Spring 09
WSCP 81601 -Topics in Women’s Studies and Gender: Bodies and Psyches in (Im)Migration
GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Patricia T. Clough [95838] [Cross listed with Soc.80200]
Taking as our starting point stories of immigration and migration and without taking only the U.S. as the point of departure or arrival, this course explores the relationship of psyches, bodies and populations in relationship to technologies of (re)presentation, measure, surveillance, memory, transportation and communication. What can we learn about time and space, place and duration through a comparison of fictional, social scientific, autobiographical, historical story telling about bodies and psyches in movement? What do we learn about race, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity and nationality as a matter of movement? A range of texts—theoretical, critical, scientific and fictional will be discussed.
WSCP 80802 -Contemporary Feminist Theories
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Susan Farrell [95839] [Cross listed with MALS 72200]
This course will provide an introduction to themes, issues and conflicts in contemporary feminist theory. The course pays particular attention to the shift from the unifying themes in earlier feminist theorizing to the destabilizing influences of recent social theories (e.g. postmodernism, queer theory, and post-colonial theory) upon feminism. Readings and discussions will address a number of conflicts and developments within feminism about the category of woman, the politics of difference, the body, sexualities, performances of gender, the stability of sexed and sexual identity. Social institutions such as family, religion, the state and their impact on the social construction of gender will also be analyzed. The course takes an interdisciplinary and transnational approach to feminist thought and brings these theories to bear upon literature and media. There will be guest speakers, and students will be responsible for two reflection papers, a short oral presentation and critical book review essay on selected feminist utopian, speculative, and science fiction with an eye toward the future of feminism and gender.
WSCP 81000 -Figures of Bodies and Speech: Eroticism and Pornography from the Renaissance to the Baroque
GC W 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Paolo Fasoli [95841] [Cross listed with Comp. Lit.72000]
Scholars have pointed out that the appearance of the earliest “manuals” on sex-positions coincided with the Hellenistic canonization of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Occasionally, in the Pre-Modern period, such writers as Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) and Antonio Vignali (1500-1559) relied on presumptive analogies between their obscene works and Aristotle’s oeuvre in order to legitimize their writings, or to satirize a hegemonic discourse. In the Age of Baroque and Galileo, thanks to the transgressive works of disciples of heterodox Aristotelian hardliners, the rediscovered kinship of instructional sex literature and Aristotelian rhetoric was celebrated in the scandalous books of early Libertines like Antonio Rocco (1586-1653) and Ferrante Pallavicino (1615-1644). This also coincided with a progressive disengagement of the erotic discourse from the visual and the representational modes. Eventually, the obscene narrative (both heterosexual, as in Pallavicino, and homosexual, as in Rocco) would play in a theater of words regulated by a purely rhetorical normative apparatus. Primary texts (in English translation) will include Aretino’s Sonnets on the 16 Modes, Vignali’s The Book of the Prick, Pallavicino’sThe Whores’ Rhetoric and The Postman Robbed, Rocco’s Alcibiades the Schoolboy, and the Marquis De Sade’sNouvelle Justine and The 120 Days of Sodom.
WSCP 81000- Immigration/Crime/Criminal Justice
JJ W 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Diana Gordon [95843] [Cross listed with CRJ 88100]
WSCP 81000 -Juvenile Law
JJ M 2:00.-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mark Fondacaro [95846] [Cross listed with CRJ 88400]
This course will address our legal system's treatment of juveniles, including such issues as parental rights and state authority over minors; children's autonomous rights; limitations on minors' liberties; medical treatment and consent, child abuse and neglect; and juvenile delinquency and the juvenile justice system.
WSCP 81000- Media, Crime and Justice
JJ R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. David Green [95848] [Cross listed with CRJ 88900]
WSCP 81000 -Gender, Sexuality and Literature
GC T 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Sarah Chinn [95849] [Cross listed with Eng. 78100]
This course will explore questions of gender and sexuality in a variety of literary texts. Given that the previous sentence could mean pretty much anything, we have our work cut out for us. We'll start by trying to establish (or at least interrogate) what we mean by "gender," "sexuality," and "literature" by looking at literary, historical, theoretical and visual materials primarily but not exclusively from the United States and Europe. Once we've struggled our way through these challenges, we'll focus on a specific place (the United States) and a specific time (roughly 1850 to 1930) to see how these terms play out in various literary texts. While a background in feminist/ queer/gender theories is a plus, it's not a prerequisite for taking this course.
WSCP 81000 -Queer Culture and Media
GC T 4:15-8:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. David Gerstner [95850] [Cross listed with Eng. 87400]
This course studies the ways queer cultural producers engage a range of media to explore questions of identity (sexuality, race, gender, class, nation). The relationship between queer cultural identity and media is complex—particularly as it is filtered through a global economy—and, as such, finds its expression through a dynamic use of multi-mediated platforms. With readings from queer theorists as our backdrop and through analyses of film, video, literature, novels, poetry, dance, and other media-arts, we will consider the varied and diverse contours that generate queer media and the artists involved in their production. Students are expected to complete weekly readings, weekly writing assignments, deliver a 15-20 minute presentation, and submit a 15-page final paper.
Readings for the class may include: Abelove, Henry, et.al. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader; Anzaldùa, Gloria.Borderlands/La Frontera; Baldwin, James. Another Country; Dyer, Richard. Now You See It; Gever, Marth, et.al. Queer Looks; Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place; Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider
Queer artists we may study include: David Wojnarowicz, Marlon Riggs, James Baldwin, Yvonne Rainer, Cheryl Dunye, Barbara Hammer, Audre Lorde, Riyad Wadia, Jean Genet, Peter Wells, Cui Zi’en, Emile Devereaux, Gloria Anzaldùa, and others.
WSCP 81000 -Biography,1600-1800: Personal and Political Histories
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Carrie Hintz [95851] [Cross listed with Eng. 87500]
We will read biographies written from 1600-1800 and theories of biography from the period, with particular attention to the construction of the private and public spheres. Text range from John Aubrey's biographical miniatures to James Boswell's magisterial Life of Johnson. We will consider the ways in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century biographies challenge and extend classical and medieval models, including hagiography and the portrayal of the exemplary woman (John Evelyn's Life of Mrs. Godolphin will be a touchstone here). We will look at the political dimensions of intimate and family biographies by writers like Richard Baxter, Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish. The development of literary biography will also be a concern, culminating in Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779-81). Samuel Johnson's writings on biography as a form will be considered in detail. A wide range of contemporary theory about auto/biography will be included; the course will be useful for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century specialists and students working on life writing in any period.
WSCP 81000 -Race and Sentiment in 19th Century American Writing
GC F 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hildegard Hoeller [95852] [Cross listed with Eng. 75100]
This course will investigate the role sentimental expression played in debates on issues of race—concerning both Native Americans and slavery-- in 19th century American literature before the Civil War. If race was a central concern in 19th century American culture, sentimentality was one of its dominant cultural modes. The complicated convergence of the two is the focus of this course. How, and why, did writers use sentiment as a way to address issue of race? What were the potentials and limits of such a use of sentiment? The most well-known example of such a convergence is perhaps Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that literally tried to, and arguably did, move a nation towards change. But, as literary criticism of the last ten years has made abundantly clear, sentimentality was, and needs to be recognized as, a pervasive cultural mode as well as an important literary tradition. In this course we will delve into much of the recent critical work on sentimental writing in 19th century American literature to explore the role sentiment played particularly in writings about race. Following the initial groundbreaking work of rediscovery of women’s sentimental writing by Jane Tompkins and Nina Baym, and arguments about its great ideological limits such as Ann Douglass’s work, an expansive body of critical work has emerged-- by critics such as Julia Stern, Mary-Louise Kete, Jocelyn Moody, Cindy Weinstein, Glenn Hendler, Kristin Boudreau, Lori Merish, Joseph Fichtelberg, and many others-- that examines and theorizes sentimental expressions in a wide variety of texts and context. What is so exciting about this critical work on sentimentalism is that it opens up our understanding of the canon and the American tradition itself and that it creates space for much new critical work still to be done—some of it hopefully initiated in this course. The seminar is designed to explore this critical work and to use it as a way to examine sentimental expressions and their engagement with issue of race in a wide range of writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, William Apess, and others.
