Gender and Society
SOC 229
Fall 2014 not offered
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| Crosslisting:
FGSS 229 |
We usually think of gender as a trait, a noun. People have a gender. Someone is a woman or a man. During this course, we will work to see gender as a verb as well. To gender something is to make it feminine or masculine. And actions, unlike objects, are not fixed. They can happen in unexpected ways. They can fail. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate gender, not only as an element of individual personhood, but as a changeable process that forms both individuals and the social world more broadly. As we do this, we will also note the ways that gender is always already inflected and shaped by other structures of inequality and difference such as race, class, and sexuality.
During the first half of the course, we will look at the multiple ways in which both gender and sex are produced, in thought and in action, in formal edicts and intimate relations, symbolically and on the body itself. In the second half of the course, we will look at work and family--to trace the ways gendered selves are shaped in daily practice within these sites and to trace the consequences of these emergent selves for the institutions in which they are formed. In the last week of the course, we will turn to the realm of international relations, to investigate how macro processes are structured with reference to gendered understandings. Throughout the semester, we will be attentive to the links between power, inequality, meaning, and selfhood, noting where particular gendered selves produce domination and constraint and where they make change imaginable. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
SBS SOC |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: SOC151 |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (SOC) |
Major Readings:
Seager, Joni, THE PENGUIN ATLAS OF WOMEN IN THE WORLD (Revised Edition), Penguin, 2009
Ingraham, Chrys, WHITE WEDDINGS: ROMANCING HETEROSEXUALITY IN POPULAR CULTURE, Routledge, 2008
Plus: Judith Butler, Nancy Chodorow, Gayle Rubin, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Michael Kimmel, Suzanne Kessler, Harold Garfinkel, Arlie Hochschild, Lila Abu-Lughod
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Examinations and Assignments:
1. Class attendance and participation - 10%
2. Six thought pieces (400-500 words each) - 20%
3. Take-home midterm exam - 20%
4. Paper (Reflective bio/application of concepts, 5-6 pages) - 20%
5. Take-home final exam - 30% |
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