law plays in maintaining or transforming gendered societies. Topics include family law, LGBT rights; and reproductive rights; affirmative action and equal protection laws; and law, culture, and international human rights. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WGS 535/HIST 535/RAZA 533 - History of Women in Latin America (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent; upper division standing or consent of the instructor. History of the changing roles of women in Latin America from the colonial period to the present. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WGS 540 - Issues in the Humanities and the Arts
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Topics to be specified in Class Schedule May be repeated when topics vary.

WGS 541 - Women Writers and Social Change
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Examines the relationship between women's literature and women's participation, as activists and theorists, in movements in the US for progressive social change.

WGS 542 - Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Popular Music
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. This course focuses on how music can restate and resist notions of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. Musical styles may include blues, jazz, folk, corridos, country, bhangra, disco, punk, rock, salsa, and hip-hop. It analyzes popular music in the US and internationally.

WGS 544/ENG 613 - Feminist Literary Criticism
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Examines the origins, methods, and functions of feminist literary criticism; feminist critical analysis to specific works of literature by women and men. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WGS 546/ENG 546/JS546 - Twentieth Century American Jewish Women Writers (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Exploration through novels, short fiction, and memoir the connections American women forge and the tensions they experience via encounters with self, family, Judaism, American society, and world history. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WGS 548 - Literature by U.S. Women of Color (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Examination of twentieth century literature by African-American, Latina, Asian-American, and Native American women. Comparative analysis of literary forms, styles, images, and themes used by each group to express their experiences of racism, sexism and daily life in the US.

WGS 550 - Issues in Queer Studies
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent.
Variable topics to be listed in Class Schedule.

WGS 551/HMSX 551 - Queer Literatures and Media (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or consent of instructor. The study of queer literature and media productions from a feminist and transnational perspective. Uses an intersectional analysis of gender, race, class, sexuality, and citizenship to examine fiction, film, cultural and historical texts.(May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WGS 552 - Transgender Identities and Communities (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Examination of transgender and transsexual identities in cultural and historical contexts using a transnational feminist approach. Presents a challenge to Western gender binaries and analyzes gender through nation, race, sexuality and class.

WGS 554/WGS 754 - Immigrant and Refugee Women (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent and WGS 200. Condition of refugee and immigrant women in the world: causes, conditions, and problems of such movements. The cultural, economic, and social issues. Paired with WGS 754. Students who have completed WGS 554 may not take WGS 754 later for credit.

WGS 560/CINE 560/ETHS 560 - Alternative Representation in Documentary Production
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Hands-on filmmaking exercises combined with historical, theoretical, and stylistic considerations of cultural representation employed by documentary filmmakers. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WGS 561 - Women of Color in the U.S. (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Major issues and themes in the history, culture, and contemporary lives of Black, Native American, Asian American, and Latina women in the US.

WGS 562 - History of African American Women (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Examines the experiences of Black women under slavery; in their pioneering roles as industrial, domestic, and agricultural workers; and in their varied political, social and educational roles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

WGS 564/WGS 764 - Women Writers and Colonialism (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Study of literature by women writers whose work addresses the experience of peoples in colonized countries with a history of colonialism and/or imperialism. Paired with WGS 764. Students who have complete WGS 564 may not take WGS 764 later for credit.

WGS 565 - Women in the Muslim and Arab World (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. An examination of difference /similarities in women's lives in Muslim/Arab world, including diaspora in Europe and North America. Also covers minorities in Arab Middle East. Analysis includes issues of gender as it related to nationalism, religion, and culture.

WGS 566/WGS 766 - Gender and Modernity in the Muslim and Arab Worlds
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. This course investigates implications of modernity/modernization for gender and sexuality in the Muslim and Arab Worlds. By interrogating dichotomies that oppose tradition to modernity, this course examines the multifaceted ways in which gender identities are produced historically. Paired with WGS 766. Students who have completed WGS 566 may not take WGS 766 for credit.

WGS 570/WGS 770 - Issues in Woman and Public Policy
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Examination of a specific issue in public policy, its role in the formation of gender inequities, and its impact on the position of women in the economy. Paired with WGS 770. Students who take WGS 570 may not take WGS 770 later for credit.

WGS 571/WGS 771 - Women, Poverty and Globalization
Prerequisite: ENG 214. Understanding of globalization and its relationship to women's poverty; work with a community organization concerned with these issues. Paired with WOMS 771. Students who take WGS 571 may not take WGS 771 later for credit.

WGS 575/HIST 575 - History of Women in China and Japan (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Social, cultural, intellectual, political, and economic lives of women in China and Japan. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WGS 578/WGS 778 - Third World Women and Ecology
Prerequisite: WGS 214 or equivalent. Ecological issues concerning women and gender from a third world women's perspective: environmental racism and justice, ecology, health, development, and international human rights. Paired with WGS 778. Students who have completed WGS 578 may not take WGS 778 for credit.

WGS 590 - Special Issues in Women and Gender Studies
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Topic to be specified in Class Schedule. May be repeated when topics vary.

WGS 593 - Women, Health, and the Environment
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Emergence of "western medicine" as primary paradigm, and the consequences of socio-political formations to women's health. Emergence of "holistic" treatments, "traditional" medicine from indigenous and pre-colonial perspectives, and oppositional health practices emerging from environmental movements.

WGS 595/ANTH 590/CST 590 - Anthropology of Women (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Ethnographic, physical, anthropological, and pre-historical materials on women. Theories on origins of the family, social structuring of sexuality, and changing sex and gender in modern societies. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WGS 611 - Theories of Female Sexuality (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Relationship between female sexuality and its historical, social, and ideological contexts focusing on trends and issues in current feminist thought. Topics include critical race studies, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender studies, transnational feminism, reproductive and non-reproductive sexualities.

WGS 621- Feminist Theories
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Analysis of feminist theories and practices internationally and historically; examination of theories of gender, race, class, sexuality, identity, community, modernity, and nation. Study of methods, histories, and implications of feminist thought in various academic, cultural and political contexts.

WGS 685 - Projects in the Teaching of Women and Gender Studies
Prerequisite: advanced undergraduate standing in Women and Gender Studies and approval of supervising instructor and department. Grade of B or better in course in which student will be an instructional aide. Teaching experience in Women and Gender Studies through assigned instructional projects in a classroom and under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Training in pedagogical principles including supervised classroom teaching activities.

WGS 690 - Senior Seminar
Prerequisite: WGS 200 and 201; ENG 214 or equivalent. Focuses on enabling students to evaluate their learning progress by creating a portfolio which includes writing a paper analyzing their work. Students collaborate to produce a publication.

WGS 698 - Work Study in Feminist Projects
Supervised community or university service that relates to the Women and Gender Studies major, individual Women and Gender Studies courses, or the student's own major. May be repeated for a total of 9 units.

WGS 699 - Special Study
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. Special study in some aspect of feminism or Women and Gender Studies, performed under department faculty supervision. Enrollment by petition. Repeatable for credit.

Graduate Courses:

WGS 700 - Introduction to Graduate Study
Origins and current status of Women and Gender Studies as field of knowledge. Relationships between gender and epistemology; examination of feminist critiques and transformations of research methodologies. Development of research skills; identification of major works and issues in feminist scholarship.

WGS 710 - Feminist Social Movements
Prerequisite: WGS 700 or consent of instructor. Social stratification and the state; political marginalization of women. Egalitarianism in the legacy of women's participation in society. Colonial transformations and the politics/culture of resistance. Turning points in women's activism. Impact of race/class inequities.

WGS 712 - Queer Theories
Prerequisite: WGS 700 or consent of instructor. Studies queer theory from a transnational feminist approach. Critiques the production of sex and sexuality within western epistemology, the politics of sexual deviance, and the racialization of sexual identities. Postculturalist, political, economic, cultural, intersectional, and historiographic approaches will be considered.

WGS 713 - Intellectual Geneaologies
Prerequisite: WGS 700 or consent of instructor (WGS 700 may be taken concurrently). Intensive examination of specific issues, topics, or theoretical tendencies in current feminist discussions and debate, and analysis of the implications of theory for social practice.

WGS 720 - Feminist Pedagogies
Prerequisite: WGS 700 or consent of instructor. Theories, methods, and planning of Women and Gender Studies courses; designed for Women and Gender Studies majors interested in teaching at the college level.

