Gender, Sexuality, and Representation (231-0-21)

Topic

Labor, Gender, and Activism

Instructors

Mounica Sreesai Vegi

Meeting Info

University Hall 412: Mon, Wed 9:30AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

This course focuses on understanding feminist movements across the world while centering the labor and activism of women of color. The course will briefly survey theoretical frameworks of labor while exploring various forms of labor-affective, care, emotional, interpretive, material, immaterial, paid, unpaid, and unfree. Tracing how Socialist-feminist, Black feminist, and Dalit feminist scholars have challenged, contributed to, and complicated the Marxian conceptions of labor and value through race, gender, and caste, this course will explore how colonial masculine paradigms have shaped our understandings of labor and productivity. Moving from abstract theories to lived realities, we will delve deeper into how racialized laboring subjects/agents embody different conceptions of "work" to shape gendered identities and selves. Drawing on historical, anthropological, sociological, and feminist texts, case studies, and films, we will learn how people across varied cultural contexts navigate, make sense of, and resist structures like capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism in their daily lives. How do neoliberal, capitalist, imperial regimes and contingent social processes produce new gendered labor relations (such as digital and gig economies)? We will explore how women in neoliberalizing, colonized, and occupied political economies assert their feminism by not only resisting capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and imperialism but also dominant "Western" discourses that strip their agencies. Are there transnational feminist solidarity networks? How can we understand "sisterhood" across varied sociopolitical and cultural contexts? How are solidarities colloquially and differently practiced? Is "women" still a relevant analytical and experiential category? Finally, students will be introduced to contemporary directions in labor and feminist studies, particularly social reproductive labor such as care and affect. This course will be helpful to those who are interested in the contemporary moment of intensified attacks on labor and gender across varied global constituencies. Paying attention to decolonial methodologies and analytical frameworks to imagine a feminist-activist praxis to ethically and responsibly analyze and produce knowledge on social movements of women of color, assignments include in-class presentations and a creative project involving feminist praxis which can be developed into a final paper.

Class Materials (Required)

All materials will be provided in Canvas.

Class Attributes

SoC Humanities and Fine Arts Distro