Theories of Feminism

LEARNING, UNLEARNING, ANALYSIS

2008-12-04T07:00:00.015-05:00

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Tuesday, 9 December—Analyzing Learning I
• DUE: Grp. 1 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and consider the learning community we have built.

Thursday, 11 December—Analyzing Learning II
• DUE: Grp. 2 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and celebrate our final day.

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We will be taking two classes for sharing our insights from the course. Everyone will turn in their analysis on Thursday, but everyone should be ready to SPEAK Tuesday regardless.

You could imagine this as a quilting bee -- a reality and metaphor of importance in women's studies. The people who talk each day depend on the careful and interested listenings of everyone else.

Each person will offer a piece for the quilt -- make it as uniquely yours as you can. Imagine yourself in our Theories of Feminism knowledge quilting society, coming together to share our understandings of theories and meanings as we have pieced them together for our intellectual community this term.

Look over your paper and makes notes of the following. If for any reason you don't have your paper with you today, you still must make these notes and speak from them. We don't even need you to say whether you have your paper with you at this point....

You will speak from something you've put down in these notes:

Find your favorite paragraph in the paper. Put a star next to it.
Write down what you are most proud of in this paper.
Put an arrow next to the place you think best describe the argument of the course.
Write down your favorite reading and be prepared to say what made it special for you.

Add one of these:

Write down the moment in the course when things started to come together for you.
Write down a note about a moment outside the course when you found yourself using what you had learned.
Write down a note about how you found yourself included in the argument of the course

When it is your turn to speak, pick out four of these pieces to share in our quilt of the class. We want to give time for half the class today, so be mindful of the the time, but make sure your piece is special and unique.

And may we all keep running into each other, over and over, in friendship, connection, intellectual community, and joyful living!

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"Odetta, the folk singer with the powerful voice who moved audiences and influenced fellow musicians for a half-century, died Tuesday Dec. 2, 2008. She was 77." (from the AP).

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Thursday, 4 December—Theories of feminism, why theories in the plural?
• Reread & review: everything. Read parts of books we didn't get to. Reread your favorite stuff. Be prepared to say what you have read and reread and why.
What has the course been put together the way it has? How has that shaping contributed to the arguments of the course? What elements of the course have meant the most to you? What will you take away from the class?

Tuesday, 9 December—Analyzing Learning I
• DUE: Grp. 1 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and consider the learning community we have built.

Thursday, 11 December—Analyzing Learning II
• DUE: Grp. 2 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and celebrate our final day.

Alison Bechtel -- the comic book as feminist theory -- see her website -- and new book

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LEARNING ANALYSIS for Feminist Theory

This is a synthetic reflection on the course and your place in it.
DUE Tuesday, 9 December: learning analysis / 6-8 pgs printed out; compact is good!
Credit given after presentation in class either Tuesday or Thursday. Make plans to be in class on all the presentation days, no matter what.

SUMMARY OF GRADED MATERIALS:
• grps and preps: 1/3 grade: 7 summary sheets, 4 submissions logbooks, 1 learning analysis
• paper: 1/3 grade
• presentation: 1/3 grade

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR WOMEN'S STUDIES MAJORS, MINORS AND CERTIFICATE STUDENTS! IN ADDITION you should turn in a hard copy of all graded written assignments for ALL women's studies courses to Laura Nichols, your women's studies advisor. RECORD THIS IN YOUR LOGBOOK! After verifying whether you are a major, minor or certificate student, all identifying information will be removed. These papers are collected so that our department can assess how we are doing in getting across concepts, skills, and approaches from this field of women's studies to our students. This is not an assessment of students, but another way to assess our department's work. YOUR COOPERATION IS ESSENTIAL. Please take this need seriously and help us collect this data. All departments are required to conduct these assessments now and in our department we want to make ours as women's studies friendly as possible!
FOR THIS CLASS TURN IN YOUR PAPER AND YOUR LEARNING ANALYSIS.

The learning analysis gives you an opportunity to talk about what the course has meant to you. It includes:

(1) your description of the argument or story of the course.
Examine the syllabus (course descriptions and requirements, the reading and writing assignments), WWW sites and blog spaces, notes from class, any freewrites, lists and preps for class, imagining this information as elements in an argument about feminist theory and its relationships to social movements. How have we put together our understandings of how thinking and action interconnect?

What is the argument of the course? What are the parts of this argument, and how do they connect together? You will be trying to imagine how the course was constructed, and why it was put together in this particular way. Pay special attention to titles for days in the Reading and Writing Assignment outline. Imagine them as titles in a Table of Contents to parts of a book and try to understand the argument of the "book" of the course.

(2) put yourself into this story.
What have we created together, considering kinds of feminisms, formats of theory, and histories of women and social movements? How are you a part of the argument of the course as you understand it? What was happening with you at different points in the unfolding and building of this argument? What kind of knowledge did you make yourself in your analysis of readings, in your presentation, in your responses to others' work, in your investigations on the Web and using our blog, and how do the insights you developed connect? Use the lists you did for class, contributions to the blog and your class notes to remember your thoughts, questions, ideas. How did these change? What changed them? What were your contributions to the class? What effects did you have on the course, on your partners? How did your responses to other people's work include you in the argument of the class? What worked for you? What didn't work for you? Be sure to account for your absences from class, and talk about what you did to keep up and how you know that you got the stuff you missed.

(3) discuss 4 readings and 1 or 2 web sites from the course connecting you to the class.
Choose readings which meant a lot to you, and web sites of substance that helped you think and connect. Demonstrate that you've kept up with the reading by showing how widely you've read in the course materials. How do these readings connect to the argument of the class? How did they affect you? What was meaningful and important about them? What did you learn from them? How did they change your relationship to the course, to ideas, issues, politics, feelings? You can talk about how your life was connected to these ideas and feelings. You can suggest relationships with other readings, other courses, other experiences.

This is an exercise in synthesizing--putting things together in new relationships, making a whole shape. It requires imagination. Have fun with it. Good luck!

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Conferencing II

2008-11-18T10:52:00.005-05:00

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From Tuesday, 18 November to 2 December

everyone will finish the class having done both a paper and a presentation. Each is 1/3 of your grade. Both will require additional research as well as keeping up with class readings. Much of the research will emerge out of lectures and their resources, so attending lectures faithfully and taking good notes will make this work a lot easier.

The second set of conferences are built around
• A project in making or using feminist theory with attention to histories of feminist movements.
How did second wave feminists produce theory in CR groups? What happens when you work in a similar group? How did the separate routes to feminism taken by some identity groups affect what counts as theory and how we understand social change? What does globalization have to do with feminist practices? These and similar projects with attention to histories of feminist movements will focus this assignment. Katie and Renee will help you figure out which issues you want to think and know more about in either a presentation for the class, or in a paper.

Tuesday, 18 November—Presentation Grp. 1
Thursday, 20 November—Presentation Grp. 2

Tuesday, 25 November—NO CLASS; KATIE IN SWEDEN
Thursday, 27 November—NO CLASS; HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Tuesday, 2 December—All papers due & all logbooks.

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Companion Species Among Worldly Processes

2008-11-12T09:00:00.044-05:00

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Surprise Surprise! The Surprised Feminist --

"I have come to think that the capacity to be surprised -- and to admit it -- is an undervalued feminist attribute. To be surprised is to have one's current explanatory notions, and thus one's predictive assumptions, thrown into confusion. In both academic life and in activist public life in most cultures, one is socialized to deny surprise. It is as if admitting surprise jeopardized one's hard-earned credibility.... Being open to surprise, being ready to publicly acknowledge surprise, may be among the most useful attitudes to adopt to prepare one's feminist self for what now lies ahead." (Cynthia Enloe 2004, 13-14)

Donna Haraway's work often comes as a surprise to feminists. "Dogs?" they say. "What do dogs have to do with feminist theory? Is it some kind of metaphor? Is it a joke? And where are the women?"

Well, there are lots of jokes in Haraway's work, lots of fun too, but it is also all very serious and literal as well. Why should feminists care about dogs, about co-evolutionary planetary processes, about arguing against human exceptionalism? Haraway wants to tell us some stories that communicate why we need to understand collectivities that matter, and why these collectivities can never be only human ones....

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Donna Haraway talks about Companion Species at the Open University in the U.K.

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Training Stories

"'Marco... Cayenne is not a cyborg truck; she is your partner in a martial art called obedience. You are the older partner and the master here. You have learned how to perform respect with your body and your eyes. Your job is to teach the form to Cayenne.' ...First, these two youngsters had to learn to notice each other. They had to be in the same game. It is my belief that Marco... as he learned to show her the corporeal posture of cross-species respect, she and he became significant others to each other." Haraway 2003 (41-2) See also Haraway 2008.

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As you can see from this, HOW you do something matters to Haraway: it matters in her agility training and it matters in her feminist theory.

"When 'pure-bred' Cayenne, 'mixed-breed Roland, and I touch, we embody in the flesh the connections of the dogs and the people who made us possible.... Inhabiting that legacy without the pose of innocence, we might hope for the creative grace of play." (98)

"Without the pose of innocence" -- without projecting away from oneself all the difficult ambiguities of power, the uneven forms of interconnection as they shift among dominations. The point is not to say that forms of domination are okay somehow, but to increase the possibilities for accountability -- to acknowledge rather than deny the complexities of power and responsibility.

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Similarly, Haraway doesn't pretend that what she writes is accessible to everyone, even while she works very hard to make her writing as clear and moving and of importance as she can.

She knows that attention to words is only one part of getting ideas across -- especially as you are in the middle of thinking something new.

Here is an exchange between Donna Haraway and a former student now a journalist interviewing her:

(from How Like a Leaf, 108):

"DH: ...I think my contribution is precisely this sensibility that people are forced to inhabit by virtue of their encounter with my writing or speaking. Actually, a lot of people get my stuff through the public performance first and only then find the writing more accessible. I've had this experience frequently because in public speaking all kinds of issues are possible to perform physically. It is such an intermedia event where voice, gesture, slides, enthusiasm all shape the density of the words. Oddly, I think people can handle the density better in a performance than on the page."

