ENGL 555 A: Feminist Theories

This course takes up the question of how feminist thinkers have gone back to their own earlier work and that of other feminist thinkers to revise their understanding of questions of solidarity, coalition, sisterhood, and alliance.  We will explore re/vision as a form of feminist praxis in both theoretical texts and in works by individual authors of fiction by tracking themes, questions, and images as they are articulated and elaborated across time.   The course will be equally concerned with literary fiction and theoretical texts and is especially interested in the dialogue between the two and thus across idioms.  Literary fiction pairings include:  Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy; Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Madd Addam trilogy.  Theoretical inter-texts and pairings may include those by bell hooks, Hazel Carby, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, Kimberly Crenshaw, Nancy Hartsock, Joan Scott, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Hortense Spillers and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.  Students interested in feminist theory will gain from this course a deepened understanding of feminist engagement starting in the 1980s through the present--though this course is not in any way a survey or a genealogy of feminism.  Rather, the course’s aim is to return to particular feminist writings in our current moment of political crisis so as to understand where particular feminist thinkers entered the discussion decades ago, where they today stand, and where feminist writing and thinking in multiple idioms yet might go in future.  Some background in feminist studies (especially Professor Ibrahim’s Winter 2017 course) will be useful but is not required.