WS 525: Feminist Theory: Major Texts/EN 500-004 Special Topics (3 credit hours): Wednesdays, 2:00-4:30, ten Hoor 119
My Office: 103 Manly Hall Office Telephone: 348-3315 E-mail: jpurvis@ua.edu Office hours: T/Th 3:30-5:00 and by appointment Course Description: Part I in a Womens Studies course sequence, this course establishes a baseline of knowledge of feminist theory in order to prepare students for the study of contemporary feminist theory in WS 530. Students may enroll in either course, or both. This course does not serve as a prerequisite to Part II in the sequence. Whats Queer about Feminist Theory? takes as its starting point the premise that feminist theory is always-already queer and embarks on analyses of critical debates within feminist theory concerning sex, gender, sexuality, and the body. Feminist theorists offer intellectual and political challenges to dominant narratives of subjectivity, including the ordering practices of kinship, which have played a central role in shaping discourses, institutions, politics, identifications, and selfhood. Students will consider the persistence of traditional identities, roles, and beliefs in spite of internal conflicts and academic and activist critiques and examine major texts that advance feminist and queer resistance and demonstrate the bodys historical construction. With an emphasis on issues of sex, gender, sexuality, and embodiment, key points of analysis include: the functioning of major binaries of self/other, the workings of sexual regulation, the power of the feminine, orientations and disorientations, identifications and disidentifications, the usefulness of the closet, and the contours of queer politics. We will examine major articulations and rearticulations of gender, subjectivity, power, and embodiment in the spaces where Feminist Theory meets Queer Theory, and beyond. (Prerequisites: None) Course Objectives: Students will gain an understanding of the function of queer as a locus of contention and how various thinkers have articulated intellectual and political challenges to dominant narratives of sex, gender, sexuality, embodiment, and kinship, which then upset, or trouble, discourses, institutions, politics, and subjectivities. Students will become conversant with an assortment of theories which bear upon current debate with particular emphasis on how feminist and queer researchers look to resistant and unconventional practices (critical, textual, political, and otherwise) as ways of subverting normative identities and conventional narratives, rigid cultural logics, and unjust social, governmental, and corporate structures. Students will emerge with a more complex understanding of sexuality, gendered difference, and embodied existence, as well as an array of feminist strategies and agendas.
Course Outcomes: Students will become familiar with the debates surrounding the queer dimensions of feminist theory and use this knowledge to conduct their own independent research on a particular topic or set of topics within the general framework of the course. This research will locate and expand upon insights crucial to the development of politically efficacious feminist theory.
Required Texts: (at the Supply Store, Ferguson Center): Mimi Marinucci, Feminism is Queer GLQ Special Issue: Rethinking Sex (GLQ 17:1 2011) Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Jos Esteban Muoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet Feminist Theory and the Body (edited by Price and Shildrick) GLQ Special Issue: Queer Bonds (GLQ 17:2-3 2011)
Course Requirements:
1.) Attendance: This class meets weekly and is discussion-based, so your attendance is expected at each meeting. If you are absent, you miss a great deal of information and class discussion. The general rule is to be in attendance, without exception, every week, barring extreme circumstances, such as illness or emergency. In cases of unavoidable conflict, you are permitted to excuse yourself from up to two class sessions. Beyond this, your final grade will be reduced by one half of a letter grade for every class you miss.
2.) Participation: In this course, your careful reading and thorough consideration of assigned texts is required, as is your frequent and substantial participation in class discussion. It is not sufficient to merely read the materials on the reading schedule and attend class. You must engage with the substance of the texts and regularly share your insights with other members of the class during class discussion. Because this is a seminar class, your active participation is crucialboth in terms of your own success and that of the course. Thus, participation weighs heavily in the determination of your final grade. Your standing assignment for each class is to formulate a short reading response (one developed paragraph) in preparation for class discussion. In your paragraph, you will draw out a few main points, raise questions, and respond, in brief, to the critical substance of the text(s) we will discuss in class. This standing assignment is your opportunity to guide discussion by providing leading questions and remarks that allow us to explore the interests and perspectives that struck you as most important. Your objective for this standing assignment is not only to demonstrate your engagement with course materials but to stimulate class discussion for the benefit of the entire class. Therefore, you are expected to share your comments and questions with the class and expand upon them in class discussion in a thoughtful and significant manner. This contributes to a dynamic, thought- provoking, and engaging class. While your paragraph will necessarily provide only a brief sketch of your ideas, you are required to elaborate on, clarify, refine, support, explain, and develop your questions and insights in the course of the discussion. Include paraphrases or partial quotes with page numbers for easy reference.
