Fall 09

• Academics, Research Centers, & Initiatives
• Certificate Programs
• Women's Studies
• Courses

WSCP 71700 - Global Feminisms

GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3207, 3 credits, Prof. Rupal Oza [97129]

Global 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"? How have conceptions of citizenship both changed and remained the same in the contemporary world? What ethical questions shape the practices of feminism and feminist politics both domestically and internationally? How has human rights discourse been deployed? What is the relationship between modes of production, political economy, and gender politics?

WSCP 81001 - Introduction to Women Studies: Texts and Theories

GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 4422 , 3 credits, Profs. Sandi Cooper and Susan O’Malley [97130] [Cross listed with MALS 72100]

This course provides a broad overview of the issues and methods 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 introduce students to a selection of feminist texts, taken from both literary and social science sources, and also to 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 - Subjects of Desire: From Goethe, Austen, Bronte to Mann and Proust

GC W. 4:15.- 6:15 p.m., Room 6494 , 3 credits, Prof. Evelyne Ender [97131] [Cross listed with Comp. Lit. 85000 & French 87400]

 NEW COURSE DESCRIPTION!

This new course, cross-listed between Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies, will enable you to study, in the richest and most provocative fashion (because fiction is complex and filled with contradictions), a selection of stories of desire that have had a decisive influence on our modern imagination of love, of sexuality, and of gender roles. 

Much of what we know about desire we indeed owe to literature. If this statement seems counterintuitive, consider for example the wave of romantic suicides that followed the publication in Germany of The Sorrows of Young Werther.  A similar claim can be made about the importance of literary representations for our understanding of gender and of sexual identities. Just as nowadays film and television reflect as well as mould our identities as desiring subject, from the eighteenth-century onwards the novel reflected as well as shaped our current understanding of gendered subjectivities. Thus, while moralists denounced the novel as a dangerous instrument of seduction, tales of adultery, sexual secrets, and unnamable transgressions filled the readers’ imagination and in the process re-defined the lives of men and of women.

WSCP 81000 -South Asian Writing: Body, Memory, Text

GCW 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 3307, 3 credits, Prof. Meena Alexander [97132] [Cross listed with Eng. 86500]

We will consider the ways in which writing is bound up with cultural citizenship and how questions of nation, memory, gender and sexuality have worked their way through twentieth century South Asian writing.From Rabindranath Tagore’s cosmopolitanism and concern with cultural translation in the early years of the twentieth century to the struggle with globalization and what has come to be known as the Rushdie affair (the burning of the novel Satanic Verses), South Asian writing both at home and in the diasporic world has struggled with questions of cultural identity. We will read Tagore’s poetry, his essays on nationalism, his play Post Office and his novel Home and the World as well as selections from Gandhi’s autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth (available on line.). The Partition of India occurred in 1947 and was marked by a massive migration of people and great bloodshed.. Using the work of feminist scholars we will reflect on questions of trauma and cultural memory focusing on the abduction of women across borders and the silence that has traditionally shrouded the issue. In this segment we will read Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, Sadat Hasan Manto’s short stories and selected poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Questions of land, territoriality, possession and dispossession emerge powerfully in Mahasveta Devi’s work and we will read several of her short stories. Fraught questions of multicultural identity , religion and secularism emerge in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses set in late twentieth century Britain. By its side, we will read Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things set in contemporary India. For several of the writers, whether they live in South Asia or are part of the diaspora , the struggle with the English language emerges as a powerful issue. The composition of poetry, with its distilled use of words is of great importance here. We will read poets such as A.K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das, Arun Kolatkar and Jayanta Mahapatra. Theoretical readings will include selections from the subaltern historians as well as others (Amin, Appadurai, Adorno, Asad, Bauman, Bhabha, Chakraborty, Chatterjee, Cheah, Das, Deleuze and Guattari, Glissant, Pandey, Ramazani, Spivak). This course will be run as a seminar with class presentations one short paper( mid semester ) and one final research paper. The books will be on order at Book Culture, 536 West 112th Street New York, NY 10025: Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India; Veena Das, Life and Words; Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses, Mahasveta Devi, Imaginary Maps; Rabindranath Tagore, Home and the World (this can also be found on line); Rabindranath Tagore, The Post Office, selected memoir pieces, essays (found in the Tagore Anthology eds Dutta and Robinson); Arundhati Roy, God of Small Things; Arun Kolatkar, Jejuri; A.K.Ramanujan, Collected Poems; A.K.Ramanujan, Interior Landscape.

