Results for FEMGEN255

What are the historical trajectories and consequences of marriage, divorce, and premarital cohabitation? Where have gay rights come from and what is the future of gay rights in the US? What are the gender differences in marriage, family and housework? What does it mean for the personal to be political? What are the racial differences in family life and how have those differences been politicized? How did marriage equality go from being impossible to being the law of the US? We will study social change from the perspective of public opinion, legal changes, and family politics.

Black feminists throughout the Western Hemisphere have long resisted carcerality, a system that emerged as a response to antebellum Black fugitivity. In this course, we will review Black feminist theory and abolitionist activism, focusing on how the carceral state affects Black women in particular. We will draw from the work of academic scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis as well as the work of abolitionist activists and community leaders such as Mariame Kaba. Participants in this course will be introduced in depth to contemporary abolitionist demands and to the Black feminist theorists working in tandem with the abolitionist movement.

This course examines masculinity in the twentieth-century United States across academic disciplines. Suspending the idea that manhood is biologically fixed or innate, this course presents masculinity as socially constructed and in a state of ongoing contest and crisis. Students will explore what it has meant (and means) to be a man in America, how masculinity has related to femininity and feminism, and masculinity's intersection with other identities like race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. Assigned materials include an array of readings in History, African and African American Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, Art History, and American Studies, along with documentary and fictional films.