Fall 12
Women's Studies Certificate Program
Coordinator: Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Room 5116 (817-8896, 817-8905)
The Certificate in Women's Studies is available to students matriculated in the Ph.D. programs at The Graduate Center. Women's Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to research and scholarship that draws on various disciplines, while challenging disciplinary boundaries. The general aim of the program is to offer critical reflection on the experiences of both women and men in terms of differences of gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity and nation. Students are prepared to teach courses and to do research in Women's Studies and related critical approaches to the disciplines, such as those developed in Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies. Besides focused course work and guidance in research, Women's Studies offers participation in a wide range of graduate students and faculty activities, including lecture series and forums. Students are also invited to participate in the research programs and seminars at the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center.
WSCP 71700 - Global Feminisms
GC M 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rupal Oza
Transnational feminisms will explore the gender dynamics of racial, ethnic, and economic relations of power in domestic, international, and transnational settings. We will examine feminist scholarship produced by and about American women of color, Third World women, and other social and political actors whose experiences and thinking have shaped contemporary ideas about gender, power, and international political economies. We will explore how both self-identified feminists and people who do not consider themselves feminists write about and understand gender, justice, human rights, tolerance, agency, imperialism, and other relevant topics. We will also examine how women and self-identified feminists practice solidarity across and within national boundaries, paying attention to the possibilities and constraints that shape transnational feminist activism. We will look at both empirical and theoretical texts from a range of academic disciplines. We will explore some of the following questions: How do racial, sexual, and national identities change the meanings of gender and feminism? Who should be the arbiter of "equality," "fairness," and "human rights"? What ethical questions shape the practices of feminism and feminist politics both domestically and internationally? What is the relationship between modes of production, political economy, and gender politics? What are the possibilities and limits of a transnational feminist politics? What are the material conditions/structural factors which enable and/or undermine transnational feminist solidarity?
WSCP 81001 - Feminist Texts and Theories
GC R 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA , 3 credits, Profs. Victoria Pitts and Talia Schaffer[Cross listed with MALS 72100]
This course provides a broad overview of the issues and texts of Women's Studies. The instructors will use an interdisciplinary approach to consider some of the themes, questions, methodologies, and findings of Women's Studies scholarship. The course will cover a selection of feminist texts, taken from both literary and social science sources, and also classic and contemporary theoretical works. In addition, students will explore the ways in which the field of women's studies has raised new questions and brought new perspectives to those areas where the humanities and social and behavioral sciences intersect, with material which is interdisciplinary in nature and frequently poses a challenge to conventional disciplinary boundaries.
WSCP 81000 -Protests of the Body
GC F 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Setha Low [Cross listed with Anthro.71000]
WSCP 81000 -The Worth of Women: Writing and Gender in Italy
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Eugenia Paulicelli [Cross listed with Comp.Lit. 88500]
The title of the course quotes a well known treatise by Venetian writer Moderata Fonte, who published il Merito delle donne in 1600. In early modern Italy women held a very prominent presence in writing and in the cultural debate on space (domestic and public); the right to education; morality; politics; identity; and the framing of gender and history. As a number of scholars have shown (Cox and Robin among others), the richness of women's writing is broad and complex even in difficult periods such as the counter-reformation, fascism and the post World War II period, as well as the present global age. Women have always written and found ways of carving out a space both to make their voices heard and to mark their presence even in hidden corners of history. In this course, we will examine these issues in a broad historical perspective and through close readings of the texts, discuss the interconnectedness of women's writing as it appears in a variety of venues, genres and social activities such as salons, letter writing, travelogues, journalism, political activities, migration, national identity and transcultural exchanges. Starting with some excerpts from early modern texts (Fonte, Tarabotti, Marinella), we will go on to read women writers in subsequent periods and investigate their concerns and negotiations within the context in which they wrote. We will read both fiction and non-fiction writings of authors such as Cristina di Belgioioso, Anna Maria Mozzoni, Sibilla Aleramo, Alba De Cespedes, Gianna Manzini, Grazia Deledda, Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa Morante, Clara Sereni and contemporary migrant writers such as Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Viola Chandra, Laila Waida and Cristina Ali Farah.
