12/10/04
WOMEN'S
STUDIES
SPRING 2005
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/wstudies/
WSTD-004-401 THE
FAMILY
MW 11-12 Noakes (noakes@sas.upenn.edu)
REC-402 F 11-12
REC-403 F 12-1
REC-404 F 1-2
REC-405 W 4-5
Cross Listed: SOCI-004
General Requirement I: Society
Fulfills College
Quantitative Data Analysis
Permission needed from Department
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-004-601 THE
FAMILY
W 6-9 Winslow (swinslow@pop.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: SOCI-004
General Requirement I: Society
Fulfills College
Quantitative Data Analysis
Permission needed from Department
See course description above
WSTD-016-401 POETRY AND PHILADELPHIA
MW 3-4:30 Burnham (dburnham@english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-016
Distribution III: Arts and Letters
It is no accident that early modern feminism arose at the same time that empirical science did, and this course will chart their relation. At a time when objectivity was being invented, writers and philosophers became interested in a set of questions about sex and gender very similar to those we ask today. Are men and women fundamentally different? Does each have its own way of knowing? Is female learning possible, and do women need their own centers of learning?
While we will read widely in early feminism, we will also read the work of two women closely: Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. These two women blazed a trail a 100 years before Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 years before Virginia Woolf; yet you'll find their writing to be as fresh and relevant today as it was then - perhaps even more so. We will engage as well with many contemporary philosophers and scientists, focusing on reactions to this early feminist rise in
conscience. There will be two papers and some short research assignments.
WSTD-028-601 FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY
M 6:30-9:30 Meyer (mwmeyer@phil.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed:
PHIL-028
Distribution I:
Society
Feminist philosophy
is as wide-ranging as philosophy itself. Feminist philosophers have articulated
radical views of philosophy of science, aesthetics, ethics, political
philosophy
and
epistemology. What they all have in
common is the belief that each of these traditional areas of philosophy has
been deformed by at best, ignoring women and, at worst actively devaluing women
and women’s experience. In this
introduction to feminist philosophy we will focus on issues in feminist ethical
and political theory, though given the nature of the feminist outlook we will
also get glimpses of feminist epistemology, social theory and philosophy of
science. Feminist political
and ethical theories are richly diverse.
But all such theories have three common functions. First, the theories attempt to describe the
nature of women’s oppression (What is oppression? And how does it manifest itself in the lives
of women). Second, they attempt to
explain the causes and consequences of that oppression. And finally they attempt to prescribe
strategies for ending women’s oppression.
We will investigate suggested answers to all three of these questions
using contemporary sources. The issues
covered will be chosen from among work and family, sexuality, sexual
harassment, abortion, date rape, beauty, pornography and affirmative
action. Requirements: two short papers (5-6 pages, double-spaced,
30% each), a comprehensive final examination (25%) and regular attendance at
the weekly class meeting and conscientious participation in its discussion and
exercises (15%)
WSTD-055-401 19TH
CENTURY NOVEL
TR 12-1:30 Auerbach (nauerbac@dept.english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-055
We will study the evolution of
the nineteenth-century novel as it moves from Jane Austen's pastorals to the
ruder ones of Thomas Hardy, exploring ways in which the novel at once reflects,
soothes, and exacerbates the unspoken tensions within its culture. We will
trace the disruptive pressure of increasingly powerful women and the
intensifying pull of the past, which becomes more difficult to resist as
modernity takes shape.
Novels we shall read include
Jane Austen's Emma, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and Dickens' Bleak House. Each
student will be required to write a 10-page critical analysis of a novel
outside the course syllabus. There will be a midterm and a final exam.
WSTD-090-401 GENDER,
SEXUALITY AND LITERATURE
MW 6-7:30 Burnham
(dburnham@english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: COML/ENGL-090
Distribution III: Arts and Letters
In this class, we'll be reading
novels and short stories that examine marriage, family and childhood, as well
as theoretical material that explains, subverts and enriches the fiction. The
course is divided into four sections, each with texts that can be made to
comment upon each other. For example, in the first section, we'll be looking at
the idealization of marriage by reading Jane Eyre, Pearl Abrams' The Romance
Reader and Janice Radway's classic work on romance novels and their readers.
