Department of Women Studies, San Francisco State University

The following is a complete listing of the undergraduate and graduate courses offered in the Women Studies Department.
For current SFSU Women Studies and general course offerings, see the SFSU Online Course Schedule.

Undergraduate Courses:

WOMS 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.

WOMS 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.

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

WOMS 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.

WOMS 301 - Women, Gender, and Community (GE)
Prerequisite: upper division standing or consent of instructor. 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.

WOMS 302 - Translating Women's Experience (GE)
Prerequisite: 3 units of English composition 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.

WOMS 303 - Women as Creative Agents (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 114. 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.

WOMS 304 - Gender and Popular Culture
Prerequisite: ENG 214. 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.

WOMS 305/WOMS 805 - Women Studies Lecture Series
Prerequisite: ENG 214 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.

WOMS 400 - Research Methods in Women and Gender Series (GE)
Prerequisite: WOMS 200 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.

WOMS 445/RAZA 445 - Gendered Borders: Latinas and Globalization (GE)
Prerequisite: upper division standing or consent of instructor. 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).

WOMS 485/BECA 485 - Women and Media (GE)
Prerequisite: upper division standing. 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.)

WOMS 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.

WOMS 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.

WOMS 512/WOMS 712 - Feminist Approaches to Sexual Identities and Cultures
Prerequisite: ENG 214. Feminist scholarship on sexual identities, movements, and cultures in different parts of the world and different historical periods. Paired with WOMS 712. Students who have taken WOMS 512 may not take WOMS 712 later for credit.

WOMS 514 - Women and the Prison Industrial Complex
Prerequisite: ENG 114 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.

WOMS 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.

WOMS 530 - Women Studies and Social Theory
Topic to be specified in Class Schedule. May be repeated when topics vary.

WOMS 531 - Gender and the Politics of Development
Prerequisite: WOMS 200 or consent of instructor. 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.

WOMS 533 - Women, Men, and Cultural Change (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 114 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.

WOMS 534/SS 345 - Gender and the Law (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 114 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.)

WOMS 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.)

WOMS 540 - Issues in the Humanities and the Arts
Topics to be specified in Class Schedule May be repeated when topics vary.

WOMS 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.

WOMS 542 - Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Popular Music
Prerequisite: ENG 114 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.

WOMS 544/ENG 613 - Feminist Literary Criticism
Prerequisite: ENG 114 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.)

WOMS 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.)

WOMS 548 - Literature by U.S. Women of Color (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 114 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.

WOMS 550 - Special Studies in Lesbian Lives
Topics to be specified in Class Schedule. May be repeated when topics vary.

WOMS 551/HMSX 551 - Lesbian and Queer Perspectives in Literature and Media (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 114 or consent of instructor. Examines literature and media productions by lesbians and queers of various racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds. Emergence of lesbian and queer concerns and feminist concerns and issues of cultural production and literary form. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WOMS 552 - Lesbian Lives and Thought (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 114 or equivalent. Examination of lesbian, queer, and transgender 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.

WOMS 554/WOMS 754 - Immigrant and Refugee Women (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent and WOMS 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 WOMS 754. Students who have completed WOMS 554 may not take WOMS 754 later for credit.

WOMS 560/CINE 560/ETHS 560 - Alternative Representation in Documentary Production
Prerequisite: upper division standing and consent of instructor. 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.)

WOMS 561 - Women of Color in the U.S. (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 114 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.

WOMS 562 - History of African American Women (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 114 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.

WOMS 564/WOMS 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 WOMS 764. Students who have complete WOMS 564 may not take WOMS 764 later for credit.

WOMS 565 - Women in the Muslim and Arab World (GE)
Prerequisite: upper division standing or consent of instructor. 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.

WOMS 566/WOMS 766 - Gender and Modernity in the Muslim and Arab Worlds
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent with grade of C or better. 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 WOMS 766. Students who have completed WOMS 566 may not take WOMS 766 for credit.

WOMS 570/WOMS 770 - Issues in Woman and Public Policy
Prerequisite: upper division standing or consent of instructor. 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 WOMS 770. Students who take WOMS 570 may not take WOMS 770 later for credit.

WOMS 571/WOMS 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 WOMS 571 may not take WOMS 771 later for credit.

WOMS 575/HIST 575 - History of Women in China and Japan (GE)
Prerequisite: upper division standing or consent of instructor. Social, cultural, intellectual, political, and economic lives of women in China and Japan. (May not be repeated under alternate prefix.)

WOMS 578/WOMS 778 - Third World Women and Ecology
Prerequisite: WOMS 200 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 WOMS 778. Students who have completed WOMS 578 may not take WOMS 778 for credit.

WOMS 590 - Special Issues in Women Studies
Topic to be specified in Class Schedule. May be repeated when topics vary.

WOMS 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.

WOMS 595/ANTH 590/CST 590 - Anthropology of Women (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 114 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.)

WOMS 611 - Female Sexuality: Social and Theoretical Perspectives (GE)
Prerequisite: ENG 114 or equivalent. Examination of the 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.

WOMS 621- Feminist Theories
Prerequisite: ENG 114 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.

WOMS 685 - Projects in the Teaching of Women Studies
Prerequisite: advanced undergraduate standing in women 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 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.

WOMS 690 - Senior Seminar
Prerequisite: WOMS 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.

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

WOMS 699 - Special Study
Prerequisite: ENG 114 or equivalent. Special study in some aspect of feminism or women studies, performed under department faculty supervision. Enrollment by petition. Repeatable for credit.

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Graduate Courses:

WOMS 700 - Introduction to Graduate Study
Origins and current status of women 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.

WOMS 710 - Women's Consciousness and Resistance in Cross-Cultural Perspectives
Prerequisite: WOMS 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.

WOMS 712 - Feminist Approaches to Sexual Identities and Cultures
Prerequisite: WOMS 700 or consent of instructor. For course description, see WOMS 512. Paired with WOMS 512. Students who have taken WOMS 512 may not tkae WOMS 712 for credit.

WOMS 713 - Issues in Feminist Theory
Prerequisite: WOMS 700 or consent of instructor (WOMS 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.

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

WOMS 747/ENG 747 - Feminist Criticisms
Prerequisite: graduate status in Women 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.)

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

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

WOMS 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.

WOMS 764 - Women Writers and Colonialism
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. For course description, see WOMS 564. Paired with WOMS 564. Students who have completed WOMS 764 may not take WOMS 564 for credit.

WOMS 766 - Gender and Modernity in the Muslim and Arabs Worlds
Prerequisite: ENG 214 or equivalent. For course description, see WOMS 566. Paired with WOMS 566. Students who have completed WOMS 566 may not take WOMS 566 for credit.

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

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

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

WOMS 785 - Graduate Projects in the Teaching of Women 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 studies subject matter.

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

WOMS 820 - Feminist Research Methods
Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor. For Women Studies students, WOMS 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.

WOMS 894 - Creative Work Project
Prerequisite: WOMS 700, advancement to candidacy, and approval of the graduate major advisor. 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.

WOMS 895 - Field Study Project
Prerequisites: WOMS 700, advancement to candidacy, and approval of the graduate major advisor. 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.

WOMS 898 - Master's Thesis
Prerequisites: WOMS 700, advancement to candidacy, and approval of the graduate major advisor. Intensive study of a topic or issue within the field of women 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.

WOMS 899: Special Study
Prerequisite: consent of the graduate major advisor 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.

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