Undergraduate Program

• Course Code: 01:988:394

Course Overview

            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 to utilize learning communities to facilitate a deeper understanding of key issues and promote teamwork in the classroom environment.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, students should:

1. Be able to define racism and sexism and explain how they work to shape the political, economic, and social conditions of Black women in the U.S.;
2. Be aware of competing ways of defining nationalism and their implications of gender politics at the level of theory and practice;
3. Be familiar with the dominant myths about and stereotypes of Black women in the U.S. and be able to explain how they affect cultural production and public policy;
4. Be aware of the key tactics and approaches used in discussing the role of women and gender in the Black church and the Nation of Islam.

• Course Code: 01:988:392

Course Outline

This course in an introduction to various philosophical and theoretical accounts of the body. The concept of the body is generally relegated to a secondary or subordinate category relative to the privilege of mind or Reason in the history of Western thought. This course will examine the work of a number of theorists who have questioned and problematized the subordination of body to mind. It is divided into four parts: the first is an introduction and selective survey of the ways in which the body (and mind) have been formulated in modern Western thought. The second part focuses on phenomenological and psychoanalytic conceptions of the lived body, the body of experience or the corporeal schema. The third part examines the body as a (writing) surface, a surface of social inscription, marking, and training. The fourth and final part explores the implications of acknowledging the sexual specificity of the body for notions of knowledge and representation.

• Course Code: 01:988:387

This course is designed to introduce students to many of the major theories and issues regarding representation arising in contemporary cultural, critical and feminist theory, from the pioneering work of the founders of structuralism - Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Pierce and Claude Levi-Strauss - to the recent critiques of structuralism developed by post-structuralists like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.  It presents an overview of leading figures within twentieth century critical theory, and also a discussion of the major issues raised in this work for the twenty-first century: according to what models and criteria can one adequately analyze cultural and social life? Should theories of culture and society aspire to the ideals of the natural sciences (as sociology and psychology have tended to do) or should they emulate the models given by the social sciences, most notably linguistics (as anthropology, and some literary theory is inclined to)? Or are other criteria necessary? If, for example, linguistics is taken to provide a model for cultural production, how adequately can it deal with non-linguistic production of the kind undertaken in the visual and performative arts? What are the terms and theoretical methods available to and useful for the analysis of socio-cultural life?

The course itself will be divided into three parts: in the first, basic concepts and pioneering theories will be introduced. Here we will examine the work of Saussure, Peirce, formalism and structuralism (Levi-Strauss, Piaget, Jakobson, Benveniste), their similarities and differences, and the debates their works have engendered. In the second part,  we will look at developments and refinements of their work, particularly in various analyses of social power: among the figures analyzed here are Roland Barthes and his analyses of bourgeois cultural life, and Michel Foucault's understanding of social power and its investments in the production and control of discourses. In the third part of the course, we will concentrate on post-structuralist developments of structuralism, particularly deconstruction, and feminism.

• Course Code: 01:988:372

Course Description and content

            Since World War II (1941-1945), the modern black freedom movement has generated an abundance of literature and literary expression. Poems, novels, short stories, speeches, sermons, songs, memoirs, histories, biographies, feature and documentary films tell canonical as well as suppressed stories of the struggle. While an “unbroken” legacy of black activism against racism endures, the freedom movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s is distinguished by a consistent use of “‘direct action’ techniques in villages, towns and cities throughout the South” (Lawson, 2003). And, for the most part, ordinary women and men – black and white, poor, middle class, rural and urban, gay and straight, Southern and Norther – formulated and carried out the movement’s strategies and goals. It was a time of charisma and danger: for the experienced “background” organizers and advisors, like Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker; to the silver-tongued Martin Luther King, Jr. and the stinging brilliance of Malcolm X, who led the masses; to the collective spirit of SNCC, who followed the masses; to the plain courage Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, Unita Blackwell who changed the face of Mississippi politics.

            Women were central to the movement’s achievements – including the dismantling of legally mandated segregation, the political empowerment of black voters and office holders, and the partial achievement of justice in the work place. Women – black and white – worked at all levels. One of them, Rosa Parks (1913-2005), has become an icon of her refusal to give up her seat to a white bus rider in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. Yet, black working class women made up the majority of the black passengers who in 1955-56 walked to work rather than ride segregated buses (Giddings, 1984). Women’s organizations were central as well; the Montgomery bus boycott was started and initially organized by the local Women’s Political Council under the leadership of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (1912). Other women have begun to attain some recognition: for example, Ella Baker (1903-1987), Anne Braden (1924-2006), and Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), Ruby Doris Smith Robinson (1941-1967).

