Courses

Courses

Fall 2007 Courses

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016. What We Talk about When We Talk about Love
Guy Foster T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55 HL-311 (third floor)
Examines literary texts in which writers from the United States and Europe follow a well-worn literary dictum to “show rather than tell” narratives dramatizing the always complex, sometimes painful, but always endlessly challenging negotiations of intimate relationships. Throughout the term, students read a variety of literary works: from an Anton Chekhov play to short stories by Edwidge Danticat and Raymond Carver. Attention given to the impact on these narratives of historical and cultural shifts in race, gender, class, and sexual discourses.

020. In Sickness and in Health: Public Health in Europe and the United States
Susan Tananbaum M 2:30 - 3:55, W 2:30 - 3:55 CT-16 Whiteside Room
Introduces a variety of historical perspectives on illness and health. Considers the development of scientific knowledge, and the social, political, and economic forces that have influenced public health policy. Topics include epidemics, maternal and child welfare, AIDS, and national health care.

101. Introduction to Gender and Women's Studies
Kristen Ghodsee T 1:00 - 2:25, TH 1:00 - 2:25 Hubbard-Conference Room West
An interdisciplinary introduction to the issues, perspectives, and findings of the new scholarship that examines the role of gender in the construction of knowledge. The course explores what happens when women become the subjects of study; what is learned about women; what is learned about gender; and how disciplinary knowledge itself is changed.

102. Cultural Choreographies: An Introduction to Dance
June Vail T 10:00 - 11:25, TH 10:00 - 11:25 Memorial Hall-601 Dance Studio
Dancing is a fundamental human activity, a mode of communication, and a basic force in social life. Investigates dance and movement in the studio and classroom as aesthetic and cultural phenomena. Explores how dance and movement activities reveal information about cultural norms and values and affect perspectives in our own and other societies. Using ethnographic methods, focuses on how dancing maintains and creates conceptions of one’s own body, gender relationships, and personal and community identities. Experiments with dance and movement forms from different cultures and epochs—for example, the hula, New England contradance, classical Indian dance, Balkan kolos, ballet, contact improvisation, and African American dance forms from swing to hiphop—through readings, performances, workshops in the studio, and field work.

201. Feminist Theory
Jennifer Scanlon T 1:00 - 2:25, TH 1:00 - 2:25 Kanbar Hall-109
The history of women's studies and its transformation into gender studies and feminist theory has always included a tension between creating “woman,” and political and theoretical challenges to that unity. This course examines that tension in two dimensions: the development of critical perspectives on gender and power relations both within existing fields of knowledge, and within the continuous evolution of feminist discourse itself.

203. Women in Performance
Gretchen Berg M 11:30 - 12:55, W 11:30 - 12:55 Memorial-108
An exploration of women on stage — as characters, performers, playwrights, directors, designers, and technicians. Reflecting their studies and personal experiences, students engage in historical research and in-class studio work that culminates in performance projects at the end of the semester.

210. Global Sexualities, Local Desires
Krista Van Vleet T 10:00 - 11:25, TH 10:00 - 11:25 Hubbard-22
Explores the variety of practices, performances, and ideologies of sexuality through a cross-cultural perspective. Focusing on contemporary anthropological scholarship on sexuality and gender, asks whether Western conceptions of “sexuality,” “sex,” and “gender” help us understand the lives and desires of people in other social and cultural contexts. Topics may include Brazilian transgendered prostitutes (travestí), intersexuality, and the naturalization of sex; “third gendered” individuals and religion in Native North America, India, and Chile; language and the performance of sexuality by drag queens in the United States; transnationalism and the global construction of “gay” identity in Indonesia; lesbian and gay kinship; AIDS in Cuba and Brazil; and Japanese Takarazuka theater. In addition to ethnographic examples of alternative genders and sexualities (so called “third genders” and non-heterosexual sexualities) in both Western and non-Western contexts, also presents the major theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches used by anthropologists to understand sexuality, and considers how shifts in feminist and queer politics have also required anthropologists to focus on other social differences such as class, race, ethnicity, and post-colonial relations.

