This course uses gender to examine the processes, politics and policies of economic development. We will begin with an introduction to alternative approaches to economics and to economic development, focusing on the neoclassical and feminist approaches, and on the theoretical frameworks that have shaped the gender perspective in economic development. We will also examine the impacts of economic development policy on men and women and on gender relations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, in the context of a globalizing world economy. Special topics will include women’s unpaid labor, women in the informal sector; the household as a unit of analysis; the gendered impacts of structural adjustment, neoliberal economic policies and economic crisis; the feminization of migration flows and the global labor force, and the implications of these trends for economic development.
Spring semester. Visiting Lecturer Pickbourn.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course introduces students to the issues involved in the social and historical construction of gender and gender roles from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective. Topics change from year-to-year and have included women and social change; male and female sexualities including homosexualities; the uses and limits of biology in explaining human gender differences; women’s participation in production and reproduction; the relationship among gender, race and class as intertwining oppressions; women, men and globalization; and gender and warfare.
Fall semester. Professors Hunt and Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course we will explore the intimate relations of gender and labor: both the necessary labor of genders’ production as well as the gendered organization of labor itself. In general the course will use gender to focus on contemporary concerns in the American workplace--class, ethnicity, sexuality, and race--but will also make critical comparisons with developments in other nations. The biological labor of reproduction and its intersection with the labor of production will necessarily be a constant concern in our discussions. We shall have to become familiar with certain terms: glass ceiling, glass escalator, mommy-track, affirmative action, child care, sexual harassment, welfare to workfare. We certainly might want to ask what constitutes work? But we also might need to wonder if work is done for love, is it still work?
Spring semester. Professors Barale and Olver.
2023-24: Not offeredHistorically the law has functioned as much to differentiate women from men as to assert their similarities. This course will explore the variety of types of laws (natural law, religious law, statute law, customary law, and the like) that have been used to regulate women’s lives and try to assess the philosophies that lie behind them. Family law, especially where it pertains to marriage, divorce, married women’s property, domestic assault, custody, and so forth, will receive special attention through a comparison of Western European and American legal traditions with Muslim shari’a law, both in the past and the present. The course will look closely at the law and law enforcement as they pertain to female sexuality, and assess issues to do with women criminals as well as women as victims of specific types of criminal acts such as rape. It will examine what happens to women when (a) legal structures break down, as in war, and (b) when “the law” becomes a tool of racial, ethnic, religious, sexual or gender repression. Finally, it will address the extent to which “changing the law” succeeds as a strategy for empowering women by looking at several key legal campaigns involving women in both Western and non-Western settings.
Sources will include religious writing (such as the Book of Leviticus from the Bible and the second and fourth surahs of the Qur’an), transcripts of court cases from a variety of times and places, historical writings on adultery and prostitution, biographical accounts of female criminals, and contemporary discussions in various media pertaining to the human rights of women and sexual minorities. Two class meetings per week.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Hunt.
2023-24: Not offeredWe consider how evolving sexual identities (homosexual/LGBT/queer) have used foundational texts (or “classics”) to create a shared history without getting trapped in it. We look at these emerging identities in the context of more visible racial and ethnic communities, and read theory by Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, and others. Some questions: How are queer kids parented by texts and, since great books tend to be tragic books, do we get more pride than pain from the experience? What do we gain and lose by recruiting earlier authors into identities that they would not have recognized or admitted? Are such canons a relic of the closet or do they still matter amid mainstreaming and the Internet? Authors and directors include: Sappho, Sophocles, Plato, Petronius, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Yukio Mishima, Manuel Puig, and Marlon Riggs.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Griffiths.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as WAGS 32 and POSC 24 [CP, GP].) This course is intended to give students a sense of the challenges and satisfactions involved in the practice of human rights work as well as a critical sense of how the discourses calling it forth developed and continue to evolve. We intend to provide specific historical and cultural context to selected areas in which human rights abuses of women and men have occurred, and to explore how differing traditions facilitate and inhibit activism within these areas. The semester will begin by exploring the historical growth of human rights discourse in Europe and the United States, culminating in the emergence of the post-World War II Universal Declaration. We will then turn to the proliferation of these discourses since the 1970s, including the growing importance of non-governmental organizations, many of them internationally based, the use of human rights discourse by a wide range of groups, and expanding meanings of human rights including new conceptions of women’s human rights. The third part of the course will explore criticisms of human rights discourses, particularly the charge that for all their claims to universalism, these discourses reflect the values of European Enlightenment traditions which are inimical to conceptions of rights and justice that are grounded in culture and religion. Throughout the course, rights’ workers will discuss their own experiences, abroad and in the U.S., and reflect on the relationship between their work and formal human rights discourse.
Omitted 2010-11. Professors Basu and Saxton.
2023-24: Not offeredWhy do we still read Shakespeare? What relevance does Shakespeare have for us today? In this course we will think through explorations of gender, race, caste and sexuality in modern-day adaptations of Shakespearean texts and continued need to engage with Shakespeare in the present-day. We will draw on a wide variety of both filmic and literary texts from across the world. Texts will range from Merchant Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah to South African activist-novelist Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story and South Asian feminist poet Suniti Namjoshi’s Snapshots of Caliban. Students are required to be familiar with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as WAGS 44 and POSC 63.) Globally as well as locally, women are claiming a new voice in civil society by spearheading both egalitarian movements for social change and reactionary movements which would restore them to putatively traditional roles. They are prominent in local level community-based struggles but also in women’s movements, perhaps the most international movements in the world today. This course will explore the varied expressions of women’s activism at the grass roots, national and transnational levels. How is it influenced by the intervention of the state and international agencies? How is it affected by globalization? Among the issues and movements which we will address are struggles to redefine women’s rights as human rights, women’s activism in religious nationalism, the international gay-lesbian movement, welfare rights activism, responses to state regulation, and campaigns around domestic violence. Our understanding of women’s activism is informed by a richly comparative perspective and attention to cases from diverse regions of the world.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Basu.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as WAGS 66, ASLC 51, and FAMS 30-01.) Do you often wonder why some countries are referred to as the “motherland” and others as the “fatherland”? What and who decides how we refer to a country? In this course, we will examine seismic changes over time in gendered imaginings of the Indian subcontinent. As women stepped out of the domestic sphere to participate in the nationalist struggle of the late 19th century, the idea of the nation swayed dramatically between the nation as wife and the nation as mother in the Indian popular imagination. Readings will include novels such as Rabindranath Tagore’s Home and the World and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. We will also study a range of cinematic texts from the classic Mother India to the recent feminist film Silent Waters.
Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Professor Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as WAGS 69, ASLC 52 [SA], and FAMS 58.) How do we define the word “feminism”? Can the term be used to define cinematic texts outside the Euro-American world? In this course we will study a range of issues that have been integral to feminist theory--the body, domesticity, same sex desire, gendered constructions of the nation, feminist utopias and dystopias--through a range of South Asian cinematic texts. Through our viewings and readings we will consider whether the term “feminist” can be applied to these texts, and we will experiment with new theoretical lenses for exploring these films. Films will range from Satyajit Ray’s classic masterpiece Charulata to Gurinder Chadha’s trendy diasporic film, Bend It Like Beckham. Attendance for screenings on Monday is compulsory.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Shandilya.
2023-24: Not offeredOpen to senior majors in Women’s and Gender Studies who have received departmental approval.
Spring semester.
2023-24: Not offeredIndependent Reading Courses.
Spring semester.
2023-24: Not offered