            As the Southern Movement gave way to Northern cynicism, as the destruction of Jim Crow gave way to the production of Black Power, as the “beloved community” gave way to the Black nationalist community, writers, especially poets and playwrights, become central to the promotion of black consciousness. The cultural production was extremely gendered, as in Haki Madhubuti’s 1970 poem, “blackwoman,” in which the speaker asserts that the black woman’s femininity is a reflection of her man’s masculinity:

                        Blackwoman:

                        Is an

                        In and out

                        Rightsideup

                        Action-image

                        Of her man…

            Women activists were overshadowed at the time of male leaders and spokespersons as were working class and poor activists by students and ministers. Moreover, the language of the freedom struggle was sometimes gendered in a way that diminished women’s visibility and importance. Participants in the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis in 1968, for example, carried placards that read, in bold capitals, “I AM A MAN.” Yet, even Martin Luther King, Jr., well-known for his preference for male (Christian) leadership, was even moved to cast that Sanitation Worker Strike in broader terms when he said “….We are saying we are determined to be men. We are famous 1968 poem, “The True Import of the Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro,” where the “we” stands in for the male and female collectivity:

                        Can we learn to kill WHITE for BLACK

                        Learn to kill niggers

                                    Learn to be black men

            What was at stake? It will be our task to examine this question, to gauge women’s importance in the black freedom movement and to explore together how gender was implicated in the movement and in resistance to the movement and how writing was and is crucial to tutelage on black consciousness. The course will span the period from the end of World War II to the early 1980’s. We will use media such as video, music, and photography to open student’s experience to the breadth and impact of the movement. We will also make reference to the movement’s precedents and parallels, e.g., Gandhi’s anti-colonial struggles in South Africa and India, other anti-colonial movements, the anti-Apartheid and Black Consciousness movement’s in South Africa during the 1980’s, and the global Movement for women’s human rights. The course will call attention to the “heroic” narrative of the movement, which usually erases ordinary people’s and women’s leadership; and it will complicate that narrative by examining the movement’s male dominance, accommodationist tendencies, heterosexism, middle-class aspirations, the riots, and black power/black nationalism. Readings will be drawn from social/intellectual history, memoir, autobiography, biography, novels, poetry, and oral history.

• Course Code: 01:988:371

Course Description

This course in Women’s and Gender Studies explores women’s theoretical, strategic and material interventions into modern political culture. We will focus particularly on the different activisms through which women have sought to achieve political, economic and personal goals and analyze the strategies they have employed. How have the political and economic status of “women” at different moments affected their rights and responsibilities as workers and citizens? How have women’s relationships to men, family, capitalism and the state shaped their goals and strategies?

• Course Code: 01:988:369

Course Description

This is an introductory course on theories of space and visuality. Instead of focusing on the question of gender and space, a recent concern of many feminists, this course will examine the more preliminary and general questions of how space, and vision which is the bodily sense that functions best to organize and structure space, have been associated with historically developed concepts of femininity and masculinity. It asks if and how the differences between the sexes may help us to understand how we conceive in and live in space, and how we are able to represent it using light; and how changing our understanding of sexual difference may transform how space and vision are understood, organized and represented. Beginning with key writings by feminist philosopher, Luce Irigaray on the relations between vision, space and sexuality, we will explore how conceptions and theories of space, light and vision are implicitly elaborated in and linked to the same terms as the differences of the sexes.

• Course Code: 01:988:368

This course looks at how identities are produced – socially, culturally, politically, sexually – from institutional definitions to style and consumption, from stereotyping to personal expression. How much do we shape who we are and how much are we formed by the market, social categories, pop culture, our skin, genitals or hair? We begin with the notion of identities as they operate in the market – corporate identities, brands, signatures, advertising, market niches, commodities, all constitute identities. And some consumers oppose these processes through culture jamming or independent identity production. We then examine the interaction between gender, ethnicity, class and nationality with a special focus on race and sexuality with an extended treatment of girls. The course takes a multiethnic and global perspective; we talk about bodies, media, toys, tourism and disease. The course treats sexuality in depth and will count towards the minor in Critical Sexuality Studies.  

• Course Code: 01:988:350
• Semester(s) Offered: Spring
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:344
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:341
• Semester(s) Offered: Spring
• Credits: 3

Course Description

We live in volatile times. Across the country, people are faced with job insecurity, decreasing wages, long working hours, continual war, and police violence, all against the backdrop of a dramatically uncertain future for the existence of life as we know it on earth. How do we manage? How do our different positions according to hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality shape our ability to thrive in these difficult conditions? Do our popular forms of entertainment, especially TV and blockbuster films, serve to anesthetize us to our difficult reality or to engage with it and maybe even strategize resistance?

In this class, we will examine popular film, TV, and fiction in light of the economic structure of our day: neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is predominantly characterized by extreme wealth inequality. However, neoliberalism materializes not only in the economic realm, resulting in shrinking paychecks for the vast majority of us. It also works through the social structures of race, gender, and sexuality. We will analyze how TV shows such as Scandal and The Orange is the New Black and films including The Wolf of Wall Street and The Hunger Games help to construct new racial, gendered, and sexual roles that respond to the political imperatives of late capitalism. In this way, we will be exploring how these notions of human difference function as dense sites of power, serving as sites of both oppression and resistance.

Taking our cue from the British Cultural Studies tradition, we will look at culture as political ideology and commodity, examining the story each text tells as well as its conditions of production, distribution, and reception. For example, when looking at reality TV, we will consider

its function as cultural entertainment and also as a site of labor. We will have a guest lecture from an Emmy-award-winning reality TV editor and watch a documentary about how Mexican women are organizing for better labor conditions in the Tijuana factories that produce most of the world’s television sets. Students will gain practice in analyzing race, gender, and sexuality as sites of power, analyzing visual texts, and making connections between culture and politics.