Gender & Identity Studies

Picture this: you and your friends are grabbing burgers and you overhear someone order a pop. You instantly get the urge to correct them because soda is the proper word you were taught. Later, the server brings the coke they ordered, which further increases your urge to intervene because they actually ordered Sprite. After all, soda is the correct word. Or is it? Which word is correct? Actually, they all are.

Linguistic variation is inherent to all languages and from a linguistic standpoint, all languages are equal. Yet, humans are continuously judged, evaluated, and discriminated against based on how they speak and write in professional, academic, and everyday settings. These seemingly innocuous comments about correctness have harmful effects on people who don’t conform to perceived language standards. As a result, various forms of discrimination and policies that exist continue to marginalize people due to misinformation and in some cases, disinformation. In this class, we will examine the intersections of language, ideology, and discrimination in everyday, educational, and professional settings while developing our research practices.

Classes will be facilitated through weekly reading discussions and discourse analysis of data (i.e., data sessions) in small and whole group activities. Readings will address the intersections of language and discrimination, such as accentism, racialization, language subordination, and social identities. The class will provide foundational concepts from applied linguistics and related fields, such as sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The course is also focused on developing your research literacies and project management skills. You will learn how to develop and carry out a project, evaluate the credibility of information, and various types of data. Labs will be used to create space for data sessions and peer-reviews.

Through discourse analysis, you will apply concepts you learned in class to develop your understanding of linguistic diversity and language related issues. Projects can utilize print and digital media to address, for instance, monolingual policies and their impact in educational or workplace settings, intersections of language and gender or race, and various forms of linguistic discrimination in the US or other contexts.

There are no prerequisites and this course is suitable for students who are curious about language, discourse, social issues, as well as research. Students will be evaluated based on completed assignments, such as readings and other homework, research projects, peer-review, and overall class contributions, including lab sessions. You must be prepared to reflect on implicit biases and perceptions of language and rethink how you approach and conceptualize research. This course meets both the writing requirement and HS requirement as it develops genre knowledge, rhetorical awareness, understanding of writing as dynamic and iterative processes, and research literacies grounded in social sciences.

This course is designed for students planning to teach in schools whether in Maine or outside of the United States. Culturally sustaining/revitalizing education (CSRE) builds on the aims, values, insights, and practices of anti-racist education, culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally responsive teaching, culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy, decolonizing education, global education, intercultural education, and multicultural education. In particular, it aims to contextualize education in the history of colonization, land theft, slavery, the continued struggle for sovereignty and self-determination of native tribes and First Nations, and calls for wider community accountability. This educational approach challenges deficit mindsets and structures that undergird policies and practices that widen the opportunity gap and equitable access to basic human and civil rights and impede educational access for sustaining and revitalizing cultures that settler colonialism has attempted to eliminate, assimilate, or marginalize. Students will practice asset-based and growth mindsets to gain an understanding of the relationship between CSRE and respect for tribal sovereignty and support of contemporary struggles for tribal continuity and resistance to cultural genocide and epistemicide. The course also opens a dialogue on the applicability of CRSE for immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking students whose relationship to their new place of residence may be tenuous at best and whose heritage languages and cultures are also endangered as a result of first- to second-generation assimilation in their adopted communities. Students will gain an understanding of conceptual frameworks, knowledge of empirical studies documenting outcomes and impacts of these approaches, and skills in ethically and effectively teaching indigenous, immigrant, and other culturally and linguistically diverse learners. For students seeking Maine teaching endorsements, this course will prepare them to implement LD291 requiring Maine educators to teach Wabanaki history and culture. Students will learn through field trips, guest speakers, films, discussions, critical exploration and reflection, independent research, observation/fieldwork/practicum, and peer teaching. Evaluation will include artifacts to be incorporated into a teaching portfolio: a lesson plan, teaching video, self-assessment, assessment of PK-12 student work, and communication with families and community members. Although there are no prerequisites, the following are recommended; Learning and/or proficiency in a language other than English; a psychology, sociology, or anthropology course; and/or a prior education course.