WSCP 81000 -Materializing "The Good Life"
GC M 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kandice Chuh [Cross listed with ENGL 80600]
What does it mean to live 'the good life'? What does it mean now, when normative definitions – of the good life as equivalent to economy stability, educational access, freedom from state intrusion – seem ever less available to ever greater numbers of people? What has it meant historically, and how have these meanings been conditioned and even compelled by the political, cultural, economic, and affective structures that have characterized different times? Who is successful in achieving the good life, who fails, and in both cases, with what effects? This course will undertake to address such questions by working with and through a set of key concepts including liberalism, neoliberalism, humanism, secularism, and cosmopolitanism. We will work by assessing the theoretical and philosophical grounds and aesthetic modalities through which 'the good life' has been stabilized conceptually and materially, by and for whom, and to theorize ways of living and knowing alternative to dominant definitions through our engagements with the literary-cultural and theoretical texts anchoring the course. Students enrolled in this course are asked to read J. Jack Halberstam's, The Queer Art of Failure, prior to the first day of class. We will also read work as wide-ranging as that by Lauren Berlant, Wendy Brown, Immanuel Kant, Janet Jakobsen, Chandan Reddy, Sianne Ngai, Cedric Robinson, Jean Luc Nancy, Lisa Duggan, Jodi Melamed, Achille Mbembe, Friedrich Schiller, and Eve Segwick, as well as literary/cultural works that we collectively identify in the first days of the course. Students taking the class for 4 credits should expect produce two short papers and a longer seminar project. Students taking the class for 2 credits will be asked to write and present a conference-length paper (10 pages) to complete the requirements of the courseproduce two short papers and a longer seminar project.
WSCP 81000- Literature of the Great War: Modernism, Memory, and the Poetics of
History
GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Richard Kaye [Cross listed with ENGL 76000]
From recent conferences of the Modernist Studies Association and numerous museum exhibitions to the BBC's current "Downton Abbey" and Tom Stoppard's forthcoming HBO adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's monumental "Parade's End," World War I is back. As in earlier decades, today literary critics and cultural historians comprehend the war as crucially determining twentieth-century and modernist literature as well as "modernity." This course explores creative and intellectual responses to the Great War (1914-1918) by focusing on the changes that wartime experience fostered in national identity, gender relations, sexual attitudes, psychoanalysis, prevailing conceptions of historical progress, and the aesthetic strategies of writers. In an exploration of fiction, poetry, memoir, film, and criticism, we consider the close relation between personal trauma and historical catastrophe. Readings will begin with Thomas Hardy's elegiac, ironic poems in "Satires of Circumstance" (1914) and "Moments of Vision" (1917), works that reflect a shift from Victorian to modernist poetics. In addition to the writings of soldier-combatants such as Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden, and David Jones, we will consider the different--and often differently ambivalent--responses of women writers and artists such as Radclyffe Hall, Kathe Kollwitz, Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain, and Rebecca West, whose novel "The Return of the Soldier" (1918) was the first fictional treatment of "male hysteria" (shell shock"). In a consideration of several pivotal works of modernist fiction--Woolf's "Jacob's Room," Ford's "Parade's End," and D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love"--we will consider how the new techniques of modernism, once critiqued by literary critics as requiring the occlusion of historical actualities, obliquely register wartime realities. The class also will read less canonical texts such as Richard Aldington's "Death of a Hero" (1923), heavily censored on publication, and H.G. Wells' "Mr Britling Sees It Through," a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, with its early critique of Edwardianism through a dissection of the Edwardian country-house idyll. Just as Primitivist, Futurist, and Dadaist art movements took their inspiration from widespread militarism and battlefield disasters across Europe, psychoanalysis shapes its new "talking cure" along with a critique of "civilization" and theories of the "death drive." At the same time, several modernist writers come to eschew the anti-war postures and documentary realism of World War I writers. If Henry James read the poetry of Rupert Brooke in 1915 with what he called "an emotion that somehow precludes the critical measure," William Butler Yeats excluded nearly all Great War poets from his 1936 "Oxford Book of Modern Verse" (because, he wrote in his introduction, "In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies...") We will view influential filmic works such as the 1916 documentary "The Battle of the Somme," Abel Gance's "J'Accuse" (1919), and Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory" (1957). Because of the Trans-Atlantic and international scope of First World War, the course will take up Anglo-American (often short fictional) texts by Lawrence. Rudyard Kipling, Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Faulkner as well as works by non-English writers such as Ernst Junger and Georg Trakl, all writers who construed the events of World War I as requiring radical innovations in literary form. A number of recent cultural historians, meanwhile, have questioned the degree to which the First World War generated "modernity" (noting, for example, the post-war popularity of seances and spiritualism.) Finally we will take up the more recent fascination with World War I in the contemporary writings of Pat Barker, Geoff Dyer, and Julian Barnes, along with the controversies animating historians, scholars, and critics such as Paul Fussell, Jay Winter, Niall Ferguson, Samuel Hynes, Ana Carden-Coyne, Elaine Showalter, Joanna Bourke, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Requirements: A final paper.