"TNG [Thyrza Goodeve]: ...There are tones and gradations and nuances available that are not as readily availalbe in a written text. I think of your use of irony, which is such a large part of you as a person. Humor, laughter, joking is a constant and it's a form of theorizing for you...."

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WITH A PARTNER: look through Haraway's pamphlet and find a "joke" that is a form of theorizing in The Companion Species Manifesto. What is the serious point of this joke? Why does it need to be in a joke form?

What does it take to read this kind of feminist theory and not be intimidated by it? How does it teach you to read other kinds of academic theory? How does it help you make writing accessible to yourself?

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Here is an interview with Haraway on the Prickly Paradigm site: Catalog

Here is Donna Haraway's agility website: Doggery.org

Here is a website also created by Haraway's partner Rusten Hogness, for a joint project on the stories of activists for sustainable agriculture, Gleaning Stories, Gleaning Change

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Genomics & Justice: A forum to bridge the historic divide between communities engaged in science and in social justice: How can we ensure that our expanding stores of genomic information benefit rather than harm people?
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How does Social Change Happen?

2008-11-10T08:50:00.055-05:00

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BRAINSTORMING: list as quickly as you can as many ways social change occurs as you can think of. With a person sitting next to you, expand the list as far as the two of you can. With the next pair near you and your partner, continue your list expansion. Among the four of you, notice which ways are most often listed. Choose two or three you four consider most effective. Choose two or three you have personally engaged in.

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Thinking ahead to our second set of conferences, before and after Thanksgiving:

The second set of conferences are built around
• A project in making or using feminist theory with attention to histories of feminist movements.
How did second wave feminists produce theory in CR groups? What happens when you work in a similar group? How did the separate routes to feminism taken by some identity groups affect what counts as theory and how we understand social change? What does globalization have to do with feminist practices? These and similar projects with attention to histories of feminist movements will focus this assignment. Katie and Renee will help you figure out which issues you want to think and know more about in either a presentation for the class, or in a paper.

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We are using INCITE's book as an incentive to consider the crucial question "How Does Social Change Happen?"

The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex

By Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, Incite! Women of Color Against Violence

Published by South End Press, 2007

This book emerged from a 2005 conference at UC-Santa Barbara as described online by Andrea del Moral: http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featdelmoral_nonprofit.htm/

Incite's website: http://www.incite-national.org/

Look at the introduction to the book:

Notice that not all the articles in this book agree with each other: what does this mean?
Pay attention to the mini-history of charities and foundations since the Civil War (3-8)
What is the difference between radical change or social reform? what theories of change are engaged and promoted in the introduction? What forms of social change do you advocate?
Why does managing "revolution" matter, and to whom?

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Some theories of social movements discuss the mobilization of resources:

from the Wikipedia on Social Movements:

"Resource Mobilization:

"Social movements need organizations first and foremost. Organizations can acquire and then deploy resources to achieve their well-defined goals. Some versions of this theory see movements operate similar to a capitalist enterprises that make efficient use of available resources. Scholars have suggested a typology of five types of resources:

Material (money and physical capital);
Moral (solidarity, support for the movement's goals);
Social-Organizational (organizational strategies, social networks, bloc recruitment);
Human (volunteers, staff, leaders);
Cultural (prior activist experience, understanding of the issues, collective action know-how)

"Political opportunity/Political process:

"Certain political contexts should be conducive (or representative) for potential social movement activity. These climates may [dis]favor specific social movements or general social movement activity; the climate may be signaled to potential activists and/or structurally allowing for the possibility of social movement activity (matters of legality); and the political opportunities may be realized through political concessions, social movement participation, or social movement organizational founding. Opportunities may include:

increased access to political decision making power
instability in the alignment of ruling elites (or conflict between elites)
access to elite allies (who can then help a movement in its struggle)
declining capacity and propensity of the state to repress dissent

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Some theories of social change:
see these websites too:
http://stmarys.ca/~evanderveen/wvdv/social_change/social_change_theories.htm
http://www.ptc.nsw.edu.au/scansw/preston.html

Evolutionary: social structures become more complex over time. Some evolutionary theories assume sociocultural change is progressive; others point out how multi-linear it is instead, and how uneven in development.

Functionalist: social structures work interdependently to keep cultural processes in equilibrium. Order and stability are maintained when new institutions are integrated into existing interrelations.

Conflictual: change is inevitable and revolutionary. Periodic crises arise in relations of power and explosively reorganize in new terms. Vested interests hold onto power through education, socialization and ideology until conflict increases to a revolutionary crisis.

Symbolic interactionist: social realities are constructed among the interactions of people and the making of meanings. How people interpret the world affects their understandings and mobilizations of power and social change.

Postmodern: power is dispersed and localized, fluidly shifting. Political strategies of coercion attempt to manage and stabilize these shifting powers, but their actions always produce reactions and resistance.

Resource Mobilization in social movements: collectivities of people create change. Social movements manipulate and manage discontent through the redistribution of resources.

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Our bit for emergent feminist knowledges

2008-10-21T08:36:00.014-04:00

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We play many roles in the transnational and transdisciplinary networks of emergent feminist knowledges. Creating, patterning, sharing, demonstrating, altering and using knowledges are some of the actions we participate in. We work together with and as part of worldly processes of many sorts.

So twice during the semester we work together in our own feminist conference, with presentations of our research -- on-going, tentative, and open -- so that we can all use it, consider collaborations, and open up our assumptions.

***FIRST SET OF CLASS CONFERENCES: many feminisms, many kinds of thought
From Tuesday, 21 October to 4 November

The first conferences address topics analyzing
• Forms in which feminist theory is shared and ways of classifying feminist theories.
Standpoint theory? Black feminist thought? Postmodernism and posthumanism? How do we describe the varieties of feminist theories and the forms they take? You, perhaps with a partner, will take up some of these issues, decided in email consultation with Katie, in either a presentation for the class or in a paper.

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Tuesday 21 October is our first plenary session of two focused on presentations. These will be followed the first week of November by paper sessions -- where paper writers will all offer themselves to discuss their topics and written results. For all sessions you should be sharing handouts for folks to use as jumping off points for interaction.

Some tips folks usually offer for what to do at a conference:

--Take the initiative and introduce yourself. Introduce others around you.
--Be socially generous. Invite others along, bring them into conversations, introduce them to colleagues, connect them to someone of common interests.
--Remind yourself that young scholars are important to any conference. They/We bring cutting edge research to the field. This is a breath of fresh air.
--While listening to presenters, offer non-verbal responses --frown, nod, take notes. Show you are listening actively. Prepare yourself to ask questions during the sessions, or one-on-one.
--Remind yourself schmoozing is important and okay. Be sure to let people know your reactions to their work, you want to know who they are, and you want them to know who you are.
--Consider how you might like to USE this work yourself. What role can it play in your own on-going projects?
--BE KIND. Everyone is in this together.

We will devote three class periods to our conferencing activities. Each time make notes on the CONTENT of the work, and also on CHANGES IN YOUR OWN THOUGHTS AND ASSUMPTIONS. You will need this second sort of material for your final learning analysis.

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"Globalization is a slogan...." (171)

2008-10-16T10:46:00.005-04:00

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Mohanty tells us "The academy as always been the site of feminist struggle." (170)

She asks "Is the North American university a similar global scape involved in the business of economic and political capitalist rule?" (172)

She continues "There is now a wide-ranging university/corporate alliance that sustains and supports the military/prison/cyber/corporate complex" and describes a shift to "an entrepreneurial, corporate university in the business of naturalizing capitalist, privatized citizenship." (173)

Mohanty wants us to preserve the university as a place in which "young people learn how to think critically and carefully about political problems, and about how to articulate their own views and defend them before people with whom they disagree."

This entails "the necessity of the relative autonomy of the university community in relation to the state and the market." (174)

University restructuring on several levels is "glued" together by privatization she says. She defines privatization as "the transfer of public assets and services owned and performed by the government to businesses and individuals in the private sector...." (176)

Under "academic capitalism" Mohanty sees that "the commodification of the educational process requires shifting attention from educators to the products of education that can now be sold in discrete units." 178)

She points out how "discourses of retrenchment, funding, and efficiency mystify and cover-up the drawing of the lines in the sand." The results are, as she quotes Currie (1998) saying, "an intensification of work practices, a loss of autonomy, closer monitoriing and appraisal, less participation in decision-making, and a lack of personal development through work." (179)

She qualifies her analysis: "I do not privilege a purist notion of the university in making this critique. This is not an argument against all forms of joint corporate/education ventures...." Yet she wants herself and us "to make this shift visible for antiracist feminist scholars and teachers so that we can reflect on our particular place and accountability in the new vision of the university and determine how we can create dialogic spaces of dissent and transformation in this institutional climate." (185)

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You can find some materials on global academic restructuring at this working group site.
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"No noncontradictory or 'pure' feminism is possible."

2008-10-13T09:36:00.103-04:00

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The US and the USSR are the most powerful countries in the world

But only 1/8^th of the world’s population

African people are also 1/8^th of the world’s population

Of that 1/4 th is Nigerian,

½ the world’s population is Asian,

½ of that is Chinese

There are 22 nations in the Middle East.

Most people in the world are Yellow, Black, Poor, Female, Non-Christian and do not speak English.

By the year 2000 the 20 largest cities in the world will have one thing in common.

None of them will be in Europe, none in the United States.

--- Audre Lorde (Oberlin College, January 1, 1989), as quoted in Mohanty, p. 43.

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largest cities 2005
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Tuesday, 14 October—Cartographies of Struggle
• read: Mohanty, Chaps. 2, 6-8: Cartographies & Part II, Demystifying Capitalism (pp. 43-84; 139-217). Be ready to name assignment themes.
Thursday, 16 October—Pedagogies of Dissent
• DUE: summary sheet 5, completed before and with book group. Set up for class conferencing.

***FIRST SET OF CLASS CONFERENCES: many feminisms, many kinds of thought From Tuesday, 21 October to 4 November

How are the ways Collins and Mohanty use marxist feminisms similar? How are they different? What political work do they each need marxism for? How does that work change from the 80's to the 2000's?

