01:988:101:01, Index 68538, WOMEN, CULTURE & SOCIETY

MTH3, Thompson Hall -Room 206, DC

Professor Yana Rodgers

This course introduces students to the theoretical study of women’s lives as they vary within and across cultures.  We will examine differences according to sex, gender, race, class, ethnicity, and age, and we will use a feminist lens to study how gender intersects with other categories of identification.  The course focuses on the social construction of gender during the life cycle by examining women within and outside of the United States.  Economic, political, and social aspects of women’s lives will gain our attention, as will a host of important issues ranging from the value of work, the work-family balance, poverty, violence, sexuality, and women in developing countries.  The course concludes with new directions for policy reforms and women’s advocacy.

01:988:202, Index 71382, GENDER CULTURE, REPRESENTATION:  WRITING EMPIRE - FEMINITY, MADNESS & MONSTROSITY

TTH 5, ARH-100, DC

Professor Julie Rajan

This course employs postcolonial and feminist theory and fiction to explore how representations of femininity in terms of madness and monstrosity shaped the phenomenon of empire from its rise in the early nineteenth century to its collapse in the early-to-mid twentieth century.  Texts considered include: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818),  Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1846), and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928).

01:988:235, Index 71242, DYNAMICS OF CLASS/RACE/SEX

TTH4, TH-206, DC

Professor Robert Sember

The demand for economic, racial, gender and sexual emancipation is the core theme for this class. Our goal is to develop a rich understanding of what it means to dream of and work for these freedoms. A second, closely related theme is the interaction between analysis and action, specifically the ways in which constructivist theories of class, race and gender inspire and direct social movements focused on social justice.

To guide our examination of these extremely complex themes we will undertake a comparative analysis of oppression and struggle in South Africa and the United States. The material for this analysis will come from two bodies of literature: 1. The U.S. and South African constitutions and rulings by these respective supreme courts that address economic, racial and sexual oppression and inequality. 2. Speeches and writings by liberation leaders as well as testimonials or accounts of key historical events in each country’s struggles for social justice. We will consider these texts and the socio-political histories they outline using theoretical propositions derived from a third body of literature; writings about the social and subjective organization of racial and sexual identity and critical investigations of capitalism, specifically neo-liberalism, its contemporary, globalized  manifestation.

The literature for the class includes written texts, film, music, images and other media. These include: Peter Irons’ /A People’s History of the Supreme Court: The Men and Women Whose Cases and Decisions Have Shaped Our Constitution/; Sampie Terreblanche’s /A History of Inequality in South Africa: 1652-2002/; the film, /Proteus/, by John Greyson and Jack Lewis, which outlines the conjunction of colonial and scientific regimes of race, gender and sex; Brett Morgan’s animated documentary about the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, /Chicago 10/; examples of South Africa’s jazz-inspired and politically astute “kwela” music and the emergence of post-apartheid resistance music employing rap and hip hop forms; and, films of various “vogue” performances by members of the New York and Newark House/Ballroom movement. We will also perform readings of certain texts in class, such as extracts from the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.

01:888:290, Index 74252, INTRO TO CRITICAL SEXUALITY STUDIES

TTH6, SC-119, CAC

Professor Robert Sember

This class focuses on sexuality rather than specific sexual identities, such as gay, bisexual or straight. By focusing on sexuality, we engage the contradictions between social discipline and intimate desires and experiences. This is a manifestation of the tension between: 1. E/mbodiment/ - the fact that our knowledge and experience always involves our bodies, and 2. C/orporeality/ - the fact that social laws condition our body's labors, pleasures, creativity and suffering. Embodiment is associated with sexual subjectivity, an understanding of ourselves through our experiences, while embodiment defines us as sexual subjects, a socio-political identity.

In the first few weeks of the semester we will examine how the relationship between sexual subjectivity and sexual subject-hood is discussed in theoretical, historical and policy texts, is represented and reorganized in medical, artistic and popular media, and is encountered in our own experiences.  With this foundation in place we will turn our attention to specific sexuality-related systems and debates. We will consider how structural inequalities established by the welfare reform initiatives in the 1990s and the criminalizing of poverty and migration within the current financial crisis impacts sexuality, particularly for poor women of color. We will also examine how sexuality-related policies and various activist movements are organized in Brasil, South Africa, and India, countries in the global south that have long histories of national struggle, well-elaborated indigenous sexual systems, and are active participants in global financial, political and cultural economies. Points of comparison will include: debates concerning adolescent sexuality, pornography and same-sex marriage; the impact virtual social networks are having on sexual networks and our understanding of our bodies, their locations and their boundaries; violence against women and other manifestations of patriarchal notions of women’s sexuality; feminist claims and counter-claims concerning commercial sex work as inherently oppressive or as a form of dignified labor oppressed by misguided moral principles; and, the challenges posed by transgender movements to essentialist conceptions of bodies, identities and moralities. Our discussion of transgender concerns will introduce us to utopian conceptions of “post-gender” societies.

