Overview of period costume and its adaption for the stage. The poetry and fiction choices will include Atwood, Laurence, Munro, Shields, and translated Quebec ecrivaine. The course will probably include a guest writer, films, and a field trip to Canada. Major paper, midterm and final exams, one or more class reports, introductory quizes.
Students work at local women's agencies, in consultation with faculty sponsors.
The course will focus on the canon, institutions, feminist practice, conflicts within feminism, the body, the gaze, desire, reading, discourse, ethnicity, history, class, autobiography, and men. The diversity of women's experience will be highlighted and the differences in feminist priorities world-wide will be explored. The course will be structured around different geographic regions, such as North Africa, Central America or South-East Asia. For each region, readings will be taken from feminist history, politics, and cultural theory, as well as literature and biography. Examines relation of cultural reproduction of knowledge by which we transmit central values of our culture to actual social processes of reproduction, or childbearing, in the U.S. today.