Revised 12/7/01

WOMEN'S STUDIES SPRING 2002

WSTD-004-401 THE FAMILY

TR 3-4:30 Gager (gager@ssc)

Cross Listed: SOCI-004

General Requirement I: Society

Fulfills College Quantitative Data Analysis

Historical and cultural development of the family, analysis of sexual codes; discussion of role differences between men and women; factors involved in mate selection and marital adjustment, analysis of family disorganization with both individual and societal implications.

WSTD-006-305 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE: SEXUALITY AND LITERARY STYLE SINCE 1700

TR 10:30-12:00 Harzewski (sharzews@dept.english.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed:ENGL-001

“In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo,” so poet T.S. Eliot muses. We will not talk of Michelangelo in this course, but we will discuss gender and art—specifically sexual representation and literary identity. We will investigate in a historical context and across genres how masters of style since 1700 have explored the interplay of literary creation and sexuality. You will develop essay-writing aptitude as we examine how a diverse group of authors use sexual representation to reaffirm, resist, or simply engage societal norms. The question of how literature negotiates self-creation and sexual expression will guide our inquiry. Authors may include Alexander Pope, Toni Morrison, Kate Chopin, Jean Genet, Nellie Wong, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anaïs Nin, Henrik Ibsen, Cherrié Moraga, Jeanette Winterson, Eliza Haywood, and James Joyce. The course will also serve as an introduction to key themes and issues in sexuality studies and Women’s Studies. Requirements include class participation and essays of various lengths; no final exam.

WSTD-090-401 WOMEN AND LITERATURE

TR 3-4:30 Auerbach (nauerbac@english)

Cross Listed: AFAM/ENGL/COML-090

Distribution III: Arts and Letters

Focusing on literature by and or about women, this course examines women as readers, writers, and subjects of literature. Works studied vary considerably from semester to semester and may include a wide range of works from various countries and in various genres, often selected to allow for examination of theoretical issues such as feminist humor, feminist literary theory, women and popular culture, and the place of women in the literary mainstream. Often special attention is paid to the experience of minority women.

WSTD-109-401 WOMEN AND RELIGION

Lec MW 11-12 Von Schlegell (brvs@ccat)

Rec 402 M 12-1

Rec 403 F 12-1

Rec 404 F 11-12

Cross Listed: FOLK-029, RELS-005

General Requirement I: Society

This course will investigate women's religious practices and beliefs in a number of established religions. We will pay attention to such topics as theological explanations of women's roles in creation, the relationship between women and evil, the position of women in religious hierarchies, and the impact of social change on women's roles in established religions. Traditional religions considered will include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Issues raised will include the impact of the women's movement and feminist thought on women and religion, and the development of contemporary women-oriented spiritual movements and religious practices.

WSTD-117-401 SOCIOLOGY OF WORK

TR 1:30-4:30 Leidner (rleidner@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: SOCI-117

The material world is shaped and maintained through work, but so is the social world. How work is organized, allocated, and rewarded determines the opportunities people have for developing their own capacities, the kinds of ties they will have with others, and how much control they will have over their own lives. We will consider various sociological perspectives on work and compare alternative ways of organizing work, with a focus on the contemporary United States.

WSTD-122-401 SOCIOLOGY OF GENDER

TR 9-10:30 Roth (silkerot@ssc)

Cross Listed: SOCI-122

General Requirement I: Society

The assignment of gender roles and the construction of gender identities has profound consequences for women and men at every level of society: from their intimate relations, how they manage and participate in the institutions of society, their place in society's stratification systems. This course examines four aspects of gender relations: historical and cross-cultural examples of gender roles; gender relations in contemporary American institutions; theories of sex differences and gender inequality; and movements and policies for gender equality. Some specific topics to be covered are: Women and the economy, women and the professions, working class women, changing male identities, the nature of male power, and the women's liberation movements

WSTD-122-601 SOCIOLOGY OF WORK

S 9:30-12 Cornwell (lcornwel@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: SOCI-122

See Description under WSTD 122-401

WSTD-199 INDEPENDENT STUDY

Arranged TBA

WSTD-202-401 HOLLYWOOD “CLASSICS”

TR 1:30-3 Sadashige (sadashig@sas)