WSCP 81000- Experiments in Art Writing
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum [Cross listed with ENGL 80200]
In this seminar, we will investigate and experience the pleasurable complexities of writing imaginatively about visual art, mostly contemporary. How might art provide impetus and excuse for experiments in critical prose? Seeking inspiration, we will read many of the following: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Charles Baudelaire, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein, Clement Greenberg, James Schuyler, Rosalind E. Krauss, T. J. Clark, Susan Sontag, David Antin, Dave Hickey, David Batchelor, James Lord, Eileen Myles, Glenn Ligon, Maggie Nelson, and Bruce Hainley. In lieu of a final paper, students will write, each week, a two-page composition that responds to a visual occasion or a work of art. (I don't mean to imply that art is always exclusively optical.) No auditors.
WSCP 81000 - Postwar Women Writers and Intellectuals
GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Nancy K. Miller [Cross listed with ENGL 78000]
Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts was published posthumously in 1941. Beginning here, with the death of this author, we will proceed to examine the work of women writers who produced essays, novels, and poetry from the war years through the advent of second-wave feminism. Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Carolyn Heilbrun, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Mary McCarthy, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, Virginia Woolf. These prolific and brilliant women are not only major writers. As cultural figures and icons, they also have played an important role in public debate. Of special interest to the seminar will be the relations among these women, who sometimes admired, sometimes detested one another. Work for the course: one oral presentation, one short paper, and one term paper, due at the end of the semester.
WSCP 81000 -Readings in African American Literary and Cultural Theory
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr [Cross listed with ENGL 85500]
Focusing primarily on "space" and "performance", this seminar will introduce students to some of the more significant recent critical and theoretical trends within the study of Black American literature and culture. Participants will be asked both if it is possible to produce a specifically black literary criticism and whether Black American identity is effected, manipulated, challenged or perhaps even erased within "peculiar" performative or spatial contexts. At the same time, the course will examine how African American Studies intersects with and challenges Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies. Students will be asked to write several short papers during the course of the semester. They will also do at least one in class presentation. Texts that we will examine include: Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850 – 1910 (Duke, 2006); Susan Buck-Morris, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (U. Pittsburg, 2009); Tina Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (U. Michigan, 2005); Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT, 2010); Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness (U. Chicago, 2011); Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates in the Civil Rights Era (UNC, 2007); Paul Gilroy, On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Harvard, 2010); Andre Guridy; Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and Afro-Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (UNC, 2010); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard, 2001); Tavia Nyong'o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruse of Memory (U. Minnesota, 2009); Shane Vogel; The Scene of Harlem Cabaret; Race, Sexuality, Performance (U. Chicago, 2009); Penny von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937-57 (Cornell, 1997).
WSCP 81000 - Representations et Theories de L'hysterie
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 4202.11, 3 credits, Prof. Evelyne Ender [Cross listed with French 87400]
Hysteria, an elusive and polymorphous disease mostly associated with femininity, was first diagnosed in Greek Antiquity. When, in the late nineteenth-century, Sigmund Freud decided to study it, he made discoveries that shaped in a decisive way the new science of psychoanalysis. But hysteria also offers interesting opportunities to show how literary authors anticipated these later psychoanalytic discoveries. The course will thus be built around a number of French literary texts that expose, in various ways, the paradigms of this illness (Racine, Phedre; Diderot, The Nun; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Zola, The Dream and Lourdes; les Goncourts Germinie Lacerteux; Duras, Ravishing of Lol Stein.. But it is also designed to develop another aspect of hysteria, namely its conceptual, theoretical significance within twentieth-century critical discourses on subjectivity and sexual identity. Involving gender, psychoanalysis (as well as its critique by feminist thinkers), critical histories of psychiatry, discourses on the body, and models of the performative, hysteria will give us a chance to study, in the concrete and provocative context provided by its literary representations, texts by Freud, Foucault, Michel Serres, Cixous, Didi-Huberman, Butler. This course will be taught in French, but the majority of readings, in fiction and in theory, are available in English.