We will conclude with a careful examination of the assumptions and possibilities of two distinct yet interconnect approaches to current sexuality-focused advocacy, sexual emancipation/citizenship and sexual rights. The former is rooted in notions of social justice and the latter in (political) ethics.

01:988:302, Index 68785, FEMINIST THEORY: CONTEMPORARY ENGAGEMENTS

MW5, RAB-206, DC

Professor Jeanne Vaccaro


This course explores contemporary manifestations of feminist thought and action, and especially the relationship of feminism to dis/ability, race and ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, geography, and class. Students will be introduced to feminist theories of psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and Marxism.  Special attention will be given to expressions of feminism is subculture, visual art, and performance, including video, mixed media, and new technologies.  Trans-feminism, or the coalition of transgender and feminist politics, will also be emphasized.  Course requirements include active participation, an in-class presentation, essay writing, and a final exam. 

01:988:329, Index 69707, RACE, GENDER NATION

TTH4, Ruth Adams Building - 001, DC

Professor Julie Rajan

Race, Gender, Nation

Race, Gender, Nation explores the intersection of race, gender, class, and other variables affecting present imaginaries of the “nation” through: colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial theories; indigenous and minority rights, including those of Native Americans and Dalits in South Asia; human rights dialogues on trafficking in Eastern Europe, genocide in Rwanda, and rape camps in the former Yugoslavia; media representations gauging terrorism and resistance in the nation space, for example,

regarding women suicide bomber missions in Chechnya, Palestine, and Sri Lanka, and political terrorism perpetrated by the United States and certain Latin American governments; notions of the relationship between diaspora and home, including South Asian American perspectives on the 2005 tsunami; and theories on amorphous nations, such as the Global Christian Right and “Al Qaeda.” The course features guest speakers, documentaries, and fictional work.

01:988:303:01, Index 66955, COMPARATIVE FEMINISM

MW5 Scott Hall-220, CAC

Professor Bonnie Smith

This  course focuses on feminist ideas and practices of the  past 1500 years.  We will read texts, discuss art, and consider the activism of women around the world.  The particular topics highlighted in the reading and discussions will include religion, work, family, sexuality, nation and nation-building, colonialism and post-colonialism, race, ethnicity, politics, migration and globalization.  Requirements for the course are perfect class attendance, informed participation in class discussions, and the completion of written work based on the readings.

10:988:307:02, Index 71321, WOMEN AND THE LAW

TH6,7 Hickman Hall - 216, DC

Professor Diane Rizzo

This course is designed to provide you with an overview of the major topics and debates surrounding the status of women subject to the law.  Our primary focus will be on exploring the key cases at both the federal,
state and international level that pertain to reproductive rights, sex and sexuality discrimination, gender violence, family law, race, and LGBT matters.  Within this topical framework, we'll examine whether and how the rhetoric of gender equality as it exists in legal doctrine measures up against the court rulings we review.  While our readings will largely consist of case law, we will draw upon the works of both critical and
legal theorists to help inform our analysis of the jurisprudential questions that we encounter throughout the semester.  Each meeting will be organized as a combination of lecture and class discussion, with ample
opportunities throughout the semester for students to work together in groups.  Your active engagement with the course materials and your willingness to collaborate with one another is essential to your success
in the course.

