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.
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
An upper-level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.
WGS332H1: Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies
An upper-level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.
WGS333H1: Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies
An upper-level seminar. Subjects of study vary from year to year.
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 Ay 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 fill out this application 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. Topics vary from year to year.
WGS435H1: Advanced Topics in Women and Gender Studies
An upper-level seminar. Topics vary from year to year.
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: Spirits of the Age: Bodyminds and Afterlives
This course uses an array of literary and critical texts, from the nineteenth century to the present, to survey representations of the human self as something both finite and ongoing. From ghost stories to treatises on identity, from science fiction to memoir, our texts find their common ground in the bodymind: a conception of the self as a complex of physical, mental, and indefinable aspects, often termed the spirit or soul. Our initial texts will invite us to consider the ways in which the bodymind has been theorized and represented as navigating the living world; the second half of term considers texts exploring its lingering presence as apparition, memory, trauma, or wider legacy.
WGS465H1: Special Topics in Gender and the Law
Senior students may pursue advanced study in gender and law. Topics vary from year to year.
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.