Algerian Jewish philosopher, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), one of the most widely translated French philosophers of the 20th century, developed a body of work often referred to as “deconstruction.” Derrida’s oeuvre has influenced multiple fields and disciplines, including Literature, Anthropology, Philosophy, Postcolonial Studies, Psychoanalysis and Feminist Theory. This course will track some of the ways in which Derrida engaged with ideas of difference, through a focus on questions his work poses for understandings of the human. The class will engage with Derrida’s archive through reading some of his early work, including essays and interviews about the status of writing and speech, language, and philosophy, and then move through his later work, including his increasing focus on explicitly political topics such as the death Peñalty, the animal, sovereignty, and war. Although the texts we read will be primarily Derrida’s own writing, we will also read authors who respond to and build on Derrida’s thought. These may include Gayatri Spivak, Ranjana Khanna, Samir Haddad, Peggy Kamuf, and Michael Naas, as well as texts by those with whom Derrida was in dialogue, such as Sigmund Freud, Hélène Cixous, Michel Foucault, Sarah Kofman, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. As we move through Derrida’s texts and those informed by them, we will pay particular attention to questions about sexual difference, colonialism, the human, death in relation to life, and representation. Students will be evaluated on participation in seminar discussions, weekly reading responses, a mid-term paper and final paper. There are no prerequisites for this course, but students will be expected to conduct close readings of challenging texts. Students are encouraged to contact the professor with any questions about the course and whether it is a good fit for them.

This course will explore heroines from two Hindu epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, alongside the Greek mythological figures Ariadne, Medusa, Circe, and Galatea. Both sets of heroines have generated deeply rooted cultural archetypes. Central to the upbringing of more than half of the Indian population through comic books, TV shows, movies, and the like, the Hindu epics have set the standard for what an ideal Hindu woman should be, bolstering the patriarchal system in the name of religion and culture. Much like Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships” in Greek mythology, some of these women have been the cause of wars of “epic proportions.” Others have become infamous archetypes for women’s witchiness and trouble-making, especially in Greek epics Western authors have retold. Myths of their beauty or its opposite have long been part of these narratives, but do we hear them speak? What do we know about the power they yield? Epics and mythologies have been unable to provide us with concrete answers.

Therefore, we will turn to female authors like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Kavita Kané, Volga, and Vaishnavi Patel for the Hindu epics and Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, and Rosie Hewlett for the Greek tales. These authors have created spaces where women’s voices can be heard and analyzed, where archetypal and epic types can be studied as multifaceted humans. We’ll not only read their novels closely but also supplement their work with feminist theory and short videos. Eventually, we’ll trace how these epics stay relevant with regard to the construction of gender and sexuality in the modern Indian and Western world.

Students will be evaluated based on class participation, an oral presentation, response posts, final paper, and a multimodal project. This class will be good for students who are interested in reading feminist literature and theory and understanding the enduring power of epics and myths as well as the contemporary feminist purpose in giving their heroines voice. Reading the Indian epics alongside the Greek tales will provide an opportunity for ample comparison of patriarchal systems and how they developed in representative cultures from the East and West.

This seminar will provide an in-depth exploration of public speech texts by a wide array of 19th century woman suffrage activists in the United States. This includes works by those individuals most often associated with the first wave of the movement including: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ernestine Rose, Anna Dickinson, Lucretia Mott, Victoria Woodhull, as well as other activists who are generally less well known today. While this is a course rooted in the history of what we might consider early American feminism, it should come as no surprise that, along the way, we will confront issues that continue to have salience today. Many of the topics surrounding gender, sex, identity, equality, empowerment, and political allyship that these activists wrestled with are still just as relevant for us to consider in our contemporary context. This is especially true when it comes to the topic of race and the intersectional nature of the discourse around gender equality, both then and now. We will spend time examining how the idea of race was rhetorically constituted, in both exclusionary and inclusionary ways, within these texts. We will also look specifically at the works of early Black feminists in the United States, and the myriad of ways they navigated the challenges of the moment, especially as they confronted a deeply embedded legacy of white supremacy within the early woman suffrage movement. Rather than rely primarily on secondary historical accounts, there will be a heavy emphasis on the close reading of primary source materials, mostly speeches, as we encounter these speakers “in their own words.” In addition, students will also take part in “hands on” recovery projects designed to locate, transcribe, document, and make broadly accessible works from the period that have been previously undocumented or left unaccounted for. In doing so, students will learn basic techniques for exploring and making effective use of various types of digitized historical collections that have emerged in recent years. Class sessions will be organized as a discussed based seminar. Assignments will emphasize critical, reflective, and analytical writing. Evaluation will be based on participation in class discussion, short written response papers, two longer form take-home essays, individual presentations, and a final “recovery” project. Students interested in topics related to gender, politics, historical research, and activism are especially encouraged to enroll. This is an introductory class and open to all students regardless of whether they have a previous background in feminism, social theory, US history, or politics.

It feels like pizza has always been considered American, but we know that it was originally brought to the US by Italian immigrants. Both the US and Italy claim pizza as a national dish, and this type of debate about where food comes from—and who it belongs to—is highly connected to our national and local identities. As humans continue to migrate across borders and blur the boundaries in digital spaces, our identities continue to develop as we interact with each other and different types of food. We will consider how this movement shapes our ideas of ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ and how one becomes the other, as well as the line between honoring a culture and appropriating it.

We will examine the intersections of the genre conventions, rhetorical situation, and the writers’ identities to understand how these elements work together when producing texts. We will learn key composition concepts (genre, rhetorical situation, and multimodality) and support the development of your genre research skills. We will use these concepts and conduct genre research to examine various food writing genres, such as narratives, recipes, and social media posts to understand how writing is an activity that goes beyond putting words together on a piece of paper. These activities will support your overall genre research skills and deepen your understanding of writing, which can be transferred to other writing activities beyond this course. Classes will be based on genre analysis activities and group discussions. We will read works that address food writing genres and identity, and we will watch documentaries that explore the intersections of food, identity, and migration. Course assignments include your reproduction of a food writing genre, weekly reading responses, reflections and narratives to document your learning trajectory, which will also be used for assessment purposes.

Why do fairy tales capture the attention of adults and children all over the world and endure in popular literary and cinematic forms? What do they reveal to psychologists, biologists, historians, linguists, artists, anthropologists, and educators? Do they politicize or de-politicize? socialize or subvert? What is the postfeminist, postmodern response to the Brothers Grimm? What do fairy tales convey about animal behavior, entomology, and cosmology? How might the tales shape human limitations, moral values, and aspirations? This course will explore the storytelling and re-telling of literary, cultural, and scientific stories from a comparative perspective, imagining their interpretations and how they may be re-told with an eye toward new understandings of human interrelationships, of a given sociohistorical moment, the culture of COA, and the larger culture. Students will read folklore and fairy tales, view several films, and discuss essays by writers such as Cristina Bacchilega, Bruno Bettelheim, Ruth Bottigheimer, Michel Butor, Italo Calvino, Robert Darnton, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maria Tatar, and Jack Zipes. Contemporary works by writers, visual artists, and musicians inspired by traditional tales will also be explored. Writers may include Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Michael Cunningham, Neil Gaiman, Tanith Lee, Naguib Mahfouz, Haruki Murakami, Helen Oyeyemi, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Francine Prose, and Anne Sexton. Reflections may center on recurrent motifs and patterns; and social, sexual, moral, scientific and political content, with emphasis on race, gender, and class structure. Students will be evaluated on two short papers; one creative project that may be expressed in writing, visual art, music, or dance; and a final written assignment in any genre—poems, plays, fiction or nonfiction.

Race as a concept was constructed in the western world in the early modern era as commentary on and explanation of human differences. This class will examine the origins of the idea of race and the ways it is central to the creation of the modern world. Drawing on histories of Europe and the Americas this class will look at the different ways racialized thinking was deployed in colonial contexts. Central themes of the course will be the history of race as an idea, the nature and impact of the Atlantic slave trade, how indigenous peoples reshaped European ideas of what it meant to be human, the construction of whiteness, and the history of slavery in the new world. The period covered by the class spans from the origins of race as an idea to the late nineteenth century. The course will be a hybrid of a lecture course and a readings seminar. Students will read major works in the field and develop an understanding of the historical background of contemporary forms of structural inequality justified and reinforced by racialized thinking. Students will do a series of short assignments, lead discussion of books, and undertake a major research paper. The research projects will allow students to explore topics beyond the chronological and spatial scope of the course.

