11/2/05
WOMEN'S STUDIES
SPRING 2006
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/wstudies/
WSTD-004-601 THE FAMILY
S 9-12
Winslow (swinslow@ssc.upenn.edu )
Cross Listed: SOCI-004
This course provides an
introduction to sociological perspectives on families, focusing largely on
contemporary American families. The course begins with a brief overview of
theoretical perspectives on families and family patterns and changes over the
past several decades. We will then turn our attention to family formation and
dissolution, considering cohabitation, marriage, divorce, remarriage, and
fertility. In the final section of the course, we will examine how the worlds
of work and family intersect and conflict, considering both paid and unpaid
labor (housework, childcare, etc.). Throughout the course, we will pay special
attention to how gender structures and is constructed in family life and
consider how race and class shape family experiences. Students will be taught
to critically evaluate the research of others, while also conducting their own
data analyses on a family-related topic of their choice.
WSTD-009-301 THE AMERICAN FAMILY
TR 12-1:30 Paxton (fpaxton@sas.upenn.edu)
Fulfills College
Writing Requirement
What do we mean when we say we're family? And what are
family values? "No Place Like Home" is an interdisciplinary writing
course that invites you to examine the evolution of American family life from
1900 to the present. Our approaches will be as varied as the families we study:
we will explore how novelists, playwrights, and poets have depicted the
American family; how advertisers and politicians have appealed to it; how
legislators have defined it; how Hollywood has imagined it; and how academics and journalists have
pronounced it to be alternately ailing and thriving. You will experiment with
numerous, including creative non-fiction, autobiography, and journalism. You
will complete formal and/or informal writing assignments every week. These will
help you develop high level academic writing skills.
WSTD-009-302 THE AMERICAN FAMILY
TR 3-4:30 Paxton (fpaxton@sas.upenn.edu)
Fulfills College
Writing Requirement
See above description.
WSTD-016-401 POETRY IN PHILADELPHIA:
TWO RIVERS, MANY VOICES
MW 2-3:30 Burnham (dburnham@english.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: ENGL-016
Distribution III: Arts and Letters
Freshman Seminar
We’ll begin by reading poems by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, who spent some of their formative years here at Penn, reading poems to each other. We’ll also look carefully at volumes by Susan Stewart and Eleanor Wilner, each of who achieve an astonishing engagement with parts of the world often ignored or invisible. By the end of the semester, we’ll have read deeply in poems that celebrate and interrogate city life, sometimes with joy, sometimes with anger. We’ll read about street corners, newsstands, babies, fights, reconciliations, rivers, trolleys, school, dogs and the occasional TastyKake. Many of the poets we read are young, some very traditional, and some experimental. Short writing assignments, a few of them creative, a final project on a poet or a locus of Philadelphia poetry, lots of conversation and collaboration. No previous experience with poetry necessary.
WSTD-028-601 FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY
R 6:30-9:30 Meyer (mwmeyer@phil.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: PHIL-028
Distribution I:
Society
Feminist theory grows out of
women's experience. In this course we will investigate how some
contemporary feminist thinkers' consideration of women's experience has caused
them to criticize society and philosophy. Traditional philosophical areas
addressed may include ethics, social and political philosophy, aesthetics,
philosophy of religion, and epistemology.
WSTD-041-401 GENDER ISSUES IN
CONTEMPORARY ASIA
T 1:30-4:30
Hannum (hannumem@soc.upenn.edu )
Cross Listed: SOCI-041/EALC-014
Distribution I:
Society
This seminar offers students an
opportunity to read and evaluate recent social science research on pressing
gender issues in contemporary Asia. Through writing projects and in-class exercises, students
will also conduct their own research in this area. We will focus on the
following topics: the missing girls phenomenon, gender and education, gender and
labor force participation, the migration of women and mothers, women’s
reproductive health and rights, and trafficking. Throughout the class, we will
consider theories and evidence about how development and globalization affect
these topics, and, more broadly, the working and family lives of women and men.
The class will be conducted as a mix of overview lectures on substantive topics
and on how to access information on these topics; discussions of books and
articles; student research exercises and presentations; and film viewing and
discussion.
WSTD-090-401 GENDER,
SEXUALITY AND LITERATURE
TR 3-4:30 Bowers
(tbowers@dept.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-096-401 THEORIES OF GENDER
AND SEXUALITY
MW
2-3:30
Love (loveh@sas.upenn.edu
)
Cross Listed:
COML/ENGL-096
Distribution
III: Arts and Letters
What is sexuality?
