Women's Studies Certificate Program
Course Descriptions
Spring 2003

Women's Studies Certificate Program
Coordinator: Patricia T. Clough, Room 5103 (817-8895, 817-8905)

The Certificate in Women's Studies is available to students matriculated in the Ph.D. programs at The Graduate Center. Women's Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to research and scholarship that draws on various disciplines, while challenging disciplinary boundaries. The general aim of the program is to offer critical reflection on the experiences of both women and men in terms of differences of gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity and nation. Students are prepared to teach courses and to do research in Women's Studies and related critical approaches to the disciplines, such as those developed in Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies. Besides focused course work and guidance in research, Women's Studies offers participation in a wide range of graduate students and faculty activities, such as lecture series and forums. Students are also invited to participate in the research programs and seminars at the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center.

WSCP 81600 -Workshop in Women Studies: Critical Methodologies/ Research
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Cheryl Fish & Catherine Lavender [55674]

Focusing on the wide range of methodologies developed for feminist research and other critical approaches to the disciplines, we will explore the relationship of methods, politics and desire in the production of knowledge and the circulation of information. We will examine the impact of feminist thought on the various disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, the sciences and the arts. We also will take account of recent criticisms of methods and disciplinarity elaborated in cultural studies of science, critical ethnography, standpoint epistemologies, posthuman studies, critical education and postmodern aesthetics and ethics. There also will be preparation for writing and publishing essays and research papers, including an introduction to networks of journals and granting institutions.

WSCP 80802 - Contemporary Feminist Thought
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Lisa Jean Moore & Victoria Pitts [55675] [Cross listed with MALS 72200]

This course explores the diversity and ambiguity of various contemporary feminist theories and addresses emergent traditions and challenges in contemporary feminism. We focus on new geographies of the body, identity, and gendered culture that have been opened by multiculturalism and transnationalism, new cultural and biomedical technologies of the body, and contemporary issues in sexuality, reproduction, and mothering. Readings will be drawn from a variety of disciplines and will include both broad theoretical pieces and multicultural and transnational narratives/testimonials.

WSCP 81000 - Weimer Republic: Gender/Race/Religion in the Visual Arts
GC M 4:15-6:15 pm, Room 3416, 3 credits, Prof. Rose Carol Long [55764] [Cross listed with Art. 85500]

This course will focus on representation in the Weimar Republic, particularly on the constructions of gender, race, and religion that emerged in the visual culture of this highly debated period from 1918 to 1933 when Germany first experimented with parliamentary democracy. A paradoxical mood of optimism and despair, which resulted in part from the inflated expectations for the new Republic, contributed to visual representations whose thematic and structural complexity echoed the conflicts and contradictions within Weimar. We will concentrate on how the dark undertones of anti-feminism, anti-semitism, anti-modernism, and anti-republicanism are reflected in the visual culture of this period, which ended with the capitulation to Hitler and National Socialism.

After a series of lectures exploring how constructions of gender, race, and religion have been treated in the literature, students will present papers on how specific painters, photographers, designers, sculptors, architects, and critics responded to these issues in their work. We will examine well-known figures such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, August Sander as well as many lesser known individuals such as Gertrud Arndt, Irene Bayer, Ilse Bing, Karl Hubbuch, Grethe Jürgens, Annelise Kretschmer, Jeanne Mammen, Ringl + Pit, among others. Knowledge of German is helpful but is not required. Students will be required to present an oral report and a paper based on their report. Auditors permitted.

WSCP 81000 - American Women Artists: From the Armory Show to the Dinner Party
GC W 4:15-6:15 pm, Room 3416, 3 credits, Prof. Gail Levin [55765] [Cross listed with Art. 87100]

This seminar will explore American women artists from the Armory Show in 1913 to Judy Chicago's landmark work, The Dinner Party in 1979, now on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. We will examine work by women in the context of both American and art world culture. Key political events include the suffrage movement, which culminated in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and the Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The course will look at discrimination that took place in art schools, galleries, and museums, often leading to the erasure of women's work, and at the impact and attitudes of female patrons and collectors. The instructor's experience as a curator at a major American museum during the 1970s will provide an eyewitness account of one institution's treatment of women artists during that era. Auditors by permission of instructor; please e-mail request to: gail_levin@baruch.cuny.edu.

WSCP 81000 - Gender and Writing in Renaissance Italy
NYU W 3:30-6:10 pm, Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Cox [55789] [Cross listed with Comp. Lit. 80103]

WSCP 81000 - Sex Crimes
JJ T 6:30-8:30 pm, Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Karen Terry [55766] [Cross listed with CRJ. 80300]

The aim of this course is to develop a psychological, sociological and legal understanding of sex crimes. It addresses the theoretical explanations for sexual offending and the policies mandating treatment for offenders living in the community. A main component of the course is an analysis of the legislation related to sex offenders - in particular, Megan's Law and Sexually Violent Predator legislation - and the constitutional legitimacy of this legislation. There is an examination of the difficulty in balancing rights of the offenders and rights of victims and the community, and what forms of community protection are viable for these offenders. By the end of the course, students should have an understanding of sex offender typologies, types of treatment offered to sex offenders, laws and policies regarding sex offenders, the impact of sexual offending upon victims, and the likely future direction of sex offender legislation.

