WFQS 245 - Making Waves: Topics in Feminist Activism

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2023/24a: Feminism, Religion, and Spirituality. (Same as RELI 245) Feminism and religion are ordinarily understood to be at odds with one another. Religion is often coded as patriarchal and restrictive, feminism as secular and liberatory. This class interrogates this presumption by taking up the multiple relationships between feminism, religion, and spirituality, from resistance to reform to resourcefulness. The course draws on a wide range of religious and spiritual traditions and global feminist movements. We take up gender and sexuality as central categories for understanding religion as a social phenomenon, and we engage multiple feminist methodologies, including womanist, mujerista, Muslima, and queer critical methods. Written assignments invite students to think self-reflexively, theorize from experience, and critically consider the relationship between religion, spirituality, and “living a feminist life,” in Sara Ahmed’s words. Kirsten Wesselhoeft.

Prerequisite(s): WFQS 130 or permission of the instructor.

Topic for 2023/24b: Vagrants, Wanderers, Runaways, and Flâneurs. Who is granted the freedom to wander? How is gender, race, or sexuality criminalized in public space? In this course, we deconstruct literary and legal figures who move through space like the vagrant, wanderer, runaway, and flâneur. We focus on their historical contexts— such as female vagrants in 18^th century England, or enslaved runaway women in the Caribbean and United States— as well as alternative theories, such as queer or cyborg flâneurs. The first part of the course examines the legal history of vagrancy law, and its role in the creation of the police and courts. We examine how gender, race, and sexuality have been policed through British imperial legislation, colonial law in the Anglophone Caribbean, and the prison system in the United States. The second part of the course looks at disobedience in public space and how Black feminist traditions offer projects in liberation. In the third part of the course, we revisit each “vagrant figure” to ask how rethinking patriarchal, colonial, or heternormative categories offers us creative ways of looking at the world. The course reads across disciplines and genres—from novels, memoir, film, law, and critical theory—but with an ethnographic perspective. Students complete written exercises in ethnography, which consider the ethnographer as a wanderer who makes knowledge through observation. By the end of the course, students question how they and others move (or are unable to move) through the world, and how we might make knowledge and political action from these observations. Natalie Reinhart.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS