2007–2008 Women’s Studies Courses
Courses in Related Disciplines
1919
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
The period l9l9-l920 saw the eruption of numerous civil disorders: riots, strikes, new social and cultural movements and political parties. New patterns of production and consumption were also beginning. While all these were responses to long-established tendencies in economic life, in class and racial conflict, and national liberation struggles, it is not a coincidence that so many appeared within a few months of each other. They stemmed from the disruption and trauma of the war. The war transformed all existing trends in ways that reverberated throughout the interwar period and beyond. The goal of this course is to examine, from a global perspective, the possibilities, for good and ill, that were opened up. It is clear, for example, that the war disrupted major tendencies in the socialist and workers’ movements. The Russian Revolution and the rise of international communism marked a break with important parts of the traditional left and seemed to some to have established a vital and exciting new kind of polity, to others, a frightening and aggressive new enemy of civilization. We will study the debates over the Soviet Union in the light of these profound disagreements. It is also clear that the war meant new directions in world capitalism. One of the most significant was the unleashing of American economic power. We will study how developments in the U.S. oil and automotive industries impinged on Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa in the search for petroleum and rubber. At the same time, we will learn how this economic buildup enabled capitalism to replicate itself through the creation of such industries as advertising, which took on a new vitality in this period. Its seductive images of individual desires and personal fulfillment permitted it both to shadow and rival the collective movements that worked for social change. Conflict over social change occurred on many fronts. Movements of national liberation in the British Empire were now placed in the context of the gradual eclipse of British power, even as Britain emerged victorious from the war and a major power in redrawing maps of many contested terrains. Against this background, we will look at British efforts to deal with popular aspirations in India, Ireland, and Palestine with the outbursts of violence that often characterized state action in these matters. Other important subjects include the movements for gender and sex equality and justice for workers and African Americans. They had to face a long-running nineteenth-century social Darwinist ideology, which the war had made only more toxic, as witness the reception given to returning black soldiers expecting a better life, the restrictions on U.S. immigration, and the appeal of racism, anti-Semitism, and many other ethnic prejudices to wide sectors of opinion. In the field of sex and gender, new movements of protest and affirmation grew up while old ones declined. The goal of woman suffrage having been achieved, the suffragist style of feminism began to disappear, along with its liberal, rationalist, and parliamentary values. The war had done much to destroy them in all parts of the political spectrum and had cleared the way for many new cultural phenomena. These included fascism, artistic modernism, and the emergence of a new gay people’s consciousness, to name just a few. Cities like Paris, New York, and Berlin offer case studies in the vibrant subcultures that flourished during these years. Course readings will include the John Dos Passos novel Nineteen-Nineteen; Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio; Rudyard Kipling’s short story Mary Postgate; Margaret McMillan’s Paris 1919, on the Treaty of Versailles; selections from Mein Kampf; literature on the steel strike of 1919 in the United States; the 1919 Amritsar Bazaar massacre in India; Pan-Africanism and American racial disturbances of that year and the responses of such people as Garvey and DuBois; the coming of the private automobile and its relationship to highway construction, suburbanization, and the onrush of the extractive industries, for example into Liberia, searching for cheap rubber; the rise of public relations and the “engineering of consent,” as it was called by a founder of modern advertising, and how it worked both in political propaganda and the sale of commodities; and the emergence of new styles of sexual expression. These are only some of the topics we will study. For written work, students will pick out subjects from the syllabus and explore them more deeply in a few short essays, using extra reading in consultation with the instructor.
From Mammies to Matriarchs: The Image of the African American Woman in Film, from Birth of a Nation to Current Cinema
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
The representation of African American women in American film will be examined historically and with reference to the relationship between existing feminist theory, representation, black feminist thought, as well as within the political and social context of race and class. The course will also challenge the viewer to critically examine the existing nature of media, imagery, and entertainment in relation to the sexual, racial, and class oppression of African American women. There will also be a required group production component.
Gender and Development: Politics, Violence, and Livelihoods in South Asian and African Societies
Semester: Spring
In this seminar, we will examine and discuss key issues of gender and development as they are relevant for rural and urban communities in African and South Asian countries. To what extent are gender politics used to include or exclude community members in the development process? How are gender associations used symbolically, and in what ways are these associations detrimental to gender equality? What limitations do community members face due to gender bias as they develop their livelihoods? To what extent is gender-based violence “learned” in schools and other institutional settings? What work is being done to improve gender equality in the development process? In Africa and South Asia, the geographical foci of the course, we will explore how gender has played a significant role in development, politics, violence, and livelihood strategies. We will begin with an overview of general themes and topics of gender and development, discussing issues of identity, misconception, and prejudice. We will discuss how the body is used metaphorically by societies and how this affects the roles of all individuals in various cultural contexts. We will explore specific case studies of gender politics, livelihoods, and violence in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, South Africa, the Gambia, and other African and South Asian countries. Complicated and sensitive issues such as HIV/AIDS, cultural initiation rights, and sexual violence will be discussed. This seminar will conclude with a hopeful look forward with an examination of work being conducted toward gender equality and analysis of projects using gendered approaches to the peace process. Weekly films, mass media, books, and selected readings will be used to inform debate and discussion. A structured conference project will integrate closely with one of the diverse topics of the seminar.
