Seminar in Gender Studies: Race, Gender, Disability

G701 — Fall 2023

Instructor
Cynthia Wu
Location
Lindley Hall (LIND) 201H
Days and Times
R 9:00 AM - 11:30 AM meets with G498
Course Description
This course addresses how physical, cognitive, and sensory difference-as a social justice category-intersects with race as well as with other vectors of identity like gender, sexuality, class, and nation. We will cover texts that reveal the complex interrelations among valences of power. We will ask how political thought and action address historical injuries and how calls for redress may or may not be successful. We will ask how forms of oppression and forms of liberation do or do not travel across national boundaries.

In an age of increased antipathy directed at disabled people, people with long-term or acute illnesses, people of color, immigrants, the undocumented, the poor and working classes, women, and queers, this course will also attempt to think differently about pedagogy and the normative structures of the academy. How does society make certain lives more precarious than others? How does the academy replicate these hierarchies? Can we, as teachers and students in this environment, rethink entrenched practices in order to intervene in these conditions? We will not begin with any definitive answers to these questions or solutions for these problems. Rather, through the process of progressing through the semester, we will think through possibilities and revise them as they warrant.