Gender, Culture & Society
COURSES
SPRING 2009

 

 

GSOC-004-401                       THE FAMILY

MW 11-12  Lecture                 Harknett (harknett@sas.upenn.edu)
REC:
402 F 10-11
403 F 12-1
404 R 12:30-1:30
405 R 11-12

Cross Listed: SOCI-004

Fulfills College Quantitative and Data Analysis Requirement
Society Sector

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.

 

GSOC-007-401          POPULATION & SOCIETY
TR 10:30-12                            Flippen (chenoa@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed:  SOCI-007
Society Sector

The course covers selected aspects of population and the study of demography, including social, economic, and political issues: population explosion, baby bust, population aging, abortion, teenage pregnancy, illegal aliens, racial classification, and population and development.

 

GSOC-016-401          BURDEN OF REPRESENTATION
TR 1:30-3                                Love (loveh@english.upenn.edu)

Freshman Seminar

Cross Listed: ENGL/CINE-016

What does it mean to be a person? In this course, we will approach this question by considering how individuals are represented in film, literature, photography, art, the social sciences, and medicine. In particular, the course explores the representation of social otherness: how are particular kinds of bodies marked as different and what are the consequences of such acts of categorization? We will be looking at the roots of social stigma in ancient practices of branding slaves and criminals and at the development of the idea of the normal or average man in the modern period. Our work will touch on related scholarship in the fields of disability, critical race, and gender and sexuality studies; however, the focus will be on particular representations of otherness. Writings by Jacob Riis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Djuna Barnes, Carson McCullers, Frantz Fanon, Erving Goffman, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and others.  Films by: D. W. Griffith, Douglas Sirk, Frederick Wiseman, and Forugh Farrokhzad. In a final unit we read several recent graphic novels.

 

GSOC-051-401     BRITISH NOVEL OF DEVELOPMENT
MWF 12-1                              Burnham (dburnham@english.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: ENGL-051

Distribution Course Arts and Letters – Class of ’09 and Prior

The focus of this course is the classic English novel of education.  We’ll first read Jane Eyre and Great Expectations to see how the pattern of growing up varies by gender. We’ll continue with two massive but marvelous novels, Middlemarch and Vanity Fair, one heroine devoted to the notion of duty, the other to the notion of self. We will not rush through these texts; we’ll take our time and appreciate their intricate structures and passionate intelligence. We’ll also read Tess of the D’urbervilles and Shaw’s play St. Joan, both stories of country girls who can live honestly only by defying the men who seek to control them. Finally, we’ll read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and Alice in Wonderland, both written for children but which are even better read in adulthood.

 

GSOC-090-401       18TH CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS
TR 3-4:30                                Bowers (tbowers@english.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed:  ENGL-045

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 Kigsolver’s The Bean Trees, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and stories by Toni Cade Bambara.  Throughout, we’ll be investigating the ways in which fiction codifie, 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 reading to bear on the fiction.

 

GSOC-122-401    SOCIOLOGY OF GENDER                                                  TR 1:30-3                                Leidner (rleidner@sas.upenn.edu)     

Cross Listed: SOCI-122

Cultural Diversity in US – Class of ’12 and After

Society Sector

The assignment of gender roles and the construction of gender identities have 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.

 

GSOC-199            INDEPENDENT STUDY
Arranged                                  TBA         

See Department for Permission and Section Number

 

GSOC-203-401      SEX AND THE FAMILY
M 2-5                                      Connolly

Cross Listed: HIST-203

 

GSOC-206-402      HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE IN CHINA
R 1:30-4:30                              Fei (siyen@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: HIST-206

 

GSOC-214-402         SAME-SEX MARRIAGE
M 2-5                                      Gordon (sgordon@law.upenn.edu)

Benjamin Franklin Seminars

Cross Listed: HIST-214

 

GSOC-213-601        INDIAN CINEMA & SOCIETY
MW 4:30-7:30                         Desser

Cross Listed:  SAST-213, SAST-513, CINE-215

This course provides a historical and thematic introduction to the variety of films that constitute a “national” cinema of “India,” with a particular focus on Hindi popular cinema. We will begin by considering the cultural backgrounds of Hindi cinema, including the translation of traditional forms through modern technology such as the mythological, and move on to exploring in the post-independence context: the genres of the national epic, the courtesan film, the historical, parallel film, the social, the masala, and the romance. We will also consider the relationship between particular regional cinemas and Bollywood. Finally, we will conclude by examining Hindi cinema within the context of globalization and changes that distribution, marketing, and thematic shifts herald by considering the roles that the diaspora, neo-liberal economic policy, consumerism, and trans-nationalism play in producing new genres such as Bombay noir and the new wave. Three themes will organize our study: the nation, the public, and gender, particularly as it is constitutive of the previous two. Our study will expose is to various theories of the study of culture but will emphasize methods which will fall under the rubric of cultural studies. By the end of this course, students should be able to write and analyze film critically and consider its role in relation to other contexts such as society.

