WGST 202

Seeing Gender: Introduction to Gender in Visual Studies - AH, D1

This course introduces students to the disciplines of Visual Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. It explores the many ways in which these fields intersect through a consideration of two primary, related concepts: the social construction of vision and its inverse, the visual construction of the social. The first highlights how humans are conditioned to see the way they do because they are social animals. The latter underscores the fact that it is equally true that social arrangements, such as gender and race, take the forms that they do because humans are seeing animals. This framework allows students to critically engage some of the central questions that have shaped both Visual Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. How does seeing impose itself upon the social construction of gender and other forms of identity, such as racial and sexual identity? What is the relationship between images and words, and how does that relationship affect the politics of how images are used? What are the mechanisms by which vision and visual images become gendered or racialized? Why is visual experience so fraught with anxiety and fantasy? How do visual encounters with other people (and with images and objects) inform the construction of social life as gendered and racialized?

Units: 3.0