WSCP 81000 - Margery Kempe in Context
GC T 11:45-1:45 pm, Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Michael Sargent [55676] [Cross listed with Eng. 80700]

Until 1934, all that the world knew of The Book of Margery Kempe was a set of pious extracts printed in pamphlet form at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Wynkyn de Worde. The single extant manuscript was only identified when Col. William Butler-Bowden brought it, together with other family antiquities, to the Victoria and Albert Museum for a valuation; the Museum, having no one on staff with expertise in late medieval contemplative and devotional literature, called upon Hope Emily Allen, an independent American scholar then pursuing her own work in the manuscript reading room of the British Museum, to examine the small, workaday paper volume. She immediately announced her discovery in the Times Literary Supplement.

Ms. Allen proposed an edition of the Book to the editorial board of the Early English Text Society. They agreed, but insisted that she take a collaborator with a stronger background in philology: Prof. Sanford Brown Meech, the editor of the Middle English Dictionary. A job was found for Ms. Allen with the Dictionary project at the University of Michigan, and the two began their collaboration: Meech to produce the text itself and notes on all issues other than those involving late medieval women's spirituality, and Allen to produce a second volume of commentary dealing specifically with those issues. The collaboration foundered, however, and Ms. Allen left Ann Arbor: the one volume produced included only some of her comments, identified in the notes by her initials at the end of each entry for which she was responsible. Butler-Bowden produced a modern-English version of the text, in which the more embarrassingly mystical passages were printed in smaller type.

Today, extracts from The Book of Margery Kempe are to be found in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Book of Margery Kempe thus offers a particularly rich opportunity for the study both of late medieval literature, and of the construction of "medieval-ism" as a field. It is in terms of both of these contexts that we will read Margery's book. We will read some of the books that Margery read, or that served as models or parallels for her work, including the Middle English lives of three Belgian beguine holy women, and Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ; but we will also read modern criticism of Margery's book, not just as secondary literature commenting on her, but as primary literature requiring examination in its own right.

WSCP 81000 - Queering the Renaissance
GC R 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Tom Hayes [55677] [Cross listed with Eng.78100]

Although Michel Foucault points out in his History of Sexuality that there was no such thing as "a homosexual" until 1870 when the practice of sodomy "was transposed onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul" (43), same-sex desire is evident in many texts produced in 17^th century England. Starting with Marlowe's Edward II and continuing with Shakespeare's Richard II and The Sonnets we will discuss examples of same-sex desire that precede modern definitions of homosexuality and heterosexuality. We will also discuss examples of "queer" erotic discourse such as George Herbert's poem about nursing at Christ's breast, Richard Crasaw's poem about Mary sucking Christ's bloody teat, John Davies's celebration of Christ's tormented body and Lady Eleanor Davies's references to King James's relationship with the Duke of Buckingham whom he called "his sweet child and wife, that give voice to desires that, outside the sphere of sacred rapture, would be seen as tasteless if not blasphemous". Abezier Coppe, a Ranter who refused compliance with monogamous marriage, wrote about his relationship with "Filthy blinde Sodomites called Angel's men" and told of his joy in "clipping, hugging, embracing, and kissing a poor deformed wretch." Aphra Behn, who often dressed as a man, wrote in the epilogue to her play The Widow Ranter: "Men are but bunglers, when they would express/ The sweets of love, the dying tenderness;/ But women, by their own abundance, measure,/ And when they write, have deeper sense of pleasure ." In another play by a woman, Margaret Cavendish's The Female Academy, the central misogynistic trope of Jonson's Epicoene is re-appropriated.

We will read the following primary texts: Christopher Marlowe, Edward II; William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and Richard II; Poems by George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Davies, and Henry Vaughan; Abezier Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll; Laurence Clarkson, The Lost Sheep Found and A Single Bye; Eleanor Davies, Prophecies; Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone; Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter and The Rover; Ben Johnson, Epicoene; Margaret Cavendish, The Female Academy.

We will also read selection from such secondary texts as Alison Findlay and others, Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700, Longman's 2000. Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions, Duke, 1998. Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance, Duke, 1994. Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England, Chicago, paperback edn. 1993. Auditors are allowed.

