Department of English

Feminism has both united women and also generated debates between women of different races, locations and sexual orientations, not just across the world but also within the US. How should we, located in a prestigious US university, locate our own ideas about gender and sexuality in a global framework?

This is an interdisciplinary class that will include literary, cinematic, anthropological and sociological texts, as well as reportage. Through these we will understand how 

histories of slavery, race, and colonialism have structured differences between women that led to very different conceptions of feminism, gender, women, and sexuality around the world. We will consider key writings about the family, the body, labor, pleasure and agency, often grounding them in controversies around reproductive justice, global trafficking, the environmental crisis, female labor, circumcision, and the veil.