Womens Studies Certificate Program
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
Course Descriptions
Fall 2004
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, including 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 71700 - Proseminar: Multicultural/Transnational Feminisms
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Janet Ng Dudley/Ashley Dawson
[47641]
This course explores the diversity of contemporary global feminisms through a
historical and materialist framework. Particular attention will be paid to
issues such as colonial discourses of gender, the nationalist use of female
bodies as the symbol of nation to generate discourses of rape, motherhood,
sexual purity and hetero-normativity, and postcolonial theories of gender and
the nation. In addition, the seminar will focus on emerging patterns of regional
and transnational organization, looking in detail at the aesthetic and political
representations of inequalities generated by global capitalism especially in the
global South. Topics that will be addressed in this regard include gender and
violence, women's rights as human rights, and feminist post-development
discourses.
WSCP 80801 - Major Feminist Texts
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Sandi Cooper/Jacqueline DiSalvo
[47643] [Cross listed with MALS 72100]
This class will explore the recovered traditions of modern feminist thought
beginning with Christine de Pizan in the 15th century and concluding with
contemporary analyses. Guest speakers will alternate with student rapporteurs
during class meetings. Texts will include works by such authors as Sor Juana de
la Cruz, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart
Mill, Clara Zetkin, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Adrienne
Rich, Judith Butler, Marge Piercy as well as documents addressing issues of
race. gender, class and sexual orientation arising from second wave feminism.
The class will conclude with a consideration of women and peace, human rights
and global feminism.
WSCP 81000 - Technologies of the Self: Sexuality and Gender in Historical
Perspective
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Eugenia Paulicelli/Giancarlo
Lombardi [47648] [Cross listed with Comp.Lit. 80100]
Drawing on a wide range of souces (literature, critical theory and film),
this interdisciplinary seminar will deal with the writings, re-writings ,
inscriptions of the self in its multifaceted manifestations and dislocations in
both private and political practices and discourses. We will focus on how the
process of writing in film, literature or theoretical thought can be the site of
differences, desire, metamorphoses and an on-going fashioning and unfolding of
the self and the body. Special attention will be given to literary, theoretical
and cinematic works whose visionary qualities reformulate and reshape the self,
especially in the face of periods of crisis and social transformation (war,
immigration and migration, fascism, political activism, feminisms both in the
West and East, gay and lesbian movements, etc.).
Authors will include M. Foucault, R. Barthes, J. Kristeva, G. Deleuze, V.
Woolf, G. Stein, J. Rhys, L. Passerini, R. Braidotti, T. De Lauretis, E. Said,
J. Butler, A. Carter, D. Maraini, P. Tondelli, M. Duras, L. Irigaray, L. Mulvey,
A. Cavarero, writers from Francophone and Italophone literatures. Films to be taken into consideration may include Female Perversions, The
Piano, Orlando, The Hours, Ma vie en rose, My Beautiful Laundrette, Picnic at
Hanging Rock, Persona, Antonia’s line, All about my mother.
WSCP 81000 - Non-Oedipal Psychologies: Psychoanalytic Approach to Queer
Theory
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Eve Sedgwick [47657] [Cross
listed with Eng 80400]
"Non-Oedipal Psychologies" is a seminar that will explore historical and
contemporary alternatives to the psychological models that have the most
currency in present literary studies. The dominant, Lacan-inflected reading of
Freudian psychoanalysis embodies many assumptions that have been questioned,
whether from within or outside of psychoanalytic thought. Among them are the
interpretive isolation of the mother-father-child triad; the determinative
nature of childhood experience and the teleology toward a sharply distinct state
of maturity; the primacy of genital morphology and desire; the centrality of
dualistic gender difference; and the emphasis on linguistic models of mental
functioning. In this seminar we will look for interesting alternative
currents of psychological thought in writers who may include Freud, Ferenczi,
Klein, Tomkins, Deleuze, Balint, and others.
WSCP 81000 - Women Writers and Intellectuals:1940-1970s
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Nancy K. Miller [47660] [Cross
listed with Eng. 88000]
Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts was published posthumously in 1941.
Beginning here, with the death of this author, we will proceed to examine the
work of women writers who produced essays, novels, and poetry from the war years
through the advent of second-wave feminism. Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir,
Julia Kristeva, Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, Mary McCarthy, Adrienne Rich, Susan
Sontag, Simone Weil. These prolific and brilliant women are not only major
writers. As cultural figures and icons, they also have played an important role
in public debate. Of special interest to the seminar will be the relations among
these women, who sometimes admired, sometimes detested one another.