WSCP 81000 - Strange Modernisms: Verbal and Visual

GCGCT 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 4422, 3 credits, Prof. Mary Ann Caws [97133] [Cross listed with Eng. 76000]

In the wide range of modernisms, however they are defined, there is always more to read, write, think and do. Some of the texts we may have read at first as relatively innocuous, or at least unproblematic, are potentially far more peculiar than we had thought. So this investigative seminar, in recall but not repeat mode -- none of the readings repeat any of those in our previous Modernisms seminar -- will be spreading out among the following personages. The stranger, the better. Specific works will be determined by availability, and visual links by their relevance and peculiarity. Emphasis on primary rather than secondary texts. No auditors please.

Some possible personages to be consulted: Artaud, Barthelme, Beckett, Breton, Cahun, Cixous, Cortazar, Davenport, Derrida, Gass, Gide, H.D., James, Kafka, Kirkegaard, Kristeva, Lorca, Mann, Melville, Sontag, Woolf, and a bunch of exuberant French poets, like Apollinaire and Cendrars.

WSCP 81000 - Spenser’s Queens

GCGCM 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 3305, 3 credits, Prof. John Staines [97134] [Cross listed with Eng. 71100]

Queens appear the early-modern British imagination as objects of both desire and revulsion, fear and admiration. In confronting their confusion over a female body with the “heart and stomach of a king” and their anxiety over the “monstrous regiment” of women heading the patriarchal order, poets (male and female) employ their rhetoric to speak to, shape, and master the royal image, simultaneously celebrating and resisting the seductive power of queenship. This course will focus on the various guises under which Spenser engages Elizabeth and her opposite Mary Queen of Scots in The Faerie Queene, the fullest, most brilliant of these conflicted meditations on the problems of modern monarchy and queenship. Together we will read The Faerie Queene, with some attention to Spenser’s shorter lyrics (The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clout’s Come Home Again,Amoretti). We will read these poems against other representations of Elizabeth (especially her own speeches) and Mary Queen of Scots (like the forged sonnets of “Casket Letters”), also giving some attention to other contemporary poets (Philip and Mary Sidney, Walter Ralegh, Mary Wroth). Some issues to consider: the poet as political counselor; sex and gender in religious and political polemics; the gendering of romance, epic, and lyric; mutuality vs. hierarchy in Protestant sexuality and marriage; the place of emotions in political life; male counsel and the paradox of the “Elizabeth’s monarchical republic.” Each student will also prepare an oral presentation and a final paper.

WSCP 81000 - Virginia Woolf

GCW 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 5328, 3 credits, Prof. Jane Marcus [97135] [Cross listed with Eng. 86100]

We shall read the novels and essays of Virginia Woolf in concert with the theoretical and critical concerns of the seminar members. Recent critical works will be examined (Julia Briggs, Alison Light, Virginia Woolf and the Servants). Issues of class and gender will be examined, as well as Woolf's role as a critic, along with historical interpretations of the period. Students will be expected to write several short papers and give in depth oral presentations.

WSCP 81000 -Tell About the South: Faulkner and Other Southern Modernists. 1925-1962

GCGCT 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Room 3207, 3 credits, Prof. Marc Dolan [97136] [Cross listed with Eng. 75300]

From the beginning, critics have instinctively considered Modernism to be an urban movement, a revolt against the provincialism of “the village”—but what are we to make of William Faulkner? Accepted as an oxymoronic rural modernist even in his own time, Faulkner represents the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the overlooked role that regional literature, particularly Southern literature, played in the formation of American modernism. This course will examine a sampling of Faulkner’s novels, as well as novels by several other mid-twentieth-century writers from the American South, focusing on the ways in which they made a seemingly urban and European movement flourish on underdeveloped American soil. In so doing, we will also consider the simultaneously increasing interest in Southern culture throughout the United States during this period, possibly from the standpoints of both postcolonial studies and ethnic studies.

Course Requirements: Two presentations, a bibliography, and a final paper presenting original scholarship on a text or texts from the middle third of the twentieth century that either emerged from or treated the American South.

