Academics

• Course Code: 01:988:406

Course Overview

            This course focuses on women in the workforce. As current statistical data demonstrate women make up a significant and growing portion of the American labor force. However, women’s positions and experiences in the workforce in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, occupation, and class are very diverse, as are the culturally constructed meanings of those position. As such women’s experiences differ greatly based on the specific social and historical contexts in which they work. But while specific conditions of gender based workplace oppression manifest differently, they are structured in systematic ways. The goal of scholars of women and work is to uncover the patterns of inequality in order to find ways to address them.

            This course will look at how workplace conditions affect women. They study of women and work is an interdisciplinary endeavor and we will explore this topic using literature from such disciplines as sociology, economics, labor studies and psychology. While the topic of women and work is quite broad, we will focus in on some of the main aspects of this topic. In addition, this class is unique in that it will provide you with the opportunity to enter the world of social scientists as researches. This seminar will be centered on the use of scientific methods to research issues of women and work. You will be required to engage in a step by step research project, and then presenting your work at a research seminar in May. This first hand research experience will be valuable in preparing you to do research in graduate education, nonprofit organizations and corporations.

• Course Code: 01:988:405
• Semester(s) Offered: Spring
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:399

Community service placement in women's and gender studies. Corequisite: Must be taken in conjunction with a designated CESEP (Civic Engagement and Service Education Partnerships) course offered in the women's and gender studies program.

• Course Code: 01:988:398

Course Description

            This course provides an introduction to some of the central concepts in the writings of Sigmund Freud, focusing mainly on his understanding of the development of the ego or sense of self, the operations of the unconscious and the genesis of sexual drives in the constitution of male and female subjects. The course will explain these basic Freudian concepts through the central feminist question of sexual difference.

            Being a self-contained introduction to the overlapping concerns of psychoanalysis and feminist theory, the course aims to familiarize issues and debates that have ensued in feminist theory.

            The overall aim of the course will be to develop accounts of the ways in which male and female subjects are formed through the construction and control of infantile sexual drives, the pre-oedipal and oedipal forms of sexual desire, and the creation of the unconscious as a system of repressed wishes. Special emphasis will be placed on the different paths of development laid out in our own culture for masculine and feminine forms of subjectivity.

• Course Code: 01:988:397

At the end of the nineteenth century Sigmund Freud began to publish a body of texts that gave birth to the field of psychoanalysis. For the next four decades Freud created a massive archive based both on his therapeutic experiences and on the philosophical conclusions he drew from these experiences. Though Freud is perhaps best known for his insistence that the “unconscious” informs—and also deforms—our conscious behaviors, as well as the ways we make sense of them, he was not the first to propose this concept. However, he did give the unconscious a new significance when he affirmed that these unconscious meanings constitute “psychical reality” which is just as “real” as any other reality. Moreover, the reality of the psyche contains elements that do not properly belong to us insofar as they come to us from the world in which we live and from those with whom we live as infants. Freud’s emphasis on “infantile sexuality” and on the “Oedipus complex” represent his attempt to give meaningful shape to the paradox that we only become our “selves” by incorporating aspects of others who are not us. Freud recognized that the

internal tension produced among these different aspects of the psyche causes friction between competing desires and drives, often leading to deleterious or painful patterns of thought and behavior. Thus, as a therapeutic practice psychoanalysis sought to ameliorate such human suffering, while as an intellectual practice psychoanalytic writings sought to understand the psychic dynamics that give rise to it.

In this course we will attempt to understand some of the basic concepts and insights of psychoanalysis with regard to sexuality. While what Freud meant by sexuality is not exactly clear, it nevertheless served as the crux for his interpretation of human existence. In this regard Freud takes up and transforms a trajectory of European thought which extends from the middle of the 18th century to the present that sees individual human beings as belonging to a species whose continued existence as a species relies on sexual reproduction. Concomitantly, this line of thought holds sexuality to be the most animal—and hence least “rational”—aspect of human lives, leading to conflicts within the individual between these distinct animal/human imperatives. As a late 19th century Viennese physician trained in neurology, Freud took up this paradox of the human animal by situating sexuality on the borderline between the biological and the psychic. In so doing, he elaborated some of the contradictions that bourgeois European society systematically engendered, and then he sought to explain and to treat them. Although Freud believed that his insights applied universally to all human beings, it seems more likely that Freud’s work illuminates the tensions created within a distinct cultural and economic milieu—tensions which contemporary American culture continues in many ways to develop and transform. This course is not psychoanalytic per se. Rather it seeks to reflect on the ways Freud explains the dynamics of the human psyche and to consider some of the intellectual tools he offers us make sense of our own lives.

• Course Code: 01:988:396
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:395

Course Description

            This course will provide an interdisciplinary learning experience in which students consider the unique and dynamic relationship between law, gender, and race in contemporary popular and political culture. More specifically, students will engage three questions, namely: (1) How does the law generate, reinforce, and, at times, disrupt our gendered and racialized understandings of politics and society? (2) How has the rise in televised court cases and other legal and official proceedings (particularly the introduction of media technology and advanced scientific evidence) altered and/or reflected public perception of the legal system? (3) How has courtroom TV created new “communities of assessment” in the public sphere and enabled different perspectives on and public debate about justice, fact-finding, and the search for truth? In addressing these concerns, the course will integrate scholarship from critical legal studies and critical race theory within the law, political science, public policy, women’s studies, and Black and ethnic studies.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, students should:

1. Be able to define racism and sexism and explain how they function in individual and institutional dynamics;
2. Be aware of key theories and concepts regarding the operation of race and gender in the production of cultural media, such as television news programming, sitcoms, movies, and advertising;
3. Be conversant with key contemporary debates and issues concerning gender, race, and the law such as rape, sexual harassment, domestic abuse/violence, and election coverage; and
4. Be familiar with basic legal concepts regarding trial functioning, including, but not limited to, trial psychology/the psychology of persuasion, burdens of proof, legal epistemology and techniques (e.g., opening and closing statements and direct and cross-examinations).

• 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.