Archive- Fall 2016   

This course will offer a critical history of feminist theory through a sustained engagement with the key concepts and debates that have shaped the contested field of feminist theory over the past forty or so years. We begin with a contemporary preoccupation in feminist theory—“the ontological turn”— and then move out and back, mapping the poststructuralist, postcolonial, Marxist, and psychoanalytic schools of thought with which and against which feminist theory established itself as a distinct body of thought in the late twentieth century. We end with the challenge of queer and trans theory—a challenge motivated by the generative capacities of gender and sexuality—and the questioning of the function—political and epistemological—of the role of theory itself. In our reading of the material we will focus on how feminism has both utilized and “spoken back” to Marxism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, while also paying attention to the theoretical and political impasses and conundrums that continue to make feminist theory an animated and animating practice of thought in the present moment. Key thinkers in this critical history include Gayle Rubin, Audre Lorde, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rey Chow, Joan Scott, Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, Chela Sandoval, and Elizabeth Grosz.        

 

 This hands-on and workshop oriented course has three principle aims. The first is to teach Women’s Studies graduate students from diverse disciplines proficiency in minor but important scholarly genres – research and fellowship proposals, conference paper abstracts, teaching statements, job letters, and book reviews. Whereas graduate training is often focused on big ideas and long papers, success in academia means being able to communicate one’s ideas effectively within a series of defined genres – the rules of which are often not directly conveyed. Hence, the first purpose of this course is to demystify the hidden rules of distinct scholarly genres and to teach students how to go about decoding the rules of new genres on their own. The second aim is to have students reflect on and improve their research and writing process. As part of this emphasis on process, we will read about and discuss different strategies and platforms for note-taking, keeping track of ideas, using time effectively, organizing, drafting, and revising. Finally, this class will function as a writing workshop. Approximately one hour of each class will be devoted to workshopping one student’s writing. The goal of workshopping is to put into action the notion of writing as a process, one of finding the kernels, within one’s writing, that are most promising and figuring out the most effective way to develop them.          

 

 

At first glance, the title of this course might seem a bit misplaced. A course about men? Aren’t all courses “about men” – except the ones with the word “women” in the title? Well, yes. This may be true on the surface, anyway. But most courses that deal with men deal with men in their public roles – as historical figures, as writers, psychological personalities, as scientists, as participants in revolutionary mobs, as economic rational profit-maximizers. Rarely, if ever, are men discussed as men; rarely, if ever, is their experience as men seem to matter as they perform the other roles in which we study them. Indeed, this is the first graduate level course at Stony Brook devoted to the study of masculinities. And we intend to take the plural in the name seriously – working through questions about the similarities and differences in the various constructions of masculinity around the world, stressing globalization in the construction of masculine identities.  

What is good social science research? And what is social science research good for? These will be central questions of our inquiry in this seminar. We will examine ethnography as a qualitative research methodology within in the social sciences, drawing from feminist and gender studies, anthropology, and sociology in particular. Participants in the course will take part in ongoing theoretical debates around the questions of interdisciplinarity, the ethics of field research, the politics of ethnographic representation, and the practice of community engaged research. We will read and discuss a wide range of recent ethnographies, as well as critical contemporary assessments of scholarship and methods. The course will also briefly consider the relationship of other genres of writing to ethnography, asking "what counts as evidence"? In addition to learning and practicing traditional and alternative research methods, seminar participants will be expected to design their own ethnographic pilot project.