Descripción del curso
SPA203 - (For native or near-native speakers.) The grammatical structure of today's standard Spanish. Intensive practice in reading, speaking, and elementary composition.
En SPA203 vamos a explorar la relación entre el lenguaje y la diversidad en el marco de los derechos humanos fundamentales. El título del curso, “¿qué hacemos con la lengua?”, nos pregunta dos cosas: qué tipo de prejuicios perpetuamos por medio del lenguaje y cómo hacer para que la lengua albergue de manera efectiva la diversidad de nuestra sociedad. En un contexto actual, sorprendente estancado en la indiferencia, la ignorancia, el prejuicio y estigmatización de quienes son diferentes bajo excusas de todo signo, urge más que nunca tomar conciencia del mundo diverso en el que vivimos, desarrollar nuestra empatía (tanto en el lenguaje, como en los actos), fomentar la equidad como horizonte deseable para nuestra sociedad y considerar un lenguaje que funcione como herramienta de concientización y de cambio.
Con este impulso como hilo de discusión, en el curso trabajaremos la competencia lingüística y la mejora en la fluidez de español tanto a nivel oral como escrito, con privilegio del registro formal o culto. Pese a esta prioridad, el curso se enmarca en un reconocimiento de nuestra capacidad translingüe (somos poseedores de un continuo lingüístico que abraza lenguas sin separación natural) y ofrecerá una posición autocrítica frente a consideraciones prescriptivas y sesgos elitistas aun prevalentes en la enseñanza de la lengua. Los aspectos gramaticales estudiados estarán basados en las necesidades del grupo y tendrán un carácter eminentemente práctico.
Dedicaremos la primera parte del curso a entender aspectos esenciales de nuestra lengua: la importancia de nuestros nombres, qué características tiene el habla de herencia y qué es translenguar, cuál es el origen del español, qué son los niveles lingüísticos y qué trabajan estos niveles, de qué hablamos cuando hablamos de las variaciones de una lengua (dialectos, registros), y de qué hablamos cuando trabajamos la norma lingüística y el llamado español “neutro”. A continuación, nos plantearemos cómo hacer para que el lenguaje responda a la realidad social. A través de lecturas de textos, visionados de vídeos y debates, revisaremos conceptos fundamentales en nuestra sociedad como son los derechos humanos, la noción de privilegio, la discriminación lingüística (glotofobia y hablismo), cómo se manifiesta el racismo y el sentimiento anti-inmigrante en el lenguaje, que diferencia hay entre lo políticamente correcto y el lenguaje no discriminatorio, qué es el feminismo y que sentido tiene la interseccionalidad, que categorías definen nuestras identidad de género y orientación afectivo-sexual, qué términos deberíamos en casos de discapacidad y neurodiversidad, respectivamente, y por último hasta qué punto nuestra identidad procede de una raíz múltiple. A través de presentaciones, el grupo de clase compartirá su conocimiento o descubrimiento de aquellas comunidades comúnmente silenciadas cuando pensamos en la comunidad hispana y latina.
Se trata de un curso presencial, de asistencia obligatoria, ofertada para hablantes de herencia. Las sesiones y lecturas estarán, fundamentalmente, en español, con excepciones puntuales.

SPA321 - 3 hours, 3 credits. Readings from representative works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
El curso está dedicado al examen de la situación de la mujer en la sociedad patriarcal y el compromiso abolicionista durante los siglos XVIII y XIX. Tras una contextualización sumaria sobre los problemas que subyacen a la naturalización acrítica del canon y la periodización hegemónica, debatiremos sobre los estigmas que pesaron sobre las mujeres que querían dedicarse a la literatura; discutiremos el perdurable impacto que tuvo el modelo de domesticidad del “ángel del hogar” y finalmente analizaremos la contradictoria posición ideológica encarnada en el teatro abolicionista español durante este período: Zinda de María Rosa de Gálvez y La cadena rota de Faustina Sáez de Melgar.
De entre los autorxs considerados, prestaremos atención prioritaria a tres escritoras (María Rosa de Gálvez, María del Pilar Sinués, y Faustina Sáez de Melgar), si bien también nos familiarizaremos con autoras notables como María Josefa de Massanés, Carolina Coronado, Rosario de Acuña, Rosalía de Castro y Dolores Cabrera. Como contrapunto a los textos de estas autoras, atenderemos la opinión diversa de autores varones como Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Henrik Ibsen y Juan Pedro Criado.
Se trata de un curso presencial, de asistencia obligatoria, ofertada para estudiantes del programa subgraduado de español.

