History of
Feminist
Theories
and Movements
Women's
Studies 539
Fall 2007
Thursdays 3:30-6:00, Women's
Studies Conference Room
revised 27 October 2007
Professor: Kari
McBride
Office Hours: By
appointment
Phone: 520 323 7759
Email (the best way
to contact me):
kari@email.arizona.edu
This course
examines the history of the western tradition of
feminist
theories in their relationship to social movements and the founding of
womens studies departments. Read an overview
of some of the historical
moments we will
cover
This is of
course an incomplete list of
developments in feminist theories, but in
any case, no course
can cover all aspects of this extensive subject. I
have
chosen a range of works, in some instances classic texts that you may
have
read previously and many that will be new to you and that I hope will
challenge your expectations of feminist theories and stretch your
capacity to read, think, and analyze, and write. The goal of the course
is to give
you a sense of the outlines of
the
history of feminist theories and their intersection with other theories
and with political movements and social protests in any age. In
addition, when you have completed the course, I expect that you will be
able to read even the most abstruse, dense, or difficult feminist
theoretical text and be able to analyze the argument in terms of its
genealogy: what theories or theorists does the author rely on? what are
the argument's theoretical forebears?
Assignments for the course include critical
responses to readings, class presentations, and two short critical
papers that elaborate on class
presentations. The details of the assignments will be worked out on the
first day of class. Students
taking this class are expected to have a grounding in the most basic
terms,
concepts, and texts of feminism; assignments and discussion will assume
this kind of preparation. If you think you need to brush up on these
terms, consult John Storey's Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture (which has been ordered for the
class), or one of the many online
resources such as the compendious Johns
Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism Online (where you
can search "feminism" and find links to many articles on the topic) ,
or a short guide to Different
Types of Feminist Theories. You may also wish to read through my
undergrad Feminist
Theories course. Readings for the course will be available starting
spring of 2008; until then, you'll have to hunt down the articles on
your own or ask me for copies.
Required
Materials and Capabilities
Email and internet
access required. Books have
been
ordered through the UA bookstore. You may also be able to find used
copies
at local bookstores and at web sites like amazon.com.
- Gloria
Anzaldúa, Haciendo Caras/Making Face, Making Soul
- Roland Barthes, Mythologies
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
- Margaret Cavendish, The
Blazing World and Other Writings (also available through Literature Online as The Description of a New World, Called the
Blazing World)
- Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus:
Miriam's
Child, Sophia's Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology
- Michel Foucault, The History of
Sexuality,
vol.
1
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, The
Answer/La
Respuesta
- Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality
- Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind
- Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
- John Storey, Cultural Theory and
Popular
Culture
(optional)
Required Work
Participation:
20%
Critical
Reflections and Presentations: 30%
Final Project: 50%
Daily Syllabus
August 23:
Introduction to each
other and to course
materials. Which assignments for the course? Read Jonathan Culler's "What is theory? Explore theory
resources online.
August 30: theories
about the human nature of men and women in the ancient world
Meet
in Women's Studies Conference Room, SBS Annex, 1431 E 1st St.
Sign
on to class list. (Send the
message subscribe
femtheories Yourfirstname Yourlastname [substituting your own name]
to listserv@listserv.arizona.edu.)
Many thanks to James E. Wermers for his help selecting readings for
this unit.
As you read the following works, think about how each philosopher
theorizes human nature in general and the particular natures of women
and men. On
what authority does each philosopher base his arguments? How does he
make a
persuasive (or not) case, given the assumptions of the age? How can
Sappho's poetry provide an alternative to Plato and Aristotle's
understanding of human nature and gender? or Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata? Is poetry philosophy?
How/how
not? Why/why not?
Read Plato and Aristotle on human nature, men, women, children, and
slaves:
Read two articles on
gender and sexuality in the ancient world (plus, in Arkins, a riff on
sexuality in Ireland under Catholicism)
For further exploration of this
topic (optional):
Critical Reflection: James Wermers
September
6: medieval and early modern
debates about women
Thanks to Cyndi
Headley and Ryan Paul for suggesting readings for this unit.
Read an analysis of debates about gender in medieval and Renaissance
Europe:
Read about medieval
and early modern women who theorized about women and human/divine
nature:
Read articles about the debates in
early modern England and about European women and the Renaissance:
Critical Reflections: Ryan Paul and
Cyndi Headley
September
13: Seventeenth-Century Natural Science, scientific method, and new
epistemologies
Read about the revolution in
epistemology of the Enlightenment. In order to make sense of the many
philosophers whose works you will be sampling, consider listing each
one's major ideas so you can compare where they agree and where they
differ:
- the
New Science
- a description
of Francis Bacon's life and thought (follow all links, e.g., on
Works, Division of Learning, etc.)
