DOCSLIB.ORG

A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell TAMAR GARB and MIGNON NIXON Mignon Nixon: The occasion for this conversation is the publication of Siblings: Sex and Violence (2003), which comes fast on the heels of your groundbreaking study of hysteria, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition in 2000. In both books you argue that psychoanalysis is trapped in a vertical paradigm that privileges inter- generational relations—parents and children—at the expense of lateral, intragenerational relationships which find their origin in siblings. What galva- nized your thinking about siblings? And how has this turn to the horizontal, lateral dimension of experience affected your thinking about feminism? Juliet Mitchell: Freud says the Oedipus complex opens out onto a social family com- plex. At no point do I want to say that there is not a crucial intergenerational relationship. Of course there is. This is not an attempt to displace that in any sense. It is an attempt to say that at certain points there is an interaction between the intergenerational and the lateral. This idea came from my clini- cal work as a psychoanalyst, from being stuck while trying to understand something about hysteria. It also came very specifically through the question of the male hysteric. But you ask about feminism, so perhaps I should back- track and talk about my relationship to feminism. Nixon: In 1974, you published Psychoanalysis and Feminism, the first major study to consider second-wave feminism and psychoanalysis together. Maybe you could start by telling us what brought you to write that book. Mitchell: I had a gender-privileged educational background. My schooling was very gender-egalitarian. Then I got into a privileged university, which gave pedestal treatment to its few women. In our family, my mother was the breadwinner—which was tough for her in the very inegalitarian postwar years. It was only after university that I felt the full impact of the discrimina- tion feminism protested against. In the early sixties, I was on the editorial board of the New Left Review. We decided to divide up what we saw as the tasks confronting postcolonial Marxism. I said I would take the subject of women. And the other editors objected that it was not a subject. I thought, OCTOBER 113 Summer 2005, pp. 9–26. © 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0162287054769959 by guest on 24 September 2021 10 OCTOBER “Well, wait a minute, it’s both a nonsubject and a subject.” At that point, I thought it was very interesting that it wasn’t seen as a subject. Tamar Garb: Did you immediately know it was a subject? Or did it take you a while to work it out? Did you accept their edict? Mitchell: No, no, no. I didn’t accept the edict at all, but I was interested in where it came from. I thought it was part of the problem to see it as a nonsubject. Of course pragmatically, there were women. As a natural category, and as an ideo- logical category in all the trappings of the feminine mystique, there were women. But politically there wasn’t a category “subject: woman”; there was only “object: woman.” For example, at that time, there was no category on the census except a daughter or a wife. There was an absent category. There had been feminism in history, of course, in which women constituted themselves as subjects. At the start of the seventies, people began to try to account for the absence of women as subjects, to explain it, both historically and theoretically. I wanted to find women politically. After an aborted book on the position of women in England, I wrote “Women: The Longest Revolution” in 1966, which used Althusser’s schema to examine the structures within which women were located: reproduction, sexuality, child care, interacting with the world of work. I’ve begun to think that perhaps everything I do is because of something missing in what I’ve just done. So after “The Longest Revolution,” I felt I hadn’t considered how sexual difference was internalized so that, even when we didn’t think about it, it is always there. With that problem in mind I started reading psychoanalysis and concluded Woman’s Estate (1971) with a discussion of psy- choanalysis and ideology, then eventually wrote Psychoanalysis and Feminism. After the book, I felt I needed access to the material on which the theory was built, and I trained as a clinical psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis is about how one experiences gender in an internalized way, and that helped explain something that seemed very important to me— that gender was completely accepted, beyond question, in a sense. It was this natural assumption that made it invisible—a nonsubject. At the start of second- wave feminism, most feminists saw Freud as the arch-patriarch. It was de rigeur for a feminist book to attack him. As I read Freud, I came to think, what we need to look at is the unconscious. The message of Psychoanalysis and Feminism was “don’t let’s throw the baby out with the bathwater.” I was also very involved in thinking about radical anthropology at that time. In Siblings, I am still looking at kinship and trying to understand it. We haven’t actually got a kinship analysis of the gendering of complex societies. Nixon: Your work on siblings also arises from, or continues, your study of the his- tory of hysteria. The title of the book you published in 2000, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition, already announces the importance you ascribe to sibling and peer relationships in the cultural expression of hysteria—in contrast with Freud’s theory of hysteria as a repressed Oedipal