Fall 2008 Courses

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• WMST Courses
• Crosslisted Courses
• Gender Related Courses in Other Departments

V1001 Introduction to Women and Gender Studies.

A. Kessler-Harris & N. Tadiar

Call#02215
T 10:35-11:50am, with discussion section R 10:35-11:50am, 405 Milbank Hall

BC1050 Women and Health.

R. Young

Call#05986
MW 4:10-5:25pm, 405 Milbank Hall

V3111 Feminist Texts I: Wollstonecraft to Beauvoir.

L. Ciolkowski

Call#13505
W 11am-12:50pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension

4pts. The important contributions to the elaboration of feminist thought in the West, evaluated through critical discussion. Analysis of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Goldman, Anna Cooper, Radclyffe Hall, C. P. Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, and others in an attempt to discover the roots of the contemporary feminist movement. Permission of instructor required. Enrollment limited to 20 students.

V3112 Feminist Texts II: Beauvoir to the Present.

L. Tiersten

Call#07309
M 2:10-4pm, 201 Lehman Hall

4pts. Contemporary issues in feminist thought. A review of the theoretical debates on sex roles, feminism and socialism, psychoanalysis, language, and cultural representations. Permission of instructor required. Enrollment limited to 20 students.

BC3121 Black Women in America.

M. Soumahoro

Call#06039
R 2:10-4pm, 407 Barnard Hall

4pts. Examines the experiences of African-American women from slavery through the present. Emphasis will be on the history and historiography of these experiences, as well as on critical issues facing African-American women today.

BC3136 Asian American Women.

C. Cynn

Call#02467
T 2:10-4pm, 101 Barnard Hall

4pts. Explores selected texts written by Asian American women from diverse backgrounds, focusing on issues such as identity, gender, generation, race, class, religion, and language.

V3311 Colloquium in Feminist Theory.

R. Young

Call#09866
T 11am-12:50pm, 118 Reid Hall

4pts. Explores the relationship between new feminist theory and feminist practice, both within the academy and in the realm of political organizing. Prerequisite: Feminist Texts I, or II, and permission of the instructor.

BC3518 Studies in US Imperialism.

N. Tadiar

Call#03012
R 2:10-4pm, 303 Altschul Hall

4pts. Historical and comparative study of cultural effects and social experiences of U.S. Imperialism, with an attention to the making of race, gender and sexuality through practices of political, economic and cultural domination, exchange and struggle. Examples drawn from studies of U.S. imperialism in the contexts of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and Cuba, and on U.S. foreign involvements in the developing world since World War II.

V3521 Senior Seminar.

E. Povinelli

Call#27998
M 2:10-4pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.

V3521 Senior Seminar.

N. Kampen

Call#03661
T 4:10-6pm, 101 Barnard Hall

W4300 Advanced Topics in Women's and Gender Studies: Venus in Chains: Writing the Lives of Anonymous Women.

S. Hartman

Call#51029
T 11am-12:50pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension

4pts. Venus in Chains examines the experience of the dispossessed, the infamous, and the nameless by considering the strategies of literary, historical, and political representation through which the lives of anonymous women are extinguished and rendered visible.  It is a class about disposable people, folks without history, slaves, subalterns, tragic heroines, orphaned girls, whores down on their luck, and mute rebels.  The central questions that will frame our class discussions are: How does one represent unimagined existence, utter the unspeakable, or resuscitate lives from the scraps of the historical archive? Is every attempt to resurrect these lives, as Alain Corbin, suggests, just “a prelude to ultimate erasure.” Is the effort to attend to forgotten lives a way of redressing the violence of history? What forms of consolation or reparation can representation provide? Or does disclosing the intimate and giving voice to pain subject the already vulnerable to even greater dangers? The seminar is an interdisciplinary course and the materials will include primary and secondary historical narratives, novels, ethnographies, legal cases and feminist theory.

Book List: Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women's Worlds; Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood; Yvette Christiansë, Unconfessed; Maryse Conde, I, Tituba; Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angelique; Assis Djebar, Fantasia; Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing A Woman's Life;  Janelle Hobson, Venus in the Dark; Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain’s Wife; Candice Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy; Eunice Lipton, Alias Olympia; Michel Rolph-Truillot, Silencing the Past

Essays by Hilton Als, Judith Butler, Dipesh Chakrabarthy, Joan Dayan, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault,  Lila Abu-Lughod, Achille Mbembe, Joan Scott, Jenny Sharpe,Tracy Dean Sharpely-Whiting, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Spivak, Michel Rolph-Truillot, and Patricia Williams.

Films: The Life and Times of Sara Baartman by Zola Maseko(1998); Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye (1997)

W4307 Sexuality and the Law.

