Courses
WMST courses
V3813 Feminist Inquiry
G8010 Advanced Topics in Feminist Theory, Section 001 - Body & Power: Poltics of Life
This course examines a radical genealogy of the body in contemporary critical theory. It examines a number of authors who are interested in the use of the body to produce truth and naturalize power. The purpose of the course is to understand how these authors, and this genealogy of thought, variously links bodies to power - power over life and earth, power to cripple and rot certain worlds while over-investing others with wealth and hope.
W4320 Thinking Sexuality
V3111 Feminist Texts I: Wollstonecraft to Beauvoir
Readings of texts produced before the Second Wave of 20th century feminism. Explores some sources of that feminism and some ways that women and men experienced gender as both theory and lived practice prior to development of a contemporary political language for articulating those experiences.
V3112 Feminist Texts II: Beauvoir to the Present
Contemporary issues in feminist thought. A review of theoretical debates on sex roles, feminism and socialims, psychoanalysis, language, and cultural representations. Authors include Simone de Beauvoir, J.S. Mill, A. Kollantai, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. Prerequisite: the instructor's permission.
V3522 Senior Seminar II
Seminar for the preparation of the senior thesis for Columbia’s Women’s and Gender Studies majors. Individual research in Women’s and Gender Studies conducted in consultation with the instructor.
V4320 Thinking Sexuality
The course will cover a range of (mostly U.S. and mostly 20th-Century) materials that thematize gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender experience and identity. We will study fiction and autobiographical texts, historical, psychoanalytic, and sociological materials, queer theory, and films, focusing on modes of representing sexuality and on the intersections between sexuality and race, ethnicity, class, gender, and nationality. We will also investigate connections between the history of LGBT activism and current events. Authors will include Foucault, Freud, Butler, Sedgwick, Anzaldua, Moraga, Smith. Students will present, and then write up, research projects of their own choosing.
G4000 Genealogies of Feminism: The Subject(s) of Rights
The rights of women and sexual minorities have been central to feminism theory and activism. What is the genealogy of "rights talk"? What is its feminist genealogy? As the liberal language of rights has become hegemonic, in particular through international instruments that have linked women's and sexual rights to human rights and as liberal reform goes global, what is hidden from view? What understandings are foreclosed? What politics are blocked? This course will examine these key questions by exploring feminist and other critiques of liberal paradigms; considering alternative languages and practices for emanicipation, for example, Marxist thought, socialist practice, or Islamic law and its local practices; and reflecting on assumptions about the human embedded in liberalism, including the idea of human development and capability. Readings include T. Asad., J. Butler, W. Brown, S. Hartman, J. Massad, M. Nussbaum, E. Povinelli, L. Rofel, C. Walley, M. Wollestonecraft and others.
W4300 Advanced Topics in Women's and Gender Studies: Expressive Bodies
Bodies appear to defy methods of categorization across nationality, race, and sexuality (and even within subcultures and localities). While bodies remain agile, normative theories of how bodies are construed, and how and why they act, are often rigid and formulaic. This course examines how phenomenological work on bodies and expression clarifies distinctions between varying "bodily world views." We consider research on race and sexuality of the last few decades, working with texts by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Charles R. Johnson, Laura Doyle, Gail Weiss, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., as well as essays by Foucault, Butler, and French feminists. Their work shows how geography, in conjunction with a specific socio-cultural nexus of lived experience, creates distinct expressive capacity. By examining their theories, in conjunction with the artistic representation of bodies (in literary works, and in the performing and visual arts), the course will critique the parameters of categories of African American race and sexuality. We will see how art contributes to the philosophical and cultural constitution of bodily forms and bodily analysis. In particular we consider choreographers and artistic directors Alvin Ailey, Arthur Mitchell, Ron Brown, Katherine Dunham, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, playwrights Soyinka, Baldwin, Hansberry, and Suzan-Lori Parks, literary authors Lorde, Dove, Brooks, Alexander, Hurston, and Morrison, and visual artists Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon. When possible we will make use of the cultural resources of NYC by visiting museums, galleries, and performances.
