GOVT 6986 - [Other Feminisms]

Fall. Next offered 2018-2019. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Co-meets with GOVT 4986.

D. Rubenstein.

Other Feminisms is a survey of contemporary critical approaches to feminist theory today. it seeks to complicate the traditional depiction of feminist theory as “white,” “transphobic,” “Eurocentic”/western. Canonical works of feminist theory such as Shulamith Firestone or Simone de Beauvoir are re-situated in relation to contemporaneous writing such as the Combahee River Collective’s Black Feminist Statement as well as projected into the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin. “Other feminisms” will comprise experiments in genre as well as gender in Kathy Acker, Donna Haraway, Hélène Cixous, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein (“Sultana’s Dream”). We will explore the contributions of theories of intersectionality, object-oriented ontologies, disability studies, affect theory, transnational explorations of Islamic piety movements and Iranian trans and same sex communities to what Clare Hemmings calls “the political grammar of feminist theory.”