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Fall 2007 Classes
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SP.400 Special Topics in Women's Studies Seminar
Fall 2007 Topic: Reproductive Politics and Technologies
H. Paxson
SP.401 Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies
Drawing on multiple disciplines — such as literature, history, economics, psychology, philosophy, political science, anthropology, media studies and the arts — to examine cultural assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality. Integrates analysis of current events through student presentations, aiming to increase awareness of contemporary and historical experiences of women, and of the ways sex and gender interact with race, class, nationality, and other social identities. Students are introduced to recent scholarship on gender and its implications for traditional disciplines.
A. Walsh
SP.410 Masculinity in Popular Culture
This subject is an examination of how masculinity is represented in popular culture. Using recent approaches from anthropology, sociology, women's studies, minority discourses and cultural studies, popular culture is examined as a place where our identities, roles, pleasures and power are negotiated in everyday life. Topics may include the history of masculinity, masculinity as deviance, masculinity in consumer culture, and virtual masculinity.
D. Goodman
SP.459J/21H.575J Women in South Asia from 1800 to the Present
Exploration of the changes and continuities in the lives of South Asian women. Using gender as a lens, examine how politics of race, class, caste, and religion have affected women in South Asian countries, primarily in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Current debates within South Asian women's history illustrate the issues and problems that arise in re-writing the past from a gendered perspective. Primary documents, secondary readings, films, newspaper articles, and the Internet.
H. Roy
SP.493/21L.715/CMS.871 Media in the Cultural Context: Popular
Readership
What is the history of popular reading in the Western world? How does
widespread access to print relate to distinctions between highbrow
and lowbrow culture, between good taste and bad judgment, and between
men and women readers? This course will introduce students to the
broad history of popular reading and to controversies about taste and
gender that have characterized its development. Our grounding in
historical material will help make sense of our main focus: recent
developments in the theory and practice of reading, including
fan-fiction, Oprah’s book club, comics, hypertext, mass-market
romance fiction, mega-chain bookstores, and reader response theory.
Assignments will entail accessing and interpreting reading behavior:
you’ll describe what makes a bestseller, consider how the ways
books are sold influence reading practices, and observe a network of
readers in action.
S. Brouillette
SP.513J/21L.473J Jane Austen
An examination of Jane Austen's satire in her seven complete novels, several fragments, and juvenilia. Students read these texts in relation to her letters and other biographical and historical information. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication provided. Enrollment limited.
R. Perry
SP.517/21L.512 Sex in the City: Gender & the City in 19th and 20th Century American Literature
The urban landscape is at once a place of cold anonymity and of diverse opportunity. It allows an individual to remake herself as a success, but it also shows no pity for failure. This course will explore how American authors have represented gender in this landscape. How have these aothors imagined the issues surrounding power, money, and status in gender relationships in the city? How does race complicate or elucidate the position of women and men in an urban landscape? How does the representation of the urban landscape disrupt our stereotypes about the roles that men and women play?
A. Braithwaite
SP.518/21L.504 Race and Identity in American Literature
Questions posed by the literature of the Americas about the relationship of race and gender to authorship, audience, culture, ethnicity, and aesthetics. Social conditions and literary histories that shape the politics of identity in American literature. Specific focus varies each term.
S. Alexandre
SP.640J/STS.046J The Science of Race, Sex, & Gender
Subject examines the role of science and medicine in the origins and evolution of the concepts of race, sex, and gender from the seventeenth century to the present. A major focus is an examination of how biological, anthropological, and medical concepts intersect with social, cultural, and political ideas about racial, sexual, and gender difference. The approach is historical and comparative across disciplines emphasizing the different modes of explanation and use of evidence in each field.
A. Sur
SP.650J/9.75J The Psychology of Gender and Race
Examines evidence (and lack thereof) regarding when and how an individual's thoughts, feelings, and actions are affected by gender and race. Topics include gender and racial factors in: identity development; cognition and emotion; stereotypes; physical and mental health, sexuality, close relationships, and work. Enrollment limited to 25.
C. Kapungu
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