This assignment was created by Professor Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum, Ph.D., who is Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Lehman College. The blog that follows is by Mariama Khan, and also can be found here.

This course will explore the rich diversity of women's voices and experiences as reflected in writings and films by and about Latina writers, filmmakers, and artists. Through close readings, class discussions and independently researched student presentations related to each text, we will explore not only the unique, individual voice of the writer, but also the cultural, social and political contexts which inform their narratives. We will also examine the roles that gender, familial ties and social and political preoccupations play in shaping the values of the writers and the nature of the characters encountered in the texts and films.

Unlike film, theater in America does not have a ratings board that censors content. So plays have had more freedom to explore and to transgress normative culture. Yet censorship of the theater has been part of American culture from the beginning, and continues today. How and why does this happen, and who decides whether a play is too dangerous to see or to teach? Are plays dangerous? Sinful? Even demonic? In our seminar, we will study plays that have been censored, either legally or extra-legally (i.e. refused production, closed down during production, denied funding, or taken off school reading lists). We'll look at laws, both national and local, relating to the "obscene", as well as unofficial practices, and think about the way censorship operates in American life now. And of course we will study the offending texts, themselves, to find what is really dangerous about them, for ourselves.

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.

Extensive reading of works by a few major poets. Emphasizes the evolution of each poet's work and the questions of poetic influence and literary tradition. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic for Fall: Does Poetry Matter? Topic for Spring: Gender and Lyric Poetry. The core of this seminar will be the great sequences of English love sonnets written by William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth. These poems cover an enormous amount of aesthetic and psychological ground: ranging from the utterly subjective to the entirely public or conventional, from licit to forbidden desires, they might also serve as a manual of experimentation with the resources of sound, rhythm, and figuration in poetry. Around these sequences, we will develop several other contexts, using both Renaissance texts and modern accounts: the Petrarchan literary tradition (poems by Francis Petrarch and Sir Thomas Wyatt); the social, political, and ethical uses of love poetry (seduction, getting famous, influencing policy, elevating morals, compensating for failure); other accounts of ideal masculinity and femininity (conduct manuals, theories of gender and anatomy); and the other limits of the late sixteenth century vogue for love poetry: narrative poems, pornographic poems, poems that don't work.

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.

The United in Anger Study Guide facilitates classroom and activist engagement with Jim Hubbard‰Ûªs 2012 documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The Study Guide contains discussion sections, projects and exercises, and resources for further research about the activism of the New York chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The Study Guide is a free, interactive, multimedia resource for understanding the legacy of ACT UP, the film‰Ûªs role in preserving that legacy, and its meaning for viewers' lives.

This is a syllabus for a mixed MA/PhD level course, "Equity, Elitism, and Public Higher Education," taught in Spring 2021 at the Graduate Center by Matt Brim and Katina Rogers.
Higher education can be a powerful engine of equity and social mobility. Yet many of the structures of colleges and universities—including admissions offices, faculty hiring committees, disciplinary formations, institutional rankings, and even classroom pedagogies and practices of collegiality—rely on tacit values of meritocracy and an economy of prestige. For public universities like CUNY this tension can be especially problematic, as structurally-embedded inequities undermine the institution’s democratizing mission and values. It is no surprise that normative institutional structures correspond with normative formulations of sexuality, class, race, and gender such that sociocultural biases are built into the academy. This correspondence governs what counts as valuable intellectual work, and in doing so, it also overdetermines where and how and to whom resources accrue in the university. In other words, many academic structures actually undermine the values that we associate with possibilities for the most challenging and productive and diverse academic life.
In this course, we examine the purposes and principles of universities, especially public universities; consider whether various structures advance or undermine those goals; and imagine new possibilities for educational systems that weave equity into the fabric of all they do.