desire, centering on the parent- Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0162287054769959 by guest on 24 September 2021 A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell 11 child relationship. Before we explore that crucial move, perhaps you could tell us about your earlier interest in hysteria. When did hysteria first become an important question for you, and why? Mitchell: Around the time I finished Psychoanalysis and Feminism, an interest was emerging in women hysterics as protofeminists. Freud’s Dora case was filmed, produced in the theater, analyzed over and over. The interest was huge. The question being asked was, What was the female hysteric’s relation to feminism? So I began to wonder, What happened to the male hysteric? In psychoanalytic terms, hysteria is understood as a malnegotiation of the Oedipus complex. Therefore, hysteria itself has to be a universal: not only must the Oedipus complex be a universal, but hysteria has to be a universal. And if hysteria is universal, it’s important to ask what made it into a universal at the point of the transition from the pre-psychoanalytic writings of Freud to the establishment of psychoanalysis. How do you bring hysteria into univer- salism from being a particular category? Nixon: So how did Freud arrive at the theory that hysteria was universal? What made him realize that there were male hysterics? Mitchell: As we see in his pre-psychoanalytic writings, Freud was thinking of hysteria as a particular category—i.e., of abused people, as in the recovered-memory movement of recent decades. If, as he first hypothesized, hysteria had been confined to one population—women who had been abused by their fathers— then it would be a specific category rather than a universal. However, Freud has a case (which has been extracted from his letters to Fliess) of an hysterical man whom he was treating at the turning point of his move toward psycho- analysis. Freud got very entangled with this patient, regarding both the patient and himself as male hysterics. Afterward, he refers to his own petite hys- térie, not just Dora’s. With the male hysteric, we’re into the universal, and from that universal of hysteria, we get the universal of the Oedipus complex. The question of how you bring hysteria into universalism from being a particular category was an important one for feminism because, at the time, we were searching for a universalist paradigm. Later on, this was attacked by decon- struction and postmodernism, but at that time feminists were asking, Where is the origin of women’s oppression? Why does this oppression exist cross- culturally and transhistorically? So the same question in a sense was addressed to psychoanalysis: What is the universal of the psyche? The Oedipus complex is universal, whereas child abuse, though very common, is not universal. Nixon: What then prompted you to take up the question of hysteria again, in a broader cultural perspective, with Mad Men and Medusas? Mitchell: There were two questions. First, what happened to male hysteria? Early in the twentieth century, about ten years after the beginning of psychoanalysis, the male hysteric gradually began to disappear from the literature. This had interested me for a long time. The other question was simply, What happened to hysteria? By the early 1980s, hysteria had vanished. The DSM [Diagnostic Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0162287054769959 by guest on 24 September 2021 12 OCTOBER and Statistical Manual] had renamed it histrionic personality disorder, and although the characteristics of histrionic personality disorder would be the same as those in hysteria, in that transition to a behavioral disorder, you lost the symptom. And if you’ve lost the symptom, you’ve lost psychic conflict, because a symptom is always conflictual.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • GOV 1029 Feminist Political Thought
    GOV 1029 Feminist Political Thought Tuesday, Thursday 12-1.15 Fall Semester 2018 Professor Katrina Forrester Office Hours: Tuesday, Thursday 2-3 Office: CGIS K437 E-mail: [email protected] Teaching Fellow: Leah Downey E-mail: [email protected] Course Description: What is feminism? What is patriarchy? What and who is a woman? How does gender relate to sexuality, and to class and race? Should housework be waged, should sex be for sale, and should feminists trust the state? This course is an introduction to feminist political thought since the mid-twentieth century. It introduces students to classic texts of late twentieth-century feminism, explores the key arguments that have preoccupied radical, socialist, liberal, Black, postcolonial and queer feminists, examines how these arguments have changed over time, and asks how debates about equality, work, and identity matter today. We will proceed chronologically, reading texts mostly written during feminism’s so-called ‘second wave’, by a range of influential thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, bell hooks and Catharine MacKinnon. We will examine how feminists theorized patriarchy, capitalism, labor, property and the state; the relationship of claims of sex, gender, race, and class; the development of contemporary ideas about sexuality, identity, and gender; and how and whether these ideas change how fundamental problems in political theory are understood. 1 Course Requirements: Participation (25%) includes (a) active participation in discussion (15%); and (b) weekly responses: each week you will send 2-3 brief questions/ comments about the reading to your TF by 5pm the day before section (10%) Paper 1 (25%) 5-6 pages due October 18 4pm.
    [Show full text]
  • Unit 2 Feminism and Psychoanalysis
    Feminist Theories UNIT 2 FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS Anu Aneja Structure 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Objectives 2.3 Freud, Psychoanalysis and Feminism 2.3.1 Introduction to Sigmund Freud 2.3.2 Basic Concepts in Freudian Theory 2.3.3 Freud’s Theory of Infantile Sexuality and the Oedipus Complex 2.3.4 Female Sexuality in Freudian Theory 2.3.5 Feminist Detractors of Freud: Kate Millett and Nancy Chodorow 2.4 Lacan and Feminism 2.4.1 Lacan and Psychoanalysis 2.4.2 Lacanian Feminist Theorists: Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose 2.5 Let Us Sum Up 2.6 Glossary 2.7 Unit End Questions 2.8 References 2.9 Suggested Readings 2.1 INTRODUCTION In the previous block (i.e. Block 4), you have seen how feminist theorists have made significant interventions in different disciplinary areas. In Unit 3 of Block 4, we looked at feminist critiques of knowledge in the humanities, more specifically in the areas of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. In this unit, you will read further about some of the contributions made by feminist theorists who have examined psychoanalytical concepts and theories and attempted to understand their relevance for women. You will also read about the ways in which they have contributed to a critique of some of the gaps and misrepresentations prevalent in these theories. The contributions of feminist theorists will be examined in relationship to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, two major thinkers of the twentieth century whose works have provoked a rich body of diverse feminist responses and counter-theories.
    [Show full text]
  • Women: the Longest Revolution
    Juliet Mitchell Women: the Longest Revolution The situation of women is different from that of any other social group. This is because they are not one of a number of isolable units, but half a totality: the human species. Women are essential and irreplaceable; they cannot therefore be exploited in the same way as other social groups can. They are fundamental to the human condition, yet in their economic, social and political roles, they are marginal. It is precisely this combination—fundamental and marginal at one and the same time—that has been fatal to them. Within the world of men their position is comparable to that of an oppressed minority: but they also exist outside the world of men. The one state justifies the other and precludes protest. In advanced industrial society, women’s work is only marginal to the total economy. Yet it is through work that man changes natural conditions and there- by produces society. Until there is a revolution in production, the labour situation will prescribe women’s situation within the world of men. But women are offered a universe of their own: the family. Like woman herself, the family appears as a natural object, but it is actually a cultural creation. There is nothing inevitable about the form or role of the family any more than there is about the character or role of women. It is the function of ideology to present these given social types as aspects of Nature itself. Both can be exalted para- doxically, as ideals. The ‘true’ woman and the ‘true’ family are images of peace and plenty: in actuality they may both be sites of violence and despair.
    [Show full text]
  • A N Z<+Lote2svz
    a n z<+lote2svz no- BETTY FRIEDAN'S ROLE AS REFORMER IN THE WOMEN'S LIBERATION MOVEMENT, 1960-1970 Glenda F. Hodges Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of < the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY June 1980 Approved: Advisor VITA April 12, 1951...............Born - Selma, North Carolina 1972 ......................... B.A. - Virginia State College, Petersburg, Virginia 1972 - 1973 ................. Research Assistant - National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence, Washington, D.C. 1975 ......................... M.A. - Howard University, Washington, D.C. 1975 - 1977 ................. Instructor, Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama 1977 - 1979 ................. Assistant Director, Basic Speech Course, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Interpersonal and Public Communication Studies in Interpersonal Communication. Dr. James Wilcox Studies in Public Address. Dr. Raymond Yeager Studies in Persuasion. Dr. John Rickey Studies in Rhetoric. Dr. Donald Enholm Studies in Human Communication and Research Design. Dr. Raymond Tucker Studies in Business Management. Dr. William Hoskins Ill ABSTRACT The activities of the sixties that addressed the issue of women’s rights have been given considerable attention by historians. These activities called for justice and equality for women through legal reform. Betty Goldstein Friedan, noted women's rights advocater, has been regarded by some historians as one of the leaders that attempted to change status-quo conditions of the sixties, relative to women's equal­ ity. Friedan's publication of The Feminine Mystique, in 1963, cautioned women that they did not have to adhere to society's image that supposedly prescribed their lifestyles. Betty Friedan noted that there is often a discrepancy between what women feel they want to achieve and what society has mandated that they attempt to achieve.
    [Show full text]
  • The Power of Place: Structure, Culture, and Continuities in U.S. Women's Movements
    The Power of Place: Structure, Culture, and Continuities in U.S. Women's Movements By Laura K. Nelson A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Kim Voss, Chair Professor Raka Ray Professor Robin Einhorn Fall 2014 Copyright 2014 by Laura K. Nelson 1 Abstract The Power of Place: Structure, Culture, and Continuities in U.S. Women's Movements by Laura K. Nelson Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology University of California, Berkeley Professor Kim Voss, Chair This dissertation challenges the widely accepted historical accounts of women's movements in the United States. Second-wave feminism, claim historians, was unique because of its development of radical feminism, defined by its insistence on changing consciousness, its focus on women being oppressed as a sex-class, and its efforts to emphasize the political nature of personal problems. I show that these features of second-wave radical feminism were not in fact unique but existed in almost identical forms during the first wave. Moreover, within each wave of feminism there were debates about the best way to fight women's oppression. As radical feminists were arguing that men as a sex-class oppress women as a sex-class, other feminists were claiming that the social system, not men, is to blame. This debate existed in both the first and second waves. Importantly, in both the first and the second wave there was a geographical dimension to these debates: women and organizations in Chicago argued that the social system was to blame while women and organizations in New York City argued that men were to blame.
    [Show full text]
  • Understanding Patriarchy
    Foundation Course 1 Human Rights, Gender & Environment Understanding Patriarchy Suranjita Ray• Subordination of women to men is prevalent in large parts of the world. We come across experiences where women are not only treated as subordinate to men but are also subject to discriminations, humiliations, exploitations, oppressions, control and violence. Women experience discrimination and unequal treatment in terms of basic right to food, health care, education, employment, control over productive resources, decision-making and livelihood not because of their biological differences or sex, which is natural but because of their gender differences which is a social construct. “Sex is considered a fact - one is born with either male or female genitalia. Gender is considered a social construction - it grants meaning to the fact of sex. Conversely, it could be said that only after specific meanings came to be attached to the sexes, did sex differences become pertinent” (Geetha, 2002: 10). Gender based discriminations and exploitations are widespread and the socio-culturally defined characteristics, aptitudes, abilities, desires, personality traits, roles, responsibilities and behavioral patterns of men and women contribute to the inequalities and hierarchies in society. Gender differences are man made and they get legitimised in a patriarchal society. This paper attempts to link the theoretical dimensions of patriarchy with its empirical experiences to engage in the ongoing debates and discussion on “patriarchy” which manifests itself in various forms of discriminations, inequalities, hierarchies, inferior status and position of women in society. Thus it is important to understand patriarchy in terms of its multiplicity, complexities and dynamics. What is Patriarchy? Patriarchy literally means rule of the father in a male-dominated family.
    [Show full text]
  • Feminist Emergency Confirmed Keynotes
    FEMINIST EMERGENCY International Conference, London: 22-24 June 2017 The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in collaboration with British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA), Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality (BiGS), the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR), and Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics (MaMSIE) CONFIRMED KEYNOTES & PANELS listed in the order of their occurrence KEYNOTES Unspeakable Acts: The Tongues of M. NourbeSe Philip M. NourbeSe Philip, poet, thinker, activist, was born in Tobago, and now lives in Canada. She studied political science and became a lawyer but left the law for a life in poetry and social and philosophical thought. She is renowned for her experiments with language and her combative reconfigurations of received ideas and histories, as she pursues a vision of greater justice. Her publications include poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and two volumes of book-length poems. With her magnificent revolutionary work, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), she confronts burning issues of our time, bending syntax and vocabulary to shift consciousness in an improvisatory form that pays homage to jazz (it was awarded the Casa de Las Americas prize). In Discourse on the Logic of Language (1989) she introduces the now celebrated play on words, central to thinking about gender and race: ... and English is my mother tongue is my father tongue is a foreign lan lan lang language l/anguish anguish... 1 The long narrative poem Zong! (2008) is a dazzling experimental chorale-like work, which Philip has performed in a collective sound piece; it takes up the case of the 18th century slave ship of that name: slaves were drowned after the captain threw them overboard and later tried to collect insurance.
    [Show full text]
  • Module on Marxist and Socialist Feminism
    Details Role Name Affiliation Principal Investigator Sujata Patel Professor Department of Sociology University of Hyderabad Paper Coordinator Anurekha Chari Assistant Professor Wagh Department of Sociology Centre for Advanced Studies Savitribai Phule Pune University Content Writer/Author Sudeshna Mukherjee Assistant Professor (CW) Centre for Women‘s Studies Bangalore University Content Reviewer (CR) Anurekha Chari Assistant Professor Wagh Department of Sociology Centre for Advanced Studies SavitribaiPhule Pune University Language Editor (LE) Anurekha Chari Assistant Professor Wagh Department of Sociology Centre for Advanced Studies SavitribaiPhule Pune University Module Structure: 1. Introduction , 2. Basic tenets of Marxism and subordination of gender perspective under class perspective, 3. Engel‘s on a) Productive and reproductive labor and b) The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State 4. From Marxism to Marxist Feminism : ( Thinkers: Margaret Benston , Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James) 5. Issues: Socialization of Domestic work Wages for House work Theory of comparable worth 6. From Marxist Feminism to Socialist Feminism 7. Emergence of Socialist Feminism: A synthesis of Marxist Feminism, Radical Feminism and Psychoanalytic Feminism 8. Socialist Feminism on Patriarchy and Capitalism 9. Dual System Theory(Juliett Mitchell , Heidi Hartmann) 10. Unified System Theory(Irish Young , Alison Jagger ) 11. Contemporary Socialist Feminism 12. Critiques of Marxist and Socialist Feminism 13. Socialist feminism in Indian Context (B) Description of Module Items Description of Module Subject Name Sociology Paper Name Sociology of Gender Module Name/ Title Marxist and Socialist Feminism Module ID Pre-requisites Objectives The basic postulates of the Marxian model of class oppression based on economic determinism. Gender blind nature of ‗oppression‘ under Marxism and necessary push initiated by 2 Marxist feminists to address gender based oppression along with class oppression.
    [Show full text]
  • Psychoanalysis and Politics Juliet Mitchell Then and Now
    Psychoanalysis and politics Juliet Mitchell then and now Lynne Segal ʻWell, Iʼll think about women thenʼ, Juliet Mitchell on, where that entrenchment could be undermined proposed in 1963, suggesting a topic to research as and eroded in some way.ʼ4 Today, it is Mitchell herself she sat, the lone woman, on the editorial board of New who worries that psychoanalysis, and in particular Left Review – alongside her husband, Perry Anderson, feminismʼs embrace of it, may have served to displace the freshly minted editor of the journal. The inevitable politics. ʻDoes [psychoanalysisʼs] self-described, non- response greeted Mitchellʼs startling proposal in such political discourse draw all potentially radical use of circles at that time: ʻthere was silenceʼ.1 A decade later it into the apolitical?ʼ, she recently queried. Or con- and Mitchellʼs next move seemed just as eccentric, at versely, and perhaps more surprisingly, she wonders: least to many of the women who had by then raced ʻdoes the recurrent demise of feminism … turn a in to erase that earlier embarrassed silence on the radical investigatory mode which is psychoanalysis ʻsecondʼ sex once and for all – during the passion- into an apolitical discourse?ʼ5 Good questions. Her ate early years of Womenʼs Liberation. She turned, worries are just the ones we need to address if we increasingly, towards psychoanalysis for assistance want to ponder the conjunction of psychoanalysis and with her political task. The challenge, obviously, was feminism over the last three decades. The first ques- not just the serene sovereignty of male domination, tion, at least, expresses some of my own misgivings.
    [Show full text]
  • Recovering Socialism for Feminist Legal Theory in the 21 St Century Cynthia Grant Bowman Cornell Law School, [email protected]
    Cornell University Law School Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository Cornell Law Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship 11-2016 Recovering Socialism for Feminist Legal Theory in the 21 st Century Cynthia Grant Bowman Cornell Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub Part of the Law and Gender Commons, Law and Society Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Cynthia Grant Bowman, "Recovering Socialism for Feminist Legal Theory in the 21 st Century," 49 Connecticut Law Review (2016) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell Law Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CONNECTICUT LAW REVIEW VOLUME 49 NOVEMBER 2016 NUMBER 1 Article Recovering Socialism for Feminist Legal Theory in the 21 st Century CYNTHIA GRANT BOWMAN This Article argues that a significant strand offeminist theory in the 1 9 1970s and 80s-socialistfeminism-haslargely been ignoredby feminist jurisprudence in the United States and explores potential contributions to legal theory of recapturing the insights of socialistfeminism. It describes both the context out of which that theory grew, in the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-imperialiststruggles of the 1960s, and the contents of the theory as developed in the writings of certain authors such as Heidi Hartmann, Zillah Eisenstein, andIris Young, as well as theirpredecessors in the UK, and in the practice of socialistfeminist groups in the United States during the same period.
    [Show full text]
  • Sex, Gender, Sexuality I Professor Amy Hollywood
    Sex, Gender, Sexuality I Professor Amy Hollywood Fall 2019 Location: 60 Oxford Street 119 Mondays from 3-5 PM Professor Hollywood’s Office Hours: Tuesdays 1-3 and other times if needed Contact Andrea Davies to set up appointments [email protected] Teaching Fellow: Siobhan Kelly (Email: [email protected]) Teaching Fellow Office Hours: Mondays 12-2 and other times if needed Books available for purchase (all readings will be available on Canvas): Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (the Parshley translation, Vintage edition) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Strachey translation) Jacques Lacan and the École freudienne, Feminine Sexuality Course Requirements: 1. Attendance and participation in class. Please read materials carefully before we meet and be ready to discuss them. In the course schedule below, primary texts appear in bold and should be the focus of your attention. Careful reading of at least some portion of the secondary literature, however, is also essential to the success of the course. 2. Three short (5-6 pages, typed and double-spaced) exegetical papers or, with permission of the instructor or TF, one short exegetical paper and one longer (10-15 pages, typed and double-spaced) paper. This assignment will be discussed further in class. The first paper will be due on Friday, October 4th by midnight. The second paper will be due on Friday, November 8th by midnight. The final paper or the longer paper will be due on Monday, December 9th by midnight.
    [Show full text]
  • Women 'S Studies Reading and Resource List
    WWOOMMEENN''SS SSTTUUDDIIEESS RREEAADDIINNGG AANNDD RREESSOOUURRCCEE LLIISSTT --- compiled by Katherine Arens and Jill Rader -- The Center for Women's Studies The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas August 1999 Women's Studies Reading and Resource List, 2 On the Women's Studies Reading and Resource List The Center for Women's Studies at UT Austin is proud to make available a new educational resource - a comprehensive yet selected reading and resource list that reflects the breadth and richness of Women's Studies' teaching and scholarship on our campus. The idea for this resource grew out of a meeting held at UT INTERACTIVE on Saturday, March 6, 1999. This was a time set aside for major interdisciplinary programs on campus to meet to discuss ways to make their respective programs more visible on the campus and to develop important program initiatives. The set of initiatives I proposed for our meeting centered around the WS Graduate Portfolio Program (for information, see <http://www.utexas.edu/ogs/docport/ws.html>) and our graduate programming. They were: (a) developing an interdisciplinary feminist theory seminar and an interdisciplinary feminist methods seminar for the Graduate Portfolio program and (b) exploring directions for a WS master's program and joint WS master's and doctoral programs, possibly in association with other degree programs on campus. Invited to the meeting were WS affiliates from across the campus with particular interests and expertise in these areas. As is often the case in these kinds of settings, new possibilities emerged and took on a life of their own. Discussions about the interdisciplinary feminist methods seminar led to a suggestion by Katie Arens to develop this Reading and Resource List.
    [Show full text]