- the Preface
to the Novum Organum
("new instrument," his reply to Aristotle's Organon on logic and syllogisms,
the instruments of thinking)
- the Novum Organon's list
of aphorisms or propositions derived from his method
- following Bacon's conviction for bribery, his letter
to King James I pleading for mercy (with a pithy introduction about
Bacon's contradictory character)
- a description
of Margaret Cavendish's life and thought (follow all links)
- Cavendish's autobiography, A True Relation (appended to
her biography of her husband after his death; not as long as it looks;
also available through
EEBO)
- Cavendish's The Blazing World, seventeenth-century
utopian "science fiction"
- an overview of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's life and work
- a summary of Rousseau's Emile; or on Education--of a
boy,Emile, and a girl, Sophie ("wisdom")
- biography
of René Descartes and discussion of his work (follow links
and skim for main ideas); here's an alternative in French
- a summary of Descartes's
epistemology
- the epistemology
of Spinoza and Leibniz, a slightly different take on Enlightenment
theories of knowledge
- Descartes's Discourse
on Method; (alternative in French)
- about Thomas
Hobbes (follow links and skim for main ideas, focusing on his
epistemology, his understanding of human nature, and his political
philosophy)
- selections
from Hobbes's
Leviathan (here's the complete
Leviathan with table
of contents)
Critical Reflection: Terry
Filipowicz
September 20: The
Eighteenth-Century--the Enlightenment, the development of liberal
political
thought, and the emergence of liberal and other feminisms; women at work in
colonial America
Study the Enlightenment,
liberal thinkers and activists those who opposed them, and the
transformation of women's lives in eighteenth century Europe; read:
- the
Enlightenment (follow all links, e.g., Modern Assessments, etc.);
if you wish to read another overview, here is Wikipedia on
the Enlightenment
- Denis
Diderot and The Encyclopedia (follow all links)
- some of the detailed
and fascinating plates about work and trades in The Encyclopedia, many including
women artisans like button
and lace makers and candle-makers;
urban industry, especially in textiles and lace-making, revolutionized
women's lives in C18 France, allowing many poor women to support
themselves and save their own dowries, allowing them to marry --and
marry later, in their mid-late twenties, as adults with the experience
of independent life behind them; in The Household and the Making of History,
Mary Hartman has argued that the combination of late marriage, the more
or less equal ages of bride and groom in such marriages, a relatively
high percentage of women who never marry at all (up to 20%) ,and
women's experience of independence is what revolutionized the family in
northern Europe at this time and was responsible for the dynamism of
northern European culture in exploration, industrialization, and the
formation of global empires (which we find loathsome today but which
certainly made the people of northern Europe very wealthy)
- an overview of Enlightenment
epistemology through the theories of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume,
among the most influential thinkers on this topic of the era (but we
don't have time to read everything--it only seems that we are)
- a short
biography of Mary Wollstonecraft
- Wollstonecraft's Vindication
of the Rights of Women (focus on chapters 1-3, 5 (sections
1, 2, 4; Fordyce's Sermons of section 2 are mentioned in Pride and Prejudice), 6, 9, 12, and
13
- an assessment of the collboration between John
Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor
- Mill and Taylor's The Subjection of Women
- about Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich's research and writing about Martha Ballard, a
midwife in colonial America
- about African-American
midwives in Laurie A. Wilkie's Archaeology
of Mothering: An African-American Midwife's Tale
Optional: You may wish to read
about the Russian
Enlightenment.
September
27: First Wave Feminism: The Suffragist Movement, the Temperance
Movement, Radical Quakers, Liberalism, and the Emergence of the NWSA
For this week:
- browse images
of the suffrage movement
- read about Sojourner
Truth and her famous speech (two version), Ain't I a Woman; another
version
- read about Susan
B. Anthony
- and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton
- and Alice Paul
- and Lucretia
Mott
- and Lucy
Stone
- and Carrie
Chapman Catt
- and Margaret
Sanger
- read some texts
by suffragists
- Stanton's Woman's
Bible (excerpt,
incl. Genesis 1-3)
- read Linda Kerber, "Ourselves
and Our Daughters Forever: Women and the Constitution"
- read Carole Shammas, "Re-Assessing
the married Women's Property Acts," Journal of Women's History, 6.1
(Spring 1994): 9-30. (If off-campus, find through library catalog
through search for Journal Title; note that only one database includes
1994)
- read about Aemilia
Bloomer, bloomers,
(and what
Elizabeth Cady Stanton thought of Bloomer)
- read women's sexual relationship with bicycles in Haller and Haller, "Body
Religion," in The Physician and
Sexuality in Victorian America)
- read Janet Jacobsen, "Moral
Economies at Work: Diversity, Complexity, and Women's Moral Agency,"
in Working Alliances and
the
Politics
of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana Univ. Press, 1998), 28-57; available as E-text through UA
Library.
