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WST 240
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Global Women, Feminized Work
Tuesday, Thursday 9:00-10:20 a.m.
|
Elisabeth Armstrong
|
Advertisements for Madison Avenue fashions gloss over the necessary labor of picking cotton and sewing
cloth. Similarly, the women who wear the clothes have scant knowledge of the people who make them. This
course pulls the thread of profit that connects disparate places and far-flung people in the global
assembly line. As women take the frontlines of cheapened work, they develop new methods of resistance
and hone old means of survival. This course relies upon intensive research projects alongside
historical, sociological, oral, and written narratives to examine gender and work in economies of
slavery, colonialism and multinational capitalism.
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WST 252
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Colloquium: Debates in Feminist Theory: Topic for Fall 2003: "The Subject"
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.
|
Elisabeth Armstrong
|
This course provides a focused, historical understanding of vital debates in feminist theory.
Contentious and challenging points of view will center on one analytic theme, although that theme will
change from year to year. This course will cover topics such as "the subject" (Fall 2003),
representation, the body, nation/identity, and translation. Readings, lectures and discussions will
ground widely differing perspectives, modes of analysis and arguments in their political, social and
historical context.
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WST 300
|
Special Topics in Women's Studies: The Politics of Sexual Representation
Thursday 3:00-4:50 p.m.
|
Lisa Henderson
|
This course wrestles with one of the central concerns in the cultural analysis of sex: the question of
representation--the modes of symbolically constructing sexual images, standards, identifications and
communities in a variety of forms for a range of audiences. Like other inquiries in media and culture,
the course addresses contexts of production and consumption, comparative questions of genre, political
questions about norms, and the valences and viability of anti-normative challenges. Students are also
invited to consider how sexual politics animate other domains of social and cultural life, such as
protective labor legislation which distinguishes between male and female workers, legal discourse on the
constitution of the family, and the place of sexuality in constructions of citizenship and nationhood.
The course draws broadly from the related literatures of media and cultural studies, feminism, and queer
and transgender studies; framing research and analysis at the intersections of gender, race, class,
sexual identification and power.
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WST 303
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Afro-Caribbean Women Writers
Tuesday 3:00-4:50 p.m.
|
Myriam Chancy
|
This course is designed to introduce students to the forms and techniques of contemporary Afro-Caribbean
women's literature from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Spanish Caribbean. Our purpose will be to
explore the historical and contemporary contexts that have produced innovative texts by women writers of
the Caribbean who seek not only to record their cultural existence but challenge both the stereotypes and
limitations placed upon them from both within and without the Caribbean. We will thus seriously consider
the effects of enslavement, imperialism/colonialism, neo-colonialism in addition to issues of multiple
oppression such as race, color, class, gender, sexuality, and exile, upon the literary production of
contemporary writers. We will also seek to consider the forms in which Caribbean women have found voice
as they actively demand readers' reconsideration of literary genres. Thus, the course will also
incorporate documentary and film in an effort to arrive at as complete an overview of the field as is
possible.
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WST 315
|
Sexual Histories, Lesbian Stories
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:50 p.m.
|
Marilyn Schuster
|
In this seminar we will focus on three moments in twentieth-century gay and lesbian history: the
publication and trial of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness in 1928, the post World War II homophile
movement in the U.S. in the 1950s (particularly the Daughters of Bilitis and The Ladder), and the
intersections between the women's movement and the gay and lesbian movement from Stonewall (1969) through
the 1970s in North America. We will study medical, scientific, legal, political and historical narratives
as well as fiction produced by lesbian and bisexual women at these three moments. What contradictions and
continuities mark the expression and social control of female sexualities that were considered
transgressive at different moments and in different cultural contexts? Whose stories get told? How are
they read? How can the multiple narratives of control, resistance and cultural expression be useful to us
in the twenty-first century? Writers such as Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Colette, Natalie Clifford
Barney, Nella Larsen, Ann Bannon, Lorraine Hansberry, Jane Rule, Isabel Miller, Ann Shockley, Audre
Lorde, Marga Gomez, Rita Mae Brown, Alexis DeVeaux, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa and Monique Wittig
will be considered.
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WST 317
|
Feminist Legal Theory
Wednesday 7:30-9:30 p.m.
|
Gwendolyn Mink
|
Common reading and discussion will consider U.S. feminist legal theories of subordination and difference
as well as feminist legal and policy theories of sex and gender justice. We will pay particular
attention to the ways in which intersecting statuses, identities, and interests based on race, class,
sexuality, and gender can stratify different women's relationships to the same laws and can undermine the
distribution of women's rights to all women. Topics addressed will include work, reproduction, family
formation, violence and sexuality as sites of women's oppressions. Throughout the course, students will
be asked to theorize the problems posed for law by asymmetries of power and resources among women and
between women and men; and on the significance of rights to women's prospects for equality.
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AAS 212
|
Culture and Class in the Afro-American Family
Tuesday, Thursday 9:00-10:20 a.m.
|
Ann Ferguson
|
An examination of the social, economic, and historical factors that have shaped African American family
patterns over time and the ways in which black families, individually and collectively, respond to these
changes. We will draw on portraits of individual families to document and illustrate the diversity of
Black families, their internal strengths as well as their vulnerabilities.
|
AAS 300
|
Writing Race, Writing Gender
Thursday 7:30-9:30 p.m.
|
Paula Giddings
|
This is a research and writing course for Juniors wherein topics in Black women's history will be
emphasized. The course will begin with an overview of Black women's history in the United States from
Slavery to the 1960s and Epilogue. The second half of the semester will be devoted to the development of
a research topic and final paper. The objectives of the course include a general understanding of the
history of Black women - with its intersectional paradigms; a deeper knowledge of a specific topic or
aspect of that history; and a research paper that will give students a grounding for future papers in
their senior and graduate years. Texts will include: When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women
in Race and Sex in America by Giddings; A Shining Thread of Hope by Hine and Daughters of Sorrow by
Sheftall.
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AAS 348
|
Black Women Writers
Tuesday 3:00-4:50 p.m.
|
Tracy Vaughn
|
How does gender matter in a black context? That is the question we will ask and attempt to answer through
an examination of works by such authors as Phillis Wheatley, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Hurston,
Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones and Audre Lorde.
|
AAS 366
|
Contemporary Topics in Afro-American Studies Womanist/Feminist Thought
Thursday 3:00-4:50 p.m.
|
Paula Giddings
|
Because women of African descent stand squarely at the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality,
courses which focus on them also speak to wider understandings of how race-black and non-black;
gender-women and men; sexuality-gay/queer and heterosexual, shape academic discourse and our everyday
lives. This interdisciplinary course will provide a historical overview of womanist/feminist
thought-with the experience of African-American women at its center. The course will be organized around
three major frameworks that have at once shaped womanist/feminist thought, and suppressed it: the
perception of black women's sexuality in Western thought; the privileging of race over gender in the
activist discourse; and the role of gender in nationalist movements.
|
ANT 244
|
Gender, Science and Culture
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:50 p.m.
|
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
|
Science will be looked at both historically as well as ethnographically. The scientific revolution in
16th and 17th century Western Europe was an exclusively male enterprise which deliberately excluded
women. This course will focus on the origins, meaning and manifestations of this exclusion and try to
understand how it has shaped the nature of scientific inquiry. The course will range from women's
explicit exclusion from the beginnings of science in 16th and 17th century Western Europe to contemporary
practices of in vitro fertilization and germ-line engineering. Limited enrollment. Not open to
first-years.
|
CLT 229
|
The Renaissance Gender Debate
Monday, Wednesday 9:00-10:20 a.m.
|
Ann Jones
|
In "La Querelle des Femmes" medieval and Renaissance writers (1350-1650) took on misogynist ideas from
the ancient world and early Christianity: woman as failed man, irrational animal, fallen Eve. Writers
debated women's sexuality (insatiable or purer than men's?), marriage (the hell of nagging wives or the
highest Christian state?), women's souls (nonexistent or subtler than men's?), female education (a waste
of time or a social necessity?). Brief study of the social and cultural changes fuelling the polemic;
analysis of the many literary forms it took, from Chaucer's Wife of Bath to Shakespeare's Taming of the
Shrew, women scholars' dialogues, and pamphlets from the popular press. Some attention to the battle of
the sexes in the visual arts.
