Welcome to Sex, Power, and Politics (WGS 232 / POLS 385).
This course will introduce you to cutting-edge feminist and queer theories of sex, gender, sexuality, and power, and will show how competing ideas and discourses about sex and gender shape our political processes, laws, and public policies in important and sometimes unexpected ways. You will also learn about the key Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies concepts of social construction, gender performativity, heteronormativity, and intersectionality.
We will sharpen and complicate our understandings of these ideas through focused case studies of contemporary public controversies in the United States relating to sex and gender, including presidential election politics (Obama/Clinton/McCain/Palin), reproductive politics (abortion, the contraception mandate, the morning after pill), sex work (prostitution, stripping, trafficking), public health (HIV/AIDS), family law (same sex marriage), and foreign policy and transnational politics (War on Terror, immigration).
Your Instructors
Dr. Holloway Sparks earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She taught at Penn State in Political Science for 4 years before joining the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty at Emory. Her research explores the gendered politics of democratic dissent in the United States. Dr. Sparks is the author of Dissident Citizenship: Gender and the Politics of Democratic Disruption (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2015), and a number of essays, including a recent article examining gender, race, and anger in the Tea Party.
Ingrid Meintjes is a PhD student in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Ingrid hails from South Africa where she was active in HIV/AIDS and health activism. She was involved in HIV/AIDS treatment access campaigns with the Treatment Action Campaign, and most recently, worked on research-based policy development and implementation as the Chief Scientific Officer at the Perinatal Mental Health Project, Department of Psychiatry & Mental Health, University of Cape Town. She holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame, as well as Social Science Honors and Masters degrees in Gender and Development Studies from the University of Cape Town. Ingrid’s current research explores the embodied intersections of health, social exclusion, and the gendered mechanisms of sex differentiation through the perspective of Feminist Science Studies.
