Course Descriptions
Expand each section below for more details on our course offerings. One-page course outlines are available for download.
Course offering list (DOCX)
Core Courses
Course Outline (DOCX)
Description: This interdisciplinary seminar provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary theories in gender studies and in such fields as critical race, feminist, women's, queer or trans studies. The seminar will examine the development and application of theories as well as debates surrounding them. Readings and discussions will draw from both the social sciences and the humanities. Required of Gender Studies graduate students.
Course Outline (DOCX)
Description: This interdisciplinary seminar examines historical and contemporary methodological approaches in gender studies and in such fields as critical race, feminist, women's, queer or trans studies. Readings and discussions emphasize research possibilities that are opened connecting multiple academic disciplines and diverse local-global perspectives. A goal of the seminar is to understand how researchers can engage in non-oppressive politics of knowledge production and how knowledge can be utilized within processes of social change. Required of Gender Studies graduate students.
Course Outline (PDF)
Description: Course advances knowledge and skills supporting professional development of gender studies graduate students. Topics include development of teaching, research, scholarship, publishing, and academic and non-academic careers. Includes visiting researcher seminars and training and preparation of funding and employment applications. Graded Pass/Fail.
Course Outline (PDF)
Description: Examines critical theories of applications of gender studies research within work for social change. Themes include power in research and representation, researcher responsibilities, academic and nonacademic research, research careers, and community-based research. Students plan applications of original research, and evaluate plans by utilizing critical theories of application.
This course is only open to first year Gender Studies PhD students.
Description: A student and PhD supervisor design a course of research with partners at a site of application of the doctoral research project. Students examine scholarship on practica and research applications that are relevant to the research topic and site, and develop new knowledge in collaboration with research partners. The practicum design must align with the program degree learning expectations.
Elective Courses
Course Outline (PDF)
Description: Students will read a range of texts that attend to black studies, black geographies, and practices of liberation.
Course Outline (PDF)
Description: This graduate course focuses on the theories, practices and transformative visions of abolition feminism. Engaging with historical genealogies, internationalist dimensions and contemporary everyday geographies and socialities of abolition feminism, this course explores the central role of feminism in abolition politics and world building. To this end, we will learn from historical accounts of abolition feminism such as during the Haitian revolution and Quilombo formations, as well as from current abolitionist feminist work beyond carceral regimes and geographies, carceral technologies, and systems of violence. Attending to local and global forms of abolition feminist knowledge production and organizing, as well as alternative visions and practices of transformative justice, we will explore the indivisibility of abolition and feminism as pathways of liberation.
Description: This seminar is a graduate level introduction to transnational trans literatures and studies. It provides a foundation in the aesthetic, political and epistemological projects of trans literature, art and theory and will contextualize them historically and in relation to non-binary, transsexual, Two Spirit and non-Western “transgender” cultural production and knowledges.
Description: This course focuses on the theories, political activities, and organizing of Islamic feminists. It situates itself in relation to contemporary debates around the status of women in Islam and problematizes the nature of feminism and its assumed relationship to Islam. The course will focus on questions of religion, race, class, and nationalism in relation to Islam and Muslim women.
Exclusion: GNDS 401
Description: This course is designed to provide an in-depth exploration of poverty issues in Canada. It includes discussions about working poor and welfare poor and addresses how race and sexuality can compound the issues of poverty. The course will also acknowledge how poor people are actively engaged in attempting to improve their lives through antipoverty organizing.
Exclusion: GNDS 421
Description: This interdisciplinary seminar will explore the ways in which modernity shapes cultural ‘difference’ and ‘the human'. Readings will focus on the racial and geographic contours of colonialism, transatlantic slavery and The Enlightenment in order to bring into focus communities that challenge racial-sexual categorization through creative expression (music, fiction, poetry, and visual art as well as theory).
Exclusion: GNDS 427
Description: This seminar addresses some of the many meanings and manifestations of ‘gender performance’ in literature and popular culture. Primary sources include a wide variety of media - novels, plays, poems, films, magazines and cartoons. Primary material will be balanced with careful consideration of work in areas such as feminist theory, identity politics, queer and performance theory.
Exclusion: GNDS 428
Description: Examines critical theories and case studies of politics and governance in Indigenous and settler societies, based in Indigenous feminist thought. Cases examine the relation between nationality, gender, and sexuality within colonial relations of rule, methods of Indigenous governance, Indigenous sovereignty struggles, and theories and practices of decolonization.