How does Mohanty make connections between globalization and teaching in a women's studies classroom? What connections seem most important to you? As a student how do you understand her concerns as a teacher?

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POSITIONING MOHANTY

from the Wikipedia:

"Mohanty is originally from Mumbai, India. She holds a Ph.D. and Master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as a Master's degree and a bachelor's degree from the University of Delhi in India. For a long period, she was a professor of women's studies at Hamilton College in Central New York. At present, she is professor of women's studies at Syracuse University."

Mohanty's faculty website

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RELATIONS OF RULING

the term "relations of ruling" comes from Canadian standpoint theorist Dorothy Smith

Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People

By Dorothy E. Smith

Published by Rowman Altamira, 2005

From Smith's 1987 The Everyday World is Problematic, p. 108:

"The ruling apparatus is that familiar complex of management, government administration, professions, and intelligentsia, as well as the textually mediated discourses that coordinate and interpenetrate it."

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Mohanty says of this work, p. 58: "the idea of abstracting particular places, people, and events into generalized categories, laws, and policies is fundamental to any form of ruling."

MOHANTY'S EXAMPLE drawn from agrarian regulations in India, pp. 61-62.

Before colonial rule local practices were in flux and many so-called rules were unevenly known, implemented or enforced.

For example, "Scriptural sanctions agains widow remarriage were, understandably, generally disregarded; indeed, such remarriage was encouraged by custom and folk proverbs. But since widows could inherit their husband's property, there was considerable restriction placed on whom they could marry.... The colonial state, which had an economic interest in seeing landholdings stable (to ensure revenue collection), actively discouraged unmarried widows from partitioning landholdings."

The colonial state colluded with local headmen to enforce what they claimed was "general code of tribal custom." "Thus patriarachal practices were shaped to serve the economic interests of both the landowning classes and the colonial state; even the seemingly progressive customs such as widow remarriage had their limits determined within this gendered political economy." (62)

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p. 63: "No noncontradictory or 'pure' feminism is possible."

MOHANTY'S EXPLANATION draws upon "the historical context in which middle-class Indian feminist struggles arise," p. 63.

For both examples, Mohanty uses scholarship from the edited collection by Sangari and Vaid, 1987, Recasting Women, essays in Colonial history, which was originally published by Kali for Women in India, and republished in US 1990 by Rutgers.

Mohanty describes the emergence of women's struggles in India as, in some ways, a male nationalist project, one which shaped the form and values of an Indian middle-class also coming into new power. Even "the process of the 'purification' of the vernacular language in the early nineteenth century was seen as simultaneous Sanskritization and Anglicization." Another collusion with a segment of the Indian population whose power was increased together with the powers of colonial rule.

"In fact it is Indian middle-class men who are key players in the emergence of 'the woman question' within Indian nationalist struggles. Male-led social reform movements were thus preoccupied with legislating and regulating the sexuality of middle-class women, and selectively encouraging women's entry into the public sphere, by instituting modes of surveillance that in turn controlled women's entry into the labor force and into politics. This particular configuration also throws up the question of the collusion of colonialist and nationalist discourses in constructions of Indian middle-class womanhood." (63)

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CONTRADICTIONS AND FEMINISMS

How do we think about our own feminisms in Mohanty's words here, as part of "tensions between progressive and conservative ideas and actions"? How might some current issues we see today fit into these patterns? Gay marriage? Hilliary Clinton's election run and Sarah Palin's VP nomination? A history of feminism in the US, first, second, third waves?

Mohanty wants us to not inappropriately idealize feminisms, perhaps especially our own. What does "contradictory" mean here?

"Contradiction" is a technical term in various forms of Marxism. Mohanty asks feminists to work with "historical materialism" and versions of Marxism that work out "contradiction" are sometimes thought of in a philosophy of "dialectical materialism." You can check out meanings for "contradiction" in both Wikipedia articles linked here. There is a Marxist, communist portal in Wikipedia, just as there is a portal for feminism.

One piece of what is at stake in working on an idea of no noncontradictory or pure feminism is an exploration of how social change happens. How it has happened in particular histories and particilar social movements, and how we might use it for various projects. What is needed to make social change? How can one be self-critical about one's own practices of social change, and how can one see the implications and consequences of contradictory feminisms?

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RACIAL FORMATION

Omi and Winant 1986, 61): "the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings." [A second, revised edition of Racial Formation came out in 1994.]

EXAMPLES OF RACIALIZATION PROCESSES:

Asian immigration and racialization:
• Mohanty notes (p.67) that racial categories shift over time in racialization processes, often for economic reasons, and notes that Omi and Winant point out how mid-nineteenth c. US uses of "Indian" included Chinese laborers, while Mexicans were classified as white after the 1848 Tready of Guadalupe. (Omi and Winant, 75)

• Excluding Asian women from immigration into the US prevented male laborers from creating families. Asian immigration was increasingly restricted by nationality: Chinese in 1882, Japanese and Korean 1907, Asian Indian 1917, all mainland Asia 1924, Filipino 1934. "Citizenship through naturalization was denied to all Asians from 1924-1943." (68) From 1943 to the mid-60s a quota system allowed only professionals with particular education, training and specializations to immigrate.

"Thus, the replacement of the 'yellow peril' stereotype by a 'model minority' stereotype is linked to a particular history of immigration laws that are anchored in the economic exigencies of the state and systematic inequalities." (69)

examples of various black-white racialization processes:
• Mohanty contrasts "the black-white line" of the US with "a black-white color continuum which signifies status and privilege differences" in differing forms in such countries as Brazil or Apartheid South Africa. (69)

• The United Kingdom rewrote immigration laws in the 1950s to prevent "black" Commonwealth citizens from Africa, Asia, the Far East, Cyprus, and the Carribeean from entering. Then in 1981 "three new kinds of race- and gender- specific citizenships were created: British citizenship, dependent territories citizenship, and British overseas citizenship." (70) Women couldn't become citizens by marriage, children born in the UK were not all automatically citizens. Citizenship and nationality laws "explicitly reflect the ideology of (white) women as the reproducers of the nation." (70)

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THE AGENCY OF THIRD WORLD WOMEN WORKERS

Mohanty uses the work of Aihwa Ong 1987, Spirits of Resistance, to point out that Malay women working in Japanese factories in Malaysia continually renegotiate village, factory, national and multinational meanings of their work and the kinds of persons they are, their subjectivities. Gender, sexuality and morality are elements in play, which they can sometimes use themselves in forms of resistance, and which are other times used to monitor and discipline them. (72-73)

"Understanding these constructions in relation to the state and the international economy is crucial because of the overwhelming employment of Third World women in world market factories, sweatshops, and homework." (74)

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p. 80: a "writing/speaking of a multiple consciousness...."

Mohanty uses the work of theorist Gloria Anzaldua to talk about mestiza consciousness, which "uproots dualistic thinking" (Anzaldua 1987 Borderlands, 80).

Mohanty says "It is a plural consciousness in that it requires understanding multiple, often opposing ideas and knowledges, and negotiating these knowledges, not just taking a simple counterstance...." (80)

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p. 84: "... oppositional consciousness and agency...."

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from Methodology of the Oppressed

By Chela Sandoval

Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2000

"Differential consciousness requires grace, flexibility, and strength: enough strength to confidently commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic if readings of power's formation require it; enough grace to recognize alliance with others committed to egalitarian social relations and race, gender, sex, class, and social justice, when these other readings of power call for alternative oppositional stands." (Sandoval 2000, 60)

"...the differential form of oppositional consciousness which postmodern cultural conditions are making available to all of its citizenry in a historically unique democratization of oppression which crosses class, race, and gender identifications. Its practice contains the possibility for the emergence of a new historical moment--a new citizen--and a new arena for unity between peoples." (Sandoval 1991, 22, ftn. 50)

"There has been an upheavel under neocolonializing postmodernism that has transferred a potentially revolutionary apparatus into the body of every citizen-subject, regardless of social caste. As previously legitimated centers unravel from within, cityscapes degenerate, consciousness and identity splinter, the revolutionary subject who rises from the rubble is mutant: citizen-subject of a new, postmodern colonialism--and de-colonialisms--active all at once....the first world is undergoing a democratization of oppression that none can escape." (Sandoval 2000, 36)

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MUSIC:
Anne Feeney, "War on the Workers," from Union Maid, 2003.
Sweet Honey in the Rock, "We Want the Vote!" from The Women Gather, 2003.
===

Syllabus Completion: all the Reading, Writing and Web Assignments

2008-10-07T14:45:00.000-04:00

http://femtheoumd.blogspot.com/

theories of feminism, thinking and action

WMST 400, Fall 2008 UMD
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm at HBK 0103

PREREQUISITES: designed for upper division undergraduates who have taken at least one feminist course, preferably from the women's studies department. Some other courses may be used to satisfy this prerequisite, but need approval. Email Katie King for interview if necessary.

Professor: Katie King
Office: 2101F Woods Hall, University of Maryland, College Park
Katie’s office hours: 2:30-3:30 pm T & W
Office phone: 301.405.7294 (voice mail)
Katie's home tel. 301.589.2195, call only 10 am-7 pm
Email: katking@umd.edu
Homepage: http://www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking/

Class Blog at: http:// femtheoumd.blogspot.com/
ELMS login at: https://elms.umd.edu/

Reading, Writing & Web Assignments FINAL VERSION ! Oct. 7, 08

Readings are of several sorts: some will be discussed in depth in class, others are background reading to enrich discussion and class and research experiences.

Generally speaking with some exceptions, Tuesdays are lecture days, Thursdays are discussion days. Attendance both days is essential.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THEORY, FEMINISMS, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Tuesday, 2 September—Welcome to Our Course!
• HANDOUTS: syllabus, histories and documents handout, two summary sheets
What do we know coming to the class?

Thursday, 4 September—Theory makes worlds
• read the syllabus carefully, come to know it thoroughly
What will we do in this feminist theory class? a focus on creating a learning community to share our feminist knowledge worlds and participate in social change.

Tuesday, 9 September—Worlds feminisms made historically: waves, generations, social movements
• read: Berger, WAVE; everyone should read the first three essays; from the remaining thirty choose ten that interest or inspire you most; be ready to say how you chose them. For the next class you will do some web work on feminist historical sources and will fill out your first summary sheet to make connections between the web sources and this reading. You may wish to work on these at the same time, starting now. So look at the next class assignments too to see how to do this.
Feminist historians and social movement theorists have worked hard to demonstrate how feminist theory is directly created within and for social movements. Kinds of feminisms have different historical trajectories and produce a range of forms in which feminist theory is created, used and shared.

Thursday, 11 September—Feminist historical sources and web worlds
• web action: historical sources, read and analyze 3 to talk about and share; one you know already but add to, two you don't so much; see handouts and assignment links on blog
• DUE: summary sheet 1, completed before and with book group; this one is slightly modified for our first assignment connecting readings and web sources.
Feminist theory emerges from concrete complexities and historically active social movements. Why do we need to know about these histories? Take some time to notice how some learning also requires unlearning.

THE MATRIX OF DOMINATION, STANDPOINT THEORY, AND INTERSECTIONALITY

Tuesday, 16 September—What it takes to create knowledges: standpoint theory and identity politics
• read: Collins, Prefaces, Acknowledgements, Parts 1 and 3, Glossary: pp. vi-44; 227-290; 298-301.
Collins' matrix of domination brings together marxist standpoint theories and postmodern theories of subjectivity and positionality to create an afro-centric feminism. In the years in which Black Feminist Thought becomes very influential, a range of identity-based feminisms assert their histories and disciplinarities. Legal studies produce critical race theory. Intersectionality becomes both an umbrella term for many theories of political subjectivity, and also a new social science based methodology across disciplines.

Thursday, 18 September—Beginning in the Middle
• DUE: summary sheet 2, completed before and with book group.
How do we learn to put in context many theories all at once? There is no "beginning" to start from really, although histories help to track developments. Feminist generations keep recreating their own beginning, but at some point have to come to terms with feminisms that are already at work. How does one be simultaneously an initiator, a founder, a joiner and a sustainer? How do you do this yourself?

Tuesday, 23 September—Revising Oneself: critique and criticism-self-criticism
• read: Mohanty, Introduction, Chaps. 1 & 9: Under Western Eyes, and Revisited (pp. 1-42; 221-252)
The second wave in the US is known for its practice of critique, its histories of sectarian politics, and its conflict and confrontations. "Under Western Eyes" works critique in transnational terms in which the US as center of feminist theory comes under scrutiny.

Thursday, 25 September—Accountabilities
• DUE: summary sheet 3, completed before and with book group.
What does one use critique for? how do we connect and reflect on critique, debunking, critical thinking, revisioning, self-criticism?

Tuesday, 30 September—NO CLASS, Rosh Hashanah

THOUGHT AND CORE THEMES FOR FEMINISTS

Thursday, 2 October—Moving among knowledge worlds
• read: Collins, Part 2: choose at least three of the seven chapters to read carefully. Pick at least one that is something you know very little about experientially.
How do Collins' revisions from a transnational perspective alter the core themes of Black Feminist Thought? Why are these the core themes? When are they specific to Black feminism and when are they generalizable?

Tuesday, 7 October—Images, oppressions, relationships, self-definitions
• DUE: summary sheet 4, completed before and with book group; turn in logbook for the first time.
• Format Lottery for graded assignments: We will discuss how the first graded assignments will work. Note they are completed either individually or in pairs.
How do images travel and why? How do oppressions relate across differences? What relationships need to be nurtured by feminism and have nurtured it in various identity groupings? Why does self-definition matter?

Thursday, 9 October—NO CLASS, Yom Kippur

Tuesday, 14 October—Cartographies of Struggle
• read: Mohanty, Chaps. 2, 6-8: Cartographies & Part II, Demystifying Capitalism (pp. 43-84; 139-217). Be ready to name assignment themes.
How are the ways Collins and Mohanty use marxist feminisms similar? How are they different? What political work do they each need marxism for? How does that work change from the 80's to the 2000's?

Thursday, 16 October—Pedagogies of Dissent
• DUE: summary sheet 5, completed before and with book group; turn in logbook for the first time. Set up for class conferencing.
How does Mohanty make connections between globalization and teaching in a women's studies classroom? What connections seem most important to you? As a student how do you understand her concerns as a teacher?

***FIRST SET OF CLASS CONFERENCES: many feminisms, many kinds of thought
From Tuesday, 21 October to 4 November

everyone will finish the class having done both a paper and a presentation.
Whether you do a presentation or a paper this time will be determined by lot.
1/3 of your grade. Both will require additional research as well as keeping up with class readings. Much of the research will emerge out of lectures and their resources, so attending lectures faithfully and taking good notes will make this work a lot easier.

The first conferences address topics analyzing
• Forms in which feminist theory is shared and ways of classifying feminist theories.
Standpoint theory? Black feminist thought? Postmodernism and posthumanism? How do we describe the varieties of feminist theories and the forms they take? You, perhaps with a partner, will take up some of these issues, decided in email consultation with Katie, in either a presentation for the class or in a paper.

Tuesday, 21 October—Presentation Grp. 1
Thursday, 23 October—Presentation Grp. 2

Tuesday, 28 October—NO CLASS
Thursday, 30 October—NO CLASS

Tuesday, 4 November—All papers due & all logbooks.

A SONG FOR MANY MOVEMENTS

Thursday, 6 November—Movement theories, theorists, and grassroots analysis
• read: Incite, everyone read Parts I & III. Choose one chapter from Part II to read as well.
Grassroots activist theory is one of the pivotal forms of feminist theory. The Incite Collective here, published by an activist press, raises issues intended to reposition activisms under globalization. Their critiques are urgent and confrontational. They produce, implicitly and explicitly, as direct theory and as written theory, a range of analyses of how social change does, can, and should operate today.

Tuesday, 11 November—Managing dissent? industrial complexes? how change is made
• DUE: summary sheet 6, completed before and with book group.
The notion that dissent is controlled and directed in capitalist forms of democracy is a theme running through a range of progressive movements. It pressures the structure/agency relationships of different social change theories toward the structure side. How do you position your own feminist assumptions about how social change works?

Thursday, 13 November—Academic theories, everyday life, and worldliness
• read: Haraway, the whole pamphlet. Choose one section as your favorite and be prepared to explain it to others.
• DUE: summary sheet 7, completed before individually, to share in whole class discussion & to turn in for yourself individually.
Why do we need to think of ourselves in a world of companion species? How does the most current knowledge in biology and related fields get incorporated into a feminist activist and academic theoretical argument? How does such work restructure what used to be called the nature/nurture divide as feminists worked with it? Why is this a shift in a feminist critique of humanism, and a resituation of academic activisms?

***SECOND SET OF CLASS CONFERENCES: many movements producing direct theories
From Tuesday, 18 November to 2 December

everyone will finish the class having done both a paper and a presentation.
1/3 of your grade. Both will require additional research as well as keeping up with class readings. Much of the research will emerge out of lectures and their resources, so attending lectures faithfully and taking good notes will make this work a lot easier.

The second set of conferences are built around
• A project in making or using feminist theory with attention to histories of feminist movements.
How did second wave feminists produce theory in CR groups? What happens when you work in a similar group? How did the separate routes to feminism taken by some identity groups affect what counts as theory and how we understand social change? What does globalization have to do with feminist practices? These and similar projects with attention to histories of feminist movements will focus this assignment. Katie and Renee will help you figure out which issues you want to think and know more about in either a presentation for the class, or in a paper.

Tuesday, 18 November—Presentation Grp. 1
Thursday, 20 November—Presentation Grp. 2

Tuesday, 25 November—NO CLASS
Thursday, 27 November—NO CLASS

Tuesday, 2 December—All papers due & all logbooks.

LEARNING, UNLEARNING, ANALYSIS

Thursday, 4 December—Theories of feminism, why theories in the plural?
• Reread & review: everything. Read parts of books we didn't get to. Reread your favorite stuff. Be prepared to say what you have read and reread and why.
What has the course been put together the way it has? How has that shaping contributed to the arguments of the course? What elements of the course have meant the most to you? What will you take away from the class?

Tuesday, 9 December—Analyzing Learning I
• DUE: Grp. 1 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and consider the learning community we have built.

Thursday, 11 December—Analyzing Learning II
• DUE: Grp. 2 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and celebrate our final day.

Thought and Core Themes for feminists

2008-10-01T13:06:00.000-04:00

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Nikki Giovanni, "Ego-Tripping," 1973
http://nikki-giovanni.com/egotrippingqt.shtml
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Thursday, 2 October—Moving among knowledge worlds
• read: Collins, Part 2: choose at least three of the seven chapters to read carefully. Pick at least one that is something you know very little about experientially.
Tuesday, 7 October—Images, oppressions, relationships, self-definitions
• DUE: summary sheet 4, completed before and with book group; turn in logbook for the first time.

How do Collins' revisions from a transnational perspective alter the core themes of Black Feminist Thought? Why are these the core themes? When are they specific to Black feminism and when are they generalizable?

How do images travel and why? How do oppressions relate across differences? What relationships need to be nurtured by feminism and have nurtured it in various identity groupings? Why does self-definition matter?

===
Nancy C.M. Hartsock
Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism
(New York: Longman, 1983), pp. 117-8

"...a standpoint carries the contention that there are some perspectives on society from which, however well intentioned one may be, the real relations of humans with each other and with the natural world are not visible.

"...the vision available to the oppressed group must be struggled for and represents an achievement that requires both science to see beneath the surface of the social relations in which all are forced to participate, and the education that can only grow from political struggle."

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Collins, p. 46: "... who controls the definitions...."

idealism, materialism -- not the ideal type, a fantasy, but the lived and varied experiences of many, in collective meaning and in singular and local specifics

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Freewrite:
Which chapters did you choose and why?

• Work, Family, and Black Women's Oppression
• Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controling Images
• The Power of Self-Definition
• The Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood
• Black Women's Love Relationships
• Black Women and Motherhood
• Rethinking Black Women's Activism

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Group work:
• Collect selves into similar size groupings for each chapter.
How does this work out? Observations?

