WFQS 375 - Seminar in Women’s Studies

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2023/24a: Feminist Disability Studies. (Same as ENGL 375) Why is disability a feminist issue? This course addresses that question by exploring the diverse meanings of disability, both in theory and in lived experience, focusing on intersections of disability with gender, race, class, and sexuality. Disability is defined broadly to include all the ways in which a person’s body or mind may be perceived as outside what Audre Lorde called “the mythical norm.” We examine the ways in which particular historical, social, and institutional structures have shaped the experiences of disabled people, and how cultural perceptions of disability create social inequality. In the spirit of the disability rights movement’s call for “nothing about us without us,” we also give special attention to the work of disabled writers, artists, performers, and activists.Topics may include gender, sexuality, and eugenics; engendering the disabled body; disability, biotechnology, and reproductive justice; the gendering of “madness;” invisible disabilities; disability and trauma; disability and incarceration; disability, dependency, and the feminist ethics of care; disability rights and disability justice. Students deepen their personal engagement with feminist disability studies through research, self-reflection, and a final critical or creative project. Leslie Dunn, Silke von der Emde.

Topic for 2023/24b: Feminist and Queer Life Writing. In this course we explore forms of memoir and the writing of feminist and queer lives: texts written by and about the feminist and/or queer subject. We explore memoir, autobiographical fiction, and possibly even some literary biography. What motivates a person to tell their life story, or to investigate someone else’s, and how are these stories bound by both authors and readers to narratives of citizenship, belonging, and/or exclusion? What motivates a writer to share what they share, what motivates an audience to demand what it demands from them, and how are demands and motivations framed in specific ways by a feminist project, a queer subjectivity? What claims about the exemplary or excessive qualities of the life story are made, or are emulated, by the life story’s readers? In addition to critical consideration of biography and memoir in traditional media, you have the opportunity to think about the work of memoir in a number of different media, including the graphic novel, unpublished letters and diaries, and in-progress digital forms. Your work in this class also includes examinations of the fake memoir and the digital overshare, and you are invited to curate a branded footprint of your own, using tools of new media. Readings may include work by Jeanette Winterson, Brian Broome, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, Vivian Gornick, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Bechdel, and Roxanne Gay. Kristin Sanchez Carter.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS