Courses in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies are offered every spring and fall semester at Penn State Altoona. The eighteen-credit Women’s Studies minor, which is available at Penn State Altoona, enriches study in many majors, including human development, political science, criminal justice, communications, theatre, English, engineering, and the natural sciences. The minor provides students with a competitive edge in their professional lives.
It is also possible to design a Women’s Studies/Gender Studies or Diversity Studies major at Penn State Altoona through the Multidisciplinary Studies program. Contact Dr. Sandra H. Petrulionis at [email protected] for information about Multidisciplinary Studies. Research with productive faculty can be done at our college.
Graduates with degrees in Women’s Studies attend top-tier professional, law, and graduate schools. They have careers in professional fields as diverse as legal advocacy, counseling, public relations, journalism, management, non-profit administration, teaching, medicine, politics, and government.
Contact Dr. Megan Simpson at [email protected] if you are minoring in Women’s Studies to ensure courses are going into the right places on your Academic Requirements Report in LionPATH.
Spring 2023 Courses
WMNST 100: Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies
Dr. Kim S. Ménard. T/R 1:35–2:50 p.m.
This multi-disciplinary introductory course on women, gender, and sexuality will explore women’s experience and status here in the U.S. and abroad. We will examine how women’s lives are shaped by the social construction of gender, as well as its intersection with class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. In addition, we will explore how societal institutions (e.g., economic, familial, reproductive, criminal justice, educational, and political) serve to maintain the “status quo.” The course will use feminist theory and research to understand and potentially find ways to dismantle patterns of oppression affecting all people regardless of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or socio-economic status. Students of all genders, races, orientations, backgrounds, and perspectives are most welcome in this course. (GS; US; IL)
WMNST/HIST 117: Women in Modern History
Dr. Lindsay Keiter. MWF 1:25–2:15 p.m.
What has it meant to be a woman, and how has that changed over the past four centuries? This class explores how gender shaped individual and group experiences from the 17th century through today. Students will apply historical analysis to consider women not as a monolith, but as people with complex identities shaped by race, ethnicity, class, and religion. At the end of this course, students will be able to provide historical context for current debates around and challenges facing women of various backgrounds today. (GH; US; IL)
WMNST 200: Global Feminisms
Dr. Elizabeth Seymour. MWF 10:10–11:00 a.m.
This course introduces students to the complexity of feminisms in the context of contemporary globalization. Much of the course focuses on the variety of feminist movement transnationally, particularly as those movements respond to not only local culture and politics, but also to global politics, and as such it touches again and again on the history of power. Explorations of the interanimating systems of power in a given area or region includes attention to ideologies of gender, race, sexuality, colonialism, imperialism, health and welfare, any or all of which are either supported or disrupted by globalism. The course holds a feminist lens to issues such as: gender and sexualities; the politics of the body; ongoing effects of colonialism-in theory and practice-on women worldwide; women's health; women and the environment; women's labor; political economy; transnational migrations; global class relations; women and/in the media; violence against women; women and war; the global sex/human trafficking trades; silence and marginalization; citizenship politics; women in politics and activism around the globe. The course examines contemporary feminist theory in the Global North and the Global South, highlighting the ways in which the term “feminism” continues to be contested. Given that we no longer talk about “feminism” in the singular in the United States, lack of agreement on the priorities of feminists worldwide is even more acute, given diverse cultural, political and economic positions of women around the globe. Thus the course also asks students to resist the kinds of generalizations that have led to inadequate feminist response to urgent challenges faced by women around the world. At the same time, the course will ask what kinds of connections can be made between local feminisms, and transnational feminist movement. (GS; IL)
WMNST/ENGL 225N: Sexuality and Modern Visual Culture
Dr. Loura Rotunno and Dr. Douglas Page. MWF 9:05–9:55 a.m.