WSCP 81000 - Shakespearean Masculinities

GCW 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Room 3309, 3 credits, Prof. Mario DeGangi [97137] [Cross listed with Eng. 81400]

Masculinity, long a topic of interest for psychoanalytic and new historicist Shakespeare critics, has become central to recent work by feminist materialists, queer theorists, and social historians. Using insights from various critical approaches, we will explore questions such as the following: through what representational strategies (sartorial, gestural, vocal, rhetorical, erotic) is manhood staged in early modern theater and culture? How is masculine identity inflected by distinctions of social status, age, wealth, profession, sexuality, nationhood, or race? How might an analysis of the multiple forms of masculinity unsettle the notion of a monolithic patriarchal culture? What role might the study of masculinity play in recent debates between historicist and “presentist” Renaissance critics? We will examine both canonical and less familiar texts from throughout Shakespeare’s career, as well as some texts by his contemporaries. Requirements include class presentations, brief responses, and a research paper.

CANCELED *** WSCP 81000 - Women’s Authority and Men’s Mediation in Late Medieval English Books

GCR 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 3306, 3 credits, Prof. Michael Sargent [97138] [Cross listed with Eng. 70700]

In this course, we will be looking at ways in which women’s authorship/authority in creating texts in the late medieval period was mediated by male spiritual advisors, hagiographers, translators, scribes and printers. The texts that we will focus on include the Middle English versions of the lives and revelations of several medieval “holy women”, all written by men who functioned as “spiritual fathers”, as examiners for orthodoxy, or as amanuenses – or some combination of these roles – for three Belgian beguine saints (Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina mirabilis and Marie d’Oignies), Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. We will look at the adaptations of the revelations of Catherine and Birgitta that were made for the nuns of two preeminent English houses, Barking and Syon Abbeys, and at the ways that they were edited and structured – mediated, that is, not only in the most direct textual sense of recording and translating, but also of shaping and commenting upon the texts, aiming them toward particular ways of reading. Another text that would be particularly interesting to look at in this context is the glossed Middle English translation (i.e. written with explanatory passages added in) of The Mirror of Simple Souls, a treatise of mystical theology that was burned together with its author, Marguerite Porete, in Paris in 1310. Finally, we will look at the revelations of Julian of Norwich and the Book of Margery Kempe, paying attention to their (very) limited medieval circulation as complete texts in manuscript, and their redaction as sets of pious devotional extracts by fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century printers; and we will end with Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, a book originally written at the end of the fourteenth century for a woman recently enclosed as a recluse that became popular among the well-to-do laity of fifteenth-century London, and was (like a number of similar pious works) eventually printed at the request of Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of King Henry VII. We will also be looking at facsimiles of the original manuscripts and early prints (and the originals themselves in some cases), in order to examine how book format and production influenced (controlled? determined?) the perception of the text. Hmmm. That’s a lot of texts: we’ll see what we can do.

WSCP 81000 -Experimental Selves

GCR 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3309, 3 credits, Prof. Nancy K. Miller [97139] [Cross listed with Eng.87500]

“I do not know how far I differ from other people,” Virginia Woolf worries in “A Sketch of the Past.” Woolf’s perplexity summarizes the memoirist’s dilemma. In this course we will explore the process of self-discovery undertaken by twentieth and twenty-first century writers and artists for whom questions of identity and difference have required experiments in form. In addition to literary memoirs and graphic narrative, we will discuss essays, photographs, visual culture, and critical theory.

Gloria Anzaldúa, Roland Barthes, Alison Bechdel, Samuel Delany, Leslie Feinberg, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, Adrienne Rich, Marjane Satrapi, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and others

CANCELED *** WSCP 81000 - African American Drama

GCW 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 8202, 3 credits, Prof. James DeJongh [97140] [Cross listed with Eng. 85500]

 This seminar is designed to encompass the history and development of African American drama in the United States from its origins to the present moment. The course is divided into three moments. Part I will explore the roots of African American Drama, 1751-1910 with an examination of early stage images of blacks, the 19 th Century stage stereotypes of Minstrelsy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the relatively unknown initial achievements of The African Grove Theatre, the stellar career of Ira Aldridge, the first black playwrights, and the black musicals of the turn of the 20 th century. Part II the period from 1910-1950 will focus on the black theatre of the Harlem Renaissance, the Little Theatre Movement, and the Harlem Unit of the Federal Theatre Project. Part III, 1950-Present, which occupies the major portion of the semester, will be devoted to the study of major plays and playwrights from the watershed production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) to the recent Pulitzer Prize production of Suzan-Lori Parks Top Dog, Underdog (2001).

