Women’s Studies

Faculty of the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies

Affiliated Members of the Committee on Women’s Studies

Other Faculty Offering Instruction in Women’s Studies

Primarily for Undergraduates

*Women’s Studies 97 (formerly *Women’s Studies 97hf). Tutorial — Sophomore Year
Catalog Number: 7217
Linda Schlossberg
Half course (fall term). M., 2–4, or W., 2–4; students attend one, not both.
Introduction to the intellectual history of feminism through classic texts from the early modern period to the late 20th century.
Note: Required of, and limited to, Women’s Studies concentrators in the fall of their sophomore year.

*Women’s Studies 98r. Tutorial — Junior Year
Catalog Number: 8094
Juliet Schor and staff
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Note: Ordinarily taken by concentrators for one term in the second semester of the junior year.

*Women’s Studies 99a. Tutorial — Senior Year
Catalog Number: 6763
Juliet Schor and staff
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Note: Both Women’s Studies 99a and 99b are required of all concentrators in their senior year.

*Women’s Studies 99b. Tutorial — Senior Year
Catalog Number: 5847
Juliet Schor and staff
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Note: Both Women’s Studies 99a and 99b are required of all concentrators in their senior year.

For Undergraduates and Graduates

Women’s Studies 102 (formerly Women’s Studies 10c). Gender and Inequality
Catalog Number: 2516
Juliet Schor
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 1, and a one-hour section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 6
Draws on material from economics and other social sciences to analyze gender relations from an economic and social perspective. Topics include: the gender gap in pay; occupational segregation and the glass ceiling; the “second shift” of household work; motherhood; conflicts between work and family; the feminization of poverty; teen pregnancy, and the feminist critique of the State.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.

[Women’s Studies 110a. Bodies and Boundaries]
Catalog Number: 1730
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Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
The history of the body, with particular attention to gender, from the late Middle Ages to the present. Focusing on Europe and the United States, the course examines the ways in which the body has been used to construct boundaries: between male and female, between human and non-human, between races, between the “normal” and the “abnormal,” and between the healthy and the sick. It considers the techniques used to enforce those boundaries, from social discipline to surgery to eugenics, and the ways in which those boundaries were continually challenged by people who refused to accept them or whose bodies refused to conform.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.

Women’s Studies 110b (formerly Women’s Studies 10b). Current Problems in Feminist Theory
Catalog Number: 5590
Alice Jardine
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4, and a one-hour section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
A consideration of debates surrounding gender as a category of knowledge in the arts and humanities, particularly with regard to fiction, film and TV, literary criticism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cultural theory. Provides historical frameworks for understanding what is at stake in current controversies surrounding essentialism, ethnocentrism, and “the straight mind.” Explores recent struggles over both the intellectual histories and future potentials of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and avant-garde practice.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.

Women’s Studies 110c. Gender and Work
Catalog Number: 7763
Pauline E. Peters
Half course (spring term). M., 2–4 and a one-hour section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
At the heart of all societies are work, sex,and gender. The sexual division of labor is a cross-cultural constant but the specific definitions of what aconstitutes work and who is labelled a worker vary. What accounts for some activities being defined as "work" and why are some considered appropriate for women and others for men? Through cases selected cross-culturally and over time, we consider not only how work is gender-specific but how gendered work (re)produces gender differences and other social distinctions. The course examines reproductive, domestic/family, wage/market, factory, and sex work; the social construction of "female" and "male" through different types of "work"; the interactions of work, gender, and class; gendered work, global economy and modernity.

Women’s Studies 132. Shop ‘Til You Drop: Gender and Class in Consumer Society
Catalog Number: 8799
Juliet Schor
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 1 and a one-hour section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 6
Everyday life is increasingly characterized by shopping, buying, and consuming. This course will examine the historical origins of consumer societies; the ways in which advertising, media, and marketing affect culture and society; what motivates consumers; the role of consumption in the forging of identities; the globalization of consumer capitalism; the debate over “consumer society” and its alternatives. Throughout, particular emphasis will be paid to the ways in which consumption is structured by gender and class. Readings include Bourdieu, Bordo, Veblen, Galbraith, Friedan, Peiss, de Grazia.

Women’s Studies 133. The Queer Novel: Narrative and Sexuality
Catalog Number: 0630
Linda Schlossberg
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 1, and a one hour section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 15
Is the novel a queer genre? How has the cultural reception of the novel been influenced by changing ideas about gender and sexuality? This course will look at seemingly "queer" novels from the late 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in their historical and cultural contexts. We will also read selections from contemporary literary criticism and theory. Readings from Diderot, Austen, Forester, Woolf, Wilde, James, Conrad, Baldwin, Lorde, and others.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.

