Introduction to contemporary feminist theory
Katherine Gibson, Elizabeth Grosz and Rose Lucas
8 points * 3 hours per week * Second semester * Clayton * Prerequisites: A first-year sequence
This subject considers a number of theories which have informed contemporary thought in order to focus upon their implications for women and, more particularly, upon the range of feminist interventions into these theories and debates. Drawing upon a variety of traditional disciplinary concerns, this will involve an examination of issues such as the construction of subjectivities; class and power structures; sexualities; linguistic, economic and broadly cultural manifestations of phallocentrism; the formation of epistemologies; tensions between a politics of identity and a postmodern critique of representation. The subject considers the implications of these critical paradigms and the challenges offered to them by a diversity of feminist theorists such as Luce Irigarary, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler, Juliet Mitchell, Michelle Barrett, Christine Delphy, Lois McNay and Elizabeth Grosz. In order to provide most effectively points of coherent engagement with this diversity of positions, this study is organised about selected extract analysis from writers such as Freud, Foucault, Marx and Derrida, read in juxtaposition with explicit feminist adaptations, challenges, repudiations and reinscriptions. Within this framework of textual and theoretical vision and re-vision, the subject contextualises some of the range of feminist theories and methodologies at the crucial site of their deviation from dominant cultural and disciplinary models.
Assessment
Two short essays (1500 words each): 50% total * One major essay (2500-3000 words): 50%
Required texts
A reading pack will be available from the Centre for Women's Studies.