Sophomore and above. Some experience in the social sciences desired but not required.
Genre Bending in Women’s Writing
Level: Advanced
Semester: Spring
“Literature is the place where congealed practices and ideas are disturbed,” said Cornel West. And indeed, as Toni Morrison and Pynchon, as well as Rushdie and Perec have shown, transgressive forms erupt periodically, undermining coherency and the consensus and decorum it posits. In this course, we will examine French and Francophone works by women in order to explore the potential link between marginalized voices and generic border crossings—women have been, after all, as much the excluded “other” as those considered “subaltern” in terms of race or religion or sexual orientation. We will focus especially, if not exclusively, on first-person narratives, given the recurrent phenomenon whereby the first-person synthesis of narrator and protagonist seems coincident with genre disturbance. Combining as they do memoir, prose poem, novel, and philosophical essay, many such works resist classification and thus offer “subversive” versions of the world and the place of writing in constituting an alternative universe. Among the authors to be integrated from this perspective are Isabelle de Charrière, Assia Djebar, Marie Chauvet, Mariama Bâ, Anne Hébert, and Luce Irigaray—writers whose genre stretching/splicing problematizes and eludes the dominant discourse’s “strategies of containment,” as Foucault puts it.
Pretty, Witty, and Gay
Semester: Spring
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Are you ready to review your cultural map? As Gertrude Stein once said, “Literature—creative literature—unconnected with sex is inconceivable. But not literary sex, because sex is a part of something of which the other parts are not sex at all.” More recently, Fran Leibowitz observed, “If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal.” We do not have to limit ourselves to America, however. The only question is where to begin: in the pantheon, in prison, or “in the family”; in London, Paris, Berlin, or New York; with the “friends of Dorothy” or “the twilight women”? There are novels, plays, poems, essays, songs, films, and critics to be read and read about, listened to or watched. There are dark hints, delicate suggestions, “positive images,” “negative images,” and sympathy-grabbing melodramas to be reviewed. There are high culture and high camp tragedies and comedies, the good, the bad, and the awful to be enjoyed and assessed. How has modern culture thought about sexuality and art, love and literature? How might we think again? Conference work might be focused on a particular artist, set of texts, or genre or some aspect of the historical background of the materials we will be considering.
Sophomores and above.
Sexuality Across the Life Span
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
The study of human sexuality is inherently an interdisciplinary undertaking: anthropologists to zoologists all add something to our understanding of sexual behaviors and the meanings we attach to these behaviors across cultural and sociohistorical boundaries. What does psychology add to the study of the construction of sexual identity and desire? How do race and gender come together in the production of sexual behavior and meaning? In this seminar, we will study sexualities in social contexts across the life span, from infancy and early childhood to old age. Within each period of life, we will examine biological, social, and psychological factors that inform the experience of sexuality for individuals. We will also examine broader societal aspects of sexuality, including sexual health and sexual abuse. Students are encouraged to do fieldwork or community service as a part of conference work in this seminar.
Sisters in Struggle: Women and U.S. Social Movements in the Twentieth Century
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
From kitchen tables to assembly lines, from legislative podiums to sidewalk soapboxes, women have demanded dignity and respect for themselves, their families, and their communities. This course traces the history of such mobilizations in the twentieth-century United States, focusing especially on moments that can illuminate the gender dynamics of epic contests over class, race, and empire. We will explore the many varieties of women’s work for labor and civil rights movements; the multiple ways in which women have constructed activist identities; competing definitions of women’s liberation, women’s issues, and women’s rights; and their activism’s impacts on personal relationships and family life as well as national and international politics. Readings and materials include oral history, fiction, film, and autobiography, in addition to historical scholarship.
Open to graduate students, seniors, and qualified juniors.