Keep in mind, some contextualization is necessary in order to demonstrate comprehension and convey your meaning. Thus, for each comment, talking point, or discussion question you raise, you should take care to present these ideas within the context of the material in the larger discussion. That is, there is little room to do this in your paragraph, so you should be prepared to ground your points, or observations, firmly within the text, or texts, and support these ideas with direct textual evidence from the primary source(s) during class discussion. Your aim should be to point out moments of illuminationeither those you locate within the given text, or those you experience while reading it, a texts distinctive contribution to the debates at hand, key moments in relation to other texts and perspectives. Come to class prepared to relate the readings of the day to each other and note connections to previous texts in the course, where relevant. The aim of your response is to document your engagement with the course readings in preparation for class and help maintain quality class discussion. But it will be serve as a summary of any extensive notes or marginalia in your texts, a tool to reference in the service of your more elaborate in-class remarks, comments, questions, and observations.
If you have difficulty deciding what to write about: enumerate the most important points in the readings or moments of insight you experienced while reading; identify a point that connects the readings with other texts/perspectives; locate the primary insight or place of convergence among the readings for the day. These are simply suggestions, since course texts are rich with insights and often quite dense. I will review your responses regularly.
3.) Essay Assignments: You are each required to write one short, 5-page essay on the readings of a given week (due to me on Monday by 6 pm). During the Wednesday class meeting, you will consider yourself a central facilitator of class discussion, and you will share relevant insights and questions from your short paper with the class in the context of the class session. We will have up to two people per class perform this duty. If more than two people wish to do so, additional students (more than 2) may write their short, 5-page essays on the literary text of their choice using Eve Sedgwicks framework found in Epistemology of the Closet and insights from relevant course texts (two weeks). Preferences are due Week 2 of class. (Choices should state text and day and be in order, from top choice, #1, to #3, third choice.)
This short essay should demonstrate a substantive engagement with the text(s) of the day (an engagement with the most important points, or the vital substancei.e., a critical response, but this will be formulated into an essay. It will not suffice to write a summary. This paper should be geared towards opening up new perspectives and designed to generate discussion. This shorter paper will be based on the assigned reading(s) for the day and include specific textual evidence from that source or sources (quotes and paraphrases fully cited, using parenthetical notation), but you will also address 1-2 critical sources that you find through your own independent research. You will not submit a reading response paragraph the week of your paper.
Your short paper may serve as the prelude to your major research paper (20 pages) in which you will address a topic of your own choosing at greater length; but the two projects need not be related. The longer research paper should reflect your own interests, but it should also actively engage the issues and debates of the course texts, as well as the content of the course texts themselves (you are required to reference any course texts relevant to your topic). You must also conduct a significant amount of secondary research for this final project and include any outside sources with your final essay. You may write a short proposal (1-2 pages) outlining your extensive research undertaking for the final paper, if you wish to receive feedback and suggestions on your final paper, to be completed by one of the dates indicated on the reading schedule. Major research papers are due at the end of the semester. Since this is, in essence, your final exam, they will be collected during finals week, roughly during the scheduled final exam period.
