Yale Gender Studies Dept. to offer courses on Beyonce, Sex, "Friendships between Black Women and White Women," others
Yale University's Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department will offer courses in Spring 2025 on topics such as Beyonce’s cultural impact, sexual enjoyment, and interracial female friendships.
The classes examine gender, sexuality, race, and activism through interdisciplinary perspectives rooted in feminist and critical race studies.
Yale University’s Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) will offer dozens of classes during the Spring 2025 semester, including courses on Beyonce, sexual enjoyment, and the nature of friendships between black and white women.
The courses are all available on the university’s catalogue webpage online. They include “History of Sexuality,” “Gender, Sexuality, and U.S. Empire,” “Beyonce Makes History,” “Bodies and Pleasures, Sex and Genders,” “Friendships between Black Women and White Women,” and “Queer Historias from Latin America, Spain, and Latinx USA.”
The class on Beyonce describes the artist’s “sonic and visual repertoire” as “the portal through which to rigorously examine key interdisciplinary works of Black intellectual thought and grassroots activist practices across the centuries.”
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The “two-fold” goals of the class are to “explore and analyze the dense, robust and virtuosic aesthetics” of “Beyonce’s pathbreaking, mid-career body of work” and to use her work to “explore landmark Black Studies scholarship and Black freedom struggle scholarly and cultural texts.”
The “Bodies and Pleasures” class will aim “to interrogate sex, sexuality, and gender as analytical categories,” and evaluate concepts and debates within “feminist, gender, and queer studies, critical race studies, and history.”
“We will consider how terms like ‘women’ and ‘men,’ ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity,’ ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality,’ and ‘gender’ and ‘transgender’ have structured people’s experiences and perceptions of bodies – their own and others,” the course description continues.
Yale’s WGSS Program describes itself on its website as establishing “gender and sexuality as fundamental categories of social and cultural analysis.”
“Drawing on history, literature, cultural studies, social science, and science, it offers interdisciplinary perspectives from which to study the diversity of human experience,” the description continues.
Finally, the department’s course on “Friendships between Black Women and White Women” offers a hesitant endorsement of interracial female amicability.
“In this course, we are interested in exploring if relationships between Black women and White women can develop an equal footing,” the course summary describes. “Can those relationships be unfettered by the trappings of quid pro quo transactions? Can they be built upon hard emotional labor, trust, and–risky and rare as it may seem–love?”
“Are these relationships even possible?” the description concludes.
The course will be taught by Yale Dean Tasha Hawthorne, whose work “explores the intersection of gender, sexuality, genre, race, and politics in Black fiction,” according to her profile online.
Campus Reform has contacted Yale University for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
