Course Description
Examination of literary and cultural production through the lens of gender and sexuality.
Athena Title
Texts Sex and Gender
Prerequisite
Two 2000-level ENGL courses or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 3000-level ENGL course) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This course will evaluate and discuss literary, cultural, or social texts in light of debates surrounding sex, gender, sexual orientation, and sexual and gender identities. Topics, historical periods, texts, and approaches will vary from instructor to instructor, but students can expect to investigate and discuss the complex interactions among bodies, minds, textual representations, and social and institutional structures in creating and reinforcing sex, gender, sexual orientation, and sexual identity. Furthermore, since this is an upper-division English class, students can expect to develop their talents as literary and cultural critics and to consider texts not as historical curiosities but, more importantly, as artistic and formal contributions and responses to old and new debates about sex, gender, and free will.
Topical Outline
Materials assigned for the course will vary depending upon the instructor’s particular focus. Possible topics could include: • Medieval masculinities: A class on the literary construction of medieval masculinities, for example, would focus on the highly variable and intrinsically contradictory expectations of manhood across different social roles (king, knight, and monk) and within different genres (romance, epic, hagiography). • Feminism and Life-Writing: A class on the role that life- writing plays in feminist discourse across British and American literature. The course could start with biographical accounts of early feminists (including Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller, and Virginia Woolf) before moving on to second-wave, and contemporary feminism (including accounts written by Mary Daly, Robin Morgan, Cherrie Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldua). • Women Writers and Sexuality: A class that focuses on representations of women’s desire, sexual expression, and identity, paying particular attention to narratives that explore same-sex desire. • Textualities/Sexualities: Post-structuralist thinkers—from Foucault to Derrida to Cixous - have interrogated the relation between language and regimes of truth. This course will investigate this interrogation by reading the major statements of such theorists and query in what ways writing can resist the phallocentric demands of knowledge.