Queer Studies Minor Courses

GWSS 300: Queer Rights & The Law
Dr. Rachel Levitt
Online
First 4-week summer session online
In the last several years, there were more anti-queer bills proposed by legislators across the U.S. than at any other time in history, including fifteen here in Kansas. We are living through a remarkable backlash against the queer community. This course works to help us understand how we got here and what queer activists are doing to combat this threat to queer rights. This course examines how queer rights are constructed, enforced, and violated by the law. Course materials engage an intersectional approach, analyzing how racist, homophobic, nationalist, and abilitied assumptions inform the law and its enforcement. This course will look at how systems of "justice" and state enforcement mechanisms produce gendered surveillance, confinement, and violence. We will investigate how various scholars and social movements have understood law as both a site of violence against the queer community and as a potential solution to such rights violations.
Fulfills the "Human Diversity within the U.S." K-State 8 requirement; the U.S. Multicultural Overlay; the Social Sciences requirement for Arts and Sciences majors; one of the elective courses for the Queer Studies minor, the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies minor; the Intercultural Competence Certificate; the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in Business Certificate. And students can also take it for Honors credit.