WSCP 81000 - Queer Lines of Communication: Speaking/Listening/Writing/Reading to the Non-normative

GCM 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3305, 3 credits, Prof. Mark McBeth [97141] [Cross listed with Eng. 89010]

For such an everyday phenomena, communicating can pose huge challenges. But is the act of communicating so difficult because we take the tasks of conveying and retrieving ideas for granted? Have we become so accustomed to the "standard" (read: normative) commerce of words that we have forgotten how to be creative with them -- to make them do new things? Drawing upon cross-disciplinary sources ranging from the ancient to the contemporary, students will explore the odd daily utterance and reception of words. Participants in the course will investigate subjects such as the non-locutionary power of silence, the rhetoric of listening, the inventive opportunities of reading, and the passive role of the writer. They will revisit the common tropes of communication --"the silent treatment," "in one ear and out the other,""verbal diarrhea," "order in the court"-- to see what these phrases imply about the power dynamics and social perceptions of correspondence. They will invent and play with new figures of speech (as well as listening, reading, and writing) to see how fresh metaphors might open new lines of communication.

Ultimately, members of the class will explore how the "normativizing" of communicative performances affects the acquisition of these primarily linguistic activities. How do we recognize when the novice communicator falters? We often hear the term advanced readers and writers; what do advanced communicators have to do to prove themselves? Once we have grown proficient at speaking, listening, reading, and writing, why do we forget that we were once not masters of these communicative performances? As educators of the communicative arts, why do the questionable performances of inexperienced readers and writers (a.k.a., assignments) foment such strong reactions in us? Why as seasoned readers and writers in unfamiliar writing scenarios do we still become so "angst-written"? How do we rehearse both our students and ourselves into better intercommunication? If we "queer" the lines of communication, can we make them clearer?

Some authors informing this course: Jonathan Alexander (Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy), J. L. Austin (How to Do Things with ords), M. M. Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination), Cicero (Rhetorica ad Herennium), Cheryl Glenn (Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence), Krista Ratcliffe (Rhetorical Listening), A. A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh).

WSCP 81000 - Autobiographies of 20th Century Black Women

GCR 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 3308, 3 credits, Prof. Jerry Watts [] [Cross listed with Eng. 85500

This class will read and intensely analyze black female autobiographies written during the twentieth-century. We will utilize theoretical texts on autobiography as a distinct genre. Moreover, we will attempt to isolate various themes, arguments, and tendencies that seem to be present in most black female autobiographies. The class will focus on the ways that black female autobiographers utilize narratives and language to construct themselves as dynamic racialized and genderized subjects. The list of Afro-American female autobiographies written during the twentieth century would be far too large to confront in a single class. Consequently, I will choose the autobiographies that we are to study and discuss. However, I will leave class periods open to discuss black female autobiographies chosen by the students. I would like to see us read the autobiographies of Anna Julia Cooper; Mary Church Terrell; Ida B. Wells; Zora Neale Hurston; Pauli Murray; Nikki Giovanni; Maya Angelou; and bell hooks

WSCP 81000 - Writing Women in Seventeenth Century French

GCT 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 4202, 3 credits, Prof. Domna Stanton[97143] [Cross listed with French 83000]

This course will examine the varieties of female writing in the century of Louis XIV in light of debates about women’s participation in culture and society articulated in the early modern querelle des femmes, both the misogynist and pro-woman strains. We will begin by focusing on gender theory, feminist discussions of the problematics of women’s writing in a patriarchal symbolic system, and on work in women’s history that can illuminate the limitations/possibilities of women’s conditions (for instance, did women undergo un grand renfermement after l650, as some have argued?) We will consider the paradoxical status of female regents and queens, the role of the female-run salons (cercles or ruelles), and the construction of the précieuse and the femme savante in the querelle des anciens et des modernes as well.