01:988:310, Index 74186, SOUTH ASIAN FEMINISM

MW4    MU-208, CAC

Professor Jasbir Puar

This class foregrounds the intersectional relationships between gender, sexuality, race, nation and class in South Asia and several South Asian diasporic contexts, namely Trinidad, Britain, and the U.S.  In thinking about what constitutes ‘feminism’ (and progressive activism more broadly) in these locations, we will trace the tensions between western feminist neo-imperialism on the one hand, and the "resistances" of "local" postcolonial and diasporic meanings on the other, while also questioning the categories upon which such a binary relies. Further, transnational approaches are crucial in complicating notions of “authentic culture” and destabilizing the category of “South Asia” itself.  Issues we will address include colonial, postcolonial and diasporic masculinist nationalisms, progressive South Asian activism, transnational queer sexualities, "sexual rights" discourses and legislative practices, and post 9-11 organizing against detention and deportation.  There will be special attention paid to popular culture and other forms of cultural production, in particular film, dance, and progressive organizing.  Because of the dearth of discussion in South Asian communities on sexuality and alternative sexual practices, even within self-proclaimed South Asian feminist contexts, gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer sexualities and their articulations will be a central focus throughout the semester.

01:988:331, Index 71376, THEORIZING GENDER AND SEXUALITY

TTH6   Ruth Adams Building - 104, DC

Professor Ed Cohen

Since the late eighteenth century, sex has occupied a privileged place in Western cultures.  For the past two hundred years, sex has seemed to tell us something essentially "true" about who we are.  More than just biological necessity or personal preference, sexuality envelops us in a web of practices, institutions, discourses, pleasures, fantasies, and desires that organize our relations both to ourselves and to each other, as individuals and as groups.  This course will follow the play between sex and gender as it has unfolded across the last two centuries in order to explore the significance which these ways of making sense of human experience have for us today.  In particular we will examine the paradoxical oscillation between "equality" and "difference" that cuts across our ideas of personhood and that has made the emergence of what we call "sexual politics" possible.  By focusing on how sexual and gender differences have been made meaningful historically, we will try to understand how what we now call feminist and queer theory became imaginable.

01:888:339, Index 74253, RESEARCH ON SEXUALITY

MW5   SC-116, CAC

Professor Jasbir Puar

The contemporary forces of cultural, economic, and political globalization continue to alter and redefine conceptualizations of "sexuality" and its relationships to gender.  In this class our basic problematic is as follows: How does one situate the cultural, locational, and historical understandings of sexuality while remaining attentive to homophobic, oppressive, and violent state and individual practices, especially as the question of "oppression" is often posited through a totalizing human rights framework? In forging an interdisciplinary discussion through queer, feminist, and postcolonial theory, globalization studies, literature, film, and ethnography, we will examine concepts of performativity, identity, and queernesses in relation to formations of the local-global, nations, the transnational, family, homeland, diaspora, community, borders, margins, urban-rural.  The seminar aims to trace the tensions between (American? Western?) capitalist neo-imperialism on the one hand, and the "resistances" of "local" postcolonial meanings on the other, while also questioning the categories upon which such a binary relies.  Queer sexualities will remain central to the discussion and material in this class in order to deconstruct narrow heterosexual/homosexual oppositions. Issues addressed include global, diasporic, and postcolonial gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activism, tourism and travel, HIV/AIDS organizing, "sexual rights" discourses and legislative practices, sex work, and asylum based on gender and sexual orientation.

01:988:370, Index 74193:01, CRITICAL FEMINIST INVESTIGATION

Pre-req: 988:201 or permission

M3,4, WAL-203, DC

Professor Judy Gerson

This course introduces you to the methods and strategies researchers use to create knowledge, and will enable you to use several of them to explore your own research interests.  How research and knowledge actually get produced, remains invisible to readers and this class is a behind-the-scenes tour of how scholars and scholar/activists actually do their work.  

You might think this will be a boring class but it can be a lot of intellectual fun.  We look at the kinds of problems scholars and scholar-activists grapple with before they embark on a project.  How do they deal with issues that arise as they are immersed in their investigations and how do they figure out how best to report their findings to various audiences?  In other words, this course focuses on the how of knowledge production.  Ultimately this course will facilitate a stronger understanding of various forms of feminist thought and encourage you to be an active participant in its creation rather than a passive consumer. 

This class has several interrelated objectives.  First, it explores some of the processes and tensions in knowledge production.  Are there characteristics that define feminist knowledge that distinguish it from other forms of knowledge? Is feminist knowledge superior to other forms of knowledge or is it encumbered by a unique set of challenges?

Second, the seminar provides an introduction to many methodological strategies used in feminist research.  Do feminist scholars and scholar activists tend to rely on some methods rather than others?  Are there methodological distinctions between feminist and non-feminist research?  Can we explain methodological preferences, and if so, which explanations seem most cogent? 