Cross Listed: CLST/COML/FILM-204

This course will introduce students both to several foundational texts of classical literature and to the study of popular culture. We will accomplish this through a comparison of ancient works with popular film. Students will read a number of well-known texts from antiquity, one or two 20th-century works, and view 8-12 (mostly) recent popular films that in some way "translate" classical themes, ideas, or methods of narration. We will examine the texts and films first within their cultural contexts and then against one another. This comparative approach will allow us to address a number of different themes, issues, and reading strategies. Topics and films may change slightly from year to year, but some likely themes include: Homer's Odyssey, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Apuleius' Golden Ass, Euripides' Hippolytus, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and a number of critical essays. Probable films include: Die Hard, Aliens, Angel Heart, and Mighty Aphrodite. Students should plan to attend weekly screenings in addition to the regularly scheduled course.

WTSD-206-401 CHINESE WOMEN’S HISTORY

T 2-5 Sommer (mhsommer@sas.upenn.edu )

Cross Listed: HIST 206, AMES 277

This seminar will examine important questions about the lives of women in the last thousand years of Chinese history through a survey of the best recent research in a variety of disciplines. We will also read selected primary sources in translation, including fiction by Ding Ling and Pa Chin, essays by Lu Xun and Mao Zedong, and two memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. Weeks 2-6 cover the later imperial period; weeks 7-14 cover China's century of revolution. Although our topic is historical, the course as a whole explores theoretical questions fundamental to women's studies generally: how has the category of "woman" been shaped by culture and history? How has gender performance interacted with bodily disciplines and constraints (e.g., medical, reproductive, and cosmetic technologies)? How relevant is the experience of Western women to women in other parts of the world? By what standards should liberation be defined? The seminar is cross-listed with Women's Studies; prior knowledge of Chinese history is welcome but not required.

WSTD-209-401 SOUTH ASIANS IN THE U.S.

TR 1:30-3 Rocher (rrocher@sas)

Cross Listed: ASAM-209, SARS-206

Distribution I: Society

This course begins with a historical survey of South Asian immigration in the United States. It continues with a broad look at cultural, social, and political issues which confront the South Asian American community today, issues such as citizenship and transnationality, minoritization, economic opportunity, cultural and religious maintenance and adaptation, changes in family structure and gender roles, and generational shifts. It concludes with an examination of the emergence of a body of creative writings by South Asians in America as an expatriate Indian literature of exile and as American immigrant and ethnic literature.

WSTD-223-601 TRUE ROMANCE: THE NIGHTS AND KNIGHTS

OF LITERATURE

T 5-8 Rosenfeld (rosenfej@dept.english.upenn.edu)

Grocery stores line their shelves with Harlequin Romances and Danielle Steele continues to sell millions of copies of her novels. Yet the modern romance, while incredibly popular, is usually dismissed as prurient and escapist "trash," written by silly women for silly women. As a possible antidote to this dismissal, we will examine the history of this most trashy of genres, beginning with the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages and ending with contemporary novels and films. Along the way we may read/watch medieval Arthurian romances, works by Shakespeare, Eliza Heywood, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and various contemporary novels and "chick-flicks."

WSTD-224-401 DIVERSITY IN THE WORKPLACE

TR 12-1:30 Elting (eltingh@wharton)

Cross Listed: MGMT-224

The power of diversity begins with an overview of diversity issues in the workplace. The second set of readings explores management and leadership styles of men and women and invites debate as to whether they are gendered processes. The third part offers cross-racial and cross-cultural perspectives toward the experiences of mangers as they negotiate power relations in corporate America. The fourth and fifth groups of readings examine management strategies for creating and sustaining a multiculturally diverse workforce. The course culminates with a conversation as to how awareness of differences informs the academic experiences and career/life expectations of Wharton students.

This course consists both of lecture and discussion but will emphasize the latter. The success of this course is predicated upon a highly interactive method of teaching. Thus, students who offer original perspectives, built upon previous contributions, and who integrate examples from other contexts will be rewarded. The course requires one significant writing assignment as well as several short analytic papers and responsibility for one presentation.