WSCP 81000 -Repetition
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum [95853] [Cross listed with Eng. 80200]
This seminar will investigate repetition—as rhetorical device, as formal feature of literature and art, as philosophical puzzle, as psychological structure, as private pleasure, and as historical nightmare. Our texts may include Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, selections from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Homi Bhabha, Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Shelley’s “Adonais,” poems of H.D., Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen, Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, Francis Ponge’s Soap, Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, the Alain Resnais film Last Year in Marienbad, W. G. Sebald’sVertigo, the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo, Sophocles’s Electra,the Richard Strauss/Hugo von Hofmannsthal opera Elektra,Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem, and the anthology of blues poems edited by Kevin Young. We may look at examples of twentieth-century American art (particularly Pop and Miminalism) and listen to a range of music, including fugues, cabalettas, and blues. (For texts not originally in English, we will use translations.) Requirement: a 20-page final essay.
WSCP 81000 -Trauma Theory and Literature
GC R 4:15-6:15p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Nancy K. Miller[95854] [Cross listed with Eng. 86000]
Trauma and Literature will examine the work of writers who bear witness to the traumatic history of a century fractured by war and atrocity. The seminar begins with questions raised by the literature of the Holocaust, and ends at the threshold of the twenty-first century with the events of Sept.11 as a case study of memorialization. In addition to first-person accounts that deal with extreme experience, readings will include essays in visual culture, in particular the role played by photography and graphic memoir in the representation of traumatic experience. We will discuss the relation of trauma theory to issues of gender and sexuality, to narratives of war and nation, and to embodied suffering in the private, domestic sphere.
Writers include: Barthes, Beauvoir, Bechdel, Butler, Caruth, Cha, Delbo, Laub, Levi, O’Brien, Sontag, Spiegelman, Woolf.
The work for the course: a seminar report and a 20-page research paper.
WSCP 81000 -Fiction of the 1890s
GC M 11:45 a.m.-1:45p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Talia Schaffer[95855] [Cross listed with Eng. 84500]
This course will explore varieties of fiction (novels, short stories, perhaps aesthetic dialogues and even prose poems) at the fin de siècle. We will look at aesthetic texts that react against Victorian realism by attempting to enact new theories of the autonomy of art, including fiction by Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Una Ashworth Taylor, and Lucas Malet. While aesthetic fiction drew attention to its own artifice, politically engaged, journalistically oriented New Women fiction was forging an alternative to the high-art ideals of the aesthetes, a new style that has been credited with developing techniques that would be crucial to modernism. We will read New Women fiction by Sarah Grand, Ella Hepworth Dixon, and Thomas Hardy. In the 1890s, overcrowded urban space and changing commercial conditions led to drastic alterations in the kind of work and leisure available to city inhabitants. George Gissing and Annie E. Holdsworth explored the daily life of impoverished East End residents. It felt like an attractive alternative to imagine a swashbuckling adventure elsewhere in the British empire, and in the period of jingoism and the Boer War, we will look at work by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Alice Perrin, and H. Rider Haggard. We will read Dracula, the novel that expressed virtually every fin-de-siècle fear, (Jews, homosexuality, reverse colonization, New Women) but also examine the period’s powerful fantasy of an omniscient intelligence that can resolve any threat, Sherlock Holmes. This course juxtaposes lesser-known writing (especially by women) and popular fiction to canonical texts and reads fin-de-siècle fiction against journalism of the period, asking what cultural anxieties that generated these textual solutions. Throughout the semester, we will investigate the stylistic innovations of the period, seeking to develop an alternative genealogy of modernism and perhaps even an alternative view of literary history. We will use criticism and theory that rereads the transition from Victorian to modern, including work by Steven Arata, Ann Ardis, Linda Dowling, Jessica Feldman, Rita Felski, Douglas Mao, Steven Arata, Lyn Pykett.