P. Ettelbrick

Call#04398
M 6:10-8pm, 403 Barnard Hall

4pts. Explores how sexuality is defined and contested in various domains of law (Constitutional, Federal, State), how scientific theories intersect with legal discourse, and takes up considerations of these issues in family law, the military, questions of speech, citizenship rights, and at the workplace. Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

G6001 Theoretical Paradigms in Feminist Thought: The Subject of Rights.

L. Abu-Lughod

Call#72996
T 4:10-6pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension

3pts. The rights of women and sexual minorities have been central to feminist theory and activism. What is the genealogy of “rights talk”? What is its feminist genealogy? As the liberal language of rights has become hegemonic, in particular through international instruments that have linked women’s and sexual rights to human rights and as liberal reform goes global, what is hidden from view? What understandings are foreclosed? What politics are blocked? This course will examine these key questions by exploring feminist and other critiques of liberal paradigms; considering alternative languages and practices for emancipation, for example, Marxist thought and socialist practice and religious law and its local practices; and reflecting on assumptions about the human embedded in liberalism, including the idea of human development and capability. The course will be tied into ongoing symposia sponsored by the project on “Liberalism’s Others.” Readings include J. Butler, W. Brown, S. Hartman, J. Massad, M. Nussbaum, E. Povinelli, L. Rofel, C. Walley, M.Wollestonecraft. This course is open to graduate students in all disciplines and fulfills one of the requirements for the IRWaG graduate certificate.

Crosslisted Courses

83400 Greek American Culture: Multilingualism and Translation.

K. Van Dyck

Call#87003
TR 2:10-4pm, 617B Hamilton Hall

3pts. Same as GRKM W3400. This course introduces students to the rich tradition of literature about and by Greeks in America over the past century, exploring questions of ethnic identity, gender and language. Students examine how contemporary debates in immigration studies and translation theory can inform each other and how both, in turn, can inform a discussion of the writing of the Greek American experience in histories, novels, poetry, and films. Authors include Broumas, Cicellis, Eugenides, Kazan, Papadiamantis, Selz, Spanidou, and Valtinos. Theoretical texts include Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” Chíen's Weird English, Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other and Wirth-Nesher’s Call It English. No knowledge of Greek is necessary, although an extra-credit reading tutorial is available for Greek speakers. Students with a comparative interest in diaspora literature are encouraged to enroll.

83660 Gender, Culture, and Human Rights.

L. Abu-Lughod

Call#54279
R 11am-1pm, 963 Schermerhorn Ext.

4pts. Same as ANTH W3660. The field of human rights, and the adjacent field of international women’s rights, have tended to be dominated by activists, lawyers, and policy-makers, many of whom leave unquestioned the underlying assumptions of the discourse of human rights and leave unexamined the structural and institutional circuits of human rights policy. Those concerned with gender equity have been eager to extend the discourse of human rights to encompass women’s rights and sexual rights. Yet they too have only begun to think critically about the conceptual pitfalls and global circuitry of this form of politics. As some social thinkers note, both sides of the term “human rights” are ripe for critical rethinking: the universality implied by the “human”—and by extension “women” or “sexuality”--and the liberalism that makes “rights” the language of choice today in the search for justice. Although feminists and others working in multicultural settings or the international arena sometimes invoke notions of culture, especially in framing dilemmas of intervention in terms of the clash between cultures and universal rights, they have rarely had the theoretical tools from anthropology to develop adequate understandings of the dynamics of culture and the relationship between culture, social systems, and historical change.
This course will explore what anthropology, both in terms of its theories of culture and its ethnographies of particular communities, can contribute to our thinking about the relationship between gender, culture, and human rights. While appreciating the instrumental power and emancipatory possibilities of human rights discourses in the sphere of gender issues, whether around inequality or violence, it is important to explore more carefully the challenges to this framework that anthropologists and those with deep knowledge of particular regions and cultural or religious traditions might offer. We will read ethnographies as well as articles. Permission of Instructor.

83930 Renaissance Literature: Early Modern Women, Premodern Sexuality.

J. Crawford

Call#67798
W 2:10-4pm, 201D Philosophy Hall

4pts. Same as ENGL W3930. This class will focus on texts and theories about women and female sexuality in the period before the invention of the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual.” Primary literary texts will include Ovid's Metamorphoses, John Lyly’s Gallatea, William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, and the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and Katherine Phillips. In addition, we will be reading a wide range of non-fiction, critical and theoretical texts on the history of the body and reproduction, the history of sexuality, and the nature of women’s roles and relationships in premodern European and English literature and culture.

83985 Film Narrative: Masculinity and American Film.

M. Blount

Call#55030
F 2:10-4pm, 608 Schermerhorn

4pts. Same as ENGL W3985. This seminar explores how masculinity is defined in the work of a wide range of filmmakers from the 1950's to the present.  We will be particularly interested in how questions of race and sexuality complicate narratives of male identity.  Directors include Hitchcock, Lumet, Bill Condon, Gregg Araki, Gus Van Sant, Issac Julien, and Spike Lee. Requirements: two 8-10 page papers.

