Graduate
Gender, Sexuality and International Migration (GWS 696M)
Focusing on contemporary migration across international borders, we explore how migration contributes to the production, contestation, and remaking of dominant gender and sexual norms as these articulate hierarchies of race, class, and geopolitics. We particularly examine how the selection, incorporation or “illegalization,” and governance of migrants provide occasions for contesting, renegotiating, or affirming dominant gender and sexual norms; how migrants contest multiple exclusions and refashion identities, communities, and politics through gender and sexuality; and how transnational social fields, grounded in histories of empire and global capitalism, shape and are reshaped by these processes. We link these changes to other kinds of flows across borders, including of capital, goods, information, images, and technology. Moreover, we historicize and critically interrogate the formation and function of nation-state borders in relation to the regulation of sexualities and genders at multiple scales. We also analyze the circulation, impact, and contestation of hegemonic discourses about gender and sexuality that affect migration possibilities and materially impact on migrants’ lives (including discourses on HIV/AIDS, same-sex relationships, sex work, desirable family forms, and human rights standards). We consider how these processes also implicate people who do not migrate but are nonetheless affected by the dynamics of transnational migration and its governance.
Undergraduate
Gender, Sexuality, and International Migration (GWS 325)
This course explores how gender and sexual hierarchies shape and become reshaped by international migration. Focusing especially on migration from Mexico and the Philippines to the United States, we examine how the selection, incorporation, and governance of immigrants provide occasions for challenging, renegotiating, or affirming dominant gender and sexual norms; how immigrants contest multiple exclusions and refashion identities, communities, workplaces, and politics through gender and sexuality; and how transnational social fields, grounded in histories of empire and global capitalism, shape and are reshaped as a result. Throughout the course, gender and sexuality are theorized as intersecting with and reproducing inequalities of race, class, culture, and geopolitics.