Special Course Descriptions
Gender

GEN 294 11/PHL 294 11 Philosophy, Feminism, and the Body
Professor Benson
Our identities are shaped by categories like race, gender, sexuality, and disability. In this course we will examine how these types of categories shape our embodied lives and how such categories are reinforced in medical practice, reproductive technologies, cosmetics, the fitness and diet industries. The body is a place where theory and flesh exist in an uneasy relationship. We will seek to understand this contentious relationship and to understand the possibilities for resisting the social domination advanced through these categories. Readings will be drawn from race theory, feminist theory, disability studies, and queer theory. Authors are likely to include Bartky, Bordo, Foucault, Halperin, and bel hooks. Prerequisite: Completion of first year writing requirement, or equivalent.

GEN 317 10/ENG 317 10 Women's Literature
Professor D. Cousineau
This course will explore the way women writers both draw on literary traditions and introduce important innovations in narrrative form and subject matter. We will consider such psychlogical and cultural issues as the portrayal of female subjectivity and desire, mother-daughter relationships, and hybrid identities (racial and ethnic). Writers will include Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and other modern and contemporary novelists.

GEN/DRA/AMS 494 10 SpTp: Girls on Top: Plays by Wm
Professor Maloney

In 1910, Rachel Crothers wrote a play that forced the issue of a single standard of morality for women and men onto the public stage. Within a year, a prominent male playwright felt compelled to rush a rebuttal onto the stage, attempting to validate the traditional and .natural. order of male supremacy, and to prove once and for all that this is indeed .A Man.s World.. Crothers.s was the better play and the better argument. In the decades that followed, an impressive list of women playwrights took up the charge, challenging every aspect of male dominated American theatre. The focus of this course is on twelve of those American women playwrights. Reading includes plays, critical analyses, and critical biographies. Course assignments are three five-page papers and one in-class presentation.

GEN 494 11/HPS 494 10 I Am No Angel: Post-Franco Literature Written by Women
Professor Cristina Casado Presa
As M.J. Mayans Natal points out in her study "La mujer espanola: Imagen, realidad y leyenda" literary representations throughout the centuries reflect the belief that the aspirations of the Spanish women must be subordinated to the roles of "la madre, la santa, la virgen, la mujer recatada, la prudente." This course explores representative literary works written by women after General Franco's death. In this moment of political change a significant tendency is the emergent depiction of female characters that show a clear self-consciousness and express fully their thoughts, emotions and desires. Throughout the course we will examine poems, short stories and plays that allow us to consider the possibility of the production of new ideologies at a moment in which new models of "la mujer espanola" coexist and come into conflict with the old ones.