Gender and Text

Catalog description

This course examines gender in and through literary texts, and considers the ways in which categories of sexuality, sex, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and other factors influence writers’ depictions of gender. The course analyzes historical conditions relevant to gender studies, and may address social and theoretical topics such as women’s suffrage, feminisms, third-world feminism, the LGBT and LGBTQ communities, and queer theory. The course analyzes these topics through the lens of literature and asks: how is gender represented in literary texts? how do literary texts not only replicate but sometimes contest or imagine new realities for gendered subjects? what does it mean to write as a gendered subject?