This course explores major intellectual debates and dialogues in the field of feminist thought. How has feminist theory – as an expansive body of scholarship that situates marginalized voices at the core of analysis – evolved as a response to “androcentric” ways of knowing? Is there a “feminist method”? Interrogating the gendered trajectories of knowledge production, and how women have figured as silenced subjects of texts, genres, and paternalistic state policies, we will examine the contributions of multiple feminisms – liberal, materialist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, woman-of-color feminisms, and feminisms of faith, for instance, and their interstices – and how they unsettle gendered binaries and essentialist understandings. Using a transnational lens to trace the ways in which gender intersects with race, social class, nation, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and other registers of identity to produce complex structures of power and privilege in different locations and under differing historical conditions, we will examine their relevance to individual and collective experience. Eschewing an uneasy relationship between feminism in theory and practice, we will probe, instead, how the nuances of feminist thought might be applied to research, literature, art, education, and policy. The course is interdisciplinary. It will deploy literary, historical, political, philosophical, sociological, and economic perspectives, and weave together a variety of theoretical, analytical, and creative texts.

Course Requirements:

Assignments will include response papers, oral presentations, and a final project. Students are expected to participate rigorously.

Intended Audience:

This class meets the theory requirement for the Women's and Gender Studies major, Gender & Health major, and Gender, Race & Nation Minor. It also meets the seminar requirement for the Gender & Health minor.

Class Format:

This course is taught in a seminar-style and will focus on the thorough discussion of weekly readings, emphasizing a deep understanding of the arguments presented by the authors under consideration.