Graduate Courses

The Women & Gender Studies Institute offers graduate courses during the fall and winter sessions. Certain enrolment restrictions apply. Enrolment priority is given to students registered in the Master’s, Ph.D. or Collaborative Specialization in Women and Gender Studies (CWGS) programs. Interested UofT graduate students should contact the WGSI Program Office at wgsi.programs@utoronto.ca to inquire about enrolment. The Institute does not offer graduate courses in the summer session.

Students are able and expected to enrol in courses through ACORN. Note: for graduate students outside of WGSI, you will only be able to enrol once course enrolment has opened in your home graduate unit.

The SGS Add/Drop is not required to enrol in WGSI graduate courses. Students outside of WGSI who are enrolled in a graduate program offered by the School of Graduate Studies at U of T can enrol in WGSI graduate courses through ACORN. If your home graduate unit requires the add drop form, please email the form to the WGSI Program Office for processing at: wgsi.programs@utoronto.ca

Important Dates

Current Offerings

Full Timetable

Important Dates

For sessional dates, please see the dates provided by the School of Graduate Studies.

WGSI Graduate Courses start September 9, 2024. Please check the Quercus course page for the location.

2024-2025 Graduate Course Timetable

WGS2000H Y: WGS Research Seminar

Session: Y

The WGS Research Seminar is a forum for interdisciplinary research in feminist and gender studies. Directed at both faculty and graduate students within the WGSI and across the campus as a whole, the seminar’s goal is to foster intellectual engagement with key theoretical, social, and political questions touching on gender and feminism and their many intersections through the presentation of cutting-edge work by leading researchers both within and beyond the University of Toronto.

WGS5000H: Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements I

Session: F • Tuesdays 10am – 1pm • Instructor: S. Trimble

This core course explores interdisciplinary feminist theories, methodologies and epistemologies, with particular attention to transnational feminism, anti- and post-colonialism, global capitalism, critical race theory, nation and state formation, gender and sexuality studies and affect theory.

WGS5001H: Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements II

Session: S • Tuesdays 10am – 1pm • Instructor: Alissa Trotz

This qualitative methods seminar is designed for doctoral students developing research projects with feminist interdisciplinary, transnational and intersectional commitments. It will explore feminist theories and debates on epistemologies and methodologies, paying close attention to the “why” and “how” of the research process, or what Professor Emerita M. Jacqui Alexander refers to as the itinerary of an idea, as well as the complex process of its realisation. Simply put, how does something begin as a nagging question, a provocation, even an epiphany, and proceed, in fits and starts, until it morphs into a fully-fledged research project, sometimes in ways that bear faint resemblance to what appeared at one point to be a very certain starting place?

WGS1004H: Decolonial and Feminist Technoscience: Another University is Possible

Session: F • Tuesdays 1pm – 3pm • Instructors: M. Murphy & Kristen Bos

From the internet, to gaming, to the data that healthcare offers us, to the way we are policed, to how we might understand climate change, Indigenous and other oppressed communities are forced into intimate encounters with science and technology. Whatever you are researching at the university, you are likely wrestling with forms of colonial data and research methods.

This course is an introduction to the growing field of Indigenous Science and Technology Studies. It does not require any background in science or technology, but rather its starting point is the ways science and technology are ordinarily around us as part of the ongoing colonial condition. We will learn how Indigenous and other colonized people have created, taken up, critiqued, transformed and resisted technologies, data, and science starting with their own worldviews and values. From digital games to laboratories, from genetic research to pollution, from statistics to plants, we will discuss the ways land and body sovereignties are at stake in technoscience. We will learn from Indigenous science and technology studies scholars use of historical and other approaches, as well as put this field in conversation with works from other anti-colonial traditions.

WGS1014HS: Special Topics Feminist Theory II: Gender in the International Order

Session: S • Wednesdays 9am – 11am • Instructor: kerry rittich

Gender in the Global/International Order, with a focus on legal architecture, political economy, and South/North relations.

WGS1023H: Aesthetics of Radical Hope

Session: F • Thursdays 11am – 1pm • Instructor: Dina Georgis

This course reframes the idea of hope through radical enunciations of the imagination. By drawing on works from postcolonial studies, cultural studies and psychoanalysis, the course offers a way to think about the aesthetic as it relates to the capacity to compose “otherwise possibilities” (Crawley, in excess of the terms of liberal humanism. The imagination’s radical

potential for an ‘otherwise’ will be explored through various concepts such as the “not yet conscious” (Munoz), queer archives, curiosity and play.