217. Dostoevsky or Tolstoy
Raymond Miller T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55 Sills-109
Explores and compares two giants of Russian literature, Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Their works are read for their significance, both to Russian cultural history and to European thought; special attention is paid to the portrayal of women and women’s issues in both authors. Part I studies Dostoevsky’s quest for guiding principles of freedom and love in a world of growing violence, cynicism, and chaos. “The Woman Question” emerges as a constant subject: Dostoevsky particularly concerned himself with the suffering of poor and humiliated women. A close reading of several short works and the novel Brothers Karamazov set in their historical, and intellectual framework. Emphasis on the novelist’s struggle between Western materialistic individualism and Eastern voluntary self-renunciation. Examines Dostoevsky’s “fantastic realism” as a polyphony of voices, archetypes, and religious symbols. Part II studies Tolstoy’s development both as a novelist and a moral philosopher. Examines several works, the most important being the novel Anna Karenina, with special emphasis on the tension between Tolstoy-the-artist and Tolstoy-the-moralist. Discussion of the writer’s role as “the conscience of Russia” in the last thirty years of his life, as well as his influence on such figures as Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

227. Women and World Development
Kristen Ghodsee T 10:00 - 11:25, TH 10:00 - 11:25 HL-311 (third floor)
Makes an interdisciplinary and critical survey of the previous development paradigms and their diverse and wide-ranging consequences. Using literary, journalistic, theoretical, and visual texts, first examines the issues and experiences of women in the “developing” and “transitioning” world through their own words. Then reviews the major theoretical underpinnings of the “Women and Development,” “Women in Development,” and “Gender and Development” movements and the critiques that they have engendered over the previous three decades. Also explores women’s issues in the post-modern context, looking at the emerging challenges that the late capitalist globalization, neo-liberal economic hegemony, and self-defining nationalisms and fundamentalisms pose to the way that women ultimately experience their lives and societies.

231. Economics of the Life Cycle
Rachel Connelly T 11:30 - 12:55, TH 11:30 - 12:55 Searles-223
A study of economic issues that occur at each age as one moves through life, such as economics of education, career choice, marriage (and divorce), fertility, division of labor in the household, child care, glass ceilings, poverty and wealth, health care, elder care, and retirement. Considers age-relevant economic models, the empirical work that informs understanding, and the policy questions that emerge at each age lifecycle stage. Differences in experience based on race, gender, sexuality, income level, and national origin are an important component for discussion. Not open to students who have credit for Economics 301.

234. Romantic Sexualities
David Collings M 11:30 - 12:55, W 11:30 - 12:55 Searles-115
Investigates constructions of sexuality in English romantic writing. Examines tales of seduction by supernatural or demonic figures; the sexualized world of the Gothic; the Byronic hero; the yearning for an eroticized muse or goddess; and same-sex desire in travel writing, orientalist fantasy, diary, and realist fiction. Discusses the place of such writing in the history of sexuality, repression, the unconscious, and the sublime. Authors may include Austen, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Lister, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Wollstonecraft, alongside secondary, theoretical, and historical works. Formerly English 241.

243. Central Asia through Film and Literature
Jane Knox-Voina T 10:00 - 11:25, TH 10:00 - 11:25 Sills-Language Media Center
Examination of little-known Central Asian peoples of the former Soviet Union and Mongolia, and the unique challenges facing them at the start of the twenty-first century. Studies the history and culture of this transitional zone, which links West and East, Christianity and Islam, Europe and Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, and Mongolia). Includes examples of Central Asian literature and cinema. Special focus on changes in the socio-economic status of women in the region, and the spirituality (shamanism) and cultural traditions of these groups, as well as the environmental and sociopolitical issues facing them. Addresses questions such as how politicization and industrialization affect the belief systems of the indigenous ethnic groups, their rural or subsistence economies, and their attitude toward the environment; and the present and future international significance of this vast, oil-rich area.

256. Women in Religion
Elizabeth Pritchard T 11:30 - 12:55, TH 11:30 - 12:55 Ashby House-Conference Room
An analysis of the ways in which religion authorizes women’s oppression and provides opportunities and resources for women’s emancipation. Topics include the enforced gender relationships of monotheism, the goddess movement as alternative society, and the conflicts generated among women by racial, class, religious, ethnic, and sexual differences. Material drawn from Christianity, Neopaganism, Voudon, and Hinduism.