• Each group will identify the core themes of chapter and about 3 key terms.
They will decide how to share these with the whole class, each person taking up some piece to present to the whole class.

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1: work, paid and unpaid, exploitation and resistance, networks within communities
public/private =/= paid/unpaid or masculine/feminine or work for others/work for self
alienated labor, privatized motherhood
post world war II changes; 80's and after
"middle-class" controls: 64: economic, political, ideological
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2: controlling images: mammies/matriarchs, welfare recipients/black lady, hot mamas
black women's sexuality to be controlled
ideology and mystification, masking social relations
appearance of normal and natural; global selling images
othering, binary thinking: subject/object; subjection and subject formation; subject position
naturecultures; situated knowledges
blaming the victim: 80: not the structural sources of inequality, married to the state
continually renegotiated color hierarchy: 90
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3: voice in resistance, self-definition, agencies
rearticulation: 118: redefinitions and recombinations
contradictions become visible
blues tradition
writers and stories
===
MUSIC:
Sweet Honey in the Rock, "Stranger Blues," from Give Us Your Poor, 2007
Ma Rainey, "Prove It On Me," from Ma Rainey, 1992
Bessie Smith, "Do Your Duty," from Greatest Hits, 2005
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Revising Oneself

2008-09-24T10:51:00.000-04:00

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Critique and criticism-self-criticism

• read: Mohanty, Introduction, Chaps. 1 & 9: Under Western Eyes, and Revisited (pp. 1-42; 221-252)

The second wave in the US is known for its practice of critique, its histories of sectarian politics, and its conflict and confrontations. "Under Western Eyes" works critique in transnational terms in which the US as center of feminist theory comes under scrutiny.

What does one use critique for? how do we connect and reflect on critique, debunking, critical thinking, revisioning, self-criticism?

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Some questions to ask in self-examination as one engages in critique:

Given this critique, what needs to happen instead?

A critique is always a way of positioning one's own priorities and projects. Accountable and engaged critique is not self-satisfied, but puts those making it in some difficult positions....

How hard is it to do what I advocate by making my critique?

Can I do it? Do I do it? How do I do it? Who can do it? How do we do it together?

What resources will doing this take?

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Some key words: (from the Wikipedia):

historical materialism
antihumanism
(humanism)
neoliberalism

Third World
North-South Divide
First Word and renaming Two-Thirds World

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227: terminology

"we are still working with a very imprecise and inadequate analytical language. All we can have access to at given moments is the analytical language that most clearly approximates the features of the world as we understand it."

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228: privilege & solidarity:

"Thus, I am for the Two-Thirds World but with the privileges of the One-Third World."

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terms under critique may be used still, but understood as complex:

224: "I did not argue against all forms of generalization, nor was I privileging the local over the systematic, difference over commonalities, or the discursive over the material.... nor did I define 'Western' and 'Third World' feminism in such oppositional ways that there would be no possibility of solidarity between Western and Third World feminists."

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242-3: feminist solidarity model:

"the links, the relationships, between the local and the global that are foregrounded, and these links are conceptual, material, temporal, contextual, and so on. This framework assumes a comparative focus and analysis of the directionality of power...."

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"the meaning, joy and necessity of political thinking" (p. 1)

Contexts from Introduction:

2: grew up in Mumbai, India; last two decades in US in Urbana, Illinois, Clinton, New York, and Ithica, New York.

of twentieth century:

"struggles for economic and social justice"
"maturing feminist ideas"
"decolonization of the Third World/South"
"rise and spintering of the communist Second World"
"recolonization ...by capitalism"
"consolidation of ethnic, nationalist, and religious fundamentalist movements and natiion-states"

of 70s and 80s (5):

"theoretical limitations of an implicitly masculinist Marxism"
"racialization of gender and class"
"'family' and 'household' on Eurocenric grounds"
"race blindness of 'imperial feminism'"
"racism and heterosexism of the women's movement"

of 80s:

"rise of standpoint epistemology" "link between social location, women's experiences, and their epistemic perspectives"
"national struggles for liberation, and in the economic development and democratization of previously colonized countries"

contemporaneously:

"theorization of feminism and racism, immigration, Eurocentrism, critical white studies, heterosexism, and imperialism"

levels of feminist practice:

daily life: "identities and relational communities"
collective action: "groups, networks, and movements"
theory, pedagogy, and textual creativity: making knowledge

problematic directions in US feminisms:

professionalization leads to "careerist academic feminism"
"corporatization of US culture" leds to "'free-market' feminism"
"critique of essentialist identity politics" leds either "self-serving understandings of identity" or identity is only understood as "strategic"

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Standpoint theory and identity politics, beginning in the middle

2008-09-12T16:37:00.000-04:00

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We begin the section of the course titled
THE MATRIX OF DOMINATION, STANDPOINT THEORY, AND INTERSECTIONALITY

Tuesday, 16 September—What it takes to create knowledges: standpoint theory and identity politics

• read: Collins, Prefaces, Acknowledgements, Parts 1 and 3, Glossary: pp. vi-44; 227-290; 298-301.

Thursday, 18 September—Beginning in the Middle
• DUE: summary sheet 2, completed before and with book group.

Collins' matrix of domination brings together marxist standpoint theories and postmodern theories of subjectivity and positionality to create an afro-centric feminism. In the years in which Black Feminist Thought becomes very influential, a range of identity-based feminisms assert their histories and disciplinarities. Legal studies produce critical race theory. Intersectionality becomes both an umbrella term for many theories of political subjectivity, and also a new social science based methodology across disciplines.

===
"That life is complicated is a fact of great analytic importance." -- Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Intersectionality is a powerful key word in feminism today. It has its intellectual histories and many political meanings and manifestations. For some it is a very general term that includes many kinds of analysis of simultaneous oppressions. For others it is a very specific term that varies in its use from group to group, but lately has come to include particular methodologies for research. In many uses its meanings will slip among the more general and the very specific.

I will use it myself as an umbrella term that includes several kinds of analysis:
• how privilege and oppression have relational forms, meanings, histories and materialities
• how what we know is impacted by our positions within systems of power
• how who we are is socially constructed; and
• how we can change these; that is, change our conditions of oppression and privilege, the very terms of who we are, and the ways we create, share, demonstrate and use our knowledges.

===
Some key terms (as discussed and asserted in the Wikipedia):
"matrix of domination"
"standpoint feminism"

"subject position"
"social construction ism"
"postmodern feminism"

"afrocentrism"
"identity politics"
"critical race theory"
"intersectionality theory"

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Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist Thought is not only a very influential book and set of ideas that have a strong impact on what feminists think of intersectionality today, it also gives us a concrete way to locate these ideas in various histories of thinking, acting, and naming politically.

As Collins comes to revise the book over a twenty year period, these revisions reflect changes in US feminisms as they attempt to grapple with (p. 9):
• "new forms of injustice,"
• "social theories expressed by women emerging from ...diverse groups,"
• forms of thought that "diverge from standard academic theory," and
• attempts to be both specific about particular forms of oppression and also
• be able to generalize from these to others,
• and especially, to create alliances for social justice among many oppressed peoples.

What Collins' revisions attempt to grapple with are continually shifing contexts: dynamic, changing systems of power and emerging forms of resistance and social change.

===
Collins works hard in her book to allow simultaneously for:
• centering on the experiences of black women in order to reveal the contours of a unique configuration of factors as black feminism thought; and also
• creating a framework of interpretation in which such centering is situational.

In other words, this center "pivots" when different social groups examine their own unique configuration of factors that create their own situated standpoint knowledges of oppresion and privilege.

We might consider this a kind of intersectionality in which, this time, black feminisms' "center" reveals a specific set of relations between oppression and privilege, what Collins calls its "matrix of domination."

Another analysis could pivot this center, and create a different "wheel" of relations out of the standpoints of a different oppressed group, say, LGBT political struggles, histories and institutionalized oppressions.

This way of using intersectionality arises from the histories of US activism in which different groups worked out what Benita Roth calls "separate roads to feminism." These groups both overlapped in memberships and politics but also prioritized "organizing one's own" as part of histories in which activating communities within these boundaries were necessary resources for support and resistance. "Category formation" is one name for this kind of boundary-drawing.

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Another way of understanding intersectionality might be imagined with a different metaphor. Instead of many wheels with their different spokes demonstating particular matrices of domination, perhaps something more like a web or net of connections and the contradictions of competing interests among activisms and activist groups themselves.

As groups become self-consciously aware of how they are in competition with each other for resources and for community, some turn to an analysis of coalitions to provide a different framework for understanding intersectionality and working across differences. They engage in what some have called "inclusive solidarity" and they struggle -- not always successfully -- to "organize in a manner in which no group becomes dominant, and where no 'one movement, organization, or social group is in the position of defining the issues and identities that matter.'" (Roth, p. 222)

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While these may be two different ways of understanding intersectionality, they may also overlap, or exist together in that relationship Collins' calls "both/and."

She describes as one coalitional approach "transversal politics." (see pp. 245-249 especially.)

At the same time, both these forms and visions of intersectionality as they arise from social movements are partial ways of interpreting how thought and action work together in direct theory.

The part resources play in the ways groups use and think about intersectionality is one thread we will continue to explore throughout the course.

As you read Mohanty next week, you might consider what she says about such resources, and how she uses intersectional ideas and methods. And how she changes her analysis from her first version of "Under Western Eyes" to its "Revisited" version.

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And when we return to Collins' book again, it will be to explore the specificity of black feminist thought and how such specificity contributes to activism, to feminist analysis, and to the empowerment of black women.

June Jordan "Affirmative Acts"

1999 Berkeley, CA Affirmative Acts: The writing, teaching and activism of ...

2 min - Feb 3, 2008 -

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Check out this review of Jordan's book Affirmative Acts.