WSCP 81000 - (Un) Classical Bodies in 17th Century France
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Domna Stanton [Cross listed with French 83000]
This course will examine diverse and dissimilar constructions of the body in seventeenth-century France
We will begin by examining recent theories of the early-modern body in Bakhtin, Elias, Lacqueur, and Bordo, but most notably (and influentially) in Foucault and his notion of "the classical" and disciplined body. These readings will inform our discussion of different --and potentially contradictory --discourses imbricated in the production of early-modern gendered bodies over and beyond the Cartesian body: the medical (anatomical), sexual (sodomitical and tribadic), reproductive, perverse and grotesque body; the social, civilized, courtly (honnete) body; the cross-dressed body; the rhetoric of the face and the portrait; the king's bodies; and the religious and mystical (ecstatic) body.Authors to be read include: Bourgeois, Chorier, De Grenailles, Descartes, Duval, Faret, Foigny, Guyon, Heroard, La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, Moliere, Montpensier, Pare, Pascal, Poulain de la Barre, Saint-Simon and Venette. If we can arrange it, we will also visit the collections of anatomical drawings at the New York Academy of Medicine. Class discussions will be conducted in English; readings will be in French (although some, eg Descartes, Poulain, La Fontaine can also be found in translations) Work for the course will include a 20-page paper and an oral presentation of one of the primary readings. A prior knowledge of seventeenth-century French literature and culture is recommended, but not required. For any questions about the course, please contact Domna Stanton (dstanton112@yahoo.com).
WSCP 81000 - Readings in U.S. Women's History
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kathleen McCarthy [Cross listed with Hist.74300]
WSCP 81000 - Gender Theory for Historians
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dagmar Herzog [Cross listed with Hist.72100]
This graduate seminar is designed to introduce students to both classic and more recent texts in the overlapping areas of women's and gender history, queer/LGBITQ studies, and feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist and poststructuralist theory, with forays into a wide range of historiographical styles and occasional excursions into anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, and political philosophy. There will be special emphasis on: the historical intersections of gender, race, economics, empire, religion; the histories of subjectivities and epistemologies; and the histories of psychiatry, sexuality, disability, reproduction. Most of the texts will focus on the U.S., Europe, and Middle East since the 18th c., with many focused on the recent past and near-present. Throughout, the goal will be to understand the practical usefulness of varieties of gender theory for the diverse historical research projects you all are engaged in. Requirements include thorough reading of the assigned materials, two critical questions about each assigned text sent to instructor and classmates in advance of class every time, thoughtful and active participation in class discussions, three short summary analyses of weekly readings also sent to instructor and classmates in advance of class (we will divide up the reading list amongst ourselves on the first day), and one longer final paper exploring the relevance of and putting to use some aspect(s) of gender theory for your own work. Questions and summaries must be emailed by 9 a.m. on Tues.
WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy
GC W 2:00 -4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Janet Carol Gornick [Cross listed with PSC 83801]
This course will examine social welfare policy in the United States, in both historical and cross-national perspective. The course will begin with an overview of the development of social welfare policy in the U.S. We will focus on three important historical periods: the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the War on Poverty. We will end the first section with a review of developments in the tumultuous 1990s.
Second, we will assess "the big picture" of the American welfare state, through the lens of its underlying institutional framework. Third, we will survey selected areas of social policy provision, such as anti-poverty policy; health policy; employment-related social policy; social policy for the elderly; and/or work-family reconciliation policies. In each of these policy areas, we will assess current provisions and evaluate contemporary debates, integrating political, sociological, and economic perspectives. In the final section of the course, we will assess selected social policy lessons from Europe, where provisions are typically much more extensive than they are in the U.S. We will close by analyzing the question of "American exceptionalism" in social policy, and will assess a range of institutional, ideological, and demographic explanations.
