Gender Under Pressure: Identity and Politics, 1970-2025

Catalog description

Since the 1970s in the United States, there has been an attempt to forge a causal relationship between personal identity and public politics. In the case of gender identity, this has led to an increasingly complicated political knot, leading to the formal declaration in 2025, via Executive Order, that there are two genders in the United States. This course will consider the role of the feminist movement in the 1970s, the legal battles about reproduction from Roe v. Wade (1973) to Dobbs v. Jackson (2022). and the larger role of feminist and trans thinking and the backlash to these claims in producing this outcome. Please note this is an interdisciplinary course: we will be reading and interpreting feminist poetry (Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde), feminist art (Womanhouse and Judy Chicago's Dinner Party), feminist/queer theory (Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick), and feminist legal theory (Crenshaw, MacKinnon, Dworkin). All material will be at the introductory level, but openness to different modes of thinking is required.