Undergraduate Courses
For the most up-to-date information about WGSI course offerings, prerequisites, exclusions, and course enrolment procedures; please visit the Arts & Science Academic Calendar. We strongly recommend that students complete WGS160Y in preparation for 3rd-year courses; however, this is not a formal pre-requisite.
Core Courses
Group A Courses: Courses with a Primary Focus on Women and Gender Relations
Group B Courses: Courses with a Minor Focus on Women and Gender Relations
100-Series Courses
WGS160Y1 is subject to certain enrolment restrictions. During the first (P) round of ACORN/ROSI enrolment, priority is given to Specialists, Majors and Minors in Women and Gender Studies.
WGS160Y1: Introduction to Women and Gender Studies
An integrated and historical approach to social relations of gender, race, class, sexuality and disability, particularly as they relate to women’s lives and struggles across different locales, including Canada.
200-Series Courses
200-series courses, with the exception of WGS273H1, are subject to certain enrolment restrictions. During the first (P) round of ACORN/ROSI enrolment, priority is given to Specialists, Majors and Minors in Women and Gender Studies.
200-Series Courses
WGS260H1: Texts, Theories, Histories
Examines modes of theories that shaped feminist thought and situates them historically and transnationally so as to emphasize the social conditions and conflicts in which ideas and politics arise, change and circulate.
WGS271Y1: Gender in Popular Culture
A critical examination of institutions, representations and practices associated with contemporary popular culture, mass-produced, local and alternative.
WGS273H1: Gender and Environmental (In)justice
Formerly WGS273Y1
Using a transnational, feminist framework, this course examines material and conceptual interrelations between gendered human and non-human nature, ecological crises, political economies and environmental movements in a variety of geographical, historical and cultural contexts. Does environmental justice include social justice, or are they in conflict? What might environmental justice and activism involve?
WGS275H1: Men and Masculinities
Examines how masculinities shape the lives of men, women and transgender people. Effects of construction, reproduction and impact of masculinities on institutions such as education, work, religion, sports, family, medicine, military and the media are explored. Provides critical analysis of how masculinities shape individual lives, groups, organizations and social movements.
WGS280H1: Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies
Subjects of study vary from year to year.
2025-2026 Offering: Kinstillations and Other Radical Relationalities
Landing into kinstillatory relation is a course which explores the methods of the creation of a digital tool-kit as an embrace of radical relational praxis, taking into account multiple sites of ethical frameworks stemming from Adrienne Maree Brown, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s thinking on emergence and radical relationality; to exploring the theoretical implications of an embrace of a ‘pedagogy of care’ towards anti-colonial Indigenous feminist frameworks and activisms.
WGS281H1: Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies
Subjects of study vary from year to year.
300-Series Courses
300-series courses are subject to certain enrolment restrictions. During the first (P) round of ACORN/ROSI enrolment, priority is given to Specialists, Majors and Minors in Women and Gender Studies. We strongly recommend that students complete WGS160Y in preparation for 3rd-year courses; however, this is not a formal pre-requisite.
300-Series Courses
WGS331H1: Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies
Subjects of study vary from year to year.
2025-2026 Offering: Playing, Sports, Cultures
Why do we play? How do movement practices shape our selves and environments? What do sports — and the cultures around them — mean and do in the world today? And, to borrow a question from one of this term’s readings, “What do we talk about when we talk about sports?” (Darda and Davis, 444). This course explores the world of sports from a feminist cultural studies angle. Through a selection of key concepts and case studies, we examine questions of representation, identity, economics, policy and regulation, and audiences and fandoms to consider what sports cultures teach us about what it means to be human. How are athletic bodies gendered, racialized, and regulated? What might we learn about shifting gender ideologies from movements for trans and nonbinary inclusion in elite
sports? How are sports cultures shaped by ongoing legacies of colonialism? What insights into capitalism and labour can we derive from athlete sponsorships, sports betting, or sneakers? This course looks at sports from many angles, including professional leagues like the WNBA, mega-events like the Olympics, fitness classes, sports journalism, and sports movies and other media. Readings will touch on a variety of fields connected to feminist cultural studies, including Black feminism, trans studies, Indigenous studies, disability studies, and media/fan studies. Together, we’ll explore the local and global power relations that shape sports worlds,
WGS332H1: Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies
Subjects of study vary from year to year.
