Fall 2009 Courses

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

V1001 Introduction to Women and Gender Studies.

L. Ciolkowski and D. Valenze

Call#02215
T 11am-12:15, with discussion section R 11am-12:15pm, 405 Milbank Hall

BC1050 Women and Health.

R. Young

Call#05986
TR 1:10-2:25pm, 405 Milbank Hall

V3111 Feminist Texts I: Wollstonecraft to Beauvoir.

E. Tawil

Call#98396
M 2:10-4pm, 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.

K. Hall

Call#09866
W 9-10:50am, 203 Barnard Hall

4pts. Examines roles of black women in the U.S. as thinkers, activists and creators during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the intellectual work, social activism and cultural expression of African American women, we examine how they understood their lives, resisted oppression and struggled to change society. We will also discuss theoretical frameworks (such as "double jeopardy," or "intersectionality") developed for the study of black women. The seminar will encourage students to pay particular attention to the diversity of black women and critical issues facing Black women today.

V3312 Theorizing Women's Activism.

E. Bernstein & J. Jakobsen

Call#06039
W 4:10-6pm, 101 Barnard Hall

4pts. Helps students develop and apply useful theoretical models to feminist organizing on local and international levels. It involves reading, presentations, and seminar reports. Students use first-hand knowledge of the practices of specific women's activist organizations for theoretical work.

V3521 Senior Seminar.

E. Povinelli

Section 002
Call#20996
M 11am-12:50pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.

V3521 Senior Seminar.

N. Tadiar

Section 001
Call#03661
T 11am-12:50pm, 101 Barnard Hall

V3813 Colloquium on Feminist Inquiry.

R. Young

Call#02467
R 4:10-6pm, 101 Barnard Hall

W4300 Advanced Topics in Women's and Gender Studies: Feminism and Diaspora: Rites and Rights of Return.

M. Hirsch

Section 001
Call#60896
W 2:10-4pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension

4pts. This course explores contemporary diasporic and transnational feminism from the perspective of the ethics and politics of return. The losses suffered in the last century, the atrocities that have dominated it, and the displacement of peoples across the globe continue to preoccupy our current imagination, calling for justice and acts of repair.  What accounts for the contemporary obsession with the recovery of roots?  How are gender and the body tropes and idioms of remembrance?  Through a cross-disciplinary analysis of new and old media of return to past places (memoir and fiction, ritual and performance, visual and digital media, tourism, museums and memorials, as well as DNA testing), we will focus on a number of sites where contested histories collide and lost stories are waiting to be recovered (the aftermath of the slavery in Africa and the new world; anti-semitism, the Holocaust and the Nakbah in Europe and Israel/Palestine; racism, poverty and Katrina in New Orleans; queer diaspora and transnational adoption; and the claims of indigenous peoples to restitution and redress). The personal, the familial, the affective, and the intimate have offered constitutive structures of thinking in feminist theory, trauma theory, and psychoanalysis. We will bring these same emphases to bear on the paradigms of diaspora, place and displacement.

W4300 Advanced Topics in Women's and Gender Studies: Gender and Violence: Theories in Embodiment.

H. Kotef

Section 002
Call#26299
W 11am-12:50pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.

4pts. Our bodies are physically vulnerable. This is a biological fact. But what are the social ramifications of this fact? How does the abuse of this vulnerability through violence affect our social structures? How is it mapped into hierarchies? Can it be translated into sexual and gendered stratifications? into race and class? into ethnic and national identities? Looking at violence through the lens of gender we will aim to better understand both the function of violence in the construction of gender and sexual roles, and the function of gender and sexuality in cultures of violence. Examining the manners by which violence is perceived and theorized we will trace shifts in the demarcations of the political sphere, and with them shifting modes of exclusion and power. Mapping the changing facets of the political body (the different perspectives on embodiment as a political practice) we will ask whether gender can be thought of – can be produced – outside of violence. Finally, we will analyze the transnational and global contexts and effects of violence against women – as well as the global contexts and effects of violence of women.

W4300 Advanced Topics in Women's and Gender Studies: Charismatic Femininity in Twentieth Century Europe

G. Dietze

Section 003
Call#77532
R 2:10-4pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.

