Introduction to Gender, Sexuality and U.S. Empire

Catalog description

While Gender Studies is truly a vast field of inquiry, there is great symmetry in the ways in which feminist scholars have been engaged with questions as to how disciplinary apparatuses and discourses shape and construct "gender." This course will begin with the process of peeking into this exciting scholarship, focusing on the "intersectional ties" of identity-that is, how gender has been produced in and through other categories of identity, such as race, class, sexuality, and nation. While there are numerous ways to structure such a course, this course will maneuver through the field of Gender Studies with an eye toward feminisms, race, and U.S. Empire through processes of incarceration, colonialism, and war). In this course, we will explore how the "intersectional ties" of identities have been constructed within a range of institutions, discourses, and processes, such as law, medicine, popular culture, nationalism, colonialism, and empire. Throughout, we will pay close attention to how discourses normalize certain types of identities, practices, and behaviors, and mark others as deviant or unnatural. And, of course, we will look for strategies to contest these productions. This will necessarily place us within key debates in feminist studies of power, agency, activism, and justice at the individual, community, national, and transnational levels, and allow us to end the course by interrogating the role of Gender Studies in regard to current U.S. occupation in the Middle East and Native America. This course will provide a strong foundation for you to pursue studies in feminist, queer, critical race, and postcolonial theories.