Work for the course: one oral presentation, one short paper, and one term paper,
due at the end of the
semester.
WSCP 81000 - Milton and the Reinvention of Gender, Psyche, and Society
GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jacqueline diSalvo [47664]
[Cross listed with Eng. 82300]
In Paradise Lost, Milton depicts numerous beginnings, of angels,
devils, hell, paradise, both the universe and humanity, language, poetry,
marriage, sex, sin, psychic disorder, politics, tyranny, etc. Milton wrote in
revolutionary times and was himself one of the only active revolutionaries who
were also great English poets. We will read Paradise Lost , as well as
Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, within the context of both
the English revolution and the cultural revolution of the Early Modern era.
Within this context, the imagined beginnings of the epic express Milton's
crucial role in this transformation and his influential invention and
representation of new forms of politics, religion, gender, subjectivity and
other seminal ideologies, discourses and institutions of an emerging bourgeois
society. In particular we will be concerned with the relationship between
external and internal change, with psycho-history, the development of new modes
of masculine and feminine subjectivity, and gendered representations of the
conflict between aristocratic and bourgeois society. Given this
inter-disciplinary approach students will be responsible not only for close
readings of the poems, but also secondary readings in both the criticism and
relevant history. Some of this material will be presented in students' reports
which, along with a final paper will be required.
WSCP 81000 - Romantic Intimacies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Trouble
with Others
GC R 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Nancy Yousef [47666] [Cross
listed with Eng. 74000]
When and in what ways are the emotions to be understood as philosophically
and politically significant? What are the relations among philosophy and
literature -in general, and in the crucial period between the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries? This course explores the recurrent Romantic
preoccupation with a set of related issues: the possibility of trust, the
necessity of fellow-feeling, the aspirations of sympathy, and the
disappointments of intimacy. Important historical events and cultural
developments that upset established forms of domestic, communal, sexual, and
political relations will be touched on, but our main concern will be the evident
conceptual imperative to establish the bases ("natural," "conventional,"
"contractual") of relationships between individuals manifested in a range of
imaginative, theoretical, and political writing.
The course is divided into three units, beginning with a study of key pre
romantic formulations of the epistemic, ethical and psychological challenges of
intersubjectivity (in Hume, Rousseau, and Kant). The second part of the course
considers responses to the French Revolution as representative, or symptomatic,
of the complex, convulsive revaluation of terms such as "sympathy,"
"fellowship," "fraternity," "community" (readings include Burke, Wollstonecraft,
and Hegel). The third section of the course is devoted to case studies in the
core of the Romantic canon, focusing on Wordsworth (particularly his poems
treating the challenge of knowing and responding to strangers in pain) and
Austen (especially her treatment of the difficulties of achieving and dwelling
in intimacy).
At once comparative and interdisciplinary, the course offers an opportunity
to explore methodological and historical approaches to the relationship between
literary and philosophical writing in the period, while also touching on
important themes in the critical literature including ideas of self,
sensibility, sentiment, and imagination. Requirements include one oral
presentation, and an end-of-term essay of approximately twenty (20) pages.
WSCP 81000 - The Afro-American Abroad
GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr [47667] [Cross
listed with Eng. 75700 & ASCP 81500]
There are three primary goals for this seminar. First, students will be
introduced to the works of major and minor 20th Century Black
American novelists who spent significant portions of their careers abroad.
Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Charlene Hatcher Polite, Claude McKay and others
will be considered. Second, we will ask how Black American intellectuals have
conceptualized both travel and exile in their writing. Here we will be
particularly concerned with the manner in which the writing of U.S. blacks
dovetails the work of writers from the Anglophone Caribbean. Finally, with a
heavy does of secondary readings to aid them, students will be asked to place
Black American writing in the context of new developments in literary and
cultural studies that center around the concepts of globalism and
transnationalism. One class presentation, a short paper and a long research
paper are required.
