| WS 101 |
Introduction to Women's Studies Tuesday, Thursday 2:40-3:50 p.m. |
M. Ackmann |
This course offers an overview of women's position in society and culture by examining women's lives from a variety of experiential and theoretical perspectives. The first section examines works by women that illuminate both the shared and the diverse social, psychological, political, and economic realities of their experience; the second section introduces analyses of sexism and oppression, with a focus on different frameworks for making and evaluating feminist arguments. The course concludes with visionary feminist views of women recreating their lives.
| WS 200/Hist 296 |
Goddesses and Slaves, Mary and Eve: Women in the Ancient, Classical and Medieval West Tuesday, Thursday 1:15-2:30 p.m. |
Barbara Stephenson |
How did religious images of goddesses, saints, and women affect the lives of real women in the Greco-Roman world and medieval Europe? We explore how the ideas about what women are and which traits are "feminine" that developed in ancient Greece and classical Rome came to define women's roles in those cultures, and consider how Christianity introduced new perceptions of women. Did the Eve/Mary dichotomy of Christianity take away other possible definitions of what women could be? Did those changes benefit women or not? We will trace how religious beliefs and social organization shaped images of idealized women and affected the lives of real ones.
| WS 200/Hist 296 |
Women in Chinese History Tuesday, Thursday 1:15-2:30 p.m. |
Jonathan Lipman |
An exploration of the roles and values of Chinese women in traditional and modern times. Topics will include the structure of the family and women's productive work, rules for female behavior, women's literature, and the relationship between feminism and other political and social movements in revolutionary China. Readings from biographies, classical literature, feminist scholarship, and modern fiction.
| WS 250 |
Global Feminism Tuesday, Thursday 11:00-12:15 p.m. |
Asoka Bandarage |
What is globalization? What are its positive and negative effects on different regions, cultures, social classes, ethnic groups, the sexes, and the environment? How are women resisting against poverty, militarism, and the environmental and cultural destruction accompanying globalization? What alternative visions and models of development are offered by women's movements working for peace, justice, and environmental stability?
| WS 333 (01) |
Gender, Race, and Science Tuesday 1:00-3:50 p.m. |
Karen Barad |
This course examines different approaches to understanding the nature of scientific practices. Of central interest will be the diverse accounts offered by feminist studies of science. We will pay particular attention to notions of evidence, methods, cultural and material constraints and the heterogeneous nature of laboratory and theoretical practices. We will consider the ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are constructed by science and how these factors influence both scientific practices and our conceptions of science. We will also examine the feminist commitment to taking account of the multifaceted dynamics between science and society without forfeiting the notion of objectivity.
| WS 333 (02)/ Phil 350 |
Feminist and Queer Theories Thursday 1:00-3:50 p.m. |
Karen Barad |
Questions of power, agency, structure, materiality, bodies, subjectivities and discursive practices have been central to both feminist and queer theories. We will focus on these issues, exploring the tension between poststructuralist, Marxist, and materialist approaches. In analyzing contemporary theories of gender and sexuality, we will pay particular attention to issues of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and globalization. Key problematics include the nature and operation of power, the relationship between materiality and discourse, and the relationship between between theory and practice.
| WS 333 (03) |
Globalization and Fundamentalism Wednesday 2:00-4:00 p.m. |
Asoka Bandarage |
The worsening problems of global environmental and social destruction, including the oppression of women, are frequently attributed either to economic and cultural globalization or ethnoreligious fundamentalism. However, in what ways do globalization and fundamentalism reinforce each other? What theories and social movements provide more balanced alternatives to the extreme models of psychological and social development represented by both these forces? This course will seek answers to these questions in relation to case studies of ethnoreligious as well as gender, race, and class struggles from both the Northern industrialized and impoverished Southern countries.
| WS 333 (06)/History 355 |
Female Power in Early Modern Europe Wednesday 1:00-3:50 p.m. |
Barbara Stephenson |
This course will examine the sudden rise of women rulers in sixteenth-century Europe and the male reaction to it. What happened that led to both France and England being ruled by women during the upheaval of the sixteenth century, and why was the idea of female rule so threatening to men? What steps did men take to limit women's political power, and how did women evade those restrictions? We will explore how women who were excluded from official power could nevertheless play an important political role while Europe coped with the turmoil of the Reformation, the evolution into modern nation states, and the challenges of Enlightenment.
|
AMST 301/ ARTHIS 342 |
Women's Camera Work Monday 1:00-3:50 |
A. Lee |
In case studies, this seminar explores the directions women pushed photography in the twentieth century. How did women view and manage the proposals of early modernist photography? How did they interpret the social documentary? Was there a relationship between their access to the once-elitist profession of journalism and the kinds of pictures they were said to take? In addressing these and other questions, this seminar meditates on the art historical tools we use to answer them, and is therefore also a seminar about theory and methods. Among key photographers to be studied are Lange, Modotti, and especially Arbus, who will be the subject of a major exhibition at our Museum in the Fall.
