Gender Studies

UNIT ONE:  De/constructing Gender (3-4 weeks)

Unit Rationale:

This unit is designed to introduce students to contemporary studies of gender that put into question and trouble “commonsense” definitions of gender (the origins of gender and how it comes to have meaning). The required core unit readings aid students in conceptualizing gender as a social construct and seeing gender as part of a social system of difference that has its own history and institutional determinants. We’ll use literary texts, such as Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman,” Lois Gould’s “The Story of X,” and the film Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), as a way to begin questioning, among other things, what it means to be a “woman” or a “man”; who or what determines these gender binaries; and how other subject positions, such as race and class, are enmeshed in definitions of gender and relations of power. In the process, we’ll consider gender as an effect of patriarchal and heteronormative institutions and its implications for thinking through the relationship between gender and sexuality. Later units will continue to layer and complicate students’ understanding of gender and its relationship to literary texts and institutions and representations of gender.

Required Core Unit Readings:

  • Judith Lorber – “‘Night to His Day’: The Social Construction of Gender”
  • Patricia Hill Collins & Margaret Andersen – “Why Race, Class, and Gender Still Matter”
  • Sojourner Truth – “Ain’t I a Woman”

Suggested Theoretical and Literary Readings and Films

(choose 1-2 of the following or substitute equivalent):

  • Lois Gould – “The Story of X”
  • Judith Butler – “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (excerpts)
  • Anne Fausto-Sterling – “The Five Sexes…”
  • Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink) movie
  • Suzanne Kessler – “Creating Good-Looking Genitals in the Service of Gender”
  • Pamela Aronson – “Feminists or ‘Post Feminists?’ Young Women’s Attitudes Toward Feminism and Gender Relations”
  • Michael Lassell  – “How to Watch Your Brother Die”
  • bell hooks – “Understanding Patriarchy”
  • Allan Johnson – “Patriarchy”

Expanded Supplementary Materials

  • Mara Viveros Vigoya – “Sex/Gender.” The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory
  • Raised Without Gender –https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sPj8HhbwHs&feature=youtu.be
  • Growing up Trans – https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/growing-up-trans/
  • GLAAD Media Reference Guide https://www.glaad.org/reference/lgbtq
  • Leslie Feinberg – Stone Butch Blues
  • A. Finn Enke – “The Education of Little Cis: Cisgender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies”
  • Julia Serano – “Trans Woman Manifesto” and “Trans/Gender Theory” (excerpts)
  • Petra Doan – “The Tyranny of Gendered Spaces: Reflections from Beyond the Gender Dichotomy”
  • Moya Lloyd – “Performativity and Performance.” The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory
  • Earl of Rochester – “The Imperfect Enjoyment”
  • Marge Piercy – “Barbie Doll”
  • Shakespeare – As You Like It
  • Virginia Woolf – Orlando: A Biography
  • Jeanette Winterson – Sexing the Cherry
  • Dar Williams – “When  I  Was a Boy”
  • Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
  • Jeffrey Eugenides – Middlesex
  • The Matrix

UNIT TWO:  Literature, Ideology & Gendered Subjects (3-4 Weeks)

Unit Rationale:

This unit invites students to explore how literature as a social institution participates in or challenges the social reproduction of gender, i.e., to see literature not as a reflection of real life and “things as they are,” but as a form of representation that performs particular cultural work in terms of gender. Students will examine, in other words, literature as an ideological apparatus that produces, constrains, and enables gendered subjects and that positions readers/viewers in particular ways that are also racialized and classed. This unit also explores modes of “oppositional” or “resistant” reading/viewing practices, including queer reading practices.

Required Core Unit readings:

  • Jonathan Culler – “Reading As a Woman” excerpts OR
  • bell hooks – “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” AND
  • Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick – Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire excerpts

Suggested Theoretical and Literary Readings and Films

(choose 1-2 of the following or substitute equivalent):

  • Judith Fetterley – “On the Politics of Literature” & Rip Van Winkle excerpts
  • Susan Bordo – “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity”
  • J. Halberstam – Female Masculinity (excerpts)
  • Christina Rossetti – “Goblin Market”; with Ruskin – “Of Queen’s Gardens” excerpts
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman – The Yellow Wallpaper
  • Coventry Patmore – “The Angel in the House”
  • Mary Wollstonecraft  – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
  • David Henry Hwang – M Butterfly
  • Raymond Carver – “Tell the Women We’re Going,” and “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes”
  • Toni Morrison – “Recitatif”
  • Alison Bechdel – Fun Home
  • Alison Bechdel – “The Rule,” a.k.a., “The Bechdel Test”
  • Laura Mulvey – “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (excerpts)
  • Susan Glaspell – Trifles
  • Jean Kilbourne – Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women (clips)
  • Marlon Riggs – Color Adjustment (clips)

Expanded Supplementary Materials

  • J. Jack Halberstam – “The Transgender Look”
  • Julia Serano – “Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels”
  • Eli Claire – Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (excerpts)
  • Ann Balsamo –Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (excerpts)
  • Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
  •    Bram Stoker – Dracula
  • Kate Chopin – The Awakening
  • Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest
  • Mary Gaitskill – “Secretary”
  • Peggy Orenstein – “What’s Wrong with Cinderella?”
  •   Gayle Rubin – “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Econoy’ of Sex”

