sketches are by Rini Templeton

Course Description

In this course, we will be concerned with exploring one central question: What is Gender? and its many components: how is gender culturally defined? How does its definition shape gender roles? In other words: What is its relationship to culture, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality? How is it deployed in the context of women's/feminist, nationalist and other socio-political movements?

The objectives of this course are essentially threefold: (1) to familiarize students with the anthropological study of gender, or how the question of gender has been posed within the discipline of anthropology; (2) to explore and understand gender as fundamentally discursive, and (3) to examine how the “feminine” and “masculine”; “men” and “women” travel into advertising and marketing, government propaganda, scientific writing, and feminist, nationalist and other movements.

And yes, there is inevitably some feminist content in this course, but there too we will focus on how definitions of feminism are culturally determined, not on propagating one kind of feminism over any others.

Course Resources

For researching and writing your papers, be sure to visit my Women's Studies Research Resources meta-site (categorized lists of links to valuable web-resources). For a fine guide to analysing the gendered content of advertising, be sure to explore Scott Lukas' Genderads.com website.

Spring 2006: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies | also read reviews and other materials on SAWNET

Films

The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter | My feminism | La Operacion | Killing us Softly (there's a study guide here, too)