WGSS 555: Feminist Textual and Discourse Analysis
Winter 2016 * Tuesday 12:00pm to 14:50pm * 4 Credit Hours
Elizabeth Sheehan, PhD
E-mail: [email protected]
Office: 318 Moreland Hall
Office Hours: Tuesday and Thursday 10:30am to 12:00pm and by appointment
Course Description
This course introduces graduate students to current and developing methods and modes of
feminist literary, visual culture, performance, new media, and film studies with a focus on
application. In doing so, the courses focuses on recent feminist approaches to key topics within
textual studies (such as form, authors, and readers) as well as distinct methodological approaches
to various genres and mediums (including poems, performances, photographs, and films).
Learning Outcomes
-
Understand current and developing principles of advanced textual and discursive analysis
of literature, visual culture, and media in women, gender, and sexuality studies
Acquire advanced skills in analyzing creative works (including texts, images, and films)
using feminist literary and cultural theory, including concepts of authors and readers,
theories of feminist aesthetics, and anti-racist feminist critiques of texts and images
Situate cultural texts in a variety of current and developing feminist critical contexts,
including debates about the ethics and politics of representation
Required Texts and Learning Resources
All texts are available on the course Blackboard site.
Assigned readings include such articles as:
- Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-893.
- Jennifer Fleissner, “Is Feminism a Historicism?” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature
21.1 (2002): 45-66.
- Shira Wolosky, “Relational Aesthetics and Feminist Poetics,” New Literary History 41.3
(2010): 571-591.
- Lisa Lowe “Autobiography Out of Empire,” Small Axe 13.1 (2009): 98-111.
- Lorraine Sim, “A different war landscape: Lee Miller’s war photography and the ethics of
seeing,” Modernist Cultures 4 (2009): 48-66.
- Minh-Ha T. Pham, “Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings, and the Political Economy of the
Digital Raced Body,” Camera Obscura 76 26.1 (2011): 1-37.
There are also excerpted chapters from books including:
- Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2013)
- Samantha Pinto, Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black
Atlantic (2013)
- Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)
-
Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in
American Culture (2008)
Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (2008)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy (2003)
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (1998)
Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performance of Race and Freedom,
1850-1910 (2006)
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992)
Jose Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
(1999)
Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (2002)
Assignments and Requirements:
Attendance and Participation (25% of your grade): This graduate seminar offers a
space for you to develop your critical approaches, knowledge, skills, and ideas through
conversation with other scholars. The class should operate as a vibrant, stimulating, and
supportive learning community. Creating and sustaining that community requires that
members respectfully listen and respond to each other with the goal of creating
productive conversations about the ideas, topics, texts, and issues being studied. It also
requires each student to prepare for and participate in discussion during every class
meeting. In order to prepare for class, you may find it helpful to write short summaries of
each reading and bring questions that you would like to address. Participation will be
graded according to how thoughtfully and consistently you engage and respond to fellow
students and to me. You can miss one class without penalty, but any further absences will
lower your final grade. If, however, religious observance may prevent you from attending
any class session, please see me as soon as possible. Finally, please do not use your
phone in class. If you need to use an ipad or laptop in class for educational reasons,
please come talk to me before doing so.
Written Assignments on Applying Methods (20% of your grade): During the term,
you are required to complete five short (three to four page) papers. Each paper should use
a method or idea described or exemplified by one of the assigned readings to analyze a
cultural object (poem, image, film clip, etc.) of your choice. The cultural object should
not be one that is already discussed in the assigned reading. The goal of the assignment is
to demonstrate that you understand the methodology described or undertaken in the
assigned reading for that week and that you can apply it. You can choose the weeks for
which you submit these assignments, but please do not submit more than one response
per week. Each response is due in hard copy at the beginning of class. These responses
are intended to get you thinking critically about the reading, to give you practice in
applying various methodologies, and to help you discover ideas that you might want to
pursue in your longer paper.
Presentation (10% of your grade): Each student will lead discussion during one class
meeting. At the beginning of the class, you should offer an overview of key points of the
assigned reading (e.g. the main claims and evidence in each chapter or article). To guide
discussion, you should prepare some questions (about 3 to 6) that you think will help the
class to understand and engage the material.
