Bowling Green State University Prof. Vicki Patraka Fall 1995 206F University Hall English 707 Phone: 372-6831 vpatrak@bgnet.bgsu.edu English 707: Feminism and Culture Studies Book List: 1. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993. [-Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory" (1988)] 2. During, Simon, Ed. The Cultural Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1994, 3. Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. 4. Watkins, Susan Alice, Marisa Rueda and Marta Rodriguez. Introducing Feminism. Lanham, Maryland: Totem Books, 1992. 5. Walters, Suzanna Danuta. Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory. Berkeley: U California Press, 1995. SYLLABUS WEEK ONE, August 30: INTRODUCTION WEEK TWO, September 6: Read Watkins, Susan Alice, Marisa Rueda and Marta Rodriguez. Introducing Feminism. Lanham, Maryland: Totem Books, 1992. Begin reading Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Start with Ellen Willis's Foreword and keep reading. Don't read it as if you'll be tested on the book, but read for a larger sense of issues and investments. Try to make it through the beginning of Chapter 3. DUE: Paper #1: What concepts of feminist movement did you have before you began reading? How and by what were these concepts revised or challenged by our reading? How were they extended or enhanced? What is the project of each book? One work is a pedagogical comic book, the other a book by a history scholar intended for a larger audience than academics. How has each of these writing modes shaped the information contained in each work? How well is each suited for the project the authors set out to accomplish? WEEK THREE, September 13: Depending on general class response, more (or less) Echols will be due. Also read (to be given out next week): Jane Flax, "The End of Innocence," 445 - 463, and Chantal Mouffe, "Feminism, Citizenship and Radical Democratic Politics," in Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge, 1992, pp 369-384. DUE: Paper #2: Analyze the theoretical assumptions about feminism contained in the works you've read so far. Consider the assumptions made about such things as: the nature of women's oppression, the locus of oppression, the project of feminism as a transformative movement, the nature of the change(s) sought, appropriate or effective strategies for accomplishing such change(s) and the dilemmas regarding these strategies provided by material conditions and circumstances. You might want to think about the way in which certain assumptions will favor/produce certain kinds of strategies and cancel out others. WEEK FOUR, September 27: Read Walters, Suzanna Danuta. Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory. Berkeley: U California Press, 1995 (text is actually 150 pages long). Also read: During, Simon, Ed. "Introduction." The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. New York: Routledge, 1994, pp 1-29. Dr. Vida Penezic (Popular Culture) will be speaking to us about culture studies, feminism, and the intellectual tasks of the nineties. DUE: Paper #3: Several scholars, including Ellen Berry, produced the February 17, 1993 Rationale for a School of Cultural Studies at Bowling Green State University. Three of the quotations included in the rationale may be of especial interest to us: 1. "Culture studies is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counter-disciplinary field that operates in the tension between its tendencies to embrace both a broad anthropological and a more narrowly humanistic conception of culture. Unlike traditional anthropology, however, it has grown out of analyses of modern industrial societies. It is typically interpretative and evaluative in its methodologies, but unlike traditional humanism it rejects the exclusive equation of culture with high culture and argues that all forms of cultural production need to be studied in relation to other cultural practices and to social and historical structures. Cultural studies is thus committed to the study of the entire range of a society's arts, beliefs, institutions, and communicative practices" (Cary Nelson, et. al., "Cultural Studies: An Introduction," Cultural Studies) 2. . . . Concerned particularly with relationships between social groups, the reflections of power relations in cultural expressions, and the social construction of both group and individual identity, Cultural Studies examines both "high" and "low" cultural materials, examines ethnic and racial experience, explores questions of gender, charts regional characteristics, and exposes class distinctions. Inherently interdisciplinary in both theory and method, culture studies stands in direct opposition to "academic disciplines [which] often decontextualize both their methods and their objects of study; cultural studies conceives both relationally" (Nelson). 