Third, the course introduces some of the most useful methods in feminist research.  In this section we focus on the formulation of research questions, research design, strategies for data collection, modes of data analysis and evaluation of evidence, and reporting of research results.  In addition, we assess different research methods.  Fourth and finally, the course is a forum to use the methodological knowledge gained in your own research and research-activist projects. 

01:988:392:01, Index 71167, THINKING BODIES

TTH5 Ruth Adams Building -204, DC

Professor Ed Cohen

Since the 1950s, the liberation struggles of oppressed peoples in the US have organized around and through concepts of identity.  Indeed the various political movements to which they gave rise have come to be known as "identity politics." More than just new expressions of how marginalized peoples struggle for change, identity politics has changed the meanings of both "politics" and "identity" in America.  To invoke the famous feminist credo of the 70s identity politics reveals that "the personal is political." 

 While addressing those ideas and practices that marginalize, disenfranchise or dis-empower particular groups of American citizens, identity politics also produces narratives.  It offers critical representations of the contradictions and struggles that enmesh people who are positioned as being "off-center" within such group identities.   This strategy of producing images, metaphors and stories enables "eccentric subjects" to affirm themselves over and against a dominant culture that denigrates or devalues them. 

Many of these stories appear in texts written in the first person by people struggling to create new visions of "identity" both for themselves and for those with whom they identify.  In these intimate writings, they illustrate that our deepest understandings of our selves are emplotted in narratives that (often unconsciously) organize how we traverse and transform our life worlds.  In this course we will consider a variety of first person narratives in order to explore how (re)telling our own stories can help us to reimagine and thereby transform who "we are"--as individuals, as collectives, and as individuals who necessarily live collectively.

01:988:394:01, Index 71168, BLACK WOMEN IN THE US

TTH5   Hickman Hall - 205   DC

Professor Nikol Alexander-Floyd

This course will provide a dynamic learning environment in which students engage critical questions concerning race, gender, and nation through the prism of the unique history of Black Women in the U.S.  More specifically, students will engage four questions, namely: (1) What conceptual frameworks are useful in exploring how Black women have negotiated their particular political, social, and economic circumstances in the U.S.?  (2) What are the dominant cultural myths/stereotypes about Black women and how have they changed over time?  (3) What are the political, economic, and social challenges with which Black women have been confronted? (4) How have Black women strategically & creatively engaged in resistance?  In addressing these concerns, the course will integrate scholarship from a variety of disciplines and utilize learning communities to facilitate a deeper understanding of key issues and promote teamwork in the classroom environment.

01:988:396:03, Index , TOPICS IN WOMEN'S & GENDER STUDIES: CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN WOMEN WRITERS

MTH2  Murray Hall - 213, DC

Professor Josephine Diamond

This course compares contemporary women writers in India and the South Asian Diaspora who, through fiction, auto-ethnography and autobiography, explore the situation of  “subaltern” (outcaste, impoverished, oppressed) women in divergent national, economic, cultural and religious contexts.

 We will consider three Indian writers who represent untouchable and exploited  women in modern Bengal and Tamil Nadu: Mahasweta Devi, Viramma and Bama.  In Breast Stories, Mahasweta Devi, a high caste Bengali intellectual and activist constructs a complex literary palimpsest to articulate the economically and physically abused bodies of subaltern women in North East India in relation to the mythology of ideal motherhood. In Viramma, The Life Story Of An Untouchable, Viramma, an untouchable woman from a village in Tamil Nadu recounts her cultural experience as midwife and funeral singer to the Tamil/French feminist ethnologist, Josiane Racine. In Karukku and Sangati, Bama, a Christian untouchable woman from Tamil Nadu describes her education, her relation to the Catholic Church and the lives of women in the caste system. These texts represent some of the cultural complexities of subaltern women’s voices in India as well as raising questions not only about caste, class, human rights, modernization and gender but the relation of a subaltern oral tradition and culture to that of the writers and intellectuals who represent them. Alongside these texts we will read excerpts from Poisoned Bread, an anthology of Dalit literature, and from theorists such as Caren Kaplan, Mahasweta Devi and Gayatri Spivak in the context of  Dalit (untouchable) liberation movements and the rise of Dalit literature over the last few decades.  

