[bioundgrd] Fwd: Please distribute: Still accepting applications for GCWS Spring courses

[Janice Chang]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Andrea R Sutton <arsutton at MIT.EDU<mailto:arsutton at MIT.EDU>>
Date: December 13, 2013 3:17:51 PM EST
Subject: Please distribute: Still accepting applications for GCWS Spring courses


Dear Faculty, Administrators and Students:

Please read below to find out about the Spring 2014 Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies seminars. These courses are open to graduate students across disciplines; Masters and PhD students are eligible to apply as well as advanced undergraduate students doing work in a discipline related to the course topics.

The courses include:

SPRING
Feminist Inquiry

Screen Women: Body Narratives in Popular American Film

Queer Theory and Politics

The complete course descriptions and faculty bios are below.

There is an application process for GCWS courses. Applications are accepted until the enrollment deadline and are reviewed by the seminar instructors immediately following.  Students will be notified of their final acceptance two to three days after the deadline.  Students may apply after the deadline, pending available space in the class.


Application deadlines:

Spring: January 3, 2014
Please call or email the GCWS at gcws at mit.edu<mailto:gcws at mit.edu> for more information about application procedures, member institution cross-registration policies, or credit questions, and visit our web site: http://web.mit.edu/gcws

Course descriptions below:
Queer Theory and Politics

SPRING: Tuesdays, 5:30 – 8:30 PM
January 28, 2014 – May 6, 2014
Building and Room TBD

This class aims to familiarize students with the core texts and key debates that have shaped queer theory.  We trace the expansion of the term "queer" from its early contestation with LGBT identities and politics to its current use as a broad framework that designates non-normative modes of knowledge, cultural practices, and political activism.  Central to our investigation are the intersections between queer theory and feminism and critical race theory.  Weaving analyses of foundational queer and feminist texts, cultural productions, and activist treatises, we will explore an expansive and radical contemporary queer politics, pushing beyond narrow constructions of identity politics, anti-discrimination policy, and rights-based reforms.  This class will ultimately engage Queer Theory by means of a rich philosophical and political interrogation of the meaning and content of “queer."

FACULTY

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Associate Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University.  She specializes in African American literature and culture and gender and sexuality studies.  She is the author of Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (Duke UP).

C. Heike Schotten is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches political theory, feminist theory, and queer theory.  She is the author of Nietzsche’s Revolution:  Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality (Palgrave, 2009) and is currently at work on a book manuscript on queer biopolitics.

Suzanna Danuta Walters is the Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University.  She is the author of The Tolerance Trap: what’s wrong with gay rights (forthcoming from NYU Press 2014); All the Rage: the story of gay visibility in America; Material Girls: making sense of feminist cultural theory; and Lives Together/Worlds Apart: mothers and daughters in popular culture as well as numerous articles and book chapters on feminist theory, sexuality studies, and cultural studies.


Feminist Inquiry

SPRING: Wednesdays, 5:30 – 8:30 PM
January 29, 2014 - May 7, 2014
Building and Room TBD

This course investigates theories and practices of feminist inquiry across a range of disciplines by studying a series of pairings of humanist and social science works by feminist scholars. Doing feminist research involves rethinking disciplinary assumptions and methodologies, developing new understandings of what counts as knowledge, seeking new ways to frame scholarly questions, and reconsidering the relationship between subjects and objects of study. Feminist inquiry is simultaneously challenging and creative, as disciplines are revised by the analysis of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation, both embedded within and shaping particular historical, national, and cultural contexts.

This course will proceed, after a brief framing of the issues, by closely analyzing pairings of humanist and social science “case studies” of feminist scholars and their work.  Several of these feminist scholars will visit the class or speak with us remotely during the semester. Our aim is to allow seminar participants to think deeply about specific theoretical and methodological choices as these are evidenced in practice. We will also reflect on the ways that feminist inquiry/ies transform knowledge and inform varied forms of activism.

FACULTY

Linda M. Blum is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University. She is the author of Between Feminism and Labor: The Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement and At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States as well as articles in, among other venues, Gender & Society and Signs.

Kim Surkan has taught in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at
MIT since 2005. Dr. Surkan does interdisciplinary work in queer,
feminist, and new media studies with a humanities focus, and is currently
writing a series of articles on technology and the (trans)gendered body.

Screen Women: Body Narratives in Popular American Film

FALL: Mondays, 6:00 – 9:00 PM
January 27, 2014 – May 5, 2014
Building and Room TBD

The cinematic body of the woman has long been the central focus for theories of spectatorship, psychoanalytic film theory as well as feminist media and cultural studies. As such it provides rich material for an interdisciplinary conversation not only about socio-cultural and psychological constructions of gender, sexualities, and power but also about the pathologies of body disturbances and eating disorders which have become increasingly prevalent among girls and women of all ages, as well as men. Using popular film and related media as our texts this course will investigate “hot button” issues in contemporary discourses about women’s embodiments in cinematic images of excessive mothering, adolescent sexuality, obesity and diet culture, transformative surgery and body makeovers, and gender reassignment in order to answer the following question: how are contemporary debates surrounding the body both reflected in, and informed by, popular culture representations? Students can expect to come away from the class with a deeper understanding of the cultural influences that shape media products and familiarity with feminist and feminist media theory as it relates to the topic of embodiment and body image.

FACULTY

Emily Fox-Kales is a clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of eating disorders and body disturbances in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She also is on the faculty of Northeastern University where she teaches film, gender and cultural studies in the Cinema Studies program. She has served as Film Editor of the journal Gender & Psychoanalysis and published on psycho-social narratives of the woman’s body. Her new book is Body Shots: Hollywood and the Culture of Eating Disorders (2011).

Suzanne Leonard is Assistant Professor of English at Simmons College, where she co-coordinates the minor in Cinema and Media Studies. Her specialties include film and media studies, feminist theory, and women's literature, and she is the author of Fatal Attraction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Her articles have appeared in Signs, Genders, and Women's Studies Quarterly.

_______
Andrea Sutton
Program Manager
Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
14N-211, MIT
77 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617) 324-2085
http://web.mit.edu/GCWS



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