Exclusion: GNDS 432
Description: Examines the critical theories, methods, and products of feminist ethnography and queer ethnography, which we approach as unique subfields, areas of inquiry, genres of writing,and ethical methods within research and social life. Topics include historical formations of ethnography and of anti-colonial and anti-racist ethnographic criticism; adaptations of ethnography to trans, queer, and feminist work; and ethnography’s theoretical and methodological importance to gender studies.
Exclusion: GNDS 445
Description: This course examines race, gender, and their intersections through a focus on modern African American history. Topics include: gender in the post-Emancipation era; the law, racist science and racialization; racial and sexual violence and Jim Crow; the Great Migration, the New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance; mass consumption; the modern civil rights movement; and, from Black feminism to Black Liberation.This course examines race, gender, and their intersections through a focus on modern African American history. Topics include: gender in the post-Emancipation era; the law, racist science and racialization; racial and sexual violence and Jim Crow; the Great Migration, the New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance; mass consumption; the modern civil rights movement; and, from Black feminism to Black Liberation.
Exclusion: HIST 817
Course Outline (DOCX)
Description: Developed by feminist sociologist Dorothy E. Smith, Institutional Ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that begins in the everyday world of people and analyzes how institutional processes frame people’s social relations and interactions with one another. The course examines the theory that informs IE, discusses its core concepts and procedures, and provides opportunities for practice.
Course Outline (PDF)
Description: This course is a hybrid seminar/workshop that will introduce students to theories and creative practices of writing (from) the body. Critically engaging theories of how bodies are socially “written” and creative (feminist, anti-colonial, queer/trans, critical disability) theories of embodied writing, students will also write, read and workshop their own creative/critical texts. (3.0 credit units)
Description: Under the supervision of an individual faculty member, MA students may conduct intensive reading in a research area not offered in core or elective courses. Readings are to be arranged in consultation with the faculty supervisor, and accompanied by meetings during the term to discuss reading and submission of written assignments.
Note: MA students may take a maximum of two Gender Studies Directed Readings (numbered GNDS 840 and GNDS 841) while completing their degrees.
Description: Under the supervision of an individual faculty member, MA and PhD students may design a course of study on a topic related to community engagement and activism while simultaneously being placed in community-based and/or activist work. Students will analyse interdisciplinary and feminist approaches to community-based and activist knowledge, including knowledge presented by their practicum partners, and then integrate this knowledge and their accountable relationship with their partners into their research.
Description: An intensive required written project based on student’s own research questions, which is comprised of two major components: either two chapters of a single coherent work, or a two-part portfolio.
Prerequisite: Students must complete GNDS 801/3.0, GNDS 802/3.0, GNDS 815/0.0 and four elective courses in Gender Studies or in any other department to enrol in GNDS 898.
Description: An intensive required written project based on student’s own research questions, which is comprised of a number of chapters that form a single coherent work.
Prerequisite: Students must complete GNDS 801/3.0 and two elective courses in Gender Studies or another department to enroll in GNDS 899.
Description: Under the supervision of an individual faculty member, PhD students may conduct intensive reading in a research area not offered in core or elective courses. Readings are to be arranged in consultation with the faculty supervisor, and accompanied by meetings during the term to discuss reading and submission of written assignments.
Note: PhD students may take a maximum of two Gender Studies Directed Readings (numbered GNDS 940 and GNDS 941) while completing their degrees.
Assigned to PhD students who are conducting independent doctoral research
Other Information
Graduate students may ask instructors of advanced undergraduate seminars in Gender Studies (400-series courses) for permission to participate by enrolling in a parallel graduate Directed Reading (GNDS 840/841). While the precise workload graduate students must complete in such courses is determined by the instructor, generally it entails attendance at all seminar meetings and completion of additional coursework equivalent to a graduate seminar.
Students are invited to research the titles, descriptions and term offerings of graduate courses in other departments at Queen’s University. Neither the university nor the Faculty of Arts and Sciences publishes a master list of graduate courses, so students should independently investigate offerings from departments of interest.
To request a seat in a graduate course in another department, contact the course instructor and request a meeting or a discussion over email to determine whether the course will inform your MA research project. Instructor permission is required before you may enroll in any course in another department