Course Listings - Spring 2003
Women’s Studies Course Description
Spring 2003
Women’s Studies 100 – Women, Culture, Politics, and Society, Askeland
Women, Culture, Politics, and Society is an introductory Women’s
Studies course. Participants in this course will bring differing
levels of experience, interests, and talents, which this course will
seek to recognize and value as a strength. Together, we’ll seek to
understand the complex experiences of women from a variety of backgrounds.
One major premise of Women's Studies is that a focus on women's lives
can help us to create new frameworks for exploring gender--frameworks
that help us more accurately describe and understand the amazing
variety of lived experiences of all people on this planet, regardless
of gender. While we will primarily examine the lives and experiences
of women in the United States, we will also explore the way individual
lives are inevitably intertwined with global issues and questions.
Thus, as a class we will think critically about the influence of
historical events, race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, ability,
colonialism and technology on women's lives. In doing so, we will
work with the research methods of traditional fields (history,
psychology, sociology, literature), and their attendant theories,
but also invoke the creative challenge that Women’s Studies offers
to traditional, academic ways of knowing social and cultural life.
In particular, since it arose out of the civil rights movements
of the 1960s and 70s, Women’s Studies insists on an intense and
necessary relationship between theory and practice. Thus, beyond
two papers, a midterm exam and a final exam, this course will require
all students to participate in some form of gender-related activism
as part of a final project. This course is writing intensive.
