INSTRUCTORS:
Melanie Boyd
Office: Main Hall 204
Phone: (832)-6670
Email: boydm@lawrence.edu
Office hours: 1:00-3:00 M, or by appointment
Terry Gottfried
Office: Briggs Hall 311
Phone: (832)-6706
Email: rewgottt@lawrence.edu
Office hours: 10:00-11:00 MTF, or by appointment
CLASS MEETING TIME: 8:30-9:40 MWF, Briggs Hall 225
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the study of gender from the intellectual perspectives of the natural and social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. To do this, we will be exploring gender as it is understood from each of these perspectives, by reading books and articles, viewing movies and videos, analyzing data we have collected, and creating and experiencing artistic expressions.
Gender is a powerful category of analysis: we use it as a variable in order to understand a given situation or phenomenon more fully. Yet as we gather data about the differences between men’s and women’s experiences, as we better understand the lived reality of being male or female in contemporary American culture, we begin to see that gender organizes not simply experience but also power. We begin to study gender in a more abstract way, not only as a category of analysis, but also as a category for analysis. If our first question is “What does gender do?”, our second is “How does gender work?” By training our attention on the social operations of gender itself, by asking how it is constructed and maintained, this class necessarily places gender alongside other similar classificatory categories such as sexuality, race, class, and age—for these are categories that are constructed in and through one another, not in isolation.
In our effort to understand the operations of gender as it entangles with other cultural categories, we will look at the work of biologists, novelists, historians, artists, anthropologists, and psychologists. Our aim will be to see what kinds of knowledge these people have produced, and to think about what their methods of gaining and disseminating knowledge might (and might not) be able to do for us. In addition to our original questions about gender, we will ask a number of other questions about knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge. How does a natural scientist's approach to the issue of gender differ from that of a social scientist? And how do both approaches differ from those of a literary critic or a cultural historian? What might be the strengths and weaknesses, the advantages and disadvantages, of the different approaches? And to what extent can the knowledge generated by each discipline be reconciled or synthesized?
To sharpen our sense of how disciplinary traditions might affect our knowledge of gender, we will try, through a series of “practica,” to gain some first-hand experience of those traditions. Experiential learning may tell us at least as much as reading and class discussion. After performing a scientific experiment or conducting an interview, we should be in a better position to understand what the powers and limits of different disciplines might be.