258. Women and Art
Pamela Fletcher M 11:30 - 12:55, W 11:30 - 12:55 VAC-Beam Classroom
Considers the role of women as producers, viewers, and subjects of art from the Renaissance to the present. Topics include the tradition of the female nude, the rise of the Academies and their impact on women artists, the role of women as patrons of the arts, the gendered language of art criticism, the emergence of significant numbers of women artists in the twentieth century, and the impact of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s on the art world.

260. African American Fiction: (Re)Writing Black Masculinities
Guy Foster T 11:30 - 12:55, TH 11:30 - 12:55 Sills-109
Well over a century ago, Frederick Douglass told his white readers: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” By employing a figure of speech known as chiasmus, Douglass highlights the extent to which African American male identity has historically rested on a troubling paradox: although black and white males share a genital sameness, the former inhabit a culturally subjugated gender identity in a society premised on both white supremacy and patriarchy. By examining a range of U.S. literary and other popular texts – from Douglass’s 1845 narrative, to the 1980s interracial buddy film genre, to contemporary works by black and non-black, as well as by male and female writers – students will examine the myriad cultural ramifications of this enduring paradox, included among them: misogyny and homophobia.. Note: This course fulfills the literature of the Americas requirement for English majors.

261. Gender, Film, and Consumer Culture
Jennifer Scanlon T 8:30 - 9:55, TH 8:30 - 9:55 Banister-106
How do we spend money, and why? Examines the relationship between gender and consumer culture over the course of the twentieth century. Explores women's and men's relationships to consumer culture in a variety of contexts: the heterosexual household, the bachelor pad, the gay-friendly urban cafeteria, the advertising agency, and the department store. Also explores the ways in which Hollywood films, from the 1930s to the present, have both furthered and complicated gendered notions about the consumption of goods.

262. Drama and Performance in the Twentieth Century and Beyond
Marilyn Reizbaum M 1:00 - 2:25, W 1:00 - 2:25 Chase Barn Chamber
Examines dramatic trends of the century, ranging from the social realism of Ibsen to the performance art of Laurie Anderson. Traverses national and literary traditions and demonstrates that work in translation like that of Ibsen or Brecht has a place in the body of dramatic literature in English. Discusses such topics as dramatic translation (Liz Lochhead’s translation of Moliere’s Tartuffe); epic theater and its millennial counterpart (Bertold Brecht, Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill); political drama (Frank McGuinness, Athol Fugard); the “nihilism” of absurdist drama (Samuel Beckett); the “low” form of the musical (as presented, for example, by Woody Allen); and the relationship of dance to theater (Henrik Ibsen, Ntozake Shange, Stomp, Enda Walsh) with an eye to the cultural and sexual politics attending all of these categories. Formerly English 262.

312. Resistance and Accommodation: Comparative Perspectives on Gender
Nancy Riley T 11:30 - 12:55, TH 11:30 - 12:55 Mass-McKeen Study
In societies across the world, many face discrimination and oppression because of gender stratification and because of inequalities that arise from both local norms and expectations and from societal-level and even global-level forces. In response to the inequities they face, people have found ways to live in, accommodate, challenge, and change those inequalities. Examines gender inequalities and the ways that those in different communities and societies have reacted to them. As part of the course, each student conducts a major research project on an issue of gender.

320. Victorian Epics
Aviva Briefel T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55 Mass-McKeen Study
Examines one of the foremost literary forms of the Victorian period: the long novel. By focusing on a few central texts, investigates the ways in which narrative length shapes stories about wide-ranging issues related to nationalism, science, technology, and empire, as well as allegedly “local” issues regarding domesticity, familial relations, personal adornment, and romance. Of central concern is an inquiry into how the long novel weaves narratives about gender into its various plots. Explores recent criticism on the Victorian texts read in the course. Authors may include Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Anthony Trollope.

346. Philosophy of Gender: Sex and Love
Sarah Conly M 1:00 - 2:25, W 1:00 - 2:25 Edward Pols House-Conf Room
Issues of sex and love preoccupy us but may not be well understood. Considers what "counts" as having sex, why that matters, and what it is to love someone. These and other relevant topics will be explored through readings and discussion.