WSCP 81000 - The American 1950's: Dissidence and Desire
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m, Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Cindi Katz & Nancy K. Miller [55678] [Cross listed with Eng. 86000, IDS 84200 and Psych. 80130]

In 1953, Marilyn Monroe appeared in the first issue of the magazine Playboy and Simone de Beauvoir's revolutionary analysis The Second Sex was published in the United States. Alfred Kinsey appeared on the cover of Time with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. In 1953 Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were found guilty of spying and Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel The Bell Jar, began her odyssey under the sign of their execution in New York's hot summer. Between 1953 and the assassination of J.F.K. in November, 1963 a decade of social transformation unfolded. Despite the well-known repressive effects of containment culture of the Cold War, the suburbanization of American life, the celebration on television of "Father Knows Best," the 1950s were also a time of visible dissidence: the landmark decision of Brown v Board of Education and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement, the emergence of Beat writing and culture, rock and roll, and the stirrings of second-wave feminism. In the course, we will look at the complexities and contradictions of this period, in which the problems that were to explode in the 1960s found their earliest expression.

Readings will be drawn from the following: Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ralph Ellison, Franz Fanon, Betty Friedan, Anne Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Irving Goffman, Jane Jacobs, Audre Lorde, Grace Metalious, C.Wright Mills, Vance Packard, Sylvia Plath, David Riesman, J.D. Salinger,William H. Whyte. Films: All About Eve, On the Waterfront, Rebel Without A Cause, Imitation of Life, The Manchurian Candidate, Breathless, Hiroshima Mon Amour. Guest speakers will join the colloquium discussion.

WSCP 81000 - Proust II
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Eve Sedgwick [55679] [Cross listed with Eng. 87100]

This is the second half of a year-long seminar organized around a close, start-to-finish reading of Marcel Proust's A La Recherche. We will be considering a wide range of the issues, motives, and ambitions embodied in the novel, including its complicated relation to the emerging discourses of Euro-American homo- and other sexualities. Other preoccupations that I hope will emerge through our discussions include the changing possibilities of novelistic genre; narratorial consciousness; texture; habit and addiction; experimental identities; adult relations to childhood; the spatialities of present and past; the vicissitudes of gender; the bourgeois maternal in relation to such other roles as the grandmother, the aunt, the uncle, and a variety of domestic workers; alternatives to triangular desire and Oedipal psychology; the languages of affect; phallic and non-phallic sexualities; the phenomenology and epistemology of oneiric states; the relations between Jewish diasporic being and queer diasporic being within modernism; and the affective, phenomenological, and philosophical ramifications of an interest in the transmigration of souls - to name but a few. Registration for students who have not taken the first semester of the class requires permission of the instructor.

WSCP 81000 - Time and the Lyric: The Postcolonial Poem
GC R 11:45-1:45 pm., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Meena Alexander [55680] [Cross listed with Eng. 76200]

Time has a special valency in postcolonial poetry - it is the time of violation and the time of redemption, the wound of history laid bare through task of memory and in the crucible of the lyric the autobiographical `I' seeks form. But how do temporal structures in the poem sustain a memory that cuts through disparate places, bodies, tongues? How does traumatic memory find voice through a past the poet makes? In Omeros, Walcott speaks of the 'radiant wound of language' Can the materiality of language sustain a lyric that works across national borders and cultures? We will reflect on the metamorphic self the postcolonial poet creates, as he or she searches for home through migratory, multiple existences, and examine these and other complexities of poetic process, lyric time, gender and creativity through the poetry of Derek Walcott, A.K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das, Audre Lorde, Yusef Komunyakaa, Joy Harjo, David Mura, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin and others. We will pay particular attention to Walcott's use of Homer in fashioning a mythic self that cuts across time, Ramanujan's use of ancient Tamil poetics in the service of postmodern self-fashioning. We will also discuss selected poems by Irish poets, Seamus Heaney and Medbh McGuckian as well as the Wordsworthian creation of a self through literal and mnemonic return to a loved place. The readings for this course as we theorize a postcolonial poetics will include selections from Appadurai,Agamben, Anzaldua, Bhabha, Caruth, Clifford, Fusco, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Ramazani, Seyhan,Soja and others.

Course Requirements: this course will be a seminar and as such will include weekly discussion of poetry as well as a writing log of responses to the poems or specific issues in poetics. Those who wish to do so, can also hand in poems they have written as part of this informal writing log. There will be a mid term paper and a final research paper, the latter due at the end of the semester.

Texts: they will be on order at Labyrinth Books, 112street between Broadway and Amsterdam, Tel: 212-865-1588. Derek Walcott, Collected Poems; Omeros; What the Twilight Says; A.K.Ramanujan, Collected Poems; Kamala Das The Old Playhouse and other poems; Audre Lorde, Collected Poems; Yusef Komunyakaa, Pleasure Dome; Marilyn Chin, Rhapsody in Yellow; David Mura, The Color of Desire; Joy Harjo, A Map to the Next World; Jehan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English.

WSCP 81000 - Countercultures, Their Roots and Legacies: From the Romantics to the "60s"
GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jackie diSalvo [55681] [Cross listed with Eng. 84200]

This class will examine the idea that romanticism initiated a permanent counter-cultural challenge to bourgeois hegemony. We will begin by examining the hegemonic ideology that emerges from the Enlightenment to dominate modern industrial society: Newtonian science, Cartesian psychology, Lockean epistemology, liberal political economy & political philosophy, imperialism, and bourgeois patriarchy. Against this, we will place Romantic subversion and transcendence, mostly through Blake, establishing, however, a wider context that includes especially Wordsworth, the Shelleys and feminism.