WSCP 81000 - 19th Century African-American Essay as a Genre
GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jon-Christian Suggs [47668]
[Cross listed with Eng. 85500]
The emergence of an African American literary canon requires scholarly and
theoretical attention to as many genres as we can identify. This course
undertakes to describe and perhaps define the nineteenth-century origins of
African American non-fiction prose. In a search for influences, texts, and
critiques we will in fact start in the eighteenth century but it is the
multiplicity of non-fiction forms through which African Americans of the
antebellum, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction periods explained and
imagined the world that will capture most of our attention. The course will end
as Black America begins to encounter High Cultural Modernism at the advent of
the New Negro Movement of the 1920s.
The work of the course will involve three kinds of activity: 1) research: in the absence of any adequate collection of texts of generic
non-fiction from these periods, we will have to uncover our own by haunting the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; I will make arrangements for an
introduction to the library and its resources and we will set up a research
agenda among us; 2) criticism: we will read and critique what we find, bringing
to bear what ever interpretive frameworks seem applicable to the task; 3) Theorizing: we will attempt to develop a theory of the African American
non-fiction text as a genre. Each of you will be responsible for identifying a text that has not yet been
discussed in print. Exceptions will be made on petition.
WSCP 81000 - 17 e siecle: Ecrits de Femmes, Theorie du Gendre (Writing Women
in 17th Century France)
GC T 6:30- 8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Domna Stanton [47669] [Cross
listed with French 83000]
This course will examine the varieties of female writing in the century of
Louis XIV in light of specific debates about women’s participation in culture
and society articulated in the early modern querelle des femmes, both the
misogynist and pro-woman strains. We will begin by focusing on gender theory,
feminist discussions on the problematics of women’s writing in a patriarchal
symbolic system, and recent work in women’s history that can illuminate the
limitations/possibilities of women’s status and conditions (for instance, did
women undergo un grand renfermement after l650, as some have argued?) We
will consider the paradoxical status of the female regent and queen, the role of
the female-run salons (cercles or ruelles), and the construction
of the précieuse and the femme savante.
While attentive to the genres that women privileged (eg. the novel and
nouvelle, the letter, memoir, and fairy tale), the course will be devoted to
close readings of texts by writers such as Marie de Gournay, Gabrielle Suchon,
Madeleine de Scudéry, La Fayette, Villedieu, La Guette, Sévigné, Mlle de
Montpensier, L’Héritier de Vilandon and D’Aulnoy, to gauge contextually their
oppositionality and its limits.
Course requirements: A 20-page paper; an oral presentation; and a final exam.
The course will be taught in English; the readings will be in French. The
syllabus will be ready in August.
WSCP 81000 - From Colonies to Nation, America from 1607-1783
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Carol Berkin [47670] [Cross
listed with Hist. 75000 & ASCP 82000]
This course examines the world of the mainland English colonies in the 17th
and 18th centuries. Its reading list will introduce students to some
of the major themes, historiographical debates, and subject areas within a large
and rich field of scholarship.
Topics will include: cultural encounters between English settlers and Native
America societies; immigration patterns in the 17th century and the
development of distinctive regional economies and cultures; the emergence of
African slavery; formal and popular religious institutions; political culture in
the Chesapeake and the middle colonies; women’s experiences; and the origins of
the American revolution.
WSCP 81000 - Women and Gender in the Middle East
GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Beth Baron [47671] [Cross listed
with Hist. 78000]
This course examines the history of women and gender in the Middle East and
North Africa from the 18th through the 20th centuries. We will focus on topics
such as: family, law, children, sexuality, reproduction, work, feminism,
nationalism, citizenship, social welfare activism, and Islamism. Considerable
attention will be paid to the sources for the writing of Middle East women's and
gender history, debates in the field, and theoretical frames. Students may elect
to take this course as a 5-credit research seminar.
WSCP 81000 - Enlightenment and Revolution
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs.Helena Rosenblatt/Richard Wolin
[47672] [Cross listed with Hist. 71000, MALS 70600 &P SC 71902]
Alexis de Tocqueville once remarked, with reference to the Enlightenment,
that the French Revolution had been accomplished in the realm of ideas before it
was achieved in fact. Following Tocqueville's lead, this course will focus
primarily on two themes: (1) the role that the political ideas of the French
Enlightenment played in orienting the revolutionary actors, from 1789-1799; (2)
the way that, throughout the last two centuries, the Revolution's politics and
historiography have been a constant touchstone of political debate. Thus, by
referring to the Revolution - however selectively - historians, political
actors, and theorists have constantly attempted to legitimate their own
political choices: from conservatism to liberalism to Bolshevism.
