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Feminist Theory (397-0-1)

Topic

Black Feminist Theory

Instructors

Marquis Bey West

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 223: Tues, Thurs 2:00PM - 3:20PM

Overview of class

This course begins not from the premise, necessarily, of an intellectual and political genealogy of black women. Though also not to the exclusion of this. But rather, this course is one that thinks black feminist—not black "women's"—theory and theorizing; this course chronicles the ways that the political, intellectual, ethical, and social resound radically and progressively and names that resonance—and all its vibrations and textures—black feminist theory. Thus, we will, of course, be reading a variety of black women along the jagged gendered spectrum between and beyond "cis" and "trans," but more specifically we will, in this course, be tracing the ways radical politics and ethics arise in such a way as to interrogate the established parameters of race and gender normativity, of our social world. To do this, we will be reading the work of people like bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara, Jennifer Nash and Hortense Spillers, and more.