WSCP 81000 -Proust II
GC W 6:30.-8:30p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Eve Sedgwick [95858] [Cross listed with Eng. 87100]
This is the second half of a year-long seminar organized around a close, start-to-finish reading of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. We will be considering a wide range of the issues, motives, and ambitions embodied in the novel, including its complicated relation to the emerging discourses of Euro- American homosexuality. Other preoccupations that I hope will emerge through our discussions include the changing possibilities of novelistic genre; narratorial consciousness; texture; habit and addiction; experimental identities; adult relations to childhood; the spatialities of present and past; the vicissitudes of gender; the bourgeois maternal in relation to such other roles as the grandmother, the aunt, the uncle, and a variety of domestic workers; the uses of paganism; alternatives to triangular desire; the languages of affect; phallic and non-phallic sexualities; the phenomenology and epistemology of oneiric states; the relations between Jewish diasporic being and queer diasporic being within modernism; and the affective, phenomenological, and philosophical ramifications of an interest in the transmigration of souls – to name but a few. Readings will be in English, in the old translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, though with reference to the French text as well.
WSCP 81000 -Contemporary Multicultural American Fiction and Memoir
GC F 11:45 a.m.-1:45p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Neal Tolchin [95860] [Cross listed with Eng. 75400]
From N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize winning novel House Made of Dawn (1968) to Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988), Oscar Hijuelos's Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao(2008), all of which also won the Pulitzer, the neglected fields of Native American, African American, Asian American, and Hispanic/Latino American literature have gradually drawn the attention of scholars and are now often taught together under the rubric Multicultural American Literature. In contemporary Native American fiction, Leslie Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine are regarded as key texts. In Hispanic/Latino American fiction, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima is seen as a foundational text for Mexican American fiction; Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir A Place to Stand recounts his transformation from an illiterate felon into a poet while in prison. We may also read the work of Julia Alvarez and Cristina Garcia. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior put Asian American literature on the map as an academic area of study; more recently Fay Ng's Bone and Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker have attracted the interest of scholars in this field, as has a text appropriated by Americanists from Canadian writing, Joy Kogawa's Obasan. African American readings may include authors Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Walter Mosley, and John Edgar Wideman. This course will be run as a seminar, with oral reports and a research paper required. A good historical introduction to this field is Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.
WSCP 81000 -Blues People: African American Culture in the 20th Century
GC T 6:30.-8:30p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Michele Wallace [95862] [Cross listed with Eng. 75600]
This course will use an interdisciplinary method to amplify our consideration of a key series of works in African American culture—literary, musical and visual of the 20th century. We will be focused on this material in terms of how they reflect upon the notion of a blues aesthetic or a blues sensibility. Historic landposts will range from the Plessy vs. Ferguson Segregation decision in the Supreme Court (1896), the founding of the NAACP (1906) and the Crisis, WWI, the Great Migration, the Depression, the FSA (Federal Security Administration), WWII, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. The blues aesthetic, as initially defined by Leroi Jones in Blues People (1963) and as elaborated upon by so many scholars before (Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston et al) and subsequently, including most notably Steven Tracy in Langston Hughes and The Blues (2001), will help to provide our critical armature.
As Tracy writes, "A particular misery and sadness, a particular blues, unites African Americans whose common heritage—in Africa, slavery, and a theoretical freedom—often provides a bond which is difficult for middle class blacks to break."
The blues, and African American music generally, will provide us with a coherent way of interpreting the range of African American performance traditions in a range of fields since the turn-of-the-century and the publication of W.E.B. Du Bois'sSouls of Black Folk (1903).
Other crucial works to be touched upon in this survey will include in literature, besides DuBois The Souls of Black Folk and Jones's Blues People (Baraka): James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man, Jean Toomer's Cane, Langston Hughes's Weary Blues (1926), Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935), Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Gwendolyn Brook's A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Maud Martha (1953), Ralph Ellison, Flying Home and Other Stories (1934-1956), Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (1976) and Steve Tracy's Langston Hughes and the Blues.
In music: "Steal Away" Bernice Reagon and Toshi Reagon, Wiliam and Walker (1902), Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong's "St. Louis Blues" (1925), Louis Armstrong's "Black and Blue (1932)," Duke Ellington's "Black and Tan (1929)" and "Diminuendo in Blue," and Son House's "The Death Letter," Richie Haven's "Freedom (Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child)," Woodstock 1969.