| ARTHIS 301 |
Exhibiting the Female Athlete Monday, Wednesday 11:00-12:15 p.m. |
M. Doezema |
Students enrolled in this class will participate in all aspects of organizing an exhibition scheduled to be on view at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in the spring of 2004. Focusing on images of the sporting woman in American culture, the exhibition will present a rich array of visual materials including prints, photographs, and paintings that document the social history of women's participation in exercise and sport, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Clothing for sport and physical education, a rich site for examining sexual and cultural identity, will also be included in the installation.
| ASIAN 320 |
Arab Women Novelists' Work Tuesday 1:00-3:50 p.m. |
M. Jiyad |
Arab women novelists' works that address issues such as arranged marriage, divorce, child rearing and custody, rights and opportunities to work, national and religious identity, political and social freedom will be surveyed and discussed. The aim is to offer an alternative view presented in a balanced and fair approach.
|
ENGL 101 Component |
Seminar in Reading, Writing, and Reasoning Some Cultural Representations of Women Tuesday, Thursday 11:00-12:15 p.m. |
W. Quillian |
We begin with a reading of Woolf's A Room of One's Own and a consideration of Mount Holyoke as such a "room" as an introduction to thinking about some of the ways in which women have been traditionally represented (or not represented) in Western culture. After working with a variety of short fictions by men as well as women, we will focus on one particularly notable literary representation of women, Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (both the novel and the recent film). Through John Berger's Ways of Seeing we will extend our discussion to the tradition of oil painting, contemporary advertising, and the media. Writing intensive; brief weekly exercises; research paper.
| ENGL 320 |
The Eighteenth Century: Jane Austen: Readings in Fiction and Film Monday 1:00-3:50 p.m. |
J. Lemly |
A study of Austen's six novels through the lenses of Regency culture and of twentieth-century filmmakers. How do these modest volumes reflect and speak to England at the end of world war, on the troubled verge of Pax Britannica? What do the recent films say to and about Anglo-American culture at the millennium? What visions of women's lives, romance, and English society are constructed through the prose and the cinema?
| ENG 323 |
Gender & Class in the Victorian Novel Tuesday, Thursday 11:00-12:!5 p.m. |
Amy Martin |
This course will investigate how representations of gender and class serve as a structuring principle in the development of the genre of the Victorian novel in Britain. We will devote significant attention to the construction of Victorian femininity and masculinity in relation to class identity, marriage as a sexual contract, and the gendering of labor. The texts chosen for this course also reveal how gender and class are constructed in relation to other axes of identity in the period, such as race, sexuality, and national character. Novelists will include Austen, Dickens, Eliot, C. Bronte, and Hardy. Supplementary readings in literary criticism and theory.
| ENGL 327 |
Witchcraft in American Literature Tuesday, Thursday 11:00-12:15 p.m. |
C. Lee |
Colonial American witchcraft, especially Salem 1692, has animated the American literary imagination for well over three centuries. This course looks at the ways in which American writers have responded to the history of witchcraft. Why do writers find witchcraft themes so compelling? What metaphors of culture, gender, and the imagination does witchcraft provide? In this course we read several primary and secondary materials about colonial witchcraft and explore writers such as Winthrop, Mather, Franklin, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Forbes, Miller, and Updike, among others. Films screened include Three Sovereigns for Sarah, The Witches of Eastwick, and The Crucible.
| ENGL 373 |
Nature and Gender: "A Landscape of One's Own" Tuesday 1:00-3:50 p.m. |
L. Glasser |
This seminar will focus on how women writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century told their life stories in the context of the islands, prairies, forests, and deserts of the United States. Readings will include works by such writers as Thaxter, Freeman, Jewett, Stewart, Zitkala-Sa, Austin, Cather, and Hurston; genre will include autobiographical essays, narratives, biography, fiction, and poetry. Some visual works (paintings, photographs, film) may also be added to the list of texts.
|
EDUC 205 Component |
Race, Class, Culture, and Gender in the Classroom Monday, Wednesday 8:35 - 9:50 a.m. |
B. Bell |
Offers a forum for the critical study of controversial issues confronting education. Focuses on the interplay of race, class, culture, and gender in the schools and how that interplay influences the lives of students, teachers, and the quality of the educational experience for all. Topics include racism in the educational system, gender inequities in schools, homophobia in education, the effects of poverty on educational opportunity, and education that is multicultural. Requires a prepracticum in a school or community-based setting.
