Genealogies of Feminist Theory

This course is intended as in-depth introduction to feminist theoretical inquiries that have informed and continue to inform feminist scholarship in the humanities. A primary aspiration of the course is to situate contemporary feminist scholarship within broader intellectual histories that have tended to congeal into ready-made, foreshortened narratives of past errors and present atonement. Consequently, this course seeks to (re)engage these histories as a series of complex, variegated, contradictory, and ultimately unsettled conversations, whose animating preoccupations and theoretical impasses persist, for worse and for better, into the contemporary moment. Course materials will collate around three critical topoi, Capital and labor (internal colonization; standpoint, the traffic in women), family and kinship (property, propriety, and the patronymic; oedipal subjectivity/at the margins; domesticity and nation), and representation (representation?s ?two scenes;? polity, collectivity, and coalition) ? with the parenthetical additions intended to signpost a few of the issues and methods central to each of these (complexly articulated) topoi. The syllabus remains under construction and highly provisional, but work by Michele Barrett, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Angela Davis, Nancy Hartsock, Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray, Wahneema Lubiano, Catherine MacKinnon, Anne McClintock, Saba Mahmood, Maria Mies, Juliet Mitchell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Chela Sandoval, Joan Scott, Eve Sedgwick, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Iris Marion Young will most likely be included on the syllabus. Interested students are welcome to contact me for more specifics towards the end of winter quarter.