Professor Nadia Guessous is offering FG219 "Gendered Controversies" this Summer 2022 in Block A.

This course introduces students to a transnational feminist approach by critically analyzing gendered controversies from different historical-political conjunctures and parts of the world.  Examples might include debates on Sati (widow immolation) in colonial India, so-called honor-killings in the Middle East, foot-binding in China, female circumcision in Sub-Saharan Africa, the veiling of Muslim women, and children’s rights in humanitarian discourse. 

Among other questions, this course will ask: What gendered practices tend to elicit public outrage? What kinds of power relations does this outrage both depend on and enable? What normative assumptions and affective registers tend to underlie the formulation of these scandals? Which bodies tend to become the objects of moral panic?  What anxieties are articulated, projected, and displaced through these controversies? What gets elided, occluded, and foreclosed in the process? And what might we learn about modernity, colonialism, imperialism, multiculturalism, feminism, humanitarianism, secularism, power and the West by analyzing the politics of such gendered controversies from a critical transnational feminist perspective?

This course has no pre-requisites.  It meets the Global Cultures and the Power and Equity (Global) requirements.

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