We'll also look at the realities of marriage through The Awakening, The Yellow
Wallpaper and stories by the Irish novelist Edna O'Brien, and at unconventional
versions of childhood and "home" through Ella Leffland's Rumors of
Peace, Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping
and stories by Toni Cade Bambara. Throughout, we'll be investigating the ways
in which fiction codifies, subverts and re-codifies notions of
"proper" female behavior, domestic relations and individual freedom.
You'll have short, frequent
writing assignments, including response papers and discussion questions
designed to focus and energize class discussion. You'll also do a longer
paper (7-10 pages) in which you bring the theoretical readings to bear on the
fiction.
WSTD-101-401 JANE
AUSTEN AND POPULAR CULTURE
MWF 1-2 Gamer (mgamer@dept.english.upenn.edu)
T 6-9
Cross
Listed: ENGL-101/FILM-115
WATU Credit
Optional
This course provides students
with an introduction to English through the study of a single author: Jane
Austen. At once acutely aware of popular culture and a product of it, Austen
read and wrote in popular forms, from Gothic horror to raucous satire. Her love
of popular theater enters into her work constantly, her facility for writing
dialogue making possible successful screen adaptations of every one of her
novels.
During the semester, we'll read
four of Austen's novels, most likely Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice,
Emma, and Persuasion. We'll also see approximately eight films, from
faithful adaptions of her novels to films like Clueless and Brigette
Jones' Diary. In the first few weeks of the course, we'll read Austen in
the context of the popular culture of her own time -- in the circulating
libraries of resort towns like Bath, on the London stage, and in response to the
twenty-three year war with France that dominated nearly all of her adult
life. The second part of the course will then turn, particularly though not
exclusively through the medium of film, to Austen as contemporary cultural
phenomenon -- from the soldiers during the first world war who read her
obsessively in the trenches, to the fans who made the Austen film industry
possible, to the authors and directors who have found inspiration in her work,
to the fan fiction that displaces her author to heroine of her own work.
Required work: three responses, two essays, and a final
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-102-401 SECRECY
AND SEXUALITY
MWF 12-1 Love (loveh@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: COML-245/ENGL102
WATU Credit Optional
Literary critics have
traditionally seen difficulty and abstraction as signs of aesthetic value. As a
result, many of the books that we consider "great literature" are
noted as much for what they don't say as for what they do. In this course we
read several "difficult" modern classics, paying close attention to the
tactics of secrecy, ambiguity, and indirection that they employ. Rather than
reading the blanks and silences in these texts as purely formal elements of a
modernist style, we read them against the grain and historically. Placing these
texts in the context of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century crises around
illicit sexuality (homosexuality, pederasty, incest), we ask what, if anything,
they are hiding. Readings by Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Herman Melville, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson,
William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Vladmir Nabokov, James Baldwin,
Cherríe Moraga, and Jackie Kay. A few short papers, a longer final paper, final
exam.
WSTD-109-401 WOMEN AND RELIGION
MW 12-1 Von
Schlegell (brvs@ccat)
REC 402 W 1-2
REC 403 W 2-3
REC 404 F 12-1
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-122-401 SOCIOLOGY
OF GENDER
TR 10:30-12 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-125-401 ADULTERY NOVEL
TR 3-4:30 Platt (kmfplatt@sas.upenn.edu
)
Cross Listed: RUSS-125/COML-127
General Requirement III: Arts & Letters
All Readings in English
The object of the course
is to analyze a series of 19C and 20C novels (and a few short stories) about
adultery. Our reading will teach us
about novelistic traditions of the period in question and about the
relationship of Russian literature to the European models to which it
responded. The course begins with a
novel not about families falling apart, but about families coming together -
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. We
then will turn to what is arguably the most well-known adultery novel ever
written, Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
Following this, we investigate a series of Russian revisions of the same
thematic territory that range from "great literature" to pulp
fiction, including Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and other works by Tolstoy, Chekhov,
Leskov, and Nagrodskaia. As something of
an epilogue to the course, we will read Milan Kundera's backward glance at this
same tradition in nineteenth-century writing, The Unbearable Lightness of
Being. In our coursework we will apply
various critical approaches in order to place adultery into its social and
cultural context, including: sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist
examinations of family as a social and economic institution,
Freudian/Psychoanalytic interpretations of family life and transgressive
sexuality, Feminist work on the construction of gender.