In her Introduction to Women in Theatre: Compassion and Hope, Karen Malpede quotes Barbara Ann Teer as saying: “My ancestors say there is something within—it banishes all pain. That energy—that life force—that’s inside us is there. It’s given, and it’s in everybody. Everybody wants to experience themselves as able to generate their power and to experience the validation of that power.” The purpose of this course is to explore the rich and myriad ways that women and gender non-conforming artists have expressed that “life force” throughout the history of theater. We will draw on a diverse cross-section of materials to foster discussion about gender, race, identity, sex and performance, and to celebrate, and gain a deeper knowledge and appreciation of women’s role in the development of theater.

The premise of this series of classes is that the work of poet and essayist Audre Lorde has myriad lessons to teach us not only about current social issues and problems, but also about our individual and collective processes of dealing with them.  The key question becomes: how can we use our feelings to negotiate our way through these issues? How can we use our selves—our experiences, our intuitions and the insights born of our differences--as resources? Lorde was adamant that all of our most difficult emotions and experiences could be *used* for our collective progress toward creating an equal, just and healthy society.  

Gender is facing an identity crisis: queer identities in the new era of gender and genre are subverting paradigms of communication and genre by working with language and narrative in new ways. Queer biography and autobiography mark an important turn in contemporary literature and poetics: the shift from a male-dominant gaze towards a kaleidoscopic perspective on queer embodiment, trans and non-binary narrative, and speculative writing about other worlds & possibilities, which offer us as readers new opportunities for storytelling and thinking about writing. These forms also make space for other identities traditionally excluded from mainstream cultural narrative spaces, and we‰Ûªre witnessing the emergence of queerness as digital, hybrid, and ephemeral. This course will center the expanding lexicon offered by queer writers, and ground students through including some of the queer studies canon.

Gender is facing an identity crisis: queer identities in the new era of gender and genre are subverting paradigms of communication and genre by working with language and narrative in new ways. Queer biography and autobiography mark an important turn in contemporary literature and poetics: the shift from a male-dominant gaze towards a kaleidoscopic perspective on queer embodiment, trans and non-binary narrative, and speculative writing about other worlds & possibilities, which offer us as readers new opportunities for storytelling and thinking about writing. These forms also make space for other identities traditionally excluded from mainstream cultural narrative spaces, and we‰Ûªre witnessing the emergence of queerness as digital, hybrid, and ephemeral. This course will center the expanding lexicon offered by queer writers, and ground students through including some of the queer studies canon.

We will doggedly ask two questions in this class: "What is history?" and "How do you do it in 2010?" In pursuit of the answers, we will survey a variety of approaches to the past used by historians writing in the last several decades. We will examine how these historians conceive of their object of study, how they use primary sources as a basis for their accounts, how they structure the narrative and analytical discussion of their topic, and the advantages and limitations of their approaches.

This playlist and handout include works by (and various quotations and media related to) Toni Cade Bambara.

An interdisciplinary introduction to the study of women. From the first and second waves of feminism to
grrl power's cyberactivism and empowerment through femininity. Material and social constructions of sex
and gender. Power and dynamics, which drive and structure women's lives. Expressions and
representations of women's experiences. Starting fall 2018 satisfies Pathways Flexible Core US
Experience in Its Diversity requirement.

This course is an introduction to female educators and their contribution to our understanding of curriculum, pedagogy, and schooling.
Prerequisite: Women's and Gender Studies 1001 [12], and Core Curriculum 1230 [2.3].
3 hours; 3 credits

WGST 3550 Special Topics in Social Science: As mass uprisings against state violence have continued unabated since the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks, bipartisan consensus has coalesced around the need to end mass incarceration and reform prisons and policing. Simultaneously, the revolutionary movement to abolish prisons and policing entirely has gained momentum (again), drawing on a lineage of Black freedom struggles, from the movement to abolish slavery to Black Lives Matter. Yet, many are unfamiliar with prison abolition or concerned about its impacts on their safety. In this course, students will engage with the contemporary prison abolition movement as both a vision for the future and a concrete set of strategies to create safety and undo incarceration in the present. With New York City experiencing a resurgence in brutal broken windows policing while the city is poised to build four new jails over the next six years (and maybe shut down the notorious Rikers Island jail complex), this course will provide Black feminist insight into a contemporary political fight with profound consequences for the lives of working class communities of color in NYC.