2025-2026 Offering: Pleasure, Pleasure, Pleasure
What is pleasure? How do we experience and understand pleasure in a world structured by neoliberal capitalism? Is access to pleasure evenly afforded to everyone? How are our pleasures tied up in larger systems of power? What about ‘bad’ or ‘guilty’ pleasures? How can we reimagine pleasure?
Pleasure is a complicated topic – one that can be tied to oppressive structures like capitalism, neoliberalism, and colonialism. However, pleasure can also be a method of individual and collective resistance and a path to alternate forms of relationality and world-making. This courses takes an expansive view of the concept of pleasure – we will be looking at all kinds of facets of pleasure – guilty pleasures, sexual pleasures, unconventional pleasures, queer pleasures, embodied pleasures, etc. We will read a variety of theories and conceptualizations of pleasure and analyze different forms of media (reality tv, pornography, short stories, fanfiction TikTok) that either deal with pleasure or are considered ‘guilty pleasures.’ We’ll also be looking into what queer theory, youth studies, porn studies, psychoanalysis, and critical race studies all tell us about pleasure and how we might reimagine it more equitably and expansively.
WGS333H1: Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies
Subjects of study vary from year to year.
2025-2026 Offering: Feminist Mathematics
This course explores the intersection of gender and mathematics, challenging the traditional view of mathematics as a male-dominated field. Students will explore the under-recognized mathematical work of women, how our experiences of numbers within the world is shaped by our gender, the societal practices that perpetuate mathematics as a masculine domain, and the problem of sexual violence within math departments and communities. Through activities that are focused on the experiences of women in Toronto and at UofT, students will visit classes, explore history in University Archives, critique autobiographical, historical, and research texts, and craft conditions for building a feminist mathematics.
WGS334H1: Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies
An upper-level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.
WGS335H1: Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies
An upper-level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.
WGS336H1: Selected Topics in Cultural Studies
An upper-level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.
WGS340H1: Women and Revolution in the Middle East
This course examines the complex and conflictual relations between women and revolutionary struggles and focuses on a number of theoretical and empirical issues relevant to the Middle East and North Africa context. The course is open to both senior-level undergraduate and graduate students with different requirements.
WGS355H1: Gendered Labour Around the World
This course will focus on masculinities and femininities in workplace settings, with an emphasis on service work around the world. We will discuss workers’ lived experiences of gender regimes which are embedded within the dynamics of class, race and nation. The relationships between gender processes and workplace hierarchies will be explored.
WGS360H1: Making Knowledge in a World that Matters
Teaches skills in feminist approaches to making knowledge. Introduces feminist practices for doing research and navigating the politics of production and exchange. Develops skills for conveying knowledge to the wider world, such as through research papers, reports, performance, new media, art.
WGS362H1: Selected Topics in Gender and History
An upper-level course. Subjects of study vary from year to year.
WGS363H1: Selected Topics in Gender and Theory
An upper level course. Subjects of study vary from year to year.
WGS365H1: Gender Issues in the Law
Examines the operation of the law as it affects women, the construction and representation of women within the legal system, and the scope for feminist and intersectional analyses of law. Includes an analysis of specific legal issues such as sexuality and reproduction, equality, employment, violence and immigration.
WGS367H1: The Politics of Gender and Health
Examines diverse traditions and normative models of health (e.g., biomedicine, social constructionist, aboriginal health) in conjunction with analyses of the origin, politics, and theoretical perspectives of contemporary Women’s Health Movements. Topics may include fertility, sexuality, poverty, violence, labour, aging, (dis)ability, and health care provision.
WGS369H1: Studies in Post-Colonialism
Formerly NEW369H1
Examines gendered representations of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and disability in a variety of colonial, neo-colonial, and “post”-colonial contexts. Topics may include the emergence of racialist, feminist, liberatory and neoconservative discourses as inscribed in literary texts, historical documents, cultural artifacts and mass media.
WGS370H1: Utopian Visions, Activist Realities
Drawing on diversely situated case-studies, this course focuses on the ideals that inform struggles for social justice, and the mechanisms activists have employed to produce the change. Foci include the gendered implications of movement participation, local and transnational coalition, alternative community formation, and encounters with the state and inter/supra/transnational organizations.