WSCP 81000 - Race, Immigration, and Politics
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. John Mollenkopf/Philip Kasinitz
[47673] [Cross listed with P SC 72903 & Soc 75800]
Since the immigration law reform of 1965, the U.S. has admitted 25 million
legal immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Europe. The 2000
Census reported more than 10 percent of the nation’s population to be foreign
born. Immigrants have settled mainly in the largest central cities of the
biggest states, California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey,
but have also spread to virtually every corner of the U.S. Their arrival has
profoundly altered the racial and ethnic composition of our cities and
neighborhoods and revitalized their industries and labor markets. Ultimately,
their arrival will reshape urban, metropolitan, and American politics. This
seminar uses New York as a laboratory for studying this transformation and
exploring the processes of immigrant incorporation in a global metropolis.
In addition to reviewing the literature, each student will undertake "hands
on" qualitative and quantitative research to investigate the trajectory of an
immigrant or native born ethnic group, examine how it is interacting with
others, and explore group identity formation and political participation. We
have a particular interest in the young adult children of immigrant parents –
the new second generation. Our objectives are to reviewing and digest current
debates about immigrant incorporation and American racial system, analyze the
position of the second generation as ‘in between’ immigrants and native born
minority groups, profile groups with data from the 2000 Census (SF3 and the
Public Use Microdata Sample or PUMS) and Current Population Surveys, examine
trends in naturalization, registration, voting, and political ideology, and make
field visits to an ethnic neighborhood. While the course does not presume
extensive training in quantitative methods, it will be helpful to be familiar
with SPSS and willing to get out into the field. These investigations will yield
a collective portrait of an immigrant metropolis.
WSCP 81000 - Gender Policy Making
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Joyce Gelb [47674] [Cross listed
with P SC 82503]
This course will compare the how systems of representation and participation in
the United States , other selected democratic nations ( to be drawn from
Britain, the Scandinavian countries, Canada and France and Japan) affect women’s
political options and opportunities . Women's political role and impact will be
analyzed through examination of electoral and social movement/interest group
politics, as well as local and national policy making , among other factors,
within the nation-states . Readings and discussion will also address the
emerging impact of international feminism and changing international gender
equity norms on national policies. Which systems appear most "women
friendly"; are there rules changes which foster a greater role for women in
politics and policy making? While the course focus is on gender, students with
an interest in the political inclusion of other marginal groups (racial, ethnic
et al) are encouraged to join the class as well.
The course structure is seminar style. Students will be prepare a review of
the role of women in politics in one nation of their choice and to make a class
presentation. There will be a final examination. Course reading may include
books such as: O'Connor ,Orloff and Shaver, States Markets and Families, Keck
and Sikkink , Activists Without Borders, and Stetson and Mazur on
comparative state feminism.
WSCP 81000 - Civil Liberties
GC T 6:30- 8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Thomas Halper [47675] [Cross
listed with P SC 72902]
Civil Liberties focuses on freedom of expression and privacy, each viewed
from normative and constitutional perspectives. Among the specific topics
considered are defamation, hate speech and offensive speech, broadcast
regulation, obscenity and indecency, public nuisances, commercial speech, speech
plus, national security, privacy as withholding information, privacy as
seclusion, and privacy as bodily integrity. Robust class discussion is
encouraged. A final examination and critiques of three articles/chapters are
required.
WSCP 81000 - Seminar on Gender and Environment /Sexuality and Space
GC W 2:00 -4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Cindi Katz [47678] [Cross
listed with Psych 85600]
This course will address questions of space, place, and nature in relation to
gender and sexuality from a variety of theoretical frameworks. A broad range of
topics will be considered including gender and the built environment, urban
design, public space, geographies of gender over the life course, ecofeminisms
and feminist approaches to nature, embodied geographies, sexuality and space,
and "discrimination by design." Readings include feminist perspectives from
environmental design disciplines and the social sciences concerning the
production of built form, productions of nature, and the construction of social
space. No prerequisite.
WSCP 81000 - Home, Homeland and Homelessness
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Leanne Rivlin [47681] [ Cross
listed with Psych 80103]
The focus of this seminar is on people's connections to places, particularly
to their homes, their homelands and the implications of their loss. We will
begin with an analysis of theories of home, its meanings and functions, its
changes over time and its roles in people's lives. We then will consider the
implications of the loss of home and explanations for the increases in
contemporary homelessness. Finally, we will address homelands, raising questions
regarding contestations over territories, and the significance of homelands in
light of increasing global concerns. Through readings on history, theory and
research, exploration of the interests of class members, as well as the work of
outside guests who have studied theses issues, we will try to clarify the
implications of place meanings and place attachments.