WSTD-226-402 TOPICS: CARIBBEAN WOMEN WRITERS

TR 12-1:30 Clarke (clarkej2@dept.english)

Cross Listed: AFAM-293, COML-378, ENGL-293

Caribbean folk culture inherits a vestigial West Africanism in the figure of the "market woman." In some West African cultures the market was the sphere of women and provided forms of autonomy for women. In the Caribbean, this social formation appears during slavery (and after) as the "market-day " (usually on a Saturday) the day plantation owners allowed slaves to sell their produce and create and participate in circuits of economic exchange. And of course, running alongside this there was the creation and exchange of cultural capital; what Caribbean sociologists will later claim as "folk culture." Curiously enough, the first generation of writers did claim this folk culture, but gendered it male for the most part. That tradition, some have argued, has exhausted itself; and indeed, the tradition of Anglophone Caribbean writing would have ended with this first generation, were it not for the explosion of the female voice in Anglophone Caribbean fiction. The now legendary gathering of women writers at the "Caribbean Women Writers Conference" held at Wellesley College in 1988 and organized by the noted Caribbeanist Selwyn Cudjoe was a public signal of what many had privately noted. Why the sudden silence from the male pen? How do these women writers write themselves into the (Caribbean) social contract? How do these writers engage with the earlier tradition? How do these women claim and (re)construct the lives of Caribbean women? If "the pen," as two of the key players in the elaboration of North American feminist criticism have argued, "is a metaphorical penis" which writes across a blank (female) page, what do Caribbean women writers encounter at their (metaphorical) blank pages?

WSTD-228-401 WOMEN IN INTERNATIONAL CINEMA

M 2-5 Perlmutter (ruth@astro.temple.edu)

W 2-3:30

Cross Listed: FILM-208

On the premise that looking is both a sexual act and a form of colonization, this course is designed to explore how filmmakers from all over the world "look" at women -- and consequently, communicate meaning about men as well. We shall study films from modern Europe, Australia, Latin America and the emerging nations. The focus will be on issues of gender, sexual orientation, cultural attitudes, race and the effects of colonialism, globalization and exile. The readings will concern critical practices, with a grounding in feminist and multicultural film theory. There will be a mid-term and a final exam. The first session of each week will be a lecture and compulsory film screening, the second will be devoted to analysis and discussion.

WSTD-231-601 GENDER AND THE FAMILY

M 5:30-8:10 Hickes (jhickes@ssc.upenn.edu)

This course explores the extent to which the concept of the family is a gendered social construction. We will consider how the institution of the family reflects and perpetuates gender roles that are intrinsically woven into the social norms of our society. The class will analyze

ideas about the family both as a cohesive unit and as a locus of struggle between differentially-situated individuals within it. The class will consider various theoretical perspectives on the family, including feminist, conflict, and symbolic interactions. Focusing on the contemporary United States, topics will include the symbolic meaning of the wedding ceremony, marriage and its division of labor, the differing ideals of fatherhood versus motherhood, domestic violence, family roles in elder care, and alternative approaches to household formation. Changing trends in cohabitation, single parenthood, fertility rates, divorce and remarriage will be placed in a gendered context for critical analysis.

WSTD-233-401 RENAISSANCE DRAMA

TR 1:30-3 Howard (jhoward@dept.english)

Cross Listed: ENGL-233

Focusing on Renaissance dramatists other than Shakespeare, this course examines these writers from different perspectives. A sample offering: "Theater and Society," which examines Renaissance drama as it reveals a society that saw itself both through and as theater. This particular course investigates different kinds of plays as "social" and "political" theater and

studies the first "domestic" tragedies.

WSTD-235-402 PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN

T 2-5 Macmoran (ccm@nursing.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: EDUC-235

Critical analyses of the psychological theories of female development and introduction to feminist scholarship on gender development.

WSTD-258-301 INTERNATIONAL WOMEN, WAR, AND PEACE

TR 3-4:30 Kadende-Kaiser (rkadende@yahoo.com)

Cross Listed: AFST-258

This course will examine the impact of war on women as well as women's roles as peacemakers. The following questions will be addressed: How are women affected by violent conflict? What survival strategies do women employ to cope with violent conflict? Can women in post conflict societies serve as mediators and peacemakers? Countries such as Burundi, Rwanda, the former

Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, Guatemala, and Cambodia will serve as the empirical basis for exploring these questions.

WSTD 259-301 GENDER, POLICY, AND COMMUNITY SERVICE

W 2-5 Barron (dbarron@sas)

This seminar integrates community service with academic analysis and research on gender and public policy. Each student will intern with an organization in the Philadelphia area that works on gender issues. Semester-long internships will be integrated with readings and assignments on topics related to gender and policy.