WGS372H1: Women and Psychology/Psychoanalysis
An interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship of women to a variety of psychological and psychoanalytical theories and practices. Topics may include women and the psychological establishment; women’s mental health issues; and, feminist approaches to psychoanalysis.
WGS373H1: Gender and Violence
An interdisciplinary study of gendered violence in both historical and contemporary contexts including topics such as textual and visual representations; legal and theoretical analyses; structured violence; war and militarization; sexual violence; and, resistance and community mobilization.
WGS374H1: Feminist Studies in Sexuality
Sexual agency as understood and enacted by women in diverse cultural and historical contexts. An exploration of the ways in which women have theorized and experienced sexual expectations, practices and identities.
WGS376H1: Studies in Queer and Trans
Takes up conversations in queer and trans studies as separate and entangled fields. It explores how queer and trans people have experienced and theorized gender and sexuality.
WGS380H1: Feminist Graphic Novels
Comics aren’t new, and graphic novels aren’t either, but feminists have built a rich array of stories about consciousness, resistance, and coming of age in this genre that warrant scholarly attention. In this case, we will read graphic novels for their subtleties, thinking about what picture and text make possible in the exploration of emotion, interconnection, and identity. Reading about resistance to marriage in Aya of Yop City, a child’s view of revolution in Persepolis, parent child reckoning in Fun Home, and loneliness in Skim will advance students’ understandings of the power of narrative and the pictorial displacement of innocence.
WGS381H1: Black Britain: Race, Gender and Entangled Diasporas
An exploration of Black British history and culture, with a particular focus on labour, overlapping migrations, and racial formations following World War II. Topics and themes may include Afro-Asian-Arab politics and transnational solidarities against empire; citizenship and (non)belonging; mobilizations against fascism and state violence; the Black Women’s Movement and Black British Feminisms; the emergence and interventions of Cultural Studies; the Caribbean Artists Movement and Black British cultural productions more generally.
WGS385H1: Gender and Neoliberalism
Reviews major feminist transnational, Marxist and Foucauldian approaches to the study of neoliberalism. Adopts a comparative, historical and global approach to the ways that gender is implicated in state restructuring, changing roles for corporations and non-governmental organizations, changing norms for personhood, sovereignty and citizenship, and changing ideas about time/space.
WGS386H1: Gender and Critical Political Economy
Offers a critical analysis of political economy, its historical and contemporary contentions and the ‘ruptures’ that open the space for alternative theorizing beyond ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ thinking, by inserting gender and intersecting issues of power, authority and economic valorization across multiple and changing spheres: domestic, market and state.
WGS390H1: Land-ing: Indigenous and Black Futurist Spaces
This course explores Indigenous feminist theories and their critiques of settler colonial erasures. This course will illuminate how Indigenous feminist critical interventions and worlding projects are being activated upon in shaping decolonization projects through community organizing, and artistic activist interventions. Throughout this course we will explore how radical Indigenous feminisms are being articulated within urban Indigenous territories; and will be encouraged to think through its implications for how we come to understand Indigenous futurities.
WGS396H1: Writing the Body
Examines the ways in which bodies are lived and enscribed and represented through a variety of genres. Students will work through issues of corporeality and materiality in the production and reception of texts and will practice embodied writing on a personal level through in-class workshops and written assignments.
WGS397H1: The Politics of Girlhood
The course communicates the growing field of “girl studies” and provides a critical examination of the historical, social, psychological and political definitions attached to girlhood. We will move toward a feminist understanding of how definitions of girl-child shape individual experience, historical narratives, cultural representations, political agendas and futures.
400-Series Courses
During the first and second round of ACORN/ROSI enrolment, certain enrolment restrictions apply to 400-Series courses. Eligible students must have completed 2.5 full course equivalents in Women and Gender Studies. Students with 8.5 credits or less are not permitted to enrol in 400-level courses.
“RP” indicator courses: this applies to all 4th-year courses except WGS451H1. During the restricted (R) round, only 3rd-year and 4th-year Specialists and Majors in Women and Gender Studies are eligible to enrol. During the priority (P) round, 3rd-year and 4th-year Minors in Women and Gender Studies are permitted to enrol.
