Gender Studies  "Disordered" Women: An Exploration of Discourse on Women
and Mental Health Spring 1995
Jennifer L. Manlowe, Ph.D.
(401) 863-2056
Jennifer_Manlowe@Brown.Edu

Required Books:

Rhoda Unger & M. Crawford, Women and Gender: A Feminist Psychology (1992)
(Selected Readings)
bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam:  Black Women and Self-Recovery
Laura Brown, et al., Personality and Psychopathology: Feminist Reappraisals
(1990)
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture:
1830-1980
Paula Caplan, Thinking Critically About Research on Sex and Gender
 Abbreviated Calendar

Week 1          Course Overview
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture:
1830-1980

Week 2          What is a "Healthy" Woman?
Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

Week 3          The Discourse of Deviance Studies
Laura Brown, et al., Personality and Psychopathology: Feminist Reappraisals

Week 4          Homosexuality, Bisexuality, and Heterosexuality: Their
Relationship in a Homophobic Culture
Patricia Kitzinger, Changing Our Minds: Lesbian Feminism & Psychology
Ellen Willis, "Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?" pp. 3-14
and "Sisters Under the Skin? Confronting Race and Sex," pp. 101-116 in No
More Nice Girls

Week 5          Sexual Pleasure - Sexual Rights
Naomi B. McCormick, Sexual Salvation: Affirming Women's Sexual Rights and
Pleasures

Week 6          "Addictions" and "Recovery": Self-Help or Self-Harm
bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam:  Black Women and Self-Recovery
Wendy Simonds, Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading Between the Lines

Week 7          Locked Up and Locked Out - Exploring Race, Class &
Gender among Incarcerated Women
Michel Foucault, "Complete and Austere Institutions," Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of  the Prison
"Subject to Debate," {On Welfare Mothers' Pathology} The Nation, (Feb. 13,
1995), 192. (Handout)
Myrna B. Raeder, "Gender and Sentencing: Single Moms, Battered Women, and
Other Sex-Based Anomalies in the Gender-Free World of the Federal
Sentencing Guidelines"  (Class Hand-Out)

Week 8          Surviving Sexual Assault:  Women Who Fight Back
(Film) read:Transforming Rape Culture

Week 9          DSM-IV: Women's Personality Disorders, Who Decides?
Paula Caplan, They Say She's Crazy
Week 10         Women, Food, and  "Disorderly" Conduct
Leslea Newman, Eating Our Hearts Out
Becky Thompson, A Hunger So Deep and So Wide

Week 11         Intimate Violence and the Politics of "Post-traumatic
Stress"
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery  (1993)
Laura Alcoff, "Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?" Signs
18 (1993) 2: 274ff.
Jennifer Freyd, Betrayal Trauma  (Harvard U. Press, 1995)
"The Revenge of the Repressed, part 1 & 2" New York Review of Books   Vol.
XL, (Nov. 17, 1994) Number 19, 54-60ff.  (Class Hand-Out)

Week 12         Female Youth and Climates of Violence
Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang   (1993)
Meda Chesney-Lind & Randall G. Shelden, Girls: Delinquency and Juvenile
Justice  (1992)
Susan Cahill, ed. Growing Up Female:  Stories by Women Writers from the
American Mosaic

Week 13         HIV/AIDS and Women: Who Gets AIDS? (Film, Heart of the
Matter,  LAP Project, NYC)
Joan M. Anderson, "Women's Perspectives on Chronic Illness: Ethnicity,
Ideology, and Restructuring of Life," Social Science Medicine,  (1991) Vol.
33, No. 2, pp. 101-113.  Women & AIDS Hand-Out (package of articles)

Week 14         Welfare, Poverty, and Deviance
Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices   (selected readings)
Kathe Pollit, Reasonable Creatures   (selected readings), class handout

Week 15         Postmodern Notions of Behavioral Skepticism
Diamond & Quinby, Feminism & Foucault
Jane Flax, "Can Psychoanalysis Survive in the Postmodern West?" and "An End
to Innocence," in Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics,
and Philosophy    (All articles will be given as Class Hand-Out)