WSCP 81000 - Research Seminar: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Research
GC F 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jeff Parsons [47686] [Cross
listed with Psych 80103]
This seminar provides a forum for people interested in research and theory on
issues facing members of the GLBT populations. Agenda is determined by the
seminar participants and includes discussion of proposed, in-process, and
completed research projects. Participants will also work collectively to develop
new research projects, as well as examine existing datasets. Seminar
participants will select the topics and specific research questions.
WSCP 81000 - Health Psychology
GC M 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Tracey Revenson [47687] [Cross
listed with Psych 85300]
The connection between the mind and the body is a hot topic of scientific
investigation. In this course, we examine the ways that behavior and health are
related from a variety of theoretical perspectives. We study findings on the
effects of long-term stress on susceptibility to illness, including the common
cold. We explore healthy people’s risk perceptions and how they affect behavior
change. We explore the social context of health, including how social
conditions, social inequalities, and patient-provider relationships affect
health. We find out how to optimize adaptation to chronic illnesses, such as
breast cancer and AIDS. The aims of this course are three-fold. First, students
will become acquainted with the current state of knowledge in health psychology.
Second, students will develop an understanding of the models, theories, and
methods used to explore person and environment factors (and their interaction)
in health and disease. Third, substantive issues will be discussed with an
awareness of sociocultural diversity and the importance of understanding
context; specifically, each topic area will be examined as it relates to issues
of gender, age, sexual orientation and race/ethnicity. This is the fundamental
core course for all students in the Health Concentration, and for any student
interested in health psychology.
WSCP 81000 - International Perspectives on Youth Development
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Colette Daiute [47688] [Cross
listed with Psych. 80103]
This course examines conceptions of childhood that emerge from comparing
issues related to human development across geo-political contexts. Situated in
the Ph.D. Program in Psychology, this course is also designed as in
interdisciplinary course, drawing on relevant scholarship across the social
sciences.
Conceptions of childhood, its problems, and role within a life course differ
dramatically across political, cultural, geographic, religious, and economic
contexts. Theory and research have become increasingly focused on the nature and
implications of conceptions of childhood as technology, globalization, and wars
bring the plight of youth into public focus transnationally. Definitions of
"childhood" and "youth" are worth examining comparatively to understand the
nature and functions of childhood, the urgent research agendas across contexts,
and design of programs for youth. Recent research, for example, indicates that
definitions of childhood are tied to local political and economic circumstances,
which then determine whether young people are allowed relatively brief periods
of developmental plasticity (as in contexts of poverty and war) or extended
childhoods (as in Western capitalist contexts). Theoretical understandings of
development are, moreover, usually welded to local problems and goals, which
limits local critiques about childhood, development, participation in public
life, and young people’s potential contributions to the development of society.
Thus, when analyses of youth violence in the West focus on problematic traits,
practices, or circumstances in individual youth, ethnic groups, or communities,
they miss the systemic nature of youth problems and their treatment of young
people as a commodity. Likewise, in circumstances where youth are explicitly
implicated in geo-political systems, such as in situations of civil war, the
reduction of a developmental period also means the reduction of the society’s
future. In addition, to creating an agenda for research, discussions in this
course reviews innovative transnational theory and practice, which promises more
integrative understandings of child development that pay attention to local and
global circumstances. Theory and research integrated transnationally can have
implications for immigration studies, education, health, and government.
Course topics include issues that motivate transnational analyses of youth
development, including war, immigration, poverty and affluence, and HIV/AIDS;
comparative theories and research agendas on childhood; transnational advocacy
projects on behalf of youth, including the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child and civic participation. Comparative case studies on youth
civic engagement, literacy, and policies related to youth violence offer
interesting break-through examples of how transnational analyses offer new
insights about development. Course activities involve reading, class discussion,
student research papers on youth problems and development in the transnational
scale, participation in planning visits of guest speakers from different
geo-political contexts.
WSCP 81000 - Social and Cultural Theories
GC R 9:30 - 11:30 a.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Setha Low [47692] [Cross
listed with Psych. 80103] Permission of the Instructor is required.