84040 Women and Buddhism in China.

C. Yu

Call#63048
M 4:10-6pm, 101 80 Claremont Ave.

4pts. Same as RELI W4040. The order of nuns in China, established in the 4th century, is the only continuously existing one in the Buddhist world. While Empress Wu Tse-t’ien used Buddhism to legitimize her rule, lay women from different strata of society were supporters and patrons of Buddhist institution. Chinese indigenous beliefs about goddesses may have contributed to the feminization of Avalokitesvara/Kuan-yin. The contemporary revival of Buddhism in Taiwan is led and carried out by mostly nuns and laywomen. What are the scriptural views concerning a woman’s ability to achieve enlightenment or rebirth in the Pure Land? What institutional constraints women faced in pursuing a religious life? What alternative religious practices they adopted to achieve their goal? What ideals constitute the sanctity of a nun and a lay Buddhist believer? In this course, we will examine lives of nuns and lay women, writings and poems by them as well as doctrinal debates and governmental regulations in order to discover the images and realities of Buddhist women in China.

TC A&HE4056 Feminist Perspective in Literature.

P. Zumhagen

Call#
M 7-9pm, TBA

4pts. Same as Teacher’s College A&HE4056. Purposes/Aims of the course: To explore the historical feminist movement and its implications for high school students today, to familiarize ourselves with various feminist literary theoretical perspectives, to discuss feminist texts, to discuss canonical texts from a feminist perspective, and to examine feminist theories in practice in our classrooms. Required Texts: (all available at TC Bookstore) The Feminist Manifesta by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Feminism is for Everybody, by bell hooks, Look at Me, by Jennifer Egan, Orlando, by Virginia Woolf; Why Women Should Rule the World, by DeeDee Myers; Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi.

84480 Gender and Applied Economics.

L. Edlund

Call#41851
TR 2:40-3:55pm, 516 Hamilton Hall

3pts. Same as ECON W4480. This course studies gender gaps -- their extent, determinants and consequences. We will focus on the allocation of rights in different cultures and over time, why women's rights have typically been more limited and why most societies have traditionally favored males in the allocation of resources.

84548 American Social Policy from the Progressives to the Present.

A. Kessler-Harris

Call#1202
M 4:10-6pm, 311 Fayerweather

3pts. Same as HIST W4548. An exploration of the intellectual, political, and social sources and consequences of some key social policies with special attention to the roles played by gender, race and religion in their configuration. This fall, the course is likely to include such issues as Mothers' pensions; protective labor legislation; health care; social security; unemployment insurance; equal employment opportunity; birth control and abortion; welfare; and affirmative action. A substantial research paper will be required. Application required through the History Department.

BC4861 Body Histories: The Case of Footbinding.

D. Ko

Call#01934
R 2:10pm-4:00pm, 22 Lehman Hall

4pts. Same as HIST BC4861. The deceptively small subject of footbinding provides a window into the larger family dynamics and sexual politics in Chinese history and society. Explores the multiple representations of footbinding in European travelogues, ethnographic interviews, Chinese erotic novels and prints, and the polemics of modern and feminist critiques. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Preregistration required. General Education Requirement: Historical Studies (HIS).

P8709 Seminar in Sexuality, Gender, Health & Human Rights.

C. Vance

Call#68206
M 3-4:50pm, 412 Armand Hammer Health Sciences Center

3pts. Same as SOSC P8709. Students must fill out application form for permission. Prerequisites: previous coursework or work experience in at least two of the following areas-sexuality, gender, health, and human- rights-and instructor's permission. Examines recent scholarship regarding sexuality, and explores ways of integrating its empirical findings and theoretical challenges with work on gender, health, and human rights. Building on developments evident since the United Nations conferences in Cairo and Beijing, as well as the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the seminar critically analyzes new work on sexuality in light of current practical issues raised by policy intervention, public health programs, and grass-roots organizing. Drawing on the most recent scholarship and activism in sexuality, gender, health, and human rights, students explore how these basic human issues can be integrated more effectively. The seminar analyzes contemporary case studies in order to identify significant achievements, limitations, and challenges posed by current approaches and programs, in domestic and international settings. The seminar aims to promote dialogue and exchange between academic, activist, and advocacy work. Weekly critical response essays, seminar presentations, and a term paper are required.

Gender Related Courses in Other Departments

Africana Studies

American Studies

Anthropology

Art History

Comparative Literature

East Asian Languages and Culture

Education

English & Comparative Literature

Film

First Year Seminar

French & Romance Philology

History

International Affairs

Italian

Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures

Political Science

Population and Family Health

Psychology

Sociology

Spanish & Portuguese

Theatre