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Worlds feminisms made historically: waves, generations, social movements

2008-09-07T11:36:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, 9 September
• read: Berger, WAVE; everyone should read the first three essays; from the remaining thirty choose ten that interest or inspire you most; be ready to say how you chose them.
Thursday, 11 September
• web action: historical sources, read and analyze 3 to talk about and share; one you know already but add to, two you don't so much; see handouts and assignment links on blog
• DUE: summary sheet 1

from Berger's Introduction, pp. 20-1:
"...People will ask me if identify as a Third Waver, or if I think my gneration is part of a new wave, a post-Third Wave, if you will. My answer: 'Good God, we don't need another wave.
Which is not to question the efficacy of waves or dis all those powerful feminists who identify as Third Wavers. I think the whole concept of a // Third Wave was great in its function as a rallying cry during the 1990s. But, really, it's time to quit talking about the rallying cry and, you know, rally to the rallying cry.
Calling this book We Don't Need Another Wave was a deliberate choice, but it is not a dis of the Third Wave. I repeat. This is not a diss of the Third Wave.
It's more of a critique of the ways in which feminism gets discussed in the mainstream media...when it gets discussed at all. There is so much focus on the packaging of our 'message' that we hardly ever talk about what the actual 'message' is. As if there's only one."
"...the connecting theme is this: 'I'm a young feminist and I'm going to work it! Watch me enact my feminisms!'"

Who is Melody Berger? See About the Editor, p. 319.
See The F-WORD zine on MySpace.
See also MySpaceMusic: Melody Berger.

Who published this book? See Selected Titles from Seal Press, p. 320.
See also Seal Press.
What can you tell about the book and press from this material?

What do you think of this so-called "wave terminology"?
Note Lisa Jervis' comments in the Forward to the book, p. 14:
"We've reached the end of the wave terminology's usefulness. What was at first a handy-dandy way to refer to feminism's history, present, and future potential with a single metaphor has become shorthand that invites intellectual laziness, an escape hatch fromthe hard work of distinguishing between core beliefs and a cultural moment.... Writers and theorists love oppositional categories--they make things so much easier to talk about...."

Who is Lisa Jervis? See note p. 18.
Lisa Jervis profile at BITCH

Why does the book begin with "Womyn Before" by Alix Olsen?
Listen (from iTunes): "Womyn Before."
See also MySpaceMusic: Alix Olson.

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Feminist historians and social movement theorists have worked hard to demonstrate how feminist theory is directly created within and for social movements. Kinds of feminisms have different historical trajectories and produce a range of forms in which feminist theory is created, used and shared.

"Watch me enact my feminisms!"

Noel Sturgeon and the idea of "direct theory."

Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory, and Political Action

By Noël Sturgeon

Published by Routledge, 1997

"Examining the development of ecofeminism from the 1980s antimilitarist movement to an internationalist ecofeminism in the 1990s. Sturgeon explores the ecofeminist notions of gender, race, and nature. She moves from detailed historical investigations of important manifestations of US ecofeminism to a broad analysis of international environmental politics."

Wikipedia on: direct action :
"Direct action is political action which happens outside normal political channels via indirect actions such as electing representatives. Direct action is often associated with movements or groups who have little influence over normal political processes.... Nonviolent activities include strikes, workplace occupations, sit-ins, demonstrations, sabotage, vandalism and graffiti. More violent actions include riots and revolutionary/guerrilla warfare. Direct actions are often (but not always) a form of civil disobedience and thus often violate criminal law.... Less confrontational forms of this definition of direct action include establishing radical social centers, and performing street theatre."

"...social movements are involved in theorizing both the relations of power existing at particular conjunctures as well as previous traditions of opposition through their forms of action and their particular political rhetorics, and I call this aspect of movements 'direct theory." Sturgeon 1997: 5

Nancy Whittier shifting the idea of "feminist generations."

Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement

By Nancy Whittier

Published by Temple University Press, 1995

"The radical feminist movement has undergone significant transformation over the past four decades-from the direct action of the 1960s and 1970s to the backlash against feminism in the 1980s and 1990s... contemporary radical feminism is very much alive. It is sustained through protests, direct action, feminist bookstores, rape crisis centers, and cultural activities like music festivals and writers workshops, which Whittier argues are integral-and political-aspects of the movement's survival. Her analysis includes discussions of a variety of both liberal and radical organizations...."

The usual ways of thinking about generations including feminist ones:

• As mother-daughter relationships; as student-teacher relationships:
These are two common models of generational difference used by feminists; they depict generational differences in pairs, as pedagogical or educational and thus as age specific, one proceeding to another while also mutually exclusive. Any power differences appear relatively benign and "familial", generational control is imagined as parental, pedagogical and inevitable.

• Waves as historical periods:
First Wave feminism: 19thc and early 20thc feminisms as named by 1970s feminists
Second Wave feminism: feminisms of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Third Wave feminism: feminisms of the 1990s and perhaps after.

• The Third Wave from 1963-1973:
Third Wave Agenda's 1997 model is age-stratified, defining the Third Wave as feminists born between 1963-1973.
This model builds upon but alters slightly the popular notion of feminist histories in "waves" or distinct historical periods by focusing on when activists are born rather than mixed aged collectivities.

• Entry into activism: Whittier's 1995 model with micro-cohorts:
Whittier's model challenges age-groupings or life-stage as definitions of generations, rather generations are defined as collectives who become first politically active at the same time, yet don't necessarily agree among themselves, and diverge in micro-cohorts. Two large generations: the Second Wave and the Third Wave.

The availability of public and collective resources for social change is pivotal to the experiences of these cohorts.

Second Wave micro-cohorts:
=initiators (1969-1971)
=founders (1972-1973)
=joiners (1974-1978)
=sustainers (1979-1984)

Third Wave micro-cohorts (don't have names just descriptions): (AKA post feminist); understood by Whittier to redefine meanings of "feminism" by conflict with Second Wave building new collective identities (mid 1980s and later):

= micro-cohort 1: reluctant to use term "feminist" because of media associations and initial belief that feminism had completed its political tasks; rethinks these assumptions over next ten years and becomes outspoken and pro-feminist

= micro-cohort 2: establishes earlier continuity with Second Wave & esp. with radical forms, disruptive social and cultural action.

Katie's essay on web for further reading: Theorizing Structures in Women's Studies
section on Whittier's generations
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Why do "womyn before" matter from your point of view?
BE PREPARED TO DISCUSS THIS NEXT CLASS! with examples from readings and websites.
NPR: 1968's Miss America understands that the women's movement made a difference in her life....

Wikipedia Feminism Portal
This is a fabulous site -- you may wish to become part of its continuing incarnations....
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Books for our Course & Preliminary Syllabus

2008-08-12T19:47:00.000-04:00

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Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

By Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Published by Duke University Press, 2003

ISBN 0822330210

Bringing together classic and new writings of the trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders addresses some of the most pressing and complex issues facing contemporary feminism. Forging vital links between daily life and collective action and between theory and pedagogy, Mohanty has been at the vanguard of Third World and international feminist thought and activism for nearly two decades. This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anti-capitalist struggles.

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

By Patricia Hill Collins

Published by Routledge, 2000

ISBN 0415924847

In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She not only provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde, but she shows the importance of self-defined knowledge for group empowerment. In the tenth anniversary edition of this award-winning work, Patricia Hill Collins expands the basic arguments of the first edition by adding several important new themes. A new discussion of heterosexism as a system of power, an expanded treatment of images of Black womanhood, U.S. Black feminism's connections to Black Diasporic feminisms, and more attention to the importance of social class and nationalism all appear in the new edition.

We Don't Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists

By Melody Berger

Contributor Melody Berger

Published by Seal Press, 2006

ISBN 1580051820

An analysis of issues shaping the feminist movement today, told through a collection of essays by young activists, explores such topics as the commonalities shared by feminists of all ages, abuse against women, and the ways in which the feminist label has been maligned.

The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex

By Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, Incite! Women of Color Against Violence

Published by South End Press, 2007

ISBN 0896087662

A $1.3 trillion industry, the US nonprofit sector is the world's seventh largest economy. From art museums and university hospitals to think tanks and church charities, over 1.5 million organizations of staggering diversity share the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) designation, if little else. Many social justice organizations have joined this world, often blunting political goals to satisfy government and foundation mandates. But even as funding shrinks and government surveillance rises, many activists often find it difficult to imagine movement-building outside the nonprofit model. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded gathers original essays by radical activists from around the globe who are critically rethinking the long-term consequences of this investment. Together with educators and nonprofit staff they finally name the "nonprofit industrial complex" and ask hard questions....

The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

By Donna Jeanne Haraway

Published by Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003

ISBN 0971757585

from Amazon:
The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in "significant otherness." In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway's answer to her own Cyborg Manifesto, where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just "cyborgs for earthly survival" but also, in a more doggish idiom, "shut up and train."

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Here is our Preliminary Syllabus as of 1 Sept. 08. It will be completed asap. But this gives you some idea of where we are going.

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http://femtheoumd.blogspot.com/

theories of feminism, thinking and action

WMST 400, Fall 2008 UMD
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm at HBK 0103

PREREQUISITES: designed for upper division undergraduates who have taken at least one feminist course, preferably from the women's studies department. Some other courses may be used to satisfy this prerequisite, but need approval. Email Katie King for interview if necessary.

Professor: Katie King
Office: 2101F Woods Hall, University of Maryland, College Park
Katie’s office hours: 2:30-3:30 pm T & W
Office phone: 301.405.7294 (voice mail)
Email: katking@umd.edu
Homepage: http://www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking/

Class Blog at: http:// femtheoumd.blogspot.com/
ELMS login at: https://elms.umd.edu/

course description

it's all about thinking about thinking.

Does that mean it's not also about action? Well, that's one of the controversies of feminist theory -- how do thinking and acting connect? How can we describe and enact the ways they create each other?

How we see the world, what we do in it, what we can imagine changing and moving and shaking and shifting....

theory makes worlds. let's do it now, together, in this class and in the world.

This course is required for all women's studies majors, minors and certificate students. At the same time it tends to attract folks for whom women's studies is not their primary field. For the purposes of this pivotal class in women's studies you are invited, no matter what your primary field is, to make feminist theory central to all your work, be it academic, practical, theoretical, activist. But understand that the course is also properly and primarily geared to open upon some of the technical aspects of women's studies and feminist theory for our majors. Still, women's studies strives to create open communities of use. Ours here is an active and ambitious learning community for theory.