Surgically and Pharmacologically Shaping Selves
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Science, Technology and Society
From body piercing and alcohol to peyote and psychotherapy, human beings have always sought to shape their bodies and moods. Today, when we use surgery and pharmacology to change how we appear and act, we often say that we are changing our “identities.” When explaining why we undertake such changes, we often say that we are attempting to become “authentic” or “who we really are.” And when we criticize such identity-altering interventions, we often do so on the grounds that they are “inauthentic.” This seminar invites students to notice the burgeoning number of identity-altering projects that are becoming possible, to think critically about the language of authenticity that is used to promote and criticize those projects, and to think about what sorts of identity-altering they think they and those around them ought to pursue. Class discussion will be built around texts from several genres, including personal narrative, public policy, philosophy, and history. We will consider cases including the use of drugs like Prozac, Ritalin, and Viagra and the use of surgery to do things like lengthen the limbs of adolescents who are dwarfs, enable children who are deaf to hear, and enable people to transition from the sex they were born with into the one they say is “authentic” for them.
The City of Feeling: Sexuality and Space
Level: Open
Semester: Year
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Female couples in nineteenth-century New England were said to live in “Boston marriages”; Whitman aspired to a “city of friends”; Proust anatomized “the cities of the plain”; Baldwin’s all-American boy fled to Paris to have his fears confirmed by Giovanni’s love. Contemporary lesbian and gay scholars describe the development of urban communities as crucial to the history of modern lesbian and gay cultures and politics. Contemporary queer geographers have begun to map what they are calling “queer space,” which is most often either urban or understood in relation to the urban. In this course, we will be tracing the interdependent development of modern understandings of homosexualities and of cities, within the framework of a wide-ranging discussion of modern histories of sexuality, the city, gender, and space. At the intersection of queer studies and urban studies—with Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) and Samuel Delany (Times Square Red, Times Square Blue) as presiding godmother and godfather—this course will bring together classic works on the cultures of cities, lesbian/gay/queer urban histories and community studies, new analyses of “place” in urban studies and of “queer space” in geography and cultural studies, novels, and films. From Paris and Berlin to Buffalo and Wyoming, we will be considering understandings of “the country” and “the suburbs” as they help to define “the city”; great cities, global cities, industrial cities, simulated cities; public and private space; the street and domestic life; anonymity and home.
The Psychology of Race and Ethnicity
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Fall
What is race? Is it “real”? What does such a question mean in face of four hundred years of American history and a continuing legacy of racial discrimination and prejudice? Race as a “scientific” biological concept holds little currency; yet as a political and psychological construct, race holds much power in American society. This lecture explores the effects of the construction of race, ethnicity, and social class on the individual and how these constructs implicitly and explicitly inform psychological inquiry. We will examine the social construction of race and development of racial/ethnic identity in childhood and adolescence, as well as gendered and sexual aspects of race/ethnicity. In the latter half of the course, we will move toward a broader understanding of psychological aspects of prejudice, ethnic conflict, and immigration and how these themes are expressed within the U.S. and abroad.
The World’s Women During the Enlightenment
Level: Open
Semester: Year
“Et nous aussi, nous sommes citoyennes” (And we too are citizens). Could the Rights of Man be rewritten to address the Wrongs of Woman in a revolutionary era? In her groundbreaking Legislative Views for Women (1790), Marie Madeleine Jodin expresses the aspirations and frustrations of attempts to do so. This course traces women’s unprecedented engagement in the republic of letters and public action during a period of geopolitical and intellectual turbulence. To understand the emergence of late Enlightenment feminisms, we consider the cognitive advances proposed by Descartes, Newton, and Locke in the seventeenth century; the explosion of print culture; Caribbean slave rebellions; and the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century. We read landmark and little-known texts by and about women that address the “right to private judgment,” debates over “female education,” the gendering of knowledge, and ongoing battles about slavery, political representation, and suffrage. New research on women’s global history allows us to explore neglected continuities and alliances among women from diverse cultures that challenge conventional narratives of empire. Students will have the opportunity to design a research project of their choice that expands our knowledge of women’s roles in early modern history.
Thinking Gender: Inequalities and Identities
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Gender is simultaneously a central form of organization within social institutions and an integral component of self-identity and social interaction. Gender is often easiest to see as an aspect of interaction, of how others see us and how we see ourselves. The embeddedness of gender in institutions, the intersection of gender with race and class, and resulting patterns of social inequality are less immediately perceivable, yet have been a central focus of sociological study of gender. In this course, we will study theories of gender from sociology, women’s studies, and queer and transgender studies, and we will compare various approaches to defining and studying gender identities and inequalities. Some of the topics we will examine include gender norms and expectations, dominant and alternative gender identities, labor markets, occupations, and domestic work; the legal system and gender discrimination; and the history of and possibilities for social change.