We will use a cultural studies/historicist approach that locates Romanticism in relation to the Jacobin movement and working class cultures. Most of our theory will be drawn from Blake, elaborated by a Marxist/feminist/psycho-historical methodology as well as some theory from Foucault & Bakhtin.

Having established this orientation, we will study the literature, film and popular counter-culture of the 1960s (through early 70s). We will examine "texts" from and about the period to interrogate the conjuncture/dialectic/contradictions between struggle, vision, and utopia. Our context will be the Civil Rights/ Black liberation, student/youth, anti-Vietnam war/anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist, feminist and sexual liberation movements. It will also include visionary approaches to transformation of consciousness, such as the influence of hallucinogens & eastern religion. We will also examine the utopian communes & "back to the land" experiments and Hippie lifestyle - Sex, Drugs & Rock & Roll!

WSCP 81000 - Landscapes and Geographies of Romanticism
GC W 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Alyson Bardsley [55682] [Cross listed with Eng.74000]

A survey of the now-expanded canon of Romantic poetry, with a focus on representations of land. We will consider Romantic exploration, exploitation, and appreciation of territories and landscapes, real and imaginary, touching on contemporary political-economic discourses of agricultural "improvement,"as well as aesthetic discourses of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque.

While I haven't finalized the syllabus, here is a partial sample of the texts we will consider: Burke, Philosophical Reflections on the Sublime and the Beautiful, selections; Gilpin, from Three Essays; Beattie, "On Sublime Poetry," selections; Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head and Elegiac Sonnets, selections; Blake, Jerusalem; Scott, Marmion; Joanna Baillie, "Introductory Discourse" and Ethwald, Part I; W. Wordsworth, poems from his tour in Scotland and selections from The Prelude (1850); Coleridge, the "conversation" poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "Fears in Solitude," and selections from the Biographia and The Friend; Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, selections; Shelley, Prometheus Unbound; selections from Felicia Hemans; and also a small amount of travel writing. Auditors are allowed.

WSCP 81000 - Art and Text: Portrait, Autoportrait, and Place
GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. Maryann Caws [55683] [Cross listed with Eng. 87400]

We will be wanting to look at some of the ways in which painters, poets, and prose writers depict themselves and the other. Some of the self-portraits considered will be those of Chardin, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Derain, Wyndham Lewis, and of some woman painters: Valadon, Tanning, Leonor Fini, etc., to start a discussion of the differences, if any, in self-portayal and conception. These will be linked to the painters' journals, fiction, letters, and to the ways others see them. The idea of the muse and the sitter will enter our consciousness, and how they are connected with the portraiture and self-portraiture under discussion: thus, James' The Real Thing, and other representations of the "real" and the "posed" and the "adaptable…". Picasso's portraits of Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, for example, as they relate to those women's writings and work.

We will also look at exterior depictions and interior - and the exterior/interior opposition will hold also for place. Examples: Gogol's "The Portrait", Poe's "The Oval Portrait," James' The Portrait of a Lady, and his study of photographs: "The Way it Came", Stein's "Three Portraits" and various writers' idea of other writers and painters... to take a few of the exterior ones.

The group portrait is of particular interest here, and we will look at John Berger and Roland Barthes' studies of them, and at various texts depicting groups, which will lead to the idea of place, circles, and contexts: for example, Charleston and the self-portraits and portraits of and by Duncan Grant,Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry -- and various writings: stories, letters, journals, that relate them and to them.

In the representation of, the idea of , and the reality of place, one might consider cities like New York, London, Paris, on the one hand, in their tumult and silence, and, on the other, pastoral, lakes, roads, quiet. And then psychological place(s): the hidden and the overt, the small and protected, or claustrophobic, and the large, unconfined. So, for example, the home or good place ("The Jolly Corner," Hemingway's "The Clean Well-Lighted Place") the closed-in (as in James' In the Cage) or the open space: as in all the poetry of and the prose of the field (John Berger, etc.) Some art/text walking examples: the Australian Philip Hughes (Australia, Greece, France, the Antartic) - texts literally on paintings.

The way in which the visual modifies our relation to the verbal/to be imagined: say, Van Gogh's bedroom, David Hockney's pools, as opposed to Friedrich's landscapes, moonscapes, seascapes, and, in American art, Ryder, Inness. Then, what I think of as homescapes: Fairfield Porter, and American poetry: Ashbery, Schuyler, etc. Poems with portraits, still lifes, and place consciousness…and so on.

WSCP 81000 - Sappho, Dickinson, Stein, and Celan
GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum [55684] [Cross listed with Eng. 87200]

In this seminar, we will study four difficult poets (Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan) who portray consciousness with unrivaled, flashing intensity; who raise questions of ruin, comprehensiveness, and fragment; and who teach us, anew, how to read. Diversely they master catastrophe, and convert it into always timely artifacts that demand perpetual, provisional, experimental revisitation.

