Academics

• 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. 

• Course Code: 01:988:337

Course Description

This course takes a close look at what it means for the most intimate of relationships to be formed at a transnational scale. In recent decades there has been a dramatic increase in people crossing borders to engage in sex, find work in other’s households, or form families. We will examine several of the most common of these types of relationships, including: sex tourism, trafficking in women and children, international domestic work, transnational adoption, interracial marriage, and so-called “mail-order brides.”

We will learn about historical antecedents to the current globalization of sex and family and ask why these relationships are experiencing such a dramatic increase in recent decades. Economics, war, political relationships, media images of others, changes in fertility and marriage patters, etc. will all be considered as factors. We will investigate the difference it makes to definitions of kinship, family, romance, sexuality, gender, racial identity, health and other personal domains when people cross borders to form intimacies.

Readings for the course will be interdisciplinary. We will read several monographs, including ethnographic and social scientific studies, fiction, as well as personal accounts and memoirs. Articles and films will also give a vivid sense of what it is like for persons engaging in such transnational intimacies. Do people who travel long distances for work, sex or marriage maintain family ties at “home” or do they make new homes for themselves? How do people engage in emotional and/or sexual intimacy across barriers of culture, language, class, and race? What kinds of stigma, exploitation or inequality might be generated through the globalization of intimacy? What are the costs of such phenomena? Are there gains? Do such new intimacies have something to teach us about the future?

• Course Code: 01:988:333

Examines development of feminist concepts of power and the relations between feminist and patriarchal theories.

• Course Code: 01:988:332
• Semester(s) Offered: Spring, Summer
• Credits: 3