CRIT INTERSECTIONS RACE CLASS GENDER SEXUALITY: 06/04/08

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

All Readings Required. Blogging Requirement for Readings Ends on June 11th.

Yes, all readings are required. This is the reality of a 6 week course.

Bloggings on assigned readings all due by Wednesday, June 11, 2008.

This give you two days to fine-tune the final project. (This is the really challenging reality of taking a 15 week intensive reading/writing course in 6 weeks--it can be killer and even brutal. Welcome to the "Carnegie Mellon Research I Institution" reality.)

You MAY continue to finish up your blog reading responses up to the 13th. However, if you are really ambitious, you can get them all wrapped up and entered by the 11th.

I don't REQUIRE anyone to blog after the 11th, UNLESS you have not completed all other assigned readings.

Advice: Do the best you can; be realistic about the grade you want to achieve.

Readings Calendar

Critical Intersections: Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality
Readings, Responsibilities, Actions

• What you should have read by May 15, 2008:

In: Oppression, Privilege & Resistance, (OPR) Heldke & O’Connor.
➢ Introduction
➢ Iris Young, “Five Faces of Oppression”
➢ Ward Churchill, “Encountering the American Holocaust”
➢ “Sexism in the Gamin Industry” –Handout

• What you should have responded to in your blog by May 15, 2008:
➢ All the above

THE TEXTS AND THEIR CODES:
(OPR) Oppression Privilege & Resistance
(SMITH) Conquest: Sexual violence and American Indian genocide
(USS) Unsettling Settler Societies
(MC) Masculinities and Culture
(IV) Inequality & Violence in the United States: Casualities of Capitalism

Reading Calendar:
Note: You are required to read these before attending class on that date. If you do not participate in the discussion, and raise specific points relative to the readings, i.e., quotes or passages from the text and preparations to engage meaningfully, you will be graded down on your “participation” grade. General responses are not considered adequate proof of knowing the text.

• For each reading, you are required to do a “power analysis” of each author online. Simply type in their name to Google and begin searching. Add in other identifiers if you don’t succeed the first few times. Use this biographical information strategically in composing your responses.
• For each reading, you are required to post a response to a class member’s blog. You may not respond to the same blog twice in one week. Points will be deducted.

RE-THINKING FOUNDATIONS and IMPACTS OF OPPRESSION

➢ Friday, May 16
(OPR) Gloria Yamamato, “Something About the Subject Makes It Hard to Name”
(OPR) “Towards a Definition of Patriarchy”

➢ Monday, May 19
(OPR) Rodolfo Acuña, “Occupied America”
(OPR) Marilyn Frye, “Oppression”
(Smith) Foreward (Winona LaDuke) and Introduction

➢ Tuesday, May 20
(Smith) Chapter 1 Sexual Violence as a Tool of Genocide
(OPR) Alison Bailey, “Privilege”
(Handout) Peggy McIntosh “White Privilege—The Invisible Knapsack”

➢ Wednesday, May 21
(Smith) Chapter 2 Boarding School Abuses and the Case for Reparations
(Smith) Chapter 3 Rape of the Land

➢ Thursday, May 22
(Smith) Chapter 4 “Better dead than Pregnant” The Colonization of Native Women’s Reproductive Health.

➢ Friday, May 23
(Smith) “Natural Laboratories” Medical Experimentation in Native Communities
(Smith) AntiColonial Responses to Gender Violence

➢ Monday, May 26
(OPR) John Stoltenberg, “How Men have (a) Sex”
(USS) Introduction

➢ Tuesday, May 27
(USS) Chapter 4—The Fractious Politics of a Settler Society: Canada

➢ Wednesday, May 28
(USS) Chapter 5—Racializing and Classifying: Settler Colonization in the United States, 1590-1990

➢ Thursday, May 29
(USS) Chapter 6—Miscegenation as Nation-Building: Indian and Immigrant Women in Mexico

➢ Friday, May 30
(USS) Chapter 8—Constructing Race, Class, Gender and Ethnicity: State and Opposition Strategies in South Africa

➢ Monday, June 2
(MC) Chapter 1—What is Masculinity?