Films

  • Disney films
  • L.A. Confidential
  • Fight Club
  • The Crying Game
  • Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
  • Bound

Midterm essay due by end of Unit Two

UNIT THREE:  Intersections of Race, Class & Gender (4-5 weeks)

Unit Rationale:

Since gender as a system of difference does not exist or operate independently from other axes of difference, in particular those of race and class, students will explore the “intersections” between these subject positions/identifications (i.e., the ways in which they are mutually constituted) as a means of deepening their understanding of gendered subjects, forms of oppression, and the production and reception of literary texts. How is gender racialized or how are different races gendered across cultures? How might one’s race and gender in turn shape one’s desires? How might one’s class position inflect or inform one’s gender identity/ identifications as a reader?

Required Core Unit readings:

  • Kimberle Crenshaw – “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”
  • bell hooks – “Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression”

Suggested Theoretical and Literary Readings and Films

(choose 1-2 of the following texts):

  • Kimberle Crenshaw – “The Urgency of Intersectionality” (https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality)
  • Kevin Powell – “Confessions of a Recovering Misogynist”
  • Sherman Alexie – “I Hated Tonto (Still Do)” and “A Drug Called Tradition”
  • Michael Messner & Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo – “Gender Displays and Men’s Power: The ‘New Man’ and the Mexican Immigrant Man”
  • bell hooks – “Reconstructing Black Masculinity” or “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” and “Feminism and Class Power” excerpts
  • Judith Ortiz Cofer – “The Myth of the Latin Woman….” And “American History”
  • Cherrie Moraga – “La Güera” and “For the Color of My Mother”
  • Junot Díaz – “Fiesta, 1980” and “How to Date a Browngirl….”
  • Gish Jen – “Who’s Irish?”
  • Evelyn Alsultany – “Los Intersticios”

Expanded Supplementary Materials

  • Eli Clare – “Body Shame, Body Pride: Lessons From the Disability Rights Movement”
  • Jasbir Puar – “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled.” Social Text, 124 (2015): 45–73.
  • Lorraine Hansbury – A Raisin in the Sun
  • Danzy Senna – Caucasia
  • Alice Walker – You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down
  • Toni Morrison – The Bluest Eye
  • Maxine Hong Kingston – China Men
  • Andrew Lam, “Show and Tell”
  • Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese excerpts
  • Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man
  • Julia Álvarez – How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
  • Octavia Butler – Kindred
  • Aphra Behn – Oroonoko
  • Shakespeare – Othello
  • Bram Stoker – Dracula
  • Dorothy Allison – Trash or Bastard Out of Carolina
  • ZZ Packer – Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
  • Achy Obejas – We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?
  • Orange is the New Black episodes
  • John Singleton – Boyz n the Hood
  • Brian Ascalon Roley – American Son

UNIT FOUR:  Global and Transnational Genders (4-5 weeks)

Unit Rationale:

This unit encourages students to consider how gender is performed and conceptualized across cultures beyond the “local.” Students might explore, for example, how a history of colonialism shapes gender relations in a specific postcolonial literary text. Is gender done differently, for example, by the colonized in postcolonial societies or in cultures marked by war and militarism? How might gender, race, and class intersect in these geopolitical spaces? What are the effects of globalization and transnationalism on gender norms? How does a transnational lens or perspective inform representations of gender (and its intersections with race, class, and sexuality) across various geographical and cultural landscapes?

Required Core Unit readings:

  • Jan J. Pettman – “Women, Racism & Colonialism” OR
  • Excerpts from Chandra Talpade Mohanty – “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”

Suggested Theoretical and Literary Readings and Films

(choose 1-2 of the following or substitute equivalent):

  • Gloria Anzaldúa – “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers”
  • Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan – “Global Identities”
  • Jasbir Puar – “Global Circuits”
  • Mohja Kahf – “Spiced Chicken Queen” and selected poems, incl. “Hijab Scene” poems
  • Tsitsi Dangarembga – Nervous Conditions
  • Rhina Espaillat – “Bra”

Expanded Supplementary Materials

  • C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn – “Trans Necropolitics:A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death – and the Trans of Color Afterlife”
  • Leila Rupp – “Towards a Global History of Sam-Sex Sexuality”
  • Elora Chowdhury – “Locating Global Feminisms Elsewhere: Braiding US Women of Color and Transnational Feminisms”
  • Shani Mootoo – “Out on Main Street”
  • Randa Jarrar – A Map of Home
  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – The Thing Around Your Neck
  • Zadie Smith – White Teeth
  • Nadine Gordimer – selected short stories
  • Salman Rushdie – East, West: Stories
  • Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart
  • Jhumpha Lahiri – Interpreter of Maladies
  • Edwidge Danticat – Krik?Krak!
  • Zhang Yimou – Raise the Red Lantern
  • Mira Nair – Mississippi Masala
  • Deepa Mehta – Fire

Final essay due before the end of semester