Women's Studies Fall 2006 Graduate Courses

GSOC-418-401 IRANIAN CINEMA: GENDER, POLITICS, RELIGION
MW 2-3:30 Minuchehr (pardis@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: NELC/COML/GSOC-118
Distribution III: Arts & Letters
This course is the Graduate Level version of GSOC-118

Post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema has gained exceptional international reception in the past two decades. In most major national and international festivals, Iranian films have taken numerous prizes for their outstanding representation of life and society, and their courage in defying censorship barriers. In this course, we will examine the distinct characteristics of the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Discussion will revolve around themes such as gender politics, family relationships and women's social, economic and political roles, as well as the levels of representation and criticism of modern Iran's political and religious structure within the current boundaries. There will be a total of 12 films shown and will include works by Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, Beizai, Milani, Bani-Etemad and Panahi, among others.

GSOC-449-601 GLOBAL WOMEN’S LABOR
W 5:30-8:30 Diggs-Thompson (diggst@sas )

Cross Listed: ANTH-449

On the surface, domestic and factory workers appear to perform radically different tasks. However, if we explore the conditions surrounding their employment, we see that globally, women in these occupations share some very important characteristics. These include similar household status, similar economic motivation and financial goals, and, similar placement on the occupational ladder. Many domestic and factory workers are also migrants, and although they are often better educated than women of previous
generations, the vast majority are underemployed. This course examines how new forms of production and the spread of global capitalism have impacted the lives of women. The course will also examine and critique previous and current theoretical constructs that have attempted to describe and explain the phenomenon. By also evaluating women in relation to their country or region of origin, we will compare how global economic, social, and political forces have created new and renewed forms of women’s oppression.

GSOC-499-000 INDEPENDENT STUDY
Arranged Kurz (dkurz@sas)

Permission needed from department.

GSOC-516-401 PUBLIC INTEREST WORKSHOP
M 2-5 Sanday (psanday@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: ANTH-516

This is an interdisciplinary workshop sponsored by Peggy Reeves Sanday (Dept
of Anthropology), Michael Delli Carpini (Dean of Annenberg), and Ira Harkavy
(Director, Center for Community Partnerships). Open to graduate and advanced
undergraduate students, the workshop is a response to Amy Gutmann's call for interdisciplinary cooperation across the University and to the Dept. of Anthropology's commitment to developing public interest research and practice as a disciplinary theme. The workshop will be run as an open interdisciplinary forum on framing a public interest social science that ties theory and action. Students are encouraged to apply the framing model to a public interest research and action topic of their choice. Examples of public interest topics to be discussed in class and through outside speakers include how education and the media reify public interests, the conflation of race and racism in the public sphere, the role of diversity, community action and service learning in higher education, and the contradictory relationship between individual and ethnic identity.

GSOC-553-401 PREMODERN WOMEN WRITERS
M 12-3 Wallace (dwallace@dept.english.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: COML-554/ENGL-553

This course considers the relationships of premodern women to writing and to the places of their lives and travels. The relationship of premodern women to territory is particularly tenuous and fraught. Women, particularly aristocrats, were expected to leave their homes and native ground and marry into unfamiliar cultures in foreign landscapes: is homesickness originally a female complaint, before it is taken over by males dreaming of England from their distant colonial postings? Catholic English women, following the Reformation, continued living communally in continental Europe. Here too homesickness is a factor, expressed in their careful conservation of medieval English writings (Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century English anchoress, survives as written and conserved by seventeenth-century English women). Continents were often figured as naked female figures. Tensions at faith frontiers (east and west) were often expressed through conflicts over or within particular female bodies: figures to consider here include saints Dorothea of Montau and Rose of Lima. Women sometimes occupied places, knowingly or not, where earlier generations of women had lived, in quite different cultural and religious circumstances: places such as Wilton and Welbeck. The study of a particular place over time might make an interesting research essay. The question of continuing nun-nostalgia in Protestant cultures might also be raised. So too the question of women and travel: how did Margery Kempe manage to traverse the face of the known world, avoid injury, and return to compose her text? As centuries pass, do women travel less?

This course questions traditional periodizations by shooting the medieval/ Renaissance divide and by considering arguments of advance and decline for women. Does the rise of the university, for example, bring a diminution of educational opportunities for women? Is the Middle Ages to be seen, as some feminist historians have seen it, as a feminine 'golden age'? Does the coming of the 'Renaissance' reduce female options to that of marriage or marriage? How do both the observant and oppositional activities of women shift as we move from Catholic through Lollard to Protestant cultures? We might consider here the writings of Protestant Elizabeth I and embroideries of Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots; other authors might include Anne Askew, Isabella Whitney (fl. 1567-1573), Mary Herbert (1562-1621), Elizabeth Cary (1585?-1639), and Rachel Speght (c. 1597-16??). Such developmental narratives can be challenged by others suggesting strange resemblances over time, featuring women occupying luminal places: the anchoress; the pregnant woman. We can thus read Trotula texts (female-authored gynecological manuals), a manual for female recluses (Ancrene Wisse), a mystical text by a woman who uses her body as a spiritual laboratory (Julian of Norwich) and best-selling texts by Renaissance women who will not survive pregnancy. We can match texts from women centuries apart: such as Christine of Markyate (1096-1160), who defied family expectations of marriage to live as a recluse, eventually leaving us with an extraordinary life story and a psalter of her own; and Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, a playwright much reviled by Virginia Woolf who, nonetheless, wrote several plays imagining all-female academies long before Virginia penned A Room of One’s Own.

On Saturday 11 November there will be a one day conference at Penn dedicated to issues of medieval/Renaissance periodization. There will be visiting Faculty speakers: but the event is chiefly envisioned as an opportunity for graduate students to explore these issues; this course might be seen as a conduit to that event.

Assessment will be by one long essay, preceded by a one-page brainstorming abstract earlier in the semester.

GSOC-599 INDEPENDENT STUDY
Arranged Kurz (dkurz@sas)

Permission needed from department.