We will begin with Sappho, in Anne Carson's new (2002) English translation. (The edition is bilingual.) Our emphasis will be Sappho's influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone poetics. We may also read Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, an idiosyncratic work of literary criticism. Next, we will survey Dickinson, in Ralph Franklin's reading edition (a distillation of his 1998 Variorium edition); students familiar only with the 1955 Thomas Johnson edition of Dickinson will find surprises. We may also read poet Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, a critical text which indirectly measures how Dickinson's enterprise predicts Stein's and Celan's. (No surprise, that Celan translated Dickinson's poems into German.) Next, we will read Stein. Her amplitude refuses frame, and yet, frame her we must: in front of neighbors (Sappho, Dickinson, Celan), she behaves. We will focus on Stanzas in Meditation, as well as several short Steinian texts that, unlike Three Lives, declare themselves poems. Finally, we will read Celan, in Michael Hamburger's new (2002) updated translation (a bilingual edition). Celan ruins and renovates German, his mother tongue, just as Stein wreaked elysian havoc on American English. Like Stein, Celan was a displaced Jew in France--but with a difference.

Requirements: two-page position paper, read aloud in class; final essay (20-25 pages). Please note: a knowledge of German and Greek, though welcome, and laudable, is not required.

WSCP 81000 - Some American Women Poets
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Marilyn Hacker [55685] [Cross listed with Eng. 78000]

Within an overview of the work of twentieth century women poets in the United States, the course will focus on the work of a few key figures of the generation born before and during World War I, notably HD, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Bishop, with attention paid to significant and often-overlooked figures like Anne Spencer, Josephine Jacobsen, Lorine Niedecker and May Swenson. Of particular consideration will be: the role of women writers in the establishment of Modernism; the relevance of or resistance to Modernist tenets in the texts of African American women poets; the counter-tradition to Modernism established by women poets re-visioning and dialoguing with received poetic forms; the expansion of form and genre both by experimental and politically engaged poets; the role of the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Civil Rights Movement in the creation of what was to become an American feminist literary canon as well as questions of voice in the representation of gender and sexuality. Students will write semi-weekly observation papers as well as a term paper based on an in-class presentation and a final project, which may include creative work or the compilation of an individual anthology with critical introduction.

Texts studied may include, but not be limited to, HD's Trilogy, Gwendolyn Brooks' Blacks, Muriel Rukeyser's poems selected in the volume Out of Silence, Elizabeth Bishop's Collected Poems, The Love Poems of May Swenson, as well as the anthology No More Masks (Florence Howe, Ed.)

WSCP 81000 - The Making of the Modern Middle East, 1790-1923
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 5 credits, Prof. Beth Baron [55686] [Cross listed with Hist. 87900]

This course examines Middle Eastern history in the long nineteenth century from 1790 and the initiation of "modern reforms" through World War I and the remapping of the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Particular attention will be paid to slavery and household transformation; changing patterns of landholding, agricultural production, and women's work; masculinity and military reform; and constitutional movements, nationalism, and citizenship. The turn of the twentieth century was notable for the emergence of women's movements throughout the region as gender and sexual relations were challenged and rewritten in the context of changing economies and polities.

WSCP 81000 - Introduction to Queer Studies
GC R 4:15-6:15 pm, Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Steven Kruger [55767] [Cross listed with IDS. 70100]

"Introduction to Queer Studies" will consider how LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) Studies/Queer Studies has emerged as a field, some of the ways in which that field has been defined (and institutionalized in academia), as well as some of the ways in which that field has resisted "disciplinarization." Our work will emphasize the interdisciplinary bases of queer studies, while also asking what particular slants or strengths individual disciplines - sociology, history, psychology, political science, literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology - give (or might give) to queer thinking. I expect that students will bring their own disciplinary - and "personal" - voices into play in the course, opening a dialogue among various (academic, political, [anti]identitarian) positions.

Course readings will be eclectic and will be partly determined by students' interests. At least the following four kinds of reading will be represented: "Documentary" material - legal writing (e.g., the Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick), manifestos (e.g., "Queers Read This/I Hate Straights"), medical/psychological/sociological texts of the 1950s about homosexuality, etc.;Historical treatments of LGBT movements and experiences; Theoretical treatments of sexuality, including what has come to be known as "queer theory"; Cultural and popular cultural works that might be queer and/or read from a queer perspective. Students will do an oral presentation at least once in the course of the semester, and there will be a required final essay (which can take up any topic related to LGBT/queer work).