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EAL 244
|
Construction of Gender in Modern Japanese Women's Writing
Monday, Wednesday 1:10-2:30 p.m.
|
Kimberly Kono
|
This course will focus on the construction of gender in the writings of Japanese women from the mid-19th
century until the present. How does the existence of a feminine literary tradition in premodern Japan
influence the writing of women during the modern period? How do these texts reflect, resist, and
reconfigure conventional representations of gender? We will explore the possibilities and limits of the
articulation of feminine and feminist subjectivities, as well as investigate the production of such
categories as race, class, and sexuality in relation to gender and each other. Readings will include
short stories and novels by such writers as Higuchi Ichiyô, Hayashi Fumiko, Kôno Taeko, Yoshimoto Banana
and Yamada Amy. Taught in English, with no knowledge of Japanese required.
|
EAL 261
|
Major Themes in Literature: East-West Perspectives: Gendered Fate
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:00am-12:10 p.m.
|
TBA
|
Is fate indifferent along lines of gender? What (and whose) interests are served by appeals to destiny?
Close readings of women's narratives of desire, courtship, sexuality, prostitution and rape will explore
how belief in inevitability mystifies the gender-based oppression of social practices and institutions.
Are love, marriage and mothering biological imperatives? What are love, seduction and desire if not
freely chosen? Or is freely chosen love merely a Western ideal? How might women write to overcome
fatalistic discourses that shape the construction of female subjectivity and agency? Works by Maya
Angelou, Simone de Beauvoir, Hayashi Fumiko, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Wang Anyi and Zhang Jie. All
readings in English translation.
|
ENG 278
|
Asian-American Women Writers
Tuesday, Thursday 10:30-11:50 a.m.
|
Floyd Cheung
|
The body of literature written by Asian American women over the past one hundred years has been
recognized as forming a coherent tradition. What conditions enabled its emergence? How have the qualities
and concerns of this tradition been defined? What makes a text central or marginal to the tradition?
Writers to be studied include Amy Tan, Sui Sin Far, Joy Kogawa, Chitra Divakaruni, Marilyn Chin, Maxine
Hong Kingston, and Jessica Hagedorn
|
ENG 292
|
Reading and Writing Autobiography
Tuesday 1:00-2:50 p.m.
|
Ann Boutelle
|
In this workshop, we will explore, through reading and through writing, the presentation of self in
autobiography. A major focus will be on the interweaving of voice, structure, style, and content. As we
read the work of ourselves and of others, we will be searching for strategies, devices, rhythms,
patterns, and approaches that we might adapt in future writings. The reading list will consist of
writings by twentieth-century women. Admission by permission of the instructor. During pre-registration
period, a writing sample should be delivered to the English Department office in Wright Hall.
|
ENG 365
|
Seminar: The Brontës
Thursday 1:00-2:50 p.m.
|
Cornelia Pearsall
|
A study of the lives and works of the remarkable Brontë sisters and their shadowy brother, exploring the
literary, cultural and familial circumstances which aided and impeded the development of their art.
Novels, poetry and paintings by Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë and Branwell Brontë.
|
ESS 550
|
Women in Sport
Monday, Wednesday 9:00-10:20 a.m.
|
Christine Shelton
|
A course documenting the role of women in sport as parallel and complementary to women's place in
society. Contemporary trends will be linked to historical and sociological antecedents. Focus is on
historical, contemporary, and future perspectives and issues in women's sport.
|
FLS 241
|
Woman and American Cinema: Representation, Spectatorship, Authorship
Monday, Wednesday 2:40-4:00 p.m., Tuesday 7:00-10:00 p.m.
|
Alexandra Keller
|
This course provides a broad survey of women in American cinema - women on screen, as spectators, and as
filmmakers - from the silent period to the present. It examines how women are represented in films, and
how those images relate to actual contemporaneous American society and culture. The course also explores
issues of female spectatorship and female authorship as they relate to genre, the star and studio
systems, dominant codes of narration, and conceptions of the female gaze.
|
FRN 340
|
Women Writers and Images of Women in 17th and 18th Centuries French Literature
Monday, Wednesday 1:10-2:30 p.m.
|
Hélène Visentin
|
How did women have access to knowledge in the early modern period? Who were the women who dared to put
pen to paper? How did feminist protests take form? We will examine the representation of women in the
17th and 18th centuries society through different literary genres (novels, plays, essays) and we will
analyze texts by women authors. The relations between these representations and the social and
historical context will be central to our study of this period. Texts by Madeleine de Scudéry, Molière,
Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette, Françoise de Graffigny, Isabelle de Charrière et Denis Diderot. Some of
these texts will be compared with their film adaptations. Readings and discussion in French. Permission
of the instructor required.