This seminar is part of a three course sequence that introduces first and
second year graduate students to the multidisciplinary theoretical bases of the
environmental social science field. The readings are divided into four parts: 1)
From culture to interpretation includes cognitive, ecological and interpretive
theories of culture and environment drawn from anthropology. 2) From structure
to practice covers the transformation of structural theories of social behavior
to theories that include human agency and link actors to the social and physical
environment through practice. 3) From history to political economy traces
Marxism in its many forms, and focuses on Marxist geographical theory as it
redefines space and spatial practices in such a way as to understand the
production of space and the social reproduction of the class structure that
supports uneven development. The final part reviews 4) critical theories: race,
class, and gender including recent work in feminism, critical race theory, post
colonial theory, and critical literary theory.
WSCP 81000 - Case Studies in Gender
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hester Eisenstein [47693] [Cross
listed with Soc. 83300]
Over the past thirty-plus years, gender has gained widespread acceptance as a
legitimate focus for scholarly inquiry. What does it mean to use gender as a
category of analysis? In this course we will investigate this question, using
both case studies and theoretical analyses. We will read work by Judith Butler,
R.W. Connell, Karla Freeman, Nancy Holmstrom, Maria Mies, Chandra Mohanty, Leith
Mullings, Aihwa Ong, and Shulamith Reinarz, among others. The course will address the following critical issues. In what ways does
placing gender at the center of inquiry reorient research in sociology and the
other social sciences? Does an emphasis on gender necessarily eclipse issues of class, race and
ethnicity? Is gender a Eurocentric category that forces Third World experience
into a Western frame of reference? Does the widespread acceptance of gender and
sexuality studies in the academy signal a decline in the radical potential of
Women’s Studies research and activism?
The course requires a brief weekly response paper, plus a final 25-page
paper, which can take the form of a literature review, a research paper, or an
essay.
WSCP 81000 - Social Construction of Identity
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Cynthia Epstein[47694] [Cross
listed with Soc. 86800]
There are various theories about the ways in which individuals’ identities
are formed. Psychodynamic, psychological sociological and evolutionary
perspectives are among the theories that attempt to explain the phenomenon. This
course focuses on the social determinants of identity formation . It
explores identity as a dynamic process and a political process. While not
dismissing other models, the focus of the course will frame self, culture and
society as interactive.
Using research work across disciplines and literary sources we will consider
how the "public" world of social institutions such as the family, religion, work
organizations, the political sphere and the media connects with individuals’
notion of "who they are" and what they may become. Variations by gender, class,
race, nationality and ethnicity, will be considered; as well as mechanisms of
social control from the most subtle to the most obvious and coersive.
In the course we will acknowledge the multiplicity of selves women and
men may have in post-industrial society. We will study the personal and master
narratives they tell and hear. We will consider how powerful "others" determine
the minds, hearts and psyches of individuals; and also look at individuals’
resistance and agency in determining and preserving their identities.
Included in the course will be sections on theories of the self , the sociology
of emotion , the sociology of culture, case studies of organizations’ specific
practices devoted to molding the identities of individuals, the impact of social
movements and organizational change on personality, and the influences on the
crafting of selves from literature and popular culture.
WSCP 81000 - Psychoanalytic Sociology
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Catherine Silver [47695] [Cross
listed with Soc. 80500]
In this seminar on Psychoanalytic Sociology we discuss how psychoanalytic
approaches—including the works of Freud, Bion, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Doi,
Cixous, Irragary, and Castoriadis-- can be used to post-modern and post-Fordist
world? And how can our understanding of racism, war, and violence, for example,
be reshaped through cross-cultural psychoanalytic lenses? Does psychoanalytic
thinking offer intellectual and emotional tools to break out of mainstream
theorizing towards new forms of creativity? Does it provide social criticism and re-interpretations of socio-cultural issues. Can
psychoanalytic theories and clinical data provide frameworks to re-assess
current sociological and cultural theories of "self"? How do sociologists,
feminists, and literary critiques use psychoanalysis in their analysis of
identity in a The seminar provides a broad overview of the use of psychoanalysis
in a variety of non-clinical fields as well as focusing on specific themes
(identity, generations, and bodies/emotions in organization). The discussion is
based on research that draws upon psychoanalytic thinking and techniques applied
to social, cultural and literary questions (Allison, Adorno et al., Butler,
Baum, Cheng, Chodorow, Clough, Cushman, Elliot, Flax, Glass, Rose, Rustin,
Sennett, and Smelser among others).