➢ Tuesday, June 3
(MC) Chapter 2—Masculinities and the Imperial Imaginary

➢ Wednesday, June 4
(MC) Chapter 3 & 4—Understanding Masculinities; Masculinities and the Notion of ‘Crisis’

➢ Thursday, June 5
(MC) Chapter 6—‘Millennium Masculinity’

➢ Friday, June 6
(OPR) Timothy Beneke, “Gay Sexism”
(OPR) Cheryl Clarke, “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community”
(OPR) Timothy Beneke, “Homophobia”

➢ Monday, June 9
(IV) Chapter 1—Patterns of Violence, Old and New

➢ Tuesday, June 10
(IV) Chapter 2—Explaining American Violence, Four Approaches

➢ Wednesday, June 11
(IV) Chapter 3—Inequality in the United States
(IV) Chapter 4—Social Class and Organizational Power

➢ Thursday, June 12
(IV) Chapter 13—Militarism and Violence, Who Benefits?
(IV) Chapter 14—Militarism and Organizational Violence, Homeland Casualties

➢ Friday, June 13
(IV) Militarism, Structural and Interpersonal Violence
(SMITH) U.S. Empire and the War Against Native Sovereignty

Syllabus

CES/SOC/WST 300
Critical Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality

Summer 2008—WSU, Pullman Campus
Classroom: CUE 407
Days & Time: MTWTHF, 3:00-4:15 p.m.
Instructor: Margo Tamez
Office: Womens’ Studies Department, Wilson Hall-10, Rm. 12
Office Hours: Tuesday 9:00-11:00 a.m.
Email: mtamez@wsu.edu
Phone: 509-335-7268

Objectives:
CES/SOC/W St 300 prepares students with a critical understanding of the social, economic and political constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This course will specifically underscore histories, contexts and processes of the development and systems which structure oppression, privilege and resistances to racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism and homophobism.

‘Critical’ studies and ‘intersectionality’ will be used as methods and frameworks for deepening the student’s conceptualization and practical understanding of laws, institutions and policies which saffold and buttress systems of power: race, gender, class and hetero-sexuality.

‘Critical’, meaning, based in laws and practices rooted in Western European systems of power used by elite classes.

‘Intersectionality’, meaning, converging, webbed and matrixed allowing for multiple sites of impact in the processes of power and oppression.

Intersectionality and matrixes are important and useful methods for a serious, more satisfying engagement with oppressive systems of powerful groups, states, corporations, and nations used as tools to dominate and subjugate specifically raced, gendered, classed and sexed groups. Think of the box as the larger system which organizes human social, economic and political processes. Think of the processes occurring within the box, the systems both creating, producing and identifying bodies, mass, objects, subjects, and how and where they enmesh in specific ways as what is produced and the material impacts of multiple forces, at the contact zone, in the bodies, minds, cultures, memories and experiences of impacted persons, families, communities and whole societies.

We will interrogate:

• The formation of the ‘person’ in U.S. Constitutional declarations of ‘rights’
• The relationship of feudal landlordships to personhood, to peasants, and to renters, and dispossessed groups
• Rights societies v. Responsibilities societies
• Formation of identities, groups, and implications on human rights, individual rights, and civil rights
• Local, regional, national and international formations of U.S. ‘spheres’ through violent processes of colonialism, imperialism, militarism and globalization.

Texts:
OPPRESSION, PRIVILEGE & RESISTANCE. LISA HELDKE & PEG O'CONNOR. (McGraw-Hill 2004).
ISBN: 0-07-288-243-3

UNSETTLING SETTLER SOCIETIES. STASIULIS & YUVAL-DAVIS. (Sage 1995).
ISBN: 0-8039-8693-9

CONQUEST: SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND AMERICAN INDIAN GENOCIDE. ANDREA SMITH. (South End Press 2005).
ISBN: 0-896-08-743-3

INEQUALITY & VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES: CASUALTIES OF CAPITALISM. Barbara Chasin. (Humanity Books 2004).
ISBN: 1-59102-160

MASCULINITIES & CULTURE. John Beynon. (Open University Press 2002).
ISBN: 0-335-19988-7

Grading:

A-B-C-D-F system
20% --Attendance (Based on daily roster)
20% --In-Class Participation (Reading preparation, answering questions, active
responder, contributing to discussions, active note taker, responsible listener…)
20% --Blog Journal
20% --Book Review
20% --Final Project

Questions?:
mtamez@wsu.edu

CRIT INTERSECTIONS RACE CLASS GENDER SEXUALITY

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

All Readings Required. Blogging Requirement for Readings Ends on June 11th.

Followers

Land Rich Dirt Poor

Slavery Disclosure & Reparation Projects

The Yale University "Avalon Project"

Disclosing Wealth & Methods of Corporate Families

Pre-Emption of Land A Settler Societies:A Financial History of Public Lands in Texas

Barbed Wire: A Technology of Genocide

Margo Tamez

Class Member's Blogs

Blog Archive

Readings Calendar

Syllabus

Racism: Processes of Social, Economic, Political, Judicial Dispossessions