This class will be an empirically-based research seminar on the history, politics, archaeology, and culture of Maine’s Wabanaki tribes that tackles a wide range of issues. The class will consist of several group projects on topics such as cataloging indigenous place names to the loss of cultural heritage sites due to coastal erosion. After completing several of these projects, students will develop their own research project on Wabanaki history and culture that they will conceptualize, plan and carry out. The class will also cover the themes of colonialism, cultural revitalization, tribal sovereignty, preservation of cultural resources, and much more. The course will be based on projects developed in consultation with tribal cultural preservation specialists and tribal historians from Maine’s Wabanaki communities. Final projects, so long as they have a historical component, can explore a topic of the student’s choosing in consultation with the faculty. This class is appropriate for students from a range of backgrounds. Previous coursework such as Indigenous America, Native American Law, Race and Racism in America, the Yucatan Program, or other relevant courses will be extremely helpful, and preference will be given to students who have some previous academic background in historical research, indigenous studies, and ethnography. Students who have taken classes with a strong component of textual analysis of historical sources are also encouraged to take the class. Students will learn to work with both primary and secondary sources (both written and visual). Students will be evaluated on their contribution to the group projects, participation in discussion, several small assignments, and their final project.

On the one hand, modern economies are shaped by uneven capitalist development and premised on exploiting colonized, raced, gendered, sexualized Others. On the other hand, the racial and sexual violences at the heart of economic relations are often rationalized, naturalized, and turned invisible. In this course, we will explore the visible tip of the iceberg of these systemic inequities in the context of the contemporary US labor markets. We will focus on quantitative, empirical evidence of how race, gender, and sexuality influence individuals’ earnings, career prospects, life opportunities, and health and well-being; and how intersectional positionalities amplify or mitigate these disparities. We will pay particular attention to the Black–White gaps and cisgender–transgender gaps in economic opportunities and outcomes. We will also study theoretical approaches in labor economics, ranging from neoclassical economic models of discrimination to feminist economics models of marriage and intra-household bargaining, and stratification models of racial wealth inequality.

This course is intended for students who want to develop a quantitative understanding of the economic disparities that racial, gender, and sexual minorities face in the US. You will evaluate how economic policies can be used to generate and reproduce inequalities between social groups, and how they can also be used to promote a more just and equitable economy. You will leverage the tools developed in this class to prepare yourself for independent intellectual engagement in an area of personal interest, including senior projects, independent studies, internship, or postgraduate work. This is an intermediate-level seminar. Students will be evaluated through leading group discussion of assigned reading materials and developing a summative research proposal on a relevant topic of their choice.

This course will provide an introduction to the history of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Using a seminar style the class will combine some overview lectures, student-led discussion of books, and project-based learning to provide an initial introduction to the diverse histories of native peoples from Canada to the Andes. The course will focus on both pre-contact societies as well as the processes of interaction between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas. Using a selection of case studies the course will highlight building an understanding of indigenous worldviews as well as socio-political organization and the ways both were transformed by colonialism. A range of books will introduce students to the ethnohistorical literature on native communities from Mesoamerica, North America, and the Andes. A simultaneous component of the course will be student’s research projects on a topic of their choosing that explores a dimension of native people’s histories. Students will be evaluated on attendance, course participation, short analytical essays, and their final project.

From a historical perspective domestic violence has been noted as primarily a “women’s issue”. We now recognize the misuse of power and control in relationships as a complex and prevalent social issue that profoundly impacts our society as a whole. To address the complexity of domestic violence we must strive toward changing the belief systems that allow this problem to exist. Together we will explore these belief systems by examining the aspects of culture that shape and support domestic violence on individual, community, institutional, and global levels. We will review the history of the domestic violence movement, including its roots in the women’s movement and how that movement grew into a network of victim-centered services and community-based advocacy responses. As a student you will learn how best to respond to victims of intimate partner violence, and how to apply the core principles of individual, community, institutional, and social change advocacy. You will be challenged to consider and reflect upon your own beliefs and cultural lenses throughout the course. The class format includes lectures, role-plays, media presentations, interviews with guest speakers, group work, and discussions. Opportunities will be provided for students to reflect upon experiences, to practice skills, and apply new learning through community and cultural change projects. Students will be evaluated on their critical thinking, analysis, and synthesis of the course goals and objectives as demonstrated by participation in class activities (responsiveness to required and suggested readings and materials, guest and peer generated discussion), personal culture analysis (personal reflection, self-evaluation).