WSTD-143-401 WOMEN IN U.S. HISTORY: 1865-PRESENT
TR 1:30-3 Peiss (peiss@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HIST-143
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-199 INDEPENDENT STUDY
Arranged TBA
See Department
WSTD-206-401 CHINESE
WOMEN
R 1:30-4:30 Fei (siyen@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HIST-202/206
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-235 PSYCHOLOGY
OF WOMEN
401 W 2-5 Staff
402 T 4:30-7:30 Staff
Cross Listed: EDUC-235
Critical analyses of the psychological theories of female
development, and introduction to feminist scholarship on gender development.
WSTD-242-401 SCIENCE
OF SEX AND SEXUALITY
TR 12-1:30 Miller (samiller@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed:
HSOC/HSSC-242
The author of a New York Times
article entitled "On Being Male, Female, neither or both" concluded
her comments with the following statement: "The definition of sex was (and
is) still up for grabs." In our post-modern world, we have become
accustomed to the malleability of gender identity and sexuality. We are
also aware that individuals undergo sex reassignment
surgeries but by and large we assume that transgender people are transitioning
from one discrete category to another. Queer activists certainly
challenge this assumption, preferring to envision sex, gender, and sexuality on
a continuum, but these days even scientists don't concur about a definitive
definition of sex. Should sex be defined chiefly by anatomy?
Chromosomes? The body's ability to produce and respond to hormones?
If the boundaries of biological categories can be contested, what are the
implications for culturally constructed ideas about gender
identity and sexuality?
WSTD-251-401 WRITING OUT
LOUD: DEVELOPING SOLO PERFORMANCE
M 3-6 Lampley
(oflampley@aol.com)
Cross Listed: AFRC-309/THAR-250
With
increasing frequency, artists of color and other marginalized groups
are turning to solo performance as a way to more fully explore and express
the complexity of their lives. Beginning with questions such as
"What is a play?", "What is dramatic action?", and how
does the Aristotelian model serve us today?", we will ponder the role
of the spoken word in the African
American community.
But the true purpose of this course is to engage students in
the rigorous process of mining their own experiences for material that can
be transformed into a public performance piece. In-class writing,
group discussions, and field work in Philadelphia and New York will be accompanied by
videotapes of solo pieces by Leguizamo, Deaveare Smith, Bogosian,
Tomlin, and Gray. The course will culminate in a public reading by
each participant.
Accomplished
actress and award-winning playwright, Oni Faida Lampley, will conduct the
course.
WSTD-258-601 INTERNATIONAL
WOMEN, WAR, AND PEACE
M 5:30-8:30 Kadende-Kaiser
Cross Listed: AFST-258
This
course will examine the impact of war on women as well as women's roles as
peace makers. 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 peace-makers? Countries such as Argentina, 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
T 1:30-4:30 Barron
(dbarron@sas)
Distribution I:
Society
Academically Based Community Service Course
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 6:30-9:30 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-279-601 DANGEROUS
WOMEN
M 6-9 Malague (rmalague@english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed:
ENGL-290/THAR-279
Why are some women perceived as
"dangerous?" Is a woman's refusal to conform to societal expectations
and traditional gender roles a dangerous act? To whom--or what--do rebellious
women pose danger? Are 'feminists' frightening? Why? This course will examine
"dangerous women" in theatrical representations drawn from American
plays, films, and performance pieces of the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, created by both male and female artists. Among the characters and
works to be considered are: the "young woman" who murders her husband
in Sophie Treadwell's Machinal; Blanche DuBois, the smart, spinsterish,
neurasthenic who "preys" on young boys in Tennessee Williams' A
Streetcar Named Desire; Karen, the woman accused of lesbianism in Lillian
Hellman's The Children's Hour; the student who accuses her professor of
sexual harrassment in David Mamet's Oleanna, and the many women talking
about you-know-what in Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. Where
possible, we will attend relevant live theatrical performances in Philadelphia.
WSTD-291-401 NEW WOMAN/NEW LITERAUTRE
IN EAST ASIA
R 3-6 Kim (kimj7@sas)
Cross Listed: AMES-291
From
new things and new styles to new concepts and new morals, "new" was
the
craze
in East Asia during the first few decades of the 20th
century. In this milieu of dizzying changes
and expansions, the new woman took center stage. One area in which the new
woman became the subject of preoccupation was in the literary arts field where
she graced the pages of fiction, poetry, drama, and film as heroine, villain,
femme fatale, vixen, etc.