WSCP 81000 - Feminist Political Theory
GC W 4:15-6:15 , Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rosalind Petchesky [Cross listed with PSC 80301]
This course sets out from the deconstruction of its own foundational terms: Can there be a feminist political theory when feminisms--and women--are racially-ethnically pluralized and globally polyversal? When "gender" is no longer readable as merely signifying "women" and "men," but those categories themselves have become translated by new movements for gender as well as sexual, racial and geographical diversities? What might justice (erotic justice, gender justice, racial justice) mean in the face of these current complications, of both discourses and social movements? In other words, our task will be to rethink the politics of contemporary feminist thought through the lenses of queer and transgender theory, women of color and critical race theory, transnational feminisms, Indian and African feminisms, and the ways each of these has challenged the power dynamics of feminism's supposed "core" and the very boundaries of the political. The course will be conducted in an informal seminar style, with discussions focused on readings by a wide range of contemporary writers (Lila Abu-Lughod, Gloria Anzaldua, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Kimberle Crenshaw, Raewyn Connell, Paisley Currah, Zillah Eisenstein, Ratna Kapur, Amina Mama, Chandra Mohanty, Viviane Namaste, Uma Narayan, Joan Wallach Scott, and others too numerous to mention). Students taking the course for credit will be required to submit a mid-term take-home exam and a final paper (involving primarily analysis and argument rather than empirical research) as well as making two in-class oral presentations during the semester. The course is open to political science majors with a particular interest in political theory and/or gender/feminist/queer studies as well as to women's studies certificate candidates and students majoring in allied fields (philosophy, sociology, anthropology, geography).
WSCP 81000 - Occupying Home: Housing and Community Development During Global
Crisis
GC T 9:30-11:30 , Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Susan Saegert [Cross listed with Psych 80103]
Occupying Home: Housing and community development during global crises
Who occupies our homes and how does it happen? Many people are wondering this right now as far flung investors lay claim to the homes of delinquent mortgage holders. People in communities affected by immigration and other demographic shifts wonder it as well. The changes in the global political economy are posing new challenges to past decades' approaches to the provision of housing through non-profit development, state ownership and traditional rental housing and homeownership. This course will examine many different angles on the question raised in the title, and the implications at various scales of the answers. We will juxtapose readings on the personal, political economic and cultural meanings of having a home, and especially of homeownership, and of losing a home. We will explore how housing and homes provide a place on the ground where the global economy, the housing industry, and local interests meet. Homes are also components of neighborhoods, towns, cities and their landscapes and ecologies. They connect local communities to the global flow of immigration and the fall out of the conditions of labor and the foreclosure/financial crises. The course will end with a consideration of alternative ways that housing can be made better homes that contribute to better and more equally enjoyed homes, communities, political economies and culture. This section will address forms of ownership and financial investment, governance of housing, changes or instabilities in cultural constructions of home, and architectural/production innovations. The class will consist of seminar discussions of the reading, visiting lectures from illustrious faculty members and housing professional at CUNY and in the region, and student presentations of their seminar paper.
WSCP 81000 - Supportive Settings and Restorative Environments
GC R 4:15-6:15 , Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. David Chapin [Cross listed with Psych 80103]
This will be a project-based seminar that will include experiential work, extensive readings, local field trips, and guest speakers, all focusing on the close environment. Each seminar participant will be asked to choose a particular nearby place for exploration and as an anchor for readings. Through the course of the semester each participant will be expected to produce two draft presentations and one final presentation. Imaginative use of media will be encouraged and supported. We will attempt to come at this topic from different disciplines and contrasting perspectives. We will include both academic literature and other sources. We will look as conventional wisdom surrounding "nature" as well as the "urban." We will also consider the situation of people with special needs along with the needs of people who escape categorization. We will attempt a critical reading of a history of restorative places.
