Wednesdays 11:00AM - 2:00PM
Spring 2021.
Note: This course will be held remotely and synchronously. The GCWS schedule is different than the start/end date of spring courses on each campus. This is because each campus starts their semester at different times and we try to find the time frame that best accommodates nine universities. We work with graduating students to ensure grades are submitted by the deadline; non-graduating students will have a grade filed within 10 days of the end of the course.
Death in feminist thought and writing is both a metaphor and a means to unearthing material conditions that place gendered, sexualized and racialized bodies and non-human entities at risk. Feminists have written extensively on death, highlighting matters such as sexual and physical violence, reproductive politics, colonial and postcolonial genocides, slavery and its wakes, war, the environment, mourning, witnessing, memorializing, funeralizing and deathways, and more.
Drawing on feminist thought from academic and activist literatures, fiction, and performance, this course assembles an archive of readings on death through a geopolitical lens. It engages matters of governance, nationalisms, empire, settler colonialism, slavery, and migration across a variety of sites—Central and Southern Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, Middle-East, and North America, while turning to feminist scholarship in Critical Race Studies, Indigenous Studies, Postcolonialism, Queer and Trans Studies, Disability Studies, Environmental Studies, among others.
Faculty
Jyoti Puri is Professor of Sociology at Simmons University. Her current book project is on death and migration in North America. Her previous publications, including Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle against the Antisodomy Law in India, address sexuality, gender, state and nationalism. She draws inspiration from postcolonial, Black and Indigenous feminist thought and sexuality and queer studies.
Harleen Singh is Associate Professor of South Asian Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Her first book, The Rani of Jhansi: History, Gender, and Fable in India, interprets how an historical icon changes over time in literature, film, history, and popular culture. Her current monograph is titled Half an Independence: Women, Violence, and Modern Lives in India.