Simultaneously, the new woman became an object of intense debate and
conversation from which revealed the deep tensions holding together the
extraordinary changes taking place. In
this course we will explore who this new woman was, what was so "new"
about her, and what can be said about the new literature accompanying her. By placing her in a broader context of the
growing political economy and side by side with the development of modern print
culture, we will examine more closely how the categories of women's literature,
feminist literature and gender in literature complicate and inform the
development of modern literature, especially in East Asia.
WSTD-294-601
GLOBAL
FREEDOMS IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION
R 5:30-8:30
Shapple
(dshapple@sas)
Cross Listed:
COML-294/ENGL-293
With cries for freedom
ringing in today's headlines, and the U.S. proposing to bring liberty to countries across
the globe, how may we come to understand what freedom means to different societies? Might one
group's freedom lead to another's oppression? How do women, in
Particular, balance their struggles for national independence, civil rights, and individual
fulfillment? In this course, we will focus primarily on fiction written
by women living in
Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean to consider how ideas about
gender, empire, and sovereignty impact women's lives and differ between
cultures and histories. Texts may include fiction by Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Isabel Allende, Jessica
Hagedorn, Marguerite Duras, Arundhati Roy, Jean Rhys, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and
Shani Mootoo, as well as selected critical essays and several films like The Lover and The House
of the Spirits.
WSTD 307-401 GENDER
IN LATIN AMERICA
MWF 10-11 Farnsworth-Alve (farnswor@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HIST/LTAM-307
This
course will explore ideologies of masculinity and femininity in Latin
America from the colonial period to the present. Themes include Mestizaje and the conquest,
slavery and the culture of honor, organizing by working-class women, and the
political activism of mothers facing authoritarian governments. Readings
are chosen for methodological innovation and the authors' contributions to theorizing
gender relations as well as for their substantive treatment of women's and
men's interaction in specific countries.
WSTD-320-301 CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST
THOUGHT
M 2-5 Kurz (dkurz@sas)
Distribution I: Society
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 3-4:30 Foley (efoley@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HSSC-261, HSOC-216
Distribution I: Society
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-335-401 THE PAMELA CONTROVERSY
R 1:30-4:30 Bowers (tbowers@dept.english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed:
ENGL-345
Benjamin Franklin Seminar
Distribution III: Arts and Letters
In 1740, Samuel Richardson
published what turned out to be one of the most influential and controversial
novels ever written, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. It tells the story of
a servant girl who repeatedly resists the sexual overtures of her powerful
"master," Mr. B., and of the supposedly happy ending that her
virtuous behavior eventually earns. The questions about power, class, gender,
virtue, and meaning that Pamela made visible sparked an enormous amount of
writing in its day and ever since. Was Pamela really virtuous, or did she
manipulate Mr. B's desire for her in order to gain wealth and social position?
Who is the agent of the seduction in Pamela, and who its object? What is the
nature of Pamela's "virtue," and what is the quality of her
"reward?" Is women's virtue different from men's? Is marriage
necessarily a form of economic exchange, even of prostitution for women? These
are some of the questions that Pamela raised for readers of the eighteenth century,
and that continue to this day to be debated in writing surrounding this
controversial work.
In this advanced seminar, we
will examine the universe of writings that have emerged since 1740 in response
to Pamela. Starting with the novel itself and with Richardson's own defenses of it, we'll look at the
multitude of "anti-Pamelas" that crowded 18th-century
publication lists, and the critical voices that have sounded since, either to
praise or to attack the novel. Emphasis will be placed on independent library
research and on the recovery and interpretation of eighteenth-century texts.
Students will learn to use sophisticated research tools -- electronic
databases, microfilm collections, and rare book libraries, for example -
efficiently and critically.
WSTD-344-401 PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONAL
GROWTH
M 5-8 Staff
Cross Listed:
EDUC-345
Intellectual, emotional
and behavioral development in the college years. Illustrative topics:
developing intellectual and social competence; developing personal and career
goals; managing interpersonal relationships; values and behavior. Recommended for sub matriculation in
Psychological Services Master's Degree program.
