GNPR 290: Feminist Movements and Acts

Over the last decade, this "core" course for the concentration in Feminist and Gender Studies has been conceptualized as a junior seminar that uses contemporary feminist scholarship to examine gender as a mark of social and cultural differentiation, and organized around different themes and questions as a means of presenting key issues in feminist and gender studies to majors, concentrators, and minors.

This year, we will focus upon the question of what constitutes a feminist politics. We will be assessing a range of political, intellectual, and cultural movements that have influenced feminist theory and practice in the late twentieth century; these readings and conversations will be points of orientation and departure for your own investigations into feminist political formations, intellectual projects, and discursive practices that might inflect social relations, political visions, and cultural institutions in the twenty-first century. As professors, we will be approaching this course both from the perspective afforded by our academic disciplines (history and literary criticism) as well as by our personal and political investments in feminism. We will be asking a series of interrelated questions: How do we define a theory, practice, or movement as "feminist"? What have different feminist movements and practices taught us about the possibilities for working across national, cultural, geographic, and religious differences? How do feminist strategies work in relation to affiliations that people create based on constructions of gender, constitutions of race, and articulations of political agendas? How is social experience structured and how are social structures gendered? What have been feminist contributions to cultural debates that affect the situation and status of women? How has feminism been enacted in relation to nationalistic and imperialistic discourses; how can informed feminist perspectives critique these frameworks?

Course Requirements:
This class is a seminar, not a lecture course: your ideas are central, and it's important that you come to class prepared to share them. Attendance in every sense of the word is required for this class, so we ask that in addition to doing the scheduled reading, you come prepared to listen actively and to make thoughtful contributions to presentations and discussions.

We ask that you devote at least 20 minutes a week to an on-line group journal in which you’ll record your responses to the class readings as well as your evolving ideas for your semester project, You should post your entry by Monday at 5:00 PM, to ensure that everyone has a time to read and reflect on your response.

Each week, you will have a short (2-3) page written assignment based on the assigned readings that will be due in class, and, as part of a small group, you will be responsible for formulating questions for class discussion for one of the sessions.
You will have a 4-6 page "position paper" due at noon on October 24 that will provide a conceptual framework for your presentation and your semester project.

Semester Project: You will be working on a semester-long project that will be the basis of a 12-15 page paper that will be due on December 16 at noon. For your project, focus on something you want to know more about that involves, in some way, some of the issues we are dealing with in class. For example, you may decide to become involved with an organization such as the Women’s Law Project, Women in Black, or Gabriela to become more familiar with the theories and practices that influence current social justice movements. You might decide to do a series of interviews with feminist activists to find out how these women define feminism in the context of their work. You might decide to map out a project dealing with issues and ideas surrounding eco-feminism, female circumcision, transgendered communities, violence against women, the politics of breast cancer; you might want to explore the legacy of a particular feminist activist or writer, i.e Audre Lorde, Sister Mary Scullion, Fatima Mernissi, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cheri Honkala, etc. We will discuss ideas, research tactics, and writing techniques for the projects in depth -- but the most important part of the project will be choosing a topic that genuinely inspires you.

You will present your project to the class. We hope you will consider various options: A published essay? An in-class oral presentation? A video? A dance or performance piece dealing with the issues you've addressed? A poem, or group of poems? The readings for these class sessions will be chosen by the students in consultation with the professors.

Office hours: We welcome and encourage you to come and talk with us in office hours whenever you'd like -- to discuss the books we've studied, the ideas we've been exploring, the writing you're working on, or anything else the class has sparked in you.

Book list:
Lynda Barry, One! Hundred! Demons!
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
The other readings will be in a course reader that will be available the third week of classes.

September 2: Locating Ourselves
Introductions
Adrienne Rich, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location"
Assignment: Think about how a specific experience in which your body has been a "site" on which/through which/against which you have constructed a feminist perspective (i.e. a visit to the doctor, creating an online identity, going on a diet or on a date); how does your reconstruction/reconsideration of that experience work in relation to issues raised in Rich’s essay?

September 9: Toward a Politics of Location
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Minnie Bruce Pratt, "Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart"
Joan Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis"
Assignment: Choose a space that you inhabit (locker room, department store dressing room, classroom, your home, the street on which you live -- daytime, nighttime) as a point of orientation for a reflection on how you are gendered in that place.

September 16: Situating the Subject
Audre Lorde, " "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"
Joan Scott, "On Experience"
Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak"
Kamala Visweswaran, "Refusing the Subject"
Assignment: Write about three experiences: one which created a sense of belonging to a group, one in which you were excluded from a group, and one in which you excluded another from a group to which you belonged. How have these experiences shaped your critical perspective? What might be the political implications of these experiences?

September 23: Theorizing Difference
Donna Haraway, "Investment Strategies for the Evolving Portfolios of Primate Females"
Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex"
[Judith Butler, excerpts from Gender Trouble: "Preface (1999), "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire," "From Parody to Politics"]
Cherrie Moraga, "The Breakdown of the Bicultural Mind"
Assignment: Focus on two of the readings and compare the authors’ suggestions and strategies for attending to/contending with difference.

September 30: Disciplinary Perspectives on Feminism and Gender Studies
Assignment: Select a feminist journal in your discipline or in recent anthology of feminist essays and choose two articles/essays that are thematically linked. What kind of conversation/debate is being played out between these writers? What questions arise? Is a particular definition of feminist being engendered, explicitly or implicitly?

October 7: Roundtable with Monica Medina of the Chinatown Free Clinic, [tentatively scheduled: Jeannine Miller of Project Home, Dee Dee Risher of The Other Side, and a representative from the Kensington Welfare Rights organization]
Assignment: Think about yourself as a political subject/agent: what are the ways in which you enact, implement, or critique feminist ideas/ideals in your day to day life?

October 21: Thinking Locally, Acting Globally? Feminism and Challenges to Imperialism
RAWA related readings
Assignment: Prepare a "case-history" on an issue or movement that crosses political, social, cultural, or national borders (i.e. Women in Black, Gabriella, debates on female genital mutilation, sex-positive movements, etc).
October 24: A 4-6 page position paper highlighting the central concerns, questions, and investments that are shaping your project is due at noon.

October 28: Girls (and Boys)
Readings: Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis
Assignment: Compare Barry’s and Satrapi’s representations of childhood; what do their artistic strategies reveal and reflect?

November 4: Gender and the Social Construction of Disability: Conversation with Kristin Lindgren
Readings tba by Kristin