ENGL 555 A: Feminist Theories

This course takes up the question of how feminist theorists return to earlier work (that of other feminist theorists and sometimes their own) and in so doing revise their understanding of the central questions that animate feminism in order to envision critique—of power, political economy, governmentality, binaries of gender and sex, racial formations, subjectivity, epistemology, and what has ubiquitously come to be referred to as “intersectionality.”  Put otherwise, the course explores re/vision as a feminist theoretical method and political praxis that articulates (in the sense of joins) theory and politics, and elaborates (in the sense of expands and expounds) feminism as a sociocultural and sociopolitical project across time.

Students interested in feminist theory will gain from this course a deepened understanding of feminist engagements starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s through to the present–though this course is not in any way designed as a survey of Second and Third Wave feminism (is such a course possible?) or as a canon building exercise meant to cement the centrality of particular feminist “classics” or “foundational” feminist texts.  Rather, the course has a twofold aim:  1) to return to particular, often widely read feminist writings, now historical, and to inhabit or sit with these writings long enough to appreciate their complex mediation of the context in which they were written and thus the questions (and sometimes events) into which they sought to intervene;  and, 2) to understand how feminist contributions built out of feminist revision both expand upon and also potentially foreclose what the revised, earlier texts offer. In short this course offers neither a progress narrative nor an account of successive waves but instead a portrait of intellectual and political complexity. Overall, as we move through the arc of the course we will seek to build an expressly genealogical understanding of a select group of debates and questions that have animated feminist theory over the last 40 years and that bring us into our present feminist moment.  In this way, we will seek to understand where, when, and how particular feminist thinkers entered the ongoing discussion decades ago, how ongoing debates have unfolded (or, perhaps, have been dropped or disavowed), and how our apprehension of feminist theoretical production is always necessarily conditioned by the circumstances in which we receive it, the demands we make on it, and, therefore, by the political urgencies of the present.