LIT 5388 Spring 2024

This course is premised on the notion of travel and mobility as feminist issues. Female mobility, when not enforced by what Gayle Rubin calls "the traffic in women," has been historically curtailed and stigmatized (just think of the implications, in modern slang, of saying a woman “gets around”). For this reason, having the means to travel—and the intellectual and spiritual freedom travel proffers—can be celebrated as marks of an individual woman's empowerment vis-à-vis heterosexist, masculinist culture. At the same time, diaspora—that is, the displacement of an entire population—has different implications for women than for men. With these issues in mind, our seminar will undertake in-depth analysis of tropes of (im)mobility as well as literal travel in women’s literature from a variety of cultural perspectives and across a wide swathe of the Anglo-American tradition.