WGS 747/ENG 747 - Feminist Criticisms
Prerequisite: graduate status in Women and Gender Studies or consent of the instructor. Diverse feminist theoretical and critical approaches in social contexts; canons; female aesthetics; social, linguistic, and psychoanalytic approaches. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WGS 750 - Issues of Gender, Race, Class, Sexuality
Prerequisite: WGS 700 or consent of instructor. Topic to be specified in Class Schedule. May be repeated once when topics vary.

WGS 754 - Immigrant and Refugee Women
Prerequisite: WGS 564/764 or another course on history of colonialism in the Modern Period. For course description, see WGS 554. Paired with WGS 554. Students who have completed WGS 754 may not take WGS 554 for credit.

WGS 760 - Cross-cultural Study in Women's Literature and Culture
Gender and culture as the basis for a cross-cultural examination of women's literature rooted in colonial discourse. Pan-African women writers serve as points of departure for the study of Irish, Palestinian, and other women writers.

WGS 764 - Women Writers and Colonialism
Prerequisite: For course description, see WGS 564. Paired with WOMS 564. Students who have completed WGS 764 may not take WGS 564 for credit.

WGS 766 - Gender and Modernity in the Muslim and Arabs Worlds

For course description, see WGS 566. Paired with WGS 566. Students who have completed WGS 566 may not take WGS 566 for credit.

WGS 770 - Issues in Women and Public Policy
Prerequisite: WGS 700 or consent of instructor. For course description, see WGS 570. Paired with WGS 570. Students who have completed WGS 770 may not take WGS 570 for credit.

WGS 771: Women, Poverty, and Globalization
Prerequisite: Classified graduate status. For course description, see WGS 571. Paired with WGS 571. Students who have completed WGS 771 may not take WGS 571 for credit.

WGS 778 - Third World Women and Ecology
Prerequisite: WGS 700 or consent of instructor. For course description, see WGS 578. Paired with WGS 578. Students who have completed WGS 778 may not take WGS 578 for credit.

WGS 785 - Graduate Projects in the Teaching of Women and Gender Studies
Prerequisite: grade of B or better or equivalency for the course in which the graduate student will be an aide and consent of instructor. Provides practical learning experience and knowledge of pedagogical strategies and principles of teaching and learning Women and Gender Studies subject matter.

WGS 805: Women and Gender Studies Lecture Series
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. For course description, see WGS 305. Paired with WGS 305. Students who have completed WGS 805 may not take WGS 305 for credit. CR/NC grading only.

WGS 820 - Feminist Research Methods
Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor. For Women and Gender Studies students, WGS 700 required. Explores the field of social research and feminism. It will prepare students to critically analyze research studies, develop research skills, and develop their master's projects.

WGS 894 - Creative Work Project
Prerequisite: WGS 700, advancement to candidacy, and approval of the graduate major adviser. An original creative work. Projects must be described in a written document that summarizes the project's relation to other work in the area, its rationale, its significance, and its creative methodologies. Graduate Approved Program and Proposal for Culminating Experience Requirement forms must be approved by the Graduate Division before registration. CR/NC grading only.

WGS 895 - Field Study Project
Prerequisites: WGS 700, advancement to candidacy, and approval of the graduate major adviser. A field study or applied research project resulting in a completed written work that includes the project's significance, objectives, methodology, and conclusions or recommendations. Graduate Approved Program and Proposal for Culminating Experience Requirement forms must be approved by the Graduate Division before registration. CR/NC grading only.

WGS 898 - Master's Thesis
Prerequisites: WGS 700, advancement to candidacy, and approval of the graduate major adviser. Intensive study of a topic or issue within the field of Women and Gender Studies, culminating in a written thesis showing independent thinking, appropriate methodology and organization, clarity of purpose, thorough documentation, and relevant conclusions. Graduate Approved Program (GAP) and Proposal for Culminating Experience Requirement forms must be approved by the Graduate Division before registration. CR/NC grading only.

WGS 899: Special Study
Prerequisite: consent of the graduate major adviser and the supervising faculty member. Study is planned, developed, and completed under the direction of a member of the department faculty. Open only to graduate students who have demonstrated ability to do independent work. Enrollment is by petition.