Sex Sells . . . So What, Exactly, Are We Buying? Our world bombards us with images, and we contribute to that barrage each time we post a picture. This class will engage you in vital discussions about those images as well as those that came before us and continue to shape what we see and create today. At its core, this class will be driven by our discussion of visual presentations that use “sex” to “sell” us a story; that story might be about what family is or should be, about what political activism looks like, about how a society thinks about love, beauty, hate, even its future hopes or its present fears. To spur those discussions, we’ll offer you readings by and about artists and their subjects—both fictional and real—and a rich, diverse historical background in visual representations that reflect how Western society, from the mid-19th-century to today, has viewed itself through the lens of sexuality, which always intersects with race, gender, gender identity, and class. For example, the terms “feminist” and “homosexual” were invented by the Victorians and reflect profound shifts in conceptions of identity. Another 19th-century invention was the idea of the literary and artistic “avant-garde” as a minority contingent with politically and/or aesthetically advanced views. These ideas of minority culture were deeply enmeshed with one another and still have effects on our world today. Discussions of these ideas then, hopefully, can help us all navigate the flood of images that today’s media presents as well as the self-images we cast into the world. This course can be used as a prerequisite for a 1-credit study abroad (to LONDON!), an opportunity that will occur—circumstances allowing—in late May 2023. (GA; GH; Interdomain)
EDTHP/WMNST 412: Education and the Status of Women
Dr. Carrie Freie. MWF 2:30–3:20 p.m.
In this course, students explore the relationship between gender and education from historical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives. Some issues we will address include questions of educational access, the profession of teaching, curriculum, the current climate in education, Title IX, gender bias, LGBTQ+ issues, and children’s literature.
CRIMJ/WMNST 423: Sexual Violence
Dr. Kim S. Ménard. T/R 10:35–11:50 a.m.
This course examines sexual and interpersonal violence from victims’, society’s, and the criminal justice system’s perspectives. It begins by examining the nature of these crimes, including their legal definition and occurrence. Next, it reviews theories of violence and provides a more detailed analysis of the types, causes, and effects of sexual and interpersonal violence. Finally, the course focuses on college campuses, including laws institutions have to adhere to when dealing with these crimes, the policies implemented to try to reduce them, and victims’ demands for action. (US)
Additional courses that count toward the WMNST minor at Penn State Altoona. Email [email protected] to request a course be correctly counted toward a minor in LionPATH.
ENGL 268/442: Reading Sexuality and Race in Medieval Drama
Dr. Jeffery Stoyanoff. MW 4:00–5:15 p.m.
How do we bring to life on stage something written over five hundred years ago? More importantly, why would we want to do this? How is any of this “relatable” to us in 2022? This course offers a unique opportunity for students to see the history/histories of sexuality and race in texts that most folks would often (wrongly) assume are all about heterosexual, cis-gendered, white people. Medieval drama is, quite literally, the story of humankind in a Christian context, and even in this focused context, it portrays the human experience in ways to which all people can relate. Free will and faith. Fashion and sin. Heaven and Hell. Angels and demons. In this course we will first focus on context: the economic, political, and social anxieties that pervaded medieval England. Such context is remarkably similar to our own cultural context, really, and through such context, we will see how sexuality and race in particular are at work in these texts and/or are available as possibilities in performance. Then, we will read a number of the Corpus Christi pageants, the Digby Mary Magdalene, and the medieval morality play, Mankind. The Corpus Christi pageants were performed on pageant wagons that would process through city streets over the course of a day (think parade floats) while morality plays, such as Mankind, were performed on scaffold staging in which these smaller, raised stages encircled the audience seated in the middle. We will also be concerned with how to stage and to perform these texts, which means we will use the online tools available to us (TikTok, Snapchat, etc.) to aid us in recreating certain scenes. In addition to these recreations, all students will be asked to write bi-weekly short essays engaging the texts directly. ENGL 268 students will complete a longer, critical research capstone project, presenting the culmination of our work in the course, and ENGL 442 students will be expected to compose an original, research-driven critical essay on the issues of race and/or sexuality in one of the plays we study.