In the light of these Indian women writers of the subaltern “at home,” we will compare women writers of South Asian background “away,” in North America, Great Britain and the Caribbean, who define South Asian identity in alien cultures by speaking through subaltern characters. We will follow the ways Bharati Mukherjee in Jasmine narrates the journey of a subaltern Hindu woman from the Punjab to America and how subalternity is configured in the context of immigration and the American narrative of upward mobility; how Monica Ali, in Brick Lane, describes the transformation of a Muslim Bangladeshi village woman in London in the context of religious, patriarchal and language constrictions and her work in the globalized and local garment industry;  and how Shani Mootoo, in Cereus Blooms at Night, represents a world of  cultural breakdown, incest, and madness among descendants of indentured Indians brought to the Caribbean in the 1800’s, and the ways her traumatized characters through various forms of transgendering and connections to the natural world envision new possibilities of community. 

01:988:480, Index 74205,ETHICS & LEADERSHIP:  GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS

M5,6  Art History-100, DC

Professor Julie Rajan

Ethics and Leadership: Global Human Rights contextualizes human rights in current global identity politics from the individual to the local to the international levels. The course explore human rights in a wide range of contexts including: reproductive and sexual rights; torture and nationalism as contextualized in Abu Ghraib, 9/11 detention, and in Guantanamo Bay; genocide and other comparable contexts of crisis, including disaster, pertaining to issues of security and peace; trafficking and sex work; and others.  Course material will explore human rights with a consciousness of multiple variables, including: race and ethnicity, religion and government, nationalism and communalism, native home and diaspora, imperialism and postcolonialism, class and caste, ecology and development, and sexuality and gender.

01:988:491:01, Index 65774 SEMINAR IN WOMEN AND GENDER STUDIES:  GENDER, NATURE, PLACE

W 4,5          HICKMAN HALL-131, DC

Professor Mary Trigg

This seminar will focus on the representation of nature in American writing and ideas. Themes of the course will include ideas about nature, the meaning of wilderness, how nature is gendered, the sense of place, and environmental activism. We will read and analyze nature and garden writing from the 19th and 20th centuries to understand how our changing conceptions of nature influence policy decisions as well as our access to nature. Questions the course will consider include: How is an ethic of care connected to environmental movements? Have modern Americans lost a sense of place? Is nature writing an effort to re-establish connection to place? How is gender invoked, produced, and negotiated in writings about the land? What have women—as writers, environmentalists, feminists, and observers—contributed to the representation of nature in American writing and thought?

GRADUATE COURSES

16:988:520, Index 73501, AGENCY, SUBJECTIVITY &SOCIAL CHANGE

T 12:35-3:35, RJC-011, DC

Professor Louisa Schein

This course looks at questions of agency and subjectivity in multiple theoretical and empirical contexts. We ask where agency can be located, and when it is absent. We interrogate the relation between subject formation, social change, and social movements. In the process, some key debates in feminist theory are introduced. Some of the theoretical/practical questions to be considered are: What do we mean by power and empowerment? What vehicles of domination - structural, discursive, cultural, etc. - can we identify? How do they differ? What is meant by "the subject", and by the "feminist subject,"where do they emerge, and what challenges are there to subject formation?  How are agency and activism distinguished? How do women mobilize for change under different circumstances? What acts are political for whom and how do we theorize resistance and subversion? Under what circumstances do organizing and movements arise and what are their effects?  What are the possibilities and barriers for coalitional organizing across spatial, national, racial, ethnic and other divides? We will read and discuss in interdisciplinary fashion, juxtaposing a wide variety of texts - including articles and monographs, first person narratives, ethnography, textual/film criticism and other forms of writing - and interrogate their different approaches to research, evidence and exposition. This will allow you to consider a range of methods for your own scholarly and other writing projects.

16:988:525, Index 69795, COLLOQUIUM IN WG&S: DECOLONIZATION, FEMINISM, AND QUEER STUDIES

W 12:35-3:35, RJC-011, DC

Professor Carlos Ulises Decena

This reading-intensive course engages conceptualizations of decolonization as they travel in and through the intersections of feminism with postcolonial, racial and ethnic, and queer studies. A key goal of our conversations will be to engage recent scholarship emerging from heterogenous genealogies and politics and sharing a critique of European colonialism past and present. A secondary goal for our discussions will be to wrestle with the challenges and benefits of undertaking inter and transdisciplinary projects that take seriously the conjunctures and disjunctures of these bodies of scholarship. Readings will include (but not be limited to) writings by Trinh, E. Pérez, Lugones, Cesaire, Fanon, Quijano, Mohanty, Sandoval, Maldonado-Torres, Massad, I. Rodríguez, Romanov, Muñoz, Mignolo, Mbembe, Wekker, and Ferguson.