3. "Cultural politics are crucially important to feminism because they involve struggles over meaning. The contemporary Women's Liberation Movement has, by and large, rejected the possibility that our oppression is caused by either naturally given sex differences or economic factors alone. We have asserted the importance of consciousness, ideology, imagery and symbolism for our battles. Definitions of femininity and masculinity, as well as the social meaning of family life and the sexual division of labor, are constructed on this ground. Feminism has politicized everyday life - culture in the anthropological sense of the lived practices of a society - to an unparalleled degree. Feminism has also politicized the various forms of artistic and imaginative expression that are more popularly known as culture, reassessing and transforming film, literature, art, the theatre and so on. "Michele Barrett, "Feminism and the Definition of Cultural Politics" Besides the two quotations above, you have read one book about feminist cultural theory and one introduction to culture studies for week #4. Our course is entitled feminism and culture studies. The crucial word here is "and." It covers over multiple assumptions, relationships, tensions, and contradictions. For this assignment, I'd like you to try and conceptually map (or, to use Walters's terms, "make sense of") the "and" in feminism and culture studies based on what you've read. Another way of looking at it is that both feminism/feminist theory and culture studies announce themselves as interdisciplinary, as about relational and contextual models, as about how power works and meaning is made in culture, and as containing modes of reading culture based in part on political investments. So what's the connection between the two? Is one "bigger" than the other? More narrow? More fashionable? More correct? More cool? More materially rewarded within academic? Can one be grouped under the rubric of the other and what would the consequences of this be? What are the assertions about the chronological relationship between the two? Where do the tensions between the two appear most palpable? If feminist studies and culture studies were/are meshed, how might/do the assumptions and projects of each individual one shift or change? What "totalizing" ideas espoused by each would have to be jettisoned? WEEK FIVE, October 4: Continue with Material Girls. Presentations on mapping and moving assignment: 1. mapping: how can we conceptually map relationships among the intellectual and political trends we've studied this term? 2. moves: what are some of the feminist "moves" or larger reading strategies deployed in Material Girls that suggest useful applications to other texts? WEEK SIX, October 11: -De Lauretis, Teresa, "The Technology of Gender" in Technologies of Gender (Indiana UP 1987), pp. 1 - 30. -De Lauretis, Teresa. "Upping the anti [sic] in feminist theory" in During, pp 74-89. -Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory" (1988) Begin (first 10 pages or so) the following reading: -Butler: Introduction and chapter one in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993. Due: Paper #4: Construct a guide to one of the above readings for an audience who knows a bit less than you do and needs your help. Make sure to include a discussion of four major points you've noted in the essay along with quoted material helpful in more fully communicating these major points. WEEK SEVEN, October 18: Continue discussion of previous Butler and De Lauretis essays. Finish reading: Butler, Introduction and chapter one in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993. Due: Paper #5: It has been said, however jokingly, that each page written by Judith Butler constitutes a reiteration of her central ideas. Test the accuracy of this statement by 1. choosing a page from Bodies That Matter you will then explicate in a fairly direct manner and 2. relating that page (or so) to the larger ideas contained in the text. You may do 1. and 2. as you choose, either simultaneously or separately. Note: to make this assignment pleasurable, don't try and pick the most "significant" page by someone else's criteria, but instead pick your favorite and the one you felt engaged you most intellectually. You may be asked in class to argue for your page. WEEK EIGHT, October 24: -Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty and Sneja Gunew. "Questions of multiculturalism" in During, pp 193-202. -Wallace, Michelle. "Negative images: towards a black feminist cultural criticism" in During, 118-134.[-Collins, Patricia Hill."The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought." Signs 14.4 (Summer 1989): 773-745.] -West, Cornel. "The new cultural politics of difference" in During, 203-220. PAPER #6: You have been given two very current cultural documents: 1. Thirteen pages of description taken off the net about the Cultural Diversity Conference of October 25 to 28, 1995 at the Caribbean center in New York. An incomplete program is part of your packet, as well as whatever supporting documents were put on the net. You may also participate in the conference proper via e-mail, as well as access these materials yourself (most links in very good order). 