| On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Print. |
On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant
GRSJ 224C: Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice in Literature
Instructor: Dr. Kim Snowden
Techniques of literary study, with emphasis on intersectionality and the ways in which gender is represented in literature and contributions of feminism and gender studies to literary studies.
Term 1-2
6 credits
GRSJ 224C: Feminist Re/visions: Folk & Fairy Tales
Description: In this year-long course we will examine the history of the fairy tale across cultures, read traditional tales, and consider the representation of gender, sexuality, and race in contemporary fairy tales from an intersectional feminist perspective and with a focus on decolonizing knowledge about storytelling and fairy-tale scholarship.
Readings will include a selection of essays and articles from feminist and fairy-tale scholarship, a variety of traditional fairy tales, and fairy-tale retellings from contemporary authors such as Angela Carter, Nalo Hopkinson, Emma Donoghue, Soman Chainani, and Neil Gaiman.We will also examine some fairy-tale films (including Disney) the use of fairy motifs in popular culture, film, and television taking vampires as a case study and using examples from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and various reworkings of Dracula.
GRSJ 224A: Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice in Literature
Techniques of literary study, with emphasis on intersectionality and the ways in which gender is represented in literature and contributions of feminism and gender studies to literary studies.
Term 1
GRSJ 224A (101)
Instructor: Dr. Caroline Locher-Lo
Description: This course is an introduction to the ways in which gender, class, age, disability, sexual orientation, and ethnicity are represented, disseminated, and intersected in various media. Students will be immersed in a repertoire of discourse and literature, having a chance to disrupt, reflect upon, and unpack general perceptions and their own beliefs on these subjects. Students will have opportunities to rethink the notions surrounding those categories, which may subsequently affect their own praxis and studies.
Through a diverse pool of literature and other discourse (e.g., history, philosophy, theory, and film), students are exposed to content through others’ lenses which may align or conflict with their own existing beliefs, both conscious and unconscious. Students will also have opportunities in class and through assignments to share their own lens, narratives, experiences, and struggles; and to question, dispute, or advocate for certain perspectives in the realm of gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity.
The course will equip students with the capability to question how “knowledge” is objectified, upheld, and ingrained in ways that are socially constructed, sustained, and endorsed. Power relations will frame this interdisciplinary course and students will gain an awareness of how power permeates all aspects of the public sphere and institutions.
GRSJ 224A (102)
Instructor: Dr. Elle Walks
Description: Comics and graphic novels tell important visual stories, and can speak to issues of representation in ways that text-only based books cannot. In this course, we will be focusing on Autobiographical Comics and Graphic Novels from an intersectional, transnational feminist lens. We will study the importance of autobiographical texts, particularly those made for and by typically marginalized populations. Overall, the course is designed to challenge misconceptions about graphic stories, learn about populations that are often symbolically annihilated, and have students engage critically with current issues via graphic texts, all the while encouraging life-long love of reading.
NOTE: Topics raised include bullying; internalized, systemic, and inter-personal racism; Islamophobia; homophobia; and colonialism. Content may be triggering.
GRSJ 200: Gender & Environmental Justice
Instructor: Dr. Litsa Chatzivasileiou
An interdisciplinary and cross-cultural overview of contemporary environmental issues, as they relate to gender equality and social justice challenges and initiatives that respond to ecological crises. Recommended prerequisite: GRSJ 101.
An intersectional overview of environmental issues as they relate to settler colonialism, imperialism, neolibaralism and the refugee crisis intertwined with the climate crisis and hopeful decolonial alternatives based on Indigenous teachings on sound ecology, Indigenous land back movements, deep ecology and the degrowth movement.
GRSJ 102: Global Issues in Social Justice
Intersectional feminist theory and practice, focusing on contemporary issues in a transnational context.
Term 1
GRSJ 102 (101)
Instructor: Dr. Litsa Chatzivasileiou
Term 2
GRSJ 102 (201)
Instructor: Dr. Elle Walks
Description: We live in an ever increasingly globalized world; this course introduces transnational and Indigenous feminist gazes which are important to understand and engage with as we critique and understand gendered experiences cross-culturally. Each week focuses on feminism in a particular (regional, religious, gender, or online) community. The course delves into discourses on ethnocentrism, Islamophobia, orientalism, intersectionality, globalization, representation, and solidarity.
GRSJ 101: Introduction to Social Justice
An overview of intersectional feminist debates and theoretical traditions.
Term 1
GRSJ 101 (101)
Instructor: Dr. Litsa Chatzivasileiou
Description:
GRSJ 101 (102) : Fate, Fury, Forgetting and Failure
Instructor: Dr. Minelle Mahtani
Description: How have anti-colonial and feminist scholars engaged with fate, fury, forgetting and failure? By exploring these themes, the course will ultimately offer a renewed mapping of critical storytelling by investigating the relationship between affective pleasures of reading through theory, the discursive spaces of the academy and ask how certain readings (through conversations with authors) inspire us to move towards more creative and imaginative places for renewal and revitalized conversations about epistemologies.
GRSJ 101 (99A – online)
Instructor: Dr. Tara Mayer
Description:
Term 2
GRSJ 101 (201)
Instructor: Dr. Litsa Chatzivasileiou
GRSJ 101 (227)
Instructor: Pauahi Souza
This section is part of the Coordinated Arts Program Law and Society Stream.
Description: This introductory social justice course examines issues, approaches, and histories connected to terminology applicable between the boundaries of law and society using social justice and intersectional feminist frameworks. We begin with conceptualizing the importance of critical thinking and social justice and examine how power and oppression operate together while conversing with ideas associated with racism, anti-racism, feminism, and culture. Notably, we use a critical lens while thinking of the impact made through methods of colonization in relation to genocide and cultural erasure, environmental justice and kinship, and how these terms can also be combined with global anti-Blackness. We will delve into the legal aspects of intersectionality and how this concept informs legal terms such as restorative justice through the works of prominent scholars. We continue through the term by maneuvering through topics such as social justice movements in North America but find interest in global movements and how movement work in general encourages activists and organizers as a whole to work together without regard to geographical location. In this first year course focused on the Coordinated Arts Program Law and Society stream, we take a look at how gender, race, sexuality, age, ability, as well as culture is impacted, negotiated, and employed by social justice frameworks.
GRSJ 101 (99B – online)
Instructor: Dr. Tara Mayer