Gender, Race and Labor in Comparative Perspective

Catalog description

This seminar takes a broad approach to gender by placing it into conversation with race and ethnicity, as well as other lines of difference and inequality, including class, nation, and age, thinking through the dynamic relationship between gender, race and labor from a variety of situated and comparative perspectives. The course begins with two orienting, interwoven perspectives: first, feminist efforts to bring women's experiences, in all their diversity, from the margins to the center of knowledge; and second, the use of gender as a category of analysis-in this way, we will understand gender as relational, in order to study and learn from the lives and experiences of men and trans people, as well as women. Lectures, discussions, and readings in this seminar will draw upon ideas from a range of academic disciplines, addressing questions around intersectionality theory, masculinities, the global division of reproductive labor, and gendered labor and the state all within the context of a transnational and always globalizing world, but with a focus on gender and race-taken together-as an intersectional, critical lens of analysis for understanding multiple relations of power in which we are all embedded, and which shape our experiences. Though gender is an aspect of all social life, this course pays particular attention to gendered and racialized dynamics in the workplace, in the labor process, and in everyday working lives. This course will examine changes in occupational segregation on the basis of race, gender, and immigration status, with a focus on low-wage workers and the growing informal sector. It will also investigate those workers' particular sets of challenges for recognition by the state, unions, and worker centers. And through a comparative, critical perspective, this course focuses the study of gender, race and labor across global and transnational spaces.