WSCP 81000 - The American Welfare State
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Frances Fox Piven [55768] [Cross listed with Pol. Sci. 72905]

The governments of all western industrial societies have developed an array of programs to protect people against certain risks such as unemployment or ill health, and also to protect specified groups who are considered to be particularly at risk, such as the very young or the very old. However, there are large differences in the timing, type and scale of these interventions. The first American national social welfare programs were inaugurated in the United States during the Great Depression, some fifty years after comparable programs were begun in Western Europe, and these programs remained relatively niggardly. Moreover, while both European and American programs were inscribed with distinctions that differentiated among people by gender, American programs also reflected and reproduced the racial distinctions that pervaded other American institutions. There are, in other words, both provocative parallels and provocative contrasts in the development of the American and European welfare states.

In this course, we will explore these differences and similarities in the light of major theories of welfare state development, particularly those theories that fasten on gender, class or race as explanatory variables in institutional development. We will pay particular attention to what is sometimes called the contemporary "crisis of the welfare state," and to the influence of gender, class and race in the unfolding of this so-called crisis. We will also consider the implications of current developments for the future of the welfare state.

This course has been designed in three main parts. Part I takes up some of the main theoretical perspectives which have guided work on the welfare state. Part II draws on these perspectives to examine the historical origins of the welfare state in old poor relief arrangements, the emergence of the modern welfare state in the 20th century, and the distinctive pattern of American welfare state development . Part III deals with the contemporary crisis of the welfare state. In this section we will consider arguments that root the so-called crisis in the economy, and arguments that root the difficulties in politics, (including the politics specifically generated by the consequences of the operation of welfare state programs.) We will also consider some of the proposals for resolving these contemporary problems, using a case study of the recent debacle over health care reform as an illustration. And finally, we will draw on theory and history to consider the question of the political future of the welfare state in the United States. Do postindustrial (or postmodern) transformations in our society demand new ways of thinking about welfare state development?

WSCP 81000 - Federalism and State Politics
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Marilyn Gittell [55769] [Cross listed with Pol. Sci. 82401]

The course will discuss the constitutional, historical, and institutional evolution of American federalism and the formation of an intergovernmental structure that defines American politics in the 21^st century. The role of centralization and decentralization of governance structures and the role of civil society in those communities will be an important part of the discussion. There will also be an analysis of state politics, policies and institutions, and the ways in which they are shaped by changes in federalism. Emphasis will be placed on different recent practices of devolution, as well as on the effect of current factors and events (e.g. the economic slowdown and the Republican ascendancy following the 2002 midterm elections) on state politics. Readings and research papers will compare historical differences in the political culture of states, local governments, and regions, including issues of race and gender and their impact on regime politics and the policy process. There will be an extensive list of readings and a research paper required.

WSCP 81000 - Public Space and Public Life: The Impacts of Privatization, Gentrification and Terrorism
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m, Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Leanne Rivlin [55687] [Cross listed with Psych. 80100]

A number of recent events have presented challenges to public life. Moves towards privatization of public spaces, increasing amounts of gentrification of neighborhoods, and recent acts of terrorism have threatened the freedom to have a comfortable life in public. This seminar offers an opportunity to reflect on these environmental issues and to closely examine their impacts on the use and management of public spaces.

Through readings, (including theories of publicness and privacy, and the historical and cultural foundations of public spaces), visits to public spaces, discussions with public space advocates and managers, and a close examination of specific sites, it will be possible to identify the recent challenges and ideas for addressing them. We will have an opportunity to develop some fresh perspectives on the roles of public life in contemporary times and the spaces that are needed to support this life.

WSCP 81000 - Social Justice/Social Development in Education
GC M 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA ,3 credits, Profs. Michelle Fine & Colette Daiute [55770] [Cross listed with Psych. 80130] Permission of the Instructor is required.

This interdisciplinary course focuses on theory and research to analyze critically and intervene ethically in the everyday questions of social justice and development in public education. Providing an integration of perspectives on social justice and social development from disciplines including social/personality psychology, developmental psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science, the course creates a foundation for research and practice in urban education. Theory, research, and examination of community need provide the foundation for developing research questions grounded in practice for new knowledge about education. As a workshop for scholars of urban education with a critical eye on inequities that affect schooling, community life, educator practice, youth development and a creative commitment to change, this course revolves around the development of student research questions, with insights from the virtual laboratory of New York City and other sites for the finest and most devastating forms of public education systems where questions of race, ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, finance inequity, school size, testing, school violence, and student voice are everyday concerns. Defined as social theory devoted to examining critically the distribution of educational opportunities, processes and outcomes, in ways that will improve the conditions and opportunities of oppressed people, social justice studies address institutional systems, policies and practices, and the organization of educators and youth in response to these systems. Building on socio-cultural and socio-cognitive theories, social development studies address issues of diversity and critical reflection in the development of educator and student knowledge and skills required for participating in challenging circumstances and creatively extending material and social capital toward the development of social institutions in service of the intellectual, social, and political development of children and families. The integration of social justice and development can be found in the issues that confront urban schools, urban educators and urban youth, whose opportunities are seriously limited by discrimination, poverty, and social resources. Course work includes reading, class presentations, research projects, and class presentations.

