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GEN&WS 401

RACE, SEX, AND TEXTS (HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WRITING)

3 credits.

Explore how race, gender, and sexuality intersect with language and inform textual experiences. Learn how written texts in various forms and genres impact and play major roles in enforcing, or challenging, expectations about race and sex in the United States. Engage with documentation, such as marriage licenses, passports, federal policies, anti-slavery petitions, letters to the editor, posters, and hashtag activism, to follow public debates and everyday individual actions where writing and talking about sex and race makes a difference. Focus on the power of words to break bones and heal wounds. Examine historical and contemporary interconnections among race, sexuality, gender, and texts in the United States.

Prerequisites & course information

Requisites: Sophomore standing Course Designation: Core GenEd - Civics & Perspectives Ethnic St - Ethnic Studies Breadth - Humanities Level - Advanced L&S Credit - L&S Liberal Arts and Science Repeatable for Credit: No Last Taught: Fall 2025 Learning Outcomes: 1. Evaluate how race, gender, and sexuality intersect with language and inform textual experiences. Audience: Undergraduate 2. Situate the practice and use of rhetoric, writing, and/or literacy in social, historical, political, material, and personal circumstances. Audience: Undergraduate 3. Leverage writing as a mode of learning and means of conveying critical analysis. Audience: Undergraduate 4. Recognize and question cultural assumptions and knowledge claims as they relate to race and ethnicity and how they are affected by socio-historical factors. Audience: Undergraduate Learning Outcomes: 1. Evaluate how race, gender, and sexuality intersect with language and inform textual experiences. Audience: Undergraduate 2. Situate the practice and use of rhetoric, writing, and/or literacy in social, historical, political, material, and personal circumstances. Audience: Undergraduate 3. Leverage writing as a mode of learning and means of conveying critical analysis. Audience: Undergraduate 4. Recognize and question cultural assumptions and knowledge claims as they relate to race and ethnicity and how they are affected by socio-historical factors. Audience: Undergraduate

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