This course focuses on the segment of the human life span from puberty to early adulthood. In this class we will examine the physical, cognitive, social, and moral aspects of adolescent growth and development. Issues to be considered include adolescent relationships (peers, family, romantic), adolescent issues (identity formation, at risk behavior, schooling, and stereotypes), and critical reflection on one’s own adolescent experience. The main objectives of this course are to: 1) provide students with a working knowledge of the theories of psychology which pertain to early adolescent development; 2) help students develop the ability to critically analyze information and common assumptions about the development of adolescents; 3) consider contemporary issues and concerns of the field; and 4) to afford students the opportunity to explore their own adolescent development. Course work entails lecture, discussion, extensive case analysis, and a field component.

We live in a time when the struggle for economic survival is life-shortening. We live in a place where the struggles for reproductive justice, the rights of women, the rights of trans and non-binary people, and gay and lesbian freedoms are intensified and weaponized for electoral gains and political power. What are the linkages, visible or hidden, between these two phenomena? How do we bring together Marxist political economy and queer/trans-inclusive feminist analysis to diagnose them? What can the anxieties, fears, and hatreds collected at the site of (trans)genders teach us about the inner working of capitalist (re)production? In turn, how can wrestling with the racial, sexual, and environmental violence that makes contemporary capitalism possible inform our collective struggle for gender and sexual equality and justice?

In this seminar, you and I will think through these questions together through the lens of contemporary Marxist–feminist political economy. We will engage contemporary feminist, black, and queer Marxist scholars whose works illuminate the contradictory, exploitative treatment of colonialized, raced, gendered, sexualized human and non-human Others under capitalism. Topically, our focus includes the birth rate crisis and the struggle for reproductive autonomy, contemporary attacks on gender minorities, and queer and trans-centered class struggles. This is an intensive, exploratory seminar. We will read 4-5 texts closely, focusing on each book for two weeks. In the first week, we will identify the book’s main arguments and approaches. In the second week we will re-read the book along with key texts that inform, supplement, or challenge its author(s). Our selection of key texts may include Jenny Brown’s Birth Strike, and Jules Gleeson and Elle O’Rouke (eds.) Transgender Marxism, but there are rooms to replace them with texts that better reflect your interests. You don’t have to be an expert on the debates and issues we engage in, but you must be unafraid and willing to actively grapple with them both intellectually and ethically.

The course is intended for students who are interested in approaching contemporary debates about LGBT+ issues, women’s rights, and reproductive justice from a radical, intersectional, and anti-capitalist perspective. It is also valuable for students who want to understand what makes capitalism possible and what may un-make it. You will get the most out of this seminar if you have a working knowledge of the political economy of capitalism, feminist theory, and/or critical social theory. Students will be evaluated through bi-weekly reading reviews and a final project or essay.

This readings seminar will explore the history of race thinking and structural forms of power in America from the earliest settlement of the hemisphere by Europeans to the twentieth century. We will emphasize the specific mechanisms of power used to produce and reproduce the ideas and institutions that oppressed African Americans, Native Americans, and “ethnics” over the course of the country’s history. As a nation built on slavery, racial discrimination, and white supremacy, the United States provides a unique vantage point from which to examine the workings out of the strange ideologies of difference that took root in the New World. The class will explore a wide range of histories from the origins of slavery in the seventeenth century as a solution to the “the problem of the poor” to the inclusion of Irish, Jewish and others in the category of “White” in the twentieth. A key aspect of the course will be examining the construction and workings of Whiteness. The seminar will be based on discussion of key texts in the scholarship of race and racism in the United States, and students will lead those discussions. Other core work of the class will be mastering the complex arguments and evidence used to reveal the inner workings of white supremacy through readings, analytic writing, and an independent project. The course is intended for a wide range of students willing to dig in to the work of reading extensively about a contentious topic to form their own historical analysis of the past. Evaluation will be based on discussion, mastery of the readings, short analytic writing, and a final project.