 

 

GSOC-226-401                       JANE AUSTEN AND COMPANY

MW 2-3:30                              Harzewski  (harzewski@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: ENGL-260

Distribution Course Arts & Letters – Class of ’09 and Prior

 

Best embodied by the works of Jane Austen, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, the novel of manners lies between two extremes. Engaged with decoding society’s customs, dress, and private conduct, it occupies a middle ground between courtly romance and cynical anti-romantic fiction. The last decade has witnessed a major revival of this tradition in the form of film adaptations and the popular fiction subgenre “chick lit,” exemplified by international bestsellers Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. As a community of thinkers and writers we will evaluate the achievements of these perennial and new classics as well explore how novel writing is a way of creating, not just reporting, what Nancy Bentley has called “the governing fictions of culture.” Through in-class writing, discussion, and short papers, we will work to decode the ways in which this major literary tradition depicts the role and formation of heroines, male-female relations, romantic love, and courtship. As we assess this marriage of old and new, additional authors and texts may include Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Mary McCarthy’s “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment,” Louis Auchincloss’s “The Friend of Women,” Elizabeth Bowen’s “Ivy Gripped the Steps,” and Sybil Brinton’s Old Friends and New Fancies,a re-discovered sequel originally published in 1913 that unites characters from Austen’s six novels with creations of the author’s own.  Besides consistent active contributions to discussion, assignments will include a class presentation, a short paper early in the semester, and a long essay (12+ pgs.) at the end of term. No midterm or final exam. 

 

GSOC-235-401                       PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN
 W 2-5                                    

Cross Listed: EDUC-235

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

 

GSOC-241-401                     LITERARY EROTICS IN 18TH CENTURY
TR 3-4:30                                Lubey (lubey@sas.upenn.edu)

Distribution Course Arts & Letters – Class of ’09 and Prior

Cross Listed: ENG-241

Often identified as the period in which the roots of modern pornography emerged, the eighteenth century in England saw a proliferation in narratives and plots about sex, composed in styles ranging from what we might call explicit or pornographic to highly allusive, satirical, even moral and didactic. This course will explore the diverse ways in which eighteenth-century authors
employ eroticism to achieve diverse effects in readers--to produce comedy, to refine their tastes, to purge them of corruption, to cultivate morality and politeness. But even as they claim to promote traditional social practices such as chastity, reason, and self-government, authors recognize that "warm," sexualized narratives threaten to change readers from enlightened, moral
subjects to passionate, lustful brutes. How, authors persistently ask, can erotic scenes and plots be presented in such a way that they will benefit readers rather than corrupt them? We will read across the generic and moral spectrum of literature in the period to investigate the various ways in which authors approach the challenge of balancing sex with reason, paying special attention to their editorial commentary on those lessons they expect readers to derive from books. Authors will include Rochester, Behn, Wycherley, Mandeville, Addison, Swift, Pope, Montagu, Haywood, Cleland, Sterne, Boswell; secondary readings will include historical and literary-critical accounts of the rise of pornography, the discourse on sexuality, and gender in the period. Evaluation will be based primarily on papers (totaling 20+ written pages) and a final.

 

GSOC-242-401                       SCIENCE OF SEX & SEXUALITY
TR 12-1:30                              Miller (samiller@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed:  HSOC/STSC-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.

 

GSOC-245-401                       EPISTOLARY FICTION
TR 10:30-12                            Bowers (tbowers@english.upenn.edu)

Distribution Course Arts & Letters – Class of ’09 and Prior

Cross Listed: ENGL-245
Epistolary novels are works of prose fiction presented in the form of letters ("epistles"). Sometimes an epistolary novelist wants us to believe that he/she is merely an "editor" who has collected a group of private letters and published them (with or without their authors' permission). Other epistolary novels look much like other novels except for the inclusion of a letter-convention "frame." In all cases, epistolary novels add a layer of distance between the tale and its readers, and make certain kinds of authenticity claims.

The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the great age of epistolarly fiction in Britain. The form proliferated starting in the 1660s, but by the time of the French Revolution its use had dwindled markedly. (A few epistolary fictions continue to appear even today, but the form is usually considered atavistic now.)

This course will consider the functions and appeal of British epistolary fiction in its heydey, between the late seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries, reading such authors as Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Samuel Richardson, and Frances Burney. Why, we shall ask, did the epistolary form take off to such a spectacular extent during the eighteenth century, what precisely made it so popular, and why did it fade from the scene when it did? What was at stake -- aesthetically, politically, and morally --  in producing novels that pretended to be made from private letters? What might account for the strong eighteenth-century association of epistolary fiction with women's voices and experiences? What part does eighteenth-century epistolary fiction play in later British and American literary history?

The class will be seminar-style, with careful reading and discussion paramount. Each student will give one oral presentation to the class accompanied by annotated bibliography, produce weekly written responses, and write one 10-12 page paper.

GSOC-250-401               IRONIC ROMANCE
TR 12-1:30                              Auerbach (nauerbac@english.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: ENGL/CINE-251, COML-249

Romance is a palatable fictional mode in the nineteenth century. Since it endorses narrative symmetry, moral justice, emotional fulfillment, and true love, it was especially imposed on woman writers, despite--or because of--the fact that the genre breeds delusion and self-destructive fantasies in its readers. We will read a series of novels in which the author subverts her or his romance conventions, including works by Jane Austen, Flaubert, Mary Braddon, Daphne du Maurier, and perhaps Nabokov.

 

GSOC-257-401          CONTEMP FICT/FILM JAPAN
T 1:30-4:30                              Kano (akano@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: CINE-222, COML-256, EALC-251
This course will explore fiction and film in contemporary Japan, from 1945 to the present.  Topics will include literary and cinematic representation of Japan s war experience and post-war reconstruction, negotiation with Japanese classics, confrontation with the state, and changing ideas of gender and sexuality.  We will explore these and other questions by analyzing texts of various genres, including film and film scripts, novels, short stories, mangazines, and academic essays.  Class sessions will combine lectures, discussion, audio-visual materials, and creative as well as analytical writing exercises.  The course is taught in English, although Japanese materials will be made available upon request.  No prior coursework in Japanese literature, culture, or film is required or expected; additional secondary materials will be available for students taking the course at the 600 level.  Writers and film directors examined may include: Kawabata Yasunari, Hayashi Fumiko, Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Yoshimoto Banana, Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, Kurosawa Akira, Imamura Shohei, Koreeda Hirokazu, and Beat Takeshi.

GSOC-290-401          FEMINIST FAIRYTALES
TR 12-1:30                              Hufford (mhufford@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: ENGL-290
Distribution Course Arts & Letters – Class of ’09 and Prior
Traditionalists insist that woman’s place is in the home, indeed that a good woman is herself home; but women, in and out of fiction, haven’t always agreed. We shall examine a series of novels and films in which home becomes a haunted nightmare for the women who live in it.  Fiction we shall read includes Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre, Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House. Films include Polanski’s Repulsion and perhaps Rosemary’s Baby, Robert Wise’s The Haunting, and Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

GSOC-320-601           CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THOUGHT

R 6-9                 Bianchi (ebianchi@mailworks.org)

Distribution Course Society – Class of ’09 and Prior

This course covers a broad range of feminist writers, from the pioneer thinkers of the 18th century to current feminists who focus on globalization. After examining how and why feminist thought developed, we will explore how different feminist perspectives explain gender inequality both in the US and in contemporary global contexts. Readings will also focus on how gender issues interact with race, ethnicity, sexuality, and social class. We will also focus on how feminist theory informs current social movements for gender equality.

 

GSOC-338-301 SWEET OLD LADIES & SANDWICHED DAUGHTERS
W 4-7                                      Kagan (skagen@nursing.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: HSOC/NURS-338
Benjamin Franklin Seminars

This course is an intensive and focused introduction to social gerontology as a trans-disciplinary lens through which to examine aspects of social structure, actions, and consequences in an aging society.  A variety of sources are employed to introduce students from any field focused on human behavior and interaction to classical notions of social gerontology and current scholarly inquiry in gerontology.  Field work in the tradition of thick description creates a mechanism to engage students in newly gerontological understandings of their life worlds and daily interactions. Weekly field work, observing aspects of age and representations of aging and being old in every day experiences forms, is juxtaposed against close critical readings of classical works in social gerontology and current research literature as well as viewings of film and readings of popular literature as the basis for student analysis.  Student participation in the seminar demands careful scrutiny and critical synthesis of disparate intellectual, cultural, and social perspectives using readings and field work and creation of oral and written arguments that extend understandings of the issues at hand in new and substantive ways. Emphasis is placed on analysis of field work and literature through a series of media reports and a final term paper.

 

GSOC-339-301 PSYCHOLOGY OF GERONTOLOGY IN 21st CENTURY 
T 4-7                                       Kagan (skagen@nursing.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: HSOC/NURS-339
Benjamin Franklin Seminars

This honors course examines the psychological gerontology of advancing age and identity in the 21st century.  Examination emphasizes gendered notions of beauty and sexuality in ageing and the life span to foster discourse around historical notions and images of beauty and ugliness in late life in contrast to contemporary messages of attractiveness and age represented by both women and men.  The course is designed to create intellectual foundations as place from which to critique socially mediated and personally conveyed images and messages from a variety of media and their influence on intrapersonal and interpersonal constructions and social processes.  Contemporary and historical ideas encompassing stereotypical and idealized views of the older person are employed to reflect dialogue around readings and field work.