|
HST 252
|
Women in Modern Europe 1789-1918
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:50 p.m.
|
Darcy Buerkle
|
A survey of European women's experiences from the French Revolution through World War I. Women's changing
social, economic, cultural and political roles as revealed in biographies, novels, films, treatises, and
memoirs.
|
HST 278
|
History of Women in the U.S., 1865-present
Tuesday, Thursday 9:00-10:20 a.m.
|
Jennifer Guglielmo
|
An examination of the historical position of women within the society and culture. Problems include the
implications of class, changing notions of sexuality, educational growth, feminism, African-American
women in "freedom," wage-earning women, careers, radicalism, the sexual revolution, the impact of the
world wars and depression, and feminism's second wave. Emphasis on social and cultural aspects.
|
PSY 266
|
Psychology of Women and Gender
Monday, Wednesday 9:00-10:20 a.m.
|
Lauren Duncan
|
An exploration of the psychological effects of gender on females and males. We will examine the
development of gender roles and stereotypes, and the impact of differences in power within the family,
workplace, and politics on women's lives and mental health. This course will emphasize how psychologists
have conceptualized and studied women and gender, paying attention to empirical examinations of current
controversies (e.g., biological versus cultural bases of gender differences).
|
PSY 268
|
Lesbian Identity and Experience
Tuesday, Thursday 9:00-10:20 a.m.
|
TBA
|
Perspectives on the psychological, social, and cultural construction of lesbian identity and sexual
orientation are examined. Themes include the lesbian in contemporary and historical context; sexual
orientation as it intersects with gender, race, ethnicity, and social class; identity politics vs. queer
theory; bisexuality, transgenderism, and transsexuality; lesbian identity development in adolescence and
adulthood; issues of coming out; sexism; heterosexism and homophobia; lesbian and bisexual sex and
intimacy; and lesbian coupling, family-building, and parenting. The strengths and resiliencies of
lesbians as well as the kinds of psychological and social problems that can develop in hostile and
disaffirming contexts are examined.
|
PSY 340b
|
Gender and the Life Course
Thursday 3:00-4:50 p.m.
|
Maureen Mahoney
|
A seminar on the development of gender identity. Special attention will be given to critical reading of
psychological theory and research on gender identification. Topics will include a comparative analysis of
psychoanalytic, social-learning and cognitive-developmental theories. Recent work in feminist theory and
the psychology of gender will be used as a counterpoint to classical formulations.
|
PSY 366
|
Topics in the Psychology of Women
Issues in Adolescent Gender Role Development
Wednesday 1:10-4:00 p.m.
|
Lauren Duncan
|
In this course we examine psychological issues girls face in their adolescent years. Topics may include
body image, self-esteem, academic achievement, peer and dating relationships, and gender socialization.
This is a community based learning course and a central component involves volunteering as a mentor to an
adolescent girl in the Northampton area. Recommended Pre or co-requisite: PSY266 or WST150, and
permission of the instructor. Not open to first-years, sophomores. There are additional commitments
through the Spring semester required in the course - please contact the instructor for further details.
|
REL 242
|
Mary: Images and Cults
Monday, Wednesday 1:10-2:30 p.m.
|
Vera Shevzov
|
Whether revered as the Birth-Giver of God or simply remembered as a Jewish peasant woman, Mary has both
inspired and challenged generations of Christian women and men. This course focuses on key developments
in the "history of Mary" since Christian times to the present. How has her image shaped Christianity?
What does her image in any given age tell us about personal and collective Christian identity? Topics
include Mary's "life"; rise of the Marian cult; Mary and the Papacy; differences among Protestant,
Catholic and Orthodox Christians; apparitions (e.g., Guadalupe and Lourdes); miracle-working icons; Mary,
liberation and feminism. Liturgical, devotional, and theological texts, art, music, and film.
|
SOC 315b
|
The Body and Society
Tuesday 3:00-4:50 p.m.
|
Elizabeth Wheatley
|
In this seminar we will draw on sociological and interdisciplinary perspectives to consider features of
the social construction, regulation, control, and experience of the body. Through diverse theoretical
frameworks, we will view the body both as a product of discourses (such as medical knowledge and
practice, media representations, and institutional regimens), and as an agent of social activities and
interactions in daily life. We will consider the salience of bodies in constituting identities,
relationships, and differences; as bases for inequalities and forms of oppression; and as sites of
resistance and struggles for change.
