Introduction to Women's Studies in the Humanities-Spring 1994

      Mary Sullivan    State University of New York at Stony Brook
      E-mail: msulliva@ccvm.sunysb.edu

Note: class met twice weekly for 80 minute sessions.

Requirements: A two-part journal; "Responses" and "Samples."  Each week respond
to one of the readings {functioned more as a proof they had read than the
critical responses I tried to encourage} and provide a "sample."  The sample
section of your journal is to work like a scrapbook; collect images of gender
from headlines, magazines, media images, jokes you hear, incidents you observe
or take part in. {this assignment was more successful.  Students spontaneously
referred to readings as they told anecdotes.}  Two 5-8 page papers-the first a
response to questions, the second a topic of your own choosing. One Oral
presentation.

TEXTS: Women's Voices: Visions and Perspectives. Robert Diyanni,
Esther Schor and Pat Hoy. MacMillan; A xerox copypack, and Marge Piercy,
Woman on the Edge of Time.  RECOMMENDED AND ON RESERVE: Marilyn Frye, Politics
of Reality and Audre Lorde, Sister/Outsider  (*indicates an optional reading)

Week 1 "What Does a Woman Need to Know," A. Rich; "No-Name Woman" M. Hong-
Kingston; "Oppression" and "A Note on Anger," M. Frye. *"Understanding
Sexism: A Call to Men," Peter Blood and Alan Tuttle.  Watch "Still Killing
Us Softly."

Week 2  "Beauty and the Backlash" S. Faludi; "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is
The Self," A. Walker; "Breast Cancer: Power vs. Prothesis," A. Lorde; *"Tools
of Torture" Phyllis Rose; *A Woman's Beauty: Put Down or Power Source" Susan
Sontag.

Week 3 "Rape: The All-American Crime" S. Griffin; Rape a Bigger Danger than
Feminists Know," C. Paglia; "On Sex and Violence," C. MacKinnon; "Violence
Against Women" (from "Our Bodies,Ourselves); "If You Touched my Heart" Isabel
Allende.

Week 4 "Know Your Enemy," Robin Morgan; "Daddy," Sylvia Plath; "Sexism and God-
Language," Rosemary RAdford Reuther; "Grandmother of the Sun," Paula Gunn Allen

Week 5 "Origin of the Family," F. Engels (excerpt from M. Mahowald's anthology,
Philosohy of Women); "The Traffic in Women," Gayle Rubin.

Week 6 "Our MOther's Grief," Bonnie Thornton Dill.

Week 7 "On Femininity," S. Freud; "Competition," Nancy Friday; "When Our Lips
Speak together," L. Irigaray; "On Not Liking Sex" Nancy Mairs.

Week 8 ""Compulsory Heterosexuality," A. Rich; "The Two," Gloria Naylor;
"Scratching the Surface," A. Lorde. {this week two members of Stonewall
Scholars presented a workshop on gay and lesbian identity-I highly recommend it

Week 9 "Reflections on Race and Sex," Bell Hooks; Madonna video in class; *
"How it Feels to be Colored Me," Zora Neale Hurston; "poets in the Kitchen,
Paule Marshall.  "How Men Have a Sex," John Stoltenberg; "The Uses of the
Erotic," A. Lorde.

Week 10 Marge Piercy, "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Week 11 "The Second Sex-Intro," Beauvoir; "Gendering the Body, Beauvoir's
Philosophic Contributions," Judith Butler.

Week 12 "On the Generation of Animals," Aristotle; "Is Gender Necessary-Redux"
Ursula LeGuin; "Myths of Gender-Intro," Anne Fausto Sterling; "A World of
Difference," Evelyn Fox Keller.

Week 13 Ch. 1, "A Room of One's Own," V. Woolf; "An American Childhood," Annie
Dillard; "Why Have there been No Great Women Artists," Linda Nochlin

Week 14 Selections from E. Cady Stanton; "Some reflections on Separatism and
Power," M. Frye; "Getting It," Regina Barreca; "Our Barbies Ourselves," Emily
Praeger; "If Men Could Menstruate," G. Steinem, "I Want a Wife," Judy Brady.


P.S.  The graduate program at Stony Brook features a WNS certificate, and I was
a member of a stimulating interdisciplinary teaching practicuum.  This was my
first course and I know now I tried to do too much, incorporating many of my
peers'suggestions.  The oral presentations were a flop- any ideas on this might
make a good topic on the list-serv.  I did give very specific instructions on
this.  The Beauty and Violence topics are good openers-generating somewhat
predictable papers which the students were excited about nonetheless.  Piercy
was excellent for the half who read the novel.