ENG 5049 Spring 2023 Goodman

The course’s goal is to offer an introductory guide to a range of concepts that, over time, have influenced feminist thinking on literature, culture, politics, and theory. These concepts cannot be reduced to one historical moment, movement, or occurrence. Rather, they stretch across different registers and bridge between different feminist phases, events, orientations, and concerns. Whereas much feminist organizing has been fractured along identity lines or generations, this course takes a different approach, spotlighting integral concepts. The concepts are not meant to dictate a feminist agenda around a dominant or privileged experience of being a “woman,” but rather to invoke terminology around which debates and conflicts have historically arisen over and again, in order to mark the stakes in the continuities and discontinuities in thinking that make feminist politics possible.

Feminist Theory bridges the Humanities and the Social Sciences, nationalist and postnationalist perspectives, abstract philosophies and social engagement. We will ask vital questions about what it means to live, think, work, and participate in an embodied world. The first part of this course will do a deep dive into Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, reading many of her sources and inspirations, including Freud, Kristeva, and Foucault. Then we will trace topics like race, trans, colonialism/imperialism, and politics into the present.