Feminist and Gender Studies

This course introduces the core principles of the discipline of gender analysis and women-centered research and surveys key issues in current Feminist and Gender Studies scholarship, including: social construction of sex, gender, race and sexuality; body politics; gender subordination; women's activism; and social change initiatives. (

This course examines human bodies in historical and contemporary socio-political contexts, investigating gender and embodiment both as an expression of individual identity and a production of complex social processes. Drawing upon scholarship on body politics in the interdisciplinary fields of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, it explores how bodies are simultaneously gendered, raced, classed, sexualized, and politicized through interpersonal, social, and institutional processes, including culture, science, medicine, and globalization.

This course focuses on the relationship between scientific institutions and communities that are marginalized by gender, race, colonialism, class, disability, and other social markers. It explores the structural forces that contribute to exclusion and the effects of being seen as an object of scientific inquiry through feminist intersectional and decolonial approaches to the practices of scientific knowledge production. Finally, this course addresses current efforts to create a more inclusive scientific community.

This course provides a comparative and critical analysis of various feminist theories developed as explanatory frameworks for the understanding of gendered and other divisions within society. It surveys a range of feminist theoretical traditions, traces the emergence and transformation of central feminist concepts, and investigates the connections between theory and political practice. It examines theoretical frameworks that may include: Black feminist thought, anti-racist and postcolonial feminism, queer theory, trans theory, theories of embodiment, transnational feminist theory, psychoanalytic feminist theory, and decolonial theory.

This course applies a feminist analysis to the study of people at work with the premise that the workplace and the labour market cannot be understood in isolation from the private spheres of the household and the labour of social reproduction. It focuses on different experiences of work across gender, race and ethnicity, and class using an intersectional approach. It draws on interdisciplinary studies in industrial relations and feminist research practice to explore experiences of paid and unpaid work and labour.

This course focuses on the gendered, racialized, and sexualized dimensions of settler colonialism and Indigenous resurgence. It begins with the recognition that all of our learning takes place on the lands of the Mi'kmaq and Wolastoquyik peoples, and with the acknowledgement that we all have different and specific relationships to this land and these nations. Attending to these relationships and the responsibilities they entail, the central questions this course examines include: How do Indigenous thinkers conceptualize identity, land, and belonging? How do they think and talk about gender, sexuality, and difference?