Course Description:

This course examines gender, race, and class as categories of analysis for understanding the experiences of individuals in U.S. society. In an attempt to elucidate conceptions and ideas which shape cultural and sexual identities, women of color will be our primary focus. By moving women of color from their historically marginal position in the curriculum to the center of our attention, we will begin to explore ways of transforming knowledge about culture and society. Specific readings, discussion, and writing will center on themes of identity, difference, and resistance in the lives and experience of U.S. women of color.

Required Textbooks:

Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook
Angela Davis, An Autobiography
Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
photocopied reader

Course Requirements and Grades:

Students will be expected to actively participate in the course. Attendance and preparation in both the Colloquium and Seminar portions of the course are mandatory.

Grades will be based on the following:

3 Papers, 20% each 60%
Additional Assignments (including study questions, quizzes, etc.) 20%
Attendance and Participation 20%

Weekly Schedule and Reading Assignments:

The first section of this course will be concerned with the problem of identity and knowledge, i.e., with the question of how you are affects what you can know. Our goal is to understand the issues of Identity Politics as they bear on gender and race. We will examine the deconstruction of self-identity as a "phallogocentric white western capitalist ideal which represses the connectedness of human beings." We will also explore the neo-conservative implication of this deconstruction of self-identity as it functions to disempower individuals and groups.
 

Week 1
1/17 Course Introductions--Policies and Practices

1/19 Angela Davis, An Autobiography, Part 1 (pp. 1-73)
Allison Weir, "Introduction" (photocopy)

Week 2
1/24 Angela Davis, An Autobiography, Parts 2-4 (pp. 77-279)
Video: Angela Davis lecture

1/26 Angela Davis, An Autobiography, Parts 5-6 (pp. 283-400)

Week 3
1/31 Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (pp. 1-83)

2/2 Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (pp. 84-160)

Week 4
2/7 Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (pp. 161-228)

2/9 Autobiography and Identity (First Writing Assignment handed out)
"One Drop of Blood," The New Yorker (photocopy)

Week 5
2/14 Prof. Taylor: An Advanced Problem in Identity Politics
Allison Weir, "Conclusion" (photocopy)

2/16 Prof. Maeda: Identity and Difference
video: Public Hearing, Private Pain, Part 1

Paper #1 Due
 

"What is involved in the project of rescinding borders is a critical awareness of how borders have been (and continue to be) systematically policed and for whose ideological benefit and material profit. The way to rescind borders is of course to cross them, and in doing so, blur them, confuse them, make them permeable, open for traffic from all directions, and, as a result, realize that they have in fact been open all along, crossed by illegal traffic of all kinds--in short, that differences of the kind that do not settle down into binaries have already proliferated in our own backyards."

Week 6
2/21 Identities and Differences
video: Public Hearing, Private Pain, Part 2

2/23 Kimberle Crenshaw, "Whose Story, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill" (photocopy)

Week 7
2/28 Differences: Cultures and Locations
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

3/1 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (continued)

Week 8
3/6 Gloria Anzaldua, Chapter 1, "The Homeland, Aztlan/El otro Mexico"; Chapter 2, "Movimientos de rebeldia y las culturas que traicionan"

3/8 Gloria Anzaldua, Chapter 3, "Entering Into the Serpent"; Chapter 4, "La herencia de Coatlicue/The Coatlicue State"

Week 9
3/13 Differences, Identities, Spaces for Change
bell hooks, "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness" (photocopy)
Leny Mendoza Strobel, "A Personal Story: Becoming a Split Filipina Subject" (photocopy)
Chandra Mohanty, "Defining Genealogies: Feminist Reflections on Being South Asian in North America" (photocopy)

3/15 Trinh T. Minh-ha, "Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference" (photocopy)
Gloria Anzaldua, Chapter 7, "La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness"

Week 10
3/20 Spring Break

3/22 Spring Break

Week 11
3/27 Prof. Griffin: Postcoloniality and Difference
Trinh T. Minh-ha, "Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference" (photocopy)

3/29 Prof. Taylor: Differences, Identities, and Kinds of Change
bell hooks, "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness" (photocopy)

 Paper #2 Due
 

If we don't like the world we're living in, change it. And if we can't change it, we change ourselves. We can do something.

Week 12
4/3 Knowledge
Patricia Hill Collins, Preface; Acknowledgements; Chapter 1, "The Politics of Black Feminist Thought"; Chapter 2, "Defining Black Feminist Thought"

4/5 bell hooks, "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness" (photocopy)
Mitsuye Yamada, "Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster" (photocopy)

Week 13
4/10 Consciousness
Patricia Hill Collins, Chapter 4, "Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images"; Chapter 5, "The Power of Self-Definition"; Chapter 7, "Rethinking Black Women's Activism"

4/12 Rayna Green, "The Pocahontas Perplex" (photocopy)
Gloria Anzaldua, Chapter 7, "La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness"

Week 14
4/17 The Politics of Empowerment
Prof. Griffin: Sexual Identity & Resistance
Patricia Hill Collins, Chapter 8, "The Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood"

4/19 Prof. Maeda: Difference & Resistance
Gloria Anzaldua, Chapter 5, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue"; Chapter 6, "Tlilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink"

Week 15
4/24 The Politics of Empowerment (continued)
Patricia Hill Collins, Chapter 10, "Toward an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology"; Chapter 11, "Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment"

4/26 Virginia Harris and Trinity Ordona, "Developing Unity Among Women of Color: Crossing the Barriers of Internalized Racism and Cross-Racial Hostility" (photocopy)
Paula Gunn Allen, "When Women Throw Down Bundles: Strong Women Make Strong Nations" (photocopy)

Paper #3 Due during Finals Week (date to be announced)

Click here to see the Fall 1994 "Race, Class, Gender:  Women of Color in the U.S." Syllabus