Teaching
My teaching philosophy reflects my commitment to promoting cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary conversations. My experiences of teaching different levels of undergraduate classes also led me to appreciate the value of human-centered education and active learning. In over seven years of teaching, I have taught students from a variety of linguistic, racial, and cultural backgrounds, students with varied sexual and gender identities, and students with visible and invisible disabilities. I am well-prepared to teach courses addressing gender-based violence, transnational feminism(s), East Asian societies, global popular culture, and feminist and qualitative research methodologies.
Below is the course description and highlights of the courses I taught at Grinnell College.
Introduction to Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies
What is gender? What is sex? What is sexuality? Are these categories inborn or a product of society? Are female, male, transgender, and non-binary individuals different? What is considered gender inequality? How might we achieve “gender justice”? How are gender and sexuality interconnected with race, ethnicity, class, nationality, migration status, and languages? These are the central questions at the heart of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies. This course aims to tackle these questions with a range of concepts, tools, and methods in social sciences. We will collectively “experience” how gender and sexuality are socially and culturally constructed through a life course approach, from children’s play and educational experiences to formal and informal employment in various workplaces, to intimate relationships and family, and to reproduction and parenting. Remember: this is not a “standard” life course for any individual. In each of these realms, we examine sexuality and gender on multiple levels, from interpersonal interactions to systematic inequalities. Additionally, and maybe most importantly, gender or any social category is always contingent, depending on the historical, political, cultural, and economic, and national context. Consequently, this course explores gender and sexuality in a global setting and from a cross-cultural perspective. Because we all have a gender and sexual identity, this course is crucial for every person to understand the world around us and our positions in it.
This is not only a challenging course, but it also has the potential to be transformative. We are interested not only in your understanding and command of the course material, but also in your ability to apply these frameworks to analyzing our current times and politics, and to your own lives. To achieve these goals, each week is composed of a lecture session (Mondays), a seminar/discussion session (Wednesdays), and a practicum session (Fridays).
Feminism and Pop Culture
Why does Nami in One Piece always wear a bikini top? Why did the news that Hallie Bailey was going to play the role of the little mermaid raise heated discussion on social media? What message does Beyoncé’s Lemonade convey? What role does pop culture play in the production of Islamophobia in the US? Or, in general, how does pop culture reinforce and/or challenge race, gender, and sexuality norms? And, what messages do we receive from pop culture about the “correct” ways to live our lives in a specific society? In other words, what do pop culture representations say about the lived realities of race, gender, and sexuality? Those are the questions that we will discuss in this course.
This course is interested in honing the critical skills necessary to analyze the pop culture that surrounds us every day. This course takes as a foundational assumption that we still live in a world where, while there may be some improvement, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are alive and well. As such, the pop culture produced and consumed in different societies plays a part in those systems of oppression and domination. At the same time, pop culture can also be used as a powerful tool to challenge those systems. With the popularity of Internet-based social media, the problematic and innovative portrayals of the gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies in pop culture transcend national and cultural boundaries. We will explore the social construction of gender, sexuality, and race in pop culture from different societies.
Popular culture items students made in the Feminist and Popular Culture class that aimed to challenge the problematic presentations of gender, race, sexuality, and class in global popular culture.
Gender-based Violence
“We did not even have a word for domestic violence. It was just called life. Now we understand that it is not natural, it is not normal, it is not inevitable.” (Gloria Steinem 2013)
This course will examine gender-based violence (GBV) from a feminist perspective. You will be introduced to a myriad of domestic and international GBV issues, from interpersonal violence (i.e., pornography, sex work, human trafficking, rape, and intimate partner violence) to structural violence (i.e., GBV in conflict areas, honor killing, genital mutilation, and forced marriage). The course is contextualized in Crenshaw's perspective of intersectionality. GBV is understood as occurring in a social context of power, dominance, and control as a co-factor of gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, age, sexuality, nationality, and other variables. The seminar is designed to enhance students' understanding of important GBV research topics and scholarly debates, and furthermore, facilitate the application of this knowledge to real-world settings. We will discuss ongoing controversies about the causes and effects of GBV and examine the sociological, cultural, political, and legal discourses surrounding these issues. The GBV seminar is composed of seminar sessions on Tuesdays and lab sessions on Thursdays. In the lab sessions, we will work collectively to complete the “Contemporary Underground Railway” project using digital mapping.
Screenshot of one of the digital maps students in the Gender-based Violence seminar made that investigated the domestic violence services in the deep South.
Gender in Post-WWII East Asia (Spring 23)
This reading and writing intensive seminar discusses contemporary East Asian cultures and societies from the perspective of gender. It focuses on women’s and men’s different experiences, role status ideas, and contributions during the post-WWII period. Going beyond dichotomies of East and West, traditional and modern, this course will examine gender issues from a theoretically informed and comparative perspective. Our goal is to progressively map the key notions of contemporary gender studies while looking back at the sociopolitical transformations faced by China, Japan, and Korea in the past decades. In this course, we examine both the intergender differences between men and women in East Asia and the intragender variations among women and men. We will highlight the perspectives of men and women from a variety of social classes, cultures, countries, communities, and racial-ethnic backgrounds, as well as people of diverse ages, sexual orientations, and non-binary gender identities.
We will start with theoretical and historical background knowledge that we will use in the subsequent discussions. The following topics will then be explored: (1) gendered labor and gendered workplace; (2) gender and family reform; and (3) power of resistance. We will question the ruptures in identities and gender performance following China’s revolutions and economic reform, the financial crises, the popularity of K-pop and Japanese anime, as well as the neo-liberalization of the East Asian societies.