WSCP 81000 - International and Liberation Social-Community Psychology
GC W 9:30-11:30 , Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Roderick Watts [Cross listed with Psych 80103]
WSCP 81000 - Ethnography of Space and Place
GC R 2:00-4:00 , Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Setha Low [Cross listed with Psych 80103]
The study of the city has undergone a transformation during the past ten years integrating ever wider theoretical perspectives from anthropology, cultural geography, political economy, urban sociology, and regional and city planning, and expanding its attention to the city as physical, architectural and virtual form. An emphasis on spatial relations and consumption as well as urban planning and design decision-making provides new insights into material, ideological and metaphorical aspects of the urban environment. Reliance on ethnography of space and place allows researchers to present an experience-near account of everyday life in urban housing or local markets, while at the same time addressing macro-processes such as globalization and the new urban social order. This course sketches some of the methodological implications of the ethnographic study of the contemporary city using anthropological tools of participant observation, interviewing, behavioral mapping, and theories of space and place to illuminate spaces in modern/post-modern cities and their transformations. In doing so, I wish to underscore links between the shape, vision and experience of cities and the meanings that their citizens read off screens and streets into their own lives. It begins with a discussion of spatializing culture, that is the way that culture is produced and expressed spatially, and the way that space reflects and changes culture. The subsequent weeks explore different theoretical dimensions, embodied space, the social construction of space, the social production of space, language and discursive space, and translocal and transnational space. The course also explores a number of special topics including how urban fear is transforming the built environment and the nature of public space both in the ways that we are conceiving the re/building our cities, and in the ways that residential suburbs are being transformed into gated and walled enclaves of private privilege and public exclusion. The privatization of public space first signaled the profound changes that American cities are undergoing in terms of their physical, social and cultural design. Currently, however, increased fear of violence and others particularly in urban areas is producing new community and public space forms; locked neighborhoods, blank faced malls in urban areas, armed guard dogs on public plazas, and limited access housing developments are just some examples of how the cultural mood is being "written" on the landscape.
WSCP 81000 - Sociology of Gender
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hester Eisenstein [Cross listed with Soc. 73200]
In this course we will examine the relationship between the phenomenon now widely termed "globalization," and the changes in gender relations that have taken place since the rise of the second wave of the women's movement in the 1970s. Since the end of the "long boom" (starting after World War II and lasting through the mid-1970s), academic and mainstream feminism have enjoyed enormous success, during a period of economic, social, and political restructuring that has created an intensified polarization between rich and poor, and an ever-growing mass of desperately impoverished people around the globe. This course will examine this paradox. We will seek to define globalization, starting from the premise that this is a stage in the development of the international capitalist system, under the economic and military domination of the world's only remaining superpower. More specifically, we will look at the "Washington consensus," under which developing countries have been forced to open their borders to the free flow of capital from the rich countries. Among other changes, "globalization" involves the intensive use of female labor, from maquiladoras to electronics factories to textile factories. It has also produced an acceleration of "informal" work for women. While educated women can now walk through many doors previously closed to them, in the worlds of business, sports, and politics, the majority of women in the world are increasingly impoverished, overworked and exploited, and subject to a wide variety of forms of violence, sexual, military, and economic. The majority of the world's refugees are now women and children. We will address these issues by posing a number of relevant questions. Where does the ideology of globalization come from? How has globalization affected the conditions of women and children in the developed and the developing world? How has contemporary feminism been shaped by the workforce participation of women? What is the role of class in the women's movement, domestically and internationally? Why are issues of gender, sexuality, and race so central to the culture wars being waged at home and abroad by religious fundamentalist leaders? How does the association of "liberated women" with modernity affect the process of globalization? In the revived social movement that has placed the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other international financial institutions at the center of an intensified campaign for social justice, what is the place for organized women's activism? Readings in the course are selected from theoretical writings as well as case studies, and students are encouraged to develop their own research and activist agendas.
WSCP 81000 - Sociology of Homosexuality
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Juan Battle [Cross listed with Soc. 83100]
Missing! Marginal! Misrepresented! In delineating the experiences of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people, this course draws on various bodies of scholarship - historical, social scientific, and literary -to reveal the multiple and intersecting social forces that have shaped their place, or lack thereof, in U.S. society. Notably, this course also pays attention to how gays, lesbians, and bisexuals themselves have resisted and questioned dominant notions of place, based on the racial and sexual hierarchy. Because students will be exposed to (and contribute from) a wide variety of perspectives on the subject, this course is appropriate for students in the traditional social sciences (e.g. sociology, anthropology, psychology, urban education, and history) as well as more contemporary ones (e.g. women's studies, race studies, American studies, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies).
WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy and Planning I
H T 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mimi Abramovitz
[Cross listed with SSW 71000] Permission of the instructor required.
This course is an advanced introduction to social welfare policy in the United States. It reviews the history of the U.S. welfare state, contemporary social welfare policies, forces contributing to the expansion and contraction of the welfare state, and alternate welfare state models. It develops a framework for analyzing social welfare policy and the skills for critical analysis. Special attention is paid to dynamics of race, gender and class and to feminist theories of the welfare state.