Grading Policy: Your fulfillment of the objectives of this course will be determined by your successful completion of the following assignments and weighted in percentages as follows:
Participation/Responses 25% Short Critical Paper 25% Final Research Paper 50% (Proposal Optional)
Policy Regarding Late Work: All work must be completed and submitted in a timely fashion in order to succeed in this course. Late responses do not contribute to class discussion and will not be accepted. If you are late to class or come to class without your paragraph, your participation will be compromised, and your participation grade will reflect this. Once you commit to a date for your short paper (the day you will act as a discussion facilitator), you should do your best to honor this commitment. In the case of all formal papers, you should request an extension in advance of the due date, whenever possible, if you find you need more time. If you miss a major paper deadline, you must be able to provide documentation of legitimating circumstances (should I request it); penalties will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
Reading Schedule (subject to change, addition, or substitution): * = Electronic copies (available on Blackboard Learn)
W 8/21 Introductions, Syllabus review
8/28 Mimi Marinucci, Feminism is Queer + *Purvis Queer chapter + *Simone de Beauvoir, Intro, Second Sex
9/04 *Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality + GLQ Special Issue: Rethinking Sex (GLQ 17:1 2011)
9/11 Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays + *Paradigm, + *Diane Griffin Crowder, From the Straight Mind to Queer Theory: Implications for Political Movement
9/18 *Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence + Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Preface through Part 2
9/25 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Part 3-end + *Judith Butler, Critically Queer from Bodies That Matter
10/02 Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Intro-2, *Siobhan Somerville, Feminism, Queer Theory, and the Racial Closet + *Marlon B. Ross, Beyond the Closet as Race-less Paradigm
10/09 Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 3-end + *Katariina Kyrl, The Fat Gendered Body in/as a Closet + *Saguy and Ward, Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma
10/16 Eve Sedgwick, Queer and Now, from Tendencies (1-22) + Michael Warner, Queer and Then: The End of Queer Theory, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 1, 2012 (http://chronicle.com/article/QueerThen-/130161/) + *Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, Sex in Public Critical Inquiry 24 (Winter 1998): 547-566 + *Bryan McCann, Queering Expertise: Counterpublics, Social Change, and the Corporeal Dilemmas of LBGTQ Equality, Social Epistemology 25 (2011): 249-262
10/23 Jos Esteban Muoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (emphasis on Intro, 4, 7-8)
10/30 *Roderick Ferguson, Race-ing Homonormativity: Citizenship, Sociology, and Gay Identity, Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology + *bell hooks, Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace, + *Cathy Cohen, Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics? + *Michelle Jarman, Dismembering the Lynch Mob: Intersecting Narratives of Disability, Race, and Sexual Menace
11/06 Feminist Theory and the Body (Intro-3.2) + *J. Halberstam, Transgender Butch + *Susan Stryker, (De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies, *Katrina Roen, Transgender Theory and Embodiment: The Risk of Racial Marginalization, + *Jacob Hale, Are Lesbians Women? (from The Transgender Studies Reader)
11/13 Feminist Theory and the Body (3.3-5.4) + *Simone de Beauvoir, The Data of Biology, Second Sex* + *Michael Davidson, Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity; Proposalsoptional
11/20 Feminist Theory and the Body (5.5-end) + *Tobin Siebers, A Sexual Culture for Disabled People + *Abby Wilkerson, Normate Sex and Its Discontents from Sex and Disability; Last day for Proposals
11/27 Thanksgiving BreakNo Class
12/04 GLQ Special Issue: Queer Bonds (GLQ 17:2-3 2011)
Finals Week: 12/9-13 th Final Research Papers due(during scheduled final exam period: Tuesday, 12/10, 3:30-6pm)
Academic Misconduct: Acts of dishonesty in any work constitute academic misconduct. This includes, but is not limited to: cheating, plagiarism, fabrication of information, misrepresentation, and abetting any of the above. In the event that any member of this class engages in academic misconduct, the Academic Misconduct Policy will be applied. Students should refer to the Student Affairs Handbook which can be obtained from the Office of Student Life or on-line via the Office of Academic Affairs and the Provosts Office: http://provost.ua.edu/academicmisconductpolicy.doc
Disabilities Access Statement: Students with disabilities are encouraged to register with the Office of Disability Services (348- 4285) or http://ods.ua.edu/. Thereafter, you are invited to schedule an appointment to see me to discuss accommodations and other special needs.
In Case of Emergency: The primary University communication tool for sending out information is the universitys website www.ua.edu. Students should consult this site as soon as they can in an emergency, and I will provide information on the course through Blackboard Learn, as I am able.
I look forward to a pleasant and productive semester working with you. If you have any questions or concerns about this course, or any related research interests you would like to discuss with me, please feel free to meet with me during my office hours or at another scheduled time if office hours conflict with your teaching/class schedule.