WGS1029H: Black Feminist Histories: Movements, Method, and the Archive

Session: F • Wednesdays 1pm – 3pm • Instructor: Chris Johnson

This seminar provides an introduction to historiographies of Black feminism, and Black feminist approaches to history, memory and the archive. It studies activism and knowledge-making from the nineteenth century to our contemporary moment, with a particular focus on histories of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle across diasporas. For our purposes, “Movements” refers to intellectual/cultural/political mobilizations and fronts, as well as the travel of people and ideas. We will situate our texts historically as well as transnationally to examine contexts and collectives that generated imaginative practices of invention, connection and intervention that continue to animate ongoing movements for solidarity and liberation. In addition to foundational and emerging scholarship on women, gender and Black radical traditions, we will explore history-making and the political uses of the past through close readings of literary works as well as various forms of political ephemera. This seminar invites participants to build on rich traditions of self-making, bridge-building and freedom dreaming through self-reflection, creative expression and engaged scholarship. Our collective endeavor is not simply to reckon with, honor and critique what has gone before us, but also to orient ourselves toward new terrains and new questions.

WGS1031H: Gendering Racial Capitalism

Session: F • Mondays 1pm – 3pm • Instructor: Shauna Sweeney

Racial capitalism is a regime of capital accumulation predicated on the creation and mobilization of racial differences among human beings. This course aims to historicize racial capitalism both as a specific set of social relations in particular times/places and as a theoretical intervention into traditional Marxian political economy, underscoring the centrality of gender ideology to both modern conceptualizations of race and class. If capitalism alienates workers from the means of production, producing stratified class societies in the process, gender and race serve to divide human beings even further into different categories of human beings. They can function as critical fault lines of division and, simultaneously, as wellsprings of solidarity. Through a close reading of Cedric J. Robinson’s hallmark text, Black Marxism: The Black Radical Tradition, as well as critical engagement with historians of slavery, race, and reproduction; black feminists; queer theorists; and contemporary popular culture, students will grapple with the genealogies gendered racial capitalism. We will pay special attention of to the efforts of black feminists who have insisted on the centrality of intersectional approaches to both radical critiques of political economy and radical movements for liberation. At the same time, we will explore the flexibility and adaptability of racial capitalism –– its ability to absorb and deflect critique. Topics covered in this course include: racial capitalism and the black radical tradition; early modern capital accumulation and racial formation; race and reproduction from slavery to neoliberalism; theorizing super-exploitation; surveillance capitalism, the carceral state; queer anti-capitalism and the politics of pleasure.

WGS1009H: Against and Beyond Carcerality: Abolitionist Worldmaking

Session: S • Wednesdays 1pm – 3pm • Instructor: Robyn Maynard

Students will be introduced to historical and contemporary canonical texts on gender, race, punishment and abolition. We will engage primary sources, letters, speeches, oral histories, and multimedia on the topics of the carceral state, surveillance and captivity. The course is grounded in the multiplicity of liberatory intellectual traditions from and against captivity including imprisoned radicalisms, Black, Indigenous, and anti-colonial freedom traditions, social movements, and feminist practices of care.

WGS1016H: Migration, Mobility, and Displacement in Contemporary Africa

Session: S • Tuesdays 3pm – 5pm • Instructor: Marieme Lo

Why do people move? What are the causes and consequences of migration and displacement in Africa? This course critically examines the multifaceted dimensions of migration, mobility, and displacement through (text, art, film and narratives) with a specific focus on communities and populations displaced by war, environmental destruction and disaster, economic failings, and the quest for economic opportunities or individual freedom. We will: 1) explore canonical and emergent interdisciplinary scholarships and their epistemic claims and debates, key theories and concepts on migration, mobility and displacement; 2) engage in current debates and public discourses on these intersecting themes, analytics, and phenomena; and 3) interrogate the morality of media representation and gaze, discursive practices on the ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ subject formation, the ‘catastrophic’ biopolitics and governmentality of migration, the instrumentality and contingencies of political (non) interventions/(in)action, humanitarianism, and the politics of rights, justice, ethics, and solidarity. You will have the opportunity to unpack your own positionality and trajectories to reflect on the differentiated categories and trajectories of migration and mobility and to formulate your own critique and alternative epistemology.

