ENGL 261 - Reading Gender

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. A course on using gender as a tool of literary analysis. We study the ways ideas about masculinity and femininity inform and are informed by poetry, short stories, novels, plays, films, and/or pop culture productions. Also includes readings in feminist theory about literary interpretation and about the ways gender intersects with other social categories, including race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class. Historical focus will vary according to professor’s areas of interest and expertise. We study novels, poems, stories, and films that engage with what might be considered some major modern myths of gender: popular fairy tales. We focus at length upon the Cinderella and Red Riding Hood stories but also consider versions of several additional tales, always with the goal of analyzing the particular ideas about women and men, girls and boys, femininity and masculinity that both underlie and are produced by specific iterations of these familiar stories. Winter 2018: Introduction to Fourth-World Feminisms. This course reads across contexts and genres to think through 19th-21st-century formulations of gender as imagined and enacted by indigenous and tribal women. In doing so, it necessarily addresses issues of settler and extractive colonialisms (United States, Guatemala, India), forms of resistance (hunger strike, un/armed protest), and subaltern poetics complicating received narratives of progress and art. A consistent concern is the relationship between this mode of feminist praxis/politics and other modes of feminist thought, such as second wave U.S. feminism, Black feminism, and women of color feminisms. Another recurring question is to address the nuances of categories, such as “indigenous”, “tribal”, and “race/caste”, categories that have taken on heightened sensitivity in the current global moment. Reading materials span novels, films, and critical essays, and assignments center on oral presentations and regular writing. Rajbanshi. Staff.