Course Search

WGS343H5 • The Montreal Experience: Sex and Gender in la Cité

This course examines how gender and sexuality intersect with factors such as nationhood, race, language, politics, religion, geography, and the arts in Quebec. After six classroom sessions, the class will travel to Montreal for 4-5 days, where they will visit museums, cultural institutions and attend guest lectures at various institutions. This experiential learning opportunity allows students to engage in deeper learning to see the issues and histories they have been studying come to life. Ancillary fees apply for this course.

Recommended Preparation: WGS101H5 or WGS200Y5 or WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS343H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS345H5 • Genealogies of South Asian Feminisms

This course examines the histories of activism for and by women in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) from the colonial period to the present. Topics include colonialism, the Partition of 1947, war, religion, development, labour, nationalism, and the family/reproductive rights.

Prerequisites: WGS101H5 or WGS200Y5
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS345H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS347H5 • Indigenous Feminisms and Decolonization

This course explores themes related to Indigenous feminist scholarship and activism in North America. The course centres on how Indigenous women engage in decolonial practices as a response to histories of colonialism and genocide. Themes include status and tribal nations; oral history and narrative; violence and resistance, knowledge construction and pedagogy, community, self-governance and freedom.

Prerequisites: WGS101H5 or WGS200Y5
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS347H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS348H5 • Sex, Gender, and the Environment

This course discusses, historicizes, and theorizes the undeniable connection between the health of our bodies and the health of our planet. This course engages with Indigenous feminisms, Black feminisms, and queer/decolonial/anticolonial thought to build a response to historic and ongoing colonial, gender-based, and environmental violence through grounded justice practices.

Prerequisites: WGS101H5 or WGS200Y5
Recommended Preparation: ANT241H5 or GGR202H5 or SOC228H5 or WGS102H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS348H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS350H5 • Critical Race Theory in Women and Gender Studies

This course's central focus is an examination of the way race and gender operate together in structuring social inequality. It offers the analytical tools for exploring the interconnections between race and gender, along with other systems of domination, and incorporates perspectives from women of colour and from women in the global "South."

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5
Exclusions: WSTB11H3
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5 or WGS368H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS350H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS351H5 • Gender, Race, and Surveillance

From forced sterilization and sex-selective abortion, to selfies, prisons, and biosecurity, this course conceptualizes suspicion and technologies of surveillance in transnational perspectives. Informed by a range of interdisciplinary scholarship, namely critical transnational feminist and Black feminist texts, it interrogates how surveillance has long enacted racialized, gendered, and biopolitical injustices.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5
Exclusions: WGS337H5 (Fall 2017)
Recommended Preparation: WGS101H5 or WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS351H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS353H5 • Theories of Masculinity

Working with gender studies' theories, this course draws on social and cultural constructions and practices to offer a complex reading of masculinities. It explores contemporary debates of the ways in which masculinities have been theorized and experienced in practices and identity formation.

Exclusions: WGS275H1
Recommended Preparation: WGS101H5 or WGS200Y5 or WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS353H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS354H5 • Gender, Sexuality and Sport

This course explores how gender, sexuality and other intersectional identity markers work within and against structures of privilege and oppression in the world of sport. It takes up topics and themes that inform popular culture and influence the construction of social norms.

Recommended Preparation: WGS101H5 or WGS200Y5 or WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS354H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS355H5 • Wired Women: Gender, Cyberspace and New Information Technology

The course examines how computer technologies facilitate women's participation in cyberspace and how women define and construct their involvement. It studies the simultaneous generation of new modalities of empowerment and disempowerment including language, role-playing, communication, gaming, and networking and conduits for sex trafficking, harassment and other forums of exploitation.

Recommended Preparation: WGS200Y5 or WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS355H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS365H5 • Gender, Justice and the Law

This course discusses the construction and representation of women in Canadian and International law. It analyzes specific contexts and historical issues including employment, sexuality, reproduction, deviance and a variety of justice theories relating to gender.

