Schedule of Readings
Link to PDFs
{Click a link below to jump to that week’s reading assignments}
1/12 WEEK 1: Gender
1/19 WEEK 2: Sexuality
1/26 WEEK 3: Early Theories of Gender Difference and Proto-Feminisms
2/2 WEEK 4: The First Wave
2/9 WEEK 5: The Second Wave
2/16 WEEK 6: The Gay Rights’ Movement and the Third Wave
2/23 WEEK 7: Intersectionality, Black, and Chicana Feminisms
3/8 WEEK 8: Intersections of Bodies, Genders and Sexualities
3/15 WEEK 9: Transnationalism and Globalization
3/22 WEEK 10: Health and Reproduction
3/31 WEEK 11: Work
4/5 WEEK 12: Family
4/12 WEEK 13: The Meaning of Marriage
4/19 WEEK 14: (Post)colonialism, Racism, and Violence
1/12 WEEK 1: Gender
Tuesday
(Reading will be handed out during class.)
Kate Bornstein, selections from Gender Outlaw (1995) and My Gender Workbook: How to
Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely (1997)
*Vote to use Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook*
Thursday
Three to Infinity: Beyond Two Genders (2015). Stream for $4.99 on Vimeo at bit.ly/1PTvFfP
Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (1986). Read p. 1053-1056
Barbara Risman, “Gender as Structure” (1998)
Judith Jack Halberstam, introduction to Female Masculinity (1998)
Finish Bornstein and fill out workbook (not to share, just for yourself)
Optional: R.W. Connell and James W. Messersschmidt , “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept” (2005) Nb. This is a good literature review example to consult later.
1/19 WEEK 2: Sexuality
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (1991)
Riki Wilchins, selections from Queer Theory, Gender Theory (2004)
Leila Rupp, “Toward a Global History of Same-Sex Sexuality” (2001)
*Wordpress Training*
Thursday
Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980)
Jonathan Ned Katz, selections from The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995)
Michel Foucault, selections from The History of Sexuality (1979)
Event (attendance required at 2/3 events):
Monday, January 25, 4:30, Lilly Family Gallery
Lecture/Performance by queer performance artist Tim Miller: Hidden History What Happens Now That We’ve Achieved Gay Marriage?
1/26 WEEK 3: Early Theories of Gender Difference and Proto-Feminisms
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, “The Reply to Sor Philotea” (1691)
Mary Astell, “A Serious Proposal to the Ladies” (1694)
Gerda Lerner, selections from Creation of Patriarchy (1987)
William H. Reddy, selections from The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan 900-1200 CE (2012)
Thursday
Sarah Grimke, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1837)
Sharon Marcus, selections from Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007)
Jennifer DeVere Brody, selections Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (1998)
2/2 WEEK 4: The First Wave
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
(Office hours cancelled today and Thursday because of travel and Balay’s talk; Wednesday appts. are also unavailable; however, you can make appointments for Friday this week if you wish. See Office Hours for instructions on how to make appointments, which are usually only available on Wednesdays, but will be available on a make-up basis Friday, 2/5)
Luisa Capetillo, selections from A Nation of Women (1910s) and her bio
Anna Julia Cooper, selections from A Voice from the South (1892)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Solitude of Self” (1892) (attached to the Cooper PDF)
Friedrich Engels, selections from The Origins of Family, Private Property and the State (1884)
Francisca Diniz, “Equality of Rights,” (1890)
WEB DuBois, “The Damnation of Women,” (1919)
Thursday (Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Readings by Anne Balay, who will visit class on 2/4 (2 separate PDFs: the Intro. to Steel Closets and the article “Surprised by Activism“)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” (1848)
Huda Shaarawi, “Speeches at Arab Feminist Conference,” (1944)
Simone de Beauvoir, selections from The Second Sex (1949)
Lecture by Dr. Anne Gladys Balay, “John the Uptight Trucker, or, How everything changes when you start to see working class and poor people’s lives and bodies.”
*Students should choose a monograph for their book review by the end of Week 4, and visit Office Hours OR E-MAIL to get approval of said monograph by the end of Week 5 or 6.*
*Media Analysis due 2/8 on the blog*
2/9 WEEK 5: The Second Wave
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
Betty Friedan, selections from Feminine Mystique (1963)
Committee on the Status of Women in India, “Towards Equality” (India, 1974)
bell hooks, “Black Women Shaping Feminist Theory” in Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984)
Thursday
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975)
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, selections from Our Bodies, Our Selves (1971)
Peruse the contemporary Our Bodies site as well
* Book review due 2/19*
2/16 WEEK 6: The Gay Rights’ Movement and the Third Wave
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
Gay Liberation Front: Manifesto. London, 1971, revised 1978. {Skim this reading}
http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/pwh/glf-london.asp
Documents from the 1969 Furor. [Early gay liberation flyers and manifestos, and
the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front in July 1969.] {Skim this reading}
http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/pwh/1969docs.asp
Deborah Gould, selections from Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UPs Fight Against
Aids (2009)
Thursday
Susan Faludi, “Blame It on Feminism” (1991)
Kathleen Hanna, “Riot Grrl Manifesto” (1991)
Michelle Jensen, Review of Baumgardner & Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000)
* Sign up for Office Hours meetings (or drop in) 2/23-3/15 to discuss the Literature Review*
2/23 WEEK 7: Intersectionality, Black, and Chicana Feminisms
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
Alice Walker, “Definition of a Womanist” (1983) and “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” (1972)
“Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist Statement” (1977)
Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Toward a New Consciousness” (1987)
Thursday
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1991)
Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege” (1988)
SPRING BREAK 2/27-3/6
3/8 WEEK 8: Intersections of Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
Jean Kilbourne, TED Talk on Killing Us Softly IV: Advertising Images of Women (2014) 15 minutes
Marilyn Wann, foreward t0 The Fat Studies Reader (2009)
Deb Burgard, “What is Health at Every Size?” (2014)
Jen Baker, TEDx Talk on Complete and Total Body Love (2014) 16 minutes
Thursday
Eli Clare, selections from Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation (1999)
Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence” (2006)
3/15 WEEK 9: Global Perspectives
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
Beijing Declaration, “United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women” (1995) Also read this background on the significance of the Beijing conference.
Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others” (2002)
Uma Narayan, “Contesting Cultures: Westernization, Respect for Cultures and Third World Women” (1997)
Thursday: Laura Freixas visits class
Thursday
Henesler, Christine. Conteporary Spanish Women’s Narrative and the Publishing Industry, introduction
Freixas, Laura, “Absurd Ending,” a short story
Prepare 3 questions for Laura about feminism in Spain, about the Henesler reading, and/or about her short story.
Event (attendance required at 2/3 events): Lecture by Laura Freixas, “The Silence of Mothers.” Thursday, March 17, 7:30pm, Hance Auditorium.
* Sign up for mandatory meetings 3/23-4/12 to discuss the Literature Review and Grant Proposal; see Sign-Ups page*
Bring to the meeting a draft of at least one page of the Lit. Review, 5 bibliographic entries, and be prepared to discuss your plan for the Grant Proposal (or alternative to the Grant Proposal).
3/22 WEEK 10: Health and Reproduction
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
Jael Silliman et al., “Women of Color and Their Struggle for Reproductive Justice” (2004)
Wendy Hussey, “Slivers of the Journey: Using Photovoice and Storytelling to Examine FTM Experiences of Health Care Access” (2006) [Instead of reading from beginning to end, skim this article enough to extract: the argument; the discipline(s); the type of evidence; three key examples of such evidence; and the conclusion.]
Thursday
Emily Martin, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” (1991)
Anonymous, “How It All Began: I Have Had an Abortion” (1981)
3/31 WEEK 11: Work
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday-NO CLASS ON 3/29 for EASTER BREAK
Thursday
Anne Crittenden, “The Mommy Tax” (2001)
Adia Harvey Wingfield, “Racializing the Glass Escalator: Reconsidering Men’s Experiences with Women’s Work” (2009)
Brad Seligman, “Patriarchy at the Checkout Counter: The Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Class-Action Suit” (2006)
Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, “Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Immigrant Women Workers” from Sweatshop Warriors (2001)
Alice Kessler Harris, selections from In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in the 20th Century (2003)
4/5 WEEK 12: Family
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
John D’Emilio “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1983)
Noël Sturgeon, “Penguin Family Values: The Nature of Planetary Environmental Justice” (2010)
Thursday
Michael Cobb, introduction to Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled (2012) [Skim and read for main argument]
Patricia Hill Collins, “Controlling Images and Black Women’s Oppression” (1991)
4/12 WEEK 13: The Meaning of Marriage
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
Michael Warner, selections from The Trouble with Normal (1999)
Nancy Polikoff, selections from Beyond (Gay and Straight) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law (2008) [Skim the Intro. and read Chapter 1 pp. 11-33]
[Optional] Elizabeth Freeman, selections from The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in in Modern American Culture (2002)
Thursday
Kenyan Farrow “Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black?”
Marlon M. Bailey, Priya Kandaswamy, Mattie Udora Richardson “Is Gay Marriage Racist?”
4/19 WEEK 14: (Post)colonialism, Racism, and Violence
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
No reading: Presentation of my book project Queer Ambivalence: Latina/o American Sexual Cultures in the Age of Gay Marriage
Thursday
Workshop: Why is it acceptable to transition genders, but not races?
The most common meaning of “transracial”
Ponder these questions:
How are race and gender different? What do they have in common as forms of social difference? How do they intersect?
Why is it increasingly socially acceptable to transition genders, but not races?
Putting aside the scandal of Dolezal, are there circumstances under which one could transition racially, in a process partially analogous to gender transitioning?
4/26 WEEK 15: Conclusions
(Jump back to weekly scheduled readings)
Tuesday
Browse articles from Against Equality; Feministing; and Wear Your Voice. Pick one that relates to something that you learned in GSS 101 for the very first time, particularly an idea that surprised you, led you to shift your understanding of some aspect of our world. Be prepared to briefly summarize the article and how it relates to your learning in class.
Read through the list of Learning Goals, as well as the Assignments, on the syllabus and make a list of what you have learned this semester in GSS 101.
Thursday
Class celebration, the GSS major, & course evaluations.
Class starts at 10:00am instead of 9:40
Bagels and coffee from Summit, courtesy of the GSS program
