Fall 2006 Courses

ENGL 294-03: Hegemonies/Resistances: Feminist Studies (Same as WGSS 294-03 and HMCS 294-03) (Sarker)

T/TH 1:00-2:30pm, Old Main 009

You know that it's much more complex than us vs. them, oppressor vs. oppressed. In this course, we'll explore how various hegemonies (power structures rendered invisible) and resistance to them frame particular ways of reading literature, history, politics, and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. How do women and men formulate and participate in hegemonies, articulate and enact resistances? Can their resistances themselves sometimes become hegemonic, and can they be located in both?

This course derives from feminist readings of the works of Antonio Gramsci, the early 20th century Italian political thinker on hegemony and the subaltern. It is a transnational comparative analysis of gendered, classed, racialized, and sexualized beings as actors in particular times and spaces that are connected. The focus is on the literary and philosophical works of Virginia Woolf (on women and war), Grazia Deledda (on fiction and marginalization), Cornelia Sorabji (on migrations and empire), Victoria Ocampo (on class and creativity), Rosa Luxembourg (on socialist revolutions), Angela Davis (on race and radicalism), Rigoberta Menchu (on grassroots struggles), Arundhati Roy (on totalitarianisms and democracies), to name some writers and themes. Feminist analyses of Marx, Foucault, Althusser, Trinh, Hall, Spivak, Mohanty, Freire, and Chomsky, will situate our readings.

Fall 2006 Course Listings