WSCP 81000 - Psychological Aspects of Immigration
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. Kay Deaux [55801] [Cross listed with Psych.80130]

Psychological aspects of the immigration process have been understudied, in comparison to work done in some of the other social sciences (e.g. demography, anthropology, political science). In this course, we will explore the ways in which social psychological perspectives can add a valuable dimension to our understanding of this important social issue. Among the topics covered will be social representations of immigration (e.g., the melting pot, salad bowl); attitudes toward immigration in general and stereotypes of specific immigrant groups; ethnic and national identity; and the processes of identity negotiation. Members of the class will develop further topics dependent on their particular interests.

WSCP 81000 - Gender & Power in Families
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA ,3 credits, Prof. Julia Wrigley [55688] [Cross listed with Soc. 83300]

This course will focus on forms of inequality within families, including, most particularly, inequality in access to money, inequality in household maintenance work, and inequality in child rearing. It will consider how gender affects power relations in all these areas. The course will confront the theoretical and empirical question of the extent to which the family can be considered as having one social and economic identity, with family members sharing a common interest. It will explore the joint and yet separate economic and social positions of those within families. Topics covered will include women's ability to maintain economic independence within families, family economic strategies and how they affect individual members, household labor and who performs it, and childrearing and its contribution to inequality within and between families. The varying power of men, women, and children will be assessed in different types of families, including heterosexual, gay, and lesbian families. These issues will be discussed in the light of feminist and other social theories.

WSCP 81000 - Gender and Globalization
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hester Eisenstein [55771] [Cross listed with Soc. [80900]

In this course we will examine the relationship between the phenomenon now widely termed "globalization," and the changes in gender relations that have taken place since the rise of the second wave of the women's movement in the 1970s. In the period referred to as postmodern, that is, since the end of the long boom in western industrialized countries (from 1945 to the mid-1970s), academic and mainstream feminism have enjoyed enormous success during a period of economic, social, and political restructuring that has created the greatest gap between rich and poor since the first Industrial Revolution. How has contemporary feminism been shaped by changes in the workforce participation of women? What is the role of class in the women's movement, domestically and internationally? Why are issues of gender, sexuality and race so central to the culture wars being waged at home and abroad by religious fundamentalist leaders? Can the historic conflicts between white women and women of color be healed within a multicultural women's movement? How does gender play out in the revived social movement that has placed the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at the center of an intensified campaign for social justice? Readings in the course will be selected from theoretical writings as well as empirically based case studies, and students will be encouraged to develop their own research and activist agendas.

WSCP 81000 - Mythologies of Islam, Gender & Geopolitics
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Marnia Lazreg [55689] [Cross listed with Soc. 85405]

Women in Muslim countries are usually depicted either as "oppressed" by a culture grounded in religion, or resisting a legal system that denies them equal rights with men. These perspectives ignore the more essential role that women have played directly, or indirectly, in geopolitical confrontations between Muslims and non-Muslims powers. There is a thread that ties Algerian women during the colonial and post-colonial eras, and Afghan women during Taliban and post-Taliban rule that needs to be unraveled to shed light on the double (local and international) instrumentalization of women. In both cases political leaders (East and West) made pronouncements about the need to "liberate" women while they advanced their own interests.

This course explores the conditions under which women become pawns in the struggle opposing Western to Muslim men, and examines the consequences on women's identity as well as action for change. At the same time, the course will also address the use of myths about Islam created by Islamists to justify their political views and conceptions of women, and the parallel myths elaborated by Western writers and political leaders in dealing Muslims and their cultures. A number of questions will be raised throughout the course such as: What is Islam? What does it mean? Is it one or many? How is it used to promote reform or resist change? How was it handled by colonial authorities? How has it been approached since September 2001? How have women responded to men's monopoly over Quranic interpretations? What are the dimensions of their active engagement in promoting their interests? Issues raised apply to all Muslim societies. However, discussions will focus on Algeria, Egypt and Afghanistan.

Authors discussed will include Azizah Al Hibri, Amina Wadud, Taha Mahmood, Gilles Kepel, Nazih Ayoubi, John Esposito, Yvonne Haddad, Fatima Mernissi, Leila Abu-Lughod.

Requirements: (1) Term paper- Students are encouraged to select one or two Muslim countries of their choice, preferably from different continents, and examine one aspect of the interface between gender, Islam and geopolitics in depth. (2) Class presentation of some of the reading materials.