4pts. Positioned on the crossroads of literary, cultural and media studies the seminar will investigate exceptional figurations of femininity in different fields. Starting with theoretical companionship and dissidence (Lou Andreas-Salomé) poetical role-playing (Else Lasker-Schueler), and colonial ‘feminist’ empowerment (Karen Blixen) the emphasis will move then to ostentatious sovereignty in the first sexual revolution in the Twenties and Thirties incorporated by diva Marlene Dietrich and her movies contrasted to Leni Riefenstahl, the flamboyant Nazi director and her film heroines. Simone de Beauvoir, the early mastermind of Second Wave Feminism, will be looked at as a complex sign system of theoretical innovation, life-style avant-garde and radical politics. Late 20th century will be represented by media spectacles such as the death of Princess Diana and elections campaigns of Sigourny Royal and Angela Merkel. By taking into account theories of female powerlessness or ‘masquerade’, the seminar as well aims to address and theorize female cultural practices of performative agency. (Knowledge of German and French is not required but helpful)

W4302 Advanced Topics in Women's and Gender Studies: The Search for Self - 20th Century U.S. Jewish Women Writers, Part II: 1939 - Present.

I. Klepfisz

Call#03012
T 4:10-6pm, 101 Barnard Hall

4pts. Examines the memoirs and fiction by American Jewish Women writers from 1939 to the present, with a focus on the relationships between Jewish identity, post-Holocaust consciousness, gender, and class. Writers to be studied include Lucy Dawidowicz, Jo Sinclair, Tillie Olsen, Eva Hoffman, Grace Paley, Helen Epstein, Pearl Abraham, Judith Katz, and Elana Dykewomon.

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.

A. Rao

Section 001
Call#66396
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.

G6001 Theoretical Paradigms in Feminist Thought: Haunted Visuality: The Sight and Senses of Race.

S. Hartman & T. Campt

Section 002
Call#51546
T 1:15-3:30pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension

3pts. How should we understand the relations between gender, race, visuality and the senses? How is the visuality of race produced through other sensory registers and genres? And why is the site of this production most often configured around the gendered body? The photographic image has played a critical role in documenting the history of racialized communities and in producing them. Yet the meaning of racial difference in the visual domain is most often conceived as a binary of abjection and idealization. Starting from a different point of entry such as the sonic or haptic dimensions of visuality produces an alternate way of understanding racial and gendered formation. Looking at these distinct domains has produced different accounts of the subject, the meaning of difference, and a re-mapping of power and agency. This course engages contemporary theories of photography and visual culture, theories of the sonic and the haptic, history, literature and anthropology to explore the complex relationship between race, gender, visuality and the senses.This video-linked, inter-institutional, graduate/faculty seminar will be team-taught by Professors Tina Campt at Duke and Saidiya Hartman at Columbia University. Sponsored by the Women?s Studies Program at Duke and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia, the seminar will be structured around a common set of readings and a joint lecture series with speakers who will hold public talks and meet with seminar participants to discuss pre-circulated readings.

Crosslisted Courses

84080 Topics in the Black Experience: Black Feminist Musical Sub-Cultures.

D. Brooks

Call#42247
R 2:10-4pm, 758 Schermerhorn Ext.

3pts. Same as AFAS G4080, Sec. 004. From Bessie Smith and Eartha Kitt to Betty Davis and Beyonce, from Nina Simone and Labelle to Lauryn Hill and Santogold, black female artists have used varied forms of musical expression as sites of social and ideological resistance and revision. Through an exploration of voice, kinesthetic performance, and fashion aesthetics, this course interrogates the "world wide underground" of black female musical culture as insurgent feminist subcultural praxis.  How might we re-interrogate pop music subculture theories through the intersecting prisms of race, gender, class and sexuality? What are the ways that black female musicians operate as socio-political and cultural intellectuals? Throughout the semester, we will explore the ways in which lack female cultural producers have stylized and innovated counter-hegemonic performance practices within the context of American popular music culture, from the postbellum era through the present day.  Part of the aim of this course is to trace the tensions between the enormous influence and ubiquity of the black female singing voice in globalized popular cultures and the ways in which a range of entertainers have nonetheless negotiated eccentric and “obscure” musical gestures that signaled and affirmed the existence of resistant musical aesthetics in the face of panopticism. Iconic performers as well as lesser-known artists will figure prominently in discussions that will focus on re-theorizing subculture studies in relation to black female musicality. Through an interrogation of performance politics and the work of unconventional black vaudeville musical and cabaret entertainers, classic blues and jazz artists, gospel singers, rock and roll pioneers, girl groups, folk and pop iconoclasts, funk and disco performers, punk and new wave musicians, and contemporary R&B and hip hop artists, this course will examine the meaning of musical bohemia for black women as well as the ways that black feminist praxis emerges sonically and in the context of embodied performance. Audio texts, as well as film and video, literary narrative, critical theory, pop music criticism, artist biographies, and cultural histories will serve as central sites of textual inquiry.

TC ORLH 4500 Special Topic: Women and Higher Education.

