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WAGS (Women and Gender Studies) Fine Arts Political Science Religion |
14 Grosvenor 102 Fayerweather 103 Clark House 108 Chapin |
542-5781 542-2365 542-2380 542-2181 |
WAGS 8/ FA 72
To Many Europeans in the 19th century, women were becoming threatening. With
assertiveness and sometimes violence, they demanded suffrage and work outside the
home (where they would compete with men for jobs); as newspapers reported, they
carried deadly syphilis. This course will examine this set of converging events,
contemporary evolutionary theory, debates over "la femme au foyer" and "la
nouvelle femme," and arguments that linked women with putatively deviant sexuality
and inferior races. We will study images of women as powerful harpies, whores,
and femmes fatales, and images of women as powerless invalids and decadently
self-destructing addicts. We will address how women claimed agency, as defiant
outlaws or by the act of painting. We will analyze the ways in which such images
recast as well as reinforced prevailing beliefs in France, England, and Spain, and
consider how stereotypes changed over time. We will read texts by Jarry and
Huysmans, and consider a range of artists from Renior, Degas, and Beardsley to
Picasso, de Kooning and the Gorilla Girls.
WAGS 11
This 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 will include the uses and limits of biology
and explaining human gender differences; male and female sexualities including
homosexualities; women and social change; women's participation in production and
reproduction; the relationship among gender, race and class as intertwining
oppressions; and the functions of visual and verbal representation in the
creating, enforcing and contesting of gender norms.
WAGS 20
This seminar will focus on the history of homosexuality in the West. Topics will
include male homosexuality in Classical Antiquity, the rise of homosexual
subcultures in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, homosexuality and the
international sex reform and psychoanalytic movements, the roots of lesbian gay
activism in the U.S., gender, race, class within contemporary lesbian and gay
liberation movements, and the new Evangelical Right's attack on homosexuality.
Readings will include passages from Scripture, diaries and autobiographies,
medical and religious treatises, and letters and political manifestos, along with
theoretical and historical writing by Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Alan Bray,
Carroll Smith-Rosenburg, John d' Emilio, Estelle Friedman, Gayle Rubin and others.
WAGS 24
This course seeks to understand the shared and differing readings of gender that
are offered by two disciplines: History and Literature. A series of American
novels, surrounded by a grouping of critical commentaries from historians and
literary critics, will be used to examine each discipline's construction--and
possibly misconstruction--of gender's operation. Our reading will include works
by the following works authors: Louisa May Alcott, Gwendolyn Brooks, Willa Cather,
Sarah Orne Jewett, Catherine Maria Sedwick, and Harriet Wilson. Students will
find it helpful to have taken one course in one of the two disciplines. There
will be frequent writing assignments as well as two long papers.
WAGS 30
How does the writing of autobiography of women affirm, construct and reconstruct
and authentic self? How does she resolve the conflict between telling the truth
and distorting it in making her life into art? Is the making of art, indeed, her
chief preoccupation; or is her goal to record her life in the context of her
times, her religion, or her relationship to others? Reading autobiographies of
women writers helps us to raise, if not resolve, the questions. We shall also
consider how women write about experiences particular to women as shown in their
struggles to survive adversity; their sense of themselves as authorities or
challengers of authority, as well as their sense of what simply gives them pain or
joy. Readings from recent work in the psychology of woman will provide models for
describing women's development, as writings of women in turn will show how these
models emerge from real lives. The syllabus will include traditional
autobiography, historical memoir, poetry, journals and personal narratives,
physchological studies, criticism and theory. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Women
Warrior, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, poetry and prose by
Elizabeth and Bishop, Shirley Abbot's Womenfolks, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre,
Jamaica Kincaid's Anne John, Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice, Lorene Cary's
Black Ice, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, Susanna Kaysen's Girl,
Interrupted, and recent work by Janet Surrey. Writing requirements will include
several short papers and an autobiographical essay.