While attentive to the “modern” genres that women privileged (eg. the novel and nouvelle, the letter, memoir, and fairy tale), the course will be devoted to close readings of texts by writers such as Marie de Gournay,Mme de Guyon, Mme de La Fayette,Mme de La Guette, L’Héritier de Vilandon Mlle de Montpensier Madeleine de Scudéry Mme de Sévigné, Gabrielle Suchon, and Mme de Villedieu, , to gauge contextually their oppositionality and its limits.

Course requirements: A 20-page paper; an oral presentation on a reading; and a final exam.

The course will be taught in French; the readings will be in French and in English

Please address all questions to Domna Stanton ( dstanton112@aol.com). The syllabus will be ready in August.

WSCP 81000 - Fashion Studies: Fashion, Power and Space

GCW 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 6300, 3 credits, Profs. Joseph Glick and Eugenia Paulicelli [97144] [Cross listed with IDS. 82100]

“[Fashion] is a bounded thing, fixed and experienced in space – an amalgamation of seams and textiles, an interface between the body and its environment. It is a practice, a fulcrum for the display of taste and status, a site for the production of objects and beliefs; and it is an event, both spectacular and routine, cyclical in its adherence to the natural and commercial seasons, innovatory in its bursts of avant-gardism, and sequential in its guise as a palimpsest of memories and traditions” (Breward 2004:11).

The seminar will examine fashion as an industry, an economic force and a powerful mechanism to create and perform identities that has manifested and continues to manifest itself through a series of cultural and political mediations in space and time. Focusing on crucial periods of great transformation when fashion played an important role in shaping the identities of individuals, classes, genders, nations, colonial empires and cities, students will acquire a theoretical and historical framework to critically investigate contemporary phenomena of fashion and other cultural manifestations.

Already in the early modern period, Fashion was both a national and a global issue, as it is today. From the courtly societies in early modern Europe the course examines, fashion and dress contributed to the creation of identity and its relationship with power and politics. The course will then turn to Paris in the second half of 19th century and the role fashion played in branding the city not only for Parisians, but for the world. Using the historical and theoretical frameworks that emerge from the readings of Walter Benjamin, David Harvey, Marx, Bakhtin and Deleuze and recent scholarship on Fashion Studies, the course goes on to investigate modern and postmodern cities, focusing on the role fashion plays and has played in defining spaces of consumption, in reconfiguring space in cities, in branding and tourism, and in creating the global phenomenon of fashion cities.

In the work they do for the course, students will be especially encouraged to address topics related to the city of New York, for example: NY Fashion Week and its economic impact; its importance to the city; NY Fashion week in fashion journalism, the media, photography, etc.

WSCP 81000 -Feminist and Post Colonial Epistemology

GCM 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 7314, 3 credits, Prof. Linda Alcoff [97145] [Cross listed with Phil. 78700]

This course will consider the relationship of knowledge to power, and of epistemology to power, through recent work in epistemology on questions of gender and of colonialism, as well as work in social epistemology and science studies.  What counts as epistemic injustice, to use Miranda Fricker’s term? What role has western epistemology played in regard to promoting, and also ameliorating, epistemic injustice? What are the epistemic, and not simply sociological or political, lessons to be learned from the history of preemptive epistemic disauthorization of women and whole groups of people across the globe? 
Beyond the critical project, we will look at work that develops normative reconstructions of epistemology. These include, for example, proposals to build in a reflexivity about the social context in which belief formation and justification occurs, to reassess the role of social and political values as epistemic virtues, and to reconsider whether the assumptions in epistemology about the universal nature of justification are epistemically warranted. Innovative concepts such as “border gnosis,” “postcolonial standpoint theory,” and “pluritopic hermeneutics” will also be explored and assessed. 
Readings will include recent work from the following: Miranda Fricker, Sue Campbell, Helen Longino, Susan Buck-Morss, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano, Fernando Coronil, Sandra Harding, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said. 
 

