ENGL 53.52 Living a Feminist Life: Archive, Text, Action
This class will examine how “knowledge” about women’s, femmes’ and non-binary people’s lives have been constructed in text, and how this knowledge determines and impacts the choices we have and make about loving, working, thinking, and living. Over the first six weeks we’ll do a deep reading of Sara Ahmed’s book, Living a Feminist Life, putting her ideas in conversation with thinkers like Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde, Gayatri Spivak, Valerie Solanas, Angela Davis, Jose Muñoz, and bell hooks. In the second half of the course, we’ll work together through discussion and student suggestions to construct a corpus of women’s and femmes’ life “writing”—TV, poetry, music, journalism, memes, theory, and memoir—to discover how image and the written word continue to shape feminist lives, and how femmes’ and non-binary people’s lived experience in turn shapes feminist, pro-femme, and queer discourse. Through weekly short writing exercises, students will consider how their own intimate relationships—with parents, partners, children, neighbors, or friends—can become sites of intersectional feminist activism, and sources of strength and knowledge to be carried into the broader world of public engagement and intervention. In the final weeks of the course, we will think seriously about the relationship between learning and living, and collectively interrogate the boundary between writing and living as modes of feminist praxis.
Cross Listed Courses
WGSS 66.35