(3 cr. hrs.)

Mon. / Wed. 11:15AM - 12:30PM

How is gender created, contested, and made meaningful through
narrative in America? How do the stories we tell produce both
possibilities and limitations in the ways we imagine masculinity,
femininity and the transgression of boundaries?  Most broadly, this
class asks students to think rigorously and creatively about
gendered experience in America, through the perspective of its
representation in narrative.  We will study texts from multiple
American arenas, in multiple time periods, from both far away and
close to home. We will look at various performances of gender and
sexuality within a wide range of narrative genres (both scholarly
and popular), including ethnography, fiction, film, memoir, the
graphic novel, and the Internet.  We will pay particularly close
attention to expressive responses to dominant gender narratives
before, during and after the rise of 1970s feminism, and to
narratives of transformation in topics ranging from psychoanalysis
to TV makeovers. Through lecture, students will be introduced to
relevant concepts in narrative and social theory. Texts may include
in whole or in part:

Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in
Conversation Danticat, Edwidge.  Krik? Krak!

Limon, Jose. Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in
Mexican-American South Texas Freud, Sigmund.

Dora:Fragment of an Analysis of a Case History Adams, Rachel, ed.

The Masculinity Studies Reader.

Rosen, Jonathan. Eve’s Apple