Instructor: Dr. Alifa Bandali
Examination in depth of selected topics in gender, race, and sexuality. Consult the Workday Student course schedule for course offerings. May be repeated for credit. Recommended pre-requisites: either all of GRSJ 101, GRSJ 102 or third-year standing.
Term 1
Description: Emotions and affect have injected ‘the feeling body’ into academic discourse, from intersectional studies, critical race theory to gender studies. In particular, knowledge production that takes seriously affect and emotions challenge what has become a part of dominant ways of knowing that is recognizable through terms such as ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ that remove experience and politics from the conversation and dialogue. This course is interested and takes seriously the role of emotions; the nexus between everyday life and emotions; the importance of knowledge production and emotions to examine: “What do emotions do?”
As the Feminist Killjoy Sara Ahmed states: “The ‘doing’ of emotions…to consider the relation between emotions and (in)justice, as a way of rethinking what it is that emotions do.” (2014, 191) This course begins with the premise of what emotions do and builds on this sentiment to explore what can we do with them. We will trace affect and emotions not solely from academic trajectories, but its uses in women of colour and marginalized experiences through writings, activism, scholarship and politics. We will consider emotions such as anger, happiness and empathy (to name a few), along with themes related to the nation-state, popular culture and the media, institutional places and spaces and more.