J. Glazer-Raymo

Call#31982
R 7:20-9 pm, TBA

3pts. This course provides students with the opportunity to engage in systematic study of the role and status of women in contemporary American society, with a particular focus on women in higher education as students, faculty, and administrators. Utilizing interpretive and critical frameworks drawn from feminist scholarship, students explore the nature of women’s experience in higher education, issues and policies that influence their participation, and strategies for change. Among the topical areas to be considered are the gender gap in college, Title IX and affirmative action, employment and academic leadership, feminist activism, pedagogy and curriculum transformation, and the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class in shaping campus cultures. Readings will provide opportunities to explore in greater depth the topics under discussion.

86506 Gender Justice.

K. Franke

M & W 10:40am-12:00pm, TBA

3pts. Same as LAW L6506.  This course will provide an introduction to the concrete legal contexts in which issues of gender and justice have been   articulated, disputed and hesitatingly and provisionally resolved.   Readings will cover issues such as Women and the Legal Profession,   Sexual Harassment, Sex Role Stereotyping, Work/Family Conflict,   Marriage and Alternatives to Marriage, Parenting, Domestic Violence,  Reproduction and Pregnancy, Rape, Sex Work & Trafficking, Gender &   Cultural Equality, and International Women's Rights. Through these   readings we will explore the multiple ways in which the law has   contended with sexual difference, gender-based stereotypes, and the   meaning of equality in domestic, transnational and international   contexts. So too, we will discuss how feminist theorists have   thought about sex, gender and sexuality in understanding and   critiquing our legal system and its norms. Students will be   evaluated both on class participation and on a final take-home examination. For more information, go to: http://www2.law.columbia.edu/faculty_franke/Gender_Justice/2009.html
  No laptops will be allowed in this class.

88709 Seminar in Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights.

C. Vance

Call#51951
M 3:00-4:50pm, TBA

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.

89823 Human Rights and the Question of Culture.

K. Thomas & T. Keenan

R 4:20 - 7:10pm, TBA

3pts. Same as LAW L9823. What makes culture a question for international human rights discourse? This interdisciplinary seminar explores the diverse uses of culture as a concept in contemporary human rights theory and practice. Members of the seminar will be given an opportunity to examine the universalizing methods and aspirations of traditional -- and some not-so-traditional -- human rights programs and to measure these against another style of argument and analysis whose genealogy is thought or asserted to be more specifically cultural. The seminar will introduce and discuss concepts from a variety of disciplines which might be used to understand and interrogate the categories that underwrite the opposition between human rights and culture. We will then examine the specific strategies of rhetoric and representation that construct and sustain the relationship between human rights and culture as a real or imagined problem, in academic debate and in the world of international law and power politics. Weekly seminar meetings will focus on close reading and discussion of a broad range of materials: transcripts of legal proceedings, international treaties, conventions and declarations, commission reports, and court judgments; scholarly work in law, history, literary and cultural studies, as well as political science and theory; journalism; literature, film and video. Interested students should email Prof. Thomas for permission prior to registering for the course, since he intends to email the course syllabus and initial reading assignment, due on the first class meeting, in advance in order to give students time to prepare.  

89551 Feminist Theory Workshop.

K. Franke

T 4:20-6:10pm, TBA

3pts. Same as LAW L9551.  The Feminist Theory Workshop in the Fall of 2009 will focus on   issues of gender in transnational and international contexts.    Readings and speakers will cover issues of sex trafficking, gender   and colonialism, development, and human rights.  Key questions will   include: to what degree do efforts to combat gender-based   discrimination on the international or global scale risk repeating a  kind of colonial exercise; how have campaigns to combat sex   trafficking become tied up with the politics of prostitution/sex   work; how can global efforts to expand women's rights avoid   positioning cultures as more or less primitive, more or less   liberal; and how do gender and sex rights claims get used as proxies  for other global struggles?  The Workshop will be comprised of outside speakers for half of the sessions, and selected readings related to the work of the outside speakers in the intervening sessions.  Students will be expected to write three short reflection papers and one 15 page paper on a topic  of their choosing, approved by the Professor.  Students will be   evaluated on the basis of their class participation, short papers   and their final paper.
  No laptops will be allowed in the Workshop.

Gender Related Courses in Other Departments

American Studies

Anthropology

Art History

Barnard Leadership Initiative

Classical Civilization

East Asian Languages and Culture

Economics

BC2075 Logic Limits Economic Justice.
W4480 Gender and Applied Economics.
G6270 Topics in Economics of Gender.

Education

English & Comparative Literature

Ethnicity and Race

Film

First Year Seminar

Germanic Languages

History

Italian

Political Science

Population and Family Health

Psychology

Religion

Social Work

T6133 Social Work with Women.

Spanish & Portuguese Language

Theatre