WSCP 81000 - Race, Gender and Representation

GC      R 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room 5382, 3 credits, Prof. Charles Tien [97146] [Cross listed with PSC 73904]

WSCP 81000 - Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs

GC      W 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room 8203, 3 credits, Prof. George Andreopoulos [97147] [Cross listed with PSC 86002]

WSCP 81000 - Globalization and Popular Power

GC      T 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Frances Fox Piven [97148] [Cross listed with PSC 86401 &Soc.84600]

A large literature on social movements has developed in the last three decades in the fields of political science, sociology, history and anthropology. This work was no doubt stimulated by the social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, and there is much to be learned from it. But even a cursory overview reveals two large problems for an understanding of contemporary movements. First, much of the literature has been framed by the assumption that movements are shaped by and oriented to national governments, and national governments in turn mediate responses to the movement. At the very least, globalization in its many dimensions complicates this understanding. Second, and this problem is more longstanding, the literature is weak in explaining what are sometimes called movement outcomes or, in other words, movement power. This course will be guided by preoccupation with both of these problems. We will try to understand how the economic, political and cultural transformations we call globalization have influenced the emergence of movements, the forms they take, and responses to them. And in the course of this examination, we will focus particularly on the question of movement power, and ask how globalization in its several dimensions influences movement power.

We will begin this study by reviewing the main theoretical perspectives on movements, and then turn to case material to illustrate and criticize these perspectives. The first case we will examine will be familiar, the contemporary labor movement in the United States. Our focus will be on the impact of globalization on traditional forms of labor power, and the question of whether there are emerging forms of worker power generated by the complex changes associated with globalization. We will then turn to an overview of a number of popular insurgencies elsewhere in the world, particularly in the resource-rich southern hemisphere. These cases are less familiar but perhaps no less important to an understanding of the potential power of social movements in a globalized world.

WSCP 81000 -Psychology, Gender and Law

GCM 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room C415A, 3 credits, Prof. Maureen O’Connor [97149] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103]

This interdisciplinary course will explore the relationship between gender, psychology and law through a hands-on study of selected legal issues relating to gender. Virtually every law that is passed and every regulation that is promulgated rests on assumptions about how people behave, or how people will behave, once a law is enacted. Lawyers and advocates harness psychological research and social science data to surface and, in many cases, challenge those assumptions. Law students and doctoral students will gain a working fluency in one another’s discipline and will examine the role of psychology and social science data in the shaping of legal policies that bear on gender, such as gender discrimination and identity, gender based violence, family law and access to justice. Students will draw on psychological research for projects such as preparing direct and cross examinations of witnesses; the course will culminate in a final project afting an amicus brief in an area of individual interest.

WSCP 81000 - Geography and Gender/Sexuality and Space

GCT 4:15-6:15 , Room 6421, 3 credits, Prof. Cindi Katz [97150] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103]

This course will address questions of space, place, and nature in relation to gender and sexuality from a variety of theoretical frameworks. A broad range of topics will be considered such as the sedimentations of gender and sexuality in built form, work environments, play environments, “discrimination by design,” the making of queer space-times, public-private space, performance and spatiality, domestic architectures, embodied geographies, global/intimate geographies, ecofeminisms and feminist approaches to nature, and the hidden and invisible geographies all around us. We will engage readings from the humanities, social sciences, and environmental design disciplines concerning the social construction of space, the production of nature, and the making of place in everyday life. No prerequisite.

CANCELED *** WSCP 81000 - Social Theory: The Marxist-Feminist Tradition

GCT 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3209, 3 credits, Prof. Hester Eisenstein [97151] [Cross listed with Soc. 80000

 In this course we will explore the tradition of Marxist-feminism, from its origins in the writings of Marx and Engels, through the debates of the 1970s, to its contemporary iterations. What is the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism? Can a Marxist framework accommodate issues of race and gender? Do the social relations between men and women, and between production and reproduction, constitute forms of economic exploitation in the Marxist sense? How have Marxist regimes dealt with the issue of gender? What is the relevance of Marxist-feminism to today’s globalized world?

WSCP 81000 - Contemporary Issues in Social Theory: Desire, Affect and the Social 

GC R 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room 5383, 3 credits, Prof. Patricia T.Clough [97152] [Cross listed with Soc. 80000]

The course considers the differences and similarities between affect and desire. Given the interest in desire that gave shape to  feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, film studies and literary criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century, and the current interest in affect in political theory, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, performance studies and media studies, what changes have occurred making necessary the addition of affect to the stock of social theoretical concepts?  What configurations of economy, politics, sociality, and technology condition the focus on desire and on affect, respectively? What differences between affect and desire inform our understandings of language, bodies, psyche, reflexivity, thought, writing science and methodology?  Readings will be drawn from the fields mentioned above with some emphasis on the philosophical tradition running  through Gilles Deleuze, the psychoanalytic tradition beyond Lacan and the sociological tradition from Weber to Foucault and Bourdieu