WSTD-270-601 FOLKLORE AND SEXUALITY

T 6:30-9:10 Azzolina (azzolina@pobox.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: FOLK-270

Sexuality is not only a biological act or fact, it also has a creative and aesthetic element. This course examines the folklore elements of sexuality and includes historical readings such as the Bible and the Decameron as well as a contemporary look at topics such as body art and clothing choice. A field-based paper will be required and a final examination will be given on

class discussions and readings.

WSTD-274-401 TOPICS: WILLA CATHER

TR 3-4:30 Hall (lhall@dept.english)

Cross Listed: ENGL-284

Literary history has simultaneously idolized and dismissed Willa Cather (l873 - l947) as a nostalgic saint of the lost West. Recent textual and biographical scholarship has fortunately revised these anti-feminist and anti-aesthetic views. The "new" Cather is sleeker and styled along Art Deco lines, a modernist rather than a Victorian, a Greenwich Village denizen rather than Nebraska pioneer.

This course will pair key Cather texts spanning her career and genre experiments with texts by select contemporaries, in order to reveal their artistic and philosophical affinities. Sample pairs include "The Troll Garden" with Edith Wharton; "Alexander's Bridge" with Henry James; "My Antonia" with Sarah Orne Jewett; "The Professor's House" with Faulkner; "Death Comes for the Archbishop" with Mary Austin; "Sapphira and the Slave Girl" with Toni Morrison. Cather's criticism, reviews, and travel writings will also be read in tandem with subjects ranging from Stephen Crane to Mary Baker Eddy.

The seminar will be structured by a series of short papers critiquing each pair of texts, wide-ranging discussion incorporating trends in painting and the arts; and a final project inquiring into another contemporary (e.g. Georgia O'Keeffe, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Ellen Glasgow, Sherwood Anderson, Virginia Woolf) or another Cather text (e.g. "One of Ours," "A Lost Lady," "Shadows on the Rock," "Lucy Gayheart").

WSTD-290-401 FEMINIST FAIRY TALES

TR 3-4:30 Mahaffey(mahaffey@english.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: ENGL/AFAM-290

Distribution III: Arts & Letters

In this course, we will address the question of how young American women are acculturated to see some roles as desirable and others as unacceptable. In particular, we will explore the impact of popular culture, especially fairy tales, on the formation of a woman's self-image. We will examine the value of beauty, kindness, youth, sexuality, and wealth from variety of angles, and we will also assess what fairy tales from different cultures suggest about a woman's optimal size, age, intelligence, and aggressiveness.

We will begin by reading several versions of fairy tales from different time-periods and cultures, and we will contextualize those reading with commentaries that are also written from a range of perspectives: psychoanalytic, feminist, and sociological. Students will be required to see several film versions of the fairy tales we examine, although there will be no formal screenings. Once we have a fuller grasp of the variants of a given tale, it will be easier to appreciate what values are being endorsed by the popular dissemination of one particular version. We will then contrast the most well-known and influential versions of fairy tales with feminist revisions of those tales by Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Tanith Lee, Jane Yolen, and others.

Requirements include a short (one-page) oral presentation, two 6-8 page papers, and a comprehensive final examination.

WSTD-320-301 CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THOUGHT

M 2-5 Kurz (dkurz@sas)

Distribution I: Society

WATU Program - Fulfills 1/2 College Writing Requirement

In this course, which will be organized as a seminar, we will read contemporary feminist works examining feminist approaches to explaining women's experiences, their representations, and their relative positions in society. We will examine critically the theoretical assumptions of various schools of thought, and pay particular attention to the theoretical contributions women of color have brought to the feminist thought. Finally, we will also analyze selected contemporary social issues from the vantage point of different feminist perspectives.

WSTD-325-401 WOMEN AND HEALTH

TR 10:30-12 Staff

Cross Listed: HSSC-261, HSOC-216

Health, illness and healing systems are deeply connected to the organization of gender relations. This course introduces students to sociological perspectives on the intersection between gender and health in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. We will examine sex differences in disease distribution and health service use, the effect of women's poverty on health status, women's roles as health care providers, and the historical development of health issues and medical fields directly relevant to women's health (e.g. menstruation, menopause, birth control, obstetrics, pediatrics, and psychiatry).

WSTD-330-301 GENDER AND SCIENCE

W 2-5 Lindee (mlindee@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: HSSC-330

Ideas about masculinity and femininity have played a critical role in the rise of modern science since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Knowledge is gendered male, nature gendered female, and scientific practice is organized around a set of well-recognized dichotomies that map on to gender: thought/feeling, culture/nature, logic/intuition, aggression/passivity, public/private, objectivity/subjectivity, and so on. In recent years, an extremely rich historical literature has appeared that deploys gender as an analytical category in the history of technical knowledge production. Masculinity has been linked to credibility—a gentleman can be trusted because he is not beholden to anyone—and femininity to an intimacy

with nature that permits greater insights (McClintock, Profitt). In this seminar, we will explore the complex historical meanings of gender in science, technology and medicine, considering why Linnaeus chose to call mammals "mammals," the invention of two sexes in the eighteenth century, Darwin’s vulnerable male body, and the discovery of the sex hormones.

WSTD-346-401 WOMEN IN AMERICAN HISTORY

TR 1:30-3 Peiss (peiss@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: HIST-346

Picking up where History 345 leaves off, this course explores how immigration

industrialization, racial segregation, and the growing authority of science

transformed the fundamental conditions of women's lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building on previous efforts by female reformers to perfect society, women at the turn of the century organized large social movements dedicated to improving the lives of women and children and gaining public access to political power. We will examine the fruits of this activism as well as the consequences of subsequent events for the rise of several important social movements in the latter half of the century -- including civil rights, women's liberation, and gay rights -- in which women played a vital role. The course concludes with an assessment of feminism in the present day, with special emphasis on the responses of younger women to

its legacy.

WSTD-400-301 SENIOR THESIS

F 2-5 Kurz (dkurz@sas)

WATU Program - Fulfills 1/2 College Writing

This seminar is for senior undergraduate Women's Studies majors who are writing their theses.

WSTD-416-401 PUBLIC INTEREST ANTHROPOLOGY

R 2-5 Sanday (psanday@sas)

Cross Listed: AFAM-416, ANTH-416

Distribution I: Society

Because of its four-field, holistic approach anthropology is uniquely equipped to address a wide range of public and community service issues such as health, teen pregnancy, sexuality, domestic violence, ebonics, race, repatriation, and cultural heritage. Because of its emphasis on participant observation and seeing things from "the other's" point of view, anthropological methods are helpful to all professionals working in the U.S. public sphere, in government, law, education, or health fields. This course introduces the student to public service issues, from the perspective of selected Penn anthropology faculty. Lectures will be given by faculty members representing the four fields. With the course coordinator, students will be encouraged to pursue several public interest issues of their choice. Undergraduate and graduate students from all departments and schools are encouraged to take the course.

WSTD-433-401 WOMEN AND JEWISH LITERATURE

TR 10:30-12 Hellerstein (khellers@sas)

Cross Listed: GRMN-425, JWST-435

Distribution III: Arts & Letters

WATU Credit (Optional)

This course will introduce undergraduate and graduate students of literature, women's studies, and Jewish studies to the long tradition of women as readers, writers, and subjects in Jewish literature. All texts will be in translation from Yiddish and Hebrew, or in English. Through a variety of genres -- devotional literature, memoir, fiction, and poetry -- we will study women's roles and selves, the relations of women and men, and the interaction between Jewish texts and women's lives. The legacy of women in Yiddish devotional literature will serve as background for our reading of modern Jewish fiction and poetry from the past century.

WSTD-499 INDEPENDENT STUDY (SENIOR LEVEL)

Arranged TBA

See Department for Section Numbers

Permission Needed From Department

WSTD-518-401 NURSING, HEALTH AND ILLNESS IN THE UNITED

R 4:30-7:30 STATES, 1860-1985

Wilkerson (karenwil@pobox)

Cross Listed: NURS-518

Distribution II: History & Tradition

This course uses nursing's history as a framework for analyzing gendered themes in health and health care since the Civil War. Thus, the ideas, events, people and institutions that have played a role in shaping the historical health care system are examined as part of an inclusive social context that considers the multifaceted meanings of women's work and women's experiences. Specifically, this course concentrates on the ways in which women have both challenged and collaborated with social structures and ideologies that were themselves gendered. This focus is presented as one way of understanding the complex interrelationships among gender, class, and race in the American health care system.

Content includes changing ideas about the nature of health and illness; changing forms of health care delivery; changing experiences of women as providers and patients; changing role expectations and realities for nurses; changing midwifery practice; changing segmentation of the health care labor market by gender, class and race.

WSTD-524-401 DIVERSITY IN THE WORKPLACE

TR 3-4:30 Elting (eltingh@wharton)

Cross Listed: MGMT-624

See description under WSTD-224

WSTD-534-401 WOMEN IN POETRY

W 2-4 Kirkham (vkirkham@sas)

Cross Listed: COML-534, ITAL-534

The course explores female voices in medieval and early modern literature from Italy and France. We shall begin with the foundations of the "courtly" lyric tradition, reading the "trobairitz" (female troubadours). Next we shall turn to early Italian texts in which woman is the object of a male gaze. We shall consider both the classical "high" style that idolizes woman (Petrarch) and programmatic departures from it (Dante's "Stony Rhymes," satirical dialogues, and humorous misogyny). Our point of arrival will be the Petrarchan poetesses of 16th-century Europe, with an emphasis on the Italians (Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa, Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati). What were the literary and philosophical traditions that shaped notions of female identity? How do women establish their own textual space when appropriating a genre that had been the vehicle for a masculine first-person voice? How do the images of women as

scripted by men, or staged through male cross-voicing, differ from those in poetry written by women? What are problems and issues in constructing a national history of women poets?

WSTD-535-401 PROBLEMS IN ANCIENT HISTORY

T 2-5 Shaw (bshaw@sas)

Cross Listed: ANCH-535, HIST-535

A separate topic is offered in either the history of Ancient Near East, Greece, or Rome.

WSTD-540-401 MASCULINITY IN NARRATIVE AND PERFORMANCE

M 2-5 Dautcher (dautcher@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: ANTH-554, FOLK-540

In this seminar we will read and discuss fieldwork-centered approaches to understanding the individual and collective lives of men in communities around the world. Through a perspective that emphasizes masculinity as performed and narrated in everyday life, we will seek to integrate concepts of: (1) the self-the experiencing and embodiment of personhood, subjectivity, and emotion; (2) spatiality and power-public and private forms of masculine self-presentation such as bodily disciplines, sporting events, leisure spaces; and (3) the state-relations between gender ideology, governmentality and power in political theatre, media control, warfare and military memorials. Familiarity with theoretical works on performance and narrative approaches to the study of everyday life will be addressed through additional recommended readings.

WSTD-599 INDEPENDENT STUDY (GRADUATE LEVEL)

Arranged TBA

See Department for Permission and Section Number

WSTD-610-401 WOMEN AND GENDER IN U.S. HISTORY

M 2-5 Peiss (peiss@sas.upenn.edu)

This is an intensive reading/discussion seminar that examines the history of women and gender in the United States, with an emphasis on the period after 1865. Readings will focus on the major trends and new directions of scholarship in this field, and will include theoretical and comparative (non-U.S. and pre-1865 U.S.) analysis, as well as well as some primary documents. The key issues we will examine are: sexuality, reproduction, and the body; feminism and politics; gender and culture; the constructed boundaries between public and private. Requirements include frequent written responses to the readings and two historiographical essays.

WSTD-735-401 SHAKESPEARE AND WOMEN

W 12-3 Rackin (prackin@dept.english.edu)

Cross Listed: ENGL-735

Twentieth-century feminist criticism has run the full gamut in its estimates of Shakespeare's female characters--celebrated at one extreme as the visionary creations of a protofeminist genius,

deplored at the other as the repressive fantasies of a "patriarchal Bard." The focus  of  this course  will be an issue implicit in many of these debates-- the relationship between Shakespeare's fictional portraits of female characters and the positions of actual women, both in his world and in ours.  For although Shakespeare's female characters were dramatic fictions, produced by a male playwright for performance by male actors, they still appealed to the tastes of  female playgoers in his own time, and they have played  important roles ever since in shaping our understandings of  what it means to act like a woman.  Questions to be addressed include : What do we know about the lives of actual women Shakespeare would have known--the women in his family, the women would have encountered on the London streets,  at court, and among the audiences in his playhouse? What kind of work did they perform?  How accurate is the current scholarly consensus about women's repression and subordination in that period?  How have the theatrical representations and critical responses to Shakespeare's female characters changed over time?  What are the historical and political implications of those changes?

Course requirements: a review article on recent criticism and scholarship and a substantial paper (along with a class presentation) on a play or topic relevant to the subject of the course.