Exclusions: WGS365H1 or WSTC16H3
Recommended Preparation: WGS200Y5 or WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS365H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS366H5 • Women and Psychology

An interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship of women to a variety of psychological and psychoanalytical theories and practices. Topics include gender development, stereotyping and gender roles, the impact of gender on intimate relationships, women and the psychological establishment, women's mental health issues and feminist approaches to psychoanalysis.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5
Exclusions: PSYD18H or WGS372H1
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5 or WGS367H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS366H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS367H5 • Women and Health

Feminist theories and frameworks examining the interconnections between women, health and biomedicine in North America and transnationally.

Exclusions: NEW367H1 or WGS367H1 or WSTC21H3
Recommended Preparation: WGS200Y5 or WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS367H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS368H5 • Women in World Cultures

Examines the diversity and shared experiences of women in western and non-western societies. This is primarily a history course, supplemented with some contemporary perspectives. It compares women in diverse economic, cultural and religious settings. As part of this course, students may have the option of participating in an international learning experience that will have an additional cost and application process.

Exclusions: ERI368H5 or NEW368H1 or WGS368H1
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5

International Component: International - Optional
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS368H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS369H5 • Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (S.T.E.M.) analyzes how society, culture, education, and intersectional power relationships shape women’s lives and their career choices and studies the underlying gendered issues in these professions.

Recommended Preparation: WGS101H5 or WGS200Y5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS369H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS369Y5 • Gender, Colonialism and Postcolonialism

An examination of the complexities and the processes of colonialism/postcolonialism. Emphasis is placed on writings by feminists in the Global South, and the diaspora, to explore how subordination was forged and resisted in specific colonial and postcolonial settings.

Exclusions: NEW369Y1 or WGS369H1
Recommended Preparation: WGS200Y5 or WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 48L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS369Y5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS370H5 • On Love: Gender, Sexuality, Identity

This course considers the construction and mobilization of the gendered, sexed and sexualized subject within its historical, cultural and geographical contexts and seeks to understand the role of love in the construction of gendered identity and sexuality. Through its examination of texts on love, passion and desire, it investigates the lives and treatment of selected women in feminist scholarship in order to think through how ideas about race, class, sexuality, desire and danger are mediated in and through the body.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5
Exclusions: WGS374H1
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS370H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS372H5 • Theories of Sexuality

This course offers a critical overview of contemporary theories of sexuality, focusing on transnational discussions by feminists and queer theorists.

Exclusions: WGS450H5 or WSTD03H3
Recommended Preparation: WGS101H5 or WGS202H5 or WGS200Y5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS372H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS373H5 • Gender, Violence and Resistance

This course will focus on how gender and violence shapes and impacts the lives of women and LGBT persons. The course will explore the concept of gender and the myriad of ways in which it has been shaped by historical, and contextual relations of power and privilege. The course will explore how scholars in the feminist/women's movement have defined the concept of violence as it impacts women and girls.

Exclusions: WGS373H1 or WSTB12H3
Recommended Preparation: WGS200Y5 or WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS373H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS375H5 • The Aesthetics of Sexuality

What is the relationship between aesthetic form and sexuality? Drawing on theories and methods from feminist and sexuality studies, this course engages this question to understand the emergence of queer aesthetics as a response to social and political crisis, whilst comprehending how LGBTIQ+ artists create livable worlds by imagining otherwise.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5 or WGS205H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24L/12P
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS375H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS410H5 • Independent Project in Study of Women & Gender

An opportunity to carry out an extended research project under the supervision of a faculty member. A proposal must be presented to the faculty member and consent obtained before the end of the July registration period.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5 and 2.0 WGS 300+ level credits.
Exclusions: ERI410H5 or WGS411Y5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS410H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS411Y5 • Independent Project in Study of Women & Gender

An opportunity to carry out an extended research project under the supervision of a faculty member. A proposal must be presented to the faculty member and consent obtained before the end of the July registration.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5 and 2.0 WGS 300+ level credits.
Exclusions: ERI411Y5 or WGS410H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS411Y5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS415H5 • Black Feminist Performance in Popular Culture and Everyday Life

