This course will examine issues related to women, gender, and sexuality specific to the U.S., with special attention to how power, money, and labor shape each of our lives.

The class will discuss intersectionality, attending to which women are often left out of dominant narratives about these topics. We will explore related topics through interactive lectures and engaging reading material.

The course is three days long and runs over two weekends in the late morning, no more than two hours per session per day.

Through the discussion of topics, students will gain a deeper understanding of the issues related to women, gender, and sexuality and explore the following questions:

• Whose labor does U.S. public policy primarily address?
• How do issues of racism, classism, ageism, ableism, immigration status, etc. disproportionately affect the visibility of different forms of women’s labor and the bodies that perform that labor?
• How do these factors affect the allocation of economic privileges and legal protections with regard to labor and family formation?

Next Class

Summer 2023

Instructor

Kirsten Boles has taught Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies as well as Religious Studies at Santa Ana College, Redlands University, the University of California, Riverside, and Occidental College. She is currently finishing her Ph.D. in Women & Gender Studies in Religion at Claremont Graduate University. Her research is on transnational feminist and queer theory, especially in the context of Islam in America and representations of it within U.S. political discourse.