Syllabi
History 202: Women and Gender in Pre-modern Europe
Examines the history of women and the evolution of concepts of gender in western Europe from roughly 400 to 1800. Topics include the interactions of class and ethnicity with women's experiences, the social construction of sexualities, the misogynist tradition, and women's self-images.
History 478B: Problems in European History Since 1789: The Embodied Self: Themes in the History of the Body and Sexuality in Modern Europe
This course will investigate how scholars of Modern Europe (from the 18thC to the present) have approached the body and sexuality as objects of historical inquiry. What are the theoretical, epistemological, social and political stakes of such analyses? How do we grasp corporeality within an historical frame? What is sexuality? How is it practiced, produced, policed, constructed, represented, liberated, controlled? We shall begin by reading foundational texts (Foucault, Laqueur, Butler, Halperin, etc), in order to establish familiarity with the methodological and theoretical questions circumscribing work in these fields. Subsequent investigations shall be structured thematically around such topics as sexual orientation, colonial/postcolonial sexual economies, prostitution, sexology and sexual norms, reproductive technologies, disabilities, surgical interventions, pornography and the erotic, eugenics, eating disorders and bodily control, sexual education, and bodily adornment and mutilation. Our work will include analyses of the body and sexuality in art, literature, advertising, and film.
History 478C: Problems in European History Since 1789: Themes in the History of Women, Gender and Sexuality, 1945 to the Present
Recent historical scholarship has frequently argued that the terms “women,” “gender” and “sexuality” must be understood as unstable categories through which historical identities are produced within a plethora of social and discursive contexts. In this course we shall be seeking to develop a working knowledge of the methodological and historiographical issues currently shaping the field of contemporary gender history. Our focus shall be both chronological and thematic in scope. Taking the history of post-1945 Europe as our canvas—from the rise of the Cold War and the emergence of the welfare state, to decolonization and the social protest movements of the 1960s and early 70s, from resurgent nationalisms, to mass consumerism, new technologies, and globalization—we shall examine the construction of modern European identity as produced through the prism of gender and sexuality. Thematically, we shall investigate such topics as gender and the state; second wave feminisms; homoeroticism and consumer culture; race, gender and postcolonialism; ecofeminism, postmodernism and sexual transgression; and sexuality, science and technology. Using film, music, and television as well as text-based sources, our aim throughout shall be to tease out the rich relationships between social, political, and cultural change and the “gendering” of modern European identity during the second half of the twentieth century.
History 492: Gender and Religion: The Case of Christianity
The history of religion has been transformed within the last twenty years by the integration of feminist perspectives into the study of many traditional religious topics, as well as by the introduction of new research questions and agendas by feminist historians of religion.
Scholars are now examining such topics as the role of gender and sexuality in the construction of religious symbols, the impact of sex segregation on religious institutions, and the relationship between embodiment and religious practice. This course is designed to provide students with a foundation for comparative work on these and similar subjects, by examining theoretical work from a variety of disciplines on gender and religion, as well as exploring historical studies of gender in early (1st through 5th century) and later medieval (11th through 15th century) Christianity.
History 493A: Problems in Comparative Women's History: Gender and Colonialism
This course provides a thematic overview of the intellectual questions, methodological challenges and historiographical innovations that arise when gender as a category of historical analysis is brought to bear on colonialism as a world-historical phenomenon. The first half of the semester is devoted to exploring the multiple and conflicting sources through which historians have sought to reconstruct gendered colonial pasts. In the second half of the course, we examine a series of recent historical works which address conceptual problems entailed by attempts to historicize the relationship between gender and colonialism as analytical categories. Among the specific subjects under consideration are the civilizing mission; the subaltern subject; domesticities; sexuality and intimate colonialisms; racialized pathologies; gender, citizenship and nation.
We will be operating from the assumption that colonial regimes are never self-evidently hegemonic, but are always in process, subject to disruption and contest, and therefore never fully or finally accomplished. As we shall see, the gendered and sexualized social orders produced by such regimes are equally precarious, and hence offer us unique opportunities to see the incompleteness of colonial modernities. In this sense the course is not simply about gender and sexuality as self-evident categories, but about their capacity to interrupt, thwart, and sometimes reconfirm modernizing colonial regimes -- in part because they are not simply dimensions of the socio-political domain, but represent its productive and uneven effects.
History 493: Problems in Comparative Women's History: Readings in U.S. Women's and Gender History
The point of this class is to examine one tendency within women's, men's, and gender history especially noteworthy since the 1980s-the desire to broaden the field and move away from interpretive categories framed in relationship to the history of white middle-class U.S. women. The method of broadening has been to interrelate what are perceived as separate categories. These categories are gender, race, class, and sexuality. The second and third weeks of this course will focus on definitions of key terms (sex; race; class; gender; sexuality). Some readings address these categories in the context of major events or periods in American history, such as the American Revolution, Reconstruction, or World War II while other writings do not as neatly fit into event or era-focused history.