Department of English

What counts as work, and in what ways is work divided and organized by gender? How, in turn, is gender shaped by experiences of work, occupational categories, and relationships of labor? And how do race, ethnicity, class, and nationality variously define, subdivide, and reinforce the shifting category of "women's work”? In this course we will explore the gendered dimensions of labor as they intersect with other forms of social identity—and as they construct familial relations, gender norms, and economic and emotional obligations—via a range of texts. Readings may include fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Alice Childress, and Tsitsi Dangarembga; poetry by Mary Collier and Anna Barbauld; lifewriting by Hannah Crafts and Mary Seacole; and selections of social analysis and theory by Silvia Federici, Barbara Ehrenreich, Angela Davis, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Tithi Bhattacharya, Hortense Spillers, Nancy Fraser, and Evelyn Nakano Glenn.