| source Northwestern (X) |
level |
department GNDR_ST Gender Studies (X) |
This class will examine fiction, film, and theory produced in the past several decades by and concerning Asians in diaspora. We will begin with theoretical essays that examine theories of diaspora, particularly as it intersects with gender and sexuality, focusing on the specificities of diaspora for authors from South East Asia and South Asia. Using these theories as frameworks, the course will consider several novels, short stories, films, and websites that depict Asians no longer located in what the authors might consider their homes. Framed by critical theory about race, ethnicity, sex and gender, discussions will focus specifically on ways in which they are articulated within these texts. The first novel, Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia, will be read and discussed on blackboard before the class commences.
Score: 13.102399 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will introduce students to major milestone texts in the development of feminist thought and the womenÂs movement. We will read and discuss the work of major feminist Ânames from 1790-1990, and will consider the importance of both Marxist and Freudian analyses for feminist theory. Readings will be contextualized in terms of social, political, and intellectual background. We will explore the emergence of liberal, cultural, socialist-feminist, and radical feminism, and will consider issues of race and sexuality. The course seeks to develop an understanding of why feminism looks the way it does today; in fact, why we must talk about feminisms rather than assume the existence of a single, unified voice or movement. We cannot, however, hope to cover everything, and it is to be emphasized that this is an introductory course. All are welcome, but open minds and a capacity for hard work are pre-requisites. Be ready to do a lot of reading!
Score: 13.102399 Details | Listing | Web page
Styled as an introductory primer and detailed cross-section within the field of queer theory, this graduate-level course harbors five overarching goals for its participants: 1) to freshly familiarize ourselves with genitive theoretical works that enabled and inspired this school of thought; 2) to review foundational and otherwise pivotal texts that declared Âqueer theory as a rubric and operated explicitly under that mantle; 3) to consolidate and review these texts as affiliated exemplars of different trends and impulses within this ambitious and heterogeneous discipline; 4) to place the unique conundrums and disciplinary orientations behind our own research agendas in fruitful relationship to the claims, trajectories, and self-divisions of queer theory; and 5) to consider present and future directions for queer theoretical work. Inevitably, participants in the course will debate the values and implications associated with Âqueer, the relations of queer theory to feminism(s) and other modes of gender critique, and various points of compatibility and conflict with other, contemporaneous schools of theory. With these guidelines firmly in mind, and to whatever extent possible, the seminar will swerve and expand to gratify the curiosities and expertise of its participants, who will likely include students brand new to queer studies and others who cannot resist coming back for more. Seminar discussions will constitute the heart of the course, and a 20-25 page paper will serve for each student as a culminating realization of its themes. Along the way, expect shorter writing exercises and presentations, some informal, some pre-professional.
Score: 13.102399 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will introduce students to major milestone texts in the development of feminist thought and the womenÂs movement. We will read and discuss the work of major feminist Ânames from 1790-1990, and will consider the importance of both Marxist and Freudian analyses for feminist theory. Readings will be contextualized in terms of social, political, and intellectual background. We will explore the emergence of liberal, cultural, socialist-feminist, and radical feminism, and will consider issues of race and sexuality. The course seeks to develop an understanding of why feminism looks the way it does today; in fact, why we must talk about feminisms rather than assume the existence of a single, unified voice or movement. We cannot, however, hope to cover everything, and it is to be emphasized that this is an introductory course. All are welcome, but open minds and a capacity for hard work are pre-requisites. Be ready to do a lot of reading!
Score: 13.102399 Details | Listing | Web page
This course explores the emergence and experience of distinctly new gender and sexual identities in the context of the rapidly changing city during the period of so-called "high modernity" at the end of the nineteenth century. We take as our focus the case of London during the 1880s and 1890s. We begin by reading both classic and more recent statements on modernity and the modern city, consider Michel Foucault's influential twentieth-century account of the emergence of sexuality as a modern discourse, and discuss the early writings of Sigmund Freud and the sexologists as integral to the shaping of that discourse. We then move into a consideration of the ways in which contemporary accounts of sexuality worked together with views of what constituted "normal" and "deviant" desires and behaviors to produce new categories and identities like "the new woman," "the homosexual," and the predatory male "beast." These designations were deployed in specific contexts. As we explore the urban landscape of Late Victorian London, a city marked by a huge disparity between rich and poor, appalling social conditions for an urban underclass, and differing middle-class concerns and reactions to such conditions, we ask: who appropriated and invoked these new and often sexualized designations, for what differing purposes, and with what (sometimes unintended) results? We read a rich array of sources, including late-Victorian novels, periodical articles, and controversial newspaper reports of child prostitution, sexual scandals, and the Jack the Ripper murders, as well as recent critical scholarship to help us contextualize and critique this material. The movie Wilde (1997), based on the trial of Oscar Wilde, is assigned as recommended viewing.
Score: 13.102399 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examines the social, cultural, and political history of same-sex desire in the United States, with particular emphasis on the last century and a half (for reasons we will take up in the course itself). Major topics include the construction and deployment of sexuality (hetero as well as homo) as an important category of experience; the changing organization and meaning of same-sex spaces, friendships, and eroticism; the growth of lesbian and gay communities or sub-cultures and the persistence of racial, class, gender, and even generational differences within and among them; the construction of the closet; the changing, always contested representation of homosexuality in the mass media; the politics of everyday life for lesbians and gay men before and after the emergence of the gay and feminist movements; and the various ways the AIDS crisis shaped and was shaped by post-Stonewall gay life.
Score: 13.102399 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examines central contributions of feminist and critical race theory to rethinking the politics of science. Through readings in feminist philosophy, political theory, and history, we will consider various answers to the question: What kind of science stands to serve emancipatory political ends? By posing the question of science in terms of its value for emancipation, the course seeks to open to scrutiny a central assumptions of the modern scientific enterprise: namely, the assumption that the value of scientific reason is its universality. Feminist critics of science have argued that universality is itself a gendered category, with historical and intellectual roots in constructed hierarchies between those faculties marked as masculine (reason, the mind, publicity, autonomy) and those marked as feminine (affect, the body, privacy, dependency). Such gendered constructions of universal reason, they object, have served to devalue the perspectives of women and minorities, casting them as objects, not subjects, of knowledge. But feminist critiques of scientific rationality have been constructive, inspiring reinventions of universalism for feminist political purposes, or efforts to envisions a Ânew science free of universalism. What are the dilemmas and opportunities of such radical rethinkings of science for feminist political practice? What does feminist theory have to gain and loose from the critique of science? In conjunction with these theoretical questions, we will examine some of the practical dilemmas raised for feminist politics by recent developments in reproductive biology and genetics
Score: 13.102399 Details | Listing | Web page
This course explores the changing meanings attached to sexuality and marriage in industrializing and post-industrial American society. We will explore both the social and economic conditions that led to the changing relationship between sexuality, procreation, and marriage, as well as the moral reform movements that responded to these changes. Of particular interest will be what happened to social understandings and expectations of manhood and womanhood when married partners separated sex from procreation in the years after the Civil War, when romantic love became sexualized in the late 19th century, when the sexual revolution separated sex from marriage in the 1960s and 1970s, and as hooking up culture separates sex from love.
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An infant is born with ambiguous genitalia. A twelve-year-old demands sexual reassignment surgery. A transgender adult is discovered in the wrong restroom. As theorist Judith Butler explains, such cases bring into view the ways sex not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs. Sex is not simply something that bodies are, in other words, but something they are compelled to be (over and over again). This course examines that compulsion in the sites where it is most evident, in intersexed bodies, transsexual bodies, homosexual bodies, bodies that elicit intense medical, legal, religious, and social scrutiny. Our questions will range from the ontological (What makes a body male or female?) to the ethical (Who has the right to make decisions about the sex of a body?); from the historical (How do we account for the rise of sexual reassignment surgery in the mid twentieth century) to the political (How does the rise of a transgender movement change what it means to be a man or womanand how might those changes affect what it means to be transgender?).
