This course provides students with an introductory understanding of identity, focusing specifically on the concepts of gender and sexuality as they intersect with race, class, ethnicity, and other aspects of social location and identification. The course also includes an analysis of the appearance of gender and sexuality as integrated social concepts by reading and discussing contemporary American texts across multiple genres and media. This open educational resource was created specifically for English 2180 (Studies in Identity and Orientation) at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. If you have been assigned to teach this course or one like it, feel free to use and adapt the materials posted here. I have suggested a reading schedule under “Required Readings,” but you will find additional readings under “Recommended Readings” that you may use to replace or supplement the required readings. If you find any errors or broken links or if you have any suggestions for additional readings to add to this resource, please contact me at lwestengard@citytech.cuny.edu.

Is marriage a patriarchal institution? Much feminist scholarship has characterized it that way, but now in the context of the recent Massachusetts Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, the meaning of marriage itself demands serious re-examination. This course will discuss history, literature, film, and legal scholarship, making use of cross-cultural, sociological, anthropological, and many other theoretical approaches to the marriage question from 1630 to the present. As it turns out, sex, marriage, and the family have never been stable institutions; to the contrary, they have continued to function as flash points for the very social and cultural questions that are central to gender studies scholarship.

A study of contemporary North American theater movements and selected individual works that are organized around issues of ethnic and socio-cultural identity. Class lectures and discussions analyze samples of African-American, Chicano, Asian-American, Puerto Rican and Native American theater taking into consideration their historical and political context. Performance exercises help students identify the theatrical context and theatrical forms and techniques used by these theaters.

The Empire Strikes back refers to the theoretical framework introduced to study texts and their recurrent themes. Theory explores the ways in which post-colonial texts have a problematic relationship with the colonizer's language. Explores strategies used to subvert and appropriate the pre-existing discourse of the Empire in order to give rise to a new form. Introduction to post-colonial literature from South Asia, as well as from the South Asian diaspora. Through study of novels by Rushdie, Ghosh, Seth, Roy, Desai, Ontaatdje, Suleri, Sidhwa, and Lahiri, students explore the phenomenon of the post-colonial writer's encounter with modernity. Examines how authors articulate recurrent themes of the post-colonial condition: migration and history, memory and desire, and rootlessness and hybridity. Taught in English. This subject aims to provide an overview of contemporary texts in regional languages in South Asian Literature and Cinema. We will cover major authors and film makers, writing from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Within India, we will look at authors and directors working in different regional languages and as we examine their different socio-cultural, political and historical contexts we will attempt to understand what it means to study them under the all-unifying category of "South Asian Literature and Culture". Some of the major issues we shall explore include caste, gender, globalization and social change. We will end with exploring some of the newer, younger writers and directors and try to analyze some of the thematic and formal shifts in their work. Authors include Ashapurna Devi, Manto, Vijayan, Premchand, Mohanty, and Nasreen and film makers will include Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Aparna Sen and Rituporno Ghosh.

This course explores the forms, contents, and context of world traditions in dance that played a crucial role in shaping American concert dance. For example, we will identify dances from an African American vernacular tradition that were transferred from the social space to the concert stage we will explore the artistic lives of such American dance artists as Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus and Alvin Ailey along with Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, George Balanchine, and Merce Cunningham as American dance innovators. Of particular importance to our investigation will be the construction of gender and autobiography that lie at the heart of concert dance practice, and the ways in which these qualities have been choreographed by American artists.

U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

This course examines the problem of mass violence and oppression in the contemporary world, and the concept of human rights as a defense against such abuse. It explores questions of cultural relativism, race, gender and ethnicity. It examines case studies from war crimes tribunals, truth commissions, anti-terrorist policies and other judicial attempts to redress state-sponsored wrongs. It also considers whether the human rights framework effectively promotes the rule of law in modern societies. Students debate moral positions and address ideas of moral relativism.

Exploration of the changes and continuities in the lives of South Asian women. Using gender as a lens, examine how politics of race, class, caste, and religion have affected women in South Asian countries, primarily in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Current debates within South Asian women's history illustrate the issues and problems that arise in re-writing the past from a gendered perspective. Primary documents, secondary readings, films, newspaper articles, and the Internet.