Mar 29, 2024  
2021-2022 Undergraduate Catalog 
    
2021-2022 Undergraduate Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

WGS 2310 - Gender and Diversity in Leadership

Credits: 4
This course will explore cultural perspectives on what it means to be a leader and how notions of leadership are both socially constructed and reinforced in ways that reify gender norms, as well as gender, racial, and other biases. Using the lenses of feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and intersectionality, students will explore how racialized notions of masculinity and femininity, along with heteronormativity, function to determine socially acceptable and culturally valued standards of leadership. We will look at historical and contemporary contexts, locally and globally, in which leaders emerge and the ways in which leadership has been/is defined and represented. In effect, then, this is a course that examines power and the ways in which norms and biases are deployed to grant or limit access to leadership. The course will examine leadership across a range of categories and fields such as political leadership (Congress/presidency); social movement leadership (and questions of the potential for leaderless movements); business/corporate/workplace leadership. This course will explore the ways in which leadership is represented in media, as well as the language and symbols associated with leadership. Finally, our study will focus on both those who seek leadership roles and “unintentional leaders” – people who find themselves thrust into leadership positions by circumstances (i.e. Malala Yousafzai or Greta Thunberg). This course culminates by examining whether (and how) leadership as a concept can be reimagined and reinvented to allow for greater diversity.
Fulfills: SOSC, D, and X in LS Core.