EXCEPTION: WGS460Y1Y. During the restricted (R) round, only 4th-year Specialists and Majors in Women and Gender Studies are eligible to enroll in this course.
“E” indicator courses: this applies to Independent Studies (WGS451H1). Students should visit the Undergraduate forms page, fill out the appropriate form and submit it to the program office via email: wgsi.programs@utoronto.ca.
400-Series Courses
WGS420H1: Asian/North American Feminist Issues
A transpacific examination of issues that have directly and indirectly shaped the feminist and other related critical inquiries in Asia and among the Asian diasporas in Canada and the United States.
WGS426H1: Gender and Globalization: Transnational Perspectives
Critically examines current interdisciplinary scholarship on globalization, its intersections with gender, power structures, and feminized economies. Related socio-spatial reconfigurations, ‘glocal’ convergences, and tensions are explored, with emphasis on feminist counter-narratives and theorizing of globalization, theoretical debates on the meanings and impacts of globalization, and possibilities of resistance, agency, and change.
WGS434H1: Advanced Topics in Women and Gender Studies
An upper-level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.
2025-2026 Offering: Religion, Justice and Healing
Religion can be used to promote and legitimate violence, or it can be a source of healing, liberation, and transcendence. This course will examine these dual, and sometimes simultaneous, aspects of religion while focusing on the relationship of religious movements and institutions to justice and healing. We will examine a variety of historical case studies, with an emphasis on the last century and contemporary cases. Cases will include the role of Black churches in the US civil rights movement, LGBT+ evangelical churches, Indigenous religions in Canada and healing from trauma, and religious responses to genocide, among other cases.
WGS435H1: Advanced Topics in Women and Gender Studies
An upper-level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.
2025-2026 Offering: Gender, Sexuality and Nuclear Colonialism
WGS436H1S: Prisons and Abolition
What comes to your mind when you hear the term prison abolition? How can there be a society with no prisons? What are we supposed to do with our current prisoners if we abolish the prison system? What about our security, the safety of our bodies and properties? These are all legitimate
questions, but they are the wrong ones to begin our reflections on prison abolition. In fact, before beginning to imagine the possibility of a world without prisons, we first need to practice imagining the world of prison and imprisonment. What do we know of prison as a phenomenon, a space and time where every possibility with which we grow up either vanishes or shrinks?
In this course, we will draw on the works of feminist abolitionists, and critical educators in race, justice, and prison studies such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba and Lisa Guenther, and Michel Foucault. In addition, movies, prison memoirs, and documentaries, as well as prison artworks will allow us to bring the lived experience of imprisonment to the classroom. We will begin with a historical survey of the prison reformist movement beginning in the 18th century, and geographically we will look at a variety of prison systems and carceral violence around the world. We will investigate the phenomenon of prison and the psychological effects of imprisonment with an emphasis on the effects of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation; we will stay mindful of prison systems in conjunction with the patriarchal hierarchical social
order. By the end of the term, you will have gained the ability to critically reflect, think, and engage with the world of imprisonment, the implications of growing incarceration around the world, and the significance of prison abolition and transformative justice in the world you dream of living in.
WGS437H1S: Feminist Listening: Critical and Intersectional Approaches to Popular Music
Please check back for a course description.
WGS440H1: Postcolonial Cyborgs for Planetary Futures: Speculative Fiction Feminisms
Drawing together film, fiction and theory, this course invites students to explore ways of imagining other worlds. From afro-futurism to planetary humanism, from cyborgs to hauntings, from science fiction fantasies to the politics of aliens, the course examines and produces feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist, and queer visions of other worlds.
WGS442H1: Toxic Worlds, Decolonial Futures
This course explores the ways environmental violence is an integral practice of settler colonialism that affects human and non-human life, disrupts Indigenous sovereignty, and enacts ongoing racism. A typical way of addressing environmental violence is to document the harm done to bodies and communities. This class asks, how might we also refuse environmental violence and enact better obligations to land/body relations? What kind of decolonial futures can be summoned in the aftermath of environmental violence? Our readings will bring Indigenous feminist approaches together with Black feminist, queer, and feminist environmental justice approaches. Participants will build upon the readings to create their own decolonial environmental justice future projects.
