Sex, Gender and Sexuality (SGS) Studies Committee
The Reed College Sex, Gender and Sexuality (SGS) Studies Committee is a faculty committee dedicated to advancing opportunities for student learning about sex, gender, and sexuality. The committee keeps an active list of classes dedicated to these topics, organizes an annual SGS speaker and workshop, and distributes information about related events and programming.
The 2023-24 Sex, Gender, and Sexuality Symposium
Dr. Paisley Currah
“Legislating Gender”
April 11, 2024
Paisley Currah is a professor of political science and women’s & gender studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Currah has written on transgender politics for the Yale Review, the New York Review of Books, and the Boston Review. He is the founding co-editor of the leading journal in transgender studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Currah’s award-winning book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (2022) will be coming out in paperback this fall. He is currently a distinguished scholar at the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center. The lecture took place in Vollum Lecture Hall at Reed College on April 11, 2024.
The 2022-23 Sex, Gender, and Sexuality Symposium and Vine Deloria Lecture
Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio
"Abolition Dreams from a Resurgent Pu'uhonua: Tracing 'Oiwi epistemologies of care and governance in the contemporary Hawaiian Movement"
February 16, 2023
Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is Assistant Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is an award winning poet, activist, and the author of the award winning book Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea. The lecture took place in Vollum Lounge at Reed College on February 16, 2023. The event was co-sponsored by the Office for Institutional Diversity.
2024-25 Sex Gender Sexuality Studies Symposium
Examples of SGS Courses at Reed
For the most up-to-date list, go to the Schedule of Classes (class-schedule.reed.edu) and choose the SGS theme from the filters. Results are by semester.
Art 355, Representation and After. Starting with second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and civil rights in the ’60s, we will study different forms of representational politics in and around the visual arts.
Anthro 344, Anthropology of Sex and Gender. What is the difference between sex and gender? And why is this important in today’s world? This course introduces students to an anthropological perspective on the relationship between sex and gender. In order to understand the debates and their stakes, we will read anthropological accounts of communities in which sex, gender, and sexuality are construed very differently from our own.
Anthro 345, Black Queer Diaspora. This course examines the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender people across the black diaspora. The slave trade, European colonialisms, and their ongoing aftermaths have created both interlinked and locally variant cultures and lifeways across the Americas, Africa, and Europe. We interrogate how conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality shift across time and space and as lived by black social actors who both participate in and defy colonial and nationalist projects.
Anthro 362, Gender and Ethnicity in China and Tibet. Chinese and Tibetan peoples have interacted for centuries, but it is only in the last half of the 20th century that the “Tibet question” in China has risen to global attention. This course looks at modern Sino-Tibetan relations through the lens of ethnicity and gender as a way to understand the contentious process through which the Chinese nation-state and national identity have been constructed.
Creative Writing 321, Queer Writing. In this open-genre course, “queer” will exist as an adjective, noun, and verb. That is, through frequent short and longer writing forays, we will investigate why and how writing might be considered “queer”; we will consider strategies for expressing queer subjectivity and experience on the page; and we will explore how writing (language, genre, form) can be “queered” in ways that go beyond subject matter. Writing prompts will touch on realms corporeal, confessional, political, fantastical, abject. Readings will cross genre and decade, including but not limited to work by Jess Arndt, Hilton Als, David Wojnarowicz, Audre Lorde, Ocean Vuong, Ari Banias.
Dance 270, Dance, Gender, and Sexuality. How do global dance practices perform and/or contest gender and sexual identities? What is the relationship between quotidian and danced identities? This course explores the intersections between dance studies and gender, queer, feminist, and transgender studies, with special attention to how these fields intersect with questions of race, class, and ability over a wide range of historical and contemporary dance practices.
Economics 364, Economics of Population, Gender, and Race. This course will consider race and gender as they influence and are reflected in decisions about schooling, work, and, family. It will also examine trends in population and consider how and why they might change over time. We will use microeconomic models of fertility, migration, decisions to work, and decisions to invest in human capital in an effort to analyze and explain observed outcomes.
English 341, American Literature to 1865: Sex and Gender. This course explores the origins and development of the notions of masculinity and femininity in American literature to 1865. We will pay close attention to how gender and sexuality were used to construct individual, communal, and racial identities and how definitions of transgressive behavior changed during periods of social unrest and cultural anxiety.
History 301, Gender and Sexuality in Africa. This course examines constructions of gender and sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa from the 19th century to the present. This seminar supplants Western constructions of gender and sexuality with African feminism(s). Topics include kinship and dual-sex systems; how categories such as “men” and “women” change over time; the effects of colonization; anticolonial politics and gendered nationalisms; women’s “domestic” roles; and the effects of migration, urbanization, and globalization on sex and sexuality.
2024-25 SGS Committee Members
Mariela Daby, Political Science (Committee Chair)
Jay Dickson, English and Humanities
Alexandra Hrycak, Sociology
Simone Waller, English and Humanities
Faculty who teach about Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
Kris Anderson, Psychology.
Kara Becker, Linguistics.
Zhenya Bershtein, Russian.
Kate Bredeson, Theatre.
Mark Burford, Music.
Naomi Caffee, Russian.
Kris Cohen, Art History.
Mariela Daby, Political Science.
Jay Dickson, English.
Jacqueline Dirks, History.
Victoria Fortuna, Dance.
Denise Hare, Economics.
Alex Hyrcak, Sociology.
Sameer ud Dowla Khan, Linguistics.
Laura Leibman, English.
Monica Lopez Lerma, Spanish.
Charlene Makley, Anthropology.
Tamara Metz, Political Science.
Margot Minardi, History.
Radhika Natarajan, History.
Kathy Oleson, Psychology.
Kristin Scheible, Religion.
Kjersten Whittington, Sociology.
Simone Waller, English.
Catherine Witt, French.
Press About Teaching Sex, Gender, and Sexuality at Reed
Constructing Gender: A Reed theatre class explores the relationship between gender and performance—on stage and off.
Teaching Resources
Charlene Makley’s Sexism and Racism in Advertising Website.