Students are required to make oral presentations in class and select between
three short think-pieces based on the readings, a research/dissertation proposal
or a research paper. Maximum class size of 15 students.
WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy and Planning I
H T 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mimi Abramovitz [47696] [Cross
listed with SSW 71000] Permission of the instructor required.
Social welfare policy represents solutions to social problems. This advanced
introduction to social welfare policy in the United States reviews the history
of the US welfare state; contemporary social welfare policies; social, economic
and political forces contributing to the expansion and contraction of the
welfare state, and alternative welfare state models. With a view toward
developing framework for analyzing social welfare policy and the skills for
critical analysis, the course examines social welfare policy through the filters
of history, welfare state theories, political ideologies and social change.
Special attention is paid to dynamics of race, gender and class and to Feminist
theories of the welfare state. In a final paper, students conduct policy
analysis using the frameworks developed in class.
WSCP 81000 -Seminar in Film Studies: Performance and Race in Cinema, 1895
through the 1930s
GC R 6:30- 9:30 p.m., Room C-419, 3 credits, Prof. Michele Wallace [47697]
[Cross listed with Thea. 81500]
In this course, we will consider the presentation of people of color in
silent cinema, and in early features, musicals and musical shorts of the 1930s.
At-the-turn-of-the-century, around the same time in which cinematic technology
became a permanent fixture in the popular and visual cultures of the West, an
increasing interest in the appearance and the cultures of people of color also
became more and more obvious in some fraction of silent film production as yet
to bedetermined. Since most silent films didn't survive, it is difficult to
postulate relative proportions of output but it seems clear nonetheless that
cultural and racial differences were among the early preoccupations pursued in
films. We know that among the earliest silent films there were 1) performers in
black face, 2) performers in "yellow" or "red" face; 2) black vaudeville
performers, usually dancing; 3) people of color, or indigenous peoples (Native
Americans) performing their cultural difference either in world's fairs or in
other kinds of public displays, also usually dancing; 4) as well as
"actualities" in which blacks may be employed in a variety of settings.
Relatively recently born cultural stereotypes and cliches (coming out of the
visual culture of African enslavement in the Americas) were rife at the same
time that the films were also extremely brief and relatively easy to produce,
allowing for a range and variety of images that quickly overwhelmed what had
been some of the most compelling stereotypes on the stage and performance (such
as blackface or chicken stealing), at the same time that other kinds of images
(for instance, eating watermelon, stetching one's eyes, or cheating at cards)
were catapulted to the fore. In general, there was a strong emergence of
anything having to do with a confirmation of what some have called the
"Confederate Myth," the ideology of "The Lost Cause" or, briefly, the idea that
the South had lost the Civil War had been a cultural tragedy. Such features grew
particularly salient in cinema produced in the U.S. in the wake of the 50th
anniversary of The Civil War, along with the simultaneous appearance of D.W.
Griffith's The Birth of a Nation in 1915."Race films" grew into the
increasing market of segregated theatres in the teens, and in the wake of the
turmoil and controversy surrounding The Birth of a Nation, as well as in
reaction to the anger over the shenanigans of Jack Johnson and other black
heavyweight fighters. We will consider, in particular, the recent scholarship on
Oscar Micheaux, thus far the most celebrated of the race film directors. We will
also look at other works from the late teens and the early twenties attempting
to depict the lives of other non-white cultures in a curious hybrid of
anthropology and fiction, including Flaherty's Nanook of the North, Cecil
B. DeMille's The Cheat, and D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms
(1916), for the light they are able to shed upon the many permutations and
facets of cultural sollipsism gradually integrated into dominant film practices.
Despite the many objectionable features, this is a body of work which is
collectively unforgettable and irreplaceable. The more I see of it, the more I
feel compelled to share it with others. We will conclude this course with a
consideration of early efforts to capture African American performers on sound
film, including the work of Bessie Smith (in St. Louis Blues), Duke
Ellington (Black and Tan Fantasy), Louis Armstrong (Rhapsody in Black
and Blue), and Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake (Lee De Forest, 1922) and in a
series of other musical shorts. If we find thtime, we may also include
comparisons of King Vidor's Hallelujah (1929), Shanghai Express
(1932), John Stahl's Imitation of Life (1934), and Josephine Baker in
Zou Zou (1933). My choices will be guided by the directions of recent
publications on these and related subjects.
