English WMS 201 - Winter, 2017

Class Information

Instructor: Freeman, Elizabeth
Time: R 10:00am-1:00pm

Description

Feminist, Queer, and Critica Race Temporalities

In this seminar, we will consider temporality as a modality of social power: a human arrangement that shapes how resources are distributed, how lives are lived, and what counts. In addition to reading some traditional philosophical investigations, we will read feminist, queer, and critical race theorists who have take up the politics of time, considering the temporal problems of social movements; the gendering and racialization of history; psychoanalytic constructions of time and their implications for various subjects and positionalities; erotic communities and their constructions of time; the temporalities of kinship; the construction of nationalism and its others in the temporalized terms of race, gender, and sexuality; the question of blackness as a temporal question; and the vicissitudes of capitalist time for raced, gendered, and sexualized subjects. Theorists are likely to include, among others, Robyn Wiegman, Julia Kristeva, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joan Scott, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, Lee Edelman, Tim Dean, José Muñoz, Carolyn Dinshaw, Geeta Patel, Jasbir Puar, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton, Black Lives Matter, Karl Marx, Frederic Jameson, and Lauren Berlant, along with one literary text, Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic. The class will culminate in a mini-conference, with students presenting 10-minute versions of their final papers.

Grading

Abstract for paper 10%
Mini-conference presentation 20%
Participation 30%
Final Paper 40%

Texts

Ana Historic, Daphne Marlatt
Giant Coursepack