Women’s and Gender Studies



Women’s and Gender Studies Professor Hawkesworth

988:582:01 Room 8A, Vorhees Chapel

(732) 932-9577

mhawkes@rci.rutgers.edu

Office Hours: W 9-11 a.m.

and by appointment

Feminist Genealogies

Genealogy has been described as a diagnostic “history of the present, ” traced in order to undermine the self-evidences of the present and to open possibilities for the enhancement of life. Unlike traditional techniques of historical analysis, genealogy rejects any search for origins, notions of progress or unilinear development, and assumptions concerning definitive causes and unbroken continuity. Genealogy’s ‘unit of analysis’ is not ‘the past’ as it was lived (which is taken to be unknowable), but the historical record, the documents and narratives with which people have explained their past. Following Nietzsche, genealogists problematize such established discourses, insisting that historical narratives are framed by questions that reflect the preoccupations and concerns of the writers. Thus the genealogist attempts to identify the conditions under which particular discourses arise, illuminate multiplicity and randomness at the point of emergence; interrogate the interests that inform the narrative, and question the values that sustain the discursive formation. In an effort to trace complexity and disparity, genealogists begin their analysis with particularity, chance, disjuncture, accidents, dredging up forgotten documents and apparently insignificant details in order to recreate forgotten historical and practical conditions for contemporary existence.

Genealogy is a unique form of critique premised on the assumption that what is taken for granted--objects, ideas, values, events, and institutions--have been constituted contingently, discursively, practically. The genealogist attempts to lay bare that constitution and to probe its consequences. In seeking to reveal the arbitrariness of what appears ‘natural’ and ‘necessary’, the genealogist aspires to open possibilities, by stimulating reflection on and resistance against what is taken for granted about world and about ourselves. In this sense, genealogical narratives are oriented toward the enhancement of life.

In keeping with the presuppositions of genealogy, the starting point for any course entitled ‘feminist genealogies’ is quite arbitrary. While historians tend to construct a narrative of Anglo-American feminism beginning with anti-slavery activism in the 1830s, and etymologists trace the emergence of the term, ‘feminism,’ to derogatory depictions of women’s rights activists advanced by male journalists in late 19th century France, this course will have a different point of departure. In order to trace particular discursive formations in contemporary feminist theory, this course will begin with an interrogation of the ‘Self/Other’ dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind and explore how that frame has been deployed by feminist and postcolonial theorists. Taking up another strain of feminist theorizing, we will then consider materialist trajectories that run from Marx through socialist feminist theory and radical feminist theory. The final section of the course will engage a range of contestations constitutive of contemporary feminist theory.

Course Requirements

The quality of any seminar is a direct result of the level of preparation and degree of participation of class members. In this seminar, each student will be expected to:

1) complete all reading assignments by the dates specified below;

2) use this reading as the basis for informed class participation;

3) write and present one seminar paper;

4) complete two additional analytic papers; and

5) complete one final examination.

Seminar Papers

One objective of the course is to help students to develop their analytical abilities and writing skills. The seminar papers are means to this end. A good seminar paper involves exposition, analysis, and critique of a central theme in the assigned reading. A great seminar paper involves exposition, analysis, critique, consideration of the author's possible responses to the critique, and the development of rejoinders.

Each student will be expected to write one seminar paper (7-10 pages). Each student will also be expected to present and defend this paper in class. The seminar paper is due on the day of class when it will be presented. Students will be given the opportunity to revise the seminar paper on the basis of class discussion and faculty assessment. Revised seminar papers must be submitted with the original essay attached and are due on December 7.

Analytic Papers

While the seminar papers focus exclusively on a theme within one text by a particular author, the analytic papers deploy the same techniques, explication, analysis and critique of an issue or theme in the context of multiple authors. Thus the goal is to compare the authors’ varying accounts, interrogating their assumptions, examining the way they frame the issue, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the varying accounts.