In visual art and Photography: Du Bois's "Negro Exhibition" at the Paris Exposition (1900), Frances Johnston Benjamin's The Hampton Album, Henry O. Tanner's "The Banjo Lesson," Jacob Lawrence's "The Migration Series," Gordon Park's FSA Photographs, Roy de Carava's “The Sweet Flypaper of Life,” Romare Bearden's "The Block" and Faith Ringgold's "Street Story Quilt."
WSCP 81000 -Post-Modern African American Literature
GC T 2:00.4:00p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Barbara Webb [95866] [Cross listed with Eng. 75700]
A study of the poetics and politics of postmodernism in the fiction of African American writers since the 1970s. Although the last three decades of the twentieth century were undoubtedly the most productive and innovative period in the development of African American literature and literary criticism, it was also a period of extreme social and cultural fragmentation in African American communities. In this course we will examine how African American writers have addressed the problems of literary representation when faced with increased commodification of culture and knowledge, the proliferation of new forms of literacy and orality, and the breakdown of traditional forms of community. Our readings will also include some selections not usually considered postmodernist but that address similar concerns about identity, culture, writing and possibilities for social change. We will read selected essays by theorists of postmodernism such as Hutcheon, Jameson, and Bhabha as well as essays by literary critics and cultural theorists who have been involved in ongoing discussions about the relevance of postmodernism for African Americans at the turn of the 21st century such as bell hooks, Cornel West, Wahneema Lubiano, and Madhu Dubey. Primary texts: Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo; Clarence Major, Reflex and Bone Structure; Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters; John Edgar Wideman, Sent for You Yesterday; Samuel R. Delaney, Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand; Charles Johnson, Middle Passage; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; and Gayle Jones, The Healing.
Requirements: An oral presentation and a term paper (15-20 pages). The course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussions of assigned readings and oral presentations each week.
WSCP 81000 -Family and Childhood in American History
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Harriet Alonzo [95868] [Cross listed with Hist.75500]
The fields of Family and Children’s/Childhood history are relatively new. Yet, there has been much research and a plethora of wonderful books and articles to read. I have selected those books and articles which represent the breadth of the scholarship available. About a third of the course is divided between the colonial era and the post World War I era. The rest emphasizes the diversity of research about the “long” nineteenth century. I have tried to choose readings that represent the diversity of people’s experiences as well as different approaches to the field. There are readings by senior scholars as well as by scholars relatively new to the field. Although all represent excellent scholarship, I have also chosen some for their narrative approach, others for their more “academic” approaches including critical discussions of other work in the field. My hope is that by the end of the course, students will have developed a broad-based knowledge of the two fields.
Some of the authors we will read in the course include Steven Mintz, John Demos, Joan Jensen, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Nancy Cott, Mary P. Ryan, Herbert G. Gutman, Tiya Miles, John Mack Faragher, Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Linda Gordon, Valarie Matsumoto, and Elaine Tyler May. A complete list of authors and readings is available on the syllabus. For a copy, please email me at halonso@ccny.cuny.edu.
WSCP 81000 -Sex in Europe from the Renaissance to the French Revolution
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Randolph Trumbach [95873] [Cross listed with Hist.71100]
The course considers the transition from a traditional bisexuality to the modern division into a heterosexual majority and a homosexual minority with the break occurring around 1700. The nature of marriage and divorce, romance and celibacy, same-sex relations, illegitimacy, prostitution, sexual violence, and masturbation, before and after 1700 are compared. Differences in gender, age, religion, class, and region, organize the material. Students will have an opportunity to work on original sources in English drawn from the Graduate Center’s collections such as EEBO (Early English Books Online) and ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), as well as on publicly available sources such as the Old Bailey Online, and on my microfilm poor law examination collection. Students will write four page comments on the reading for each session and there will be a twenty-page paper either discussing the readings or dealing with original sources.