WGS450H1: Modernity, Freedom, Citizenship: Gender and the Black Diaspora
Explores transnational feminist genealogies of the black diaspora. The course pays attention to the contexts and movements that generated key questions, exploring how these interventions disclose preoccupations with modernity, freedom and citizenship. Topics may include trauma and memory, sexual citizenship, Afrofuturism, indigeneity, and the crafting of political communities.
WGS451H1: Independent Study in Women and Gender Studies
Under supervision, students pursue topics in Women and Gender Studies not currently part of the curriculum. Not eligible for CR/NCR option. See information regarding “E” indicator courses above.
WGS460Y1: Honours Seminar
Supervised undergraduate thesis project undertaken in the final year of study. Students attend a bi-weekly seminar to discuss research strategies, analytics, methods and findings. A required course for Specialist students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.
ACORN/ROSI Enrolment: For ACORN/ROSI enrolment details, please refer to the note on 400-level courses above. WGS Specialists and Majors in their 4th year of study are permitted to enroll during the restricted (R) round of enrolment.
WGS461Y1: Advanced Topics in Women and Gender Studies
An upper-level seminar. Topics vary from year to year depending on the instructor.
WGS462H1: Advanced Topics in Gender and History
An upper-level seminar. Topics vary from year to year.
WGS463H1: Feminism and Horror
This course explores the horror genre through a feminist cultural studies lens. Questions we will consider include: Why has horror historically had a “bad reputation” among both cultural critics and feminists, and where do things stand today? What are the limitations and affordances of the genre for (feminist) storytelling? How do horror stories illuminate the cultural contexts from which they arise, and how do they travel across space and time? What can they tell us about what and who is considered fearsome, disgusting, and/or alien, and why? How do marginalized creators and audiences negotiate a genre that both reproduces and destabilizes dominant notions of normalcy, humanness, and morality? And how might horror shed light on the ways feminist movements and thought have been framed as monstrous or threatening to the status quo? Combining touchstone theoretical texts from film studies, literary studies, psychoanalysis, and gender studies with personal essays, short fiction, and optional films and novels, this course explores the cultural politics of horror storytelling. We will work both individually and collectively to gain a deeper understanding of horror’s (manifold) pasts and speculate on its possible futures, feminist and otherwise.
WGS465H1: Special Topics in Gender and the Law
Gender in the International Order: Law, Governance and Practice
Gender issues and the advancement of gender equality can now be found across the global landscape, embedded in projects ranging from human rights, development, and economic reform to the management of peace and conflict and migration.
What does it mean for gender to move from critique to norm at the international level? Where is gender located within global governance projects? How are human rights, legal norms and institutions, and other governance technologies mobilized to further gender equality – along withthe other objectives to which it is now connected?
What visions of gender equality now circulate within the international order, and how are women positioned, for example as victims, peacemakers, entrepreneurs, leaders, and beyond? What role have feminists played in the ‘mainstreaming’ of gender equality? What, and who, have been left out or aside? How is gender entangled with legacies of colonialism and struggles around racial and economic justice?
Readings and discussions exploring these questions will include: women’s rights as human rights; queering international law: gender in international peace and conflict; gender and political economy; engendering development; labour and labour migration, care and social reproduction.
WGS470Y1: Community Engagement
The application of theoretical study to practical community experience. Advanced Women and Gender Studies students have the opportunity to apply knowledge acquired in the Women and Gender Studies curriculum through a practicum placement within a community organization.
WGS482H1: Translating Sexuality: Queer Migration/Diaspora
This course examines how notions of sexuality travel as people move within and beyond national borders. It investigates how queer and trans migrants pursue different versions of belonging, solidarity, survival, and hope. Participants will study transnational archives (which may include popular culture, new media, film, literature, and performance) as they trace globalization’s effects on racialized, queer, and trans communities. Major topics may include: queer of color critique; queer settler colonialism; transnational and global south sexualities; imperialism and militarism; neoliberalism and homonationalism; humanitarianism and sexual rights; queer and trans social movements; postcolonial intimacies.
ACORN/ROSI Enrolment: For ACORN/ROSI enrolment details, please refer to the note on 400-level courses above. WGS Specialists and Majors in their 3rd and 4th year of study are permitted to enrol during the first round of enrolment. During the second round, WGS Minors in their 3rd and 4th year of study are permitted to enroll.