WSCP 81000 - Work and Gender 

GC W 11:45a.m. -1:45 p.m., Room 8203, 3 credits, Prof. Pamela Stone [97153] [Cross listed with Soc.73200 ]

The entry of women in to the paid labor force is often hailed as one of the defining changes of the 20th Century. But still today in the 21st, gender inequalities persist, 40+ years after the feminist revolution and passage of equal opportunity laws. This course looks at changes in women’s paid and unpaid labor from the Industrial Revolution to the contemporary post-industrial globalized workplace to consider demographic trends in women’s work and family roles and their interrelationship; the gendered organization of work; the intersection of race, class and gender in understanding today’s transnational labor markets; the tension between women’s paid employment and unpaid care giving; and policies aimed at advancing women’s status and economic independence. Particular attention will be given to under-researched groups and to the analysis of gender inequality at work and at home, including consideration of such topics as the household division of labor, job segregation, wage inequality, work-family tegration, and policies such as pay equity and flexible work arrangements.

WSCP 81000 - Cultural Sociology and Sociology of Culture 

GC W 2:00 -4:00 p.m., Room 6114, 3 credits, Prof. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein [97154] [Cross listed with Soc. 86800]

Cultural practices and processes, symbolic and classificatory systems, repertoires of action, of contention, webs of significance, and cultural structures are topics comprising the “cultural turn” in sociology.

Theories and research on culture and its relationship to social structure and agency; and empirical work on culture have grown in the last 20 years. Cultural Sociology is the next to largest section in the American Sociological Association.

 Of particular interest in this course, is the work on boundaries – such as those that define gender, ethnicity, sexualities, race and nation.

We shall read the work of scholars who have conceptualized these topics, sought research sites and methodologies for exploring them in such arenas as music, art, fashion, communications, celebrity culture, sexuality, gender distinction and politics. For example, we shall read DiMaggio and Crane on the institutionalization of cultural categories, Zerubavel on cognitive sociology, Alexander on myths and narratives, Douglas and (Alexander) on the sacred and profane, Bourdieu on cultural capital, Brubaker and Barth on groups and ethnicities, Geertz on thick description and a webs of significance, Lamont (and Epstein) on symbolic boundaries and status, Swidler on Love, Friedland on religious ideology and kinship, and Kunda on corporate cultures.

We will apply theories of interest to current social phenomena: for example: the place of women in societies; religious communities; changing forms of network communications; food. fashion and art.

 As a final requirement students will be asked to write a paper on a subject of their own research interest using the concepts explored in the class.

WSCP 81000 -Gender, Crime, Media and Culture  

GC       R 2:00 -4:00 p.m., Room 6493, 3 credits, Prof. Lynn Chancer [97155] [Cross listed with Soc. 83300]

This course will explore a fascinating selection of sociological literature that combines, in myriad ways and through the use of diverse methodologies, the subject matters of gender, crime, media and culture. The first part of the course will offer students an overview of different theoretical perspectives currently exerting influence in the sociological subfields of gender, crime, media and culture respectively. In the second part of the course, we will turn to research in substantive topic areas. Among the topics covered will be school violence cases, domestic violence, sex work, gang research and the gendered division of labor in legal (as well as illegal) occupations.

WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy and Planning I

H         T 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mimi Abramovitz [97156]

 [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.

WSCP 81000 -Embodiment in 18th- and 19th-Century French Art

GC       W 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room 3307, 3 credits, Prof.Rachel Lindheim [97755] [Cross listed with ART 86010]

This class will examine the symbolic and ideological force of representations of bodies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. We will consider the ways in which depictions of the ideal male and female form have served as vehicles to engage with questions of sexuality, gender and race as they intersect with nationhood, empire and public life. We will also discuss how embodied images function as sites of both performance and contestation. Our goal will be to reconsider the work of David, Girodet, Inges, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, and Puvis de Chavannes but we will also study nineteenth-century photography and popular culture (prints, magazines, museum displays). Readings will examine recent debates on these topics from within art history, cultural studies and women’s studies.