What is gender? Why does studying it matter? This course hopes to answer both of these questions by focusing on specific ways in which our daily lives are shaped by gender. Each section of the course asks us to think about how the everyday practices of our lives revolve around gendered assumptions about human bodies, human emotions, and human potentials. Issues we will focus on include gender and the body; gender and consumer culture; gender and the family; gender and work; and gender and space. Among the questions we will ask are: how do we shape our bodies to perform our gender identities? How are various social institutions constructed in relation to gender? How does gender define the social spaces we move through and inhabit? How are gendered meanings and identities shaped by race, class, and sexuality? How have these meanings changed over time, and in relation to what kinds of social, economic, or cultural factors? Students need no prior familiarity with conversations about gender or feminism—just an interest in exploring some of the most powerful issues that shape and affect our everyday lives.
Course Goals
This course aims to provide you with:
• an understanding of the way Women’s Studies as an interdisciplinary field talks about and studies gender;
• the ability to link the study of gender to race, class, and sexuality;
• an opportunity to think about yourself in ways that forge connections between personal experience and larger social institutions and practices;
• the skills to think and write critically about the gendered aspects of everyday life.
|