This course provides students with an understanding of how Black Feminist Performance is read, interpreted and experienced in popular culture and everyday life. The course focuses on texts and cultural work produced by feminist scholars, critics and artists who engage with race, gender and sexuality across multiple sites.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5 and 1.0 WGS credit at the 300/400 level
Exclusions: WGS434H5 (Winter 2020)

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24S
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS415H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS418H5 • Feminist Cultural Studies of Biomedicine

From vaccines and contraception, to erectile dysfunction drugs and clinical trials, biomedicine and biotechnologies are increasingly powerful and transformative modalities transnationally. Incorporating methods from feminist postcolonial, cultural, media and technoscience studies, this course examines biomedicine by critically attending to its intersections with gender, race, sexuality, colonialism, capitalism and culture.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5 and 1.0 WGS 300+ level credits
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24S
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS418H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS419H5 • Gender and Disability

A critical interdisciplinary investigation of how gender impacts on central topics in disability studies: the normalized body and cultural representations; sexuality; violence; the cognitive and social roles of medicine; transnational perspectives on disability; and disability rights and issues of social justice including the experience of people with disabilities and responses of resistance.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5 and 1.0 WGS 300+ level credits.
Exclusions: WGS366H1
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24S
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS419H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS420H5 • Engendering Human Rights

This seminar analyzes human rights responses to particular gendered sites of historical repression including examples of genocide, torture and war. It includes reactions generated from government and international organizations as well as remedies developed by victims/survivors. As part of this course, students may have the option of participating in an international learning experience that will have an additional cost and application process.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5 and 1.0 WGS 300+ level credits or (HIS338H5 or HIS438H5)
Exclusions: WSTD04H3
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5

International Component: International - Optional
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24S
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS420H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS421H5 • Engendering Ethics

This course situates feminist ethics within the context of Western moral theories, and will consider the challenges that have been posed to this tradition from careful consideration of the category of women's experience. It will examine foundational texts in the history of ethics as well as more recent feminist interventions in such paradigms. The course complements the study of the theoretical texts with analysis and discussion of contemporary social and political issues pertaining to gendered selves.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5 and 1.0 WGS 300+ level credits
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24S
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS421H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS425H5 • Decolonial Feminist Archival Practices

This course challenges the notion of the archives as institutions and repositories of historical truths. It develops students’ archival analytical skills using critical feminist intersectional, decolonial, diasporic, and queer approaches. Students learn to reimagine and rethink archival spaces.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5 and 1.0 WGS credit at the 300/400 level
Recommended Preparation: WGS372H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24S
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS425H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS430H5 • Diasporic Sexualities

What can diaspora studies teach us about sexuality studies? And, what can sexuality studies teach us about diaspora studies? This class examines the relationship between diaspora studies, sexuality studies, and feminist studies by focusing on how diasporic movements of bodies have altered and transformed modern conceptualizations of gender and sexuality. It will investigate how diasporic subjects negotiate their relationship to constructs of home and (un)belonging.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5 and 1.0 WGS300+ level credits
Exclusions: WGS430H1
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5 or WGS205H5 or DTS201H5 or DTS202H5 or DTS301H5 or DTS401H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24S
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS430H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS434H5 • Special Topics in Women & Gender Studies

A special topic by a guest instructor. Topics vary from year to year. Check the web site for information about this offering each term.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5 and 1.0 WGS 300+ level credits.
Recommended Preparation: WGS202H5

Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24S
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS434H5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

WGS435Y5 • Women and Gender Studies Practicum

The practicum allows advanced WGS students to combine theory and practice through part-time unpaid placement with a community agency, government body, educational or social change organization.

Prerequisites: WGS200Y5
Exclusions: WGS470Y1 or WSTC23H3
Recommended Preparation: 1.0 credit of WGS at the 300-level or higher

Course Experience: Partnership-Based Experience
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Total Instructional Hours: 24S
Mode of Delivery: In Class

WGS435Y5 | Program Area: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies