Louise Bourgeois, Cell (Red Room), Courtesy of lightsgoingon
Violence as Politics
How does politics situate itself vis-à-vis violence? What are the historical and theoretical legitimations upon which the political attempts to absolve, regulate, or incorporate violence? What gets counted as violence and what are the global prototypes of the violence of modern political systems? This course works through these questions by largely focusing on four modern political phenomena: Imperialism, Nationalism, (Post-)Colonialism, and Biopolitics.
Intro to Theory and Critique
This course is an introduction to core concepts in critical theory from the critical traditions of Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and critical race studies. Students learn the theoretical foundations of concepts such as critique, ideology, power, subjectivity, freedom, and resistance and discuss their political relevance for understanding gender, class, race, and ethnicity, and the histories of capitalism, colonialism, and migration across geographies and social contexts.
Sexual Politics in Transnational Perspective
This class comparatively examines how sexuality and gender intersected with politics to shape modern societies. We will address the global dimensions of sexuality, but our readings will primarily focus on developments in Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. Our weekly discussions will revolve around several interesting themes, including gender-role construction, theories of sexual identity, state regulation of sexual behavior, and rise of LGBTQ emancipation movements. After discussing the significance of these themes on the local level, we will then examine them within large cultural, social and transnational contexts.
Contemporary Theories of Gender
What does it mean to be man, woman, human, and other? Where do our ideas of sexual difference, gender roles, and sexual desires come from? This course traces the thinking of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore the central debates among feminist scholars regarding the stability and the relation between these categories. The first half of the course establishes a firm grounding in the structural and post-structural conversation, mostly between French feminists and queer theorists. In the remainder of the course we will look at the political, economic, and legal manifestations of gender, as well as post-colonial and intersectional themes put forth by Indigenous, Black, and Muslim, feminists. The course will end by a brief discussion of the limits of thinking gender through humanism.
Women and Gender in Western Political Thought
This course examines history of political thought from the perspective of gender relations and the treatment of women. We will be asking two key questions: What are the ways in which women and other minorities have been excluded, erased, and discounted from theorizations of the political? And how do such exclusions determine the conceptions of justice, power, equality, and freedom that have been hitherto inscribed by white men?
Global Wars in the Middle East
Why are multiple states at war in the Middle East? The common explanations of conflict in the region tend towards religious, ethnic, and sectarian frames of analysis. This course seeks to unpack the historical, economic, and ecological conditions that have enabled the narratives of so-called “sectarian violence.” In doing so, we will inquire into how imperial, colonial, and post-colonial relations of power have created and maintained modern infrastructures of violence in the region. We will also study how the contemporary global flows of capital and bodies posit the Middle East as a hot zone for contested global interests. Finally, we will explore the possibilities opened by indigenous cultures and networks of transnational solidarity and resistance to formulate a political imaginary beyond nationalism or tribalism.