[Women’s Studies 134. Women’s Writing and Film in Latin America and the Caribbean]
Catalog Number: 9230
Bradley S. Epps
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
This course focuses on 20th-century narrative fiction, testimony, theater, and film by women from a variety of linguistic cultures (French, Spanish, Creole, Quiche, English, Portuguese), paying special attention to to the ties and tensions between feminism and post-colonialism. Other topics include gender and genre; sexuality and the state; social engagement and artistic autonomy; nationality, nationalism, and internationalism; class conflict and the “global market”; kinship, ritual, and religion; lesbianism, heterosexuality, and bisexuality; authoritarianism and democracy. May include works by Diamela Eltit, Clarice Lispector, Jamaica Kincaid, and others. Critical and theoretical texts will also be employed. All writings are available in English translations.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.

[Women’s Studies 136. Engendering Hunger: Women, Food, and Culture]
Catalog Number: 9961
Linda Schlossberg
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
This course explores the vexed relationship between women’s bodies, “disorderly eating,” and the formation of gendered subjectivity from historical, psychological, socioeconomic, and literary perspectives. Topics include the narrativization of eating disorders, hunger-striking, etiquette, the relationship between sexuality, race, and “deviant” appetites, the erotics of food, and men’s body image. Readings in history, biography, psychology, cultural theory, literature, and the visual arts, including Foucault, Ellman, Dickinson, Esquivel, Morrison, Chernin, Chicago, Orbach, Freud, and others.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.

[Women’s Studies 152 (formerly Women’s Studies 126). Women and Science: Conference Course]
Catalog Number: 5621 Enrollment: Limited to 15
Katharine Park
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
A survey of the position of women in the study of nature and in scientific writing about sex and gender in Europe and the United States from the Scientific Revolution to the 20th century. Principle themes of the course include: changing conceptions of women’s nature and the female body; opportunities for and barriers to the participation of women in science as students, teachers, producers, translators and consumers of scientific work; and the gendering of nature and scientific authority.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.

[Women’s Studies 153 (formerly Women’s Studies 122). Gender, Race, and Psychoanalysis]
Catalog Number: 7950 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Lynne B. Layton (Medical School)
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Freud knocked his head against the riddle of femininity, but as Sander Gilman has argued, his answer to the riddle may have derived less from science than from his own anxieties about race. Following Freud, many mainstream psychoanalysts continue to propose a universal schema for the development of proper masculine and feminine gender identities. Analytic theorists at the other end of the spectrum, however, argue that gender is a defensive construct that imposes a unitary identity on a fluid experience. Increasingly, psychoanalysis is called upon to account for the fact that genders are lived in connection with race, class, and sexuality. In this course, we will look at psychoanalytic descriptions, prescriptions, and resistances to gender identity and desire.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.

[Women’s Studies 154 (formerly Women’s Studies 111). I Like Ike, But I Love Lucy: Women, Popular Culture, and the 1950s: Conference Course]
Catalog Number: 6855 Enrollment: Limited to 15
Alice Jardine
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
A diagnosis and analysis of this formative decade for the U.S. babyboomer. Taught from a cultural studies perspective, the course will focus on gender politics in print media, film, television, and rock of the early cold war era. Parks, McCarthy, Monroe, Kerouac, and many others.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.

Women’s Studies 155. Women, Girls, and Poverty: Conference Course
Catalog Number: 9165 Enrollment: Limited to 20
Elizabeth Dodson
Half course (fall term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Using a life-stages approach, this course examines conditions and effects of economic hardship in the lives of women and girls. Themes include daughters’ work in low-income families, adolescent pressures and strengths, early (often) single motherhood, and women’s ongoing development, despite multiple barriers. A conceptualization of an economically segregated society, with the accompanying issues of race, ethnicity, and welfare stigma is integrated throughout. Students co-lead weekly class discussions. Readings by Sidel, Hill Collins, Fine, Dodson, Edin, Luker, Way and others.

Women’s Studies 156. Feminism and Sexuality
Catalog Number: 0605 Enrollment: Limited to 20
Sasha Torres (Johns Hopkins University)
Half course (spring term). Th., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
This course surveys the variety of positions on sexuality — sexual practices, desires and pleasures — that have laid claim to the descriptor “feminist” from the beginning of the second wave to the present. We will consider debates about the location of female pleasure, lesbian sadomasochism, pornography, sex work and heterosexuality. Reading will include the work of Allison, Bright, Califia, Duggan and Hunter, Echols, Ehrenreich, Firestone, Hite, Rubin and Wolf.

Women’s Studies 157. Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Performance
Catalog Number: 0618 Enrollment: Limited to 25
Holly Hughes
Half course (spring term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
An examination of recent performance pieces, both solo and collaborative including Split Britches, Luis Alfaro, Kate Bornstein, Carmelita Tropicana, Annie Sprinkle, in which sexuality and gender are central themes. Theories of performance, gender and sexuality (Román, Dolan, Solomon) will be studies alongside the performance texts. In a workshop component of the course, students will also create their own short performance pieces.

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