WGS1017H: Queer and Trans Nightlife

Session: S • Mondays 5pm – 7pm • Instructor: Robert Diaz

This course examines the relationship between nightlife spaces—or nocturnal sites where people gather, create, and perform—to queer and trans politics. Rather than frame “after dark” locations (bars, house parties, city alleyways, movie theatres, bathrooms, public parks, and other relevant venues) as automatically utopian or freeing for sexual minorities, materials for the course will instead emphasize how uneven power dynamics conditionally affect which intimacies, cultural practices, and experiences matter or emerge within these locales. As we encounter transnational and diasporic examples of queer and trans nightlife, we all also identify the many solidarities, affinities, and sexual histories that such nocturnal geographies at times erase and at other times enable.

WGS1018H: Self-Study: Where Research And Making Things Begins, and Travels

Session: S • Thursdays 1pm – 3pm • Instructor: Judith Taylor

Feminist Studies contain traditions of self-reflection and self-examination that anchor this interdiscipline, and are in some ways, unique to it. Scholars, writers, artists, poets — begin from a place of deep thinking, joy, anger, challenge, or practiced awareness– to tell stories as they have experienced, seen, and felt them, part lived, part imagined. You might say, isn’t this just biography? Memoir? If my response is that it is more than just biography and memoir, what is it? And what could it still further be?

To answer these questions we will read, dialogue, and gain tools for thinking about this tradition and set of practices. We will develop a sense of the ethical, methodological, social, and political promise of work that begins with and examines the self, and moves into greater projects of criticality, relationality, solidarity, and resistance.

The course helps students gain an appreciation of the feminist and critical sensibilities that make the self a starting place on a journey to greater objectives of solidarity, social theorizing, and social transformation. The course does not require self-study! Rather, students gain an appreciation for the self-study undertaken by others, and a tool kit for future work in this vein should they choose it.

WGS1028H: Queer of Colour Critique

Session: S • Tuesdays 1pm – 3pm • Instructor: Cassandra Lord

This course tracks the deployment and emergence of “queer of color critique” and its interconnections with women of color feminisms. We will examine theoretical texts, cultural production and forms of activism by queer scholars of color who attend to questions of race, class, sexuality and gender as intersecting social practices.

WGS1030H: Indigenous Feminism

Session: S • Thursdays 11am – 1pm • Instructor: Kai Recollet

Drawing from Indigenous feminist conversations taken up within the field, this course practices an ethics of care and focuses on relationality through exploring Black and Indigenous feminist ‘texts’ as forms of remapping, and reimagining “otherwise” spatial forms of reworlding. This course gathers a series of texts and conversations focusing on decolonial anti-conquest feminist abolitionist frameworks and theories to illuminate and analyse Indigenous feminist spatial projects of liberation through highlighting the transformative, or worlding potentials of Indigenous feminist theories. Together we lean into critiques of settler colonial infrastructures and forms of feminist abolition frameworks of relational creative work of ‘gathering’ to highlight ‘otherwise’ modes of activating in the world.

This course makes possible a deep exploration of a set of conversations and fields of inquiry centered around Indigenous feminist ‘gatherings’ forms of space making through a set of ethical orientations towards forms of liberatory social transformation and change. As such we will be examining actions, manifesto’s, speculative fiction writing, poetics and other world-making strategies that abolitionist and anticolonial feminists have engaged to create alternative worlds. We account for and archive a critiquing of modes of discourses, and representations rooted in settler colonial atmospherics as we radically engage in theorizing ‘gatherings’ / relational creative work altering settler cartographies; and generate work together that explore practices and grammars feminist abolitionists are activating to create alternative spatial scales of liberation. For example, we will be exploring the writings and relational creative works of key thinkers such as: Angela Davis, Katherine McKittrick,& Mishauna Goeman.

Graduate Courses

WGS Core Courses

WGS5000H: Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements I

WGS5001H Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements I

This is an advanced course designed for doctoral students, which explores feminist debates on epistemology, methodology and methods, paying close attention to the “why” and “how” of the research process, or what Professor Emerita M. Jacqui Alexander refers to as the itinerary of an idea, as well as the complex process of its realisation. This course offers a space for students to reflect carefully, creatively and critically on their research journeys, while also offering an opportunity to address/demystify the moving parts of the doctoral process.

WGS1005Y: Master’s Research Paper

**Enrolment is restricted to students registered in the Master’s and Ph.D. Degree Programs in Women and Gender Studies or Collaborative Specialization in Women and Gender Studies.

WGS1007H: Directed Research/Reading

Under supervision, students can pursue an independent research/reading course on topics in Women and Gender Studies that are not currently part of the curriculum. **Students must have a project that a WGSI Faculty member is willing to supervise. To enroll in WGS1007H, please email: wgsi.programs@utoronto.ca