WSCP 81000 -Gender Theory for Historians
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dagmar Herzog [95874] [Cross listed with Hist.72000]
This graduate seminar is designed to introduce students to some classic as well as many recent texts in the overlapping areas of women’s history, the history of masculinity, queer studies, and feminist, psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory, with forays into a wide range of historiographical styles and occasional excursions into anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, and philosophy. There will be special emphasis on: the historical intersections of gender, race, economics, empire; the histories of subjectivities and epistemologies; and the histories of sexuality, disability, reproduction. Most of the texts will focus on the U.S. and Europe since the 18th c., with many focused on the 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, thoughtful and active participation in class discussions, one short critical essay, and one longer final paper exploring the relevance of some aspect of gender theory for your own work.
WSCP 81000 -Music, Gender and Sexuality
GC W 10:00a.m.-1:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jane Sugarman [95875] [Cross listed with Music 83100]
Over the past two decades, the relationship between music and issues of gender and sexuality has become a major field of scholarly inquiry. Among the studies that have appeared, some seek to expand our knowledge of the musical activities of women, others examine how concepts of gender and sexuality shape and are shaped by musical practices and discourses, while still others investigate the construction of desire and sexuality through music. The approaches that these studies have taken have often been suggested by developments in other fields, ranging from anthropology and cultural studies to feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theory. This seminar will survey classic and recent writings on music, gender, and sexuality in conjunction with background readings from other disciplines. Although the focus will be on ethnomusicological writings, there will also be readings on Western popular and concert musics. Included will be readings on the musical construction of femininity, masculinity, and heterosexuality; music as a mode of resistance to gender norms; transvestite, transgendered, and "queer" performance; intersections of gendered performance with issues of race and class; and the ethics of feminist ethnography.
WSCP 81000 -Ethics of Care
GC T/R 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Virginia Held [95876] [Cross listed with Phil. 77600]
Since its beginnings in the 1980’s, the ethics of care has developed as an alternative to such established moral theories as Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, and virtue theory, although some theorists see it as a version of virtue ethics. The ethics of care has increasingly been developed as a comprehensive moral approach relevant to political theory, international relations, and environmental concerns as well as to family life and friendship.
We will review some early texts in the ethics of care literature and some of the background in traditional moral theory. The course will focus on recent contributions to the development of the ethics of care, considering difficulties with it as well as its potential. The course will presume some familiarity with dominant moral theories. Students with limited backgrounds in ethics would do well to prepare with such texts as:Stephen Darwall, Philosophical Ethics (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998)
Marcia Baron, Philip Pettit, and Michael Slote, Three Methods of Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)
William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973)
WSCP 81000 -Federalism and State Politics
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Marilyn Gittell [95907] [Cross listed with Pol. Sci. 82500]
The course will discuss the constitutional, historical, and institutional evolution of American federalism and the formation of an intergovernmental structure that defines American politics in the 21st century. The role of centralization and decentralization of governance structures and the role of civil society in those communities will be an important part of the discussion. There will also be an analysis of state politics, policies and institutions, and the ways in which they are shaped by changes in federalism. Emphasis will be placed on different recent practices of devolution, as well as on the effect of current factors and events on state politics. Readings and research papers will compare historical differences in the political culture of states, local governments, and regions, with an emphasis on issues of race and gender and their impact on regime politics and the policy process. There will be an extensive list of readings and a research paper required.
The course will discuss the constitutional, historical, and institutional evolution of American federalism and the formation of an intergovernmental structure that defines American politics in the 21st century. The role of centralization and decentralization of governance structures and the role of civil society in those communities will be an important part of the discussion. There will also be an analysis of state politics, policies and institutions, and the ways in which they are shaped by changes in federalism. Emphasis will be placed on different recent practices of devolution, as well as on the effect of current factors and events on state politics. Readings and research papers will compare historical differences in the political culture of states, local governments, and regions, with an emphasis on issues of race and gender and their impact on regime politics and the policy process. There will be an extensive list of readings and a research paper required.
