“Scattered Feminisms: The Shifting Projects of Feminist Theory”

This course will investigate feminist theory of (roughly-speaking) the last twenty five years, by taking as its central axis of interrogation the (re)organizations of power variously cited as post-Fordism, transnationalism, globalization, and /or multiculturalism. In Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, editors Karen Caplan and Inderpal Grewal propose (in brief) that the dispersal and de-centralization of power wrought by transnational capitalism – the scattering of hegemonies, in their phrase – mandates alternative forms of feminist practice that would answer to women’s situation within systems of social and economic discipline at once highly localized and broadly (if unevenly) integrated. From this historical vantage, we might say that feminist theory and practice have been compelled to resign the intellectual and material terrain of patriarchy, understood as a monolithic formation. Thus we move, for example, from a feminist philosophy that takes modern, Western patriarchy as paradigmatic or from a structuralist feminist anthropology that would theorize the cross-cultural contours of patriarchal order to feminist knowledge projects variously impelled to confront the discontinuous micro-logics of patriarchal order, on the one hand, and their (often contradictory) overlays and intersections, on the other – to confront, in a word, the scattering of patriarchies. Our aim in this course will be to read broadly across the scope of feminist theorizing in order to trace the tropes and protocols, as well as the (inter)disciplinary and social locations, of its scattered feminisms.

In the interest of avoiding either a periodizing scheme or a narrowly thematic organization of the course materials, we will be reading for conversations in feminist theory: the reading will thus be structured around a set of six or seven germinal publications – books or essays that in one respect of another made a decisive intervention, shifting (or capturing a shift) in the practice of feminist theory, and thus reorienting the terms of its inquiries. Each of these publications will then anchor a cluster of readings, in which we follow (as fully as time permits) the career of the ensuing conversation. The list of “anchor” texts remains under construction, but might include: Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women;” Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics; Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century;” Catherine MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State;” Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema;” “Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera; Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.”

Work for the course will include a 10-12 page paper, as well as an in-class presentation on an assigned reading. All class members are expected to participate consistently and actively in class discussion.