Does it exist in the body or in the mind? Is it a collection of actions,
desires, and fantasies, or is it rather a disposition, a way of seeing oneself,
an identity? Does what we want depend on who we are? Does what we do define
who we are? This course will address such questions by introducing students to
several classic texts in the history and theory of sexuality. We will consider
the politics and meaning of non-normative sexualities across time and in
different cultural locations. After working through several key texts in the
field, we will turn to contemporary debates about the limits of transgender
identity, gay pride and gay shame, the commodification of identity, the meaning
of “queer,” and responses to HIV/AIDS. Readings by Freud, Michel
Foucault, Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayle Rubin,
Michael Warner, Cherríe Moraga, Leo Bersani, and others; we will also look at
some contemporary queer cultural production (music, film, zines). Requirements:
two short papers; one longer paper; a final exam.
WSTD-122-401 SOCIOLOGY
OF GENDER
TR 1:30-3 Leidner (rleidner@sas.upenn.edu)
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-143-401 WOMEN: US HISTORY
1865-PRESENT
MW 2-3:30
Stein (tba)
Cross Listed: HIST-143
Distribution II: History and Tradition
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
170-401 THE
AMERICAN SOUTH
MW 11-12 McCurry (smccurry@sas.upenn.edu)
Rec-402 F 11-12
Rec-403 R 12-1
Rec-404 F 1-2
Cross Listed: HIST-170
General Requirement II: History and Tradition
Southern culture and history from 1607-1860 from Jamestown to secession. Traces the
rise of slavery and plantation society, the growth of Southern sectionalism and
its explosion into Civil War. Midterm, short paper (5-7 pages) and final.
WSTD-187-401
POSESSING WOMEN
MWF 11-12 Chance (lchance@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: EALC-017/COML-187
Distribution III: Arts & Letters
A man from Tennessee
writes Memoirs of a Geisha. A Japanese
novelist tells the story of the "comfort women" who served the
Japanese army. A tenth century courtier
poses as woman writing the first woman's diary.
Poets from Byron to Robert Lowell, through Ezra Pound to Li Po, have
written as though they were women, decrying their painful situations. Is something wrong with this picture, or is
"woman" such a fascinating position from which to speak that writers
can hardly help trying it on for size?
In this course we will look at male literary impersonators of women, as
well as women writers. Our questions
will include who speaks in literature for prostitutes--whose bodies are in some
sense the property of men--and what happens when women inhabit the bodies of
other women via spirit possession. Readings
will draw on the Japanese tradition, which is especially rich in such cases,
and will also include Western and Chinese literature, anthropological work on
possession, legal treatments of prostitution, and film. Participants will keep a reading journal and
write a paper of their own choosing.
WSTD-199 INDEPENDENT
STUDY
Arranged TBA
See Department for Permission and Section
Number
WSTD-206-401 CHINESE
WOMEN
R 1:30-4:30 Fei (siyen@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross Listed: HIST-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-235-401 PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN
W 2-5
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 & 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 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 (lampley@aol.com)
Cross Listed: AFRC-309/THAR-250
Distribution III: Arts &
Letters
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-252-401 FREUD
TR 10:30-12 Weissberg (lweissbe@sas.upenn.edu )
Rec-402 F 10-11
Rec-403 F 11-12
Rec-404 F 11-12
Rec-405 F 12-1
Rec-406 F 12-1
Rec-407 F 1-2
Rec-415 F 11-12
Cross Listed: COML/GRMN/HSOC/HSSC-253/COLL-002
General Requirement VII: Science Studies
No other
person of the twentieth century has probably influenced scientific thought,
humanistic scholarship, medical therapy, and popular culture as much as Sigmund
Freud. This seminar will try to study his work, its cultural background, and
its impact on us today. In the first part of the course, we will learn about
Freud's life and the Viennese culture of his time. We will then move to a discussion
of seminal texts, such as excerpts from his Interpretation of Dreams, case
studies, as well as essays on psychoanalytic practice, human development,
definitions of gender and sex, neuroses, and culture in general. In the final
part of the course, we will discuss the impact of Freud's work. Guest lecturers
from the medical field, history of science, psychology, and the humanities will
offer insights into the reception of Freud's work, and its consequences for
various fields of study and therapy.
WSTD-254-601
GENDER & WARFARE: CONTEMPORARY FRONTS
T
6-9
Lundeen (bshannon@sas.upenn.edu )
In what ways is gender affected by
war? In what ways are war, warfare, and military activity affected by gender?
How are contemporary culturally specific notions of femininity and masculinity
produced, challenged and/or perpetuated by and through current military
engagements across the globe? In this course we will examine the relationship
between war and gender in a contemporary socio-political framework. We will
focus on particular fronts of civil and international war including here in the
U.S. and abroad in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Congo, and Haiti. Some of the questions we will ask are: Why is sexual
degradation and violation such a prominent instrument of domination in warfare?
How does the shaping of masculinity in a time of war coincide with defending
one’s nation, one’s religion, or one’s tribe? In what ways are contemporary
notions of femininity in particular cultures challenged or reinforced in times
of war? Why is it that in all of these contemporary fronts of war civilian
girls and women are subjected to sexual assaults while men are emasculated or
feminized as part of the process of marking one’s enemies and degrading them?
We will examine all of these questions with a commitment to discerning what
sort of possibilities war and its aftermath provide for challenging current
conceptions of gender. Facilitated discussion, writing assignments, and group
research-projects will be the primary forms of assessment in this course.
WSTD-270-401 FOLKLORE
AND SEXUALITY
TR 10:30-12 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-275-401 KING KONG: MONSTERS & THEIR BRIDES
MW
2-3:30
Lafferty (tmlaffer@sas.upenn.edu )
Cross
Listed: FILM-225/THAR-275
Distribution
III-Arts & Letters
This course will incorporate a historical overview of
gender, sexuality, race, and religion in monster images of literature, theatre,
and cinema. Vampires, werewolves, and
the Golem are precursors to modernist figures like Dracula, Mr. Hyde/Wolf Man,
and Frankenstein. Students will also
look at contemporary adaptations, including The
Phantom of the Opera, Metamorphosis,
and Godzilla. Ironically, these manifestations of
resistance against dominant social orders often die in the end of their tales,
thus confirming existing hierarchies of power.
A centerpiece of this course will be the character of King Kong. Students will participate in presenting a
production of Chinese American Ping Chong's play Kind Ness, in which a gorilla named Buzz immigrates from Africa
to the U.S. Perceived as a model minority, Buzz
assimilates so fully into human culture that he cannot recognize a zoo gorilla
as his relative. Students may
participate in the production as actors, backstage workers, and even
filmmakers: each student will contribute his or her own unique skills to this
exciting project (so don't worry if you don't want to act or make a film—we
have plenty of other areas in which you can help out). The play will be accompanied by the screening
of a film by an Indonesian American of Muslim heritage, Fatimah Tobing
Rony. Her short video On Cannibalism deconstructs the original
King Kong movie as evidence of how
the West has configured Africans and Asians as barbaric and uncivilized, as
well as how stereotypes of race and gender are linked through the Sumatran
Bride of Kong offered as a sacrifice and the white woman Kong carries to the
top of the Empire State Building. In
addition to screening Rony's film, our multimedia production of Chong's Kind Ness will also incorporate original
short films by interested students. With
the latest remake of King Kong being
released in December 2005, this course will be a timely look at how monsters
express social and cultural anxieties.
To successfully complete this course, students will actively prepare for
and take part in class discussions, read and/or view selected plays and films,
write shorter and longer critical writing assignments, participate in the
production of Kind Ness and related
film screenings, and compile a final portfolio of their course work.
WSTD-279-401 DANGEROUS WOMEN
M
6-9 Malague
(rmalague@english.upenn.edu)
Cross
Listed: FILM-225/THAR-279/ENGL-256
Distribution
III-Arts & Letters
Theatre
began as a form that excluded women entirely.
The plays of ancient Greece
and Elizabethan England were written and performed only by men, beginning a
long tradition of theatre that represented women only from male perspectives. Has that tradition been so dominant for so
long that women's voices on stage are still a novelty? This course focuses on a wide range of plays
and performances by and about women; the work we read (and view) will
evidence
artistic attempts to represent women's lives, experiences and perspectives on
the stage. Among the issues encountered
and examined in these works are the roles of love, sexuality, friendship,
career, community, marriage, motherhood, family, and feminism in women's lives
- as well as the economic and political position(s) of women in society. The course will also
offer
contextual background on feminist theatre history, theory, and literature, the
diverse (and divergent) creative efforts of female artists to use live
performance as a means of creating social and political change.
WSTD-290-401 GENDER, SEXUALITY &
LITERATURE:
THE BLUESTOCKING
CIRCLE
TR 12-1:30 Snead (jsnead@writing.upenn.edu)
Cross
Listed: ENGL-290
Distribution III: Arts & Letters
This seminar explores the writings and ideologies of
the “Bluestocking Circle”
of the mid- to late-eighteenth century. A group of writers and
intellectuals who originally gathered for conversation and exchange in
the 1750s and 60s in the salons of educated women like Elizabeth Montagu,
Frances Boscawen, and Elizabeth Vesey, the Bluestockings believed in
intellectual rather than social merit, polite sociability, and equality
between the sexes. The term “bluestocking” itself originally
referred to the blue worsted stockings worn by seventeenth and
eighteenth-century men for informal occasions, and it became both symbol
and metaphor for the group’s informality and sense of equality among its
members. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, the Bluestockings
wrote and published poems, novels, plays, essays, translations, and reams
of letters – especially among and by the prominent women in the
group. Later in the century, however, the term “bluestocking”
gradually took on the meaning it retains today: a derogatory epithet
for an intellectual, socially privileged, and conservative woman.
