Gender, Culture, and Society
Fall 2007 Graduate Courses
GSOC-450-640 FEMINISM AND FREEDOM
6-8:40 Lundeen (bshannon@sas.upenn.edu)
(Currently open only to MLA students)
Feminism and Freedom will provide students with an introduction to theories and topics in western feminism (predominantly American) ranging from the early suffragist movement in 19th-century America to more recent 21st-century efforts to articulate transnational feminist aims and concerns. The course will be driven by two questions which we will continue to pose throughout the semester: 1) what is feminism? 2) What is freedom for feminists? Because feminist thought is not monolithic, we will find throughout the course of the semester that the answers to the preceding questions will depend upon each particular feminist thinker and/or "type" of feminism. Thus, several times throughout the semester, students will be asked to pose variations of these two questions to selected readings and respond to the questions in brief papers. Among the topics covered in the seminar: Liberalism, Women's Rights and Human Rights, Socialist and Marxist Feminism, and Global Feminism.
GSOC-513-401 INDIAN CINEMA & SOCIETY
TR 10:30-12 Majithia (majithia@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: CINE-215/SAST-213/SAST-513
This course provides a historical and thematic introduction to the variety of films that constitute a “national” cinema of “India,” with a particular focus on Hindi popular cinema. We will begin by considering the cultural backgrounds of Hindi cinema, including the translation of traditional forms through modern technology such as the mythological, and move on to exploring in the post-independence context: the genres of the national epic, the courtesan film, the historical, parallel film, the social, the masala, and the romance. We will also consider the relationship between particular regional cinemas and Bollywood. Finally, we will conclude by examining Hindi cinema within the context of globalization and changes that distribution, marketing, and thematic shifts herald by considering the roles that the diaspora, neo-liberal economic policy, consumerism, and trans-nationalism play in producing new genres such as Bombay noir and the new wave. Three themes will organize our study: the nation, the public, and gender, particularly as it is constitutive of the previous two. Our study will expose is to various theories of the study of culture but will emphasize methods which will fall under the rubric of cultural studies. By the end of this course, students should be able to write and analyze film critically and consider its role in relation to other contexts such as society.
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-528-301 GENDER AND SCIENCE
R 1:30-4:30 Lindee (Mlindee@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HSSC-528
With a special focus on methods, this course explores the rich literature on
gender and technical knowledge.
GSOC-553-401 18th CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS
R 3-6 Bowers (TBOWERS@ENGLISH.UPENN.EDU )
Cross Listed: ENGL-553
An introduction to the work of the most influential female writers of Britain's "Augustan" age, and to culture in which their work emerged. No previous knowledge of the eighteenth century is required, and students from disciplines other than English are welcome. Our goal will be to ask not only how women wrote but how they *were written* -- what possibilities existed (or could be imagined) for women as individuals, as members of families, as citizens, and as authors. We shall look at a small number of authors, a few of whom we shall study in some depth, asking questions such as these: what forms of social authority were available to women during this period? what alternatives were conceivable, and what kinds of worlds were created (or denied) as particular notions of gendered identity and authority were represented in texts? The emphasis will be on fiction, but several other genres will be represented (typically, poetry, drama, conduct writing, periodical writing, and political polemic). Typical authors: Behn, Manley, Pope, Swift, Haywood, Burney, Wollstonecraft.
GSOC-599-401 INDEPENDENT STUDY
Arranged Kurz (dkurz@sas)
Permission needed from department.