2. Michele Wallace's "Art for whose sake?," a critique of bell hooks's book Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. This piece appeared in a very recent Women's Review of Books. [questions on my mind include: why now? why this book and not another by hooks? why art as the site of contestation? how does it matter that Wallace mother is artist Faith Ringgold (who, by the way, made a powerful storyquilt on Alice Walker's The Color Purple)?] You may choose to write about either or both of these documents. Using materials we have read this term, but most particularly Wallace, West, and Spivak, place the ideas of these cultural critics in 1990 with cultural expressions in 1995. There is no need to erect a progressive narrative to do this (though you may if you wish): you may, in your dialogue, look at how a document exemplifies aspects of what Wallace, West, and Spivak (and her participant interviewer) lay out for us and/ or what cultural trends their work anticipates. You may also look at the assumptions and risks of the two documents in relation to our readings. If you decide to take it further and actively take up a space of cultural critique (which I encourage), do so remembering what Spivak notes in her article about shifting from "I am white, I can't speak" to speaking "through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person" (and not a position of lofty, objective authority). You also may want to ask yourself how these particular documents position you. Questions for me (but maybe not you) are how these documents: 1. situate the term culture, implicitly or explicitly, and how we might relate them to other works we have read this term 2. situate the production of cultural criticism in academic institutions and the differences among scholars of color. 3. situate themselves in terms of the categories of race and gender (and also class and sexuality) and/or postcolonial and third world discourse. A few more instructions: try to avoid the term essentialism or essentialist as a label. If you are white, avoid expressions of amusement over what is simultaneously a very public and "in-house" debate among Black Feminists. WEEK EIGHT: November 1 -Kaplan, Caren. "The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Critical Practice." Eds. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994: 137-152. -Maria Lugones's "Playfulness, "World"-Traveling, and Loving Perception." From Anzaldua, Gloria, Ed. Making Face, Making Soul San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, 1990. -Dolan, "Geographies of Learning," Theatre Journal 45.4 (December 1993) 417 -441. WEEK NINE: November 8 In Probyn, Sue Elsbeth. Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. Routledge, 1993: -Introduction: speaking the self and other feminist subjects -1: A problematic: speaking the self -6: 'Without her I'm nothing: feminisms with attitude' WEEKS TEN AND ELEVEN: November 15 and November 29 Articles from Differences, A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Special Issue entitled "More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory" (Summer/Fall 1994, Vol. 6, #s 2&3): -Judith Butler, "Introduction: Against Proper Objects" -Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, "Sexual Traffic" -Biddy Martin, "Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary" -Evelynn Hammonds, "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality" -Butler's "Critically Queer" in Bodies That Matter Paper #7 due WEEKS TWELVE AND THIRTEEN: December 6 and December 13 [session at my house to see Livingston's film Paris Is Burning] -Butler's "Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion," in Bodies That Matter -Phelan's "The golden apple: Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning in UnMarked: the politics of performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. -hooks on Livingston in Black Looks: Race and Representation, South End Press, 1992 -Amy Robinson's "It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest" in Critical Inquiry Summer 1994, Vol. 20, #4. -Work by Adrian Piper: the video Cornered Articles from Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Tomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, edited and with an Introduction by Toni Morrison. Pantheon Books, 1992: - Toni Morrison, "Introduction: Friday on the Potomac" - Patricia J. Williams, "A Rare Case Study of Muleheadedness and Men" - Kimberle Crenshaw, "Whose Story It It, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill" Paper #8 due Performances at my house on December 15. Vicki Patraka office: 419 372 6831 Dept. of English fax: 419 372 0333 Bowling Green SU Bowling Green, OH 43403 vpatrak@bgnet.bgsu.edu