WSCP 81000 -History of American Theatre: A Century of Protest
GC M 4:15- 6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Alisa Solomon [47698] [Cross
listed with Thea. 86100 & ASCP 82000]
This course will examine how American social movements have employed theater
as an instrument of social change. Looking at a range of plays and performances
addressing women, workers, war, racial justice, and sexuality, we will attend to
political and aesthetic questions of form, function, audience, and artistic and
historical context. While understanding the role of such works in their own
times will be paramount, we’ll juxtapose suffragist agit-prop to feminist and
lesbian-feminist agit-prop of the 1970s; labor union plays of the 1930s to the
Living Theatre’s efforts in Pittsburgh; Living Newspaper plays about sexually
transmitted diseases to early plays about AIDS; and so on. In doing so, we will
focus on dramatic strategies and their relationships to political goals. Of
course we will consider how and when dramaturgical experimentation can itself be
a political gesture. Thus we will range far beyond agit-prop and include poetic
dramatists such as James Baldwin, Adrienne Kennedy, and Maria Irene Fornes. The
course will be run as a seminar and will require a presentation, two short
papers and one major research project.
WSCP 81000 -Professions, Power, Portraits
GC T 6:30- 9:30 p.m., Room C-419, 3 credits, Prof. Mary Ann Caws [47699] [Cross
listed with Thea. 81500, ENGL 87300 & ASCP 81500]
A study of the ways in which various professions and the worlds they
represent are portrayed, with the kinds of power that work within their realm,
and the types of personalities within them, in film, with a few sallies into a
television series. The broadly or finely etched portraits and the actors who
present them are of especial interest, as are the ways in which certain
professions seem to summon certain kinds of beings, and how they change – or
not. What kind of development can arise and be powerful in itself. An additional
complication is the sort of actor as he or she determines the representation (e.g.William
Hurt in Broadcast News and The Doctor). If it is a question of
series (Rocky I, II, etc., or the Forsythe Saga, to take 2
different types) or The West Wing, the issue of development will be a
thorny one, or less so, depending on the creators. A few biographies, if there
is time, or scenes from them (The Young Mr. Lincoln, Francis Bacon, etc.)
Among the films and the careers represented, in whatever order will seem to work
best – this is only an indicative sampling, clearly, for there are many more
possibilities, depending on the epoch. Whenever the "straight representation"
and then a parody are available (for example, a Jesus film and The Life of
Brian), we may think of both. NB. Not necessarily these films: this is just
an indication. Depending on the interests of the seminar participants, others
may be added. On Point – the world of the ballerina, and a more recent
one; Broadcast News; Up Close and Personal; Front Page –
desk stuff and news reporting; Stevie; Sylvia; Tom and Viv—the
poetic world; The Quiet American; The Third Man – the espionage
world; M. Poirot, etc. – detective world; Bringing up Baby – world
of collecting and museums; Is There a Doctor in the House? Dark
Victory; Magnificent Obsession; The Doctor– the world of
medicine; Blackboard Jungle; Dead Poets Society; The Affair
– the world of education; Shakespeare in Love – biography, and the world
of the dramatic writer; Days of Heaven – world of the farmer; Legal
Eagles, To Kill a Mockingbird; Philadelphia -- the world of
law; Old Man and the Sea; Moby Dick; Mutiny on the Bounty;
Master and Commander-the sea and sailors; The Front Line – the
point of view of the bodyguard; Upstairs Downstairs; The Servant –
of domestic service; The Notebooks of Anna Magdalena Bach; Clara and Robert
Schumann; Hilary and Jackie; etc. – the world of music; The West
Wing; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; The Maltese Falcon; All the
President’s Men-- the world of politics and government; Parody: Wag the
Dog; Dr. Strangelove; Rocky, etc.- the world of prizefighting;
Parody: Movie Movie; The Last Emperor; I Claudius; etc. --
royalty. Readings from such writers as John Berger, Krakauer, Roland Barthes,
Eisenstein, Tom Gunning, the Mast and Cohen reader, James Monaco, Bordwell,
Bluestone, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, and the French cubist Blaise Cendrars,
the surrealist Robert Desnos, etc. etc.