WSCP 81000 - Political Economy of the Current Situation: Global & Local
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Roslyn W. Bologh [55790] [Cross listed with Soc. 84600]

Although most sociologists recognize that political economy is foundational to the social order, most of the time people treat political economy as taken for granted background. Nevertheless, people say we are in a global economic crisis. Neighboring countries are experiencing economic and political turmoil. Federal, state and local governments are facing budget deficits. For the first time since the Great Depression, the three nations that drive the world economy are in trouble at the same time. Japan seems unable to emerge from the economic downturn that began with the bursting of an economic bubble more than a decade ago. Germany seems unable to ends its problem of chronic unemployment. The U.S. seems unable to bounce back from recession. Some critical developments beginning around 1970 have had momentous consequences globally and locally. This course will provide students with tools for understanding and analyzing political economy from a critical perspective. In addition to some key writings by Marx and other earlier thinkers, we will read some important new work, including theories of international relations and international political economy. We will look at important developments in the political economy of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to provide a context for understanding the world situation today. Students will help each other to analyze news articles, showing how they reveal and illustrate the underlying assumptions, principles and dynamics of our current world order as they operate both locally and globally. Our collective aim will be to explain the principles at work in (re)producing the current world system and what the alternatives are. We will develop a critical analysis of the prevailing explanations and attempts to solve the problems of the economy (e.g. economic crises, unemployment, underemployment, bubbles and busts, financial crises, third world debt and poverty, the crisis of Keynesianism). Emulating and drawing inspiration from classical sociological theory as well as feminist theory, we will be developing a sociological perspective on social life that focuses on the relations within and between the political order, the economic order, culture, and the social order (e.g. gender, class, racial, ethnic, and immigrant group relations) with our primary emphasis being political economy. Students may work on projects individually, in pairs or in small groups. This course is for beginning students who have no background in political economy as well as for advanced students who may have a background in the area.

WSCP 81000 - Crime, Criminology & Public Policy
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Michael Jacobson [55791] [Cross listed with Soc. 85000 and CRJ 80500]

This course will examine how criminological research influences the creation of public policy at the national, state and local levels. We will cover a variety of research (ethnographic, empirical and phenomenological) in the areas of policing, punishment and corrections (including the death penalty), criminal defense and prosecution, and the courts (including drug, community and reentry courts). Each of these areas has its own particular criminological tradition and history and research in these areas has had very different implications for the development of public policy. For instance, research on policing and domestic violence has been very influential on public policy in law enforcement while research on corrections and sentencing has made few inroads into U.S. corrections policy. The course will be broken down into these different areas and each will consist of reading the criminological literature as well as critical work on policy development and implementation. In addition, since the political dynamic and public discourse in each of these areas is so varied, we will examine polling data and several recent high profile cases and their implications for policy. Readings will include work by Jerome Skolnick, Jim Fyfe, Loic Wacquant, Franklin Zimring, Lawrence Sherman, Jack Katz, Terry Williams, George Kelling and Bernard Harcourt among others.

WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy and Planning
H T 2:00-4:00 p.m.,Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. Mimi Abramovitz [55690] [Cross listed with SSW 71000]

The course applies historical, ideological and theoretical models (including feminism) to the study of social problems and social welfare policies. In a seminar fashion, students critique various definitions of social problems; examine the impact of race, class, gender and heterosexist power relationships on the definitional process; and explore the implications of social problem definition for social welfare policy analysis and application. Using the intellectual frameworks developed in class students study and analyze a social problem of their choosing in class presentations and in a final paper.

WSCP 81000 - Women and Social Welfare Policy
H T 9:00-11:00 a.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mimi Abramovitz [55691] [Cross listed with SSW 85000]

This course introduces students to US. social welfare policy from the perspective of women. First we look at contemporary attitudes towards women's rights, definitions of women's oppression as articulated by different feminist perspectives and the role and function of the welfare state in wider society. Drawing on this foundation we explore how the ideology of gender shapes the design of social welfare policy and delivery of social services focusing on several contemporary social policy issues (such as welfare reform). (Students explore other issues in the written assignment). Finally, the course examines role of women in the development of the welfare state, as well as low-income women's social welfare activism. The course pays special attention to diversity issues particularly the impact of social welfare policies and programs on women of different races, classes, and sexual orientations.

WSCP 81000 - Cultural Theory and the Documentary Film
GC R 6:30-9:30 p.m., Room C419, 3 credits, Professor Alison Griffiths [55692] [Cross listed with Theatre 81600]

This is a lecture course examining documentary cinema through the lens of cultural theory. The course is organized around three key topics: the documentary archive and the ethnographic gaze; national identity and documentary aesthetics; and experimental and postcolonial documentary practice.  The course offers students a broad introduction to cultural theory, drawing upon such theoretical frameworks as historiography, race, gender, social class, nation, ethnography, and postmodernism.

Films screened in class will encompass the following genres: silent ethnographic film, Griersonian documentary, feminist documentary, direct cinema, auteurist documentary, postcolonial documentary, activist video, and mainstream documentary. The course considers how these films circulate within and across historical, social, and cultural spheres and evoke discourses of "truth," "realism," and "authenticity" through their representational forms and cross-cultural readings. (List of required & recommended texts available in the Certificate Programs office, Room 5109.)

SEE ALSO:

Psych. 80110 - Research Seminar: The Study of Lives
GC T 11:15-1:45 p.m., Room TBA , 0/1 credit, Prof. Suzanne Ouellette [55788]