ENG 5388 Fall 2024 - Caputi

This course is premised on the notion of travel and mobility as feminist issues. The material, practical, and ideological obstacles to women's mobility can be taken as a world-historic given, and the ambivalent literary treatment of female travelers–from the more benign example of Chaucer's Wife of Bath to the longer-lived and more ubiquitous example of the witch on her broomstick–represents the cultural imprint of the former. Using Gayle Rubin's analysis of the "traffic in women" as our theoretical base, we explore in this course tropes of (im)mobility and journey narratives by women authors including but not limited to Aphra Behn, Marjane Satrapi, Toni Morrison and Cheryl Strayed. Given the historic injunction to domesticity and the prohibition of female mobility (or, in my shorthand, fem[m]obility) outside the system outlined by Rubin, is travel for women on their own terms synonymous with empowerment? Under what circumstances is the freedom to travel compromised and/or complicit in class and/or cultural hierarchies that are otherwise oppressive? Under what circumstances, contrariwise, is it a mark of an individual's transnationalist and/or intersectionalist positioning? These are some of the questions that will drive our discussions this semester.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area(s) of Concentration: Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. This course also meets the Alterity requirement.