WAGS 32
Freud located identity formation in the emotion of fear--a boy's fear of
castration, a girl's terror at lack. Later theories have agreed that worries
about exposure, ridicule and confession shape the sexual self. Our course will
explore the gendered origins and effects of fear, asking how fear of the other
sex, and fear about the self, ground identity. We will try to differentiate among
forms of fear, comparing anxiety, obsession, trauma, and phobia. Course material
will be studied for the ways in which it condenses and substitutes various forms
of dread. The course material will include fiction (Pat Barker, Regeneration;
Lydia Chuyovskaya, Sofia Petrovna; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein), poetry (by Anna Akhmatova, Rita Dove, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth
Macklin); theory (Freud, Torok and Abraham); quasi-autobiography (Kenzaburo Oe, A
Quiet Life; Nathalie Sarraute, Childhood), and film Carrie, M, Perfect World,
Psycho, Vertigo). We will ask what cultural and psychological work fear performs:
what fears are required or liberation from social taboos? How do adults contain
(and repeat) the fears that ruled childhood? Why do we like to be frightened?
WAGS 39/ REL 39
A study of the portrayal of women in Jewish tradition. Readings will include
biblical and apocryphal texts; Rabbinic legal (halakic) and non-legal (aggadic)
material; selections from medieval commentaries; letters, diaries, and
autobiographies written by Jewish women of various periods and settings; and work
of fiction and non-fiction concerning the woman in modern Judaism. Employing an
inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural approach, we will examine not only the
actual roles played by women in particular historical periods and cultural
contexts, but also the roles they assume in traditional literary patterns and
religious symbol systems.
WAGS 44
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 is the struggle 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.
WAGS 56/ REL 56
The focus of this course is on the lives of contemporary Muslim women. The
factors informing constructions of gender in the Islamic world, and the role
played by questions of women's status in modern Islamic religion and society. We
will begin by briefly examining the status of women in classical Islamic thought,
including themes relating to scripture, tradition, law theology, philosophy and
literature. The second section of the course will focus on contemporary Muslim
women in a number of different cultural context from Morocco to Bangladesh and the
United States in order to highlight a variety of issues significant for
contemporary Muslim women; veiling and seclusion, kinship structures, violence,
health, feminist activism, literary expression, etc. The final section of the
course will deal with an exploration of Muslim feminist thought, which we will
attempt to place in dialog with western feminism with the hope of arriving at a
better understanding of issues related to gender, ethics and cultural relativism.
Weekly readings will include original religious texts in translation, secondary
interpretations, ethnographic descriptions and literary works by Muslim women
authors. These will be supplemented by feature films and documentaries to provide
a visual complement to the textual materials.
WAGS 65/ POLSCI 65
In this course the students will examine the role of the modern welfare state in
people's everyday lives. We will study the historical growth and retrenchment of
the modern welfare state in the United States and other Western democracies. The
course will critically examine the ideologies of "dependency" and the role of the
state as an agent of social control. In particular, we will study the ways in
which state action has implications for gender identities. In this course we will
analyze the social construction of social problems linked to states of poverty,
including hunger, homelessness, health care, disability, discrimination and
violence. We will ask how these conditions disproportionately affect the lives of
women and children. We will take a broad view of the interventions of the welfare
state by considering not only the impact of public assistance and social services
programs, but also the role of the police, family courts, therapeutic
professionals, and schools in creating and responding to the conditions of
impoverishment. The work of the seminar will culminate in the production of a
research paper and students will be given the option of incorporating fieldwork
into the independent project. This course fulfills the requirement for an
advanced seminar in Political Science.
Bad Girls
Tuesday, Thursday 2:00 p.m.
Natasha E. Staller
Construction of Gender
Monday, Wednesday 12:30 p.m.
Michele Barale
Rose Olver
Sex, Gender, and the Family
Wednesday 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Margaret R. Hunt
Fiction as History
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30 a.m.
Michele Barale
Martha Saxton
Autobiographies of Women
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00 a.m.
Rose Olver
Susan R. Snively
Sex, Self and Fear
Monday 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Stephanie Sandler
Women in Judaism
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 9:00 a.m.
Susan Niditch
Women's Activism
Tuesday, Thursday 2:00 p.m.
Amrita Basu
Kristin Bumiller
Margaret R. Hunt
Islamic Construction of Gender
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00 a.m.
Jamal J. Elias
States of Poverty
Monday 2:00-4:00
Kristin Bumiller
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WOST Program Departmental Component |
Women of Color Graduate Level Winter 2000 |
Hampshire College Mount Holyoke Smith College |