 

GSOC-344-401     PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONAL GROWTH
M 5-8                                     

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 the Psychological Services Master's Degree program.

 

GSOC-346-401     GENDER IN MODERN AMERICAN HISTORY
TR 10:30-12                            Brown (kbrown@sas.upenn.edu)
                                               
Cross Listed: HIST-346                      

From the sixteenth century, when Native American populations flourished on the North American continent, to the Civil War, when North and South collided over the question of slavery, women have played a critical role in American society.  This course traces the history of women and gender in America during this period with special emphasis on the importance of women's reproductive and economic roles to the emergence of ethnic, racial, regional, and socio-economic categories in the United States.  Slides, lectures, and readings drawn from primary documents introduce students to the conditions of women's lives during the colonial and revolutionary periods and to the rise of women's activism in the nineteenth century.  In addition, we will consider how dramatic changes in housework, wage labor, female access to public forms of power, and ideas about female sexuality make it difficult to generalize about what is commonly thought of as women's "traditional" or "natural" role.

 

GSOC-349-401   HISTORY OF SEXUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES
MW 3:30-5                              Estepa

Cross Listed:  HIST-349

Distribution Course History/Tradition – Class of ’09 and Prior

This course introduces students to a relatively new field of inquiry, the history of sexuality in the U.S.  It explores the past to consider why sexuality has been so central to American identities, culture, and politics. Primary documents and other readings focus on the history of sexual ideology and regulation; popular culture and changing sexual practices; the emergence of distinct sexual identities and communities; the politics of sexuality; and the relationship between sexual and other forms of social difference, such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, and class.  Topics include many with continuing relevance to contemporary public debate: among them, sexual representation and censorship, sexual violence, adolescent sexuality, the politics of reproduction, gay and lesbian sexualities and sexually transmitted diseases.

 

GSOC-400-301   SENIOR THESIS                                                                            F 2-5                                         Kurz (dkurz@sas.upenn.edu)

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

 

GSOC-405-601           THE DIARY
T 6-9                                       Ben-Amos (benamos@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed:  COML-502, ENGL-490

This course examines the diary as a genre with its own function, structure, conventions and expectations, comparing it, on the one hand with other forms of autobiographical writings such as the autobiography and the memoir, and on the other hand with fictive diary or the diary novel.  During the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe there was a mutual influence between the personal diary and the diary novel, which over time achieved independence and separate developments.  Historically there was a gender distinction in diary writing.  Mostly women were seen as engaged in private diary writing, while men, especially public figures, resorted to this form of expression and self-presentation with the intent to publish.  Hence the course will examine comparative gender diary writing.  A special emphasis will be placed on the “Holocaust Diary”.  It represents a case in which both, context and text deviate significantly from the norms and expectations of the genre, and from the circumstances in which diary writing is usually practiced.  While Holocaust diaries share the quality of privacy and intimacy with other diaries, they also functioned as testimonies and eye-witness reports to historical events, combining writing of self and community.  Yet, as a first person form it is concerned with the writer’s own identity and perceived meanings.

 

GSOC-461-641          RACE, CLASS & PUNISHMENT
R 5:30-8:30                              Watterson (kwatters@english.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed:  ENGL-461, AFRC-462

The American prison system, with a seventy-five percent return rate, has been profiting from its own failures since Charles Dickens visited America’s first penitentiary (Eastern State) in 1842, and afterwards wrote: “I am persuaded that those who devised this system of prison discipline, and those… who carry it into execution, do not know what they are doing… I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon [its prisoners].” This seminar will examine the origins, myths and realities of the complex industry that imprisons more than two million men, women and teens in today’s city, county, state and federal prisons, at a taxpayer cost of more than a hundred-million dollars a day. More costly than an Ivy League education, prisons fail to provide basic tools, such as higher education, drug treatment, skilled job training, mental health services, or rehabilitation that would reduce recidivism. During this semester, we will read prison literature, visit Eastern State Penitentiary, visit a working prison, and listen to guest speakers, including authors, public defenders, prisoners and ex-prisoners. Students will learn how the
legacies of slavery, racism and class prejudice not only have intersected with popular perceptions of crime and punishment from the late 1700s to current times, but also have determined who goes to prison and who does not. Readings will include essays, stories and poems by Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, Michel Foulault, Chester Himes, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Dorothy Day, David Kairys, Fox Butterfield, Kathryn Watterson, Charles Mills, and David Cole. Students will write journal responses to films, readings, guest speakers and
class experiences, and choose a facet of the prison system as the focus of a project that will include research, interviews, two papers and an oral report.