To create our own community of theorists and activists, we want to all get to know each other and work with each other. All students please do come to office hours to just talk. I want to get to know each of you personally!

We are also lucky to have an undergraduate teaching assistant for this course, Renee Davidson, a women's studies major who loves feminist theory and loves sharing it. Renee will be working with our on-going book groups. We be talking more about this in class, but basically everyone will belong to book groups over the semester and will work in them to help each other read, understand, and think about how to use the course books and any other reading, research or activist materials. Renee will be the team leader advising book groups and sharing her skills and knowledges about how to read feminist theory, how to approach a women's studies course, and how to connect the scholarly aspects of the class to the many political, personal and social change goals feminists have.

Both Renee and I want to know how the class is working for you, what touches and excites you, how your projects are going. Let me know in office hours or after class when you need help, or any special accommodations, the sooner the better.

Folks with disabilities or who need time from class to observe religious holidays, please contact Katie ASAP to make any arrangements necessary.

we will have a class blog as well as use course mail, so be sure you have access to internet resources, perhaps in labs across campus. Come and talk to me if you are having difficulties getting access to these resources. Plan on visiting our blog site and reading email at the very least twice a week, and not just a few minutes before class. You are encouraged to bring laptops to class and to use the campus wireless network. We want to include new media skills as elements in our learning community, and teach each other the best ways to use them for academic work.

required readings (also on reserve at McKeldin):
For your convenience I have ordered all the course textbooks for purchase at the campus book store. But, remember that while you are required to READ them, you are not required to BUY them. I have also requested them all on reserve at McKeldin Library Reserves (at the Circulation Desk) for any of you to use for 24 hrs at a time. You could read them there or at any library you can get them from, taking good notes; you could xerox parts for yourself; you can share books with each other; and you can buy them anywhere you can find them including online used, or order them individually anywhere as you like. So, borrow and share with each other, or find them anyway you can. However, do not wait until the last minute (the night before) to discover one is not available on reserve (it does happen even if I've requested it, and often if someone else is using it), at any bookstore, online, etc. Be sure you have secured access LONG before we are going to read it. Finding a copy to read is part of your job in the class!

In the past I ordered all course books from Vertigo Books, a wonderful independent bookstore located on the edge of campus, because I wanted to support the bookstore and help it to survive in College Park. It is such a contribution to the community life of College Park and our university! Supporting them, I felt, works to counter the large economic consolidations of the publishing industry; it's a way of using your economic power to promote good feminist political practice. However, university rules have made this option unfeasible, for classes and for Vertigo too. Still, I would like to encourage you to check the place out anyway. When you go there, be sure to sign up for notice of when authors come to talk about their books. Vertigo regularly has exciting events of this sort. The bookstore is on the corner between HW 1 and Knox Rd, across the street from the Cornerstone restaurant: 7346 Baltimore Avenue. The telephone number there is: 301.779.9300.

Here's the book list with ISBN numbers to make it easier for you to order them yourselves if you want to do that: do get the 10th anniversary edition of Black Feminist Thought if possible; however the older editions are usable in the course too. Otherwise, any edition is fine:

required:

• Melody Berger. 2006. We Don't Need Another Wave. Seal Press. 1580051820
• Patricia Hill Collins. 2000. Black Feminist Thought. Routledge. 0415924847
• Donna Haraway. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm. 0971757585
• Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. 2007. The Revolution Will Not be Funded. South End. 0896087662
• Chandra Talpade Mohanty. 2003. Feminism Without Borders. Duke. 0822330210

recommended and also on reserve at McKeldin:

TRANSNATIONAL AMERICA 978-0-8-2233544-3 GREWAL
SEPARATE ROADS TO FEMINISM 978-0-5-2152972-3 ROTH

assignments and class organization, in the context of the pleasures of a learning community

learning communities

In this course you are not just learning what others know, but, in the intellectual traditions of women's studies, you too are creating new knowledge, in your own research, activities and synthesis! Our objective in this course is together to create a vibrant learning community. This is an exciting responsibility – we have obligations to each other in a learning community, but even more, we keep close to the whole point of belonging to knowledge worlds: making, sharing, using, demonstrating and patterning knowledge.

In this spirit, each assignment is created to provide a specific learning experience. Grades matter but not as much as the experience does. Grades will be distributed and papers returned twice during the semester in order to emphasize the learning process itself. But you may come to office hours with Katie at any time to discuss grades, papers and how you are doing in the class in detail.

Keeping up with assignments, carefully preparing for class, participating in discussion and in analysis, and opening up to the implications of what we come to know in the course, these are all elements of a leaning community that we will sometimes talk about as well as implement. This is an important way to get to know others too. Intellectual friendship is one of the great enjoyments that college offers, sometimes lasting throughout one's life. This could be a place where you make life-long friends and learn skills and pleasures you will find valuable for many years. This is where we want to put our intentions, motivations and energies.

Half the assignments will be written and half will be presentations. Some people are better at one or the other. Encourage yourself to work with the sort you usually find harder. And encourage others who may have different skills and pleasures than you do, sharing with them what makes it easier or more fun for you. It may seem rather silly to call class work fun, and admittedly it may not be especially relaxing or recreational. But I am the sort of person who finds intellectual work fun; that's why I am a professor of women's studies. And I would like to share with you as much I can what this kind of fun is about, how to cultivate it and recognize it, and how to carry it with you throughout your life.

finding and reading

So the fun of it all starts with finding interesting stuff. One place is the library. Before the Web, the library was usually the very best place. Today the Web is also a great place, and some stuff is in both places. But some stuff is only in the library. We will be doing a lot of work on the Web, especially in the beginning, and the lecture part of the class will run from there. But having intellectual fun requires coming to enjoy libraries. While our library is good in many ways, I admit it's not the most fun library I have ever used. Over your life, find libraries that are. And do get into using ours, even if it is a bit confusing in organization and is not as comfortable or attractive as would be nicer. It does have open stacks, which are great for finding things unexpectedly. It does have a wonderful staff that will guide you in learning research skills and maybe pleasures. And it has many electronic resources that will help you learn to use the Web too more effectively.

The biggest piece for class however will be the reading. We are deliberately reading things that are not all alike, but are all forms in which feminist theory is shared. Some readings are more difficult than others, some are more immediately accessible than others, some have technical or scholarly bits that will require careful close attention. All of them are fun for someone, whether or not they are, at least immediately, fun for you. Getting a sense of the range of feminist theory means learning to read difficult scholarly material without being intimidated by it. None of our books are among the very most difficult stuff. Even the most difficult of our books are, relatively speaking, carefully written to be shared as widely as possible. But they are not necessarily specifically written for an undergraduate women's studies class in feminist theory. They are not textbooks in that sense. They are written for some group or groups of feminist theorists. You may or may not be a member of those groups. Learning to read these things is a skill we will address directly in class. But here are a few points to keep in mind:

• First, be willing to REread, perhaps many times. Especially so if you find this book valuable.
Don't assume any book can be understood in one reading, or that it is the author's job to make this book something easy to consume. Be realistic about how much one can understand on first reading a book, even on first working with a book over several readings.

• Second, that means, don't be intimidated.
Books of real importance introduce us to questions that no one has easy answers to. Think instead of being invited into the most interesting concerns that humans have had over long stretches of time. Now it's your turn to take up these issues and come to care about them, to add your bit to the range of collective human knowledge, to learn how to create knowledge, to share it, to show others how to use it, to be savvy in what you do with it yourself.

• Third, work with the book in layers: notice what's easy and get that first.
Only after getting the first easiest layer do you take up the next level of difficulty or confusion. When you do, pick out the most interesting bit of it next. See what connects to that, and work out where this might take you. Add in bits and layers, reading, checking the web, talking to others, then re-reading. Real reading happens in bits and bursts; it is highly interactive and it takes time.

• Finally, if it is hard and confusing, swim around in the difficulty and the chaos a bit
-- without that stage of engagement as well, you cannot really believe in the depth of these human concerns and why all this matters. Enjoy the spaces of non-knowing and the excitements of learning yet to happen. Have some trust, as well as willingness to be in the spaces of not-yet-knowing. This can be an intellectual, emotional, spiritual and political experience of importance. Check it out.

how the class will be organized

On Tuesdays we will have some lecturing time. Some days this will take up the whole class period. Other times it will take up a big chuck of it. Thursdays we will be mostly discussing together or presenting to each other. In other words, Tuesdays will be more about taking things in, absorbing them and learning to put them in context. Thursdays will be more about actively using what we come to know, sharing it others, thinking on one's feet, brainstorming and speculating, figuring out how it all fits together. Both require careful preparation before class, the most important being keeping up with the reading. You won't get as much from the lecturing part if you haven't read the stuff, and you certainly will have a hard time participating and discussing something you haven't read. Some educators call these forms passive and active learning. One can take in and absorb more complicated stuff than one can work with and work out, at least at first. We do both in the class, but we also realize that active learning requires patience and imagination, a bit of courage to try things out without knowing something for sure yet, and a willingness to play around with being right and wrong, guessing and redoing.

The on-going book groups will usually meet for about 25 mins on Thursdays at the beginning of class, when together they will fill out the book group sheet to help collect and organize thoughts about the materials. You can always do this individually before class too. Occasionally the groups will meet just before we end on Tuesdays. So you really do need to have done the reading by Tuesday properly speaking, and then probably do re-reading for Thursday.

assignments

everyone will contribute to on-going book group work: summary sheets, learning analysis, log book.

• Participating actively in book group, turning in summary sheets and other preparations.
For example, what are three important points from the reading? How do you outline the argument? Name a key term. These and other questions are part of the summary sheets you will fill out for each week's reading. Group work will include comments on who does what. Everyone will fill out sheet in class (and maybe before); one person will turn one in during class; that person will need a xerox of someone else's sheet for their use through the course. The final week of class will be devoted to the learning analysis, which is the culminating book group activity. And a log book of assignments completed, dates turned in, and so on, will be collected 3 times during the semester, and will be considered part of this on-going summarizing. 1/3 of your grade comes from summary sheets, learning analysis, and log book submissions.

everyone will also do a paper and a presentation.