WSCP 81000 -Social Welfare Policy
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Janet Gornick [95877] [Cross listed with Pol. Sci 73901]
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 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 curse, 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 -Approaches to Political Theory
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Alyson Cole [96029] [Cross listed with Pol. Sci 80602]
"What is politics? What does it mean to theorize? How do our responses to these questions make visible or occlude aspects of the political? What epistemological commitments underlie different methods of political theorizing? What sort of knowledge can political theory yield? What effects, if any, can the knowledge produced by theory have on political practice? In this seminar we grapple with these questions by reflecting upon the recent history and current state of the subfield "political theory," its boundaries, protocols, and modes of exchange. We examine how political theory has been situated within political science and interrogate the relationship between theory and practice. This course is open to all students at the Graduate Center, though modest familiarity with the history of political thought or some form or genre of theorizing (e.g., feminist theory, CRT, or queer theory) would be helpful. Readings will likely include: Arendt, Barber, Berlin, Flax, Foucault, Hawkesworth, Heidegger, Kateb, Kuhn, Marx, Pitkin, Rancière, Schmitt, Strauss, Tully, Weber, and Wolin, among others."
WSCP 81000-Ethnography of Space and Place
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m. Rm TBA, 3 credits , Prof. Setha Low, [95935 ] [Cross listed with PSYCH 80103]
WSCP 81000 -Portrait as Psychological Practice
GC R 4:15.-6:15p.m., Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. Suzanne Ouellette [95934] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103]
A close and careful look at how people tell their own lives and those of others reveals individuals in all their complexity, in the many contexts in which they find themselves – internal and external contexts. Viewing, reading, and writing lives enable discoveries about individual uniqueness and the distinctive blend of consistency and change in lives; and discoveries about the communities, societies, and cultures of which individuals are part. The ability to see and develop deep understanding of one single person facilitates and requires the awareness and knowledge of the many who people their times and places, near and far. The class will consider the history and current state of the study of lives in its several forms, including written texts, painting, and film. The class will be an interdisciplinary space in which several different theoretical and methodological approaches will be engaged.
The course is intended for students seeking to make life studies a central part of their work and those for whom the biographical is only to supplement other approaches. Although it serves as the second part of the Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir sequence in M.A.L.S., student do not need to have taken that course in order to participate in this one.
WSCP 81000 -Stress, Coping , Trauma and Resilience
GC M 9:30.-11:30 a.m., Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. Tracey Revenson [95878] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103]
The seminar focuses on the intersections among the constructs of stress, coping, trauma, and resilience (or positive adaptational outcomes), in particular, theories that provide clues about which factors enhance adaptation. We will explore how stress affects psychological functioning and physical health, and the interpersonal and environmental resources that individuals and communities draw upon to cope with stress and trauma. Historically, in psychology, we have focused almost on negative health and mental health consequences of stress and trauma. But what factors allow individuals, communities, and societies to flourish in the face of stress/trauma? To answer these questions, we will read the literature while focusing on several areas -- the terrorist events of 9-11, the experience of cancer, and loss and bereavement.
WSCP 81000 -Race, and Multiculturaalism in a Global Context
GC W 2:00.-4:00 p.m., Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. E. Chito Childs [95879] [Cross listed with Soc. 84001]
We hear endlessly about our increasingly multicultural world, with rising, even skyrocketing intermarriage rates, increased visibility of multiracial families, multiracial casts featured in film and television and even Barack Obama, the first African American biracial candidate for president. Yet what does this tell us about the contemporary state of race relations in America, or even more importantly globally? This course will cover a myriad of issues under the rubric of race and multiculturalism, encompassing a large multidisciplinary body of research. Throughout the course, we will explore what interracial intimacies, multiracial families, and multicultural unions show us about contemporary race relations, and the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class. Subjects covered include interracial/intercultural marriage , transracial adoption, multiracial coalitions, multicultural education, and multiculturalism in the media and popular culture. We will focus on these issues in contemporary America, as well as globally with a particular focus on South Africa, Brazil and Europe. A variety of theoretical frameworks including critical race theory, cultural studies, and post-colonial writings, as well qualitative and quantitative methodologies for studying these issues will be addressed. Students will be expected to develop a research project over the course of the semester.
WSCP 81000 -Gender in a Global Perspective
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hester Eisenstein [95880] [Cross listed with Soc. 83300]
In the swirl of contemporary events, there is no way to avoid controversies over gender, race and class, from the role of women military personnel in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq to the firing of broadcaster Don Imus in 2007 for his scurrilous remarks about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, and most recently the debates over the presidential and vice-presidential candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.