In this class, we’ll read the writings of many of the best-known women
writers of the Bluestocking circle, including Anna Laetitia Barbauld,
Elizabeth Carter, Hester Chapone, Sarah Fielding, Catherine Macaulay, and
Hannah More, exploring their relationships with each other and with the
public, print culture that they participated in. We’ll also dip
into the writings that constituted the “Bluestocking backlash” of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including satires on
intellectual women by Frances Burney, Richard Polwhele, Thomas Moore, and
Lord Byron. What did it mean to be a public female intellectual
during the second half of the eighteenth century? What kinds of
issues were at stake? What risks, and what gains, did it
involve? And in what relationship do these early women writers stand to
the development of feminism and feminist thought?
Course requirements will include regular attendance and class participation;
weekly response papers; one group presentation; one longer research paper.
WSTD-294-601 BIOPOWER & GENDER IN A
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
R 5:30-8:30 Tracy
(mtracy@sas.upenn.edu)
This course examines contemporary issues of biopower from
a global perspective and how they are shaped by gender. Biopower is a set of
diverse techniques intended to manage bodies and control populations. The
concept of biopower focuses our attention on the governing of human bodies and
biological and social processes such as reproduction, aging, illness and
health. We will consider questions and issues being played out in the media and
across the globe today, including: the role of gender in biopolitical debates
such as stem cell research and the function of women in the military; the
transnational circulation of bodies as commodities through prostitution,
slavery, organ transplants, fertility treatments, etc.; how feminist writings
on science address emerging debates on biotechnology, genetic engineering and
cloning; how moral and ethical judgments made in the West influence health care
agendas in other areas of the world.
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-333-601
CONSUMING CULTURE:
THE
ANTHROPOLOGY OF MUSIC & ART
W 6-9
Diggs-Thompson (diggst@pobox.upenn.edu)
Cross-Listed: ANTH-333
Since its
birth, the discipline of anthropology has played a significant role (for better
or for
worse) in
influencing popular perceptions of the arts. As objects of study, artifacts, as
well as visual and performing arts of non-western cultures have fascinated and
preoccupied those within
the discipline. Early social thinkers and
anthropologists have used various material and visual cultural manifestations
of peoples culture (inclusive of dance, music, museum and visual arts) to
construct evolutionary models and to develop theories of culture purporting to
both describe and explain. In this course we will review historically how ethnocentric
biases against other peoples artistic creativity have led to dichotomizations
such as high/low culture, fine/primitive art, and
classic/folk art and music--that invariably place
Euro-western art forms at the pinnacle of refinement and taste. We will also
look at how gender plays a role in how artistic culture is ranked.
Informed
by interdisciplinary critical analyses of theory, we next turn the lens inward
at ourselves to investigate where, when, how, and for what purpose contemporary
consumption of art and music takes place. We question when and why various
forms of art and music become symbolic in and out of the context in which they
were created. Aside from their aesthetic
dimension,
we will analyze how various arts have been marketed, and how they are
implicated in consumption habits which become associated with certain social
classes and different categories of taste. The semester will be divided into
two parts, Part I will be devoted to the visual arts,
and Part II will concentrate on performing arts and music.
In addition to what we learn from lectures, readings, research
assignments, field trips, guest speakers and films, each participant will
develop, research, and present on a particular topic of interest.
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-390-401 TOPICS IN GENDER, SEXUALITY & LITERATURE:
FRIENDSHIP
T 1:30-4:30 Love (loveh@sas.upenn.edu)
Cross
Listed: ENGL-390
Benjamin Franklin Seminar
Distribution III: Arts and Letters
This seminar offers an introduction to the history and philosophy
of friendship. We will consider friendship in relation to eros and same-sex
desire; as a mode of political thought; and in relation to questions of
representation and truth. We will take up twentieth-century transformations in
marriage and kinship and will reflect at length on recent queer rethinking of
friendship “as a way of life.” Students will also be asked to think about the
classroom as an alternative space of social relations and to design and lead
one pedagogical experiment during the semester. Readings by Plato, Aristotle,
Montaigne, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry James, Gertrude
Stein, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alan Hollinghurst, and
others. One class presentation; pedagogy project; long final paper.
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.