WMST 408: Gender, Sexuality, and Human Rights

WMST 408-DL1: Gender, Sexlty Human Rghts
(Spring 2021)

01:30 PM to 02:45 PM TR

Online

Section Information for Spring 2021

This course will explore the globalization of women’s and LGBTIQ human rights discourses from a transnational perspective. During the course of the semester, we will consider some of the social and political movements as well as the kinds of legal and policy-making arguments that have helped to shape gender and sexual rights advocacy. We will examine a variety of texts—anthropological, cinematic, literary, and legal—across a range of disciplines, including women’s and gender studies, sexuality studies, anthropology, conflict analysis, political science, critical legal studies, and film and media studies, to name a few. Issues we will address include: women’s human rights and the war on terrorism; rape and sexual violence; sex work and sex trafficking; HIV/AIDS; children’s human rights; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex rights; and disability rights. In doing so, our goal is to examine how the discourse of human rights maps vulnerability onto certain bodies—and not others—and how these bodies take on the burden of representation in domestic and international politics and law. Other course goals include the following:

(1) To familiarize students with the ways in which human rights frameworks have been applied to questions of gender, sexuality, and disability

(2) To help prepare students for possible future work in human rights organizations or in other advocacy fields. 

Course Information from the University Catalog