|
GERM 221 Component |
Pasts and Presences in German Culture Monday, Wednesday 1:15-2:30 p.m. |
TBA |
Major forms of literary texts from the 18th century to the present are analyzed, orally and in writing, within their social, political, and cultural context and from multiple critical perspectives. We study diverse voices of male and female authors from German-speaking countries, including immigrant writers, on themes important to their and our times: the power and mystery of nature; science and ethics; freedom and social oppression; art and reality; aesthetics and the Holocaust; gender, nation, and identity. Music, films, art, historical and philosophical documents complement literary readings. Each student is encouraged to contribute to the course according to her individual interests.
| HIST 101 |
Foundation Colonial Communities, Creole Lives: Interracial Sex, Miscegenation, and National
Desire Monday, Wednesday 2:40 - 3:55 p.m. |
D. Ghosh |
This course examines sites of sexual intimacy between colonizers and colonized in the Americas, South Asia, and Africa from the seventeenth century onward. By examining communities that were produced out of interracial sex, the readings address how racial, familial, and national affiliations were created in response to sexual transgressions. The course examines how social, racial, and political differences were represented and constructed in the first moments of cultural contact between Europe and the rest of the world. Themes include perceptions of the marvelous, the exotic and the erotic, and colonial policies to maintain gender and racial boundaries.
|
HIST 351f Component |
The Middle Ages Medieval Monasticism Monday 2:00-4:50 p.m. |
C. Straw |
This survey of Western monasticism from its origins in the Egyptian desert to the mendicant orders of fourteenth-century Europe seeks to understand what motivates men and women to define perfection as abnegation of food, sex, wealth, success, and even laughter - all that we now consider valuable in life. Topics: fasting, virginity, voluntary poverty; monastic rules and reform movements (e.g., Celtic, Benedictine, Cistercian, Franciscan, etc.). Also various saints' lives, mysticism, and women's spirituality. Course includes a stay at the Abbey of Regia Laudi.
| JEWISH 222 |
Engendering Judaism: Women and Jewish Tradition Tuesday, Thursday 2:40 - 3:55 p.m. |
L. Fine |
This course examines the representations and roles of women in Jewish culture, from the literature of the Hebrew Bible to the contemporary period. What were the distinctive ways in which women's religious life expressed itself by way of prayer and ritual practice? Were there women mystics and visionaries? How did women exert their influence as mothers and wives? There will be significant focus on the dramatic developments taking place among contemporary Jewish women: innovative rituals and experimental liturgies, opportunities to become rabbis, new approaches to God, theology, and social issues, the Jewish lesbian movement, women's writing and documentary filmmaking.
| PHIL 249 |
Women and Philosophy Monday, Wednesday 11:00-12:15 p.m. |
Julie Inness |
Do we all dress in drag? Should women strive to be less emotional? Is sexuality socially constructed? Is popular culture harmful to women? This course focuses on philosophy that explores women's understanding of reality. By studying the work of various twentieth-century feminist philosophers as well as films and stories, we shall explore a number of crucial philosophic concerns including truth, the self, and morality. Our aim is to become philosophers ourselves, thinking deeply about issues of fundamental importance to our lives.
| PHIL 374 |
Developments in Feminist Philosophy: Rethinking the World: Philosophy of Sex Monday, Wednesday 1:15-2:30 p.m. |
Julie Inness |
What makes a body sexy? Is heterosexuality natural? What is "sex"? Feminist philosophy is in the midst of a revolutionary transformation. Rather than remaining content with the task of indicating the shortcomings of the philosophical canon, feminist philosophers are constructing their own distinctively feminist version of philosophy. In this course, we shall explore what contemporary feminist philosophers have written about the nature of sex and sexuality.
|
SOC 316 Component |
Mass Media Studies Monday 7:00-10: 00 p.m. |
P. Lopes |
This seminar explores contemporary issues and perspectives in mass media studies. This course is designed to provide students with a provocative look at mass media in order to begin to develop a critical perspective on mass media and contemporary society. The first part of the course looks at the effects of entertainment culture in contemporary mass media and society. The second and third parts of the course address issues in the representation of gender and race in mass media. The fourth part of the course takes a unique look at the impact of advertising and marketing on American culture. The final part of the course addresses the future of mass media and globalization.
| SPAN 332 |
Spanish Literature: Medieval, Renaissance, and Golden Age Staging Desire: Politics, Gender and
Sexuality in Early-Modern Spanish Comedias Tuesday 1:00-3:50 p.m. |
J. Gonzalez-Ruiz |
Taking desire on the Spanish stage as a point of departure, this course will address issues of politics, gender and sexuality. We will examine the innovation of formal conceptions of art in 17th century Spain and its connection with the revolutionary new themes introduced in this period. By examining a variety of plays in their socio-historical context from an interdisciplinary approach, we will explore how some playwrights open up new and distinctive perspectives in the cultural debates of both Early Modern Spain and contemporary criticism. Authors to be studied will include Lope de Rueda, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderon de la Barca, and Lanini y Sagredo.
