WS 539: Feminist Theories
Course Topics

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Topics we will cover in this course include

• theorizing about men and women in the ancient world;
• the Woman Controversy or querelle des femmes (debate about women) of the medieval and early modern world;
• Englightenment debates about epistemology. theorizing the Cartesian subject, and the development of liberal political and social theory;
• the emergence of the first true women's movement among suffragists like Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, and Carrie Chapman Catt, and others schooled in the abolitionist movement;
• divisions between emancipated blacks and whites, the emergence of the black women's club movement, and the founding of NAWSA (the National American Women Suffrage Association);
• the founding of the NWP (National Women's Party) , the development and proposal of the Equal Rights Amendment and the founding of the League of Women Voters;
• the rebirth of liberal feminism out of the Civil Rights movement, the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex  and Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, and the founding of NOW (the National Organization of Women),; the emergence of second wave feminism;
• theorizing of postcolonialism in the works of Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, and, ultimately, Edward Said (who coined the term orientalism in his book of that title) and Gayatri Spivak, in her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (both 1988);
  
• the social protests of 1968, the Stonewall riots of the following year, the completion of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party a decade later, the efflorescence of consciousness raising groups;
  
• the founding of the first women's studies programs  at San Diego State and Buffalo (by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy) in 1971, and the emergence of lesbian history from Joan Nestle and and Deborah Edel's Herstory Archives;
  
• the more fully theorized feminisms arising from materialist/Marxist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist theories as well as Michel Foucault and and various combinations of these base theories, e.g. in cultural studies, and the emergence of feminist critiques of traditional academic disciplines in, for instance, Joan W. Scott's "Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis" (1988);
• critiques of women's studies and feminism as racist, the emergence of feminist and womanist works by women of color and their subversion of traditional forms of analysis and critique through the use of poetry and other literary forms and the mixing of polemic/analysis with a wide range of genres, from literature to memoir to dream narratives
• the debate pitting identity politics and political action against postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction and further criticism of women's studies as an elite institution for elite women;
• the emergence of gender studies and queer theories, and the development among critical legal theorists of critical race theories, esp. in the work of Derreck Bell;
  
• post-feminism, the sex positive theory and movement, and the proclamation of the death of women's studies.