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-518-401 NURSING, HEALTH AND
ILLNESS IN THE UNITED
R 4-7 STATES,
1860-1985
Fairman (ron.fairman@uphs.upenn.edu)
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-542-401 WORK
AND GENDER
R 2-5 Leidner (rleidner@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: SOCI-542
This
seminar examines the relevance of gender to the organization and experience of
paid
and
unpaid work. Combing materialist and social constructionist approaches, we will
consider
occupational segregation, the relation of work and family, gender and class
solidarity,
the construction of gender through work, race and class variation in work
experiences,
and related topics. (description from 532 fall 2002)
WSTD-553-401 BRITISH
WOMEN WRITERS
F 12-3 Bowers (tbowers@dept.english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed:
ENGL-553
Permission needed from Instructor
A study of British women
writers, often focusing on the women authors who came into prominence between
1775 and 1825.
WSTD-556-401 SPECTACULAR
VICTORIAN SUFFERING
T 3-6 Auerbach
(nauerbac@dept.english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-556
Why are some
women perceived as "dangerous?" Is a woman's refusal to conform
to societal expectations and traditional gender roles a dangerous act? To
whom--or what--do rebellious women pose danger? Are feminists
frightening? Why? This course will examine "dangerous
women" in theatrical representations drawn from American plays, films, and
performance pieces of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, created
by both male and female artists. Among the characters and works to be
considered are: the "young woman" who murders her husband in
Sophie Treadwell's /Machinal/; Blanche DuBois, the smart, spinsterish,
neurasthenic who "preys" on young boys in Tennessee Williams' /A Streetcar
Named Desire/; Karen, the woman accused of lesbianism in Lillian
Hellman's /The Children's Hour/; the student who accuses her professor of
sexual harassment in David Mamet's /Oleanna/, and the many women talking about
you-know-what in Eve Ensler's /The
Vagina Monologues/. Where possible, we will attend relevant live
theatrical performances in Philadelphia.
WSTD-572-401 LANGUAGE
AND GENDER
W 2-4 Pomerantz (apomeran@dolphin.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: EDUC-572
A critical investigation of relationships between language, gender,
and social structure which explores how our language use can reflect and
perpetuate gender inequities, or challenge and potentially transform gender
relations. Students' ongoing discourse analytic projects are integral to our
inquiry. Implications for individual and social change are emphasized.
WSTD-576-401 FOLKLORE
AND FEMINISM
W 1-3 Hufford (mhufford@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: FOLK-576
Undergraduates by permission only.
This graduate seminar will explore issues in the study of
women's culture as folklorists have encountered and theorized it in recent
decades. We will pay special attention to folklorists' engagement with
the theories of such leading feminist writers as Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous,
and Merchant.
WSTD-588-401
THE POLITICS OF
WOMEN’S HEALTH
R 3-6 Durain (duraind@nursing.upenn.edu);
McCool (mccoolwf@nursing.upenn.edu
Cross Listed: NURS-588
This course will utilize a multidisciplinary approach to
address the field of women’s health care. The constructs of women’s health care
will be examined from a clinical, as well as sociological, anthropological and
political point of view. Topics will
reflect the historical movement of women’s health care from an
obstetrical/gynecological view to one that encompasses the entire life span and
life needs of women. The emphasis of the course will be to undertake a critical
exploration of the diversity of women’s health care needs and the past and
current approaches to this care. Issues
will be addressed from both a national and global perspective, with a
particular focus on the relationship between women’s equality/inequality status
and state of health.
WSTD-599 INDEPENDENT STUDY
(GRADUATE LEVEL)
Arranged TBA
See Department for Permission and Section Number
WSTD-683-401 GENDER, POWER, AND FEMINIST THEORY
R 2-5 Hirschmann
njh@sas.upenn.edu
Cross Listed PSCI 683
This graduate seminar will take up a number of texts in contemporary feminist
theory centered on the theme of gender and power. We will start with
various texts that theorize power from different perspectives and continue onto
specific topics relating to power such as sexuality, marriage, race, and
"east-west" relations within feminism. Theorists to be considered
include Butler, Brown, Collins,
Fineman, hooks, Narayan, Nussbaum, and others.
WSTD-775 -001 INTIMATE
VIOLENCE
F 9 – 10:50 McCloskey lmcclosk@ssw.upenn.edu
Cross Listed: SWRK-755
The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the definition,
theories, causes, processes, consequences, and social interventions in intimate
violence. The course will attempt to provide insight on the phenomenon of
intimate violence by examining the ways in which it affects survivors,
perpetrators, and their children. This will be accomplished by reviewing the
current research as well as by exploring how intimate violence is constructed
by the participants on the personal, interpersonal, and social structural
level.