Smith College Offers $5K Course for Teens on ‘Queer Love Stories’
For the cost of almost $5,000, high schoolers can learn about “black feminism,” “reproductive justice,” “trans lives,” and “queer love stories” from a private liberal arts college in Northampton, Massachusetts this summer.
The summer program appears on Smith College’s website under the title of “Women, Gender, & Representation.” The classes are scheduled for July 20-Aug. 2, which students can attend for $4,864.
During the course of the program, students will take six classes, all in the general category of women’s and gender studies.
They include “Play Like a Girl: Gender in Sport,” “Rest as Resistance: Black Feminism & Radical Interiority,” “Shaping a New World: Race, Gender, Feminism, & Science Fiction for a Better Tomorrow,” “Global Reproductive Justice,” “Women of Rock,” and “Queer Love Stories.”
A description for Gender in Sport says that students will learn about “critical feminist and queer theories,” and the web page also calls “gender” a “social construction.”
“[W]e interrogate the histories of gender in sport and physical education and use critical feminist and queer theories to decipher the ways sport creates, supports, and resists dominant ideologies of inequality,” the description says.
“This course will focus on the creation and legacy of women’s sports, patterns of inclusion and exclusion in sport with particular attention to women of color, trans, and nonbinary athletes, and the social construction of gender, race, and sexuality in sport,” it continues.
Meanwhile, in Global Reproductive Justice, the students will study abortion rights after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Specifically, they will ask consider questions such as “[w]hat does it mean to live in a Post-Roe world,” “[w]hat is the history of reproductive justice,” and “[w]hat are the legacies of protest movements for and against access to reproductive health care.”
The Queer Love Stories course will instruct about the desire for love from many different gender identities like “asexual,” “questioning,” or “pansexual.”
“Whether we are queer, straight, pansexual, asexual, questioning, or anywhere on the continuum of desire and attraction, we all long to give and receive love,” the description says. “During our time together, we will read and watch love stories as narrative, poetry, and film exploring everything from romantic love to family love to community love to self-love.”
Smith College’s summer program has similarities to a feminist summer program for high schoolers at Tulane University. Some of Tulane’s 2023 courses included “Decolonizing Feminisms” and “Dismantling Rape Cultures.”