- read Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True
Womanhood"
The Library of Congress has a superb collection of original
materials and manuscripts on Women's History
in the US, especially rich in documents relating to First Wave
Feminism. The LOC also has an extensive manuscript related to Hispanic America
(both Spanish and Portuguese culture in the Americas). These two links
give you only a tiny glimpse of the massive amount of research
materials available there, many of them as yet unread and unused by
scholars. Anyone writing a thesis or dissertation about American
women's history should consider doing archival research there. I can
also direct you to manuscript resources at other archives, including UA
Library Special Collections, which has a rich collection of
materials on the Southwest; the nearby Huntington Library in San
Marino, CA, which has a Research
Center for Women's Studies; and the Newberry Library in Chicago,
which has extensive
holdings on North America, from pre-contact and colonial periods.
All of these libraries can support archival research on a huge range of
topics. If you are putting together ideas for a research project, do
look into their holdings. There are often fellowships available
to help support thesis and (especially) dissertation research; here are some offered
by the LOC. Grants are also made by UA (including the
Graduate and Professional Student Countcil) and various philanthropic
organizations.
October 4: No class--reading week
Read Virginia Woolf, The Three
Guineas
Watch A Midwife's Tale
and Hearts and Hands (both
available through library ERes--more details when the videos have been
streamed for desktop viewing). We'll discuss the movies as we can over
the next couple of weeks.
(Presentations on October 11 and 18)
October 11: Anarchism, Marxism and Materialist Theories
Read:
Presentations: Heather Fukunaga
(Woolf) & Mari Galup (Goldman)
October 18: Twentieth-Century Reaction to the
Enlightenment; new Epistemologies
Read:
- about early
C20 epistemologies
- Lorraine Code, "Feminist
Epistemologies," in Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (if connecting from off
campus, find through library catalogue under Articles and Databases.
- Michel Foucault, "The
Discourse on Language" (Kari's notes on
Foucault)
- Haraway “Situated
Knowledges” Available on JSTOR: Feminist Studies, Vol.
14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599
- Joan Scott, "The
Evidence of Experience" Available on JSTOR: Critical Inquiry,
Vol. 17, No. 4 (Summer, 1991), pp. 773-797
- Linda Alcoff, "Cultural
Feminism v. Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist
Theory." Available on JSTOR: Signs (Spr 1988): 405-436.
- Mary Hawkesworth, "Knowers,
Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth", Response
1, Response
2 Available on JSTOR: Signs, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Spring,
1989), pp. 533-557, and Signs, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter, 1990)
- Patricia Hill Collins “Some Group
Matters: Intersectionality, Situated Standpoints, and Black Feminist
Thought” Fighting Words pp.
201-228.
- Simone de Beauvoir, Introduction
to The Second Sex
- Chapter 1
of Betty Friedan's The Feminine
Mystique
- bell hooks, "Black
Women: Shaping Feminist Theory"
Presentations: Terry Filipowicz
(Beauvoir & Friedan), Danielle Embry (Alcoffs, Scott, Hawkesworth),
Marta Stone (Foucault, Haraway)
October
25: Freud, Psychoanalytic Theory, the Second Wave, and French Feminist
Theories (Writing
the Body)
Read:
Presentations: Julia Rogers
(Freud), Ryan Paul (Lacan, Speculum),
Zalia Toure (This Sex, Cixous)
November 1: No
Class--Writing Week
November
8: Like Fish in the Ocean (with or without a bicycle): Saussure,
Linguistics, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction, Visual
Culture
Read:
- McBride, Structuralism,
Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (Foucault).
- Roland Barthes, Mythologies
- excerpt from Julia Kristeva's Desire in Language and Revolution in Poetic Language
- Gayle Rubin, “The
Traffic in Women”
- Jacques Derrida, "Structure,
Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"
- Linda Nochlin, "Why
Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"
- Laura Mulvey, "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
- John Berger, excerpts from Ways of Seeing
- Gayatri Spivak, "Can the
Subaltern Speak?"
Presentations: Marta Stone (Silverman,
Post-Structuralist theory), Heather Fukunaga
(Mulvey, Nochlin)
November
15: Gender, Race, and Class
Read:
- Edward Said, excerpt from Orientalism
- Rodriguez, "Race
and Ethnicity"
- Gloria Anzaldúa ed., Haciendo Caras/Making Face,
Making Soul (at least p. 29-71, 162-69, 207-20, 227-30, 245-55,
271-90, 304-16, 321-25, 335-45, 356-402)
- Chela Sandoval, "US Third
World
Feminisms"
- Cherrie Moraga, "From a
Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism"
- "Women's
Struggles and the Politics of Difference in Nigeria"
- Ogundipe-Leslie, "Stiwanism"
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Presentation: Albert Muniz ("Women's Struggles"), Danielle Embry (Making
Face), Mari Galup (Sandoval)
November
22: No class--Thanksgiving break
November
29: Sex, Sexuality, Queer Theory
Read:
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1
- Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind
- excerpt from Liz Kennedy, Boots of
Leather, Slippers of Gold
Presentation: Erin Durban (Queer Theories), Julia Rogers (Foucault)
December
6: Religion and Feminism
Read:
December
13: Class dinner
