ENGL 380 - English Seminar

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2025/26b: Social Reproduction Feminism and the Fictions of Care Work. This upper-division course explores the literary mediation of feminized care work and socially reproductive labor. We will read contemporary fiction from across the Anglophone world that has upended the sentimentalist norms of older domestic fiction through these more recent texts’ aesthetic navigation of racial difference, transnational migration, and global capitalism. While the nuclear family of the Global North has long depended on the obscured labor of women, this course explores the expanded scalar implications of gendered care work in our contemporary global economy. What happens when the intimate spaces of the family home are represented as thoroughly social workplaces tethered to exploitative transnational relations? To answer this, our course will insist on paying close attention to how transnational feminist fiction about care work demands relational modes of interpretation such as “reparative reading,” intersectional explication, and “reading with the grain.” When a fictional text cultivates readerly empathy, can that be considered an act of care? While maids, caregivers, and domestic workers have often been relegated to the margins of the global cultural imaginary, this course reads fiction that focalizes these transnational laborers as agential protagonists not only in literature but history itself. Literary texts may include Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Joanne Ramos’s The Farm, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, Amma Darko’s The Housemaid, Héctor Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries, Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Now You See Us, Mona Simpson’s My Hollywood, Catherine Hernandez’s The Story of Us, and Mia Alvar’s In the Country. To inform our literary analyses, we will also engage recent developments in the strand of materialist feminist thought known as “social reproduction theory” (SRT). Likely theorists include Nancy Fraser, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, Neferti Tadiar, Cinzia Arruzza, and Tithi Bhattacharya. Alden Sajor Marte-Wood.

This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS