SDS Graduate Courses 2023-2024

Students enrolled in the SDS collaborative program are required to take our core course, SDS1000H.

SDS1000H Theory and Methods in Sexual Diversity Studies

Instructor: Dana Seitler

Time: Winter term, Fridays 1-3pm

This course serves as the core requirement for the collaborative specialization in Sexual Diversity Studies. It covers important theories, methods, and historical movements in queer, trans, and sexuality studies across the disciplines. It approaches sexuality studies through an intersectional lens by examining how colonialism, settler colonialism, migration, class structure, and neoliberalism shape and are shaped by gender and sexual minorities locally and globally.

Enrollment in SDS1000 is restricted to students in the SDS collaborative specialization. Students in the SDS collaborative can request enrolment through ACORN. Students outside of Faculty of Arts and Science may also have to submit an add/drop form.

If space remains available, students from outside the collaborative specialization can apply for enrolment by filling out an SDS1000 ballot as well as an add/drop form. The course is limited to 15 spaces.

SDS1999H Special Topics – Race, Sex, Pleasure 

Instructor: Jordache Ellapen

Time: Fall Term, Thursdays 5-7pm

This seminar examines the concept of pleasure, especially as it relates to race and racialization. In feminist and queer studies, pleasure (and sex) is highly fraught and contested. However, recent shifts in Black feminist studies, women of color feminism, and queer of color critique point to the importance of sex and pleasure as analytics to think about, and theorize, racialized difference. How is pleasure understood in the afterlives of settler colonialism, slavery, indigenous violence, neoliberalism, apartheid, and other forms of dispossession? How do the colonized and dispossessed use sex and pleasure to resist and critique but also to create queer social worlds that evade surveillance in the face of ongoing anti-Black-Brown-Indigenous and anti-queer structural violence? What are the stakes of examining the pleasures in racialization and can sex and pleasure provide analytics to understand the complexities of racialized sexual subjectivities? How does pleasure—as analytic, methodology, and theory—expand on and trouble queer theorizing in productive ways?  And what significance does pleasure hold for expanded understandings of practices of freedom and politics? Throughout this seminar we will investigate the complexities of racialized sexual desires, sexual behavior or practices, sexual identities, and subjectivities. Rather than offering any conclusive definition of pleasure, we will interrogate what the stakes of talking about sex and pleasure have been within contemporary theory and culture. This course takes gender, race, and sexuality as central analytic components to understand how pleasure is defined and who has access to it. 

Enrolment is open to all graduate students. Students can request enrolment via ACORN. Students outside of Faculty of Arts and Science may also have to submit an add/drop form.