Both will require additional research as well as keeping up with class readings. Much of the research will emerge out of lectures and their resources, so attending lectures faithfully and taking good notes will make this work a lot easier.

• Forms in which feminist theory is shared and ways of classifying feminist theories.
Standpoint theory? Black feminist thought? Postmodernism and posthumanism? How do we describe the varieties of feminist theories and the forms they take? You and a partner will take up some of these issues, decided in consultation with Katie, in either a presentation for the class, or, a week later, in a shared paper. Whether you do a presentation or a paper will be determined by lot. 1/3 of your grade.

• A project in making or using feminist theory with attention to histories of feminist movements.
How did second wave feminists produce theory in CR groups? What happens when you work in a similar group? How did the separate routes to feminism taken by some identity groups affect what counts as theory and how we understand social change? What does globalization have to do with feminist practices? These and similar projects with attention to histories of feminist movements will focus this assignment. Katie and Renee will help you figure out which issues you want to think and know more about in either a presentation for the class, or, a week later, in a paper. Whether you do a presentation or a paper will be determined by lot. 1/3 of your grade.

SUMMARY OF GRADED MATERIALS:
• grps and preps: 1/3 grade: 7 summary sheets, 4 submissions logbooks, 1 learning analysis
• paper: 1/3 grade
• presentation: 1/3 grade

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR WOMEN'S STUDIES MAJORS, MINORS AND CERTIFICATE STUDENTS! IN ADDITION you should turn in a hard copy of all graded written assignments for ALL women's studies courses to Laura Nichols, your women's studies advisor. RECORD THIS IN YOUR LOGBOOK! After verifying whether you are a major, minor or certificate student, all identifying information will be removed. These papers are collected so that our department can assess how we are doing in getting across concepts, skills, and approaches from this field of women's studies to our students. This is not an assessment of students, but another way to assess our department's work. YOUR COOPERATION IS ESSENTIAL. Please take this need seriously and help us collect this data. All departments are required to conduct these assessments now and in our department we want to make ours as women's studies friendly as possible!

Wondering how grades are determined? What they mean on your paper?

• A work is excellent, unusually creative and/or analytically striking
• B is fine work of high quality, though not as skilled, ambitious, or carefully edited as A
• C is average work fulfilling the assignment; may be hasty, drafted once, showing difficulties with grammar, spelling, word choice
• D work is below average or incomplete; shows many difficulties or can't follow instructions
• F work is not sufficient to pass; unwillingness to do the work, or so many difficulties unable to complete

See http://www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking/teaching/250/grades.html
for more discussion of each grade.

Class Blogs and Coursemail

When you registered for this course the email address that you gave to Testudo will be the place where you will receive announcements for the class on coursemail. If you have not already gotten such coursemail then you are not regularly checking that particular address and are using another email location as your preferred address. YOU ARE REQUIRED to regularly view coursemail, at least twice a week. Any announcements about cancellations due to weather or other considerations, and general class requirements will be sent out on coursemail and you need to see them quickly. So, either make a point of checking THAT email address, or redirect or seek help to redirect this mail to your preferred email address. To get help go to OIT's Help Desk at the Computer Center.

the blog for our entire class is located at: http:// femtheoumd.blogspot.com/
This is where graphics, lecture materials and notes, communications and assignment help, and other vital class information and presentations are displayed. This too needs to be regularly checked out. Your assignments will be easier to do if you stay very familiar with this website.

We will also have an ELMS class site. We will probably be using this only occasionally. Check in there, note the first announcement (about the blog address), and keep your connection handy. Probably we will be using this site to keep track of your assignments. If so, you will turn in hard copy and also upload assignments here. You would not receive credit for any assignment until BOTH of these versions are submitted. If you have any difficulties with this, come to office hours for help.

what to do when you miss class:
• TALK TO AT LEAST TWO CLASS BUDDIES IMMEDIATELY. Before you even come back to class, call them up or email them and find out if any special assignments are due the day you return, and make sure that you know about any changes in the syllabus. Try to have done the reading and be as prepared as possible to participate in class when you return.
• MAKE A DATE TO MEET WITH CLASS BUDDY TO GET NOTES AND DISCUSS WHAT WENT ON IN CLASS WHILE YOU WERE GONE. You are responsible for what happened in class while you were gone. As soon as possible, get caught up with notes, with discussions with buddies and finally with all the readings and assignments. Always talk with class buddies first.
• AFTER YOU HAVE GOTTEN CLASS NOTES AND TALKED ABOUT WHAT WENT ON IN CLASS WITH BUDDIES, THEN MAKE APPOINTMENT TO SEE KATIE. If you just miss one class, getting the notes and such should be enough. But if you've been absent for more than a week, be sure you make an appointment with Katie, and come in and discuss what is going on. She wants to know how you are doing and how she can help. Or, while you are out, if it's as long as a week, send Katie email at katking@umd.edu and let her know what is happening with you, so she can figure out what sort of help is needed.
• BE SURE TO CHECK IN WITH OUR UTA, Renee Davidson. Her email is: rdavidsn@umd.edu. She also wants to help you out, and needs to understand why you were absent, since work with your book group will be part of your grade. She will ask who you've been getting notes from and so on, so have done that already if at all possible.
• IF YOU ARE OUT FOR ANY EXTENDED TIME be sure you contact both Katie and Renee. Keep them up to date on what is happening, so that any arrangements necessary can be made. If you miss too much class you will have to retake the course at another time. But if you keep in contact, depending on the situation, perhaps accommodations can be made. Since attendance is crucial for almost all assignments and thus for your final grade, don't leave this until the end. LET US KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING so that we can help as much and as soon as possible.

Check our blog and http://www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking/teaching/250/missmore250.html
for these instructions.

Reading, Writing & Web Assignments

Readings are of several sorts: some will be discussed in depth in class, others are background reading to enrich discussion and class and research experiences.

Generally speaking with some exceptions, Tuesdays are lecture days, Thursdays are discussion days. Attendance both days is essential.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THEORY, FEMINISMS, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Tuesday, 2 September—Welcome to Our Course!
• HANDOUTS: syllabus, histories and documents handout, two summary sheets
What do we know coming to the class?

Thursday, 4 September—Theory makes worlds
• read the syllabus carefully, come to know it thoroughly
What will we do in this feminist theory class? a focus on creating a learning community to share our feminist knowledge worlds and participate in social change.

Tuesday, 9 September—Worlds feminisms made historically: waves, generations, social movements
• read: Berger, WAVE; everyone should read the first three essays; from the remaining thirty choose ten that interest or inspire you most; be ready to say how you chose them. For the next class you will do some web work on feminist historical sources and will fill out your first summary sheet to make connections between the web sources and this reading. You may wish to work on these at the same time, starting now. So look at the next class assignments too to see how to do this.
Feminist historians and social movement theorists have worked hard to demonstrate how feminist theory is directly created within and for social movements. Kinds of feminisms have different historical trajectories and produce a range of forms in which feminist theory is created, used and shared.

Thursday, 11 September—Feminist historical sources and web worlds
• web action: historical sources, read and analyze 3 to talk about and share; one you know already but add to, two you don't so much; see handouts and assignment links on blog
• DUE: summary sheet 1, completed before and with book group; this one is slightly modified for our first assignment connecting readings and web sources.
Feminist theory emerges from concrete complexities and historically active social movements. Why do we need to know about these histories? Take some time to notice how some learning also requires unlearning.

THE MATRIX OF DOMINATION, STANDPOINT THEORY, AND INTERSECTIONALITY

Tuesday, 16 September—What it takes to create knowledges: standpoint theory and identity politics
• read: Collins, Prefaces, Acknowledgements, Parts 1 and 3, Glossary: pp. vi-44; 227-290; 298-301.
Collins' matrix of domination brings together marxist standpoint theories and postmodern theories of subjectivity and positionality to create an afro-centric feminism. In the years in which Black Feminist Thought becomes very influential, a range of identity-based feminisms assert their histories and disciplinarities. Legal studies produce critical race theory. Intersectionality becomes both an umbrella term for many theories of political subjectivity, and also a new social science based methodology across disciplines.

Thursday, 18 September—Beginning in the Middle
• DUE: summary sheet 2, completed before and with book group.
How do we learn to put in context many theories all at once? There is no "beginning" to start from really, although histories help to track developments. Feminist generations keep recreating their own beginning, but at some point have to come to terms with feminisms that are already at work. How does one be simultaneously an initiator, a founder, a joiner and a sustainer? How do you do this yourself?

Tuesday, 23 September—Revising Oneself: critique and criticism-self-criticism
• read: Mohanty, Introduction, Chaps. 1 & 9: Under Western Eyes, and Revisited (pp. 1-42; 221-252)
The second wave in the US is known for its practice of critique, its histories of sectarian politics, and its conflict and confrontations. "Under Western Eyes" works critique in transnational terms in which the US as center of feminist theory comes under scrutiny.

Thursday, 25 September—Accountabilities
• DUE: summary sheet 3, completed before and with book group.
What does one use critique for? how do we connect and reflect on critique, debunking, critical thinking, revisioning, self-criticism?

Tuesday, 30 September—NO CLASS, Rosh Hashanah

THOUGHT AND CORE THEMES FOR FEMINISTS

Thursday, 2 October—Moving among knowledge worlds
• read: Collins, Part 2: choose at least three of the seven chapters to read carefully. Pick at least one that is something you know very little about experientially.
How do Collins' revisions from a transnational perspective alter the core themes of Black Feminist Thought? Why are these the core themes? When are they specific to Black feminism and when are they generalizable?

Tuesday, 7 October—Images, oppressions, relationships, self-definitions
• DUE: summary sheet 4, completed before and with book group; turn in logbook for the first time.
How do images travel and why? How do oppressions relate across differences? What relationships need to be nurtured by feminism and have nurtured it in various identity groupings? Why does self-definition matter?

Thursday, 9 October—NO CLASS, Yom Kippur

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MUSIC:
Le Tigre. "Dyke March 2001." Feminist Sweepstakes. 2003.

Toshi Reagon. "Have You Heard?" from album Have You Heard? 2005.

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