The topic for the first analytic paper is fixed, “The Self/Other Dialectic in Hegel, Fanon, and Beauvoir.” The deadline for the first analytic paper is September 28.

Students may choose the topic and the specific theorists to examine for their second analytic papers, although they must submit a brief topic proposal no later than November 9. The deadline for the second analytic paper is December 14.

Grading Policy

In calculating grades for the course, student performance will be assessed according to the following weighting scheme:

Class participation 15%

Seminar Paper 25%

Analytic Paper I 20%

Analytic Paper II 20%

Final Examination 20%

Required Reading

The following books are required for the course. All but one are available for purchase at the Douglass College Coop Bookstore. One text (Delphy) is out of print, but photocopies may be purchased at Pequod Copy Center, 119 Somerset Avenue, adjacent to the College Avenue Campus. Additional assigned articles will be made available in photocopy.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Toril Moi, What is A Woman?

Robert C. Tucker, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader

Christine Delphy, Close to Home

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

Robert Connell, Gender and Power

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Judith Grant, Fundamental Feminism: Contesting the Core Concepts of Feminist Theory

Shane Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians and Dilemmas of Citizenship

Chilla Bulbeck, Re-orienting Western Feminisms

Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter

Semester Calendar

Sept. 7 On the Presuppositions of Genealogy: Hegelian Roots

Sept. 14 Dialectics of Self/Other

Reading: Hegel, “Self-Consciousness,” “Independence and Dependence of

Self Consciousness,” and “Freedom of Self-Consciousness” in

Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 218 – 267

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Sept. 21 Feminism and the Politics of Othering

Reading: Beauvoir, The Second Sex,

Introduction

Part I, Destiny,

Chapter I, The Data of Biology

Part IV, The Formative Years

Chapter XII, Childhood

Chapter XIII, The Young Girl

Chapter XIV, Sexual Initiation

Chapter XV, The Lesbian

Sept. 28 Moi on Beauvoir and the Situation of Women

Reading: Toril Moi, “What is a Woman? Sex, Gender, and the Body in Feminist

Theory” and “I Am A Woman: The Personal and the Philosophical” in

What is a Woman?

Sept. 28 First Analytic Paper Due: The Self/Other Dialectic in Hegel, Fanon, Beauvoir

Oct. 5 Othering: the White, Western Imperial Gaze

Reading: Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Third World Women and the

Politics of Feminism,” and “Cartographies of Struggle: Feminist

Scholarship and Colonial and Colonial Discourses”

Ofelia Schutte, “Cultural Alterity: Cross Cultural Communication and

Feminist Theory in North South Contexts”

Evelynn Hammonds, “Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality:

The Problematic of Silence”

Rey Chow, “Violence in the Other Country: China as Crisis, Spectacle,

and Woman”

Oct. 12 Historical Materialism: Marx

Reading: Marx, The German Ideology,

Wage, Labor and Capital,

The Communist Manifesto

Oct. 19 Feminist Applications of Historical Materialism

Reading: Christine Delphy, Close to Home

Oct. 26 Feminist Appropriations of Historical Materialism

Reading: Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

Catharine MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7(3): 515-544 [1982].

Catharine MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8(4): 635-658 [1983].

Nov. 2 Contesting the Terms of Debate: From Women to Gender

Reading: Robert Connell, Gender and Power

Nov. 9 Contesting the Core Concepts

Reading, Judith Grant, Fundamental Feminism: Contesting the Core Concepts of

Feminist Theory

Nov. 9 Topic Proposals for Second Analytical Paper

Nov. 16 Contesting Heteronormativity

Reading: Shane Phelan, Sexual Strangers

Nov. 22 Contesting Western Feminisms

Reading: Chilla Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms

NOTE: Class meets on Tuesday rather than Wednesday

Nov. 30 Trying Again: Migratory Feminism in the Borderlands

Reading: Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural

Geographies of Encounter

Dec. 7 Reports on Second Analytic Papers

Dec. 14 Final Exam

Second Analytic Paper Due

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