WS 480 GQU - Senior Seminar: Women & Gender Std

4 Credit(s)

What issues are important to women in different parts of the world? How do those issues relate to one another? What makes an issue “feminist” or not? How do we conceive of feminisms outside of our borders, whether those borders are geographic, political, or personal? What strategies can we employ to understand women’s lives and concerns in different cultures, locations, and times? Is it possible to actively support feminist causes across the globe without imposing dangerous sets of limiting assumptions? This course is an exploration of the methods, concepts, and experiences of feminism as it is practiced all over the world in different ways. The historical development and cultural mappings of feminism since the second wave will be our main concern, but we will maintain specificity by focusing on particular locations, and on locational concerns. Three large units will make up the course: feminism and race at the end of the second wave and into the present; postcolonial critiques of feminism and issues of religion, rights, and class in various locations throughout the world; and transnational approaches to feminist identity, politics and possibilities. Throughout our explorations of contemporary feminisms, we will interrogate how our own lives and choices affect the lives of women around the world, in part by investigating the origins of products we purchase regularly. Feminist theorists from a variety of disciplines including philosophy, literature, political science, history and sociology will provide groundwork for our explorations, which will be filled out through case studies, historical texts and literary narratives. Cross-listed ENG 480A and ETHS 481.

Prerequisite(s): W-tag and one of the following: ENG 280, ETHS 201, WS 204A, or WS 204B.