Courses
In this course, we will problematize the biases in biomedical discourse that unproblematically considers a large body to be a “health risk.” To this end, this course makes use the term “fat” as a reclaimed descriptive term, avoiding terms such as “overweight” and “obese,” which reflect medical pathologizations of body size. We will first explore the field of Fat Studies and the ways it challenges dominant belief systems that speak to power, oppression, and privilege. Then, we will historicize those belief systems as they developed during the 20th century to the present.
Feminismos decoloniales desde Abya Yala
The course defines and contextualizes decolonial feminist praxis among Indigenous/Native and Latin American activists and academics. In the first part of the course, we begin to make sense of what decoloniality is via the notion of coloniality and its extension and antecedents beyond academia. In the second part of the course, we will map the reach of the oppressive structures of coloniality according to Native/Indigenous discourse, considering their effect on ways of thinking and being to enactments of labor, sexuality, gender, and reproduction.
Latina/x Feminisms & Social Media
This course has two goals: first, students will become familiarized with a panorama of texts exemplifying the historical trajectory of Latina/x intersectional feminist thought, a tradition that draws from a variety of disciplines. During the second half of the course, students will research social media activism and contextualize popular Latina/x social media activists, with special emphasis on the disputes and ongoing developments in group identities and senses of self, as well as broad social and political questions relevant to Latinxs, with an eye towards citizenship, consumerism, and immigration issues. Course materials are in English, with Spanish or Spanglish references. Taught in English.
Literatura maya contemporánea
Este curso ofrecerá una primera aproximación a la ética y metodología descolonial usadas en la examinación de la producción textual y cultural creada por personas que se autoidentifican como mayas yucatecos, entre otros grupos de esa misma familia lingüística.
Intro to Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
This course introduces students to major issues and debates within the interdisciplinary field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. We begin with finding our own personal definitions and understandings of feminism, gender, and sexuality. We then embark on panoramic overviews of theoretical expressions of feminism, gender, and sexuality as imagined in 1. white, neoliberal feminisms; and 2. abolitionist, liberatory, Black, intersectional feminisms. Finally, we will reflect on how our preconceived personal definitions interact with the theoretical expressions explored in this course.
Caste War Textualities I: Nineteenth-Century Imaginings of Race, Gender & Class
This course explores a corpus of historical and literary texts written by Yucatán's white-identifying population in the nineteenth-century as the region experienced major social, political and economic change. We will explore the racial mythologies deployed in these texts, pairing them with theoretical explorations of the emergence of the colonial-modern system.
Caste War Textualities II: 21st-Century Expressions of Yucatán's "Race War"
This course explores a corpus of literary and popular texts written by indigenistas and indigenous authors in the twentieth- and twenty-first century. We will consider the events of the Caste War from the perspective of modern history to then explore the War's literary and popular memory. These considerations are framed by indigenous/native critical theory that brings Western constructs of the temporal and the literary into question, positing them as complicit in colonizing gestures.