Virginia Woolf in the Twentieth Century
Semester: Fall
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
“On or about December, 1910,” Virginia Woolf observed, “human character changed. . . . All human relations shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” In her novels, essays, reviews, biographies, and polemics, as well as in her diaries, letters, and memoirs, Woolf charted, and fostered, the cultural and political forces behind those changes as they developed across the century. Over the course of that century, Woolf’s image also changed, from that of the “invalid lady of Bloomsbury,” a modern, a madwoman, and perhaps a genius, to that of a monster, a feminist, a socialist, and a lesbian. She became an icon. While focusing on the development of her writing, we will also consider her life and its interpretation, her politics and their implications, and the use of her art and image by others as points of reference for new work of their own. Her family, friends, lovers, and critics will all appear. We will also be reading her precursors, her peers, and those who took up her work and image in the decades after her death, in fiction, theatre, and film. This course will serve as an introduction to twentieth-century fiction, feminist literary study, lesbian/gay/queer studies, the study of sexuality, and the study of politics in literature. Conference projects might focus on one other writer, a range of other writers, or one of these approaches to literary analysis.
Sophomores and above.
Visions/Revisions: Issues in U.S. Women’s History
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
This seminar surveys path-breaking studies of U.S. women’s history and related subjects, including women’s lives beyond the United States. Course readings, both scholarship and political treatises, exemplify major trends in feminist discourse since the 1960’s, from early challenges to androcentric worldviews to the current stress on differences among women. Class discussions will range from fundamental questions—What is feminism? Is “women” a meaningful category?—to theoretical, interpretive, and methodological debates among women’s historians. The course is designed to help advanced students of women’s history to clarify research interests by assessing the work of their predecessors. M.A. candidates will also use the course to define thesis projects.
A graduate course open to qualified seniors and graduate students.
Women and the Church in Late Antiquity Through the Late Middle Ages
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
The Christian Bible is notably ambiguous on the place of women in the church. While one New Testament letter admonishes that women must be silent in church, other scriptural passages have been read as supporting women’s active ministry. This course will examine primary as well as secondary sources to determine women’s public and private roles in the church from the first century through the Late Middle Ages. A central theme will be the degree to which women’s religious activities were sanctioned or condemned by ecclesiastical authorities.
Women in the Black Revolt: The Lecture
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Fall
This lecture course explores several historical dimensions of women’s leadership in the black freedom struggle in the United States. Women like Mary Prince and Linda Brent fought American slavery on a number of fronts, resisting their exploitation in production and reproduction, defining the meaning of kinship, creating sisterhood and community, fashioning spiritual movements, and writing narratives as the liberating act of self-definition. Forging their freedom, washer women like Callie House fought for the right to have some pleasure in life; they also led labor battles, initiated general strikes, and mobilized mass movements for reparations. Women like Ida B. Wells led anti-lynching crusades and those like Amy Jacques Garvey sustained Pan-African political movements. Intellectuals like Anna Julia Cooper criticized male chauvinism and challenged patriarchy. Sisters like Vicki Garvin created radical theories and those like Gloria Richardson and Diane Nash mapped strategies for liberation. Sarah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam and Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party. Women like Ella Baker and Septima Clark pioneered the organizing tradition in the Black Revolt, and sisters like Johnnie Tillmon and Ruby Duncan served as the vanguard of the welfare rights movement. Thus, this course examines the lives of a number of those leaders, writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Mary Bethune, Elizabeth Catlett, Anne Moody, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur.
Women in the Black Revolt: The Seminar
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
This seminar explores several historical dimensions of women’s leadership in the black freedom struggle in the United States. Women like Mary Prince and Linda Brent fought American slavery on a number of fronts, resisting their exploit-ation in production and reproduction, defining the meaning of kinship, creating sisterhood and community, fashioning spiritual movements, and writing narratives as the liberating act of self-definition. Forging their freedom, washer women like Callie House fought for the right to have some pleasure in life; they also led labor battles, initiated general strikes, and mobilized mass movements for reparations. Women like Ida B. Wells led anti-lynching crusades and those like Amy Jacques Garvey sustained Pan-African political movements. Intellectuals like Anna Julia Cooper criticized male chauvinism and challenged patriarchy. Sisters like Vicki Garvin created radical theories and those like Gloria Richardson and Diane Nash mapped strategies for liberation. Sarah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam and Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party. Women like Ella Baker and Septima Clark pioneered the organizing tradition in the Black Revolt, and sisters like Johnnie Tillmon and Ruby Duncan served as the vanguard of the welfare rights movement. Thus, this course examines the lives of a number of those leaders, writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Mary Bethune, Elizabeth Catlett, Anne Moody, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur.