WMST 375 - Seminar in Women’s Studies

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This capstone seminar examines recent topics in contemporary feminist theory, foregrounding work at the frontier and periphery of what we might call 21st century feminisms. Class readings and viewings are radically interdisciplinary and include themes such as sex worker rights, transgender feminisms, women of color feminisms, transnational feminisms, crip feminisms, post-feminisms, feminism and the body, and media activisms.

Topic for 2016/17b: Feminists Imagining Otherwise: What are the limits of liberalism for framing social justice? How might we begin to think outside of a liberal framework and “imagine otherwise”? This capstone seminar asks students to grapple with these questions by engaging and applying insights from feminist, queer, and women of color critique. The course topics straddle tensions between projects for representational inclusion and projects for material transformation. We consider recent #blacklivesmatter protests and the prison abolition movement as responses to the limits of our criminal “justice” system; anti-capitalist analyses and women and queer of color critiques of identity politics and multicultural inclusion; and queer analyses of the limits of the law for addressing anti-trans violence and exclusion. Throughout, we are looking for the feminist possibilities that are foreclosed when “liberalism,” broadly conceived, is something we cannot not want. Christina Owens.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

One 2-hour period.