WGS 450 Capstone: Intersectionality

Prerequisite: WGS 124 and senior standing

This course explores how ‘intersectionality’—Kimberlé Crenshaw’s canonical concept for thinking about how institutions (and not just experiences) of identity co-produce difference—is challenged and/or upheld by recent contributions to the field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As intersectionality arose out of responses by women of color to (white) feminism’s blindness to race/ism, the texts included on this syllabus privilege women and queer of color interventions, specifically, black feminist, indigenous, and ‘crip’ (i.e., dis/ability studies) interventions that move us
past the binaries of Western metaphysical thought. Their contributions suggest that not all women and femmes get access to human markers of difference like gender. This syllabus therefore asks questions like: Who is gender for? How do markers of human difference like race and ability, which measure the degree of one’s human-ness, precede and structure our experiences of gender and sexuality, including our experiences of gender queerness and trans-ness? How do we make sense of the non-human intersections that make up even our human ecosystems of relationality? And
how do black and indigenous women and femmes carry this burden, for the rest of us? Majors must attend five departmental colloquium events. (African Americans’, Appalachians’, and Women's Perspective.)