Conference Presentation and Paper (45% of your grade):
Propose, compose, present, and revise a conference paper that draws upon at least one of
the approaches studied in the class and that offers a contestable, supportable, and
compelling argument about a cultural object of your choice.
Step 1: Submit a 250 to 300-word summary of your paper (i.e. an abstract) to me by the
beginning of week 8 of the term. (1% of your grade)
Step 2: Complete a conference paper of up to 20 minutes (roughly 9 pages) and present it
in class. (9% of your grade)
Step 3: Based on the feedback that you receive from your instructor and classmates on
your conference presentation, revise the paper and submit it by the due date below. (35%
of your grade)
Statement Regarding Students with Disabilities:
Accommodations are collaborative efforts between students, faculty and Disability Access
Services (DAS). Students with accommodations approved through DAS are responsible for
contacting the faculty member in charge of the course prior to or during the first week of the
term to discuss accommodations. Students who believe they are eligible for accommodations but
who have not yet obtained approval through DAS should contact DAS immediately at 737-4098.
Academic Dishonesty
As the OSU Statement of Student Conduct and Community Standards states, “Academic or
Scholarly Dishonesty is defined as an act of deception in which a Student seeks to claim credit
for the work or effort of another person, or uses unauthorized materials or fabricated information
in any academic work or research, either through the Student's own efforts or the efforts of
another.” Such dishonesty can include cheating, fabrication, and plagiarism, which involves
“representing the words or ideas of another person or presenting someone else's words, ideas,
artistry or data as one's own, or using one's own previously submitted work.” If you have any
questions about these guidelines, I urge you to read the complete guide on Student Conduct
(http://oregonstate.edu/studentconduct/), especially the description of offenses
(http://oregonstate.edu/studentconduct/offenses#acdis) and to contact me well before you submit
any assignments if you have further questions. Any instance of academic dishonesty will result
in a failing grade for a given assignment and possibly for the course as a whole.
Course Schedule
Week 1: Aesthetics
- Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
- bell hooks, “An Aesthetic of Blackness—Strange and Oppositional”
- Shira Wolosky, “Relational Aesthetics and Feminist Poetics”
- Sianne Ngai, “Zaniness”
Week 2: Form and History
- Jennifer Fleissner, “Is Feminism a Historicism?”
- Susan Stanford Friedman, “Towards a Transnational Turn in Narrative Theory: Literary
Narratives, Traveling Tropes, and the Case of Virginia Woolf and the Tagores”
- Samantha Pinto, “The Feminist Disorder of Diaspora”
- Patti Duncan, “The Uses of Silence and the Will to Unsay”
Week 3: Authors and Life Writing
- Anita Helle, “Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Memory”
- Judith Butler, excerpt from Giving an Account of Oneself
- Lisa Lowe, “Autobiography Out of Empire”
- Hilary Chute, “Women, Comics, and the Risk of Representation”
Week 4: Readers and Fans
- Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy, Publicity, and Femininity”
- Rita Felski, “Recognition”
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading or Reparative Reading”
- Henry Jenkins, “’It’s Not a Fairy Tale Anymore: Gender, Genre, Beauty and the Beast”
Week 5: Performance
- Judith Halberstam, excerpt from Female Masculinity
- Daphne Brooks, “Our Bodies Our/Selves”
- Jose Esteban Muñoz, excerpt from Disidentifications
Week 7: Photography
- Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave”
- Lorraine Sim, “A different war landscape: Lee Miller’s war photography and the ethics of
seeing”
- bell hooks, "In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life”
- Shawn Michelle Smith, “Race and reproduction in Camera Lucida”
Week 8: Film
- Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
- Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator”
- bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze”
- Ella Shohat, “Post-Third Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema”
Week 9: New Media and Technology
- Donna Haraway “A Cyborg Manifesto”
- Lisa Nakamura, “Where Do You Want to Go Today?: Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet,
and Transnationality”
- Minh-Ha T. Pham, “Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings, and the Political Economy of the
Digital Raced Body”
Week 10: Conference Presentations and Feedback
Final Paper Due on the Thursday of exam week