This course is an introduction to graduate work in gender studies. The focus is on women and gender from a global perspective. As Johanna Brenner has argued, for women this is both the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, for the first time in known human history most of the constraints on the options for women have to all intents and purposes been removed. On the other hand, the conditions of life for most women (and men as well) have become increasingly harsh, dangerous, and unforgiving, both in the industrialized countries of the North and the struggling countries of the Third World.
I hope to open up the terrain of gender studies in a way that shows something of the range of approaches that are possible and that introduces some theoretical debates. Given that the existence of gender and women’s studies in the academy is the product of women’s movement activism from the 1960s onward, I have included works that are inspired by activist struggles as well as more conventional case studies.
My own current work focuses on the political economy of gender. (The title of my new book is Feminism seduced: How global elites are using women’s labor and ideas to exploit the world, Paradigm Publishing, 2009). I take a basically Marxist economic approach to the study of world capitalism, wedded to a feminist analysis that insists on the centrality of gender to economic, social, cultural and political life. Students will be encouraged to construct their own theoretical frameworks as their ideas develop.
WSCP 81000 -Sociology of Bodies
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Victoria Pitts-Taylor [95881] [Cross listed with Soc. 86800]
Once neglected within sociology, the body is now considered within contemporary social theory, sociology, women’s and cultural studies to be a social and cultural space of considerable theoretical and political importance. In this course, we explore how the body can be viewed from social, cultural and political perspectives. The human body is both material and symbolic, and is influenced by, and influences, our understandings of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and age, among other factors. We will explore the construction of normative bodies (linked to medicine, technology, gender, race and other institutions) as well as the social construction of ‘deviant’ bodies. We consider the problems of the ‘natural’ body and the ‘technological’ body, and think through body modifications as social practices. We will look at the coding of bodies in racial and ethnic terms and consider how bodies ‘figure,’ so to speak, in current political controversies and crises. Using classical social theory, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial and critical race theory, we will work toward ‘mapping’ the social significance of the body in contemporary Western and postcolonial cultures.
WSCP 81000 -Gender/Class/Race/Ethnicity
GC W 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein [95882] [Cross listed with Soc. 75800]
This course will focus on stratification as a dynamic process and will consider both structural and cultural aspects of mobility persistence and mobility. Not your usual stratification course, it will consider micro as well as macro processes , and within stratum differences between members of the same class (e.g. the differential position of women and men in given class strata). The course will include inquiry regarding life styles and values. Readings will include theories of stratification, qualitative as well as quantitative studies and literary accounts.
WSCP 81000 -Consumer Society and Culture
GC M 2:00: -4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Sharon Zukin [95997] [Cross listed with Soc. 86800]
This interdisciplinary course examines the historical and institutional development of consumption in modern societies by connecting it with large-scale social changes and ideologies. Looking closely at the institutions of consumer society—including symbols, sites, languages, and texts, we will develop a critique that relates consumption to the development of the market economy, civil society, and conceptions of the self—and speculates about the resurgence of thrift in the current economic crisis. After several weeks of common reading and discussion, with weekly short responses, each student will develop an independent project of empirical research on a consumption site (store, website, marketplace, provision of services), a discourse (such as localism), or a specific commodity, which will result in a 15-page final paper. Readings from authors both classical (W. Benjamin, J. Baudrillard) and contemporary (L. Cohen, S. Mintz, S. Zukin), with field work encouraged from American Apparel to Zucco Le French Diner. Enrollment strictly limited to 12 students.
WSCP 81000 -Social Welfare Policy and Planning II
H T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mimi Abramovitz [95931] [Cross listed with SSW 71100] Permission of the Instructor is required.
The course applies historical, ideological and theoretical models (including feminism) to the study of social problems and social welfare policies. In a seminar fashion, students critique various definitions of social problems; examine the impact of race, class, gender and heterosexist power relationships on the definitional process; and explore the implications of social problem definition for social welfare policy analysis and application. Using the intellectual frameworks developed in class students study and analyze a social problem of their choosing in class presentations and in a final paper.