Score: 13.102399 Details | Listing | Web page
The purpose of this course is to examine the recent explosion of feminist critique on traditional psychotherapy. Emphasis will be placed on problems most commonly presented by female clients, including incest, sexual assault, depression, relationship violence and battering, low self-esteem, substance abuse, eating disorders and anxiety. The gender related aspects of these problems and feminist strategies for their resolution will be explored. While this course is particularly suited to the needs of students who are preparing to become mental health professionals, it is not a how to course, and requires no specialized knowledge about how to conduct therapy. Therefore, it is open to any upper division or graduate student who wishes to explore these issues in depth. As we are all deeply gendered creatures, a portion of the class will focus on how we have each absorbed the gender mandates of our culture, and how our different ethnic, racial, religious and class differences have informed that process. Special attention will be focused on how gender beliefs affect the work of therapists.
Score: 13.102399 Details | Listing | Web page
Sigmund Freud famously characterizes womens difference from men in terms of lack. For Freud, women are defined by the piece of masculine anatomy that they do not possess. In this class, we will explore how bodies and selves are sexed according to another rubric: penetrability, or the capacity to be penetrated. For, as we will see, penetrability does not clearly delimit the anatomical basis of femininity, but rather gives rise to an unstable array of bodily and subjective possibilities. Bodies and selves, it turns out, open in a variety of ways: we will investigate how literary, filmic, and philosophical/ theoretical figurations of penetrability variously link the opening of the mind and/ or body to the categories of masculinity and femininity. The class will begin with the trope of penetrability or receptivity as the ground of classical philosophical order, as well as feminist revisions of the classical scheme. We will then turn to the figuration of penetrability that, since the Scientific Revolution and the rise of empiricism, has most resonantly confused penetrability and subjectivity itself: perception, or the entrance of things into the mind. Having tracked these philosophical and figural antecedents, we will then explore their relation to a series of contemporary texts: first, the critical discourse on rape and its extension to legal and feminist debates about pornography. Finally, we will consider penetrability and the sexing of characters and viewers in the horror film. As we proceed, well ponder the remarkably volatile schematics of gender that come into view when bodies and minds open.
Score: 13.102399 Details | Listing | Web page
If the starting point of contemporary feminist theory can be traced to Simone de Beauvoirs germinal work The Second Sex (1949), then the past (nearly) sixty years must be deemed a truly turbulent epoch of academic thinking and political discourse, given the contestations that have marked the field since Beauvoir declared One is not born a woman but becomes one. The aim of this seminar is to engage in an overview and assessment of the changing and challenging domain of feminist theorizing, along two general lines of inquiry. First, we will devote attention to controversies surrounding feminist approaches to gender, identity, and subjectivity, or the so-called woman question. Within this context, feminist academic discourse has produced three varied, if not completely oppositional perspectives, emphasizing (a) difference, concerned with revaluing women, the feminist standpoint, or the feminine side of the masculine/feminine binary; (b) diversity, aimed at complicating gender and identity politics through race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity; or (c) deconstruction, geared toward interrogating the coherence of the subject woman, and the heterosexual matrix upon which the category of gender has hitherto relied. To understand the tensions between and among difference, diversity, and deconstruction feminist projects is, as we shall see, to confront questions pertaining not only to (knowing) the self and subjectivity but also to feminist praxis, freedom, and agency. Thus our second line of inquiry will move from knowing to doing in order to bring bridge the gap between feminist theory and politics, with a view toward new directions in theorizing feminist democratic political practices, national, transnational, multicultural, and postcolonial.
Score: 13.102399 Details | Listing | Web page